Loneliness, solidarity and sexuality in a hundred years of solitudeSoledad in Spanish means more than our word "loneliness", although it also means that. It suggests loneliness, the feeling of being separated from others. Although ultimately every human being is alone, because there are parts of our experience that we cannot share, some people are lonelier than others. The truly lonely characters in this novel are those who deliberately cut themselves off from other humans. They are opposed to characters who fight their loneliness by making strenuous efforts to reach out to others. The founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendia, is the first great solitaire. He becomes so obsessed with his own search for truth that he neglects his family and eventually loses all contact with outside reality. His wife, Ursula, is perhaps the greatest anti-lonely figure, the one who, more than anyone else, ensures the cohesion of the family and the house. She takes in an adopted child and later insists on raising the bastard children of her sons and grandsons. His whole life is devoted to strengthening social bonds. Pilar Ternera, the fortune teller, is also an anti-loner. Her role is to comfort Buendia's men and, in her younger years, to sleep with them and bear their children. At the end of the book and of her very long life (she no longer counts birthdays after one hundred and forty-five), she is the mistress of a wonderful zoological brothel, which in this context represents a generous and generous sexuality. There is a lot of sex in the novel, much of it celebrating the size and power of Buendia's men's phalluses or the lubricity of women. Sex can be used to combat loneliness, because of its power to connect one person to another. Even the two rapes in the novel create close links: José Arcadio Buendia rapes his wife Ursula to begin the family line (second chapter), and the last Aureliano rapes Amaranta Ursula (who is not, however, very resistant), who will bring the last of the line.