The novella, set in October 1928, frequently switches among the perspectives of three narrators: an unnamed young boy; his mother, Isabel; and the boy’s grandfather, known locally as the Colonel.

The boy accompanies Isabel and the Colonel to attend the funeral of a doctor who has died in Macondo. It’s the first time the boy has seen a corpse, and though it’s a school day, he’s excused from class and dressed in formal clothes that make him feel like it’s Sunday. The dead man’s room feels overwhelmingly hot and smells decrepit. The boy is surprised that the corpse doesn’t look peaceful, as he had expected, but rather like he’s “awake and in a rage after a fight” (16). The boy wonders why he was brought along, considering that he never met the doctor and assumed that the doctor’s house was empty. When he first entered the room, the boy hadn’t noticed the corpse because the room was so dark. His grandfather attempted to open the window, but it was stuck. The boy’s mother looked distant and serious, which reminded him of her instruction to behave. Since then, he has forced himself to sit still and look ahead at the corpse.

The Colonel orders his men to lay the doctor’s coffin beside the bed. They fill the coffin with lime and place the corpse inside the coffin. It looks more peaceful inside the coffin. The Colonel places several items from the room into the coffin, including a book. The boy doesn’t understand why the coffin was filled with lime and old belongings. He’s relieved when his grandfather orders the men to cover the box. The boy finally receives a smile from his mother and then hears the train whistle, signaling that it’s already 2:30 pm.

Twenty-nine-year-old Isabel regrets bringing her son to the doctor’s funeral, as she doesn’t want to involve him in the spectacle surrounding the event. The text reveals that the Colonel is the only person in Macondo willing to give the doctor a proper burial, a decision that could affect the family’s reputation. However, the Colonel and the doctor had known each other for 25 years. Isabel thinks the Colonel’s charitable nature prepared him to weather such a scandal. She interprets his request for her to accompany him as a sign of his imperfect courage. Isabel brought her son along only because she thought he would insulate her from feeling shame. Her only hope is that people will think she came for the sake of Meme, the Colonel’s former housekeeper, who became the doctor’s mistress and mysteriously vanished 11 years earlier. Isabel notes that some townspeople (Señora Rebeca, Agueda, Solita, and Father Angel) judge things from a spiritual high ground. However, the entire town has anticipated the doctor’s death for years. The novella then reveals that the doctor died by suicide.

The boy observes that his grandfather is trying to act calm to hide his impatience with the situation. They’re waiting for other people to arrive before they can seal the coffin. The heat is suffocating, so the boy asks his mother if he can step out. The Colonel declines his request, so Isabel and the boy wait for his discomfort to pass. Just then, a policeman and a coughing man with a gun and a hat enter the room. The coughing man gets the policeman to force the window open. To distract her son from his discomfort, Isabel invites him to look for their house through the window.

The man with the hat, whom the text reveals is the mayor, argues that they should wait until the corpse begins to smell to confirm that the doctor is dead. The Colonel criticizes the mayor for avoiding the obvious and catering to the townspeople’s desire to rob the doctor of his dignity. The mayor reminds him that the doctor can’t be buried unless he issues a death certificate. The Colonel demands that he bring another doctor into town to confirm the doctor’s death. The novella reveals that the town’s animosity toward the doctor stems from an incident 10 years earlier. One stormy night, some wounded men were brought to the doctor’s house for treatment, but the doctor refused to open his door for them, claiming that he had forgotten his skills. Subsequently, the doctor secluded himself from the townspeople, fearing that they would try to kill him in revenge.

The Colonel is aware of how his actions will impact his reputation, as Father Angel warned him that it would be a sin to bury an atheist who died by suicide. He asked Isabel to come along to show that his family, rather than he alone, would lead the funeral. He hopes that the townspeople’s better natures will leave Isabel’s reputation unscathed. When the Colonel arrived in the room, he examined the doctor’s modest belongings, reflecting on the doctor’s life in Macondo. In 1903, the doctor arrived with a letter of recommendation from the Colonel’s intendant general, accepted the Colonel’s invitation to eat, and requested grass for his meal. Honoring the doctor, the Colonel filled the coffin with his belongings.

