百年孤独(英文版)
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GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia in 1928, but
he has lived most of his life in Mexico and Europe. He attended the
University of Bogot?and later worked as staff reporter and film
critic for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. In addition to
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. he has also written two collections
of short fiction, NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL and LEAF STORM (both
available in Bard editions).
García Márquez currently lives with his wife and
children in Barcelona.
Other Avon Bard Books by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
IN EVIL HOUR
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ONE HUNDRED YEARS
OF SOLITUDE
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH
BY GREGORY RABASSA
AVON BOOKS ?NEW YORK
This book was first published in Argentina in 1967 by Editorial
Sudamericana, S.A., Buenos Aires, under the title Cien A?os de
Soledad.
Assistance for the translation of this volume was given by the
Center for Inter-American Relations.
AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
105 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016
English translation ?1970 by Harper & Row, Publishers,
Inc.
Published by arrangement with Harper & Row, Publishers,
Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 7483632
ISBN: 0-380-01503-X
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this
book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided
by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Harper &
Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York
10022.
First Avon Bard Printing: May 1971
AVON BARD TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT OFF. AND OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA
REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
K-R 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33
for jom?garcía ascot
and maría luisa elío
ONE HUNDRED YEARS
OF SOLITUDE
Chapter 1
MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano
Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took
him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty
adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran
along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like
prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked
names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.
Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies
would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar
of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First
they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and
sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold
public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of
the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house
dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots,
pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams
creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge,
and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from
where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in
turbulent confusion behind Melquíades?magical irons. “Things have a
life of their own,?the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s
simply a matter of waking up their souls.?Jos?Arcadio Buendía,
whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature
and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be
possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from
the bowels of the earth. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned
him: “It won’t work for that.?But Jos?Arcadio Buendía at that time
did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule
and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. ?rsula Iguarán,
his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor
domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. “Very soon well have
gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house,?her husband
replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth
of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the
riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting
Melquíades?incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing
was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of
its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there
was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When
Jos?Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to
take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a
copper locket containing a woman’s hair around its neck.
In March the gypsies returned. This time they
brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum,
which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of
Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and
set up the telescope at the entrance to the tent. For the price of
five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy
woman an arm’s length away. “Science has eliminated
distance,?Melquíades proclaimed. “In a short time, man will be able
to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving
his own house.?A burning noonday sun brought out a startling
demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they put a pile
of dry hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by
concentrating the sun’s rays. Jos?Arcadio Buendía, who had still
not been consoled for the failure of big magnets, conceived the
idea of using that invention as a weapon of war. Again Melquíades
tried to dissuade him, but he finally accepted the two magnetized
ingots and three colonial coins in exchange for the magnifying
glass. ?rsula wept in consternation. That money was from a chest of
gold coins that her father had put together ova an entire life of
privation and that she had buried underneath her bed in hopes of a
proper occasion to make use of it. Jos?Arcadio Buendía made no at.
tempt to console her, completely absorbed in his tactical
experiments with the abnegation of a scientist and even at the risk
of his own life. In an attempt to show the effects of the glass on
enemy troops, he exposed himself to the concentration of the sun’s
rays and suffered burns which turned into sores that took a long
time to heal. Over the protests of his wife, who was alarmed at
such a dangerous invention, at one point he was ready to set the
house on fire. He would spend hours on end in his room, calculating
the strategic possibilities of his novel weapon until he succeeded
in putting together a manual of startling instructional clarity and
an irresistible power of conviction. He sent it to the government,
accompanied by numerous descriptions of his experiments and several
pages of explanatory sketches; by a messenger who crossed the
mountains, got lost in measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers,
and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair,
plague, and wild beasts until he found a route that joined the one
used by the mules that carried the mail. In spite of the fact that
a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at that time,
Jos?Arcadio Buendía promised to undertake it as soon as the
government ordered him to so that he could put on some practical
demonstrations of his invention for the military authorities and
could train them himself in the complicated art of solar war. For
several years he waited for an answer. Finally, tired of waiting,
he bemoaned to Melquíades the failure of his project and the gypsy
then gave him a convincing proof of his honesty: he gave him back
the doubloons in exchange for the magnifying glass, and he left him
in addition some Portuguese maps and several instruments of
navigation. In his own handwriting he set down a concise synthesis
of the studies by Monk Hermann. which he left Jos?Arcadio so that
he would be able to make use of the astrolabe, the compass, and the
sextant. Jos?Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy
season shut up in a small room that he had built in the rear of the
house so that no one would disturb his experiments. Having
completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire
nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars and he
almost contracted sunstroke from trying to establish an exact
method to ascertain noon. When he became an expert in the use and
manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion of space
that allowed him to navigate across unknown seas, to visit
uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid
beings without having to leave his study. That was the period in
which he acquired the habit of talking to himself, of walking
through the house without paying attention to anyone, as ?rsula and
the children broke their backs in the garden, growing banana and
caladium, cassava and yams, ahuyama roots and eggplants. Suddenly,
without warning, his feverish activity was interrupted and was
replaced by a kind of fascination. He spent several days as if he
were bewitched, softly repeating to himself a string of fearful
conjectures without giving credit to his own understanding.
Finally, one Tuesday in December, at lunchtime, all at once he
released the whole weight of his torment. The children would
remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with
which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the
wrath of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them:
“The earth is round, like an orange.?
?rsula lost her patience. “If you have to go crazy,
please go crazy all by yourself!?she shouted. “But don’t try to put
your gypsy ideas into the heads of the children.?Jos?Arcadio
Buendía, impassive, did not let himself be frightened by the
desperation of his wife, who, in a seizure of rage, mashed the
astrolabe against the floor. He built another one, he gathered the
men of the village in his little room, and he demonstrated to them,
with theories that none of them could understand, the possibility
of returning to where one had set out by consistently sailing east.
The whole village was convinced that Jos?Arcadio Buendía had lost
his reason, when Melquíades returned to set things straight. He
gave public praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure
astronomical speculation had evolved a theory that had already been
proved in practice, although unknown in Macondo until then, and as
a proof of his admiration he made him a gift that was to have a
profound influence on the future of the village: the laboratory of
an alchemist.
By then Melquíades had aged with surprising
rapidity. On his first trips he seemed to be the same age as
Jos?Arcadio Buendía. But while the latter had preserved his
extraordinary strength, which permitted him to pull down a horse by
grabbing its ears, the gypsy seemed to have been worn dowse by some
tenacious illness. It was, in reality, the result of multiple and
rare diseases contracted on his innumerable trips around the world.
