Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘ comes to an end with the eighth episode of Season 2, which closes the final chapter of the Buendia family. The second season started with the return of Colonel Aureliano Buendia to Macondo, but the town has transformed drastically, and the Colonel is not the same man as he was when he left. Over the course of the season, the war comes to an end, the Americans arrive, the banana company comes to town, and another line of Buendias goes through a cycle of love, heartbreak, and death. The eighth episode brings the story full circle in the most unexpected manner. SPOILERS AHEAD.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Season 2 Episode 8 Recap
The final episode of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ picks up years after the seventh episode. Now, only Fernanda and Aureliano Babilonia are left in the Buendia house. Her son, Jose Arcadio III, is away in Rome, training to become a priest. Her daughter, Amaranta Ursula, is away in Europe. With the rest of the family dead or gone, Fernanda shuts herself and Aureliano in the house. She refuses to let him go out, but thanks to Petra Cotes, they keep getting baskets of food every week. While young Aureliano uses this solitude to learn several languages and read all the books in the house, learning everything about the world, Fernanda’s isolation feeds the delusion that she was supposed to become a queen.
Eventually, Melquiades’ ghost tells Aureliano that he must go out, find the bookshop in town, and get the books that will help him decipher the manuscript that had been the object of the obsession of other Aurelianos before him. The youngest Buendia finds the courage to finally leave the house and comes back shaken up, only to find Fernanda dead in her bed. He preserves the body until months later, when her son, Jose Arcadio, comes back. It turns out that he is not the priest his mother had wanted him to be. He only came back because his mother had told him about a treasure hidden inside the house, but when the search yielded nothing, he had no choice but to drop his facade and be who he really is.
It turns out Jose Arcadio is much more like his father, Aureliano Segundo. He spends his days drinking and partying, and includes young Aureliano in this celebration of life as well. Finally, Aureliano goes out of the house, makes friends, indulges in philosophical discussions with them, and gets to see more of the town that had been right outside his door all this time. However, all good days must come to an end, and soon, Jose Arcadio, too, meets a tragic fate. He is killed by the boys whom he’d previously let inside the house to party. They found Ursula’s hidden treasure and, angry at Jose Arcadio for unceremoniously kicking them out, they killed him and fled with the money. Once again, Aureliano was left alone until the only family he’d left returned.
Are Amaranta Ursula and Her Baby Dead? Why did He Have a Tail?
The curse of the Buendia family is that they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Even with the new generations, the cycle of doomed endeavors and tragic deaths keeps repeating. This also includes the romances, with each generation witnessing at least one incestuous romance, and the trail of this pattern started long before Macondo. When Jose Arcadio and Ursula were married in their village, long before they moved out in search of a new place and founded the town of Macondo, there were rumors that their families had married into each other so much that they were basically each other’s cousins. While Ursula loved and married Jose Arcadio, she also had a raging fear put in her mind by her mother.
She was warned that a child of incest would be born with a pig’s tail. Due to this fear, she decided not to consummate her marriage with Jose Arcadio, which eventually paved the path for the events that forced them out of Macondo. As the generations unraveled in front of her, the fear of a pig-tailed child never left Ursula. Whenever she saw that someone in the family was at risk of indulging in incest, she tried to force them apart. By the time Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano Babilonia came around, Ursula already had one foot in the grave. Still, she warned them not to consummate the feelings they would eventually have for one another. However, they were too young to understand and heed that warning at the time.
Years later, when they reunite, those feelings resurface. While Amaranta Ursula is with Gaston, she and Aureliano start an affair. Once Gaston leaves Macondo, nothing stops them from being together. For a while, they are happy. They spend their days inside the house, without a care in the world, ensconced in their own version of Eden. And then, Amaranta Ursula becomes pregnant, which reminds her of Ursula’s words. She worries that they are related and the child was born of incest. However, neither knows exactly who Aureliano’s parents are, and he assures her that Fernanda found him in a basket floating in the river. There is no way he could be related to her.
Of course, neither knows that they are aunt and nephew, so they go about their days, happily waiting for the child to arrive. When the child is born, it has a pig’s tail, bringing Ursula’s worst fear to life. However, the parents are not perturbed by this. They decide to cut off the tail when the child is old enough, but they never get to that point. With no one else left in the town, Aureliano has no help in delivering Amaranta Ursula’s baby. He has no idea how to help her as she bleeds out on the table following childbirth. The heartbreak of losing her is so strong that it takes him some time to realize that the baby is dead as well, and he has been carrying around a pile of stones, not his son. Both mother and child are dead, and once again, Aureliano is left all alone.
