Art of the Sentence Piece

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

            The more I stare at the typed version of this sentence, the smaller it becomes, at least visually. Book in hand, I read it, see it, and taste it as if the twenty-six-word sentence were pages and pages in length—as if it weighs four tons. I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude in my early teens. Images of the Buendía family’s chaotic, almost barbaric traditions stuck with me everywhere I went, like the image of Jose Arcadio Buendía tied to an Eden-like tree of knowledge under the harsh ever-changing weather of Macondo, or how Amaranta’s stubborn virginal ways eventually led her to her death, but I don’t remember having this particular sentence stand out from the rest. It wasn’t until I came back from Nicaragua this year, after four years of not going to my country, that I picked up the book again with nostalgic eyes and realized that I couldn’t move past the first sentence of the novel. It wasn’t until about a month ago that I was able to know why I had become so drawn to this sentence.

       
There is a sort of longing in the last part of the sentence, “Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Colonel Aureliano Buendía is a stoic character who, throughout the novel, removes himself from human contact because he is unable to feel anything for anybody. Yet this sentence says otherwise, it gives the reader a glimpse of a character who has been deemed hopeless and portrays him as a man who is tormented by a lost father-son relationship that stopped the very moment José Arcadio Buendía took his son to discover ice.

         
The novel tells the story of a family carried adrift along the currents of a more modern, mechanical world. The unknown gypsies of major towns travel to Macondo with pots and pans, magnets, ice and other inventions that still had not been discovered in that part of Colombia. José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of the town, becomes mesmerized by the new inventions to the extent of neglecting his duties as a father and husband. The family’s innocent routine is interrupted by modern ideals. José corrupts his son, Aureliano by taking him to see the gypsies on the day they have brought ice. From that day until his death, Colonel Aureliano Buendía “discovers” the same world his father had been obsessing about for years. In short, his mind becomes tainted by the traditions of other regions. Macondo had never seen ice; therefore, it leaves a tremendous impression on the thirteen year-old Aureliano Buendía, to the point that his only memory in life is “of that distant afternoon.”

       
García Márquez could’ve simply written, “As he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía suddenly remembered the afternoon his father took him to discover ice.” But words like many, years, distant, portray something that was once reached but has not been recovered for multiple centuries. Phrases like “distant afternoon” sound romantic, like an unreachable, unimaginable lover that one hasn’t met but it predisposed to meet at some point in life. Given that One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered magical realism, García Márquez almost has an obligation to overdramatize each word by humanizing its qualities, not to mention playing with time, which was one of magical realism’s main concerns during the Post-Modern era. Márquez links the past and the future in this sentence by preparing the reader for a future war-zone, which Colonel Aureliano Buendía will undoubtedly take part in and a past filled with innocent, naïve minds of people who are just beginning to discover materials that have long existed in other parts of the world. When I see this sentence, I see grief—an assault; I see the colonel getting shot by the opposing party. I see a man that once comfortably rested under his mother’s arms as she rocked him to sleep—the woman who never thought that her newborn would ever grow pubic hair on his face, or leave that comfortable warmth of her arms, let alone be part of a war that kills other adult-children just like her own, leaving another mother parading around the dusty streets, following her son’s casket to the cemetery.

       
Márquez successfully captures the rise and fall of a town in a book in just one sentence. In the New York Times Book Review, William Kennedy wrote, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, and meaningless in life.’ Even though this quote appears in the back covers of all the English translation copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a place where a publisher will cherry-pick their blurbs to get readers to buy a book, Kennedy was right; the book is a must-read for every human on the face of the earth because it tells the tale of a people. Essentially, Macondo is all of us and with a sentence like this, it’s hard to put the text down.

I store One Hundred Years of Solitude on the very top shelf of my book collection not only for the author’s literary genius, but because I can relate to García Márquez’s upbringing. Like him, my grandparents used to tell me the folkloric tales of Granada—tales of La Llorona, the devil, the legend of the Carreta Nagua, and the dead inhabitants of the town that sleep at one’s feet at night. García Márquez used most of the material that his grandmother, Tranquilina, shared with him, and placed those tales in the form of stories that created One Hundred Years of Solitude. I barely spoke to my grandfather, Enrique, on the phone those four years I had not travelled to Nicaragua. When I was finally able to visit him, I thought he would pick up where we left off, but not only did he not have any more stories left to tell, he hardly spoke to me. He didn’t know me; too much time had passed, too many deaths had claimed our family members. And his lung cancer prohibited him from sitting for too long in my presence. When I left him, I thanked him for telling me all those legends as a child—I thanked him for helping me become a writer. He didn’t say a word. When I came back to the States, I grabbed One Hundred Years of Solitude like a life raft. I wanted to relive those festive moments with my grandfather, even if it meant reliving those memories through another man’s story.

A couple of days ago, I envisioned myself being eighty; old and crippled, the four hundred and seventeen pages that make up One Hundred Years of Solitude tattooed all over my body—the words’ ink poured into my skin—my grandfather’s voice nearest me—from my scalp to my toes. The image of it is compelling—that of a walking novel, but after considering it further, I have only decided on its opening sentence; I believe it captures the book’s brilliance on its own.