payment page
“It’s the smell of the devil,” she said. “Not at all,” Melquíades corrected her. “It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate.”
This conversation between Úrsula and Melquíades occurs in Chapter 1 as Melquíades helps set up José Arcadio Buendía’s alchemy lab. Although young José Arcadio remembers the alchemy lab with wonder, Úrsula’s memory is tainted by a broken flask of chemicals. To Úrsula, the bad smell takes on biblical proportions. Melquíades understands the scent with both his scientific and theoretical knowledge. These three perspectives on the incident—childlike wonder, scandalized horror, and scientific mysticism—coexist without hierarchy in the novel.
The concert of so many different birds became so disturbing that Úrsula would plug her ears with beeswax so as not to lose her sense of reality.
This quotation appears in Chapter 1, as the narrator describes how Macondo originally had cages full of birds. Although ostensibly a setting detail, the cacophony of birds and the effect on Ursula’s reality hints at the hazy borders between people’s subjectivity in the novel. Too much noise and too many voices can uproot a person’s sense of what’s real and their own thoughts on a subject. However, as the novel will show, too much isolation can lead a person to become too entrenched in their own reality, one that doesn’t match with those around them.
“In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper,” he said without losing his calm. “And so that you know it once and for all, we don’t need any judges here because there’s nothing that needs judging.”
José Arcadio Buendía makes this proclamation to Don Apolinar Moscote in Chapter 3. Don Apolinar Moscote has just moved to Macondo to become its new magistrate on behalf of the central government and dictated that all houses should be painted blue. José Arcadio Buendía, who has up till now been the de facto leader of Macondo, is angry and confused by the sudden usurpation of his power. From his perspective, Macondo was independently founded and runs perfectly well. From the government’s perspective, it is within their territory and therefore requires their oversight.
“Remember, old friend,” he told him. “I’m not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendía makes this comment to General Moncada in Chapter 8, after Moncada has been sentenced to death for being on the Conservative side. The entire war is a minefield of hazy realities because of the way rules and systems enact ideology without any regard for individual reality. Aureliano as a symbol of the revolution will shoot Moncada as a symbol of the Conservative government to achieve a symbolic victory. In reality, however, Aureliano and Moncada are good friends whose politics are fairly similar, but who happen to be on opposite sides.
It was there that the sleight-of-hand lawyers proved that the demands lacked all validity for the simple reason that the banana company did not have, never had had, and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis.
This quotation comes from Chapter 15, in the leadup to the worker’s strike that ends with a massacre. Using the power of law and shady contracts, the banana company’s lawyers can manipulate reality in the banana company’s favor. Since the employees of the banana company are registered as gig workers, the company can abdicate responsibility for their wellbeing even though a look at the material reality of the situation would see that they are, in fact, employees in all but name.