According to what he himself said as he spoke to Jos?Arcadio
Buendía while helping him set up the laboratory, death followed him
everywhere, sniffing at the cuffs of his pants, but never deciding
to give him the final clutch of its claws. He was a fugitive from
all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind. He
had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malayan archipelago,
leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in
Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in
the Strait of Magellan. That prodigious creature, said to possess
the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura,
with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the
other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a
raven with widespread wings, and a velvet vest across which the
patina of the centuries had skated. But in spite of his immense
wisdom and his mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an
earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of
daily life. He would complain of the ailments of old age, he
suffered from the most insignificant economic difficulties, and he
had stopped laughing a long time back because scurvy had made his
teeth drop out. On that suffocating noontime when the gypsy
revealed his secrets, Jos?Arcadio Buendía had the certainty that it
was the beginning of a great friendship. The children were startled
by his fantastic stories. Aureliano, who could not have been more
than five at the time, would remember him for the rest of his life
as he saw him that afternoon, sitting against the metallic and
quivering light from the window, lighting up with his deep organ
voice the darkest reaches of the imagination, while down over his
temples there flowed the grease that was being melted by the heat.
Jos?Arcadio, his older brother, would pass on that wonderful image
as a hereditary memory to all of his descendants. ?rsula on the
other hand, held a bad memory of that visit, for she had entered
the room just as Melquíades had carelessly broken a flask of
bichloride of mercury.
“It’s the smell of the devil,?she said.
“Not at all,?Melquíades corrected her. “It has been
proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a
little corrosive sublimate.?
Always didactic, he went into a learned exposition
of the diabolical properties of cinnabar, but ?rsula paid no
attention to him, although she took the children off to pray. That
biting odor would stay forever in her mind linked to the memory of
Melquíades.
The rudimentary laboratory—in addition to a
profusion of pots, funnels, retorts, filters, and sieves—was made
up of a primitive water pipe, a glass beaker with a long, thin
neck, a reproduction of the philosopher’s egg, and a still the
gypsies themselves had built in accordance with modern descriptions
of the three-armed alembic of Mary the Jew. Along with those items,
Melquíades left samples of the seven metals that corresponded to
the seven planets, the formulas of Moses and Zosimus for doubling
the quantity of gold, and a set of notes and sketches concerning
the processes of the Great Teaching that would permit those who
could interpret them to undertake the manufacture of the
philosopher’s stone. Seduced by the simplicity of the formulas to
double the quantity of gold, Jos?Arcadio Buendía paid court to
?rsula for several weeks so that she would let him dig up her
colonial coins and increase them by as many times as it was
possible to subdivide mercury. ?rsula gave in, as always, to her
husband’s unyielding obstinacy. Then Jos?Arcadio Buendía threw
three doubloons into a pan and fused them with copper filings,
orpiment, brimstone, and lead. He put it all to boil in a pot of
castor oil until he got a thick and pestilential syrup which was
more like common caramel than valuable gold. In risky and desperate
processes of distillation, melted with the seven planetary metals,
mixed with hermetic mercury and vitriol of Cyprus, and put back to
cook in hog fat for lack of any radish oil, ?rsula’s precious
inheritance was reduced to a large piece of burnt hog cracklings
that was firmly stuck to the bottom of the pot.
When the gypsies came back, ?rsula had turned the
whole population of the village against them. But curiosity was
greater than fear, for that time the gypsies went about the town
making a deafening noise with all manner of musical instruments
while a hawker announced the exhibition of the most fabulous
discovery of the Naciancenes. So that everyone went to the tent and
by paying one cent they saw a youthful Melquíades, recovered,
unwrinkled, with a new and flashing set of teeth. Those who
remembered his gums that had been destroyed by scurvy, his flaccid
cheeks, and his withered lips trembled with fear at the final proof
of the gypsy’s supernatural power. The fear turned into panic when
Melquíades took out his teeth, intact, encased in their gums, and
showed them to the audience for an instant—a fleeting instant in
which he went back to being the same decrepit man of years past—and
put them back again and smiled once more with the full control of
his restored youth. Even Jos?Arcadio Buendía himself considered
that Melquíades?knowledge had reached unbearable extremes, but he
felt a healthy excitement when the gypsy explained to him atone the
workings of his false teeth. It seemed so simple and so prodigious
at the same time that overnight he lost all interest in his
experiments in alchemy. He underwent a new crisis of bad humor. He
did not go back to eating regularly, and he would spend the day
walking through the house. “Incredible things are happening in the
world,?he said to ?rsula. “Right there across the river there are
all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like
donkeys.?Those who had known him since the foundation of Macondo
were startled at how much he had changed under
Melquíades?influence.
At first Jos?Arcadio Buendía had been a kind of
youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and
advice for the raising of children and animals, and who
collaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, for the
welfare of the community. Since his house from the very first had
been the best in the village, the others had been built in its
image and likeness. It had a small, well-lighted living roost, a
dining room in the shape of a terrace with gaily colored flowers,
two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut tree, a well
kept garden, and a corral where goats, pigs, and hens lived in
peaceful communion. The only animals that were prohibited, not just
in his house but in the entire settlement, were fighting
cocks.
?rsula’s capacity for work was the same as that of
her husband. Active, small, severe, that woman of unbreakable
nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing seemed
to be everywhere, from dawn until quite late at night, always
pursued by the soft whispering of her stiff, starched petticoats.
Thanks to her the floors of tamped earth, the unwhitewashed mud
walls, the rustic, wooden furniture they had built themselves were
always dean, and the old chests where they kept their clothes
exhaled the warm smell of basil.
Jos?Arcadio Buendía, who was the most enterprising
man ever to be seen in the village, had set up the placement of the
houses in such a way that from all of them one could reach the
river and draw water with the same effort, and he had lined up the
streets with such good sense that no house got more sun than
another during the hot time of day. Within a few years Macondo was
a village that was more orderly and hard working than any known
until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy
village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one
had died.
Since the time of its founding, Jos?Arcadio Buendía
had built traps and cages. In a short time he filled not only his
own house but all of those in the village with troupials, canaries,
bee eaters, and redbreasts. The concert of so many different birds
became so disturbing that ?rsula would plug her ears with beeswax
so as not to lose her sense of reality. The first time that
Melquíades?tribe arrived, selling glass balls for headaches,
everyone was surprised that they had been able to find that village
lost in the drowsiness of the swamp, and the gypsies confessed that
they had found their way by the song of the birds.
That spirit of social initiative disappeared in a
short time, pulled away by the fever of the magnets, the
astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation, and the
urge to discover the wonders of the world. From a clean and active
man, Jos?Arcadio Buendía changed into a man lazy in appearance,
careless in his dress, with a wild beard that ?rsula managed to
trim with great effort and a kitchen knife. There were many who
considered him the victim of some strange spell. But even those
most convinced of his madness left work and family to follow him
when he brought out his tools to clear the land and asked the
assembled group to open a way that would put Macondo in contact
with the great inventions.
Jos?Arcadio Buendía was completely ignorant of the
geography of the region. He knew that to the east there lay an
impenetrable mountain chain and that on the other side of the
mountains there was the ardent city of Riohacha, where in times
past—according to what he had been told by the first Aureliano
Buendía, his grandfather—Sir Francis Drake had gone crocodile
hunting with cannons and that he repaired hem and stuffed them with
straw to bring to Queen Elizabeth. In his youth, Jos?Arcadio
Buendía and his men, with wives and children, animals and all kinds
of domestic implements, had crossed the mountains in search of an
outlet to the sea, and after twenty-six months they gave up the
expedition and founded Macondo, so they would not have to go back.
