Mar
15
La figura de Úrsula
Posted by: | March 15, 2010 | Comments Off on La figura de Úrsula
The maternal figure of Úrsula has been of interest to me throughout this book, but something really struck me when I read the following:
“Todavía en sus últimos años, cuando ya no podía levantarse de la cama, parecía simplemente que Úrsula estaba vencida por la decrepitud, pero nadie descubrió que estuviera ciega” (pg 360).
We see this woman throughout the novel take responsibility for a flighty husband, a gaggle of children, all of whom aren’t necessarily hers, and the physical Buendía household. She is incredibly strong. As others attempt to push themselves away from the family into their own deeper rendition of solitude, Úrsula is there to pull them back in, unless they are doing things to soil the good Buendía name like uncontrollable killings, recurrent incest or the such. But mainly Úrsula is that tough love mother who you don’t necessarily like as a character, but realize later how essential she is to the backbone of the family, how, in truth, she is the backbone of the novel.
The above quote really struck me because it confirms that even though Úrsula tried so hard to protect her family from their own solitude she too was encompassed by it. No one in the family ever noticed her blindness, which she’d suffered from for years (“Ella lo había notado desde antes del nacimiento de José Arcadio” (pág 360)). And how truly solitary must one be to go unnoticed by your own family and in Úrsula’s case the people she worked so hard to care for and accept. Granted, in keeping with the strict maternal character she has, Úrsula would never let the family see her weakness. After all, she never did tell anyone in the family about her blindness, but, in my opinion, that makes it all the sadder. Her self-sacrifice only proved to tether her tighter to the very misery she tried to keep others away from.
On another note, in any child-parent relationship there comes a point where the holiness of the parent is worn away to reveal the parent as a real-life, breathing and sinning person. It’s an odd occurrence. There is a phrase in my family to accompany it: “You can only blame your parents until you’re thirty.” Meaning, as I’ve interpreted it, that if your parents are still around by the time you hit the big 3-0 you have to start treating them like actual people. Considering that my mother has been a single mother since I was four, I’ve repeatedly tried to bring thirty down to my respective age and cut the woman a little slack. And I suppose that’s what made reading about this instance in the novel where we learn that Úrsula has been blind for so long without anyone else knowing so hard for me. No one in the Buendía family has been able to look past Úrsula’s maternal veneer (craziness included) to see an actual person. And I can’t help but feel bad for the woman and then I can’t help think about my own mother. God, this book is good.
