Ah, the prodigal son returns. Jose, who took off with the gypsies, Aurielano’s brother, has returned. A wanderer of land and seas, a big hulk of a man who has grown to almost match the size of his penis, which, like the rest of him, is covered in tattoos. And which he has followed around, led by its competent point of assuring him love and fortune enough to survive. It has also captured the attention of Rebeca, the young woman who was brought to his mother’s door as a young girl sucking her finger and eating whitewash and dirt when disheartened.
"One afternoon, when everyone was having a siesta, she could no longer resist and went to his bedroom. She found him in his shorts, lying in the hammock that he had hung from the beams with a ship’s hawser. She was so impressed by his enormous motley nakedness that she felt an impulse to retreat. "Excuse me," she said, "I didn’t know you were here." But she lowered her voice so as not to wake anyone up. "Come here," he said. Rebeca obeyed. She stopped beside the hammock in an icy sweat, feeling knots forming in her intestines, while Jose Arcadio stroked her ankles with the tips of his fingers, then her calves, then her thighs, murmuring, "Oh, little sister, little sister." She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three slashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter.
"Three days later they were married during the five-o’clock mass."
But amidst this dysfunctional family (Aurielano is just getting over the death of his 11-year old bride), there is a power even in their loving. They are usually overcome, smitten by lust before they even understand what it is about. The intensity that the patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, puts into his quest to understand his world, is to a degree evident in his children in their own chosen goals. Aurielano, in his pursuit of the child-woman Remedios. For many years, in Amaranta in her resolve to destroy Rebeca’s intent to marry the wispy Pietro Crespi, prior to the return of Jose and her passionate deflowering in the hammock. In Jose, in once having discovered the power in his penis, dutifully allows it to master his life.
I don’t care how big it is; I still like his father the best.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology