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Many years later, standing before the review board who were ready to decide my fate, I had a moment to remember that far off afternoon when I first discovered "Cien Años de Soledad" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In those days, the world of the Spanish language was new to me, as if the Earth had just been born, and many things lacked names. To refer to them in Spanish, I had to point with a finger and say "qué es...?"

That's a little riff on the first page of the famous novel by GGM ("Cien Años de Soledad" or "One Hundred Years of Solitude"), which has recently been made into a sumptuous and beautiful streaming mini-series. Although I had only seen the opening fifteen minutes or so of the new film, I convinced my sister to watch, since she is learning Spanish and needs to hear some. She watched the whole first episode and announced, "it's really good, but I wasn't expecting the celestial navigation!" Celestial navigation? Neither was I. But it's not the practice or the skill of celestial navigation; just an unfortunate and "quixotic" innocent man who desperately wants to understand the world... going through some motions of handling a sextant, motions which he has invented without the slightest idea of what he is doing.

In the book, which I had read some portions of forty years ago (and here I am, "muchos años despues"...), there is, in fact, a single sentence on the third page that mentions Melquiades, a "gypsy" entertainer and magician, giving our "hero" Jose Arcadio Buendia, an astrolabe, a compass, and a sextant to experiment with. These are consolation prizes after J.A.B. has miserably failed to extract gold from the ground using powerful magnets that he had purchased with child-like naiveté from Melquiades. The old man has some pity for our poor hero and also perhaps hopes to set him up as a better "mark" for the next round... Of course J.A.B. has no idea what is going on, with the magnets, the sextant, or Melquiades, and that is the whole point. He is innocent. He finds escape playing with the sextant and pondering civilization and the world "out there". And he guesses that the world is round "like an orange" [an unmotivated speculation, which also turns up in another popular streaming series *]. His life in his little village is primeval bliss, but he imagines he is missing the big show...

In the images below we can see the sextant chosen for these scenes. It looks good! It appears to be a genuine instrument from the middle or late 19th century, cleaned and polished, or it could be a good copy. Authenticity is not important here. As a film prop it misses the mark in two ways. First, just by showing it visually, simply by translating from the medium of text on a page to a finely-crafted bit of cinematography, they have over-emphasized the importance of the sextant. It's one minor sentence in the book. It "looks like" science when it should be more of a trinket. That often happens when books are filmed. Second, the sextant is "too good". Even to a casual viewer, it looks "expensive". The toys that Melquiades gave to Jose Arcadio Buendia should look mysterious, yes, but more like "junk". To me it would have made more sense if the sextant had been missing its mirrors or even its index arm... "science-like" but useless. Melquiades is a showman and probably a grifter (a traditional model for a "gypsy"). He is not providing J.A.B. with tools to study the world; he's setting him up to purchase the kit of an alchemist in the next scene!

Frank Reed
Clockwork Mapping / ReedNavigation.com
Conanicut Island USA

* Another excellent streaming series, "Silo", also presents a character who realizes that the Earth is round and turning after seeing the stars moving in the sky on a video display in their underground "prison". Both "Cien Años..." and "Silo" are suggesting that an innocent "genius" merely pondering the motions of the heavens could deduce that the Earth is round and rotating, as if "Copernican cosmology" is obvious. That ain't right! It's not even close... :)

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