Isabel recalls Meme’s life from the time she left the Colonel’s house to her disappearance. As mysterious as her vanishing were the circumstances of her relationship with the doctor, who once refused to treat her when she was sick, despite the pleas of his host, the Colonel, to examine her. After leaving the Colonel’s household, Meme ran a variety store in Macondo. A month after leaving the Colonel’s residence, Meme attended Sunday Mass overdressed in gaudy clothes, which clashed with her usual simplicity, as if trying to draw attention. The townspeople waited outside the church to ambush her, but the Colonel helped her escape. Later, she stopped attending church and became known as the doctor’s mistress. The last time Isabel saw Meme was when Isabel walked past the store, and Meme teased her about her imminent wedding. Soon after, an anonymous note tacked to the door of the doctor’s house accused him of murdering and burying Meme in the garden to stop the town from using her to betray him.

The Colonel argues with the mayor, who remains deliberately obtuse to hold off issuing a death certificate. The Colonel is tempted to return the corpse to the hanging noose to prove his point to the mayor, but he holds back out of concern for Isabel and his grandson. Instead, he challenges the mayor to do it himself. The mayor asks the Colonel how he learned that the doctor had died before anyone else did, insinuating that he may have been involved. The Colonel reminds him that as soon as he found out that the doctor was dead, he informed the mayor, who took so long to arrive at the house that the Colonel had the doctor removed from the noose out of respect. Embarrassed by the counter-accusation, the mayor sends the policeman away and then asks to speak to the Colonel in private. When prompted by the mayor, the Colonel offers him a bribe.

The last time Isabel spoke to Meme at the store, Meme was nostalgic about the prosperity of Isabel’s family before the war. The war caused Isabel’s parents, accompanied by Meme as a foster child, to flee from their home, leading them to search the land and eventually settle in Macondo. Meme remembered Isabel’s mother as a humanitarian. When she and the Colonel arrived in Macondo, Isabel’s mother was already pregnant, though she also had an illness that would make her labor difficult to survive. Meme’s recollections greatly moved Isabel, but when she heard a man coughing in the next room, Isabel became conscious of the doctor’s presence in the house. In addition, Isabel realized that Meme longed to return to better times than those she was living through.

Meme repeatedly observed a strong resemblance between Isabel and her mother. A few months after arriving in Macondo, Isabel’s mother gave birth and died. Believing that this would undermine his moral authority in the town, the Colonel remarried a year later, wedding Isabel’s stepmother, Adelaida. Five years later, Meme told the Colonel of the doctor’s arrival.

The Colonel recalls the construction of a hut in the big lot behind the church. No one lived in the hut until Macondo hosted its first parish priest, when an unknown woman and her infant occupied it. In 1903, a new priest was assigned to the parish, and the town prepared to welcome him. To their surprise, a man in military leggings arrived on the main road, while the priest arrived via the shortcut on the other side of town. The priest was told that the hut behind the church was the parish house. At the time, the woman was out, so the priest set up his hammock, paying no attention to the woman’s unattended child. When the woman returned, she took her child and her belongings and left. The townspeople found the priest and mistakenly assumed that he was related to the woman. His strangeness bewildered them, but they couldn’t help noticing his resemblance to an old colonel who fought in the Civil War in the previous century. Because that colonel was called “the Pup,” they gave the priest the same name.

The man in military leggings was the doctor, who immediately presented himself at the Colonel’s house. Adelaida became nervous when she saw the doctor pacing around the Colonel’s office, transfixed with a dancing-girl toy he found there. He failed to return Adelaida’s greetings, insisting on seeing the Colonel. The doctor stood at attention, giving Adelaida the impression that he was a military man. The Colonel tried to find out which man the doctor reminded Adelaida of, but she merely repeated fragments of her story until the Colonel agreed to see the doctor. When Adelaida left the office, she felt the doctor looking at her legs.

