Chapter 5
AURELIANO BUEND?A and Remedios Moscote were married one Sunday
in March before the altar Father Nicanor Reyna had set up in the
parlor. It was the culmination of four weeks of shocks in the
Moscote household because little Remedios had reached puberty
before getting over the habits of childhood. In spite of the fact
that her mother had taught her about the changes of adolescence,
one February afternoon she burst shouting into the living room,
where her sisters were chatting with Aureliano, and showed them her
panties, smeared with a chocolate-colored paste. A month for the
wedding was agreed upon. There was barely enough time to teach her
how to wash herself, get dressed by herself, and understand the
fundamental business of a home. They made her urinate over hot
bricks in order to cure her of the habit of wetting her bed. It
took a good deal of work to convince her of the inviolability of
the marital secret, for Remedios was so confused and at the same
time so amazed at the revelation that she wanted to talk to
everybody about the details of the wedding night. It was a
fatiguing effort, but on the date set for the ceremony the child
was as adept in the ways of the world as any of her sisters. Don
Apolinar Moscote escorted her by the arm down the street that was
decorated with flowers and wreaths amidst the explosion of rockets
and the music of several bands, and she waved with her hand and
gave her thanks with a smile to those who wished her good luck from
the windows. Aureliano, dressed in black, wearing the same patent
leather boots with metal fasteners that he would have on a few
years later as he faced the firing squad, had an intense paleness
and a hard lump in his throat when he met the bride at the door of
the house and led her to the altar. She behaved as naturally, with
such discretion, that she did not lose her composure, not even when
Aureliano dropped the ring as he tried to put it on her finger. In
the midst of the. murmurs and confusion of the guests, she kept her
arm with the fingerless lace glove held up and remained like that
with her ring finger ready until the bridegroom managed to stop the
ring with his foot before it rolled to the door, and came back
blushing to the altar. Her mother and sisters suffered so much from
the fear that the child would do something wrong during the
ceremony that in the end they were the ones who committed the
impertinence of picking her up to kiss her. From that day on the
sense of responsibility, the natural grace, the calm control that
Remedios would have in the face of adverse circumstances was
revealed. It was she who, on her own initiative, put aside the
largest piece that she had cut from the wedding cake and took it on
a plate with a fork to Jos?Arcadio Buendía. Tied to the trunk of
the chestnut tree, huddled on a wooden stool underneath the palm
shelter, the enormous old man, discolored by the sun and rain, made
a vague smile of gratitude and at the piece of cake with his
fingers, mumbling an unintelligible psalm. The only unhappy person
in that noisy celebration, which lasted until dawn on Monday, was
Rebeca Buendía. It was her own frustrated party. By an arrangement
of ?rsula’s, her marriage was to be celebrated on the same day, but
that Friday Pietro Crespi received a letter with the news of his
mother’s imminent death. The wedding was postponed. Pietro Crespi
left for the capital of the province an hour after receiving the
letter, and on the road he missed his mother, who arrived
punctually Saturday night and at Aureliano’s wedding sang the sad
aria that she had prepared for the wedding of her son. Pietro
Crespi returned on Sunday midnight to sweep up the ashes of the
party, after having worn out five horses on the road in an attempt
to be in time for his wedding. It was never discovered who wrote
the letter. Tormented by ?rsula, Amaranta wept with indignation and
swore her innocence in front of the altar, which the carpenters had
not finished dismantling.
Father Nicanor Reyna—whom
Don Apolinar Moscote had brought from the swamp to officiate at the
wedding—was an old man hardened by the ingratitude of his ministry.
His skin was sad, with the bones almost exposed, and he had a
pronounced round stomach and the expression of an old angel, which
came more from, simplicity than from goodness. He had planned to
return to his pariah after the wedding, but he was appalled at the
hardness of the inhabitants of Macondo, who were prospering in the
midst of scandal, subject to the natural law, without baptizing
their children or sanctifying their festivals. Thinking that no
land needed the seed of God so much, he decided to stay on for
another week to Christianize both circumcised and gentile, legalize
concubinage, and give the sacraments to the dying. But no one paid
any attention to him. They would answer him that they had been many
years without a priest, arranging the business of their souls
directly with God, and that they had lost the evil of original sin.
Tired of preaching in the open, Father Nicanor decided to undertake
the building of a church, the largest in the world, with life-size
saints and stained-glass windows on the sides, so that people would
come from Rome to honor God in the center of impiety. He went
everywhere begging alms with a copper dish. They gave him a large
amount, but he wanted more, because the church had to have a bell
that would raise the drowned up to the surface of the water. He
pleaded so much that he lost his voice. His bones began to fill
with sounds. One Saturday, not even having collected the price of
the doors, he fell into a desperate confusion. He improvised an
altar in the square and on Sunday he went through the town with a
small bell, as in the days of insomnia, calling people to an
open-air mass. Many went out of curiosity. Others from nostalgia.
Others so that God would not take the disdain for His intermediary
as a personal insult. So that at eight in the morning half the town
was in the square, where Father Nicanor chanted the gospels in a
voice that had been lacerated by his pleading. At the end, when the
congregation began to break up, he raised his arms signaling for
attention.
“Just a moment,?he said.
“Now we shall witness an undeniable proof of the infinite power of
God.?
The boy who had helped
him with the mass brought him a cup of thick and steaming
chocolate, which he drank without pausing to breathe. Then he wiped
his lips with a handkerchief that he drew from his sleeve, extended
his arms, and closed his eyes. Thereupon Father Nicanor rose six
inches above the level of the ground. It was a convincing measure.
He went among the houses for several days repeating the
demonstration of levitation by means of chocolate while the acolyte
collected so much money in a bag that in less than a month he began
the construction of the church. No one doubted the divine origin of
the demonstration except Jos?Arcadio Buendía, who without changing
expression watched the troop of people who gathered around the
chestnut tree one morning to witness the revelation once more. He
merely stretched on his stool a little and shrugged his shoulders
when Father Nicanor began to rise up from the ground along with the
chair he was sitting on.
“Hoc est
simplicissimus,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía said. “Homo iste statum quartum
materiae invenit.?
Father Nicanor raised his
hands and the four legs of the chair all landed on the ground at
the same time. “Nego,?he said. “Factum hoc existentiam Dei probat
sine dubio.?
Thus it was discovered
that Jos?Arcadio Buendía’s devilish jargon was Latin. Father
Nicanor took advantage of the circumstance of his being the only
person who had been able to communicate with him to try to inject
the faith into his twisted mind. Every afternoon he would sit by
the chestnut tree preaching in Latin, but Jos?Arcadio Buendía
insisted on rejecting rhetorical tricks and the transmutation of
chocolate, and he demanded the daguerreotype of God as the only
proof. Father Nicanor then brought him medals and pictures and even
a reproduction of the Veronica, but Jos?Arcadio Buendía rejected
them as artistic objects without any scientific basis. He was so
stubborn that Father Nicanor gave up his attempts at evangelization
and continued visiting him out of humanitarian feelings. But then
it was Jos?Arcadio Buendía who took the lead and tried to break
down the priest’s faith with rationalist tricks. On a certain
occasion when Father Nicanor brought a checker set to the chestnut
tree and invited him to a game, Jos?Arcadio Buendía would not
accept, because according to him he could never understand the
sense of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon
the rules. Father Nicanor, who had never seen checkers played that
way, could not play it again. Ever more startled at Jos?Arcadio
Buendía’s lucidity, he asked him how it was possible that they had
him tied to a tree.
“Hoc est
simplicissimus,?he replied. “Because I’m Crazy.?
From then on, concerned
about his own faith, the priest did not come back to visit him and
dedicated himself to hurrying along the building of the church.
Rebeca felt her hopes being reborn. Her future was predicated on
the completion of the work, for one Sunday when Father Nicanor was
lunching at the house and the whole family sitting at the table
spoke of the solemnity and splendor that religious ceremonies would
acquire when the church was built, Amaranta said: “The luckiest one
will be Rebeca.?And since Rebeca did not understand what she meant,
she explained it to her with an innocent smile:
“You’re going to be the
one who will inaugurate the church with your wedding.?
Rebeca tried to forestall
any comments. The way the construction was going the church would
not be built before another ten years. Father Nicanor did not
agree: the growing generosity of the faithful permitted him to make
more optimistic calculations. To the mute Indignation of Rebeca,
who could not finish her lunch, ?rsula celebrated Amaranta’s idea
and contributed a considerable sum for the work to move faster.
Father Nicanor felt that with another contribution like that the
church would be ready within three years. From then on Rebeca did
not say another word to Amaranta, convinced that her initiative had
not the innocence that she attempted to give it. “That was the
least serious thing I could have done,?Amaranta answered her during
the violent argument they had that night. “In that way I won’t have
to kill you for three years.?Rebeca accepted the challenge.
When Pietro Crespi found
out about the new postponement, he went through a crisis of
disappointment, but Rebeca gave him a final proof of her loyalty.
“We’ll elope whenever you say,?she told him. Pietro Crespi,
however, was not a man of adventure. He lacked the impulsive
character of his fiancée and he considered respect for one’s given
word as a wealth that should not be squandered. Then Rebeca turned
to more audacious methods. A mysterious wind blew out the lamps in
the parlor and ?rsula surprised the lovers kissing in the dark.
Pietro Crespi gave her some confused explanations about the poor
quality of modern pitch lamps and he even helped her install a more
secure system of illumination for the room. But the fuel failed
again or the wicks became clogged and ?rsula found Rebeca sitting
on her fiancé’s lap. This time she would accept no explanation. She
turned the responsibility of the bakery over to the Indian woman
and sat in a rocking chair to watch over the young people during
the visits, ready to win out over maneuvers that had already been
old when she was a girl. “Poor Mama,?Rebeca would say with mock
indignation, seeing ?rsula yawn during the boredom of the visits.
“When she dies she’ll go off to her reward in that rocking
chair.?After three months of supervised love, fatigued by the slow
progress of the construction, which he went to inspect every day,
Pietro Crespi decided to give Father Nicanor the money he needed to
finish the church. Amaranta did not grow impatient. As she
conversed with her girl friends every afternoon when they came to
embroider on the porch, she tried to think of new subterfuges. A
mistake in calculation spoiled the one she considered the most
effective: removing the mothballs that Rebeca had put in her
wedding dress before she put it away in the bedroom dresser. She
did it when two months were left for the completion of the church.
But Rebeca was so impatient with the approach of the wedding that
she wanted to get the dress ready earlier than Amaranta had
foreseen. When she opened the dresser and unfolded first the papers
and then the protective cloth, she found the fabric of the dress
and the stitches of the veil and even the crown of orange blossoms
perforated by moths. Although she was sure that she had put a
handful of mothballs in the wrappings, the disaster seemed so
natural that she did not dare blame Amaranta. There was less than a
month until the wedding, but Amparo Moscote promised to sew a new
dress within a week. Amaranta felt faint that rainy noontime when
Amparo came to the house wrapped in the froth of needlework for
Rebeca to have the final fitting of the dress. She lost her voice
and a thread of cold sweat ran down the path of her spine. For long
months she had trembled with fright waiting for that hour, because
if she had not been able to conceive the ultimate obstacle to
Rebeca’s wedding, she was sure that at the last moment, when all
the resources of her imagination had failed, she would have the
courage to poison her. That afternoon, while Rebeca was suffocating
with heat inside the armor of thread that Amparo Moscote was
putting about her body with thousands of pins and infinite
patience, Amaranta made several mistakes in her crocheting and
pricked her finger with the needle, but she decided with frightful
coldness that the date would be the last Friday before the wedding
and the method would be a dose of laudanum in her coffee.
A greater obstacle, as
impassable as it was unforeseen, obliged a new and indefinite
postponement. One week before the date set for the wedding, little
Remedios woke up in the middle of the night soaked in a hot broth
which had exploded in her insides with a kind of tearing belch, and
she died three days later, poisoned by her own blood, with a pair
of twins crossed in her stomach. Amarante suffered a crisis of
conscience. She had begged God with such fervor for something
fearful to happen so that she would not have to poison Rebeca that
she felt guilty of Remedios?death. That was not the obstacle that
she had begged for so much. Remedios had brought a breath of
merriment to the house. She had settled down with her husband in a
room near the workshop, which she decorated with the dolls and toys
of her recent childhood, and her merry vitality overflowed the four
walls of the bedroom and went like a whirlwind of good health along
the porch with the begonias: She would start singing at dawn. She
was the only person who dared intervene in the arguments between
Rebeca and Amaranta. She plunged into the fatiguing chore of taking
care of Jos?Arcadio Buendía. She would bring him his food, she
would help him with his daily necessities, wash him with soap and a
scrubbing brush, keep his hair and beard free of lice and nits,
keep the palm shelter in good condition and reinforce it with
waterproof canvas in stormy weather. In her last months she had
succeeded in communicating with him in phrases of rudimentary
Latin. When the son of Aureliano and Pilar Ternera was born and
brought to the house and baptized in an intimate ceremony with the
name Aureliano Jos? Remedios decided that he would be considered
their oldest child. Her maternal instinct surprised ?rsula.
Aureliano, for his part, found in her the justification that he
needed to live. He worked all day in his workshop and Remedios
would bring him a cup of black coffee in the middle of the morning.
They would both visit the Moscotes every night. Aureliano would
play endless games of dominoes with his father-in-law while
Remedios chatted with her sisters or talked to her mother about
more important things. The link with the Buendías consolidated Don
Apolinar Moscote’s authority in the town. On frequent trips to the
capital of the province he succeeded in getting the government to
build a school so that Arcadio, who had inherited the educational
enthusiasm of his grandfather, could take charge of it. Through
persuasion he managed to get the majority of houses painted blue in
time for the date of national independence. At the urging of Father
Nicanor, he arranged for the transfer of Catarino’s store to a back
street and he closed down several scandalous establishments that
prospered in the center of town. Once he returned with six
policemen armed with rifles to whom he entrusted the maintenance of
order, and no one remembered the original agreement not to have
armed men in the town. Aureliano enjoyed his father-in-law’s
efficiency. “You’re going to get as fat as he is,?his friends would
say to him. But his sedentary life, which accentuated his
cheekbones and concentrated the sparkle of his eyes, did not
increase his weight or alter the parsimony of his character, but,
on the contrary, it hardened on his lips the straight line of
solitary meditation and implacable decision. So deep was the
affection that he and his wife had succeeded in arousing in both
their families that when Remedios announced that she was going to
have a child. even Rebeca and Amaranta declared a truce in order to
knit items in blue wool if it was to be a boy and in pink wool in
case it was a girl. She was the last person Arcadio thought about a
few years later when he faced the firing squad.
?rsula ordered a mourning
period of closed doors and windows, with no one entering or leaving
except on matters of utmost necessity. She prohibited any talking
aloud for a year and she put Remedios?daguerreotype in the place
where her body had been laid out, with a black ribbon around it and
an oil lamp that was always kept lighted. Future generations, who
never let the lamp go out, would be puzzled at that girl in a
pleated skirt, white boots, and with an organdy band around her
head, and they were never able to connect her with the standard
image of a great-grandmother. Amaranta took charge of Aureliano
Jos? She adopted him as a son who would share her solitude and
relieve her from the involutary laudanum that her mad beseeching
had thrown into Remedios?coffee. Pietro Crespi would tiptoe in at
dusk, with a black ribbon on his hat, and he would pay a silent
visit to Rebeca, who seemed to be bleeding to death inside the
black dress with sleeves down to her wrists. Just the idea of
thinking about a new date for the wedding would have been so
irreverent that the engagement turned into an eternal relationship,
a fatigued love that no one worried about again, as if the lovers,
who in other days had sabotaged the lamps in order to kiss, had
been abandoned to the free will of death. Having lost her bearings,
completely demoralized, Rebeca began eating earth again.
