Unknown Melancholies

Hello!

I just want to start off by saying: we're half-way there!
As great as it is that I've finished my fiction book, that means this project is officially half-way over which makes me strangely sad. (I'll no longer have the excuse to rant for an obnoxiously long time about books.) That makes this the last blog I'll write for 100 Years of Solitude, so hopefully I'll go out on a good note.

In the time leading up to my writing this blog post, I was dead-set on retelling a moment from the novel in a different POV. Though I doubted that I could live up to Marquez's prose, I'll take any excuse to do creative writing. The only issue: the narrator is third-person omniscient, so nearly every relevant character constantly has their voice heard. However, I found a loop-hole of sorts in Santa Sofia de la Piedad. One of a group of women that I've affectionately dubbed "The Exasperated Housewives of Macondo", Santa Sofia de la Piedad is unique in that she has "the rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment” (116). In other words, she's the perfect narrator for a retelling because even in the instances that she does exist, it's rarely revealed what she's thinking and feeling. There's even a line towards the end of the book that says that when she was given a prophetic assignment by Aurelinao, it was "the first time in her long life Santa Sofia de la Piedad let a feeling show through" (356).

As for the scene I chose to rewrite, it begins when Santa Sofia's son Jose Arcadio Segundo returns home, the only survivor of the "banana massacre" (which is conveniently part of a giant government cover-up/conspiracy), and goes on to when the military raids the Buendia household looking for rebels. Santa Sofia de la Piedad speaks, moves, and exists in the scene, but the window to her mind is closed, like always, so I wanted to explore my interpretation of what she might have been feeling/thinking throughout it.


The persistent rain pattered against the windowsill, ran rivers down the cracks in the whitewash, as both Santa Sofia de la Piedad and the dawn rose into existence. Just then, Jose Arcadio Segundo entered through the kitchen door, not unlike the stray cats Santa Sofia de la Piedad occasionally spoiled. Perhaps she should have felt shocked by his return, but her heart remained as still as always. Her voice barely raised. “Don’t let Fernanda see you,” she said. “She’s just getting up.” She glanced back at the simmering stew as Jose Arcadio Segundo dripped in the doorway like a familiar stranger. She was not compelled to ask where he had been, for she could see in his eyes the stamp of a violence she was not meant to handle. One that he was perhaps not meant to either.

Santa Sofia de la Piedad left the stew to cool as she led her son to the “chamberpot room” and set up for him Melquiades’ decrepit cot. No small talk was made, for it was as if both of them knew that there was no longer any room in this house for thinking about other people’s happiness. Still, Santa Sofia de la Piedad smoothed the sheets and dusted the desk for longer than necessary, reveling in the feeling of shared solitude and of the inklings of what might have been affection. Soon enough, she left to attend to the stew she had abandoned back in the kitchen, but as Fernanda was taking her afternoon siesta, she returned to pass a plate of food to him through the window.

Days passed, and as well as the government had done in hiding their affairs, it was clear they were still on the hunt for the rebels of Decree No. 4. The government insisted Macondo was and continues to be a “happy town,” but Sofia de la Piedad was not so foolish. Perhaps Macondo had once been as lively and jubilant as Ursula recalled it to be, but now it might as well have been a ghost town home to only misery and solitude. And so it came as no surprise to Santa Sofia de la Piedad when one February night the unmistakable blows of rifle butts could be heard pounding the door. Aureliano Segundo, who now spent all his waking hours waiting for the endless rain to clear, answered the door, revealing an officer and six soldiers under his command. No words were said as the men, soaked to the bone, searched the every inch of the house. Santa Sofia de la Piedad managed to slip away from the fray—for she was not fully existent at that moment—to warn the sleeping Jose Arcadio Segundo. But by the time she woke Jose Arcadio Segundo, there was no time left for him to escape. She watched as he attempted to make himself presentable and then sat on the cot to bide his time before the arrest. Santa Sofia de la Piedad left, locking the door behind her, to make her way back to the scavenging. Once the men reached the “chamberpot room,” Santa Sofia de la Piedad placed all the hope she had onto her tongue and said, “No one has lived in that room for a century.”

But as always no one paid any mind to her, and so the door was opened. The beam of the officer’s lantern flashed in Jose Arcadio Segundo’s eyes and illuminated the pallor of his face, but the only thing the officer took note of were the numerous chamberpots piled in the cupboards. The lights were flicked on, and to Sofia de la Piedad, Jose Arcadio Segundo seemed to finally look like himself again—pensive, solemn, and constantly waiting for the inevitable. As the officer’s gaze paused over the spot where Sofia de la Piedad and Aureliano Segundo were seeing Jose Arcadio Segundo, the three of them realized that the officer was looking at the latter without seeing him. Satisfied that his search was complete, the officer turned out the light and closed the door. It was then that Santa Sofia de la Piedad sent her first and last message to God to thank Him for granting Jose Arcadio Segundo with the very same invisibility she had spent her life resenting prior to meeting Arcadio.

After all was said and done, the rain still had not cleared. Jose Arcadio Segundo returned to his room and to his thoughts, Aureliano to the window, and Santa Sofia de la Piedad to the kitchen. Somehow she knew that she had lost Jose Arcadio Segundo to something worse than the hands of the military officials, for he had never looked more alive than he had been waiting patiently for the reaper. But she figured that in a house full of ghosts, one more could not hurt.


End

gnossienne
n. a moment of awareness that someone you’ve known for years still has a private and mysterious inner life, and somewhere in the hallways of their personality is a door locked from the inside, a stairway leading to a wing of the house that you’ve never fully explored—an unfinished attic that will remain maddeningly unknowable to you, because ultimately neither of you has a map, or a master key, or any way of knowing exactly where you stand.