payment page
The daughter of José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán, Amaranta is a character with many contradictions. She is loving and loveless, lonely but often pursued. Her name bears similarity to the Spanish “amar,” the verb for “to love,” but also “amagura,” meaning bitterness, a quality she cultivates throughout her life. This bitterness begins in adolescence when Pietro Crespi falls for Rebeca instead of her. Amaranta attempts to stop the wedding, even considering poisoning Rebeca. When Remedios’s death cancels the wedding, Amaranta’s guilt becomes so strong it seems to taint her passions for the rest of her life. As Úrsula will later observe of Amaranta, “the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.” Amaranta’s terror of her own passion means that she’s afraid to pursue it. She remains a virgin for the rest of her life, even when courted by suitors. She even rejects Pietro Crespi, driving him to suicide. In response, she burns her hand, covering it forever with a black bandage. From her perspective, the whims of her heart cause tragedy, and the bandage becomes a sign of her desire to keep herself distant.
Although Amaranta’s bitterness is a defining trait of hers, she also has a deep capacity for love. She is a secondary mother figure to the many children in the household. She plays Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, entertaining his suit. At the end of her life, recognizing her imminent death, she offers to bring letters to people’s dead loved ones. At times her bitterness is indistinguishable from love. For example, she initially hopes to die after Rebeca so that she can make her a funeral shroud, a hateful gesture. However, the narrator observes that were love Amaranta’s motivation, her actions would be the same. Her inappropriate, aborted relationship with Aureliano José also shows a similar confusion of how to love, as her maternal love almost automatically turns sexual. It’s instructive to read Amaranta next to her brother, Colonel Aureliano Buendía. When Úrsula looks back on her children, she’s shocked to realize that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, celebrated and loved, has no capacity for love, whereas unloved Amaranta is full of it. That is, while Colonel Aureliano Buendía experiences sex without love, Amaranta experiences love without sex. Both are deficient in one, and both are prone to intense solitude.