Suddenly—when the
mourning had gone on so long that the needlepoint sessions began
again—someone pushed open the street door at two in the afternoon
in the mortal silence of the heat and the braces in the foundation
shook with such force that Amaranta and her friends sewing on the
porch, Rebeca sucking her finger in her bedroom, ?rsula in the
kitchen, Aureliano in the workshop, and even Jos?Arcadio Buendía
under the solitary chestnut tree had the impression that an
earthquake was breaking up the house. A huge man had arrived. His
square shoulders barely fitted through the doorways. He was wearing
a medal of Our Lady of Help around his bison neck, his arms and
chest were completely covered with cryptic tattooing, and on his
right wrist was the tight copper bracelet of the ni?os-en-cruz
amulet. His skin was tanned by the salt of the open air, his hair
was short and straight like the mane of a mule, his jaws were of
iron, and he wore a sad smile. He had a belt on that was twice as
thick as the cinch of a horse, boots with leggings and spurs and
iron on the heels, and his presence gave the quaking impression of
a seismic tremor. He went through the parlor and the living room,
carrying some half-worn saddlebags in his hand, and he appeared
like a thunderclap on the porch with the begonias where Amaranta
and her friends were paralyzed, their needles in the air.
“Hello,?he said to them in a tired voice, threw the saddlebags on a
worktable, and went by on his way to the back of the house.
“Hello,?he said to the startled Rebecca, who saw him pass by the
door of her bedroom. “Hello,?he said to Aureliano, who was at his
silversmith’s bench with all five senses alert. He did not linger
with anyone. He went directly to the kitchen and there he stopped
for the first time at the end of a trip that had begun of the other
side of the world. “Hello,?he said. ?rsula stood for a fraction of
a second with her mouth open, looked into his eyes, gave a cry, and
flung her arms around his neck, shouting and weeping with joy. It
was Jos?Arcadio. He was returning as poor as when he had left, to
such an extreme that ?rsula had to give him two pesos to pay for
the rental of his horse. He spoke a Spanish that was larded with
sailor slang. They asked where he had been and he answered: “Out
there.?He hung his hammock in the room they assigned him and slept
for three days. When he woke up, after eating sixteen raw eggs, he
went directly to Catarino’s store, where his monumental size
provoked a panic of curiosity among the women. He called for music
and cane liquor for everyone, to be put on his bill. He would
Indian-wrestle with five men at the same time. “It can’t be
done,?they said, convinced that they would not be able to move his
arm. “He has ni?os-en-cruz.?Catarino, who did not believe in
magical tricks of strength, bet him twelve pesos that he could not
move the counter. Jos?Arcadio pulled it out of its place, lifted it
over his head, and put it in the street. It took eleven men to put
it back. In the heat of the party he exhibited his unusual
masculinity on the bar, completely covered with tattoos of words in
several languages intertwined in blue and red. To the women who
were besieging him and coveting him he put the question as to who
would pay the most. The one who had the most money offered him
twenty pesos. Then he proposed raffling himself off among them at
ten pesos a chance. It was a fantastic price because the most
sought-after woman earned eight pesos a night, but they all
accepted. They wrote their names on fourteen pieces of paper which
they put into a hat and each woman took one out. When there were
only two pieces left to draw, it was established to whom they
belonged.
“Five pesos more from
each one,?Jos?Arcadio proposed, “and I’ll share myself with
both.
He made his living that
way. He had been around the world sixty-five times, enlisted in a
crew of sailors without a country. The women who went to bed with
him that night in Catarino’s store brought him naked into the dance
salon so that people could see that there was not a square inch of
his body that was not tattooed, front and back, and from his neck
to his toes. He did not succeed in becoming incorporated into the
family. He slept all day and spent the night in the red-light
district, making bets on his strength. On the rare occasions when
?rsula got him to sit down at the table, he gave signs of radiant
good humor, especially when he told about his adventures in remote
countries. He had been shipwrecked and spent two weeks adrift in
the Sea of Japan, feeding on the body of a comrade who had
succumbed to sunstroke and whose extremely salty flesh as it cooked
in the sun had a sweet and granular taste. Under a bright noonday
sun in the Gulf of Bengal his ship had killed a sea dragon, in the
stomach of which they found the helmet, the buckles, and the
weapons of a Crusader. In the Caribbean he had seen the ghost of
the pirate ship of Victor Hugues, with its sails torn by the winds
of death, the masts chewed by sea worms, and still looking for the
course to Guadeloupe. ?rsula would weep at the table as if she were
reading the letters that had never arrived and in which Jos?Arcadio
told about his deeds and misadventures. “And there was so much of a
home here for you, my son,?she would sob, “and so much food thrown
to the hogs!?But underneath it an she could not conceive that the
boy the gypsies took away was the same lout who would eat half a
suckling pig for lunch and whose flatulence withered the flowers.
Something similar took place with the rest of the family. Amaranta
could not conceal the repugnance that she felt at the table because
of his bestial belching. Arcadio, who never knew the secret of
their relationship, scarcely answered the questions that he asked
with the obvious idea of gaining his affection. Aureliano tried to
relive the times when they slept in the same room, tried to revive
the complicity of childhood, but Jos?Arcadio had forgotten about
it, because life at sea had saturated his memory with too many
things to remember. Only Rebeca succumbed to the first impact. The
day that she saw him pass by her bedroom she thought that Pietro
Crespi was a sugary dandy next to that protomale whose volcanic
breathing could be heard all over the house. She tried to get near
him under any pretext. On a certain occasion Jos?Arcadio looked at
her body with shameless attention and said to her “You’re a woman,
little sister.?Rebeca lost control of herself. 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. She vomited up a green liquid
with dead leeches in it. She spent nights awake shaking with fever,
fighting against delirium, waiting until the house shook with the
return of Jos?Arcadio at dawn. One afternoon, when everyone was
having a siesta, she could no longer resist and went to his
bedroom. She found him in his shorts, lying in the hammock that he
had hung from the beams with a ship’s hawser. She was so impressed
by his enormous motley nakedness that she felt an impulse to
retreat. “Excuse me,?she said, “I didn’t know you were here.?But
she lowered her voice so as not to wake anyone up. “Come here,?he
said. Rebeca obeyed. She stopped beside the hammock in an icy
sweat, feeling knots forming in her intestines, while Jos?Arcadio
stroked her ankles with the tips of his fingers, then her calves,
then her thighs, murmuring: “Oh, little sister, little sister.?She
had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly
regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled
her of her intimacy with three clashes of its claws and quartered
her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been
born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that
unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock
which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter.
Three days later they
were married during the five-o’clock mass. Jos?Arcadio had gone to
Pietro Crespi’s store the day before. He found him giving a zither
lesson and did not draw him aside to speak to him. “I’m going to
marry Rebeca,?he told him. Pietro Crespi turned pale, gave the
zither to one of his pupils, and dismissed the class. When they
were alone in the room that was crowded with musical instruments
and mechanical toys, Pietro Crespi said:
“She’s your
sister.?
“I don’t
care,?Jos?Arcadio replied.
Pietro Crespi mopped his
brow with the handkerchief that was soaked in lavender.
“It’s against nature,?he
explained, “and besides, it’s against the law.?
Jos?Arcadio grew
impatient, not so much at the argument as over Pietro Crespi’s
paleness.
“Fuck nature two times
over,?he said. “And I’ve come to tell you not to bother going to
ask Rebeca anything.?
But his brutal deportment
broke down when he saw Pietro Crespi’s eyes grow moist.
“Now,?he said to him in a
different tone, “if you really like the family, there’s Amaranta
for you.?
Father Nicanor revealed
in his Sunday sermon that Jos?Arcadio and Rebeca were not brother
and sister. ?rsula never forgave what she considered an
inconceivable lack of respect and when they came back from church
she forbade the newlyweds to set foot in the house again. For her
it was as if they were dead. So they rented a house across from the
cemetery and established themselves there with no other furniture
but Jos?Arcadio’s hammock. On their wedding night a scorpion that
had got into her slipper bit Rebeca on the foot. Her tongue went to
sleep, but that did not stop them from spending a scandalous
honeymoon. The neighbors were startled by the cries that woke up
the whole district as many as eight times in a single night and
three times during siesta, and they prayed that such wild passion
would not disturb the peace of the dead.
Aureliano was the only
one who was concerned about them. He bought them some furniture and
gave them some money until Jos?Arcadio recovered his sense of
reality and began to work the no-man’s-land that bordered the
courtyard of the house. Amaranta, on the other hand, never did
overcome her rancor against Rebeca, even though life offered her a
satisfaction of which she had not dreamed: at the initiative of
?rsula, who did not know how to repair the shame, Pietro Crespi
continued having lunch at the house on Tuesdays, rising above his
defeat with a serene dignity. He still wore the black ribbon on his
hat as a sign of respect for the family, and he took pleasure in
showing his affection for ?rsula by bringing her exotic gifts:
Portuguese sardines, Turkish rose marmalade, and on one occasion a
lovely Manila shawl. Amaranta looked after him with a loving
diligence. She anticipated his wants, pulled out the threads on the
cuffs of his shirt, and embroidered a dozen handkerchiefs with his
initials for his birthday. On Tuesdays, after lunch, while she
would embroider on the porch, he would keep her happy company. For
Pietro Crespi, that woman whom he always had considered and treated
as a child was a revelation. Although her temperament lacked grace,
she had a rare sensibility for appreciating the things of the world
and had a secret tenderness. One Tuesday, when no one doubted that
sooner or later it had to happen, Pietro Crespi asked her to marry
him. She did not stop her work. She waited for the hot blush to
leave her ears and gave her voice a serene stress of
maturity.
“Of course, Crespi,?she
said. “But when we know each other better. It’s never good to be
hasty in things.?
?rsula was confused. In
spite of the esteem she had for Pietro Crespi, she could not tell
whether his decision was good or bad from the moral point of view
after his prolonged and famous engagement to Rebeca. But she
finally accepted it as an unqualified fact because no one shared
her doubts. Aureliano, who was the man of the house, confused her
further with his enigmatic and final opinion:
“These are not times to
go around thinking about weddings.?
That opinion, which
?rsula understood only some months later, was the only sincere one
that Aureliano could express at that moment, not only with respect
to marriage, but to anything that was not war. He himself, facing a
firing squad, would not understand too well the concatenation of
the series of subtle but irrevocable accidents that brought him to
that point. The death of Remedios had not produced the despair that
he had feared. It was, rather, a dull feeling of rage that grades
ally dissolved in a solitary and passive frustration similar to the
one he had felt during the time he was resigned to living without a
woman. He plunged into his work again, but he kept up the custom of
playing dominoes with his father-in-law. In a house bound up in
mourning, the nightly conversations consolidated the friendship
between the two men. “Get married again. Aurelito,?his
father-in-law would tell him. “I have six daughters for you to
choose from.?On one occasion on the eve of the elections, Don
Apolinar Moscote returned from one of his frequent trips worried
about the political situation in the country. The Liberals were
determined to go to war. Since Aureliano at that time had very
confused notions about the difference between Conservatives and
Liberals, his father-in-law gave him some schematic lessons. The
Liberals, he said, were Freemasons, bad people, wanting to hang
priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce, to recognize the
rights of illegitimate children as equal to those of legitimate
ones, and to cut the country up into a federal system that would
take power away from the supreme authority. The Conservatives, on
the other hand, who had received their power directly from God,
proposed the establishment of public order and family morality.
They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of
authority, and were not prepared to permit the country to be broken
down into autonomous entities. Because of his humanitarian feelings
Aureliano sympathized with the Liberal attitude with respect to the
rights of natural children, but in any case, he could not
understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over
things that could not be touched with the hand. It seemed an
exaggeration to him that for the elections his father-in-law had
them send six soldiers armed with rifles under the command of a
sergeant to a town with no political passions. They not only
arrived, but they went from house to house confiscating hunting
weapons, machetes, and even kitchen knives before they distributed
among males over twenty-one the blue ballots with the names of the
Conservative candidates and the red ballots with the names of the
Liberal candidates. On the eve of the elections Don Apolinar
Moscote himself read a decree that prohibited the sale of alcoholic
beverages and the gathering together of more than three people who
were not of the same family. The elections took place without
incident. At eight o’clock on Sunday morning a wooden ballot box
was set up in the square, which was watched over by the six
soldiers. The voting was absolutely free, as Aureliano himself was
able to attest since he spent almost the entire day with his
father-in-law seeing that no one voted more than once. At four in
the afternoon a roll of drums in the square announced the closing
of the polls and Don Apolinar Moscote sealed the ballot box with a
label crossed by his signature. That night, while he played
dominoes with Aureliano, he ordered the sergeant to break the seal
in order to count the votes. There were almost as many red ballots
as blue, but the sergeant left only ten red ones and made up the
difference with blue ones. Then they sealed the box again with a
new label and the first thing on the following day it was taken to
the capital of the province. “The Liberals will go to
war,?Aureliano said. Don Apolinar concentrated on his domino
pieces. “If you’re saying that because of the switch in ballots,
they won’t,?he said. “We left a few red ones in so there won’t be
any complaints.?Aureliano understood the disadvantages of being in
the opposition. “If I were a Liberal,?he said, “I’d go to war
because of those ballots.?His father-in-law looked at him over his
glasses.
“Come now, Aurelito,?he
said, “if you were a Liberal, even though you’re my son-in-law, you
wouldn’t have seen the switching of the ballots.?
What really caused
indignation in the town was. not the results of the elections but
the fact that the soldiers had not returned the weapons. A group of
women spoke with Aureliano so that he could obtain the return of
their kitchen knives from his father-in-law. Don Apolinar Moscote
explained to him, in strictest confidence, that the soldiers had
taken the weapons off as proof that the Liberals were preparing for
war. The cynicism of the remark alarmed him. He said nothing, but
on a certain night when Gerineldo Márquez and Magnífico Visbal were
speaking with some other friends about the incident of the knives,
they asked him if he was a Liberal or a Conservative. Aureliano did
not hesitate.
“If I have to be
something I’ll be a Liberal,?he said, “because the Conservatives
are tricky.?
On the following day, at
the urging of his friends, he went to see Dr. Alirio Noguera to be
treated for a supposed pain in his liver. He did not even
understand the meaning of the subterfuge. Dr. Alirio Noguera had
arrived in Macondo a few years before with a medicine chest of
tasteless pills and a medical motto that convinced no one: One nail
draws another. In reality he was a charlatan. Behind his innocent
fa?ade of a doctor without prestige there was hidden a terrorist
who with his short legged boots covered the scars that five years
in the stocks had left on his legs. Taken prisoner during the first
federalist adventure, he managed to escape to Cura?ao disguised in
the garment he detested most in this world: a cassock. At the end
of a prolonged exile, stirred up by the exciting news that exiles
from all over the Caribbean brought to Cura?ao, he set out in a
smuggler’s schooner and appeared in Riohacha with the bottles of
pills that were nothing but refined sugar and a diploma from the
University of Leipzig that he had forged himself. He wept with
disappointment. The federalist fervor, which the exiles had
pictured as a powder keg about to explode, had dissolved into a
vague electoral illusion. Embittered by failure, yearning for a
safe place where he could await old age, the false homeopath took
refuge in Macondo. In the narrow bottle-crowded room that he rented
on one side of the square, he lived several years off the
hopelessly ill who, after having tried everything, consoled
themselves with sugar pills. His instincts of an agitator remained
dormant as long as Don Apolinar Moscote was a figurehead. He passed
the time remembering and fighting against asthma. The
approach of the elections was the thread that led
him once more to the skein of subversion. He made contact with the
young people in the town, who lacked political knowledge, and he
embarked on a stealthy campaign of instigation. The numerous red
ballots that appeared is the box and that were attributed by Don
Apolinar Moscote to the curiosity that came from youth were part of
his plan: he made his disciples vote in order to show them that
elections were a farce. “The only effective thing,?he would say,
“is violence.?The majority of Aureliano’s friends were enthusiastic
over the idea of liquidating the Conservative establishment, but no
one had dared include him in the plans, not only because of his
ties with the magistrate, but because of his solitary and elusive
character. It was known, furthermore, that he had voted blue at his
father-in-law’s direction. So it was a simple matter of chance that
he revealed his political sentiments, and it was purely a matter of
curiosity, a caprice, that brought him to visit the doctor for the
treatment of a pain that he did not have. In the den that smelled
of camphorated cobwebs he found himself facing a kind of dusty
iguana whose lungs whistled when he breathed. Before asking him any
questions the doctor took him to the window and examined the inside
of his lower eyelid. “It’s not there,?Aureliano said, following
what they told him. He pushed the tips of his fingers into his
liver and added: “Here’s where I have the pain that won’t let me
sleep.?Then Dr. Noguera closed the window with the pretext that
there was too much sun, and explained to him in simple terms that
it was a patriotic duty to assassinate Conservatives. For several
days Aureliano carried a small bottle of pills in his shirt pocket.