It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could
lead only to the past. To the south lay the swamps, covered with an
eternal vegetable scum and the whole vast universe of the great
swamp, which, according to what the gypsies said, had no limits.
The great swamp in the west mingled with a boundless extension of
water where there were soft-skinned cetaceans that had the head and
torso of a woman, causing the ruination of sailors with the charm
of their extraordinary breasts. The gypsies sailed along that route
for six months before they reached the strip of land over which the
mules that carried the mail passed. According to Jos?Arcadio
Buendía’s calculations, the only possibility of contact with
civilization lay along the northern route. So he handed out
clearing tools and hunting weapons to the same men who had been
with him during the founding of Macondo. He threw his directional
instruments and his maps into a knapsack, and he undertook the
reckless adventure.
During the first days they did not come across any
appreciable obstacle. They went down along the stony bank of the
river to the place where years before they had found the soldier’s
armor, and from there they went into the woods along a path between
wild orange trees. At the end of the first week they killed and
roasted a deer, but they agreed to eat only half of it and salt the
rest for the days that lay ahead. With that precaution they tried
to postpone the necessity of having to eat macaws, whose blue flesh
had a harsh and musky taste. Then, for more than ten days, they did
not see the sun again. The ground became soft and damp, like
volcanic ash, and the vegetation was thicker and thicker, and the
cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and
more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the
expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that
paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original
sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their
machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a
week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers
through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection
of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a
suffocating smell of blood. They could not return because the strip
that they were opening as they went along would soon close up with
a new vegetation that. almost seemed to grow before their eyes.
“It’s all right,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía would say. “The main thing is
not to lose our bearings.?Always following his compass, he kept on
guiding his men toward the invisible north so that they would be
able to get out of that enchanted region. It was a thick night,
starless, but the darkness was becoming impregnated with a fresh
and clear air. Exhausted by the long crossing, they hung up their
hammocks and slept deeply for the first time in two weeks. When
they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky, they were
speechless with fascination. Before them, surrounded by ferns and
palm trees, white and powdery in the silent morning light, was an
enormous Spanish galleon. Tilted slightly to the starboard, it had
hanging from its intact masts the dirty rags of its sails in the
midst of its rigging, which was adorned with orchids. The hull,
covered with an armor of petrified barnacles and soft moss, was
firmly fastened into a surface of stones. The whole structure
seemed to occupy its own space, one of solitude and oblivion,
protected from the vices of time and the habits of the birds.
Inside, where the expeditionaries explored with careful intent,
there was nothing but a thick forest of flowers.
The discovery of the galleon, an indication of the
proximity of the sea, broke Jos?Arcadio Buendía’s drive. He
considered it a trick of his whimsical fate to have searched for
the sea without finding it, at the cost of countless sacrifices and
suffering, and to have found it all of a sudden without looking for
it, as if it lay across his path like an insurmountable object.
Many years later Colonel Aureliano Buendía crossed the region
again, when it was already a regular mail route, and the only part
of the ship he found was its burned-out frame in the midst of a
field of poppies. Only then, convinced that the story had not been
some product of his father’s imagination, did he wonder how the
galleon had been able to get inland to that spot. But Jos?Arcadio
Buendía did not concern himself with that when he found the sea
after another four days?journey from the galleon. His dreams ended
as he faced that ashen, foamy, dirty sea, which had not merited the
risks and sacrifices of the adventure.
“God damn it!?he shouted. “Macondo is surrounded by
water on all sides.?
The idea of a peninsular Macondo prevailed for a
long time, inspired by the arbitrary map that Jos?Arcadio Buendía
sketched on his return from the expedition. He drew it in rage,
evilly, exaggerating the difficulties of communication, as if to
punish himself for the absolute lack of sense with which he had
chosen the place. “We’ll never get anywhere,?he lamented to ?rsula.
“We’re going to rot our lives away here without receiving the
benefits of science.?That certainty, mulled over for several months
in the small room he used as his laboratory, brought him to the
conception of the plan to move Maeondo to a better place. But that
time ?rsula had anticipated his feverish designs. With the secret
and implacable labor of a small ant she predisposed the women of
the village against the flightiness of their husbands, who were
already preparing for the move. Jos?Arcadio Buendía did not know at
what moment or because of what adverse forces his plan had become
enveloped in a web of pretexts, disappointments, and evasions until
it turned into nothing but an illusion. ?rsula watched him with
innocent attention and even felt some pity for him on the morning
when she found him in the back room muttering about his plans for
moving as he placed his laboratory pieces in their original boxes.
She let him finish. She let him nail up the boxes and put his
initials on them with an inked brush, without reproaching him, but
knowing now that he knew (because she had heard him say so in his
soft monologues) that the men of the village would not back him up
in his undertaking. Only when he began to take down the door of the
room did ?rsula dare ask him what he was doing, and he answered
with a certain bitterness. “Since no one wants to leave, we’ll
leave all by ourselves.??rsula did not become upset.
“We will not leave,?she said. “We will stay here,
because we have had a son here.?
“We have still not had a death,?he said. “A person
does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the
ground.?
?rsula replied with a soft firmness:
“If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here,
I will die.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendía had not thought that his wife’s
will was so firm. He tried to seduce her with the charm of his
fantasy, with the promise of a prodigious world where all one had
to do was sprinkle some magic liquid on the ground and the plants
would bear fruit whenever a man wished, and where all manner of
instruments against pain were sold at bargain prices. But ?rsula
was insensible to his clairvoyance.
“Instead of going around thinking about your crazy
inventions, you should be worrying about your sons,?she replied.
“Look at the state they’re in, running wild just like
donkeys.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendía took his wife’s words literally.
He looked out the window and saw the barefoot children in the sunny
garden and he had the impression that only at that instant had they
begun to exist, conceived by ?rsula’s spell, Something occurred
inside of him then, something mysterious and definitive that
uprooted him from his own time and carried him adrift through an
unexplored region of his memory. While ?rsula continued sweeping
the house, which was safe now from being abandoned for the rest of
her life, he stood there with an absorbed look, contemplating the
children until his eyes became moist and he dried them with the
back of his hand, exhaling a deep sigh of resignation.
“All right,?he said. “Tell them to come help me take
the things out of the boxes.?
Jos?Arcadio, the older of the children, was
fourteen. He had a square head, thick hair, and his father’s
character. Although he had the same impulse for growth and physical
strength, it was early evident that he lacked imagination. He had
been conceived and born during the difficult crossing of the
mountains, before the founding of Macondo, and his parents gave
thanks to heaven when they saw he had no animal features.
