100 Years of Solitude: Meme's Story

By Gabriel García Márquez

     Hi, guys! I was trying to fit the whole story but I found it almost impossible. So I decided I will write the stories of each character individually. 

     This is Renata Remedios's story. She is the oldest daughter of Aureliano Second Buendía and Fernanda de Carpio, she's a fifth generation Buendía. 

     The reason I decided to start with her story is in fact because it's my favorite and because Mauricio Babilonia, who has an important part in this story, is one of my favorite characters and so are the yellow butterflies.

     Meme always obeyed his mother who she thought was irritating due to her queen complex and did all her bidding to evade her constant scolding but, after his father almost died trying to beat La Elefanta in a food contest, he started to share more time with her. Meme made such a good friendship with his father that he helped as a go-between with her mother. She was permitted to go to Patricia Brown's house which was in the other side of the fence the gringos, owners of the Banana plantation made.

     One day her friend's choffeur didn't come so they asked Mauricio Babilonia, a worker in the plantation, to drive them. He worked in a garage where lots of yellow butterflies surrounded it. He later saw him in the cinema when she went with her dad. He was looking at her and she grew disgusted. It was later that it crossed her mind that the yellow butterflies who she thought were attracted to the paint of the garage were actually following Mauricio Babilonia. She knew without seeing, only by the fleeting of the wings or the sight of the butterflies that he was near. One night she dreamt he saved her, and started growing anxious and couldn't stand the idea of not seeing him. She went to Patricia's house and made all sorts of excuses to be able to go to the garage. He knew instantly the reason she went there. They started seeing in secret, kissing behind the garage, talking and constantly grew more and more restless.
     She decided to meet a woman who was said to be able to see things through the cards and unknowningly met Pilar Ternera, her grandgrandmother. She foretell that she would find rest only in bed. Pilar Ternera instructed her in the use of mustard plasters and other concoctions to evade conception. Unable to resist anymore, she gives herself to Mauricio Babilonia.

     After two months, Fernanda starts suspecting something odd in her daughter and goes to seek for her in the cinema where she finds Mauricio Babilonia and Meme kissing in the darkness. She drags Meme away and keeps her locked inside the house and shooes Mauricio Babilonia from the house. Yet Meme was imperturbable, her routine was the same except for her afternoon baths. Every afternoon Fernanda would grow ill-tempered by the enourmous amount of yellow butterflies inside the house. One day while looking for something in Meme's closet she found the mustard plasters and silently made the connection between them and her afternoon baths. She invited the mayor to dinner and told her to put some guards around the house as someone was robbing their chicken. Later that day, Mauricio Babilonia was shot at the roof where he was removing the tiles to enter the bath were the nude Meme waited for him eager of love. He was shot in the spinal cord and died in bed labeled as a chicken thief.
     Shocked by his scream, Meme became mute and silent. Her mother dragged her to a convent where she didn't oppose at all as she had no will at all. But still all her thoughts were filled with Mauricio Babilonia and would continue until her death in a faraway hospital. The butterflies still followed her to the convent but not long after she did not see another yellow butterfly getting crushed against the fans, that she comprehended that he had already died.

     For anyone of you who may think, "Damn, this is too tragic," that's actually the atmosphere of the book. Although I can't transmit the way the story is written, I can tell you that this is one of my two favorite books of all.

Happy reading!