He would take it out every two hours, put three pills in the palm
of his hand, and pop them into his mouth for them to be slowly
dissolved on his tongue. Don Apolinar Moscote made fun of his faith
in homeopathy, but those who were in on the plot recognized another
one of their people in him. Almost all of the sons of the founders
were implicated, although none of them knew concretely what action
they were plotting. Nevertheless, the day the doctor revealed the
secret to Aureliano, the latter elicited the whole plan of the
conspiracy. Although he was convinced at that time of the urgency
of liquidating the Conservative regime, the plot horrified him. Dr.
Noguera had a mystique of personal assassination. His system was
reduced to coordinating a series of individual actions which in one
master stroke covering the whole nation would liquidate the
functionaries of the regime along with their respective families,
especially the children, in order to exterminate Conservatism at
its roots. Don Apolinar Moscote, his wife, and his six daughters,
needless to say, were on the list.
“You’re no Liberal or
anything else,?Aureliano told him without getting excited. “You’re
nothing but a butcher.?
“In that case,?the doctor
replied with equal calm, “give me back the bottle. You don’t need
it any more.?
Only six months later did
Aureliano learn that the doctor had given up on him as a man of
action because he was a sentimental person with no future, with a
passive character, and a definite solitary vocation. They tried to
keep him surrounded, fearing that he would betray the conspiracy.
Aureliano calmed them down: he would not say a word, but on the
night they went to murder the Moscote family they would find him
guarding the door. He showed such a convincing decision that the
plan was postponed for an indefinite date. It was during those days
that ?rsula asked his opinion about the marriage between Pietro
Crespi and Amaranta, and he answered that these were not times to
be thinking about such a thing. For a week he had been carrying an
old-fashioned pistol under his shirt. He kept his eyes on his
friends. In the afternoon he would go have coffee with Jos?Arcadio
and Rebeca, who had begun to put their house in order, and from
seven o’clock on he would play dominoes with his father-in-law. At
lunchtime he was chatting with Arcadio, who was already a huge
adolescent, and he found him more and more excited over the
imminence of war. In school, where Arcadio had pupils older than
himself mixed in with children who were barely beginning to talk,
the Liberal fever had caught on. There was talk of shooting Father
Nicanor, of turning the church into a school, of instituting free
love. Aureliano tried to calm down his drive. He recommended
discretion and prudence to him. Deaf to his calm reasoning, to his
sense of reality, Arcadio reproached him in public for his weakness
of character. Aureliano waited. Finally, in the beginning of
December, ?rsula burst into the workshop all upset.
“War’s broken out!?
War, in fact, had broken
out three months before. Martial law was in effect in the whole
country. The only one who knew it immediately was Don Apolinar
Moscote, but he did not give the news even to his wife while the
army platoon that was to occupy the town by surprise was on its
way. They entered noiselessly before dawn, with two pieces of light
artillery drawn by mules, and they set up their headquarters in the
school. A 6 P.M. curfew was established. A more drastic search than
the previous one was undertaken, house by house, and this time they
even took farm implements. They dragged out Dr. Noguera, tied him
to a tree in the square, and shot him without any due process of
law. Father Nicanor tried to impress the military authorities with
the miracle of levitation and had his head split open by the butt
of a soldier’s rifle. The Liberal exaltation had been extinguished
into a silent terror. Aureliano, pale, mysterious, continued
playing dominoes with his father-in-law. He understood that in
spite of his present title of civil and military leader of the
town, Don Apolinar Moscote was once more a figurehead. The
decisions were made by the army captain, who each morning collected
an extraordinary levy for the defense of public order. Four
soldiers under his command snatched a woman who had been bitten by
a mad dog from her family and killed her with their rifle butts.
One Sunday, two weeks after the occupation, Aureliano entered
Gerineldo Márquez’s house and with his usual terseness asked for a
mug of coffee without sugar. When the two of them were alone in the
kitchen, Aureliano gave his voice an authority that had never been
heard before. “Get the boys ready,?he said. “We’re going to
war.?Gerineldo Márquez did not believe him.
“With what weapons??he
asked.
“With theirs,?Aureliano
replied.
Tuesday at midnight in a
mad operation, twenty-one men under the age of thirty commanded by
Aureliano Buendía, armed with table knives and sharpened tools,
took the garrison by surprise, seized the weapons, and in the
courtyard executed the captain and the four soldiers who had killed
the woman.
That same night, while
the sound of the firing squad could be heard, Arcadio was named
civil and military leader of the town. The married rebels barely
had time to take leave of their wives, whom they left to their our
devices. They left at dawn, cheered by the people who had been
liberated from the terror, to join the forces of the revolutionary
general Victorio Medina, who, according to the latest reports, was
on his way to Manaure. Before leaving, Aureliano brought Don
Apolinar Moscote out of a closet. “Rest easy, father-in-law,?he
told him. “The new government guarantees on its word of honor your
personal safety and that of your family.?Don Apolinar Moscote had
trouble identifying that conspirator in high boots and with a rifle
slung over his shoulder with the person he had played dominoes with
until nine in the evening.
“This is madness,
Aurelito,?he exclaimed.
“Not madness,?Aureliano
said. “War. And don’t call me Aurelito any more. Now I’m Colonel
Aureliano Buendía.?
Chapter 6
COLONEL AURELIANO BUEND?A organized thirty-two armed uprisings
and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen
different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a
single night before the oldest one had reached the age of
thirty-five. He survived fourteen attempts on his life,
seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose
of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse. He
refused the Order of Merit, which the President of the Republic
awarded him. He rose to be Commander in Chief of the revolutionary
forces, with jurisdiction and command from one border to the other,
and the man most feared by the government, but he never let himself
be photographed. He declined the lifetime pension offered him after
the war and until old age he made his living from the little gold
fishes that he manufactured in his workshop in Macondo. Although he
always fought at the head of his men, the only wound that he
received was the one he gave himself after signing the Treaty of
Neerlandia, which put an end to almost twenty years of civil war.
He shot himself in the chest with a pistol and the bullet came out
through his back without damaging any vital organ. The only thing
left of all that was a street that bore his name in Macondo. And
yet, as he declared a few years before he died of old age, he had
not expected any of that on the dawn he left with his twenty-one
men to join the forces of General Victorio Medina.
“We leave Macondo in your
care.?was all that he said to Arcadio before leaving. “We leave it
to you in good shape, try to have it in better shape when we
return.?
Arcadio gave a very
personal interpretation to the instructions. He invented a uniform
with the braid and epaulets of a marshal, inspired by the prints in
one of Melquíades?books, and around his waist he buckled the saber
with gold tassels that had belonged to the executed captain. He set
up the two artillery pieces at the entrance to town, put uniforms
on his former pupils, who had been amused by his fiery
proclamations, and let them wander through the streets armed in
order to give outsiders an impression of invulnerability. It was a
double-edged deception, for the government did not dare attack the
place for ten months, but when it did it unleashed such a large
force against it that resistance was liquidated in a half hour.
From the first day of his rule Arcadio revealed his predilection
for decrees. He would read as many as four a day in order to decree
and institute everything that came into his head. He imposed
obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be
public property any animals walking the streets after six in the
evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He
sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of
execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells
unless it was for a Liberal victory. In order that no one would
doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized
in the square and had it shoot at a scarecrow. At first no one took
him seriously. They were, after all, schoolchildren playing at
being grown-ups. But one night, when Arcadio went into Catarino’s
store, the trumpeter in the group greeted him with a fanfare that
made the customers laugh and Arcadio had him shot for disrespect
for the authorities. People who protested were put on bread and
water with their ankles in a set of stocks that he had set up in a
schoolroom. “You murderer!??rsula would shout at him every time she
learned of some new arbitrary act. “When Aureliano finds out he’s
going to shoot you and I’ll be the first one to be glad.?But it was
of no use. Arcadio continued tightening the tourniquet with
unnecessary rigor until he became the cruelest ruler that Macondo
had ever known. “Now let them suffer the difference,?Don Apolinar
Moscote said on one occasion. “This is the Liberal
paradise.?Arcadio found out about it. At the head of a patrol he
assaulted the house, destroyed the furniture, flogged the
daughters, and dragged out Don Apolinar Moscote. When ?rsula burst
into the courtyard of headquarters, after having gone through the
town shouting shame and brandishing with rage a pitch-covered whip,
Arcadio himself was preparing to give the squad the command to
fire.
“I dare you to,
bastard!??rsula shouted.
Before Arcadio had time
to read she let go with the first blow of the lash. “I dare you to,
murderer!?she shouted. “And kill me too, son of an evil mother.
That way I won’t have the eyes to weep for the shame of having
raised a monster.?Whipping him without mercy, she chased him to the
back of the courtyard, where Arcadio curled up like a snail in its
shell. Don Apolinar Moscote was unconscious, tied to the post where
previously they had had the scarecrow that had been cut to pieces
by shots fired in fun. The boys in the squad scattered, fearful
that ?rsula would go after them too. But she did not even look at
them. She left Arcadio with his uniform torn, roaring with pain and
rage, and she untied Don Apolinar Moscote and took him home. Before
leaving the headquarters she released the prisoners from the
stocks.
From that time on she was
the one who ruled in the town. She reestablished Sunday masses,
suspended the use of red armbands, and abrogated the harebrained
decrees. But in spite of her strength, she still wept over her
unfortunate fate. She felt so much alone that she sought the
useless company of her husband, who had been forgotten under the
chestnut tree. “Look what we’ve come to,?she would tell him as the
June rains threatened to knock the shelter down. “Look at the empty
house, our children scattered all over the world, and the two of us
alone again, the same as in the beginning.?Jos?Arcadio Buendía,
sunk in an abyss of unawareness, was deaf to her lamentations. At
the beginning of his madness he would announce his daily needs with
urgent Latin phrases. In fleeting clear spells of lucidity, when
Amaranta would bring him his meals he would tell her what bothered
him most and would accept her sucking glasses and mustard plasters
in a docile way. But at the time when ?rsula went to lament by his
side he had lost all contact with reality. She would bathe him bit
by bit as he sat on his stool while she gave him news of the
family. “Aureliano went to war more than four months ago and we
haven’t heard anything about him,?she would say, scrubbing his back
with a soaped brush. “Jos?Arcadio came back a big man, taller than
you, and all covered with needle-work, but he only brought shame to
our house.?She thought she noticed, however, that her husband would
grow sad with the bad news. Then she decided to lie to him. ‘Rou
won’t believe what I’m going to tell you,?she said as she threw
ashes over his excrement in order to pick it up with the shovel.
“God willed that Jos?Arcadio and Rebeca should get married, and now
they’re very happy.?She got to be so sincere in the deception that
she ended up by consoling herself with her own lies. “Arcadio is a
serious man now,?she said, “and very brave, and a fine-looking
young man with his uniform and saber.?It was like speaking to a
dead man, for Jos?Arcadio Buendía was already beyond the reach of
any worry. But she insisted. He seemed so peaceful, so indifferent
to everything that she decided to release him. He did not even move
from his stool. He stayed there, exposed to the sun and the rain,
as if the thongs were unnecessary, for a dominion superior to any
visible bond kept him tied to the trunk of the chestnut tree.
Toward August, when winter began to last forever, ?rsula was
finally able to give him a piece of news that sounded like the
truth.
“Would you believe it
that good luck is still pouring down on us??she told him. “Amaranta
and the pianola Italian are going to get married.?
Amaranta and Pietro
Crespi had, in fact, deepened their friendship, protected by
?rsula, who this time did not think it necessary to watch over the
visits. It was a twilight engagement. The Italian would arrive at
dusk, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and he would translate
Petrarch’s sonnets for Amaranta. They would sit on the porch,
suffocated by the oregano and the roses, he reading and she sewing
lace cuffs, indifferent to the shocks and bad news of the war,
until the mosquitoes made them take refuge in the parlor.
Amaranta’s sensibility, her discreet but enveloping tenderness had
been wearing an invisible web about her fianc? which he had to push
aside materially with his pale and ringless fingers in order to
leave the house at eight o’clock. They had put together a
delightful album with the postcards that Pietro Crespi received
from Italy. They were pictures of lovers in lonely parks, with
vignettes of hearts pierced with arrows and golden ribbons held by
doves. “I’ve been to this park in Florence,?Pietro Crespi would
say, going through the cards. “A person can put out his hand and
the birds will come to feed.?Sometimes, over a watercolor of
Venice, nostalgia would transform the smell of mud and putrefying
shellfish of the canals into the warm aroma of flowers. Amaranta
would sigh, laugh, and dream of a second homeland of handsome men
and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language with ancient
cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble
remained. After crossing the ocean in search of it, after having
confused passion with the vehement stroking of Rebeca, Pietro
Crespi had found love. Happiness was accompanied by prosperity. His
warehouse at that time occupied almost a whole block and it was a
hothouse of fantasy, with reproductions of the bell tower of
Florence that told time with a concert of carillons, and music
boxes from Sorrento and compacts from China that sang five-note
melodies when they were opened, and all the musical instruments
imaginable and all the mechanical toys that could be conceived.
Bruno Crespi, his younger brother, was in charge of the store
because Pietro Crespi barely had enough time to take care of the
music school. Thanks to him the Street of the Turks, with its
dazzling display of knickknacks, became a melodic oasis where one
could forget Arcadio’s arbitrary acts and the distant nightmare of
the war. When ?rsula ordered the revival of Sunday mass, Pietro
Crespi donated a German harmonium to the church, organized a
children’s chorus, and prepared a Gregorian repertory that added a
note of splendor to Father Nicanor’s quiet rite. No one doubted
that he would make Amaranta a fortunate mate. Not pushing their
feelings, letting themselves be borne along by the natural flow of
their hearth they reached a point where all that was left to do was
set a wedding date. They did not encounter any obstacles. ?rsula
accused herself inwardly of having twisted Rebecca’s destiny with
repeated postponements and she was not about to add more remorse.
The rigor of the mourning for Remedios had been relegated to the
background by the mortifications of the war, Aureliano’s absence,
Arcadio’s brutality, and the expulsion of Jos?Arcadio and Rebeca.
With the imminence of the wedding, Pietro Crespi had hinted that
Aureliano Jos? in whom he had stirred up a love that was almost
filial, would be considered their oldest child. Everything made
Amaranta think that she was heading toward a smooth happiness. But
unlike Rebeca, she did not reveal the slightest anxiety. With the
same patience with which she dyed tablecloths, sewed lace
masterpieces, and embroidered needlepoint peacocks, she waited for
Pietro Crespi to be unable to bear the urges of his heart and more.
Her day came with the ill-fated October rains. Pietro Crespi took
the sewing basket from her lap and he told her, “We’ll get married
next month.?Amaranta did not tremble at the contact with his icy
hands. She withdrew hers like a timid little animal and went back
to her work.
“Don’t be simple,
Crespi.?She smiled. “I wouldn’t marry you even if I were
dead.?
