LITERATURE: 100 Years – Transitioning

There is no doubt that with one hundred years to play with, Marquez need be a master at timeline in sequential, foreshadowing, backplay (my own term), and tieing everything in so that it runs as smoothly and accurately as a…well, clock.

This was just too good not to share with you:  The Buendia family is doing well in the ice business (remember Jose Arcadio Buendia’s great scheme when the gypsies brought a chunck of ice?)  Well, two things are going on:  One, Aureliano Triste decided they need to expand the business and leaves to seek the railroad coming through Macondo; two, Aureliano Centeno (another ash-crossed illegitimate son of Aureliano) has returned to help in the ice factory, and this is his contribution:

"Aureliano Triste consulted the calendar and left the following Wednesday, planning to return after the rains had passed.  There was no more news of him.  Aureliano Centeno, overwhelmed by the abundance of the factory, had already begun to experiment with the production of ice with a base of fruit juices instead of water, and without knowing it or thinking about it, he conceived the essential fundamentals for the invention of sherbet."

Don’t you just love it?  There’s Jose Arcadio Buendia surviving in the great unknown space of his grandson.  Sherbet for God’s sake! 

But Marquez brings back Aureliano Triste and spans the missing eight months he is gone in a matter of a few sentences, moving quickly to what becomes a major change in the village of Macondo, and I am sure, in the Buendia family–or maybe they don’t change all that much…

"At that moment the town was shaken by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration.  During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laying ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they throught it was some new trick of the gypsies, coming back with whistles and tambourines and their age-old and discredited song and dance about the qualities of some concoction put together by journey-man geniuses of Jerusalem.  But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureliano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late."

Lord, the ghosts of Jose Arcadio, Melquiades, and all the rest must be laughing their asses off.

But the thing is, is that while recalling the men from the past, Marquez brings them into the present with the spirit and ideas of the sons.  And at the same time, while moving so very quickly through the present, gives us a hint of a future that will see rapid change, growth, maybe good, maybe evil.  All this, in a single event, a single catalyst:  A moving train of endless cars…like endless rooms.