Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

"One Hundred Years of Solitude": The Last Three Pages

Author(s): Emir Rodríguez Monegal
Source: Books Abroad, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Summer, 1973), pp. 485-489
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40127322 .
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One Hundred Years of Solitude: The Last
Three Pages

By EMIR RODRIGUEZMONEGAL

The last three pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude contains one of the keys to the
book, one which gives access to its total fictionality. In three pages, Aureliano Babi-
lonia, after having seen the corpse of his monstrous son carried away by "all the ants
in the world," has a sudden revelation. He remembers something he once read in
an obscure and indecipherablemanuscript: "The first of the line is tied to a tree and
the last is being eaten by ants" {One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 420). The text
belongs to the manuscript left behind by Melquiades, a text inserted into the novel
like the play-within-the-playin the third act of Hamlet. The sudden revelation decides
Aureliano's destiny: leaving everything out, he will lock himself in a room to read for
the first time in its entirety Melquiades's book; he will then be able to decipher the
sense of his destiny and the destiny of his family, of which he is the only survivor. If
the reading of the coded parchments had been impossible before, now (after the
revelation) he reads them as easily "as if they had been written in Spanish." What
Aureliano reads is summed up by the author in these words:
It was the historyof the family, written by Melquiades,down to the most trivial
details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit,which
was his mothertongue,and he had encodedthe even lines in the privatecipherof
the EmperorAugustus and the odd ones in a Lacedemonianmilitary code. The
final protection,which Aurelianohad begun to glimpse when he let himself be
confusedby the love of AmarantaUrsula,was based on the fact that Melquiades
had not put events in the orderof man'sconventionaltime, but had concentrated
a centuryof dailyepisodesin such a way that they coexistedin one instant,(p. 421)
While Aureliano reads the history of his family and discovers that he had been
engendered by people of whose existence he had a very vague idea, or none at all;
while he reads that Amaranta Ursula is his aunt and not his sister (as he feared with
delicious horror while possessing her voraciously), and that the son with the pig's
tail whom they engendered is not only their offspring but that of a whole line which
extends to them through "the most intricate labyrinths of blood," Macondo, the town
surrounding the house in which Aureliano is reading, is being assailed by a wind

Note: This article is an expanded and more detailed version of the final part of my article "Novedad
y anacronismode Cien anos de soledad" published in Revista Nacional de Cultura, Caracas, XXIX, No.
185, July-September1968, pp. 3-21. In her excellent book, Cien anos de soledad: una interpretation
(Buenos Aires, Tiempo Contemporaneo,1970), Josefina Ludmer offers a psychoanalyticalreading of the
last pages which coincides only in some aspects with mine. GarciaMarquez's own version of his childhood
can be read in Luis Harss's Into the Mainstream,New York, Harper & Row, 1966 and in Mario Vargas
Llosa's GarciaMdrquez:Historia de un deicidio, Barcelona,Barral, 1971. The latter also discusses Borges's
influence on Garcia Marquez (which he dismisses as "fugaz") but he does not discuss in this context the
last three pages of the novel. The Borges texts are quoted from The Aleph and Other Stories, New York,
E. P. Dutton, 1970 and Other Inquisitions, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1968. There is a mistake in the
latter's translationwhich I have corrected.All the quotations of One Hundred Years of Solitude are from
GregoryRabassa'stranslation,New York, Harper&Row, 1969.