The boy recalls the day before the doctor’s funeral, when he went to hunt birds at the plantation with his friends Abraham, Tobias, and Gilberto. When the hunt failed to yield any birds, Abraham stripped naked to hunt for fish in the river. The boy refused to surrender his knife to Abraham, so Abraham urged the boy to join him in the water. At the last minute, the boy changed his mind about swimming with Abraham. On the way back to town, Abraham jumped behind a hawthorn bush to conceal his actions from the boy. The boy pointed out a single swallow in the sky while waiting for Abraham. Abraham returned, fixing up his pants and looking relieved. Ever since then, the boy has wanted to return to the river alone with Abraham, just to see his body in the water and be close to him. He hopes that they can go home soon so that he can see Abraham again.

The Colonel recalls his first interview with the doctor, whom he guessed was close to Colonel Buendia. Adelaida improvised a formal welcome dinner for the doctor, making him conscious of his vulgar appearance. The Colonel then introduced Adelaida as his second wife, which irritated her but broke the formal air in which she held power over the doctor. Sitting down, the doctor requested grass to eat, further upsetting Adelaida. In the early days of his time as the Colonel’s house guest, the doctor saw patients.

Against Isabel’s expectations, the town allows the doctor’s funeral to begin just after siesta time. Isabel worries that the town will soon begin to gossip about their family. She imagines that the outside world is moving faster through time than time inside the doctor’s room. As she watches her son, she imagines the townspeople moving to anticipate the funeral. The Colonel disrupts these thoughts by reminding her of the real time. He reassures her that if the townspeople come to watch the funeral, they’ll end up ruining their afternoon meals in the middle of their preparation.

The corpse’s face remains fixed in the boy’s mind, even after the coffin has been shut. The boy also feels that he’ll never forget the smell of the doctor’s room. This reminds him of one night the previous year when he noticed an unfamiliar smell of jasmine in his house. The housemaid, Ada, told him that nine years ago, there was a jasmine bush in the courtyard. She compared this sensation to that of people who return to the world after their deaths. This, in turn, prompted the boy to share that he had seen a ghost in the house by the stove, but Ada wouldn’t believe him.

The Colonel recalls how careless and vulgar the doctor’s appearance remained during the four years that the Colonel hosted him. When the banana company arrived in Macondo and opened a clinic for its workers, the townspeople stopped visiting the doctor, and he started secluding himself in his room. The only person who regularly saw him was Meme, since she brought him breakfast and cleaned his room. Adelaida protested against continuing to host the doctor, but the Colonel insisted on being charitable to him, as he had no one else. Upon the opening of the railroad and the urbanization of Macondo, the doctor voiced optimism for the town’s future and started stepping out to socialize at the barbershop. By 1907, the banana company conspired to end the doctor’s practice entirely by forcing the mayor’s office to require the registration of the doctor’s professional degree. The doctor refused to meet their demands.

When Isabel was 17, Adelaida padlocked the doctor’s room in the Colonel’s house, as if to quarantine his belongings from the town. A few months later, Isabel started dreaming that Martin, her fiancé, was occupying the doctor’s room. The dream resonated with Isabel’s impression that Martin never felt entirely real to her. She was compelled to ask Adelaida for permission to move into the house with him, but never worked up the courage to do so. Martin first visited Macondo at the start of that year, attending the wake of a local child, which became a social gathering among Isabel’s peers. The friend group registered Martin’s presence at once, curious after seeing how eloquent and fashionable he was. When Isabel left the wake, Martin predicted that she would dream about him. Later, he claimed to have enchanted Isabel so that she would think of him constantly. Over the next few months, Martin visited the Colonel to seek private conferences with him. By the end of the year, Martin and Isabel were married. Two years later, Isabel saw Martin for the last time as he left Macondo on the train.

The Colonel recalls that whenever the doctor returned to his room from the barbershop, he was restless until dawn, and the Colonel thought the doctor was wrestling with his past self. The doctor became increasingly more concerned about his appearance, replacing his military leggings with perfumed clothes and polished boots. Eventually, a cruel rumor spread that the doctor was romantically interested in the barber’s daughter, which only made the Colonel pity the doctor in his solitude. The barber’s daughter was similarly rumored to have been haunted by a ghost lover, which many took as a sign that she would become a spinster.