Pietro Crespi lost
control of himself. He wept shamelessly, almost breaking his
fingers with desperation, but he could not break her down. “Don’t
waste your time,?was all that Amaranta said. “If you really love me
so much, don’t set foot in this house again.??rsula thought she
would go mad with shame. Pietro Crespi exhausted all manner of
pleas. He went through incredible extremes of humiliation. He wept
one whole afternoon in ?rsula’s lap and she would have sold her
soul in order to comfort him. On rainy nights he could be seen
prowling about the house with an umbrella, waiting for a light in
Amaranta’s bedroom. He was never better dressed than at that time.
His august head of a tormented emperor had acquired a strange air
of grandeur. He begged Amaranta’s friends, the ones who sewed with
her on the porch, to try to persuade her. He neglected his
business. He would spend the day in the rear of the store writing
wild notes, which he would send to Amaranta with flower petals and
dried butterflies, and which she would return unopened. He would
shut himself up for hours on end to play the zither. One night he
sang. Macondo woke up in a kind of angelic stupor that was caused
by a zither that deserved more than this world and a voice that led
one to believe that no other person on earth could feel such love.
Pietro Crespi then saw the lights go on in every window in town
except that of Amaranta. On November second, All Souls?Day, his
brother opened the store and found all the lamps lighted, all the
music boxes opened, and all the docks striking an interminable
hour, and in the midst of that mad concert he found Pietro Crespi
at the desk in the rear with his wrists cut by a razor and his
hands thrust into a basin of benzoin.
?rsula decreed that the
wake would be in her house. Father Nicanor was against a religious
ceremony and burial in consecrated ground. ?rsula stood up to him.
“In a way that neither you nor I can understand, that man was a
saint,?she said. “So I am going to bury him, against your wishes,
beside Melquíades?grave.?She did it with the support of the whole
town and with a magnificent funeral. Amaranta did not leave her
bedroom. From her bed she heard ?rsula’s weeping, the steps and
whispers of the multitude that invaded the house, the wailing of
the mourners, and then a deep silence that smelled of trampled
flowers. For a long time she kept on smelling Pietro Crespi’s
lavender breath at dusk, but she had the strength not to succumb to
delirium. ?rsula abandoned her. She did not even raise her eyes to
pity her on the afternoon when Amaranta went into the kitchen and
put her hand into the coals of the stove until it hurt her so much
that she felt no more pain but instead smelled the pestilence of
her own singed flesh. It was a stupid cure for her remorse. For
several days she went about the house with her hand in a pot of egg
whites, and when the burns healed it appeared as if the whites had
also scarred over the sores on her heart. The only external trace
that the tragedy left was the bandage of black gauze that she put
on her burned hand and that she wore until her death.
Arcadio gave a rare
display of generosity by decreeing official mourning for Pietro
Crespi. ?rsula interpreted it as the return of the strayed lamb.
But she was mistaken. She had lost Arcadio, not when he had put on
his military uniform, but from the beginning. She thought she had
raised him as a son, as she had raised Rebeca, with no privileges
or discrimination. Nevertheless, Arcadio was a solitary and
frightened child during the insomnia plague, in the midst of
?rsula’s utilitarian fervor, during the delirium of Jos?Arcadio
Buendía, the hermetism of Aureliano, and the mortal rivalry between
Amaranta and Rebeca. Aureliano had taught him to read and write,
thinking about other things, as he would have done with a stranger.
He gave him his clothing so that Visitación could take it in when
it was ready to be thrown away. Arcadio suffered from shoes that
were too large, from his patched pants, from his female buttocks.
He never succeeded in communicating with anyone better than he did
with Visitación and Cataure in their language. Melquíades was the
only one who really was concerned with him as he made him listen to
his incomprehensible texts and gave him lessons in the art of
daguerreotype. No one imagined how much he wept in secret and the
desperation with which he tried to revive Melquíades with the
useless study of his papers. The school, where they paid attention
to him and respected him, and then power, with his endless decrees
and his glorious uniform, freed him from the weight of an old
bitterness. One night in Catarino’s store someone dared tell him,
“you don’t deserve the last name you carry.?Contrary to what
everyone expected, Arcadio did not have him shot.
“To my great honor,?he
said, “I am not a Buendía.?
Those who knew the secret
of his parentage thought that the answer meant that he too was
aware of it, but he had really never been. Pilar Ternera, his
mother, who had made his blood boil in the darkroom, was as much an
irresistible obsession for him as she had been first for
Jos?Arcadio and then for Aureliano. In spite of her having lost her
charms and the splendor of her laugh, he sought her out and found
her by the trail of her smell of smoke. A short time before the
war, one noon when she was later than usual in coming for her
younger son at school, Arcadio was waiting for her in the room
where he was accustomed to take his siesta and where he later set
up the stocks. While the child played in the courtyard, he waited
in his hammock, trembling with anxiety, knowing that Pillar Ternera
would have to pass through there. She arrived. Arcadio grabbed her
by the wrist and tried to pull her into the hammock. “I can’t, I
can’t,?Pilar Ternera said in horror. “You can’t imagine how much I
would like to make you happy, but as God is my witness I
can’t.?Arcadio took her by the waist with his tremendous hereditary
strength and he felt the world disappear with the contact of her
skin. “Don’t play the saint,?he said. “After all, everybody knows
that you’re a whore.?Pilar overcame the disgust that her miserable
fate inspired in her.
“The children will find
out,?she murmured. “It will be better if you leave the bar off the
door tonight.?
Arcadio waited for her
that night trembling with fever in his hammock. He waited without
sleeping, listening to the aroused crickets in the endless hours of
early morning and the implacable telling of time by the curlews,
more and more convinced that he had been deceived. Suddenly, when
anxiety had broken down into rage, the door opened. A few months
later, facing the firing squad, Arcadio would relive the wandering
steps in the classroom, the stumbling against benches, and finally
the bulk of a body in the shadows of the room and the breathing of
air that was pumped by a heart that was not his. He stretched out
his hand and found another hand with two rings on the same finger
about to go astray in the darkness. He felt the structure of the
veins, the pulse of its misfortune, and felt the damp palm with a
lifeline cut off at the base of the thumb by the claws of death.
Then he realized that this was not the woman he was waiting for,
because she did not smell of smoke but of flower lotion, and she
had inflated, blind breasts with nipples like. a man’s, a sex as
stony and round as a nut, and the chaotic tenderness of excited
inexperience. She was a virgin and she had the unlikely name of
Santa Sofía de la Piedad. Pilar Ternera had paid her fifty pesos,
half of her life savings, to do what she was doing. Arcadio, had
seen her many times working in her parents?small food store but he
had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue
of never existing completely except at the opportune moment. But
from that day on he huddled like a cat in the warmth of her armpit
She would go to the school at siesta time with the consent of her
parents, to whom Pilar Ternera hid paid the other half of her
savings. Later on, when the government troops dislodged them from
the place where they had made love, they did it among the cans of
lard and sacks of corn in the back of the store. About the time
that Arcadio was named civil and military leader they had a
daughter.
The only relatives who
knew about it were Jos?Arcadio and Rebeca, with whom Arcadio
maintained close relations at that time, based not so much on
kinship as on complicity. Jos?Arcadio had put his neck into the
marital yoke. Rebeca’s firm character, the voracity of her stomach,
her tenacious ambition absorbed the tremendous energy of her
husband, who had been changed from a lazy, woman-chasing man into
an enormous work animal. They kept a clean and neat house. 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. Her hunger for earth, the cloc-cloc of her
parents?bones, the impatience of her blood as it faced Pietro
Crespi’s passivity were relegated to the attic of her memory. All
day long she would embroider beside the window, withdrawn from the
uneasiness of the war, until the ceramic pots would begin to
vibrate in the cupboard and she would get up to warm the meal, much
before the appearance, first, of the mangy hounds, and then of the
colossus in leggings and spurs with a double-barreled shotgun, who
sometimes carried a deer on his shoulder and almost always a string
of rabbits or wild ducks. One afternoon, at the beginning of his
rule, Arcadio paid them a surprise visit. They had not seen him
since they had left the house, but he seemed so friendly and
familiar that they invited him to share the stew.
Only when they were
having coffee did Arcadio reveal the motive behind his visit: he
had received a complaint against Jos?Arcadio. It was said that he
had begun by plowing his own yard and had gone straight ahead into
neighboring lands, knocking down fences and buildings with his oxen
until he took forcible possession of the best plots of land around.
On the peasants whom he had not despoiled because he was not
interested in their lands, he levied a contribution which he
collected every Saturday with his hunting dogs and his
double-barreled shotgun. He did not deny it. He based his right on
the fact that the usurped lands had been distributed by Jos?Arcadio
Buendía at the time of the founding, and he thought it possible to
prove that his father had been crazy ever since that time, for he
had disposed of a patrimony that really belonged to the family. It
was an unnecessary allegation, because Arcadio had not come to do
justice. He simply offered to set up a registry office so that
Jos?Arcadio could legalize his title to the usurped land, under the
condition that he delegate to the local government the right to
collect the contributions. They made an agreement. Years later,
when Colonel Aureliano Buendía examined the titles to property, he
found registered in his brother’s name all of the land between the
hill where his yard was on up to the horizon, including the
cemetery, and discovered that during the eleven months of his rule,
Arcadio had collected not only the money of the contributions, but
had also collected fees from people for the right to bury their
dead in Jos?Arcadio’s land.
It took ?rsula several
months to find out what was already public knowledge because people
hid it from her so as not to increase her suffering. At first she
suspected it. “Arcadio is building a house,?she confided with
feigned pride to her husband as she tried to put a spoonful of
calabash syrup into his mouth. Nevertheless, she involuntarily
sighed and said, “I don’t know why, but all this has a bad smell to
me.?Later on, when she found out that Arcadio had not only built a
house but had ordered some Viennese furniture, she confirmed her
suspicion that he was using public funds. “You’re the shame of our
family name,?she shouted at him one Sunday after mass when she saw
him in his new house playing cards with his officers. Arcadio paid
no attention to her. Only then did ?rsula know that he had a
six-month-old daughter and that Santa Sofía de la Piedad, with whom
he was living outside of marriage, was pregnant again. She decided
to write to Colonel Aureliano Buendía, wherever he was, to bring
him up to date on the situation. But the fast-moving events of
those days not only prevented her plans from being carried out,
they made her regret having conceived them. The war, which until
then had been only a word to designate a vague and remote
circumstance, became a concrete and dramatic reality. Around the
end of February an old woman with an ashen look arrived in Macondo
riding a donkey loaded down with brooms. She seemed so inoffensive
that the sentries let her pass without any questions as another
vendor, one of the many who often arrived from the towns in the
swamp. She went directly to the barracks. Arcadio received her in
the place where the classroom used to be and which at that time had
been transformed into a kind of rearguard encampment, with roiled
hammocks hanging on hooks and mats piled up in the corners, and
rifles and carbines and even hunting shotguns scattered on the
floor. The old woman stiffened into a military salute before
identifying herself:
“I am Colonel Gregorio
Stevenson.?
He brought bad news. The
last centers of Liberal resistance, according to what he said, were
being wiped out. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, whom he had left
fighting in retreat near Riohacha, had given him a message for
Arcadio. He should surrender the town without resistance on the
condition that the lives and property of Liberals would be
respected. Arcadio examined that strange messenger who could have
been a fugitive grandmother with a look of pity.
“You have brought
something in writing, naturally,?he said.
“Naturally,?the emissary
answered, “I have brought nothing of the sort. It’s easy to
understand that under the present circumstances a person can’t
carry anything that would compromise him.?
As he was speaking he
reached into his bodice and took out a small gold fish. “I think
that this will be sufficient,?he said. Arcadio could see that
indeed it was one of the little fishes made by Colonel Aureliano
Buendía. But anyone could have bought it before the war or stolen
it, and it had no merit as a safe-conduct pass. The messenger even
went to the extreme of violating a military secret so that they
would believe his identity. He revealed that he was on a mission to
Cura?ao, where he hoped to recruit exiles from all over the
Caribbean and acquire arms and supplies sufficient to attempt a
landing at the end of the year. With faith in that plan, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía was not in favor of any useless sacrifices at
that time. But Arcadio was inflexible. He had the prisoner put into
the stocks until he could prove his identity and he resolved to
defend the town to the death.
He did not have long to
wait. The news of the Liberal defeat was more and more concrete.
Toward the end of March, before a dawn of premature rain, the tense
calm of the previous weeks was abruptly broken by the desperate
sounds of a cornet and a cannon shot that knocked down the steeple
of the church. Actually, Arcadio’s decision to resist was madness.
He had only fifty poorly armed men with a ration of twenty
cartridges apiece. But among them, his former pupils, excited by
the high-sounding proclamations, the determination reigned to
sacrifice their skins for a lost cause. In the midst of the
tramping of boots, contradictory commands, cannon shots that made
the earth tremble, wild shooting, and the senseless sound of
cornets, the supposed Colonel Stevenson managed to speak to
Arcadio. “Don’t let me undergo the indignity of dying in the stocks
in these women’s clothes,?he said to him. “If I have to die, let me
die fighting.?He succeeded in convincing him. Arcadio ordered them
to give him a weapon and twenty cartridges, and he left him with
five men to defend headquarters while he went off with his staff to
head up the resistance. He did not get to the road to the swamp.
The barricades had been broken and the defenders were openly
fighting in the streets, first until they used up their ration of
rifle bullets, then with pistols against rifles, and finally hand
to hand. With the imminence of defeat, some women went into the
street armed with sticks and kitchen knives. In that confusion
Arcadio found Amaranta, who was looking for him like a madwoman, in
her nightgown and with two old pistols that had belonged to
Jos?Arcadio Buendía. He gave his rifle to an officer who had been
disarmed in the fight and escaped with Amaranta through a nearby
street to take her home. ?rsula was, in the doorway waiting,
indifferent to the cannon shots that had opened up a hole in the
front of the house next door. The rain was letting up, but the
streets were as slippery and as smooth as melted soap, and one had
to guess distances in the darkness. Arcadio left Amaranta with
?rsula and made an attempt to face two soldiers who had opened up
with heavy firing from the corner. The old pistols that had been
kept for many years in the bureau did not work. Protecting Arcadio
with her body, ?rsula tried to drag him toward the house.
“Come along in the name
of God,?she shouted at him. “There’s been enough madness!?
The soldiers aimed at
them.
“Let go of that man,
ma’am,?one of them shouted, “or we won’t be responsible!?
Arcadio pushed ?rsula
toward the house and surrendered. A short time later the shooting
stopped and the bells began to toll. The resistance had been wiped
out in less than half an hour. Not a single one of Arcadio’s men
had survived the attack, but before dying they had killed three
hundred soldiers. The last stronghold was the barracks. Before
being attacked, the supposed Colonel Gregorio Stevenson had freed
the prisoners and ordered his men to go out and fight in the
street. The extraordinary mobility and accurate aim with which he
placed his twenty cartridges gave the impression that the barracks
was well-defended, and the attackers blew it to pieces with cannon
fire. The captain who directed the operation was startled to find
the rubble deserted and a single dead man in his undershorts with
an empty rifle still clutched in an arm that had been blown
completely off. He had a woman’s full head of hair held at the neck
with a comb and on his neck a chain with a small gold fish. When he
turned him over with the tip of his boot and put the light on his
face, the captain was perplexed. “Jesus Christ,?he exclaimed. Other
officers came over.
“Look where this fellow
turned up,?the captain said. “It’s Gregorio Stevenson.?
At dawn, after a summary
court martial, Arcadio was shot against the wall of the cemetery.