Why was Macondo Empty? Where Did Everyone Go? Is Macondo Destroyed?
Following the banana massacre and the rains that lasted almost five years, the town of Macondo is left in tatters. So much destruction has happened by now that a lot of people are already packing up and leaving, if they didn’t already. This exodus from the town continues over the years, even as Fernanda and Aureliano spend years cooped up inside the house. Funnily, the only people to come to Macondo are the two remaining Buendias, Jose Arcadio and his sister, Amaranta Ursula. One could say they were bound to return because the Buendias’ story was intrinsically tied to Macondo, and the family’s end was inherently tied to the town’s. Eventually, as Aureliano steps out of the house, there are still some people left.
He even gets to be friends with the four debaters, one of whom is Gabriel Garcia, the grandson of Gerineldo Marquez, who had been a close friend and confidant of Colonel Aureliano Buendia. But as Aureliano finally starts to explore the town he has spent his entire life in, the people around him, including his friends, start to pack up. Gabriel Garcia is one of the last people to say goodbye to Aureliano, following which he retreats to the workshop, trying to break Melquiades’ manuscript again. In the meantime, the rest of the people also leave town, including Gaston, who appears to be the only one taking the otherwise empty train out of Macondo. No new people come to town, and with Gaston’s departure, the Buendias are truly left to their own devices.
Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano spend their days inside the house, having sex and making up for the time they were kept apart because of Fernanda. It isn’t until she gets pregnant that Aureliano goes out into the town to find the records that will tell him who his parents were. But all he hears are the whispers of his dead ancestors. The streets are completely empty, and the houses have long been abandoned. When he reaches the church, he finds a priest, but no one comes to pray there anymore. And the priest is so consumed by his own solitude that he confesses he doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not. In that sense, the only two people to have any sense of Macondo’s existence are Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula. But then, they, too, meet their end.
What was in Melquiades’ Manuscript? Is Aureliano Babilonia Dead?
One of the major mysteries since the time of Jose Arcadio Buendia had been Melquiades’ manuscript. He wrote it in Sanskrit, leaving generations of Buendia unable to read and decipher it. Even as he appeared as a ghost to some of them, he never told them about the key that could open the lock of his secrets. It turns out that none of those Buendias were meant to decipher the book. It was Aureliano Babilonia’s destiny to get the answers, which is why Melquiades’ ghost tells him about the bookstore and the specific books that will help him uncover the truth. Even with that, the last Buendia is unable to break the code that has fascinated the long line of Buendia men who came before him. And there was a good reason for that, too.
Once Aureliano read the book and got all the answers, it would mean the end of the Buendia line, and that’s how it was always supposed to end. While it may have seemed like an epic tale spanning over hundreds of pages written in Sanskrit, the true story had been written in one page, with all the events, starting from Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula’s wedding to Colonel Aureliano Buendia facing the firing squad to Remedios the Beauty ascending to heaven to the Buendia twins dying at the same time. It also included the birth of Amaranta Ursula and Aureliano Babilonia’s pig-tailed son, as well as his imminent death. And it tied the whole story from the first Buendia being tied to the tree to the last being eaten by the ants.
The ability to read this concurrent telling of his family’s history comes to Aureliano right as a huge storm takes over Macondo. As destruction rages outside, Aureliano continues reading the story and eventually reaches the point where the events in the book mirror those happening right now. He reads about the town being swept away by the storm and how he, the last Buendia, will also be swept away in it. In the end, Aureliano Babilonia and Macondo are destroyed by the storm. They are removed from the face of the Earth such that there is no physical trace remaining that will make people think of them.
By this point, anyone who knew or remembered the Buendias is dead. All the Buendias are dead, too. Everyone who did not remember them has left Macondo and forgotten about the town as well. And with that, the town has completely erased the one hundred years of the town and the family’s history. All their riches and misfortunes and their fated curses are wiped away. The slate is entirely clean, and the narrator reveals that there will be no second chance for them to either rectify their story or repeat the cycle. It is well and truly over for the Buendias and Macondo, and so end their one hundred years of solitude.
Read More: One Hundred Years of Solitude Season 2: Is Remedios the Beauty Dead?
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