Aureliano, the first human being to be born in Macondo, would be
six years old in March. He was silent and withdrawn. He had wept in
his mother’s womb and had been born with his eyes open. As they
were cutting the umbilical cord, he moved his head from side to
side, taking in the things in the room and examining the faces of
the people with a fearless curiosity. Then, indifferent to those
who came close to look at him, he kept his attention concentrated
on the palm roof, which looked as if it were about to collapse
under the tremendous pressure of the rain. ?rsula did not remember
the intensity of that look again until one day when little
Aureliano, at the age of three, went into the kitchen at the moment
she was taking a pot of boiling soup from the stove and putting it
on the table. The child, Perplexed, said from the doorway, “It’s
going to spill.?The pot was firmly placed in the center of the
table, but just as soon as the child made his announcement, it
began an unmistakable movement toward the edge, as if impelled by
some inner dynamism, and it fell and broke on the floor. ?rsula,
alarmed, told her husband about the episode, but he interpreted it
as a natural phenomenon. That was the way he always was alien to
the existence of his sons, partly because he considered childhood
as a period of mental insufficiency, and partly because he was
always too absorbed in his fantastic speculations.
But since the afternoon when he called the children
in to help him unpack the things in the laboratory, he gave them
his best hours. In the small separate room, where the walls were
gradually being covered by strange maps and fabulous drawings, he
taught them to read and write and do sums, and he spoke to them
about the wonders of the world, not only where his learning had
extended, but forcing the limits of his imagination to extremes. It
was in that way that the boys ended up learning that in the
southern extremes of Africa there were men so intelligent and
peaceful that their only pastime was to sit and think, and that it
was possible to cross the Aegean Sea on foot by jumping from island
to island all the way to the port of Salonika. Those hallucinating
sessions remained printed on the memories of the boys in such a way
that many years later, a second before the regular army officer
gave the firing squad the command to fire, Colonel Aureliano
Buendía saw once more that warm March afternoon on which his father
had interrupted the lesson in physics and stood fascinated, with
his hand in the air and his eyes motionless, listening to the
distant pipes, drums, and jingles of the gypsies, who were coming
to the village once more, announcing the latest and most startling
discovery of the sages of Memphis.
They were new gypsies, young men and women who knew
only their own language, handsome specimens with oily skins and
intelligent hands, whose dances and music sowed a panic of
uproarious joy through the streets, with parrots painted all colors
reciting Italian arias, and a hen who laid a hundred golden eggs to
the sound of a tambourine, and a trained monkey who read minds, and
the multi-use machine that could be used at the same time to sew on
buttons and reduce fevers, and the apparatus to make a person
forget his bad memories, and a poultice to lose time, and a
thousand more inventions so ingenious and unusual that Jos?Arcadio
Buendía must have wanted to invent a memory machine so that he
could remember them all. In an instant they transformed the
village. The inhabitants of Macondo found themselves lost is their
own streets, confused by the crowded fair.
Holding a child by each hand so as not to lose them
in the tumult, bumping into acrobats with gold-capped teeth and
jugglers with six arms, suffocated by the mingled breath of manure
and sandals that the crowd exhaled, Jos?Arcadio Buendía went about
everywhere like a madman, looking for Melquíades so that he could
reveal to him the infinite secrets of that fabulous nightmare. He
asked several gypsies, who did not understand his language. Finally
he reached the place where Melquíades used to set up his tent and
he found a taciturn Armenian who in Spanish was hawking a syrup to
make oneself invisible. He had drunk down a glass of the amber
substance in one gulp as Jos?Arcadio Buendía elbowed his way
through the absorbed group that was witnessing the spectacle, and
was able to ask his question. The gypsy wrapped him in the
frightful climate of his look before he turned into a puddle of
pestilential and smoking pitch over which the echo of his reply
still floated: “Melquíades is dead.?Upset by the news, Jos?Arcadio
Buendía stood motionless, trying to rise above his affliction,
until the group dispersed, called away by other artifices, and the
puddle of the taciturn Armenian evaporated completely. Other
gypsies confirmed later on that Melquíades had in fact succumbed to
the fever on the beach at Singapore and that his body had been
thrown into the deepest part of the Java Sea. The children had no
interest in the news. They insisted that their father take them to
see the overwhelming novelty of the sages of Memphis that was being
advertised at the entrance of a tent that, according to what was
said, had belonged to King Solomon. They insisted so much that
Jos?Arcadio Buendía paid the thirty reales and led them into the
center of the tent, where there was a giant with a hairy torso and
a shaved head, with a copper ring in his nose and a heavy iron
chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was
opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation.
Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite
internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up
into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were
waiting for an immediate explanation, Jos?Arcadio Buendía ventured
a murmur:
“It’s the largest diamond in the world.?
“No,?the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendía, without understanding,
stretched out his hand toward the cake, but the giant moved it
away. “Five reales more to touch it,?he said. Jos?Arcadio Buendía
paid them and put his hand on the ice and held it there for several
minutes as his heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact
with mystery. Without knowing what to say, he paid ten reales more
so that his sons could have that prodigious experience. Little
Jos?Arcadio refused to touch it. Aureliano, on the other hand, took
a step forward and put his hand on it, withdrawing it immediately.
“It’s boiling,?he exclaimed, startled. But his father paid no
attention to him. Intoxicated by the evidence of the miracle, he
forgot at that moment about the frustration of his delirious
undertakings and Melquíades?body, abandoned to the appetite of the
squids. He paid another five reales and with his hand on the cake,
as if giving testimony on the holy scriptures, he exclaimed:
“This is the great invention of our time.?
Chapter 2
WHEN THE PIRATE Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the
sixteenth century, ?rsula Iguarán’s great-great-grandmother became
so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of
cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a
lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the
rest of her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by
pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of
walking, for she never walked again in public. She gave up all
kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion that her body
gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard, for
she did not dare fall asleep lest she dream of the English and
their ferocious attack dogs as they came through the windows of her
bedroom to submit her to shameful tortures with their red-hot
irons. Her husband, an Aragonese merchant by whom she had two
children, spent half the value of his store on medicines and
pastimes in an attempt to alleviate her terror. Finally he sold the
business and took the family to live far from the sea in a
settlement of peaceful Indians located in the foothills, where he
built his wife a bedroom without windows so that the pirates of her
dream would have no way to get in.
