After the armistice and signing of the treaty of Neerlandia, peace still does not reach Macondo. The Conservatives, fearful of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s threats, plot an attack that —by a twist of fate— brings Fernanda del Carpio from Bogotá to the town. When she marries Aureliano Segundo, one of the bastard Arcadio’s untamable twin sons, she gives Úrsula Iguarán her first legitimate heirs.
Meanwhile, the other twin, José Arcardo Segundo, absorbed in José Arcadio Buendía’s manuscripts accomplishes the patriarch’s wild dreams of connecting Macondo with the world. The railroad’s arrival opens the doors to the banana company, which unleashes the town’s downfall and ultimately fulfills Úrsula Iguarán’s curse: for the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude were not granted a second opportunity on earth.
