In all the stories by Garcia Marquez , the women have long lives. They seem more able than the men to make the best of life and to finally accept the inevitable solitude of aging in chronological time. Jack Richardson, in his review of this novel, correctly summed up this difference: “When Colonel Buendia dies, one feels the poignancy in the death of a single being; but when Ursula is buried, one understands that life itself can be worn down to nothing” (The New York Review of Books, March 26 ,1970). But these stalwart bastions of adversity rarely seem to triumph over the machismo of the Buendia males. Indeed, the female Buendias put up with a multitude of suffering and, as a result, become insensitive to the self-degradation (or in Fernanda’s case, hypocrisy) of their body-and-soul loyalty to their men. If the men are ruined by monomania, the women are reduced by their blind constancy. For instance, none of the women really strikes one as erotic although the book abounds with Rabelaisian couplings. But the sexual act is always a mechanical thing, something abstract despite or because of Garcia Marquez’ sexual rhetoric (for example, “cat howls in her stomach”; “a panther-faced woman in profile”). In 100 Hundred Years of Solitude, sexuality is muted in maternal desire, which not surprisingly expresses itself through incestuous relationships.

The pillar of the Buendias is Ursula Buendia, the wife of Macondo’s founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia. Like her husband, Ursula comes from an early South American family, living in a sleepy coastal village. The Iguarans and the Buendias have been mating for centuries, and despite the rumors circulating among the two families concerning genetic mutations (the birth of babies as armadillos, or born with pigs’ tails), Ursula marries Jose Arcadio Buendia. After Macondo is founded, she becomes the mother of Aureliano (the Colonel), Amaranta, and Jose Arcadio, and she is mother to the adopted Rebeca.

When Jose Arcadio Buendia loses his mind, Ursula ties him to a chestnut tree and keeps the family going. When her grandson Arcadio becomes dictator, she prevents him from executing Don Apolinar Moscote, the mayor. She tries unsuccessfully to arrange a marriage between Amaranta and the Italian pianola expert, Pietro Crespi. Then she banishes Jose Arcadio II and Rebeca for what she considers an unnatural marriage, and she thinks that she will die of shame when her daughter, Amaranta, refuses to wed Pietro Crespi.

Ursula is very much a part of Macondo’s history, especially its linear chronicle; she is always in the thick of the action. After the capture of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, during the first rebellion, she smuggles a revolver to him in an attempt to help him escape. This strategy fails, although the Colonel is ultimately saved from execution by his brother. Through this period of the Buendia defeat, she becomes the “only human being who succeeds in penetrating” the Colonel’s misery. Her powers of sympathetic insight even give her the power of prophecy; she foresees the death of her son Jose Arcadio II. But time and tragedy are cyclical for her — sadness and solitude are, in fact, where she expects to find them. She never loses her equanimity, however, when misfortune, flood, incest, death, or disease occur, for Ursula always knows that they will be “on time.”