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Don’t get your hopes up. Even if they send me to the ends of the earth I’ll find some way of stopping you from getting married, even if I have to kill you.
Amaranta makes this warning to Rebeca in Chapter 4, signaling her refusal to let go of jealousy and wish her happiness. Her anger is such that she even imagines herself capable of murdering Rebeca without remorse. Even though Úrsula takes Amaranta on a trip to the capital in order to help open up her world, Amaranta nurtures a bitterness over being Pietro Crespi’s second choice. This bitterness will follow her for the rest of her life, becoming a defining feature of her character.
She did not even raise her eyes to pity her on the afternoon when Amaranta went into the kitchen and put her hand into the coals of the stove until it hurt her so much that she felt no more pain but instead smelled the pestilence of her own singed flesh. It was a stupid cure for her remorse.
This quotation comes from Chapter 6, as Úrsula stoically watches Amaranta burn herself in response to Pietro Crespi’s suicide. Úrsula is horrified at the cruelty of Amaranta’s rejection of Pietro Crespi, how she worked to get his hopes up before letting him down. However, Amaranta’s reaction to Pietro Crespi’s death suggests that she cannot maintain the heartlessness she has tried to cultivate. Instead of public mourning, Amaranta turns to self-mutilation, a kind of grieving in solitude. The singed hand, marked by a black bandage, will become a sign of Amaranta’s impenetrable solitude for the rest of her life.
Always, at every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought about Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.
This quotation comes from Chapter 11, when the rest of the Buendía family discovers that Rebeca has been alive in her isolated home all this time. Here, it’s revealed that Amaranta has known Rebeca is alive because of her bitterness and hatred of Rebeca. Instead of choosing reconciliation in the face of their respective romantic tragedies, Amaranta nurtures an eternal vendetta. Instead of time healing her wounds, her focus on her memories has cemented her isolation because she imagines things even worse than they were.
Both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.
This quotation comes from Chapter 13, as Úrsula looks back over her life and her children. Here she comes to the stunning realization that Amaranta’s bitterness is in fact the result of deep love mixed with cowardice. Amaranta initially feels guilt over Remedios’s death because she feels like her desire to stop Rebeca’s wedding caused it. She later feels guilt over refusing Pietro Crespi out of spite. Armed with this evidence of what her passions are capable of, Amaranta becomes too afraid to connect with anyone, and instead lives with her bitter memories.
