Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude‘ follows the Buendia family over seven generations, as each generation deals with its own forms of love, heartbreak, solitude, and death. Over the course of two seasons, we see them move to Macondo, where their family expands and flourishes, mirroring Macondo’s rise as a bustling town and culminating in the family’s and the town’s eventual synchronous downfall. Over the years, the Buendias form relationships with various people, but only one person remains strongly tied to their story from beginning to end. No one comes close to the impact Pilar Ternera has on the Buendias and Macondo, which makes her death an even more significant event for the town and the last living member of the family. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Pilar Ternera Lives Long Enough to See Macondo’s Downfall
Pilar Ternera is introduced as one of the earliest residents of Macondo. Like most other people in town, she was uprooted from her life in a place that she never returned to by her parents, who wanted her to have a fresh start. When she was seventeen, she was sexually assaulted by a man who loved her, or at least, he claimed to love her until she was twenty-two. By this time, her parents had already removed her from that man’s shadow by bringing her to Macondo, where she was brought into Jose Arcadio Buendia and Úrsula Iguarán’s house for help. She later becomes known for reading people’s fates from cards and almost always predicts events with surprising accuracy. But what truly connects her to the Buendias is that she has two sons who continue the family line.
Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula’s first son, Jose Arcadio, has one son, Arcadio, with Pilar. He has no other sons that the family knows of. Colonel Aureliano Buendia also has a son with Pilar, named Aureliano Jose, who was also brought up in the Buendia house. This means all of Jose Aracadio Buendia and Ursula’s grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren are also Pilar’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. From the third generation onward, she is tied to the Buendias by blood, and while she never officially becomes part of the family, she continues to be there for her children and their children. She advises them in matters of love and tries to stop them from meeting their fateful ends.
Because of her, the Buendia line continues, as she introduces Arcadio to his future wife, Santa Sofia de la Piedad, and later advises Meme on her romance with Mauricio Babilonia. In the end, when the rest of the older generations of the Buendias are dead, she is still alive in kicking in Macondo and one of the only few people to remember the Buendias and recognize Fernanda’s son, Jose Arcadio, and Meme’s son, Aureliano Babilonia, neither of them aware of their connection with her. Considering that Ursula was well over a hundred years old when she passed, following the nearly five-year-long rain, Pilar lives for a couple more decades before she dies. It is revealed that she was 145 years old when she stopped counting her years, which becomes her assumed age at the time of her death.
Pilar Ternera’s Death Marks the End of Macondo and the Buendias
Jose Arcadio and Aureliano Babilonia meet Pilar Ternera, the madam of a brothel in Macondo. She seems permanently seated on her rocking chair, which is placed at the gate of the brothel. She instantly recognizes the two Buendias, seeing in them the same longing for a love they cannot have, which had plagued their fathers and grandfathers as well. When she’d seen the same emotion in Aracadio’s eyes (for herself, since he didn’t know she was his mother), she brought him Sofia. Then, her other son, Aureliano Jose, also became enamored with her, but she told him she was his mother, and they formed a different relationship.
Still, she knew Aureliano Jose’s true love lay with his aunt, Amaranta, and to help him get out of it, she’d arranged for him to meet with a young woman who would have been his wife and borne him several children. Unfortunately, that fate was not for Aureliano Jose. So, when she sees the same emotion in the eyes of Jose Arcadio and Aureliano Babilonia, she tries to help them by introducing them to Nigromanta. Things don’t work out this time either, as Jose Arcadio dies soon after, leading to the return of Amaranta Ursula, the object of the last Aureliano’s obsession. Meanwhile, Macondo also falls from grace, as it is long past its glory days and is starting to empty.
People are packing up and leaving the town, and it is with Pilar’s death that this exodus comes to an end. Old age finally catches up with her, and she drifts away peacefully on the same rocking chair she’d spent the last years of her life in. Aureliano Babilonia attends her funeral and watches her being laid to rest along with the chair. With her gone, the last person to remember the entire history of the Buendias is gone. Interestingly, it is after her death that the curse of the pigtailed child, which Ursula had feared her entire life, comes to pass. That, along with the biblical storm, wipes away Macondo and the remaining Buendia in one fell swoop, bringing an end to their one hundred years of solitude.
Read More: One Hundred Years of Solitude: How did Jose Arcadio Die? What Happened to Ursula’s Gold?
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