In the last two hours of his life he did not manage to understand
why the fear that had tormented him since childhood had
disappeared. Impassive. without even worrying about making a show
of his recent bravery, he listened to the interminable charges of
the accusation. He thought about ?rsula, who at that hour must have
been under the chestnut tree having coffee with Jos?Arcadio
Buendía. He thought about his eight-month-old daughter, who still
had no name, and about the child who was going to be born in
August. He thought about Santa Sofía de la Piedad, whom he had left
the night before salting down a deer for next day’s lunch, and he
missed her hair pouring over her shoulders and her eyelashes, which
looked as if they were artificial. He thought about his people
without sentimentality, with a strict dosing of his accounts with
life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people
he hated most. The president of the court-martial began his final
speech when Arcadio realized that two hours had passed. “Even if
the proven charges did not have merit enough,?the president was
saying, “the irresponsible and criminal boldness with which the
accused drove his subordinates on to a useless death would be
enough to deserve capital punishment.?In the shattered schoolhouse
where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few
feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of
love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really
did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he
felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of
nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last
request.
“Tell my wife,?he
answered in a well-modulated voice, “to give the girl the name of
?rsula.?He paused and said it again: “?rsula, like her grandmother.
And tell her also that if the child that is to be born is a boy,
they should name him Jos?Arcadio, not for his uncle, but for his
grandfather.?
Before they took him to
the execution wall Father Nicanor tried to attend him. “I have
nothing to repent,?Arcadio said, and he put himself under the
orders of the squad after drinking a cup of black coffee. The
leader of the squad, a specialist in summary executions, had a name
that had much more about it than chance: Captain Roque Carnicero,
which meant butcher. On the way to the cemetery, under the
persistent drizzle, Arcadio saw that a radiant Wednesday was
breaking out on the horizon. His nostalgia disappeared with the
mist and left an immense curiosity in its place. Only when they
ordered him to put his back to the wall did Arcadio see Rebeca,
with wet hair and a pink flowered dress, opening wide the door. He
made an effort to get her to recognize him. And Rebeca did take a
casual look toward the wall and was paralyzed with stupor, barely
able to react and wave good-bye to Arcadio. Arcadio answered her
the same way. At that instant the smoking mouths of the rifles were
aimed at him and letter by letter he heard the encyclicals that
Melquíades had chanted and he heard the lost steps of Santa Sofía
de la Piedad, a virgin, in the classroom, and in his nose he felt
the same icy hardness that had drawn his attention in the nostrils
of the corpse of Remedios. “Oh, God damn it!?he managed to think.
“I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her
Remedios.?Then, all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again
all the terror that had tormented him in his life. The captain gave
the order to fire. Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and
raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned
his thighs was pouring from.
“Bastards!?he shouted.
“Long live the Liberal Party!?
Chapter 7
THE WAR was over in May. Two weeks before the government made
the official announcement in a high-sounding proclamation, which
promised merciless punishment for those who had started the
rebellion, Colonel Aureliano Buendía fell prisoner just as he was
about to reach the western frontier disguised as an Indian witch
doctor. Of the twenty-one men who had followed him to war, fourteen
fell in combat, six were wounded, and only one accompanied him at
the moment of final defeat: Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. The news of
his capture was announced in Macondo with a special proclamation.
“He’s alive,??rsula told her husband. “Let’s pray to God for his
enemies to show him clemency.?After three days of weeping, one
afternoon as she was stirring some sweet milk candy in the kitchen
she heard her son’s voice clearly in her ear. “It was Aureliano,
?she shouted, running toward the chestnut tree to tell her husband
the news. “I don’t know how the miracle took place, but he’s alive
and we’re going to see him very soon.?She took it for granted. She
had the floors of the house scrubbed and changed the position of
the furniture. One week later a rumor from somewhere that was not
supported by any proclamation gave dramatic confirmation to the
prediction. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had been condemned to death
and the sentence would be carried out in Macondo as a lesson to the
population. On Monday, at ten-thirty in the morning, Amaranta was
dressing Aureliano Jos?when she heard the sound of a distant troop
and the blast of a cornet one second before ?rsula burst into the
room with the shout: “They’re bringing him now!?The troop struggled
to subdue the overflowing crowd with their rifle butts. ?rsula and
Amaranta ran to the corner, pushing their way through, and then
they saw him. He looked like a beggar. His clothing was torn, his
hair and beard were tangled, and he was barefoot. He was walking
without feeling the burning dust, his hands tied behind his back
with a rope that a mounted officer had attached to the head of his
horse. Along with him, also ragged and defeated, they were bringing
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. They were not sad. They seemed more
disturbed by the crowd that was shouting all kinds of insults at
the troops.
“My son!??rsula shouted
in the midst of the uproar, and she slapped the soldier who tried
to hold her back. The officer’s horse reared. Then Colonel
Aureliano Buendía stopped, tremulous, avoided the arms of his
mother, and fixed a stern look on her eyes.
“Go home, Mama,?he said.
“Get permission from the authorities to come see me in jail.?
He looked at Amaranta,
who stood indecisively two steps behind ?rsula, and he smiled as he
asked her, “What happened to your hand??Amaranta raised the hand
with the black bandage. “A burn,?she said, and took ?rsula away so
that the horses would not run her down. The troop took off. A
special guard surrounded the prisoners and took them to the jail at
a trot.
At dusk ?rsula visited
Colonel Aureliano Buendía in jail. She had tried to get permission
through Don Apolinar Moscote, but he had lost all authority in the
face of the military omnipotence. Father Nicanor was in bed with
hepatic fever. The parents of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, who had
not been condemned to death, had tried to see him and were driven
off with rifle butts. Facing the impossibility of finding anyone to
intervene, convinced that her son would be shot at dawn, ?rsula
wrapped up the things she wanted to bring him and went to the jail
alone.
“I am the mother of
Colonel Aureliano Buendía,?she announced.
The sentries blocked her
way. “I’m going in in any case,??rsula warned them. “So if you have
orders to shoot, start right in.?She pushed one of them aside and
went into the former classroom, where a group of half-dressed
soldiers were oiling their weapons. An officer in a field uniform,
ruddy-faced, with very thick glasses and ceremonious manners,
signaled to the sentries to withdraw.
“I am the mother of
Colonel Aureliano Buendía,??rsula repeated.
“You must mean,?the
officer corrected with a friendly smile, “that you are the mother
of Mister Aureliano Buendía.??rsula recognized in his affected way
of speaking the languid cadence of the stuck-up people from the
highlands.
“As you say, mister,?she
accepted, “just as long as I can see him.?
There were superior
orders that prohibited visits to prisoners condemned to death, but
the officer assumed the responsibility of letting her have a
fifteen-minute stay. ?rsula showed him what she had in the bundle:
a change of clean clothing, the short boots that her son had worn
at his wedding, and the sweet milk candy that she had kept for him
since the day she had sensed his return. She found Colonel
Aureliano Buendía in the room that was used as a cell, lying on a
cot with his arms spread out because his armpits were paved with
sores. They had allowed him to shave. The thick mustache with
twisted ends accentuated the sharp angles of his cheekbones. He
looked paler to ?rsula than when he had left, a little taller, and
more solitary than ever. He knew all about the details of the
house: Pietro Crespi’s suicide, Arcadio’s arbitrary acts and
execution. the dauntlessness of Jos?Arcadio Buendía underneath the
chestnut tree. He knew that Amaranta had consecrated her virginal
widowhood to the rearing of Aureliano Jos?and that the latter was
beginning to show signs of quite good judgment and that he had
learned to read and write at the same time he had learned to speak.
From the moment In which she entered the room ?rsula felt inhibited
by the maturity of her son, by his aura of command, by the glow of
authority that radiated from his skin. She was surprised that he
was so well-informed. “You knew all along that I was a wizard,?he
joked. And he added in a serious tone, “This morning, when they
brought me here, I had the impression that I had already been
through all that before.?In fact, while the crowd was roaring
alongside him, he had been concentrating his thoughts, startled at
how the town had aged. The leaves of the almond trees were broken.
The houses, painted blue, then painted red, had ended up with an
indefinable coloration.
“What did you
expect???rsula sighed. “Time passes.?
“That’s how it
goes,?Aureliano admitted, “but not so much.?
In that way the
long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had
even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday
conversation. When the guard announced the end of the visit,
Aureliano took out a roll of sweaty papers from under the cot. They
were his poetry, the poems inspired by Remedios, which he had taken
with him when he left, and those he had written later on during
chance pauses in the war. “Promise me that no one will read
them,?he said. “Light the oven with them this very night.??rsula
promised and stood up to kiss him good-bye.
“I brought you a
revolver,?she murmured.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía
saw that the sentry could not see. “It won’t do me any good,?he
said in a low voice, “but give it to me in case they search you on
the way out.??rsula took the revolver out of her bodice and put it
under the mattress of the cot. “And don’t say good-bye,?he
concluded with emphatic calmness. “Don’t beg or bow down to anyone.
Pretend that they shot me a long time ago.??rsula bit her lip so as
not to cry.
“Put some hot stones on
those sores,?she said.
She turned halfway around
and left the room. Colonel Aureliano Buendía remained standing,
thoughtful, until the door closed. Then he lay down again with his
arms open. Since the beginning of adolescence, when he had begun to
be aware of his premonitions, he thought that death would be
announced with a definite, unequivocal, irrevocable signal, but
there were only a few hours left before he would die and the signal
had not come. On a certain occasion a very beautiful woman had come
into his camp in Tucurinca and asked the sentries?permission to see
him. They let her through because they were aware of the fanaticism
of mothers, who sent their daughters to the bedrooms of the most
famous warriors, according to what they said, to improve the breed.
That night Colonel Aureliano Buendía was finishing the poem about
the man who is lost in the rain when the girl came into his room.
He turned his back to her to put the sheet of paper into the locked
drawer where he kept his poetry. And then he sensed it. He grasped
the pistol in the drawer without turning his head.
“Please don’t shoot,?he
said.
When he turned around
holding his Pistol, the girl had lowered hers and did not know what
to do. In that way he had avoided four out of eleven traps. On the
other hand, someone who was never caught entered the revolutionary
headquarters one night in Manaure and stabbed to death his close
friend Colonel Magnífico Visbal, to whom he had given his cot so
that he could sweat out a fever. A few yards away, sleeping in a
hammock in the same room. he was not aware of anything. His efforts
to systematize his premonitions were useless. They would come
suddenly in a wave of supernatural lucidity, like an absolute and
momentaneous conviction, but they could not be grasped. On occasion
they were so natural that he identified them as premonitions only
after they had been fulfilled. Frequently they were nothing but
ordinary bits of superstition. But when they condemned him to death
and asked him to state his last wish, he did not have the least
difficulty in identifying the premonition that inspired his
answer.
“I ask that the sentence
be carried out in Macondo,?he said.
The president of the
court-martial was annoyed. “Don’t be clever, Buendía,? he told him.
“That’s just a trick to gain more time.?
“If you don’t fulfill it,
that will be your worry.?the colonel said, “but that’s my last
wish.?
Since then the
premonitions had abandoned him. The day when ?rsula visited him in
jail, after a great deal of thinking he came to the conclusion that
perhaps death would not be announced that time because it did not
depend on chance but on the will of his executioners. He spent the
night awake, tormented by the pain of his sores. A little before
dawn he heard steps in the hallway. “They’re coming,?he said to
himself, and for no reason he thought of Jos?Arcadio Buendía, who
at that moment was thinking about him under the dreary dawn of the
chestnut tree. He did not feel fear or nostalgia, but an intestinal
rage at the idea that this artificial death would not let him see
the end of so many things that he had left unfinished. The door
opened and a sentry came in with a mug of coffee. On the following
day at the same hour he would still be doing what he was then,
raging with the pain in his armpits, and the same thing happened.
On Thursday he shared the sweet milk candy with the guards and put
on his clean clothes, which were tight for him, and the patent
leather boots. By Friday they had still not shot him.
Actually, they did not
dare carry out the sentence. The rebelliousness of the town made
the military men think that the execution of Colonel Aureliano
Buendía might have serious political consequences not only in
Macondo but throughout the area of the swamp, so they consulted the
authorities in the capital of the province. On Saturday night,
while they were waiting for an answer Captain Roque Carnicero went
with some other officers to Catarino’s place. Only one woman,
practically threatened, dared take him to her room. “They don’t
want to go to bed with a man they know is going to die,?she
confessed to him. “No one knows how it will come, but everybody is
going around saying that the officer who shoots Colonel Aureliano
Buendía and all the soldiers in the squad, one by one, will be
murdered, with no escape, sooner or later, even if they hide at the
ends of the earth.?Captain Roque Carnicero mentioned it to the
other officers and they told their superiors. On Sunday, although
no one had revealed it openly, although no action on the part of
the military had disturbed the tense calm of those days, the whole
town knew that the officers were ready to use any manner of pretext
to avoid responsibility for the execution. The official order
arrived in the Monday mail: the execution was to be carried out
within twenty-four hours. That night the officers put seven slips
of paper into a cap, and Captain Roque Carnicero’s unpeaceful fate
was foreseen by his name on the prize slip. “Bad luck doesn’t have
any chinks in it,?he said with deep bitterness. “I was born a son
of a bitch and I’m going to die a son of a bitch.?At five in the
morning he chose the squad by lot, formed it in the courtyard, and
woke up the condemned man with a premonitory phrase.
“Let’s go, Buendía,?he
told him. “Our time has come.?
“So that’s what it
was,?the colonel replied. “I was dreaming that my sores had
burst.?
Rebeca Buendía got up at
three in the morning when she learned that Aureliano would be shot.
She stayed in the bedroom in the dark, watching the cemetery wall
through the half-opened window as the bed on which she sat shook
with Jos?Arcadio’s snoring. She had waited all week with the same
hidden persistence with which during different times she had waited
for Pietro Crespi’s letters. “They won’t shoot him
here,?Jos?Arcadio, told her. “They’ll shoot him at midnight in the
barracks so that no one will know who made up the squad, and
they’ll bury him right there.?Rebeca kept on waiting. “They’re
stupid enough to shoot him here,?she said. She was so certain that
she had foreseen the way she would open the door to wave good-bye.
“They won’t bring him through the streets,?Jos?Arcadio insisted,
with six scared soldiers and knowing that the people are ready for
anything.?Indifferent to her husband’s logic, Rebeca stayed by the
window.
“You’ll see that they’re
just stupid enough,?she said.
On Tuesday, at five-in
the. morning, Jos?Arcadio had drunk his coffee and let the dogs out
when Rebeca closed the window and held onto the head of the bed so
as not to fall down. “There, they’re bringing him,?she sighed.
“He’s so handsome.?Jos?Arcadio looked out the window and saw him.
tremulous in the light of dawn. He already had his back to the wall
and his hands were on his hips because the burning knots in his
armpits would not let him lower them. “A person fucks himself up so
much,?Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. “Fucks himself up so much
just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can’t do anything
about it.?He repeated it with so much rage that it almost seemed to
be fervor, and Captain Roque Carnicero was touched, because he
thought he was praying. When the squad took aim, the rage had
materialized into a viscous and bitter substance that put his
tongue to sleep and made him close his eyes. Then the aluminum glow
of dawn disappeared and he saw himself again in short pants,
wearing a tie around his neck, and he saw his father leading him
into the tent on a splendid afternoon, and he saw the ice. When he
heard the shout he thought that it was the final command to the
squad. He opened his eyes with a shudder of curiosity, expecting to
meet the incandescent trajectory of the bullets, but he only saw
Captain Roque Carnicero with his arms in the air and Jos?Arcadio
crossing the street with his fearsome shotgun ready to go
off.
“Don’t shoot,?the captain
said to Jos?Arcadio. “You were sent by Divine Providence.?
