Leaf Storm
58 pages • 1-hour read
Gabriel García MárquezLeaf Storm
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Symbols & Motifs
Storms
Storms recur in two of the entries in this collection, functioning generally as a symbol for upheaval. The nature of these upheavals becomes more specific in each of the stories where they appear.
In Leaf Storm, the titular storm occurs in the introduction to the novella, carrying the dregs of the city along with it to create a more complex town than the original Macondo. This points to not just the physical upheaval of Macondo via rapid industrialization, but also the cultural upheaval that this sudden development entails: “Even the dregs of the cities’ sad love came to us in the whirlwind and built small wooden houses […] and then a whole inner village of tolerance within the town” (10). In the novella, García Márquez connects this upheaval to the railroad’s coming to Macondo, making way for the development of movie theaters and other urban amusements to accommodate the needs of the banana company workers. When the doctor declares that they’ll need to adjust themselves to the leaf storm, it solidifies the function of the leaf storm as a symbolic rather than material reality in the life of the village.
In “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo,” a long rainstorm plagues Macondo, washing many of the buildings away to the point of ruin. This upheaval functions in reverse to the one depicted in Leaf Storm. Whereas the leaf storm drives the urbanization of Macondo, the rainstorm eradicates all the original markers of the town’s founding, including the church. Viewing Leaf Storm as a continuation of this story, this rainstorm lays the foundation for Isabel’s reflection that Macondo is doomed to die and fade away at the end of the novella.
Ghosts
As a recurring symbol for the persistence of the past throughout the collection, ghosts show how history never really dies, but survives and bleeds into the reality of the present.
Leaf Storm implies that the Colonel’s house is haunted when the boy tells Ada that he sometimes sees a ghost by the stove. Later in the novella, when Isabel is preparing for her wedding to Martin, she sees her mother in her reflection, stoking her fears of her marriage being doomed like her mother’s. The sight of her mother’s ghost points to Isabel’s doubt in her ability to break the cycles of history. Martin’s subsequently abandoning her and their son in Macondo suggests that the prophecy of her mother’s specter has been fulfilled.
Similarly, the ghost ship in “The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship” represents a cycle of history that comes to fruition in the present. The ghost ship repeatedly crashes against the reef near the colonial city. The fact that this apparition recurs on one night every year underscores the idea that this was a historical event, rooted in a specific time and place. When the boy steers the ship away from its usual destination, it suddenly materializes, as though breaking through the cycle of history into the present. Ironically, the boy chooses to repeat history by driving the now-material ship toward his village, suggesting that he did so out of a desire to vindicate himself.
Trunks
Throughout Leaf Storm, trunks recur as a motif that thematically supports The Burden of Inherited Identity. Trunks represent the histories that people bring with them to new homes, using them to root themselves in the land. Although the trunks function as baggage, the novella implies that they’re impossible to move once one settles in a given place, making them burdensome to the people who keep them.
The first time the novella invokes trunks is when the boy observes “the smell of trunks” in the doctor’s room (16), though the trunks are nowhere in sight. The text later reveals that the doctor arrived in town and was spotted bringing along “the largest trunk ever seen in Macondo” (52). Despite the grandiose nature of the doctor’s trunk, the novella’s opening reveals that this trunk contained little at the time of the doctor’s death. Nevertheless, the scent of his ambition, which marked his identity upon his arrival in Macondo, hangs in the air of his house, rooting itself to the location.
The Colonel is also known to possess trunks. The novella describes how the trunks possess the “clothing of people who had died before [the Colonel and his wife] had been on earth, ancestors who couldn’t have been found twenty fathoms under the earth” (45). The Colonel literally brings his family history along with him, storing it in the place he deems peaceful enough to allow his family legacy to remain undisturbed. At the novella’s end, Isabel associates these trunks with her family’s inability to leave Macondo because they’ve already set their roots too deep in the now-dying town: “Everyone will have gone then except us, because we’re tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks” (138)
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