magdalene redux

[lithiumbunnies]

"Jose Arcadio felt his bones filling up with foam, a languid fear, and a terrible desire to weep. The woman made no insinuations. But Jose Arcadio kept looking for her all night long, for the smell of smoke that she had under her armpits and that he had got caught under his skin. He wanted to be with her all the time, he wanted her to be his mother, for them never to leave the granary, for her to say "lordy!" to him. ...that night, during the frightful time of lying awake, he desired her again with a brutal anxiety...days later the woman suddenly called him to her house...in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable...from the moment he entered [her house]...he caught the smell...he could have guided himself [in the darkness] by the smell if the smell had not been all over the house, so devious and at the same time so definite, as it had alwasy been on his skin. he did not move for a long time, wondering in fright how he had ever got to that abyss of abandonment, when a hand with all its fingers extended and feeling about int he darkness touched his face...he had been expecting it. Then he gave himself over to that hand...[led naked to] a bottomless darkness in which his arms were useless, where it no longer smelled of woman but of ammonia, and where he tried to remember her face and found before him the face of [his mother], confusedly aware that he was doing something that for a very long time he wanted to do but that he had imagined could really never be done, not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his feet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the ait of his intestines, and fear, and the bewlindering anxiety to flee and at the same time stay forever in that exasperated silence and that fearful solitude.

Her name was Pilar Ternera. She had been part of the exodus that ended with the founding of Macondo, dragged along by her family in order to seperate her from the man who had raped her at fourteen and had continued to love her until she was twenty-two...he promised to follow her to the ends of the earth but..she had become tired of waiting for him, always identifying him with the tall and short, blond and brunet men that her cards promised...With her waiting she had lost the strength of her thighs, the firmness of her breasts, the habit of tenderness, but she kept the madness of her heart intact. Maddened by that prodigious plaything, Jose Arcadio followed her path every night through the labyrinth of [her bedroom]...when she came into the house...he did not have to make any effort to hide his tension, because that woman, whose explosive laugh frightened off doves, had nothing to do with the invisible power that taught him how to breathe from within and control his heartbeats, and that had permitted him to understand why men are afraid of death."

--gabriel garcia marquez, "Cien Anos De Soledad/One Hundered Years of Solitude"