Diksha Sundriyal
The relationships within the Buendia family are full of complexities in Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ The story unfolds over the course of seven generations, with each generation bearing its own curse. Amaranta falls into a life of solitude and despair after her failed marriage to Pietro Crespi and the resultant hatred for her sister, Rebeca. However, over the years, as she closes her heart to love, more suitors come out of the woodwork to win her heart, one of whom is her own nephew, Aureliano Jose. The illegitimate son of Colonel Aureliano Buendia with Pilar Ternera, Aureliano Jose develops feelings for his aunt, who raises him like her own son. At first, his feelings are dismissed as infatuation, but it later turns out to be something that consumes his life to the point of death. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Aureliano Jose’s Love for Amaranta is Never Reciprocated
With all the curses that decide the fates of the Buendias, incest remains one of the recurring ones throughout the generations. The family members keep falling in love with the same person or with each other, giving the family’s matriarch, Ursula, nightmares about their romances leading to children with pig’s tails. This concern pushes her to ensure that every person in her family is married to the right person, but she cannot exactly control everything, most of all, who her children and grandchildren fall in love with. The same happens with Aureliano Jose. He falls so hard in love with his aunt that when she rejects him, he decides to join his father in war, knowing very well that it could kill him at any time.
His decision is also a means to poke at Amaranta, to make her see that if he dies, it will be on her. However, years pass, and when he returns to Macondo, he finds his aunt’s heart unchanged. He thinks the societal taboo is keeping her from being with him, but she makes it clear that she does not want to see him at all. There could be a possibility that Amaranta, like the rest of her siblings, is also cursed with loving the wrong person, and that she, too, loves Aureliano Jose in a romantic way. But she is bound by her past actions and intentions, which is why she always keeps him at an arm’s distance and spends the rest of her life as a virgin, pure of body if not entirely pure of mind and heart. In a twist of fate that fits well with the story of the Buendias, Aureliano Jose and Amaranta meet their deaths in starkly different manners.
Death Comes in Polar Opposites to Amaranta and Aureliano Jose
After a brief stay at Macondo, his father decides to go back to the battlefield, but this time, Aureliano Jose does not follow him. He stays back in the town, believing that he will one day change Amaranta’s heart. He lives in Pilar’s house, and for the love of her son, she tries to set him up with a different woman, just as she’d set up her other son, Arcadio, with Sofia de la Piedad, with whom he had three children. She tells him she has someone she wants him to meet before he heads out to the cinema one evening. He says he will come back, but even Pilar knows that he might be able to keep his promise. Sure enough, at the cinema, a Conservative is riled up, leading him and Aureliano Jose to engage in a fight which ends with the man shooting Aureliano Jose to death.
Thus, Aureliano Jose’s death arrives suddenly, without warning, and takes him in a violent and bloody manner. In contrast, Amaranta’s death is patient, calm, and welcoming. Unlike Aureliano Jose, who is killed in the prime of his life, Death comes to Amaranta when she is an old woman. Earlier, in her hostility toward Rebeca, Amaranta had wished for her sister to die so she could sew a shroud for her. Not surprisingly, Death has different plans. Instead of taking Rebeca, who has been sequestered in her house for decades, it comes to Amaranta while she is still alive and tells her to start sewing her own shorud. With this, the timing of her death is put in her hands because the day the shroud is made, she will die. She is allowed to take as long as she wants to make as intricate a shroud as she wants, and that’s what Amaranta does.
She doesn’t try to cheat Death by making something that is never finished. Instead, she takes it up like just another task, and when her creation is near its end, she declares the date she will die. Knowing the exact moment of her death allows Amaranta to extend one last favor to her family and the residents of Macondo. She offers to take their letters to the afterlife to deliver them to the dead, so the living can say all the things they couldn’t before. On the day of her death, she wears her shroud and lies inside her coffin with all the letters from the townsfolk and breathes her last quietly and peacefully.
Read More: Is Ursula Dead? How did She Die? How Old Was She?
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