A good ghost story is something that has always been able to captivate me. It’s no surprise that the short section about Prudencio Aguilar was such a delight. However, there is something to the way that Garcia Marquez designed the encounter that stands out as both melancholy and terrifying. The terrifying part is in Aguilar’s lack of action. As readers, we know how to handle a vengeful ghost trying to wreak havoc on the living who murdered it. Dealing with a ghost simply lingering in the world is much more difficult.
The interaction with Aguilar reminded me of another Latino creator, Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro deals in the fantastic too, although mostly in the form of films, and two of his movies have dealt with ghosts. There is a book about his first ghost film, The Devil’s Backbone. In the foreword, del Toro wrote “The ghost is not the scariest thing in the tale. It is human cruelty.” Ghosts are treated with a level of kindness in del Toro’s works, as is Aguilar in Garcia Marquez’s.
It is wildly interesting that Jose Arcadio Buendia noted that the ghost must be suffering a great deal. The Buendias worked to treat the ghost well, to the point of leaving town. Having this ghost simply linger in pain allows for a show of compassion from the Buendias that might be less accessible in a non-fantastic setting. What benefit is there to giving water to a ghost that can’t leave? There is none, and the action is only done for the sake of kindness. The ghost story isn’t good because Aguilar is scary. It is good because of the gentle sorrow in the imagery of a ghost trying forever to clean their death wound and the only help coming from those who killed it.
Link to del Toro’s foreword: https://ew.com/books/2017/09/05/guillermo-del-toro-foreword-devils-backbone-book/
This passage was really striking to me as well! I wonder if Macondo moving in loops has an impact on how its residents view and treat ghosts, since they seem to accept that they themselves could very well be in that position someday. Do you have any thoughts on that?
I really appreciate the del Toro link here :^)
I was also very struck by Prudencio’s story. One of my favorite lines in the novel is “After many years of death the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the nearness of that other death which exists within death, that Prudencio Aguilar had ended up loving his worst enemy” (77).