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486 BOOKS ABROAD
that will erase it from the face.of the earth. The reading of the book of destiny takes
place at the very moment when destiny closes the book of life.
Outside, the wind destroys everything. Inside, Aureliano remains trapped in the
hypnotic reading of a text which not only escapes time because it was written one
hundred years ago and tells what is happening now but which is also outside of time
because it telescopes a whole century into a single moment. Inside, Aureliano dis-
covers the immortality of the text. Outside, the wind (a metaphor of time) will
destroy Macondo, yet in the timeless world of Melquiades's parchments, nothing ever
dies, nothing is destroyed, everything is present.
The Magic Room
The reading of Melquiades's book being simultaneous with the destruction of Ma-
condo by an apocalypticwind is only a textual simultaneity. In the reality of the fiction,
the reading is done outside time and thus the wind that levels Macondo cannot touch
the reader. The end of Garcia Marquez's book is very explicit:
Macondowas alreadya fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about
by the wrath of the biblicalhurricanewhen Aureliano skipped eleven pages so
as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipherthe
instant that he was living, decipheringit as he lived it, prophesyinghimself in
the act of decipheringthe last page of the parchments,as if he were looking into
a speakingmirror.Then he skippedagain to anticipatethe predictionsand ascer-
tain the date and circumstancesof his death. Beforereachingthe final line, how-
ever, he had alreadyunderstoodthat he would never leave that room, for it was
foreseenthat the city of mirrors(or mirages)would be wiped out by the wind and
exiled from the memoryof men at the precisemomentwhen AurelianoBabilonia
would finish decipheringthe parchments,and that everythingwritten on them
was unrepeatablesince time immemorialand forever more, because races con-
demned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunityon
earth,(p. 422)
Aureliano is thus trapped in a magic room in which time has stopped forever. It is
the same room in which Jose Arcadio Segundo had taught him to read, Melquiades's
room still haunted by the presence of the immortal gypsy :
In the small isolatedroom where the arid air never penetrated,not the dust, nor
the heat,both had the atavisticvision of an old man, his backto the window, wear-
ing a hat with a brim like the wings of a crow who spoke about the world many
years before they had been born. Both describedat the same time how it was
alwaysMarchthere and alwaysMonday.... (p. 355)
In that magic room, where neither the wind nor the dust nor the heat had ever come,
time itself never comes. Now that Aureliano has locked himself up in that room to
decode his destiny in Melquiades's parchments, he discovers perhaps that he too is
trapped there forever. Like the magician who dreams a man (a son) in Borges's
masterful story, "The CircularRuins," this Aureliano of the city of mirrors,or mirages,
discovers on the last page that he too is a ghost who has been dreamed by another
man. He is trapped in a labyrinth of words, written one hundred years before and in
Sanskrit,by the Magus.
An Aleph of Time
The connection of One Hundred Years of Solitude's last three pages with Borges's
fiction is not casual. Where else can one find texts which contain similar magic and

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 RODRIGUEZ MONEGAL 487
textual connotations? Where else can one find a similar profusion of fantasy and
hyperbole? Only in Borges does one find the same labyrinths made of unending or
circular time, the secret scriptures of gods, cities obliterated by time to their very
ashes, immortal men forever trapped in the lines of a text which turns upon itself in
such an obsessive,oneiric way.
Borges's fiction helps to understand a decisive aspect of One Hundred Years of
Solitude, i.e., the simultaneity of its times. The key lies in one of its sentences. Upon
discovering the parchments, Aureliano understands that "Melquiades had not put
events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of
daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant" (p. 421). Melquiades
had created an Aleph made of time. In Borges's story of the same title, the Aleph is
made of space: " 'The Aleph?' I repeated.'Yes, the only place on earth where all places
are- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending' "
(The Aleph, p. 23). A few pages later, when the narrator finally sees the Aleph, he
says, "I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth
and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth . . ." (p. 28) . The coexistence
of one hundred years in a single moment of time makes Melquiades's book into an
emblem of the Aleph. As in Borges's story, the book contains the world and the world
containsthe book, in a mirror-likeway.
It is not necessary to resort to the Kabbalah (which has so much influenced this
aspect of Borges's fiction) nor to the better known example of Nostradamus's prophe-
cies (which Garcia Marquez does mention), nor even to Mallarme's famous dictum
that everything culminates in a book, to discover that this concept which connects
the book and the world is at the core of the basic religions of the West, as Borges has
shown in his famous essay, "On the Cult of Books" (in Other Inquisitions, 1952).
Borges's essay concludes as follows: "According to Mallarme, the world exists to
culminate in a book; according to Bloy, we are the versides or words or letters of a
magic book, and that incessant book is the only thing in the world : or rather, it is
the world" (p. 120). It is obvious that Garcia Marquez arrives at this concept in his
novel not only through the reading of the Bible (as has been suggested by some
critics) but also through Borges and his total reading of literature as text. On the
level Melquiades's parchments are situated, his book is an Aleph image of the world,
and the word (as in St. John's Gospel) is the instrument of creation. In the Beginning
was the Verb. Which brings the argument back to a point already discussed. Instead
of being completely destroyed, the world of Macondo is partially saved from time.
On the last page, the wind does not annihilate the whole of Macondo because there is
still one room untouched. Time is finally stopped in its tracks to become eternally
fixed in the very act of creation. That is, in the act of reading. (To decipher a text is
to createit.)
In skipping through Melquiades's book, while outside the wind erases Macondo
forever, Aureliano perhaps discovers what the other reader (the reader) has dis-
covered a while back: that he and the room in which he reads are immune to the
destructions of time because they have always lived in another dimension, that of
the speaking mirror of a book. A mirror which is also a mirage, composed of solitude
and sudden revelation, but above all of the immortality which the word confers.

