Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘ begins with Colonel Aureliano Buendia standing before a firing squad, remembering the day his father took him to find ice. The story winds back a few years, telling us about Aureliano’s parents and how they founded the town of Macondo, with him becoming the first person born there. It takes a while before we come to the firing squad, but starting the story this way casts a tragic shadow on the Colonel’s life. With people, including several people of his own family, getting violently killed in Macondo, it seems he will meet the same fate. However, death, surprisingly, comes very differently to him. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia Survives All Attempts on His Life, Including His Own
Considering the life Colonel Aureliano Buendia lives and the ominous start to the story, it is believed that he would die a violent death, too. Sure enough, he meets death at a different point in his life. When he decides to start a war against the Conservatives, he has fourteen attempts made on his life, all of which he survives by some twist of fate. In the war, he meets seventy-three ambushes, and while a lot of his soldiers fall to their deaths, the Colonel survives every single one. Even though he stirs up thirty-two uprisings, he loses every single one of them, and yet, even as the men who follow him perish on the battlefield, he lives to see another day. Eventually, the moment arrives when the enemies get a hold of him, and he is brought to Macondo to be put in front of a firing squad.
Just when death seems imminent for him, he survives again, thanks to his brother, Jose Arcadio, who barges in at the last moment. Though interestingly, he doesn’t return to do the same thing for his son, Arcadio, who is also killed by a firing squad. After this close brush with death, Aureliano returns to war and takes back Macondo. Here as well, he faces death again. He is poisoned with a lethal dose of strychnine that would have killed anyone else, but he survives, thanks to his mother. Again, he rides into war, and again, he is the only one to make it back home while the rest of his men die. After all this war and bloodshed, he agrees to sign the surrender of the liberals, and this time, he tries to kill himself.
Aureliano gets the doctor to mark the location of his heart, and after signing the treaty, he puts a bullet in the same place. This time as well, he survives because the doctor marked the wrong location. He resigns himself to solitude in his house’s workshop, where he makes fish of gold. He thinks of staging another rebellion when it turns out the Conservative government did not fulfill his demands from the treaty, but this time, there is no one left to follow him into battle. His seventeen sons, whose mothers he didn’t remember, and who had dispersed into the world following one evening of meeting their father, are also killed one by one. Eventually, when death comes to him, it is much more peaceful and solitary than he’d imagined.
Aureliano Dies of Natural Causes and Fades From Memory
After a life full of death and destruction, Aureliano Buendia dies of natural causes in his home, by the tree his father, Jose Arcadio Buendia, had spent the last years of his life. Arguably, Aureliano has the most adventurous life of all the Buendias, making him a legend whose name carries a different kind of weight, despite the Buendia surname. But the memories of that legend begin to fade as he grows old. During the war, everyone, particularly the government, was acutely interested in his whereabouts. But in his later years, he disappears into the workshop of his house in such a way that even his own house members forget he is there. In fact, even his remains are not found until the next morning, when Sofia comes out to throw out the garbage and notices the vultures in their yard.
In his last moments, he is visited by the memory of the parade he saw as a child. He walks out of his house and from the door, he watches the woman in gold on the elephant, the clowns doing cartwheels, and all the other attractions that had captivated him as a child. But as the parade leaves, the last thing he sees is the face of his own solitude, one that had clung to him his entire life, right from the time when he wept in his mother’s womb to now as he stood on the brink of death. He tries to go back to that memory when he goes back inside and stands in front of the chestnut tree where his father had been for so many years. But the memory is completely erased from his mind, and no matter what, he cannot conjure it again.
That night, he does not go back to his workshop or his room. He dies standing by that chestnut tree, where his father had also died, clinging to the forgotten memory of the parade. This nature of unexceptional death stands in strong contrast to his otherwise remarkable life. However, it also foreshadows that the Colonel himself would soon be forgotten from Macondo’s memory, even with the memorial that stands on the town’s square, placed there long before his death. Even in his death, he is gripped by the solitude that had a chokehold on him during his entire life.
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