Isabel recalls the day when she asked Adelaida to let Martin move into the padlocked room. While sewing Isabel’s wedding dress, Adelaida insisted that no one would ever enter the locked room again. She then told Isabel that the Colonel’s desire to continue hosting the doctor would have serious consequences on the household, culminating in Meme’s departure. One night, Meme became so sick that she collapsed while serving dinner. The Colonel asked the doctor to examine her, but he refused. This offended Adelaida, though the Colonel later returned from his failed attempt to plead with the doctor and declared that Meme’s condition wasn’t serious. After being rubbed with alcohol, Meme recovered. She was forced to leave the house the following day.

Adelaida resented the Colonel for choosing to keep the doctor in their house over Meme. However, she later discovered that the doctor had unceremoniously moved out as well, invoking her ire once again. The Colonel never explained what really happened to make both the doctor and Meme leave on the same day. Adelaida then learned about Meme’s church incident and the doctor and Meme living together. The offense to Adelaida continued when she learned that Meme had opened the store and was using her savings from working at the Colonel’s house to open a sewing business. When Adelaida confronted the Colonel about it, he urged her to wait until she could understand the situation.

In December 1916, after a private conference with Martin, the Colonel announced that they would move up the date of Isabel’s wedding to the following Monday. Isabel again became conscious of how unreal Martin felt to her. While fitting her dress on the eve of her wedding, she recalled Meme telling her that her mother had been buried in her bridal dress. This convinced Isabel that she was looking at her mother in the mirror. Later that night, she received a letter from Martin telling her that he had almost finished conducting business he had agreed on with the Colonel. The next morning, the Pup officiated the wedding, and Martin left after the reception breakfast. Upset over Martin’s absence, Isabel dismantled her wedding gown and envisioned it as her future shroud. When Martin returned and asked her what she was thinking about, Isabel expressed her wish for rain.

The Colonel recalls one of his last conversations with the doctor before he sequestered himself. After feeling his distanced curiosity and sympathy for the doctor turn into love for him, the Colonel asked the doctor about his faith, wondering if he believed in the existence of a higher power. The doctor replied that he was more bothered by the existence of religious people like the Colonel than he was by the existence of God. Nevertheless, he clarified that he wasn’t an atheist, but that he simply found the question of God too bothersome to give any time and energy to. The doctor wondered why the Colonel would ask him such a question, prompting the Colonel to admit that he was both curious and worried for the lonely doctor.

The doctor assessed that the Colonel found happiness in fixing things. He praised the Colonel’s lifestyle, which included having a daughter like Isabel, as a reward for this habit. When the Colonel raised the question of the doctor having his own daughter, the doctor dismissed the idea that he might enjoy the same rewarding lifestyle as the Colonel. The Colonel then suggested that the doctor meet the Pup, telling him that he saw the two men as brothers. Apart from arriving on the same day as the doctor, the Pup bore a striking resemblance to him. Despite the Pup’s strange habit of preaching from the storm reports in the Bristol Almanac rather than the Gospel, the Colonel venerated the Pup as a living saint. He believed that the Pup would adequately challenge the doctor’s perspective.

The Colonel reveals that the doctor’s old room remains padlocked. He considers the possibility that his charity toward the doctor may have been misguided, citing the punishment he experienced in life. Martin had proposed several business ventures to pursue with the Colonel’s support, along with his desire to marry Isabel. Martin left Macondo to execute those projects, but because he never returned to report their progress, the Colonel had no reason to believe that the projects were ever fully realized.

The Colonel sensed that, though he was the master of the house, some other unseen force controlled its affairs, leading to Meme’s expulsion. He deduced that the doctor had secluded himself from the world to avoid engaging with the question of God, and that he would eventually exit this seclusion for the sake of his mental health. This insight came to him the night Meme became sick, when he asked the doctor for help. At once, the doctor confessed that Meme was pregnant with his child since they had been engaged in a sexual affair for several years. He added that while he had taken precautions to prevent a pregnancy, it had happened twice already. The doctor gave her an abortion over a year ago, and was prepared to do so again, but Meme refused, preferring to raise the child.