In that hidden village there was a native-born
tobacco planter who had lived there for some time, Don Jos?Arcadio
Buendía, with whom ?rsula’s great-great-grandfather established a
partnership that was so lucrative that within a few years they made
a fortune. Several centuries later the great-great-grandson of the
native-born planter married the great-great-granddaughter of the
Aragonese. Therefore, every time that ?rsula became exercised over
her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over three hundred
years of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked
Riohacha. It was simply a way. of giving herself some relief,
because actually they were joined till death by a bond that was
more solid that love: a common prick of conscience. They were
cousins. They had grown up together in the old village that both of
their ancestors, with their work and their good habits, had
transformed into one of the finest towns in the province. Although
their marriage was predicted from the time they had come into the
world, when they expressed their desire to be married their own
relatives tried to stop it. They were afraid that those two healthy
products of two races that had interbred over the centuries would
suffer the shame of breeding iguanas. There had already been a
horrible precedent. An aunt of ?rsula’s, married to an uncle of
Jos?Arcadio Buendía, had a son who went through life wearing loose,
baggy trousers and who bled to death after having lived forty-two
years in the purest state of virginity, for he had been born and
had grown up with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of a corkscrew
and with a small tuft of hair on the tip. A pig’s tail that was
never allowed to be seen by any woman and that cost him his life
when a butcher friend did him the favor of chopping it off with his
cleaver. Jos?Arcadio Buendía, with the whimsy of his nineteen
years, resolved the problem with a single phrase: “I don’t care if
I have piglets as long as they can talk.?So they were married
amidst a festival of fireworks and a brass band that went on for
three days. They would have been happy from then on if ?rsula’s
mother had not terrified her with all manner of sinister
predictions about their offspring, even to the extreme of advising
her to refuse to consummate the marriage. Fearing that her stout
and willful husband would rape her while she slept, ?rsula, before
going to bed, would put on a rudimentary kind of drawers that her
mother had made out of sailcloth and had reinforced with a system
of crisscrossed leather straps and that was closed in the front by
a thick iron buckle. That was how they lived for several months.
During the day he would take care of his fighting cocks and she
would do frame embroidery with her mother. At night they would
wrestle for several hours in an anguished violence that seemed to
be a substitute for the act of love, until popular intuition got a
whiff of something irregular and the rumor spread that ?rsula was
still a virgin a year after her marriage because her husband was
impotent. Jos?Arcadio Buendía was the last one to hear the
rumor.
“Look at what people are going around saying,
?rsula,?he told his wife very calmly.
“Let them talk,?she said. “We know that it’s not
true.?
So the situation went on the same way for another
six months until that tragic Sunday when Jos?Arcadio Buendía won a
cockfight from Prudencio Aguilar. Furious, aroused by the blood of
his bird, the loser backed away from Jos?Arcadio Buendía so that
everyone in the cockpit could hear what he was going to tell
him.
“Congratulations!?he shouted. “Maybe that rooster of
yours can do your wife a favor.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendía serenely picked up his rooster.
“I’ll be right back,?he told everyone. And then to Prudencio
Aguilar:
“You go home and get a weapon, because I’m going to
kill you.?
Ten minutes later he returned with the notched spear
that had belonged to his grandfather. At the door to the cockpit,
where half the town had gathered, Prudencio Aguilar was waiting for
him. There was no time to defend himself. Jos?Arcadio Buendía’s
spear, thrown with the strength of a bull and with the same good
aim with which the first Aureliano Buendía had exterminated the
jaguars in the region, pierced his throat. That night, as they held
a wake over the corpse in the cockpit, Jos?Arcadio Buendía went
into the bedroom as his wife was putting on her chastity pants.
Pointing the spear at her he ordered: “Take them off.??rsula had no
doubt about her husband’s decision. “You’ll be responsible for what
happens,?she murmured. Jos?Arcadio Buendía stuck the spear into the
dirt floor.
“If you bear iguanas, we’ll raise iguanas,?he said.
“But there’ll be no more killings in this town because of
you.?
It was a fine June night, cool and with a moon, and
they were awake and frolicking in bed until dawn, indifferent to
the breeze that passed through the bedroom, loaded with the weeping
of Prudencio Aguilar’s kin.
The matter was put down as a duel of honor, but both
of them were left with a twinge in their conscience. One night,
when she could not sleep, ?rsula went out into the courtyard to get
some water and she saw Prudencio Aguilar by the water jar. He was
livid, a sad expression on his face, trying to cover the hole in
his throat with a plug made of esparto grass. It did not bring on
fear in her, but pity. She went back to the room and told her
husband what she had seen, but he did not think much of it. “This
just means that we can’t stand the weight of our conscience.?Two
nights later ?rsula saw Prudencio Aguilar again, in the bathroom,
using the esparto plug to wash the clotted blood from his throat.
On another night she saw him strolling in the rain. Jos?Arcadio
Buendía, annoyed by his wife’s hallucinations, went out into the
courtyard armed with the spear. There was the dead man with his sad
expression.
“You go to hell,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía shouted at him.
“Just as many times as you come back, I’ll kill you again.?
Prudencio Aguilar did not go away, nor did
Jos?Arcadio Buendía dare throw the spear. He never slept well after
that. He was tormented by the immense desolation with which the
dead man had looked at him through the rain, his deep nostalgia as
he yearned for living people, the anxiety with which he searched
through the house looking for some water with which to soak his
esparto plug. “He must be suffering a great deal,?he said to
?rsula. “You can see that he’s so very lonely.?She was so moved
that the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the
stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she
placed water jugs all about the house. One night when he found him
washing his wound in his own room, Jos?Anedio Buendía could no
longer resist.
“It’s all right, Prudencio,?he told him. “We’re
going to leave this town, just as far away as we can go, and we’ll
never come back. Go in peace now.?
That was how they undertook the crossing of the
mountains. Several friends of Jos?Arcadio Buendía, young men like
him, excited, by the adventure, dismantled their houses and packed
up, along with their wives and children, to head toward the land
that no one had promised them. Before he left, Jos?Arcadio Buendía
buried the spear in the courtyard and, one after the other, he cut
the throats of his magnificent fighting cocks, trusting that in
that way he could give some measure of peace to Prudencio Aguilar.
All that ?rsula took along were a trunk with her bridal clothes, a
few household utensils, and the small chest with the gold pieces
that she had inherited from her father. They did not lay out any
definite itinerary. They simply tried to go in a direction opposite
to the road to Riohacha so that they would not leave any trace or
meet any people they knew. It was an absurd journey. After fourteen
months, her stomach corrupted by monkey meat and snake stew, ?rsula
gave birth to a son who had all of his features human. She had
traveled half of the trip in a hammock that two men carried on
their shoulders, because swelling had disfigured her legs and her
varicose veins had puffed up like bubbles. Although it was pitiful
to see them with their sunken stomachs and languid eyes, the
children survived the journey better than their parents, and most
of the time it was fun for them. One morning, after almost two
years of crossing, they became the first mortals to see the western
slopes of the mountain range. From the cloudy summit they saw the
immense aquatic expanse of the great swamp as it spread out toward
the other side of the world. But they never found the sea. One
night, after several months of lost wandering through the swamps,
far away now from the last Indians they had met on their way, they
camped on the banks of a stony river whose waters were like a
torrent of frozen glass. Years later, during the second civil war,
Colonel Aureliano Buendía tried to follow that same route in order
to take Riohacha by surprise and after six days of traveling he
understood that it was madness. Nevertheless, the night on which
they camped beside the river, his father’s host had the look of
shipwrecked people with no escape, but their number had grown
during the crossing and they were all prepared (and they succeeded)
to die of old age. Jos?Arcadio Buendía dreamed that night that
right there a noisy city with houses having mirror wails rose up.
