Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘ follows the story of the Buendia family over two eight-episode seasons. While the first season focuses on the establishment and expansion of Macondo, the second season features its downfall and the eventual fate of the Buendia family. Over the course of sixteen episodes, several family members’ secrets come to light, accompanied by dangerous consequences that leave the Buendias paying a steep price. In the final episode, Fernanda and Aureliano Segundo’s son, Jose Arcadio, unravels one such long-hidden secret and pays a dear price for it. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Location of Ursula’s Gold Turns Out to be the Most Obvious Place
When Úrsula Iguarán married José Arcadio Buendia, she brought a chest of gold coins from her parents’ house. She carried it with her as they made the long and arduous journey through the forests and finally founded Macondo. The gold was to serve as something their family could fall back on during severe hardships, but Ursula also knew she had to keep it hidden. She was proven right soon enough when her husband got mesmerized by the worldly inventions that the Gypsies, especially Melquiades, brought with them, and he tried to find their fortune in them. Had she handed over the chest to Jose Arcadio, they would have lost everything in their first few years in Macondo. Sure enough, Jose Arcadio became obsessed with alchemy and thought he could make more gold out of Ursula’s coins.
While she did hand over some coins to Jose Arcadio, she buried the chest somewhere in the house and never revealed its location to anyone. Ursula took the secret to her grave, leaving her family to fend for themselves after the nearly five-year-long rain ended. Aureliano Segundo tried and failed to find his grandmother’s hidden treasure and had to sell away things just so he could afford to get his daughter, Amaranta Ursula, out of Macondo and to Europe. In the following years, Fernanda used the promise of the treasure to keep her son on the right path, or so she thought. In the letters she wrote to Jose Arcadio, who was supposed to be training as a priest in Rome, she repeatedly mentioned the hidden treasure that would be his once he became the Pope.
Jose Arcadio never had any interest in taking up the priesthood. He whiled away his time in Rome, waiting for his mother to eventually reveal the location of the gold. But then, she died, and when he came back, he found nothing but squalor in the dilapidated house. Still, he searched the entire house, hoping he would find something somewhere, but failed. So, he fell back into the state of drinking and partying with whatever money he got from the things he could still sell. Eventually, he brought in four boys from the town inside the house to party with him, and they were the ones who eventually found the gold hidden under Ursula’s bed. This is where it had been all along, and Jose Arcadio feels foolish for never having looked in the most obvious place in the house.
Jose Arcadio Pays the Price for Bringing In the Wrong People into the House
When Jose Arcadio returns to Macondo, Aureliano Babilonia thinks he is just like his mother, Fernanda. However, he turns out to be severely wrong and discovers that Jose Arcadio is much more like his father, Aureliano Segundo. When he was alive, Aureliano Segundo was the life of the party. He loved to drink and dance till the early hours, and he had a reputation in Macondo for partying with all kinds of people. While he got into his fair share of trouble in his lifetime, Macondo was still a better place at the time, and whatever danger emerged in his life was usually because of his own doing. His son, however, returns to Macondo under completely different circumstances.
While Aureliano Segundo had spent his entire life in the town where he knew everyone and everyone knew him, his son, Jose Arcadio, spent years away, knowing next to nothing about Macondo. When he returned, he brought back the party spirit of his father, but he failed to see that the town was worse off now. With people slowly moving out of the town, more bad was left behind, and one of those bad things was the four boys he brought into his house. Aureliano Babilonia tried to warn him about the boys, who had previously assaulted him during his first foray out of the house. However, Jose Arcadio was too drunk and uncaring to fret about it.
Moreover, Jose Arcadio was ecstatic because the boys had helped him find Ursula’s gold, and now, he would never run out of money to drink and party. But while the gold coins could save him from financial despair, the loneliness of his own heart and mind and the guilt of reducing himself to this debauched version of himself when his mother died, thinking he’d become the Pope, slowly started to strangle him from the inside. One day, when the darkness caught up with him, the presence of the boys in the house was too much for him to bear. So, he threw them out. He could have been more polite and gentle about it. He could have asked them to come back again when he was in a better mood, but he was in the worst mood, and he treated them more harshly than he’d intended.
The boys didn’t like this at all. By now, they already knew about all the riches inside the house. There is no doubt that they’d been secretly stealing things before. For example, one night, they sneak into Aureliano Babilonia’s workshop and try to put their hands on Melquiades’ manuscript. But they are thrown out by a mysterious force they don’t understand. They do, however, know about the gold coins they found and hence feel entitled to them. So, when Jose Arcadio throws them out of the house, they find a way back in through the hole in the bathroom’s roof. They drown Jose Arcadio in the tub, leaving his body to be discovered by his nephew. Meanwhile, they take away as many coins as possible and are never seen again.
Read More: One Hundred Years of Solitude Season 2 Ending Explained: Is Aureliano Babilonia Dead?
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