The Colonel suggested that the doctor marry Meme to avoid the scandal of insulting his generosity, but the doctor declined, indicating that he and Meme would move into another house together instead. This horrified the Colonel, though the doctor assured him that it was the only way to absolve the Colonel of any responsibility. The doctor repeatedly indicated that the Colonel didn’t know everything about Meme, which gave him the confidence to take matters into his own hands. Realizing that the doctor had used his own conscience against him, the Colonel agreed to let him handle the matter and indicated that he was evicting him from the house.

The boy watches as his grandfather and his mother realize that they’re both thinking about the Pup. It reminds him of how he and Abraham understand each other when they use made-up words. He also thinks about their visits to their friend Lucrecia, who lifts her gown for them to see her stomach. The boy wonders if the funeral will end in time for him to meet Abraham.

The Colonel recalls the last time he and the Pup went to the doctor’s house to intervene on his behalf before the local government. Following the banana company’s departure from Macondo, which left the town ruined, the government, hoping to improve its image before the upcoming election, decided to investigate the rumor that the doctor had murdered Meme. The police searched for her corpse, but couldn’t find it. The doctor told the Colonel and the Pup that Meme had simply become so restless that she decided to leave Macondo. The Colonel then introduced the doctor to the Pup, knowing that the doctor failed to heed his suggestion years earlier. Shortly before they left the doctor’s house, the Colonel asked him about his child with Meme. The doctor answered that he had forgotten about it.

The Colonel misses the Pup, who would have compelled the town to attend the doctor’s funeral. Isabel turns to her son, whose distanced expression reminds her of Martin and makes her worry that he, too, will eventually disappear. Isabel recalls her friend Genoveva Garcia, who first observed the resemblance between Martin and the boy. Feeling attached to the boy, Isabel reassures him since he’s uncomfortable in his glasses and tie.

The Colonel recalls a recent day when Adelaida found the dancing-girl toy and was reminded of the doctor. The Colonel asked Adelaida who she thought the doctor was and why she felt the need to set a formal dinner for him. Adelaida was too embarrassed to answer, making the Colonel think she had dropped her ire against him. When the Colonel asked her to accompany him to the funeral, however, Adelaida refused, resenting the Colonel for his misplaced generosity once again. The Colonel argued that he owed the doctor for saving him three years earlier, but Adelaida claimed that was to repay the debt of hosting him for many years. She adamantly refused to pray for the doctor’s soul in rebellion against him.

The Colonel hears the mayor returning and is about to meet him when he falls again on his injured leg. The mayor helps him up. Isabel remembers her father’s fall, which would have killed him if not for the doctor’s last-minute intervention. When the Colonel asked what he owed the doctor for his services, the doctor answered that they owed him nothing, but invited the Colonel to bury him after his death. The Colonel knew then that the doctor had a slow, life-threatening illness and thus anticipated death. He assured the doctor that he would have buried him regardless of the favor, and the doctor quipped that he would need to be alive to do so.

The text reveals that 10 years earlier, the banana company left Macondo, and the town entered a state of ruin. Stores of liquor were left in the town square for public consumption, causing a riot. The doctor refused to treat the wounded, so the townspeople prepared to burn his house down. The Pup intervened, urging them away from the doctor’s door. The only thing they could do was curse the doctor’s future death. In 1924, the Pup died, remaining beloved by the town.

After catching the Colonel to prevent his fall, the mayor provides him with the burial authorization for the doctor. The coffin is finally sealed, and the door is opened. Isabel pulls her son away so that the townspeople don’t see either of them as the funeral procession begins. To her surprise, the street is empty, reminding her of a ruin. Through the window, she sees her family’s house and realizes that it, too, is in a state of collapse, which none can prevent or repair. Even then, Isabel knows that her family can never leave Macondo because they carry too many of their ancestors’ belongings, which link them to the land.

The boy watches the recent string of events, which ends with the mayor reassuring the Colonel that no one is left to remember the doctor’s transgressions against them. The boy feels sick, but knows that he can no longer step out. As the men carry the coffin out, the boy thinks that the corpse’s smell will get the curlews to sing.