Another war began right
there. Captain Roque Carnicero and his six men left with Colonel
Aureliano Buendía to free the revolutionary general Victorio
Medina, who had been condemned to death in Riohacha. They thought
they could save time by crossing the mountains along the trail that
Jos?Arcadio Buendía had followed to found Macondo, but before a
week was out they were convinced that it was an impossible
undertaking. So they had to follow the dangerous route over the
outcroppings; with no other munitions but what the firing squad
had. They would camp near the towns and one of them, with a small
gold fish in his hand, would go in disguise in broad daylight to
contact the dormant Liberals, who would go out hunting on the
following morning and never return. When they saw Riohacha from a
ridge in the mountains, General Victorio Medina had been shot.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s men proclaimed him chief of the
revolutionary forces of the Caribbean coast with the rank of
general. He assumed the position but refused the promotion and took
the stand that he would never accept it as long as the Conservative
regime was in power. At the end of three months they had succeeded
in arming more than a thousand men, but they were wiped out. The
survivors reached the eastern frontier. The next thing that was
heard of them was that they had landed on Cabo de la Vela, coming
from the smaller islands of the Antilles, and a message from the
government was sent all over by telegraph and included in jubilant
proclamations throughout the country announcing the death of
Colonel Aureliano Buendía. But two days later a multiple telegram
which almost overtook the previous one announced another uprising
on the southern plains. That was how the legend of the ubiquitous
Colonel Aureliano Buendía, began. Simultaneous and contradictory
information declared him victorious in Villanueva. defeated in
Guacamayal, devoured by Motilón Indians, dead in a village in the
swamp, and up in arms again in Urumita. The Liberal leaders, who at
that moment were negotiating for participation in the congress,
branded him in adventurer who did not represent the party. The
national government placed him in the category of a bandit and put
a price of five thousand pesos on his head. After sixteen defeats,
Colonel Aureliano Buendía left Guajira with two thousand well-armed
Indians and the garrison, which was taken by surprise as it slept,
abandoned Riohacha. He established his headquarters there and
proclaimed total war against the regime. The first message he
received from the government was a threat to shoot Colonel
Gerineldo Márquez within forty-eight hours if he did not withdraw
with his forces to the eastern frontier. Colonel Roque Carnicero,
who was his chief of staff then, gave him the telegram with a look
of consternation, but he read it with unforeseen joy.
“How wonderful!?he
exclaimed. “We have a telegraph office in Macondo now.?
His reply was definitive.
In three months he expected to establish his headquarters in
Macondo. If he did not find Colonel Gerineldo Márquez alive at that
time he would shoot out of hand all of the officers he held
prisoner at that moment starting with the generals, and he would
give orders to his subordinates to do the same for the rest of the
war. Three months later, when he entered Macondo in triumph, the
first embrace he received on the swamp road was that of Colonel
Gerineldo Márquez.
The house was full of
children. ?rsula had taken in Santa Sofía de la Piedad with her
older daughter and a pair of twins, who had been born five months
after Arcadio had been shot. Contrary to the victim’s last wishes,
she baptized the girl with the name of Remedios. I’m sure that was
what Arcadio meant,?she alleged. “We won’t call her ?rsula, because
a person suffers too much with that name.?The twins were named
Jos?Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. Amaranta took care of
them all. She put small wooden chairs in the living room and
established a nursery with other children from neighboring
families. When Colonel Aureliano Buendía returned in the midst of
exploding rockets and ringing bells, a children’s chorus welcomed
him to the house. Aureliano Jos? tall like his grandfather, dressed
as a revolutionary officer, gave him military honors.
Not all the news was
good. A year after the flight of Colonel Aureliano Buendía,
Jos?Arcadio and Rebeca went to live in the house Arcadio had built.
No one knew about his intervention to halt the execution. In the
new house, located on the best corner of the square, in the shade
of an almond tree that was honored by three nests of redbreasts,
with a large door for visitors and four windows for light, they set
up a hospitable home. Rebeca’s old friends, among them four of the
Moscote sisters who were still single, once more took up the
sessions of embroidery that had been interrupted years before on
the porch with the begonias. Jos?Arcadio continued to profit from
the usurped lands, the title to which was recognized by the
Conservative government. Every afternoon he could be seen returning
on horseback, with his hunting dogs and his double-barreled shotgun
and a string of rabbits hanging from his saddle. One September
afternoon, with the threat of a storm, he returned home earlier
than usual. He greeted Rebeca in the dining room, tied the dogs up
in the courtyard, hung the rabbits up in the kitchen to be salted
later, and went to the bedroom to change his clothes. Rebeca later
declared that when her husband went into the bedroom she was locked
in the bathroom and did not hear anything. It was a difficult
version to believe, but there was no other more plausible, and no
one could think of any motive for Rebeca to murder the man who had
made her happy. That was perhaps the only mystery that was never
cleared up in Macondo. As soon as Jos?Arcadio closed the bedroom
door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle
of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out
into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven
terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the
Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to
the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under
the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so
as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a
wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch
with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s
chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jos?, and went
through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where ?rsula was
getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
“Holy Mother of
God!??rsula shouted.
She followed the thread
of blood back along its course, and in search of its origin she
went through the pantry, along the begonia porch where Aureliano
Jos?was chanting that three plus three is six and six plus three is
nine, and she crossed the dining room and the living rooms and
followed straight down the street, and she turned first to the
right and then to the left to the Street of the Turks, forgetting
that she was still wearing her baking apron and her house slippers,
and she came out onto the square and went into the door of a house
where she had never been, and she pushed open the bedroom door and
was almost suffocated by the smell of burned gunpowder, and she
found Jos?Arcadio lying face down on the ground on top of the
leggings he had just taken off, and she saw the starting point of
the thread of blood that had already stopped flowing out of his
right ear. They found no wound on his body nor could they locate
the weapon. Nor was it possible to remove the smell of powder from
the corpse. First they washed him three times with soap and a
scrubbing brush, and they rubbed him with salt and vinegar, then
with ashes and lemon, and finally they put him in a barrel of lye
and let him stay for six hours. They scrubbed him so much that the
arabesques of his tattooing began to fade. When they thought of the
desperate measure of seasoning him with pepper, cumin seeds, and
laurel leaves and boiling him for a whole day over a slow fire, he
had already begun to decompose and they had to bury him hastily.
They sealed him hermetically in a special coffin seven and a half
feet long and four feet wide, reinforced inside with iron plates
and fastened together with steel bolts, and even then the smell
could be perceived on the streets through which the funeral
procession passed. Father Nicanor, with his liver enlarged and
tight as a drum, gave him his blessing from bed. Although in the
months that followed they reinforced the grave with walls about it,
between which they threw compressed ash, sawdust, and quicklime,
the cemetery still smelled of powder for many years after, until
the engineers from the banana company covered the grave over with a
shell of concrete. As soon as they took the body out, Rebeca closed
the doors of her house and buried herself alive, covered with a
thick crust of disdain that no earthly temptation was ever able to
break. She went out into the street on one occasion, when she was
very old, with shoes the color of old silver and a hat made of tiny
flowers, during the time that the Wandering Jew passed through town
and brought on a heat wave that was so intense that birds broke
through window screens to come to die in the bedrooms. The last
time anyone saw her alive was when with one shot she killed a thief
who was trying to force the door of her house. Except for Argénida,
her servant and confidante, no one ever had any more contact with
her after that. At one time it was discovered that she was writing
letters to the Bishop, whom she claimed as a first cousin. but it
was never said whether she received any reply. The town forgot
about her.
In spite of his triumphal
return, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was not enthusiastic over the
looks of things. The government troops abandoned their positions
without resistance and that aroused an illusion of victory among
the Liberal population that it was not right to destroy, but the
revolutionaries knew the truth, Colonel Aureliano Buendía better
than any of them. Although at that moment he had more than five
thousand men under his command and held two coastal states, he had
the feeling of being hemmed in against the sea and caught in a
situation that was so confused that when he ordered the restoration
of the church steeple, which had been knocked down by army cannon
fire, Father Nicanor commented from his sickbed: “This is silly;
the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the
Masons order it rebuilt.?Looking for a loophole through which he
could escape, he spent hours on end in the telegraph office
conferring with the commanders of other towns, and every time he
would emerge with the firmest impression that the war was at a
stalemate. When news of fresh liberal victories was received it was
celebrated with jubilant proclamations, but he would measure the
real extent of them on the map and could see that his forces were
penetrating into the jungle, defending themselves against malaria
and mosquitoes, advancing in the opposite direction from reality.
“We’re wasting time,?he would complain to his officers. “We’re
wasting time while the bastards in the party are begging for seats
in congress.?Lying awake at night, stretched out on his back in a
hammock in the same room where he had awaited death, he would evoke
the image of lawyers dressed in black leaving the presidential
palace in the icy cold of early morning with their coat collars
turned up about their ears, rubbing their hands, whispering, taking
refuge in dreary early-morning cafés to speculate over what the
president had meant when he said yes, or what he had meant when he
said no, and even to imagine what the president was thinking when
he said something quite different, as he chased away mosquitoes at
a temperature of ninety-five degrees, feeling the approach of the
fearsome dawn when he would have to give his men the command to
jump into the sea.
One night of uncertainty,
when Pilar Ternera was singing in the courtyard with the soldiers,
he asked her to read the future in her cards. “Watch out for your
mouth,?was all that Pilar Ternera brought out after spreading and
picking up the cards three times. “I don’t know what it means, but
the sign is very clear. Watch out for your mouth.?Two days later
someone gave an orderly a mug of black coffee and the orderly
passed it on to someone else and that one to someone else until,
hand to hand, it reached Colonel Aureliano Buendía office. He had
not asked for any coffee, but since it was there the colonel drank
it. It had a dose of nux vomica strong enough to kill a horse. When
they took him home he was stiff and arched and his tongue was
sticking out between his teeth. ?rsula fought against death over
him. After cleaning out his stomach with emetics, she wrapped him
in hot blankets and fed him egg whites for two days until his
harrowed body recovered its normal temperature. On the fourth day
he was out of danger. Against his will, pressured by ?rsula and his
officers, he stayed in bed for another week. Only then did he learn
that his verses had not been burned. “I didn’t want to be
hasty,??rsula explained to him. “That night when I went to light
the oven I said to myself that it would be better to wait until
they brought the body.?In the haze of convalescence, surrounded by
Remedios?dusty dolls, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, brought back the
decisive periods of his existence by reading his poetry. He started
writing again. For many hours, balancing on the edge of the
surprises of a war with no future, in rhymed verse he resolved his
experience on the shores of death. Then his thoughts became so
clear that he was able to examine them forward and backward. One
night he asked Colonel Gerineldo Márquez:
“Tell me something, old
friend: why are you fighting??
“What other reason could
there be??Colonel Gerineldo Márquez answered. “For the great
liberal party.?
“You’re lucky because you
know why,?he answered. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come to
realize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.?
“That’s bad,?Colonel
Gerineldo Márquez said. Colonel Aureliano Buendía was amused at his
alarm. “Naturally,?he said. “But in any case, it’s better than not
knowing why you’re fighting.?He looked him in the eyes and added
with a smile:
“Or fighting, like you,
for something that doesn’t have any meaning for anyone.?
His pride had prevented
him from making contact with the armed groups in the interior of
the country until the leaders of the party publicly rectified their
declaration that he was a bandit. He knew, however, that as soon as
he put those scruples aside he would break the vicious circle of
the war. Convalescence gave him time to reflect. Then he succeeded
in getting ?rsula to give him the rest of her buried inheritance
and her substantial savings. He named Colonel Gerineldo Márquez
civil and military leader of Macondo and he went off to make
contact with the rebel groups in the interior.
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez
was not only the man closest to Colonel Aureliano Buendía, but
?rsula received him as a member of the family. Fragile, timid, with
natural good manners, he was, however, better suited for war than
for government. His political advisers easily entangled him in
theoretical labyrinths, But he succeeded in giving Macondo the
atmosphere of rural peace that Colonel Aureliano, Buendía dreamed
of so that he could die of old age making little gold fishes.
Although he lived in his parents?house he would have lunch at
?rsula’s two or three times a week. He initiated Aureliano Jos?in
the use of firearms, gave him early military instruction, and for
several months took him to live in the barracks, with ?rsula’s
consent, so that he could become a man. Many years before, when he
was still almost a child, Gerineldo Márquez had declared his love
for Amaranta. At that time she was so illusioned with her lonely
passion for Pietro Crespi that she laughed at him. Gerineldo
Márquez waited. On a certain occasion he sent Amaranta a note from
jail asking her to embroider a dozen batiste handkerchiefs with his
father’s initials on them. He sent her the money. A week later
Amaranta, brought the dozen handkerchiefs to him in jail along with
the money and they spent several hours talking about the past.
“When I get out of here I’m going to marry you,?Gerineldo Márquez
told her when she left. Amaranta laughed but she kept on thinking
about him while she taught the children to read and she tried to
revive her juvenile passion for Pietro Crespi. On Saturday,
visiting days for the prisoners, she would stop by the house of
Gerineldo Márquez’s parents and accompany them to the jail. On one
of those Saturdays ?rsula was surprised to see her in the kitchen,
waiting for the biscuits to come out of the oven so that she could
pick the best ones and cap them in a napkin that she had
embroidered for the occasion.
“Marry him,?she told her.
“You’ll have a hard time finding another man like him.?
Amaranta feigned a
reaction of displeasure.
“I don’t have to go
around hunting for men,?she answered. “I’m taking these biscuits to
Gerineldo because I’m sorry that sooner or later they’re going to
shoot him.?
She said it without
thinking, but that was the time that the government had announced
its threat to shoot Colonel Gerineldo Márquez if the rebel forces
did not surrender Riohacha. The visits stopped. Amaranta shut
herself up to weep, overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt similar to
the one that had tormented her when Remedios died, as if once more
her careless words had been responsible for a death. Her mother
consoled her. She inured her that Colonel Aureliano Buendía would
do something to prevent the execution and promised that she would
take charge of attracting Gerineldo Márquez herself when the war
was over. She fulfilled her promise before the imagined time. When
Gerineldo Márquez returned to the house, invested with his new
dignity of civil and military leader, she received him as a son,
thought of delightful bits of flattery to hold him there, and
prayed with all her soul that he would remember his plan to marry
Amaranta. Her pleas seemed to be answered. On the days that he
would have lunch at the house, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez would
linger on the begonia porch playing Chinese checkers with Amaranta.
?rsula would bring them coffee and milk and biscuits and would take
over the children so that they would not bother them. Amaranta was
really making an effort to kindle in her heart the forgotten ashes
of her youthful passion. With an anxiety that came to be
intolerable, she waited for the lunch days, the afternoons of
Chinese checkers, and time flew by in the company of the warrior
with a nostalgic name whose fingers trembled imperceptibly as he
moved the pieces. But the day on which Colonel Gerineldo Márquez
repeated his wish to marry her, she rejected him.
“I’m not going to marry
anyone,?she told him, “much less you. You love Aureliano so much
that you want to marry me because you can’t marry him.?
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez
was a patient man. “I’ll keep on insisting,?he said. “Sooner or
later I’ll convince you.?He kept on visiting the house. Shut up in
her bedroom biting back her secret tears, Amaranta put her fingers
in her ears so as not to bear the voice of the suitor as he gave
?rsula the latest war news, and in spite of the fact that she was
dying to see him she had the strength not to go out and meet
him.
At that time Colonel
Aureliano Buendía took the time to send a detailed account to
Macondo every two weeks. But only once, almost eight months after
he had left, did he write to ?rsula. A special messenger brought a
sealed envelope to the house with a sheet of paper inside bearing
the colonel’s delicate hand: Take good care of Papa because he is
going to die. ?rsula became alarmed. “If Aureliano says so it’s
because Aureliano knows,?she said. And she had them help her take
Jos?Arcadio Buendía to his bedroom. Not only was he as heavy as
ever, but during his prolonged stay under the chestnut tree he had
developed the faculty of being able to increase his weight at will,
to such a degree that seven men were unable to lift him and they
had to drag him to the bed. A smell of tender mushrooms, of
wood-flower fungus, of old and concentrated outdoors impregnated
the air of the bedroom as it was breathed by the colossal old man
weather-beaten by the sun and the rain. The next morning he was not
in his bed. In spite of his undiminished strength, Jos?Arcadio
Buendía was in no condition to resist. It was all the same to him.
