All 9 Uses of
whitewash
in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
- No one understood why she had not died of hunger until the Indians, who were aware of everything, for they went ceaselessly about the house on their stealthy feet, discovered that Rebeca only liked to eat the damp earth of the courtyard and the cake of whitewash that she picked of the walls with her nails.†
Chpt 3
- The house was opened, still smelling of resin and damp whitewash, and the children and grandchildren of the founders saw the porch with ferns and begonias, the quiet rooms, the garden saturated with the fragrance of the roses, and they gathered together in the parlor, facing the unknown invention that had been covered with a white sheet.†
Chpt 4
- She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them.†
Chpt 4
- She went back to eating earth and the whitewash on the walls with the avidity of previous days, and she sucked her finger with so much anxiety that she developed a callus on her thumb.†
Chpt 5
- Rebeca would open it wide at dawn and the wind from the graveyard would come in through the windows and go out through the doors to the yard and leave the whitewashed walls and furniture tanned by the saltpeter of the dead.†
Chpt 6
- He was not pained by the peeling of the whitewash on the walls or the dirty, cottony cobwebs in the corners or the dust on the begonias or the veins left on the beams by the termites or the moss on the hinges or any of the insidious traps that nostalgia offered him.†
Chpt 9
- Ursula had the bills taken down, stuck to great cakes of whitewash, and the house was painted white again.†
Chpt 10 *
- Someone told him that it did not belong to anyone, that in former times a solitary widow who fed on earth and whitewash from the walls had lived there, and that in her last years she was seen only twice on the street with a hat of tiny artificial flowers and shoes the color of old silver when she crossed the square to the post office to mail a letter to the Bishop.†
Chpt 11
- She took charge of a crew of carpenters, locksmiths, and masons, who filled in the cracks in the floor, put doors and windows back on their hinges, repaired the furniture, and whitewashed the walls inside and out, so that three months after her arrival one breathed once more the atmosphere of youth and festivity that had existed during the days of the pianola.†
Chpt 19
Definitions:
-
(1)
(whitewash as in: whitewash the fence) a liquid used to paint something in a see-through white color; or the act of painting something with such a liquid
-
(2)
(whitewash as in: investigative whitewash) cover up, hide, or minimize (a wrong or error)
-
(3)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Whitewash, especially in the past, can also refer to painting something white.