In 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', which character eats earth out of anxiety?

In 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', Rebeca Buendía eats earth out of anxiety. When Rebeca first arrives in Macondo, she is a traumatized, nearly silent orphan who carries a bag containing her parents' bones. She refuses ordinary food and instead eats earth and whitewash scraped from the house walls.

The behavior is associated with her emotional distress and is described in the novel as pica, a condition involving the consumption of non-food substances. Úrsula tries to cure Rebeca by forcing her to eat conventional food and by using bitter remedies. Rebeca eventually improves, but the habit returns during periods of intense emotional turmoil, especially when she is distressed by romantic uncertainty.

Readers sometimes confuse Rebeca's earth-eating with the novel's other unusual behaviors, such as José Arcadio Buendía's obsession with alchemy or Remedios the Beauty's supernatural ascension. Rebeca's habit is not presented as a magical power; it is one of the novel's unsettling examples of psychological suffering rendered in its matter-of-fact style.