100 Years of Solitude - Chapter 2

Well, I checked, and I am currently at page 180 or so. But I am also re-reading the early chapters as I advance through the later ones so as to make my chapter summaries. it's also helping me to identify the cycles and patterns that develop in the later chapters to see how they were introduced in the earlier ones. This book seems to me to be all about how history repeats itself in this place, and I'm picking up on very interesting details that went by me in the mad rush of ideas that is the style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

So, apparently, Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula did not consummate their marriage for a year because they (well, Ursula, mostly) feared that their children would be born with pig tails, or worse! Both of their families had lived in Riohacha for generations, and this sort of thing had happened before. So Ursula would wear a chastity belt to bed and they would just wrestle. Jose Arcadio Buendia’s patience with this arrangement wore out when the whispers of the townspeople got to him. A man, Prudencio Agular, said something impugning Jose Arcadio Buendia’s manhood, and he killed Prudencio for it. Then he went home and had his wild way with Ursula saying, “if you bear iguanas, we’ll raise iguanas.” But the ghost of Prudencio haunted Jose Arcadio Buendia, and this is what inspired him to pack his things and begin the two-year trek that led to the founding of Macondo. Along the way, Jose Arcadio was born, thankfully normal and not an iguana.

He did, however, possess a very large penis. This detail passed me right by when I first read it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not so coarse a writer that we would come right out and say that young Jose Arcadio had a big dick. (and I suppose that I am!) What he did say was that “he was so well-equipped for life that he seemed almost abnormal” and “she (Ursula) thought that his disproportionate size was something as unnatural as her cousin’s tail of a pig.” It was at about this point in the novel that we are introduced to Pilar Ternera, who reassured Ursula that Jose Arcadio was actually pretty lucky to be so “equipped for life.” (I’ll say!) “Lordy!” she said when she saw it. Then we are treated to a few pages depicting the hot, cloudy confusion and drive of adolescent lust as experienced by Jose Arcadio, who wanted nothing more than to hear her say “Lordy” again and took to sneaking into her room at night to be heaved about like a sack of potatoes and to be thrown from one side to the other in a bottomless darkness… Well, that Pilar Ternera is some woman.

While Jose Arcadio was engaged with this, his father and brother were busy trying to separate Ursula’s gold from crust of gnar at the bottom of the kettle. When they succeeded , everybody was happy about it, except for Jose Arcadio, who didn’t really give a care, so wrapped up in Pilar Ternera was he. Around this time, the Gypsies came to town. Not the Gypsies of Melquiades’ tribe, with their heralds of technological progress, but another band who mere purveyors of amusement. And they offered the villagers rides on a flying carpet. Well, the town was thrown into a state of collective disorder that Jose Arcadio and Pilar Ternera used as cover to spend even more time together. Well, at least until Pilar Ternera revealed that she was pregnant. That freaked out Jose Arcadio, and he first hid in his father’s alchemy lab. Then he went and started fooling around with a little Gypsy girl. A Gypsy woman entered (with a companion of her own), took a look at Jose Arcadio there with the Gypsy girl and… well… “lordy” is as good a way to put it.

"On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud… Jose Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out her mouth translated into her language. It was Thursday."

On Sunday, Jose Arcadio left with the Gypsies.

Ursula, distraught at the very thought that her son would become a Gypsy set out in pursuit of them into the swamp and was gone for 5 months. While she was gone, Jose Arcadio Buendia missed her terribly. And then, suddenly, she returned, having succeeded not in finding her wayward son with the large penis, but instead in finding a road that would lead to another town on the other side of the swamp, a mere two days travel away. Remember that Jose Arcadio Buendia had tried to do this, had failed and come to the conclusion that they were absolutely isolated on a peninsula surrounded by the sea. Well, no, they weren’t as isolated as that.

Heady, saucy stuff, is it not? We'll see Jose Arcadio again later, very much a changed man. He'll still have that big wiener, though.