One Hundred Years of Solitude: Chapter 12  Summary & Analysis

Aureliano Triste brings in electrical power on his second visit on the train. Bruno Crespi opens a movie theater and the people riot in response to the films until the mayor explains that they are just illusions. The French matrons introduce phonographs and live musicians suffer at first. Everyone is upset when the first telephone is installed.

A man named Mr. Herbert arrives to town with his hot air balloon, but the people of Macondo are not impressed, having already ridden the flying carpet of the gypsies years before. He eats a bunch of bananas and examines them closely. A group of scientists arrive to inspect the area. Mr. Jack Brown shows up, accompanied by a team of lawyers, and closely followed by a horde of gringos who live in a town they set up across the railroad tracks. The demographics of the merchants of Macondo shift to become mostly foreigners, and gambling halls and shooting galleries are established. Eight months after the arrival of Mr. Herbert, the town is almost unrecognizable.

Strangers of all sorts visit the Buendía home. All the residents of Macondo know is that the gringos plan to plant banana trees. Two more of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s fifteen remote sons return because, they say, everyone is coming to Macondo. Remedios the Beauty remains unchanged and serene. She sews herself a simple cassock to wear so that she might feel as naked as possible while technically covered and shaves her head, and she seems all the more beautiful for all of these rejections of conventional beauty. Úrsula fears that the sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendía will be attracted to Remedios the Beauty and they will produce a child with the tail of a pig. She keeps a close eye on all of them to be sure this doesn’t happen.

Remedios the Beauty has no idea of the calamity she causes in the men who see her. Úrsula insists she eat in the kitchen with Amaranta, keeping her out of sight of the visitors. One day, while she performs her bathing ritual, a stranger removes a roof tile and spies on her from above. She warns him that he will fall, but doesn’t mind his watching. He continues to watch, removing two more tiles so that he might let himself into the bathroom, but the drop is too far, and he falls to his death. The men who remove his body note that he does not bleed blood, but instead an amber oil that smells of Remedios the Beauty.

Remedios the Beauty and her friends go to look at the new plantings. The men working the fields begin weeping at the sight of her, and they pursue the group of young women until they take refuge in a nearby house. The four Aurelianos rescue them after one of the attackers claws at Remedios the Beauty. That night the attacker is kicked in the chest by a horse and dies. People come to believe that Remedios the Beauty bears powers of death, rather than the previously assumed powers of love. Úrsula attempts to teach Remedios the Beauty housekeeping duties, but she fails.

One afternoon in March, folding sheets in the yard with Fernanda, Remedios the Beauty becomes pale. She rises up into the sky with the flapping sheets around her, disappearing. The only thing that overwhelms the talk of this miracle is the extermination of the Aurelianos. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had foreseen the tragedy. When he saw Mr. Brown arrive to town in the first automobile, he could see that the nature of men had changed. When the banana company appears, the local dignitaries are replaced with foreign rulers. Policemen are supplanted by assassins bearing machetes.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía thinks again that it was a mistake to end the war. A relative of his friend Magnífico Visbal and his grandson accidentally bumps into a policemen on the street and the child is cut to pieces and the grandfather beheaded. Colonel Aureliano Buendía threatens to arm his sons to exterminate the fascist gringos. Over the course of the next week, his sons are hunted down, identified by the mark of ashes on their foreheads. Amaranta records all of their deaths until only the eldest, Aureliano Amador, remains alive.

The death of his sons causes rage, not sadness, in Colonel Aureliano Buendía. He halts production of his fishes and wanders the house aimlessly. He finds Úrsula in the courtyard, kneeling at the feet of the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía, and asks what his father has to say. Úrsula tells Colonel Aureliano Buendía that his father is very sad because he thinks his son is going to die. Colonel Aureliano Buendía responds “that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.” He asks Úrsula where the gold from the broken statue has been hidden, but she tells him that only the man who it belongs to will be able to find it.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía goes to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez to ask for help in starting the total war. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez has kept in touch with the rebel officers, many of whom are dying of hunger, still waiting for the pensions they were promised. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez pities his old friend for thinking that he can still make a change, remarking that Colonel Aureliano Buendía is even older than he looks.