If he went back to the chestnut tree it was not because he wanted
to but because of a habit of his body. ?rsula took care of him, fed
him, brought him news of Aureliano. But actually, the only person
with whom he was able to have contact for a long time was Prudencio
Aguilar. Almost pulverized at that time by the decrepitude of
death, Prudencio Aguilar would come twice a day to chat with him.
They talked about fighting cocks. They promised each other to set
up a breeding farm for magnificent birds, not so much to enjoy
their victories, which they would not need then, as to have
something to do on the tedious Sundays of death. It was Prudencio
Aguilar who cleaned him fed him and brought him splendid news of an
unknown person called Aureliano who was a colonel in the war. When
he was alone, Jos?Arcadio Buendía consoled himself with the dream
of the infinite rooms. He dreamed that he was getting out of bed,
opening the door and going into an identical room with the same bed
with a wrought-iron head, the same wicker chair, and the same small
picture of the Virgin of Help on the back wall. From that room he
would go into another that was just the same, the door of which
would open into another that was just the same, the door of which
would open into another one just the same, and then into another
exactly alike, and so on to infinity. He liked to go from room to
room. As in a gallery of parallel mirrors, until Prudencio Aguilar
would touch him on the shoulder. Then he would go back from room to
room, walking in reverse, going back over his trail, and he would
find Prudencio Aguilar in the room of reality. But one night, two
weeks after they took him to his bed, Prudencio Aguilar touched his
shoulder in an intermediate room and he stayed there forever,
thinking that it was the real room. On the following morning ?rsula
was bringing him his breakfast when she saw a man coming along the
hall. He was short and stocky, with a black suit on and a hat that
was also black, enormous, pulled down to his taciturn eyes. “Good
Lord,??rsula thought, “I could have sworn it was Melquíades.?It was
Cataure, Visitación’s brother, who had left the house fleeing from
the insomnia plague and of whom there had never been any news.
Visitación asked him why he had come back, and he answered her in
their solemn language:
“I have come for the
exequies of the king.?
Then they went into
Jos?Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him as hard as they could,
shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they
could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was
taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a
light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town
all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs
and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who dept outdoors.
So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets
were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them
away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could
pass by.
Chapter 8
SITTNG IN THE WICKER ROCKING chair with her interrupted work
in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano, Jos?, his chin covered with
foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His
blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a
mustache of blond fuzz and when it was all over he looked the same
as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that
she had begun to grow old at that moment.
“You look just like
Aureliano when he was your age,?she said. “You’re a man now.?
He had been for a long
time, ever since that distant day when Amaranta thought he was
still a child and continued getting undressed in front of him in
the bathroom as she had always done, as she had been used to doing
ever since Pilar Ternera had turned him over to her to finish his
upbringing. The first time that he saw her the only thing that drew
his attention was the deep depression between her breasts. He was
so innocent that he asked her what had happened to her and Amaranta
pretended to dig into her breasts with the tips of her fingers and
answered: “They gave me some terrible cuts.?Some time later, when
she had recovered from Pietro Crespi’s suicide and would bathe with
Aureliano Jos?again, he no longer paid attention to the depression
but felt a strange trembling at the sight of the splendid breasts
with their brown nipples. He kept on examining her, discovering the
miracle of her intimacy inch by inch, and he felt his skin tingle
as he contemplated the way her skin tingled when it touched the
water. Ever since he was a small child he had the custom of leaving
his hammock and waking up in Amaranta’s bed, because contact with
her was a way of overcoming his fear of the dark. But since that
day when he became aware of his own nakedness, it was not fear of
the dark that drove him to crawl in under her mosquito netting but
an urge to feel Amaranta’s warm breathing at dawn. Early one
morning during the time when she refused Colonel Gerineldo Márquez,
Aureliano Jos?awoke with the feeling that he could not breathe. He
felt Amaranta’s fingers searching across his stomach like warm and
anxious little caterpillars. Pretending to sleep, he changed his
position to make it easier, and then he felt the hand without the
black bandage diving like a blind shellfish into the algae of his
anxiety. Although they seemed to ignore what both of them knew and
what each one knew that the other knew, from that night on they
were yoked together in an inviolable complicity. Aureliano
Jos?could not get to sleep until he heard the twelve-o’clock waltz
on the parlor dock, and the mature maiden whose skin was beginning
to grow sad did not have a moments?rest until she felt slip in
under her mosquito netting that sleepwalker whom she had raised,
not thinking that he would be a palliative for her solitude. Later
they not only slept together, naked, exchanging exhausting
caresses, but they would also chase each other into the corners of
the house and shut themselves up in the bedrooms at any hour of the
day in a permanent state of unrelieved excitement. They were almost
discovered by ?rsula one afternoon when she went into the granary
as they were starting to kiss. “Do you love your aunt a lot??she
asked Aureliano Jos?in an innocent way. He answered that he did.
“That’s good of you,??rsula concluded and finished measuring the
flour for the bread and returned to the kitchen. That episode drew
Amaranta out of her delirium. She realized that she had gone too
far, that she was no longer playing kissing games with a child, but
was floundering about in an autumnal passion, one that was
dangerous and had no future, and she cut it off with one stroke.
Aureliano Jos? who was then finishing his military training,
finally woke up to reality and went to sleep in the barracks. On
Saturdays he would go with the soldiers to Catarino’s store. He was
seeking consolation for his abrupt solitude, for his premature
adolescence with women who smelled of dead flowers, whom he
idealized in the darkness and changed into Amaranta by means of the
anxious efforts of his imagination.
A short time later
contradictory news of the war began to come in. While the
government itself admitted the progress of the rebellion, the
officers in Macondo had confidential reports of the imminence of a
negotiated peace. Toward the first of April a special emissary
identified himself to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. He confirmed the
fact to him that the leaders of the party had indeed established
contact with the rebel leaders in the interior and were on the
verge of arranging an armistice in exchange for three cabinet posts
for the Liberals, a minority representation in the congress, and a
general amnesty for rebels who laid down their arms. The emissary
brought a highly confidential order from Colonel Aureliano Buendía,
who was not in agreement with the terms of the armistice. Colonel
Gerineldo Márquez was to choose five of his best men and prepare to
leave the country with them. The order would be carried out with
the strictest secrecy. One week before the agreement was announced,
and in the midst of a storm of contradictory rumors, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía and ten trusted officers, among them Colonel
Roque Carnicero, stealthily arrived in Macondo after midnight,
dismissed the garrison, buried their weapons, and destroyed their
records. By dawn they had left town, along with Colonel Gerineldo
Márquez and his five officers. It was such a quick and secret
operation that ?rsula did not find out about it until the last
moment, when someone tapped on her bedroom window and whispered,
“If you want to see Colonel Aureliano Buendía, come to the door
right now.??rsula Jumped out of bed and went to the door in her
nightgown and she was just able to see the horsemen who were
leaving town gallop off in a mute cloud of dust. Only on the
following day did she discover that Aureliano Jos?had gone with his
father.
Ten days after a joint
communiqu?by the government and the opposition announced the end of
the war, there was news of the first armed uprising of Colonel
Aureliano Buendía on the western border. His small and poorly armed
force was scattered in less than a week. But during that year,
while Liberals and Conservatives tried to make the country believe
in reconciliation, he attempted seven other revolts. One night he
bombarded Riohacha from a schooner and the garrison dragged out of
bed and shot the fourteen best-known Liberals in the town as a
reprisal. For more than two weeks he held a customs post on the
border and from there sent the nation a call to general war.
Another of his expectations was lost for three months in the jungle
in a mad attempt to cross more than a thousand miles of virgin
territory in order to proclaim war on the outskirts of the capital.
On one occasion he was lea than fifteen miles away from Macondo and
was obliged by government patrols to hide in the mountains, very
close to the enchanted region where his father had found the fossil
of a Spanish galleon many years before.
Visitación died around
that time. She had the pleasure of dying a natural death after
having renounced a throne out of fear of insomnia, and her last
wish was that they should dig up the wages she had saved for more
than twenty years under her bed and send the money to Colonel
Aureliano Buendía so that he could go on with the war. But ?rsula
did not bother to dig it up because it was rumored in those days
that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had been killed in a landing near
the provincial capital. The official announcement—the fourth in
less than two years—was considered true for almost six months
because nothing further was heard of him. Suddenly, when ?rsula and
Amaranta had added new mourning to the past period, unexpected news
arrived. Colonel Aureliano Buendía was alive, but apparently he had
stopped harassing the government of his country and had joined with
the victorious federalism of other republics of the Caribbean. He
would show up under different names farther and farther away from
his own country. Later it would be learned that the idea that was
working on him at the time was the unification of the federalist
forms of Central America in order to wipe out conservative regimes
from Alaska to Patagonia. The first direct news that ?rsula
received from him, several years after his departure, was a
wrinkled and faded letter that had arrived, passing through various
hands, from Santiago, Cuba.
“We’ve lost him
forever,??rsula exclaimed on reading it. “If he follows this path
he’ll spend Christmas at the ends of the earth.?
The person to whom she
said it, who was the first to whom she showed the letter, was the
Conservative general Jos?Raquel Moncada, mayor of Macondo since the
end of the war. “This Aureliano,?General Moncada commented, “what a
pity that he’s not a Conservative.?He really admired him. Like many
Conservative civilians, Jos?Raquel Moncada had waged war in defense
of his party and had earned the title of general on the field of
battle, even though he was not a military man by profession. On the
contrary, like so many of his fellow party members, he was an
antimilitarist. He considered military men unprincipled loafers,
ambitious plotters, experts in facing down civilians in order to
prosper during times of disorder. Intelligent, pleasant,
ruddy-faced, a man who liked to eat and watch cockfights, he had
been at one time the most feared adversary of Colonel Aureliano
Buendía. He succeeded in imposing his authority over the career
officers in a wide sector along the coast. One time when he was
forced by strategic circumstances to abandon a stronghold to the
forces of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, he left two letters for him.
In one of them quite long, he invited him to join in a campaign to
make war more humane. The other letter was for his wife, who lived
in Liberal territory, and he left it with a plea to see that it
reached its destination. From then on, even in the bloodiest
periods of the war, the two commanders would arrange truces to
exchange prisoners. They were pauses with a certain festive
atmosphere, which General Moncada took advantage of to teach
Colonel Aureliano Buendía how to play chess. They became great
friends. They even came to think about the possibility of
coordinating the popular elements of both parties, doing away with
the influence of the military men and professional politicians, and
setting up a humanitarian regime that would take the best from each
doctrine. When the war was over, while Colonel Aureliano, Buendía
was sneaking about through the narrow trails of permanent sub.
version, General Moncada was named magistrate of Macondo. He wore
civilian clothes, replaced the soldiers with unarmed policemen,
enforced the amnesty laws, and helped a few families of Liberals
who had been killed in the war. He succeeded in having Macondo
raised to the status of a municipality and he was therefore its
first mayor, and he created an atmosphere of confidence that made
people think of the war as an absurd nightmare of the past. Father
Nicanor, consumed by hepatic fever, was replaced by Father Coronel,
whom they called “The Pup,?a veteran of the first federalist war.
Bruno Crespi, who was married to Amparo Mos. cote, and whose shop
of toys and musical instruments continued to prosper, built a
theater which Spanish companies included in their Itineraries. It
was a vast open-air hall with wooden benches, a velvet curtain with
Greek masks, and three box offices in the shape of lions?heads,
through whose mouths the tickets were sold. It was also about that
time that the school was rebuilt. It was put under the charge of
Don Melchor Escalona, an old teacher brought from the swamp, who
made his lazy students walk on their knees in the lime-coated
courtyard and made the students who talked in class eat hot chili
with the approval of their parents. Aureliano Segundo and
Jos?Arcadio Segundo, the willful twins of Santa Sofía de la Piedad,
were the first to sit in the classroom, with their slates, their
chalk, and their aluminum jugs with their names on them. Remedios,
who inherited her mother’s pure beauty, began to be known as
Remedios the Beauty. In spite of time, of the superimposed Periods
of mourning, and her accumulated afflictions, ?rsula resisted
growing old. Aided by Santa Sofía de la Piedad, she gave a new
drive to her pastry business and in a few years not only recovered
the fortune that her son had spent in the war, but she once more
stuffed with pure gold the gourds buried in the bedroom. “As long
as God gives me life,?she would say, “there will always be money in
this madhouse.?That was how things were when Aureliano Jos?deserted
the federal troops in Nicaragua, signed on as a crewman on a German
ship, and appeared in the kitchen of the house, sturdy as a horse,
as dark and long-haired as an Indian, and with a secret
determination to marry Amaranta.
When Amaranta, saw him
come in, even though he said nothing she knew immediately why he
had come back. At the table they did not dare look each other in
the face. But two weeks after his return, in the presence of
?rsula, he set his eyes on hers and said to her, “I always thought
a lot about you.?Amaranta avoided him. She guarded against chance
meetings. She tried not to become separated from Remedios the
Beauty. She was ashamed of the blush that covered her cheeks on the
day her nephew asked her how long she intended wearing the black
bandage on her hand, for she interpreted it as an allusion to her
virginity. When he arrived, she barred the door of her bedroom, but
she heard his peaceful snoring in the next room for so many nights
that she forgot about the precaution. Early one morning, almost two
months after his return, she heard him come into the bedroom. Then,
instead of fleeing, instead of shouting as she had thought she
would, she let herself be saturated with a soft feeling of
relaxation. She felt him slip in under the mosquito netting as he
had done when he was a child, as he had always done, and she could
not repress her cold sweat and the chattering of her teeth when she
realized that he was completely naked. “Go away,?she whispered,
suffocating with curiosity. “Go away or I’ll scream.?But Aureliano
Jos?knew then what he had to do, because he was no longer a child
but a barracks animal. Starting with that night the dull,
inconsequential battles began again and would go on until dawn.
“I’m your aunt,?Amaranta murmured, spent. “It’s almost as if I were
your mother, not just because of my age but because the only thing
I didn’t do for you was nurse you.?Aureliano would escape at dawn
and come back early in the morning on the next day, each time more
excited by the proof that she had not barred the door. He had nit
stopped desiring her for a single instant. He found her in the dark
bedrooms of captured towns, especially in the most abject ones, and
he would make her materialize in the smell of dry blood on the
bandages of the wounded, in the instantaneous terror of the danger
of death, at all times and in all places. He had fled from her in
an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by
means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be
boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the
war, the more the war resembled Amaranta. That was how he suffered
in exile, looking for a way of killing her with, his own death,
until he heard some old man tell the tale of the man who had
married his aunt, who was also his cousin, and whose son ended up
being his own grandfather.
“Can a person marry his
own aunt??he asked, startled.
“He not only can do that,
a soldier answered him. “but we’re fighting this war against the
priests so that a person can marry his own mother.?
Two weeks later he
deserted. He found Amaranta more withered than in his memory, more
melancholy and shy, and now really turning the last corner of
maturity, but more feverish than ever in the darkness of her
bedroom and more challenging than ever in the aggressiveness of her
resistance. “You’re a brute,?Amaranta would tell him as she was
harried by his hounds. “You can’t do that to a poor aunt unless you
have a special dispensation from the Pope.?Aureliano, Jos?promised
to go to Rome, he promised to go across Europe on his knees to kiss
the sandals of the Pontiff just so that she would lower her
drawbridge.
“It’s not just
that,?Amaranta retorted. “Any children will be born with the tail
of a pig.?
Aureliano Jos?was deaf to
all arguments.
“I don’t care if they’re
born as armadillos,?he begged.