He asked what city it was and they answered him with a name that he
had never heard, that had no meaning at all, but that had a
supernatural echo in his dream: Macondo. On the following day he
convinced his men that they would never find the sea. He ordered
them to cut down the trees to make a clearing beside the river, at
the coolest spot on the bank, and there they founded the
village.
Jos?Arcadio Buendía did not succeed in deciphering
the dream of houses with mirror walls until the day he discovered
ice. Then he thought he understood its deep meaning. He thought
that in the near future they would be able to manufacture blocks of
ice on a large scale from such a common material as water and with
them build the new houses of the village. Macondo would no longer
be a burning place, where the hinges and door knockers twisted with
the heat, but would be changed into a wintry city. If he did not
persevere in his attempts to build an ice factory, it was because
at that time he was absolutely enthusiastic over the education of
his sons, especially that of Aureliano, who from the first had
revealed a strange intuition for alchemy. The laboratory had been
dusted off. Reviewing Melquíades?notes, serene now, without the
exaltation of novelty, in prolonged and patient sessions they tried
to separate ?rsula’s gold from the debris that was stuck to the
bottom of the pot. Young Jos?Arcadio scarcely took part in the
process. While his father was involved body and soul with his water
pipe, the willful first-born, who had always been too big for his
age, had become a monumental adolescent. His voice had changed. An
incipient fuzz appeared on his upper lip. One night, as ?rsula went
into the room where he was undressing to go to bed, she felt a
mingled sense of shame and pity: he was the first man that she had
seen naked after her husband, and he was so well-equipped for life
that he seemed abnormal. ?rsula, pregnant for the third time,
relived her newlywed terror.
Around that time a merry, foul-mouthed, provocative
woman came to the house to help with the chorea, and she knew how
to read the future in cards. ?rsula spoke to her about her son. She
thought that his disproportionate size was something as unnatural
as her cousin’s tail of a pig. The woman let out an expansive laugh
that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass.
“Just the opposite,?she said. “He’ll be very lucky.?In order to
confirm her prediction she brought her cards to the house a few
days later and locked herself up with Jos?Arcadio in a granary off
the kitchen. She calmly placed her cards on an old carpenter’s
bench. saying anything that came into her head, while the boy
waited beside her, more bored than intrigued. Suddenly she reached
out her hand and touched him. “Lordy!?she said, sincerely startled,
and that was all she could say. Jos?Arcadio felt his bones filling
up with foam, a languid fear, and a terrible desire to weep. The
woman made no insinuations. But Jos?Arcadio kept looking for her
all night long, for the smell of smoke that she had under her
armpits and that had got caught under his skin. He wanted to be
with her all the time, he wanted her to be his mother, for them
never to leave the granary, and for her to say “Lordy!?to him. One
day he could not stand it any more and. he went looking for her at
her house: He made a formal visit, sitting uncomprehendingly in the
living room without saying a word. At that moment he had no desire
for her. He found her different, entirely foreign to the image that
her smell brought on, as if she were someone else. He drank his
coffee and left the house in depression. That night, during the
frightful time of lying awake, he desired her again with a brutal
anxiety, but he did not want her that time as she had been in the
granary but as she had been that afternoon.
Days later the woman suddenly called him to her
house, where she was alone with her mother, and she had him come
into the bedroom with the pretext of showing him a deck of cards.
Then she touched him with such freedom that he suffered a delusion
after the initial shudder, and he felt more fear than pleasure. She
asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed. in order to
get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night,
in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go we her, even if
he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark
to his brother’s calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the
next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the
mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of
a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out into
the sleeping street. With all his heart he wanted the door to be
barred and not just closed as she had promised him. But it was
open. He pushed it with the tips of his fingers and the hinges
yielded with a mournful and articulate moan that left a frozen echo
inside of him. From the moment he entered, sideways and trying not
to make a noise, he caught the smell. He was still in the hallway,
where the woman’s three brothers had their hammocks in positions
that he could not see and that he could not determine in the
darkness as he felt his way along the hall to push open the bedroom
door and get his bearings there so as not to mistake the bed. He
found it. He bumped against the ropes of the hammocks, which were
lower than he had suspected, and a man who had been snoring until
then turned in his sleep and said in a kind of delusion, “It was
Wednesday.?When he pushed open the bedroom door, he could not
prevent it from scraping against the uneven floor. Suddenly, in the
absolute darkness, he understood with a hopeless nostalgia that he
was completely disoriented. Sleeping in the narrow room were the
mother, another daughter with her husband and two children, and the
woman, who may not have been there. He could have guided himself by
the smell if the smell had not been all over the house, so devious
and at the same time so definite, as it had always been on his
skin. He did not move for a long time, wondering in fright how he
had ever got to that abyss of abandonment, when a hand with all its
fingers extended and feeling about in the darkness touched his
face. He was not surprised, for without knowing, he had been
expecting it. Then he gave himself over to that hand, and in a
terrible state of exhaustion he let himself be led to a shapeless
place where his clothes were taken off and he was heaved about like
a sack of potatoes and thrown from one side to the other in a
bottomless darkness in which his arms were useless, where it no
longer smelled of woman but of ammonia, and where he tried to
remember her face and found before him the face of ?rsula,
confusedly aware that he was doing something that for a very long
time he had wanted to do but that he had imagined could really
never be done, not knowing what he was doing because he did not
know where his feet were or where his head was, or whose feet or
whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial
rumbling of his kidneys and the air of his intestines, and fear,
and the bewildered anxiety to flee and at the same time stay
forever in that exasperated silence and that fearful
solitude.
Her name was Pilar Ternera. She had been part of the
exodus that ended with the founding of Macondo, dragged along by
her family in order to separate her from the man who had raped her
at fourteen and had continued to love her until she was twenty-two,
but who never made up his mind to make the situation public because
he was a man apart. He promised to follow her to the ends of the
earth, but only later on, when he put his affairs in order, and she
had become tired of waiting for him, always identifying him with
the tall and short, blond and brunet men that her cards promised
from land and sea within three days, three months, or three years.
With her waiting she had lost the strength of her thighs, the
firmness of her breasts, her habit of tenderness, but she kept the
madness of her heart intact. Maddened by that prodigious plaything,
Jos?Arcadio followed her path every night through the labyrinth of
the room. On a certain occasion he found the door barred, and he
knocked several times, knowing that if he had the boldness to knock
the first time he would have had to knock until the last, and after
an interminable wait she opened the door for him. During the day,
lying down to dream, he would secretly enjoy the memories of the
night before. But when she came into the house, merry, indifferent,
chatty, he did not have to make any effort to hide his tension,
because that woman, whose explosive laugh frightened off the doves,
had nothing to do with the invisible power that taught him how to
breathe from within and control his heartbeats, and that had
permitted him to understand why man are afraid of death. He was so
wrapped up in himself that he did not even understand the joy of
everyone when his father and his brother aroused the household with
the news that they had succeeded in penetrating the metallic debris
and had separated ?rsula’s gold.
