One Hundred Years of Solitude: Chapter 16  Summary & Analysis

The rain last for four years, eleven months and two days. Aureliano Segundo stays home for the entire time and slowly loses weight. Everything in the house is incredible damp, even the humans, proved when they find Úrsula’s back covered in leeches. Aureliano Segundo, locked in the house with young Aureliano, knows what Fernanda has kept secret from all the others: Aureliano is a true Buendía. Aureliano Segundo shows the children the old encyclopedias, making up stories as he goes along because he does not speak English.

Fernanda fears that Aureliano Segundo will want to have sex with her while he is trapped at home, but she is incapable, suffering from severely painful cramps. She writes to the invisible doctors, hoping for an answer. Fernanda is happy that the rain keeps people from going outside because she feels that “doors have been invented to stay closed.” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez dies and his funeral procession passes the house. The Buendía family watches the sorry spectacle. Even Úrsula is present, blessing the young man she treated like a son and telling him that she will see him again when the rain stops, predicting her own death.

Aureliano Segundo goes to the home of Petra Cotes to check on the animals, but they have all died in the floods. Petra Cotes has not seen him since the rain started. He stays for three months, getting up the will to go back out into the rain. He tries to seduce Petra Cotes again, but she refuses his advances. He returns home with his trunks, convinced that everyone in Macondo is waiting for the rain to stop so they might die. The Buendías run low on food. Fernanda’s protests about Aureliano Segundo’s indifference to their needs is emitted as a long drone of sound. Eventually, when Aureliano Segundo complains about the noise, Fernanda unleashes a long monologue of grievances about the life that she was been forced to live by marrying Aureliano Segundo. Aureliano Segundo listens to her all day, not saying a word, until she tells a fib, and he calls her out on it.

Fernanda goes on humming. The next morning Aureliano Segundo asks for an egg, oblivious that they ran out of eggs sometime before, and Fernanda begins another monologue about men who are so self-centered as to “ask for larks’ livers” when there is no food at all. He goes to show the children the encyclopedia, even claiming that Colonel Aureliano Buendía is featured there. When he goes out to the porch to sit with Fernanda afterward, she continues her rant until he can bear it no longer and he tells her to shut up. In a rage, he smashes as many breakables as he can get his hands on, leaves the house, and returns with some food for the family.

Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano think the rainy time is fun, splashing in puddles and playing with the senile Úrsula. Around the third year of the rain, Úrsula’s mind has started to confuse the present with the past, and the children play along, making up imaginary visits from relatives who lived at different time, but have been long dead. She takes incredible joy in being reunited with them all.

Aureliano Segundo remembers that there is a large fortune buried somewhere on the property, waiting for its proper owner to appear to claim it. He consults Pilar Ternera about the where the gold is buried but she can tell him only it is within a certain proximity of Úrsula who buried it. He digs up the courtyard to such a degree that the foundation of the house is weakened, but he finds nothing.

Finally, one Friday afternoon, the rain clears and it does not rain again for ten years. Macondo is in ruins. The banana plantation and city has been deserted. When Aureliano Segundo finally returns to Petra Cotes, he is so thin that she is convinced he is José Arcadio Segundo. In the bedroom, he finds a skinny mule who Petra Cotes has been feeding the fancy linens of the house when no proper food remained.