Col. Aureliano Buendia (poem)

after Lord Alfred Tennyson


It baffles the mind that an idle colonel,

In this dark laboratory, among flasks and Bunsen burners sits,

Matched with solitude, I melt and mold

Tiny gold fishes for a savage race,

That lies and brutalizes and scoffs and knows not me.

I cannot bare to travel: I will drink

The solemn cup of defeat: few times I have enjoyed

I have suffered immeasurably, both with those

That followed me and on my own; in swamps, and

Over mountains backed up to wild jungles

Thwarted by Conservatives, by my own pride: They named a street after me;

For fighting in countless numbers of battles and never winning

I’ve scoured the world, cities of cesspools

And starch collared butchers,

Myself, wrapped in a cloak, separate from them all;

And the horrible reality of unrelenting battle,

Far from Macondo, far from myself.

I am removed from all I have met;

Experience is a bridge which

Cracks under the weight of the world, which splinters

Forever and digs into my feet.

How I long to pause, to cease, to end,

To rust and mold, to quiet the sun!

Yet I draw the breath of life. Life piled on life

Suffocating me, cloistering me

There’s nothing left: Every hour is torture

I long for eternal silence, something less than life,

A charioteer of death; and vile I am

To my mother, who patiently stores me,

And this damp spirit yearning not to yearn

To sweep away knowledge, like dust to the sewer,

I’m bound by human thought.


This is my illegitimate son Aureliano Triste

Whom I give the blame and the land -

Barely known by me, seeking to fulfill

His own labour, by swift foolishness to complicate

A simple people, and through brutal reality

Hypnotize them with the modern and the harsh

To blame is he, seated on the innocent yellow train

Of the common uncommon, destined to fail

In offices of advancement and he

Falsifies adoration of my father’s ghost,

May I be gone! He warps his work, I stand by mine.


There lies the train; the steam piercing sky:

There is gloom on the faces of people. My family,

Macondians that have struggled and denied with me -

That never with joyous welcome took to

The gypsies and the movies, and supported

Enslaved minds, enslaved states of matter - you and I are old;

Old age hath no honor, only stagnation;

Death opens all; but something keeps me here;


No work of noble note can ever be done,

Because no living man can photograph God.

The dark begins to twinkle from the sun:

The long life wanes: The quickened stars climb, the deep

Cheers round with faceless voices. Stay, you fool,

It’s too late to seek another world.

Stay still, and sitting well in apathy flick

The sounding furrows; My purpose is to escape,

To raise to heaven like Remedios the Beauty, and the showers

Of all the non-western stars, I’d like to die.

May it be a banana peel on which I slip:

May it be my head against a tree,

And see the great gypsy Melquíades, who has slipped into death.

Though nothing is sacred, his parchments survive; And though

I never had the strength I sought in days of old

I ravaged the Earth, forsaking heaven; I’m not what I am;

A false description of a heroic heart,

Made weak by power and solitude, lacking in will

To burn, to fight, to sigh - begging to yield.








(Col. Aureliano Buendia is a central figure in the brilliant novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez)