Colonel Aureliano Buendia is the most complex and haunting character in One Hundred Years of Solitude, although not the most forceful or the most necessary to life in Macondo. We are in his mind in the first sentence of the book, and worrying about his vanished political legacy on the last pages. He is austere, distant, yet oddly appealing, and seems to provoke in others an irresistible urge to simplify him – the others including many critics, many readers, García Márquez himself and Aureliano's mother Úrsula. There is also at one point a sort of drift in the character, an uncertainty in the narrator's hold on him, which threatens to take him quite out of focus, beyond simplification but also beyond understanding.

A daguerrotype of Aureliano as a child is described – he is between Amaranta and Rebeca, wears a black velvet suit, has ‘the same languor and the same clairvoyant look that he was to have years later as he faced the firing squad’ [51: 56] – but he permitted no photographs during his military days or after. The Buendía children of a later generation are told that a Tartar horseman in an encyclopaedia is Aureliano because ‘in spite of his strange outfit’ he has ‘a familiar (or a family) air’, ‘un aire familiar’ [280: 297]. And of course this is a picture of Aureliano, of the kind this book affords: his bony face and drooping moustache give him the oriental appearance so common in Latin America, and his spells of tyranny suggest some Asiatic scourge.