Early one morning,
vanquished by the unbearable pain of repressed virility, he went to
Catarino’s. He found a woman with flaccid breasts, affectionate and
cheap, who calmed his stomach for some time. He tried to apply the
treatment of disdain to Amaranta. He would see her on the porch
working at the sewing machine, which she had learned to operate
with admirable skill, and he would not even speak to her. Amaranta
felt freed of a reef, and she herself did not understand why she
started thinking again at that time about Colonel Gerineldo
Márquez, why she remembered with such nostalgia the afternoons of
Chinese checkers, and why she even desired him as the man in her
bedroom. Aureliano, Jos?did not realize how much ground he had lost
on, the night he could no longer bear the farce of indifference and
went back to Amaranta’s room. She rejected him with an inflexible
and unmistakable determination, and she barred the door of her
bedroom forever.
A few months after the
return of Aureliano Jos?an exuberant woman perfumed with jasmine
appeared at the house with a boy of five. She stated that he was
the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and that she had brought him
to ?rsula to be baptized. No one doubted the origins of that
nameless child: he looked exactly like the colonel at the time he
was taken to see ice for the first time. The woman said that he had
been born with his eyes open, looking at people with the judgment
of an adult, and that she was frightened by his way of staring at
things without blinking. “He’s identical,??rsula said. “The only
thing missing is for him to make chairs rock by simply looking at
them.?They christened him Aureliano and with his mother’s last
name, since the law did not permit a person to bear his father’s
name until he had recognized him. General Moncada was the
godfather. Although Amaranta insisted that he be left so that she
could take over his upbringing, his mother was against it. ?rsula
at that time did not know about the custom of sending virgins to
the bedrooms of soldiers in the same way that hens are turned loose
with fine roosters, but in the course of that year she found out:
nine more sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendía were brought to the
house to be baptized. The oldest, a strange dark boy with green
eyes, who was not at all like his father’s family, was over ten
years old. They brought children of all ages, all colors, but all
males and all with a look of solitude that left no doubt as to the
relationship. Only two stood out in the group. One, large for his
age, made smithereens out of the flowerpots and china because his
hands seemed to have the property of breaking everything they
touched. The other was a blond boy with the same light eyes as his
mother, whose hair had been left to grow long and curly like that
of a woman. He entered the house with a great deal of familiarity,
as if he had been raised there, and he went directly to a chest in
?rsula’s bedroom and demanded, “I want the mechanical
ballerina.??rsula was startled. She opened the chest, searched
among the ancient and dusty articles left from the days of
Melquíades, and wrapped in a pair of stockings she found the
mechanical ballerina that Pietro Crespi had brought to the house
once and that everyone had forgotten about. In less than twelve
years they baptized with the name Aureliano and the last name of
the mother all the sons that the colonel had implanted up and down
his theater of war: seventeen. At first ?rsula would fill their
pockets with money and Amaranta tried to have them stay. But they
finally limited themselves to giving them presents and serving as
godmothers. “We’ve done our duty by baptizing them,??rsula would
say, jotting down in a ledger the name and address of the mother
and the place and date of birth of the child. “Aureliano needs
well-kept accounts so that he can decide things when he comes
back.?During lunch, commenting with General Moncada about that
disconcerting proliferation, she expressed the desire for Colonel
Aureliano Buendía to come back someday and gather all of his sons
together in the house.
“Don’t worry, dear
friend,?General Moncada said enigmatically. “He’ll come sooner than
you suspect.?
What General Moncada knew
and what he did not wish to reveal at lunch was that Colonel
Aureliano Buendía was already on his way to head up the most
prolonged, radical, and bloody rebellion of all those he had
started up till then.
The situation again
became as tense as it had been during the months that preceded the
first war. The cockfights, instituted by the mayor himself, were
suspended. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, the commander of the garrison,
took over the exercise of municipal power. The Liberals looked upon
him as a provocateur. “Something terrible is going to
happen,??rsula would say to Aureliano Jos? “Don’t go out into the
street after six o’clock.?The entreaties were useless. Aureliano
Jos? just like Arcadio in other times, had ceased to belong to her.
It was as if his return home, the possibility of existing without
concerning himself with everyday necessities, had awakened in him
the lewd and lazy leanings of his uncle Jos?Arcadio. His passion
for Amaranta had been extinguished without leaving any scars. He
would drift around, playing pool, easing his solitude with
occasional women, sacking the hiding places where ?rsula had
forgotten her money. He ended up coming home only to change his
clothes. “They’re all alike,??rsula lamented. “At first they behave
very well, they’re obedient and prompt and they don’t seem capable
of killing a fly, but as soon as their beards appear they go to
ruin.?Unlike Arcadio, who had never known his real origins, he
found out that he was the son of Pilar Ternera, who had hung up a
hammock so that he could take his siesta in her house. More than
mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude. Pilar Ternera
had lost the trail of all hope. Her laugh had taken on the tones of
an organ, her breasts had succumbed to the tedium of endless
caressing, her stomach and her thighs had been the victims of her
irrevocable fate as a shared woman, but her heart grew old without
bitterness. Fat, talkative, with the airs of a matron in disgrace,
she renounced the sterile illusions of her cards and found peace
and consolation in other people’s loves. In the house where
Aureliano Jos?took his siesta, the girls from the neighborhood
would receive their casual lovers. “Lend me your room, Pilar,?they
would simply say when they were already inside. “Of course,?Pilar
would answer. And if anyone was present she would explain:
“I’m happy knowing that
people are happy in bed.?
She never charged for the
service. She never refused the favor, just as she never refused the
countless men who sought her out, even in the twilight of her
maturity, without giving her money or love and only occasionally
pleasure. Her five daughters, who inherited a burning seed, had
been lost on the byways of life since adolescence. Of the two sons
she managed to raise, one died fighting in the forces of Colonel
Aureliano Buendía and the other was wounded and captured at the age
of fourteen when he tried to steal a crate of chickens in a town in
the swamp. In a certain way, Aureliano Jos?was the tall, dark man
who had been promised her for half a century by the king of hearts,
and like all men sent by the cards he reached her heart when he was
already stamped with the mark of death. She saw it in the
cards.
“Don’t go out
tonight,?she told him. “Stay and sleep here because Carmelita
Montiel is getting tired of asking me to put her in your
room.?
Aureliano Jos?did not
catch the deep feeling of begging that was in the offer.
“Tell her to wait for me
at midnight?he said. He went to the theater, where a Spanish
company was putting on The Dagger of the Fox, which was really
Zorzilla’s play with the title changed by order of Captain Aquiles
Ricardo, because the Liberals called the Conservatives Goths. Only
when he handed in his ticket at the door did Aureliano Jos?realize
that Captain Aquiles Ricardo and two soldiers armed with rifles
were searching the audience.
“Be careful,
captain,?Aureliano Jos?warned him. “The man hasn’t been born yet
who can lay hands on me.?The captain tried to search him forcibly
and Aureliano Jos? who was unarmed, began to run. The soldiers
disobeyed the order to shoot. “He’s a Buendía,?one of them
explained. Blind with rage, the captain then snatched away the
rifle, stepped into the center of the street, and took aim.?
“Cowards!?he shouted. “I
only wish it was Colonel Aureliano Buendía.?
Carmelita Montiel, a
twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and
was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera’s bed when the shot
rang out. Aureliano Jos?had been destined to find with her the
happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and
to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back
and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation
of the cards. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, who was really the one
destined to die that night, did indeed die, four hours before
Aureliano Jos? As won as the shot was heard he was brought down by
two simultaneous bullets whose origin was never established and a
shout of many voices shook the night.
“Long live the Liberal
party! Long live Colonel Aureliano Buendía!?
At twelve o’clock, when
Aureliano, Jos?had bled to death and Carmelita Montiel found that
the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men
had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the
abandoned body of Captain Aquiles Ricardo. A patrol had to use a
wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell
apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread.
Annoyed by the outrages
of the regular army, General Jos?Raquel Moncada used his political
influence, put on his uniform again, and assumed the civil and
military leadership of Macondo. He did not expect, however, that
his conciliatory attitude would be able to prevent the inevitable.
The news in September was contradictory. While the government
announced that it was maintaining control throughout the country,
the Liberals were receiving secret news of armed uprisings in the
interior. The regime would not admit a state of war until it was
proclaimed in a decree that had followed a court-martial which had
condemned Colonel Aureliano Buendía to death in absentia. The first
unit that captured him was ordered to carry the sentence out. “This
means he’s come back,??rsula said joyfully to General Moncada. But
he himself knew nothing about it.
Actually, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía had been in the country for more than a month. He
was preceded by conflicting rumors, supposed to be in the most
distant places at the same time, and even General Moncada did not
believe in his return until it was officially announced that he had
seized two states on the coast. “Congratulations, dear friend,?he
told ?rsula, showing her the telegram. “You’ll soon have him
here.??rsula was worried then for the first time. “And what will
you do??she asked. General Moncada had asked himself that same
question many times.
“The same as he, my
friend,?he answered. “I’ll do my duty.?
At dawn on the first of
October Colonel Aureliano Buendía attacked Macondo with a thousand
well-armed men and the garrison received orders to resist to the
end. At noon, while General Moncada was lunching with ?rsula, a
rebel cannon shot that echoed in the whole town blew the front of
the municipal treasury to dust. “They’re as well armed as we
are,?General Moncada sighed, “but besides that they’re fighting
because they want to.?At two o’clock in the afternoon, while the
earth trembled with the artillery fire from both sides, he took
leave of ?rsula with the certainty that he was fighting a losing
battle.
“I pray to God that you
won’t have Aureliano in the house tonight,?he said. “If it does
happen that way, give him an embrace for me, because I don’t expect
ever to see him again.?
That night he was
captured when he tried to escape from Macondo, after writing a long
letter to Colonel Aureliano Buendía in which he reminded him of
their common aim to humanize the war and he wished him a final
victory over the corruption of the militarists and the ambitions of
the politicians in both parties. On the following day Colonel
Aureliano Buendía had lunch with him in ?rsula’s house, where he
was being held until a revolutionary court-martial decided his
fate. It was a friendly gathering. But while the adversaries forgot
the war to remember things of the past, ?rsula had the gloomy
feeling that her son was an intruder. She had felt it ever since
she saw him come in protected by a noisy military retinue, which
turned the bedrooms inside out until they were convinced there was
no danger. Colonel Aureliano Buendía not only accepted it but he
gave strict orders that no one should come closer than ten feet,
not even ?rsula, while the members of his escort finished placing
guards about the house. He was wearing an ordinary denim uniform
with no insignia of any kind and high boots with spurs that were
caked with mud and dried blood. On his waist he wore a holster with
the flap open and his hand, which was always on the butt of the
pistol, revealed the same watchful and resolute tension as his
look. His head, with deep recessions in the hairline now, seemed to
have been baked in a slow oven. His face, tanned by the salt of the
Caribbean, had acquired a metallic hardness. He was preserved
against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do
with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had
left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of
resistance to nostalgia. “Good Lord,??rsula said to herself. “Now
he looks like a man capable of anything.?He was. The Aztec shawl
that he brought Amaranta, the remembrances he spoke of at lunch,
the funny stories her told were simple leftovers from his humor of
a different time. As soon as the order to bury the dead in a common
grave was carried out, he assigned Colonel Roque Carnicero the
minion of setting up courts-martial and he went ahead with the
exhausting task of imposing radical reforms which would not leave a
stone of the reestablished Conservative regime in place. “We have
to get ahead of the politicians in the party,?he said to his aides.
“When they open their eyes to reality they’ll find accomplished
facts.?It was then that he decided to review the titles to land
that went back a hundred years and he discovered the legalized
outrages of his brother, Jos?Arcadio. He annulled the registrations
with a stroke of the pen. As a last gesture of courtesy, he left
his affairs for an hour and visited Rebeca to bring her up to date
on what he was determined to do.
In the shadows of her
house, the solitary widow who at one time had been the confidante
of his repressed loves and whose persistence had saved his life was
a specter out of the past. Encased in black down to her knuckles,
with her heart turned to ash, she scarcely knew anything about the
war. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had the impression that the
phosphorescence of her bones was showing through her skin and that
she moved in an atmosphere of Saint Elmo’s fire, in a stagnant air
where one could still note a hidden smell of gunpowder. He began by
advising her to moderate the rigor of her mourning, to ventilate
the house, to forgive the world for the death of Jos?Arcadio. But
Rebeca was already beyond any vanity. After searching for it
uselessly in the taste of earth, in, the perfumed letters from
Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found
peace in that house where memories materialized through the
strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings
through the cloistered rooms, Leaning back in her wicker rocking
chair, looking at Colonel Aureliano Buendía as if he were the one
who looked like a ghost out of the past, Rebeca was not even upset
by the news that the lands usurped by Jos?Arcadio would be returned
to their rightful owners.
“Whatever you decide will
be done, Aureliano,?she sighed. “I always thought and now I have
the proof that you’re a renegade.?
The revision of the deeds
took place at the same time as the summary courts-martial presided
over by Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, which ended with the execution
of all officers of the regular army who had been taken prisoner by
the revolutionaries. The last court-martial was that of Jos?Raquel
Moncada. ?rsula intervened. ‘”His government was the best we’ve
ever had in Macondo,?she told Colonel Aureliano Buendía. “I don’t
have to tell you anything about his good heart, about his affection
for us, because you know better than anyone.?Colonel Aureliano
Buendía gave her a disapproving look.
“I can’t take over the
job of administering justice,?he replied. “If you have something to
say, tell it to the court-martial.?
?rsula not only did that
she also brought all of the mothers of the revolutionary officers
who lived in Macondo to testify. One by one the old women who had
been founders of the town, several of whom had taken part in the
daring crossing of the mountains, praised the virtues of General
Moncada. ?rsula was the last in line. Her gloomy dignity, the
weight of her name, the convincing vehemence of her declaration
made the scale of justice hesitate for a moment. “You have taken
this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because
you are doing your duty,?she told the members of the court. “But
don’t forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be
mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the
right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first
sign of disrespect.?The court retired to deliberate as those words
still echoed in the school that had been turned into a barracks. At
midnight General Jos?Raquel Moncada was sentenced to death. Colonel
Aureliano Buendía, in spite of the violent recriminations of
?rsula, refused to commute the sentence. A short while before dawn
he visited the condemned man in the room used as a cell.
“Remember, old friend,?he
told him. “I’m not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s
shooting you.?
General Moncada did not
even get up from the cot when he saw him come in.
“Go to hell, friend,?he
answered.
Until that moment, ever
since his return. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had not given himself
the opportunity to see him with his heart. He was startled to see
how much he had aged, how his hands shook, and the rather
punctilious conformity with which he awaited death, and then he
felt a great disgust with himself, which he mingled with the
beginnings of pity.
“You know better than
I,?he said, “that all courts-martial are farces and that you’re
really paying for the crimes of other people, because this time
we’re going to win the war at any price. Wouldn’t you have done the
same in my place??
General Moncada, got up
to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail.
“Probably,?he said. “But what worries me is not your shooting me,
because after all, for people like us it’s a natural death.?He laid
his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. “What
worries me,?he went on, “is that out of so much hatred for the
military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so
much, you’ve ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is
worth that much baseness.?He took off his wedding ring and the
medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and
watch.
“At this rate,?he
concluded, “you’ll not only be the most despotic and bloody
dictator in our history, but you’ll shoot my dear friend ?rsula in
an attempt to pacify your conscience.?
Colonel Aureliano Buendía
stood there impassively. General Moncada then gave him the glasses,
medal, watch, and ring and he changed his tone.
“But I didn’t send for
you to scold you,?he said. “I wanted to ask you the favor of
sending these things to my wife.?
Colonel Aureliano Buendía
put them in his pockets.
“Is she still in
Manaure??
“She’s still in
Manaure,?General Moncada confirmed, “in the same house behind the
church where you sent the letter.?
“I’ll be glad to,
Jos?Raquel,?Colonel Aureliano Buendía said.
When he went out into the
blue air of the mist his face grew damp as on some other dawn in
the past and only then did he realize that -he had ordered the
sentence to be carried out in the courtyard and not at the cemetery
wall. The firing squad, drawn up opposite the door, paid him the
honors of a head of state.
“They can bring him out
now,?he ordered.
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