They had succeeded, as a matter of fact, after
putting in complicated and persevering days at it. ?rsula was
happy, and she even gave thanks to God for the invention of
alchemy, while the people of the village crushed into the
laboratory, and they served them guava jelly on crackers to
celebrate the wonder, and Jos?Arcadio Buendía let them see the
crucible with the recovered gold, as if he had just invented it.
Showing it all around, he ended up in front of his older son, who
during the past few days had barely put in an appearance in the
laboratory. He put the dry and yellowish mass in front of his eyes
and asked him: “What does it look like to you??Jos?Arcadio answered
sincerely:
“Dog shit.?
His father gave him a blow with the back of his hand
that brought out blood and tears. That night Pilar Ternera put
arnica compresses on the swelling, feeling about for the bottle and
cotton in the dark, and she did everything she wanted with him as
long as it did not bother him, making an effort to love him without
hurting him. They reached such a state of intimacy that later,
without realizing it, they were whispering to each other.
“I want to be alone with you,?he said. “One of these
days I’m going to tell everybody and we can stop all of this
sneaking around.?
She did not try to calm him down.
“That would be fine,?she said “If we’re alone, we’ll
leave the lamp lighted so that we can see each other, and I can
holler as much as I want without anybody’s having to butt in, and
you can whisper in my ear any crap you can think of.?
That conversation, the biting rancor that he felt
against his father, and the imminent possibility of wild love
inspired a serene courage in him. In a spontaneous way, without any
preparation, he told everything to his brother.
At first young Aureliano understood only the risk,
the immense possibility of danger that his brother’s adventures
implied, and he could not understand the fascination of the
subject. Little by little he became contaminated with the anxiety.
He wondered about the details of the dangers, he identified himself
with the suffering and enjoyment of his brother, he felt frightened
and happy. He would stay awake waiting for him until dawn in the
solitary bed that seemed to have a bottom of live coals, and they
would keep on talking until it was time to get up, so that both of
them soon suffered from the same drowsiness, felt the same lack of
interest in alchemy and the wisdom of their father, and they took
refuge in solitude. “Those kids are out of their heads,??rsula
said. “They must have worms.?She prepared a repugnant potion for
them made out of mashed wormseed, which they both drank with
unforeseen stoicism, and they sat down at the same time on their
pots eleven times in a single day, expelling some rose-colored
parasites that they showed to everybody with great jubilation, for
it allowed them to deceive ?rsula as to the origin of their
distractions and drowsiness. Aureliano not only understood by then,
he also lived his brother’s experiences as something of his own,
for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail
the mechanism of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it
feel like??Jos?Arcadio gave an immediate reply:
“It’s like an earthquake.?
One January Thursday at two o’clock in the morning,
Amaranta was born. Before anyone came into the room, ?rsula
examined her carefully. She was light and watery, like a newt, but
all of her parts were human: Aureliano did not notice the new thing
except when the house became full of people. Protected by the
confusion, he went off in search of his brother, who had not been
in bed since eleven o’clock, and it was such an impulsive decision
that he did not even have time to ask himself how he could get him
out of Pilar Ternera’s bedroom. He circled the house for several
hours, whistling private calls, until the proximity of dawn forced
him to go home. In his mother’s room, playing with the newborn
little sister and with a face that drooped with innocence, he found
Jos?Arcadio.
?rsula was barely over her forty days?rest when the
gypsies returned. They were the same acrobats and jugglers that had
brought the ice. Unlike Melquíades?tribe, they had shown very
quickly that they were not heralds of progress but purveyors of
amusement. Even when they brought the ice they did not advertise it
for its usefulness in the life of man but as a simple circus
curiosity. This time, along with many other artifices, they brought
a flying carpet. But they did not offer it as a fundamental
contribution to the development of transport, rather as an object
of recreation. The people at once dug up their last gold pieces to
take advantage of a quick flight over the houses of the village.
Protected by the delightful cover of collective disorder,
Jos?Arcadio and Pilar passed many relaxing hours. They were two
happy lovers among the crowd, and they even came to suspect that
love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the
happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights. Pilar,
however, broke the spell. Stimulated by the enthusiasm that
Jos?Arcadio showed in her companionship, she confused the form and
the occasion, and all of a sudden she threw the whole world on top
of him. “Now you really are a man,?she told him. And since he did
not understand what she meant, she spelled it out to him.
“You’re going to be a father.?
Jos?Arcadio did not dare leave the house for several
days. It was enough for him to hear the rocking laughter of Pilar
in the kitchen to run and take refuge in the laboratory, where the
artifacts of alchemy had come alive again with ?rsula’s blessing.
Jos?Arcadio Buendía received his errant son with joy and initiated
him in the search for the philosopher’s stone, which he had finally
undertaken. One afternoon the boys grew enthusiastic over the
flying carpet that went swiftly by the laboratory at window level
carrying the gypsy who was driving it and several children from the
village who were merrily waving their hands, but Jos?Arcadio
Buendía did not even look at it. “Let them dream,?he said. “We’ll
do better flying than they are doing, and with more scientific
resources than a miserable bedspread.?In spite of his feigned
interest, Jos?Arcadio must understood the powers of the
philosopher’s egg, which to him looked like a poorly blown bottle.
He did not succeed in escaping from his worries. He lost his
appetite and he could not sleep. He fell into an ill humor, the
same as his father’s over the failure of his undertakings, and such
was his upset that Jos?Arcadio Buendía himself relieved him of his
duties in the laboratory, thinking that he had taken alchemy too
much to heart. Aureliano, of course, understood that his brother’s
affliction did not have its source in the search for the
philosopher’s stone but he could not get into his confidence. He
had lost his former spontaneity. From an accomplice and a
communicative person he had become withdrawn and hostile. Anxious
for solitude, bitten by a virulent rancor against the world, one
night he left his bed as usual, but he did not go to Pilar
Ternera’s house, but to mingle is the tumult of the fair. After
wandering about among all kinds of contraptions with out becoming
interested in any of them, he spotted something that was not a part
of it all: a very young gypsy girl, almost a child, who was
weighted down by beads and was the most beautiful woman that
Jos?Arcadio had ever seen in his life. She was in the crowd that
was witnessing the sad spectacle of the man who had been turned
into a snake for having disobeyed his parents.
Jos?Arcadio paid no attention. While the sad
interrogation of the snake-man was taking place, he made his way
through the crowd up to the front row, where the gypsy girl was,
and he stooped behind her. He pressed against her back. The girl
tried to separate herself, but Jos?Arcadio pressed more strongly
against her back. Then she felt him. She remained motionless
against him, trembling with surprise and fear, unable to believe
the evidence, and finally she turned her head and looked at him
with a tremulous smile. At that instant two gypsies put the
snake-man into his cage and carried him into the tent. The gypsy
who was conducting the show announced:
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to show
the terrible test of the woman who must have her head chopped off
every night at this time for one hundred and fifty years as
punishment for having seen what she should not have.?
