One Hundred Years of Solitude: Chapter 20 Summary & Analysis

Pilar Ternera dies in her rocking chair, buried in the same position in a hole dug into the center of the dance floor. The Catalonian auctions off his bookshop and returns to his home on the Mediterranean. Many letters and pictures arrive from him, showing a growing nostalgia for life in Macondo, while he had previously been nostalgic for his old home in Barcelona. He writes telling them to forget everything he taught them and to leave Macondo. All of the young men, with the exception of Aureliano, follow his advice. The last to remain is Gabriel, who enters a contest to go to Paris and wins.

In the town, now so sparsely populated, overrun with noisy red aunts and suffocated by dust and heat, only Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula are happy, but they are so happy they are believed to be the happiest people on earth. Gaston goes to Brussels to bring back the plane. Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula grow delirious with their passion for one another, walking around naked and destroying the house with their lovemaking. Aureliano abandons the manuscripts. They enjoy their periods of rest, worshipping each other’s bodies, almost more than the moments of having sex. They cover each other in jam, licking it off one another on the floor of the porch and wake to the bites of the carnivorous red ants.

Both of the remaining Buendías cannot imagine the return of either Gaston or Gabriel Márquez and lose themselves in a universe empty of anything but love. Suddenly a letter arrives with the news of Gaston’s imminent return. Amaranta Úrsula writes Gaston a letter saying she loves him very much, but that she cannot live without Aureliano. Gaston sends them a calm letter back warning them about the dangers of passion, but wishing them the very best. Six months later another letter arrives from Gaston saying he has found his plane and asking them to ship him his bicycle.

Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula discover they are expecting a child. Amaranta Úrsula tries to make a business selling her fish vertebra necklaces, but there is only one buyer interested. Aureliano realizes he has no skills that can earn them money. They sit with the uncertainty of how they will live and think back to their blissful childhood together. They reexamine the stories of their youth and question the truth of Aureliano’s having arrived in a basket, but they have no way of knowing his actual origins. Aureliano worries that he is Amaranta Úrsula’s brother, but he can find no record to indicate this. The priest tells him he is likely named after a street in town. When Aureliano confronts the priest about his skepticism regarding the origin of his name, the priest responds that he cannot be certain because it is enough for him to be sure that the two of them exist in that moment.

A letter arrives from Barcelona in a hand other than the Catalonian’s and Aureliano refuses to open it, not wanting to know the news it contains. No additional letters arrive from Barcelona, proving Aureliano’s assumption right.

At night, the couple holds each other, listening to the ants and moths and weeds growing and the ghosts traversing the house. One Sunday, Amaranta Úrsula goes into labor. When their son is born, Amaranta Úrsula wants to name him Rodrigo, but Aureliano says they will name him Aureliano. When the midwife cleans off the newborn, they find the tail of a pig. Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula are unaware of the precedent in the family though, and they didn’t remember Úrsula’s fears. The midwife assures them it is no big deal, and they don’t have time to worry about it because Amaranta Úrsula cannot stop bleeding. She assures Aureliano that “people like her were not meant to die against their will,” but the light in her slowly fades. She dies the next day.

Aureliano covers her face, puts the child in a basket and wanders town, looking for a path back to the past. He consoles himself by talking to a bartender in the last open salon of the red-light district. Nigromanta finds him and takes him in so he can sleep off his drunkenness. When he wakes, soon after, he remembers the child, but he cannot find the basket. He wonders if, perhaps, Amaranta Úrsula might not be dead, and might have found the child to care for it, but he finds he body, heavy as stones. He finds the child in the garden, being eaten by the aunts. In his mind, he remembers the epigraph from Melquíades’ parchments: “The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.”

He goes to the manuscript and can read it clearly; it is the history of Buendía family written 100 years in advance. Melquíades had written it all as though it had happened in a single instant instead of in the order of conventional time. Aureliano skips ahead, impatient to learn his own destiny. The winds pick up. Aureliano is so absorbed in the story that he doesn’t notice the doors and windows are being blown off their hinges. He discovers that Amaranta Úrsula is his aunt and the roof flies off. He sees the parchment’s delivery of the present moment like a mirror. He understands that the city of mirrors is being wiped out by the wind and will never be remembered. All that has happened is unrepeatable because a race “condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”