Rebeca's Relationships

Relationships play a massive role in Garcia Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the character of Rebeca may be one of the most reliant on these relationships. Her strange origins make her undergo an identity crisis that can only be solved by meeting someone who will introduce her to what she truly wants. This person comes in the form of her first love, Pietro Crespi, who appears to be everything that Rebeca would ever need. However, Pietro will give Rebeca so much more than a new life; he will help her identify herself through distance and recognize the core of her strange habits and ambitions. This makes her realize that what she wants is not what Pietro and everyone else in the Buendia family desires, but what her former background
When Pilar Ternera tells her that Rebeca will not be happy as long as her parents are unburied, Rebeca finds herself thinking about her parents and her past once more, but Jose Arcadio Buendia reassures her. "Get those bad thoughts out of your head...you're going to be happy" (Garcia Marquez 75). This happiness that Jose Arcadio Buendia is referring to is Rebeca's new life with Pietro, the fantasy that she is so conditioned to love that it must be what she wants. While the wedding keeps getting postponed, Rebeca becomes incredibly anxious. However, her anxiety does not seem to be because she desires to be with Pietro as soon as possible; on the contrary, it seems as though she just wants to get the wedding over with so she can become a "normal" bride. She makes one last attempt to run away with Pietro, to gain a life of adventure and spontaneity that her inner self craves, thinking that she can have the best of both worlds by having the love of a handsome man along with the freedom of herself. However, Pietro's contained nature prohibits them from doing so (Garcia Marquez 84). It is through this that she realizes that her former self is no more, that Pietro has "tuned" her into the proper lady she was designed to be. After Remedios' death and the recognition that Rebeca's new life will probably never become a reality, she again resorts back to eating earth, losing her romantic connection with
She loves rebellion, she loves savagery, and she loves the thrill of the chase, all of which Jose Arcadio brings to her. Rebeca can finally connect her past and present together, not by eating whitewash and sucking her finger, but by loving someone so masculine and so closely connected to her that it is almost a crime. By defying Ursula, the voice of reason in the family and both Rebeca and Jose Arcadio's mother, Rebeca is doing what she tried to do as a child when she was force-fed rhubarb to stop her from eating dirt: she is going against authority. It does not seem as though Rebeca inherited her poor eating habits from her parents, nor does she enjoy those habits. Rather, she uses this oddity as defiance, a defiance that Pietro Crespi kept her from pursuing in hopes of her living a normal life. By loving Jose Arcadio, who would not care if she ate whitewash, she finds true pleasure, a pleasure she may not have found if it were not for Pietro breaking her out of her shell and showing her love. Even towards the end of Rebeca's journey, before losing Jose Arcadio, she still carries a little bit of the normality that Pietro Crespi installed in her, taking up embroidery with her friends on her porch (Garcia Marquez