One Hundred Years of Solitude

Úrsula cleans and restores the Buendía house. She finds José Arcadio Segundo in Melquíades’s workshop.

Petra and Aureliano Segundo continue with their raffle business, which they name Divine Providence Raffles. They acquire more animals to raffle off. They give most of their money to Fernanda and remain in poverty themselves; however, they rediscover their passion for one another and fall madly in love once more.

Fernanda puts Amaranta Úrsula in school but keeps the youngest Aureliano hidden. Úrsula dies, and few people attend the funeral because it is so hot birds are dying. The elderly priest blames the plague of dead birds on a creature he calls by the antisemitic term "wandering Jew." The creature is part-human, with wings that apparently were cut off. The people of Macondo kill it.

Rebeca dies in bed. Fernanda discovers that she has a uterine prolapse, and José Arcadio mails her pessaries—intravaginal medical devices designed to help support her uterus and ease her suffering—from Rome. Aureliano Segundo finds them, thinks they're meant for witchcraft, and tries—unsuccessfully—to solve Fernanda's medical issue by burying a chicken alive.

José Arcadio Segundo befriends little Aureliano and teaches the child how to read and write, as well as telling him about the banana company massacre.

Aureliano Segundo has difficulty breathing and intimates that he is going to die. He scrapes together as much money as he can from the raffles and sends Amaranta Úrsula to Brussels to continue her education.

Aureliano Segundo and José Arcadio Segundo die at the same time. Aureliano Segundo's friends put a wreath on his coffin that reads, "Cease, cows, life is short" (354).

After Aureliano Segundo dies, Petra sends a weekly basket of food to Fernanda until Fernanda, too, passes away.

The young Aureliano spends a great deal of time in Melquíades’s former workshop, where Santa Sofía de Piedad brings him food and clothing. The ghost of Melquíades visits him and tells him to visit a specific bookstore in town to buy books that will assist him in deciphering Melquíades’s writings.

Santa Sofía de Piedad tries to manage the household by herself, but she is elderly. Frustrated, she packs her clothes and tells Aureliano that she is going to spend the rest of her life at a cousin's house. Fernanda has no idea how to do any of the household chores, so Aureliano does what he can.

Aureliano tries to work up the courage to ask Fernanda's permission to go to the bookstore. She refuses and starts to keep the house keys on her person at all times. One day, Aureliano sees that she didn’t eat the meal he left out for her the previous day. He finds her dead in bed, wearing the queen's outfit she wore on her very first visit to Macondo.

After Fernanda's death, Aureliano works up the courage to finally visit the bookstore.

José Arcadio arrives home from his religious schooling four months later and moves back in permanently. He dismisses Aureliano as "the bastard" (365) and ignores him. José Arcadio sells what remains in the house and invites children over to play and party. The children bother Aureliano, but they find the three sacks of gold hidden under the spot where Úrsula's bed used to be. With the money, José Arcadio buys fancy food and alcohol. He also has all-night nude parties with the town's teenagers, after which he feels guilty and whips himself.

Aureliano Amador, the last of Colonel Aureliano Buendía's sons, knocks on their door and tries to come inside. Two police officers who are chasing him murder him in the street.

The teenagers who accompanied José Arcadio return to the house, drown him in the bath, and steal the sacks of gold. The young Aureliano does not notice anything happening until he finds the body.

Amaranta Úrsula returns to the Buendía house with her Belgian husband, Gaston, whom she leads around on a silk rope. She thoroughly cleans the house and buys canaries in an attempt to repopulate the birds of Macondo. Gaston collects insects, eggs, and butterflies as natural history samples; he rides his bike around town, and he spends time with Aureliano. Gaston tries to create an airmail service to Macondo, but the plane he orders never arrives.

Aureliano explores Macondo and lives off the sale of antiques from the house. He ends up having sex with Amaranta Úrsula, who is his aunt, and visits a sex worker named Nigromanta most nights. He makes friends after getting into an argument about cockroaches with other customers at the bookstore and starts to regularly visit a brothel in Macondo's red-light district.

Gaston thinks that their sojourn in Macondo is temporary and suggests a quick trip to Belgium to figure out the airmail business. Amaranta Úrsula refuses to leave Macondo, even if it means the marriage will end.

Aureliano goes with his bookstore friends to a "zoological brothel" (394), where the elderly proprietress, Pilar, thinks he is Colonel Aureliano Buendía. She is Aureliano's great-great-grandmother. He sobs to her about his obsession with his aunt, Amaranta Úrsula, and she tells him Amaranta is waiting for him.

Aureliano goes home and begins raping Amaranta Úrsula while her husband is in the next room. This situation is presented as becoming quasi-consensual over the course of the encounter, with the two having an ongoing sexual relationship that is a focus of the following chapter.

Pilar dies and is buried under the floor of her brothel. The bookstore closes, and its proprietor returns to Catalonia. He sends Aureliano and his friends letters and photos from his travels.

Aureliano's friends leave Macondo. The former banana company becomes a grass field, and the Catholic church is in ruins.

Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula’s sexual relationship continues, and her husband returns permanently to Brussels. Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula have passionate sex all over the Buendía house, and Amaranta becomes pregnant. The two of them live in only a few rooms of the house and let the rest decay.

Amaranta Úrsula gives birth with the assistance of the brothel’s owner. The infant has the tail of a pig, fulfilling the great fear of the now deceased Úrsula Iguarán, as it symbolizes incest. After the birth, Amaranta Úrsula dies of blood loss. In his grief, Aureliano takes the infant with him while he goes carousing around town. He yells, drunk, in the town square, where Nigromanta finds him passed out and cleans him up.

When Aureliano awakes, he cannot find his infant son. He eventually finds the infant's corpse in the Buendía house’s courtyard, being eaten by ants. Seeing the body makes him realize that Melquíades’s writing predicted everything about events within the Buendía family. Aureliano decodes the parchments as it starts to become very windy. The wind strengthens as he reads. It tears off doors and uproots the house’s foundation. He realizes that Melquíades predicted that "the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men" (417), just as the fierce wind does precisely that.