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488 BOOKS ABROAD
It is poetic justice that the last name of the characterto whom this revelation is
destined is Babilonia, in double homage to Borges's "The Lottery in Babylon" and
"The Library of Babel." For who but a man with such a name could have trium-
phantly decoded the Babelic cipher of Melquiades's parchments. From the Biblical
confusion of languages to the discovery of the key to language, Aureliano Babilonia
solves the mystery and reads (for the first time in its entirety) the book. Needless to
say, the book he reads is, emblematically, the same in which he lives, One Hundred
Years of Solitude. Melquiades's reader and Garcia Marquez's reader complete the
same task at the same time. Both decode the same text, the same Aleph.
The simultaneity of readings reinforces the concept of the world as a book. While
Aureliano Babilonia discovers that his own destiny and that of his lineage are en-
closed in a book, the reader discoversthat the book Aureliano is reading and Macondo
itself are enclosed in yet another book, which is the Book. The true destiny of
Aureliano Babilonia is not to be forever trapped in Melquiades's magic room (as he
had been virtually enclosed from the very beginning in the Magus's parchments) but
to be trapped in the pages of this other Book. His destiny is the circular immortality
of all creaturesof fiction.

The Total Fiction

Melquiades is not the only magus which the Book postulates. It has already been
insinuated, I think, that Melquiades has a role in relation to the author that is similar
to the one Aureliano occupies in relation to the reader.This paves the way to a reading
of the Book as total fiction: a fiction in which even the author is incorporated into
the text not as a secondarycharacter (there is a "Gabriel,"a friend of Aureliano, who
could represent him) but as the author of the parchments. Beneath the mask of
Melquiades it is possible to recognize the face of Garcia Marquez: the Magus is a
persona of the author. Like the latter, the author has written the complete story of
One Hundred Years of Solitude before that story had been read and deciphered by
its readers.It would be possible to stretch the parallel a bit further. I would like, how-
ever, to suggest another reading which the Book indicates. One must look beyond the
text into the author's biography for the elements which appear (metamorphosed)
in the novel. Some anecdotes help to place Garcia Marquez's childhood in the same
pathetic dimension of the last Aureliano's. He too was a child abandoned by his
parents who lived an almost ghostly existence in the big rambling houses of his grand-
parents. Even though many details do not coincide (Garcia Marquez's parents would
come back to reclaim him), the basic initial situation, the one which generates the
symbols, is the same. Garcia Marquez has told of his admiration for his grandfather,
the prototypeof Colonel Aureliano Buendia, and he has also told of his grandmother's
tales, she being the model of the fabulous Ursula Iguaran and the person to whom
he owes the fantastic turn of his best fiction and above all the gift of the spoken
language in his stories. His grandparents are at the origin of his fiction. But it is the
abandonment by his parents that created the basic situation in which his whole fiction
is rooted.
Knowing this, how is it possible to resist the temptation to recognize in Aureliano,
the last of his lineage, in that child who runs naked and wild through his grand-

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 RODRIGUEZ MONEGAL 489

parents' house, deserted by his parents, an alter ego of his author, even though this
Gabriel is no bastard nor has ever had carnal relations with his aunt, nor has en-
gendered a son with pig's tail, nor is the last of a line condemned to one hundred
years of solitude? The truth of the emblematic figure outshines the mere truth of
detail.
Accepting this, it is possible then to see in Melquiades, in that extra-lucid and
kabbalistic gentleman, the same child who is now situated in another dimension of
time : after he has grown up and seen the world and returned to his place of origin to
write in Sanskrit (that is, in his mother tongue), the history of his ancestors, the
fabulous history of his lineage. Because to become an author is to become a magus.
Aureliano reading Melquiades's parchments in Melquiades's magic room (the
same room, by the way, in which he learned to read) becomes Melquiades, that is, he
becomes the author. When Aureliano decodes his life and destiny in the parchments
he is like the author (any author) when he reaches the end of his book: only then can
he read it in its entirety. Now Aureliano can read what he has lived as the author
can read the text which he was destined to write. The character and the author not
only share a common biographical experience, they have come to share the same
complex specular operation of the writing-and-readingand writing of a text which is
a speaking mirror. An operation, on the other hand, of perfect circularity.So that we
finally reach the last tautology of this novel, which like all stories, ends up biting its
tail. In the end is the beginning.
If the last Aureliano discovers on the last page that he won't be able to leave the
magic room any more because that room is the last reality that remains to him in a
world obliterated by the wind, it is not only because he has finally accepted being
condemned to solitude but because perhaps on a non-conscious level he has accepted
his reality as a creature forever lost in a world of mirages, of a being who inhabits a
world of total fiction. But within that world, the wind that destroys the rest of
Macondo in the last two pages does not touch Aureliano, petrified forever in the last
line in the act of reading. Because that wind (like everything else in the Book) is
made of words and is enclosed in a solid object made of pages that one can turn back to
begin (once more and so on to infinity) the reading. What really ends on the last
page of the Book is only the first reading. It is enough to turn back the pages for time
to begin to run again, for the figures of the old and deceased to come to life, for the
fable to recommence. It's enough to read, or re-read.
Yale University

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