Jos?Arcadio and the gypsy girl did not witness the
decapitation. They went to her tent, where they kissed each other
with a desperate anxiety while they took off their clothes. The
gypsy girl removed the starched lace corsets she had on and there
she was, changed into practically nothing. She was a languid little
frog, with incipient breasts and legs so thin that they did not
even match the size of Jos?Arcadio’s arms, but she had a decision
and a warmth that compensated for her fragility. Nevertheless,
Jos?Arcadio could not respond to her because they were in a kind of
public tent where the gypsies passed through with their circus
things and did their business, and would even tarry by the bed for
a game of dice. The lamp hanging from the center pole lighted the
whole place up. During a pause in the caresses, Jos?Arcadio
stretched out naked on the bed without knowing what to do, while
the girl tried to inspire him. A gypsy woman with splendid flesh
came in a short time after accompanied by a man who was not of the
caravan but who was not from the village either, and they both
began to undress in front of the bed. Without meaning to, the woman
looked at Jos?Arcadio and examined his magnificent animal in repose
with a kind of pathetic fervor.
“My boy,?she exclaimed, “may God preserve you just
as you are.?
Jos?Arcadio’s companion asked them to leave them
alone, and the couple lay down on the ground, close to the bed. The
passion of the others woke up Jos?Arcadio’s fervor. On the first
contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a
disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin
broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her
whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud.
But she bore the impact with a firmness of character and a bravery
that were admirable. Jos?Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the
air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst
forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the
girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her
language. It was Thursday. On Saturday night, Jos?Arcadio wrapped a
red cloth around his head and left with the gypsies.
When ?rsula discovered his absence she searched for
him all through the village. In the remains of the gypsy camp there
was nothing but a garbage pit among the still smoking ashes of the
extinguished campfires. Someone who was there looking for beads
among the trash told ?rsula that the night before he had seen her
son in the tumult of the caravan pushing the snake-man’s cage on a
cart. “He’s become a gypsy?she shouted to her husband, who had not
shown the slightest sign of alarm over the disappearance.
“I hope it’s true,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía said,
grinding in his mortar the material that had been ground a thousand
times and reheated and ground again. “That way he’ll learn to be a
man.??rsula asked where the gypsies had gone. She went along asking
and following the road she had been shown, thinking that she still
had time to catch up to them. She kept getting farther away from
the village until she felt so far away that she did not think about
returning. Jos?Arcadio Buendía did not discover that his wife was
missing until eight o’clock at night, when he left the material
warming in a bed of manure and went to see what was wrong with
little Amaranta, who was getting hoarse from crying. In a few hours
he gathered a group of well-equipped men, put Amaranta in the hands
of a woman who offered to nurse her, and was lost on invisible
paths in pursuit of ?rsula. Aureliano went with them. Some Indian
fishermen, whose language they could not understand, told them with
signs that they had not seen anyone pass. After three days of
useless searching they returned to the village.
For several weeks Jos?Arcadio Buendía let himself be
overcome by consternation. He took care of little Amaranta like a
mother. He bathed and dressed her, took her to be nursed four times
a day, and even sang to her at night the songs that ?rsula never
knew how to sing. On a certain occasion Pilar Ternera volunteered
to do the household chores until ?rsula came back. Aureliano, whose
mysterious intuition had become sharpened with the misfortune, felt
a glow of clairvoyance when he saw her come in. Then he knew that
in some inexplicable way she was to blame for his brother’s flight
and the consequent disappearance of his mother, and he harassed her
with a silent and implacable hostility in such a way that the woman
did not return to the house.
Time put things in their place. Jos?Arcadio Buendía
and his son did not know exactly when they returned to the
laboratory, dusting things, lighting the water pipe, involved once
more in the patient manipulation of the material that had been
sleeping for several months in its bed of manure. Even Amaranta,
lying in a wicker basket, observed with curiosity the absorbing
work of her father and her brother in the small room where the air
was rarefied by mercury vapors. On a certain occasion, months after
?rsula’s departure, strange things began to happen. An empty flask
that had been forgotten in a cupboard for a long time became so
heavy that it could not be moved. A pan of water on the worktable
boiled without any fire under it for a half hour until it
completely evaporated. Jos?Arcadio Buendía and his son observed
those phenomena with startled excitement, unable to explain them
but interpreting them as predictions of the material. One day
Amaranta’s basket began to move by itself and made a complete turn
about the room, to the consternation of Auerliano, who hurried to
stop it. But his father did not get upset. He put the basket in its
place and tied it to the leg of a table, convinced that the
long-awaited event was imminent. It was on that occasion that
Auerliano heard him say:
“If you don’t fear God, fear him through the
metals.
Suddenly, almost five months after her
disappearance, ?rsula came back. She arrived exalted, rejuvenated,
with new clothes in a style that was unknown in the village.
Jos?Arcadio Buendía could barely stand up under the impact. “That
was it!?he shouted. “I knew it was going to happen.?And he really
believed it, for during his prolonged imprisonment as he
manipulated the material, he begged in the depth of his heart that
the longed-for miracle should not be the discovery of the
philosopher’s stone, or the freeing of the breath that makes metals
live, or the faculty to convert the hinges and the locks of the
house into gold, but what had just happened: ?rsula’s return. But
she did not share his excitement. She gave him a conventional kiss,
as if she had been away only an hour, and she told him:
“Look out the door.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendía took a long time to get out of
his perplexity when he went out into the street and saw the crowd.
They were not gypsies. They were men and women like them, with
straight hair and dark skin, who spoke the same language and
complained of the same pains. They had mules loaded down with
things to eat, oxcarts with furniture and domestic utensils, pure
and simple earthly accessories put on sale without any fuss by
peddlers of everyday reality. They came from the other side of the
swamp, only two days away, where there were towns that received
mail every month in the year and where they were familiar with the
implements of good living. ?rsula had not caught up with the
gypsies, but she had found the route that her husband had been
unable to discover in his frustrated search for the great
inventions.
Chapter 3
PILAR TERNERA’S son was brought to his grand parents?house two
weeks after he was born. ?rsula admitted him grudgingly, conquered
once more by the obstinacy of her husband, who could not tolerate
the idea that an offshoot of his blood should be adrift, but he
imposed the condition that the child should never know his true
identity. Although he was given the name Jos?Arcadio, they ended up
calling him simply Arcadio so as to avoid confusion. At that time
there was so much activity in the town and so much bustle in the
house that the care of the children was relegated to a secondary
level. They were put in the care of Visitación, a Guajiro Indian
woman who had arrived in town with a brother in flight from a
plague of insomnia that had been scourging their tribe for several
years. They were both so docile and willing to help that ?rsula
took them on to help her with her household chores. That was how
Arcadio and Amaranta came to speak the Guajiro language before
Spanish, and they learned to drink lizard broth and eat spider eggs
without ?rsula’s knowing it, for she was too busy with a promising
business in candy animals. Macondo had changed. The people who had
come with ?rsula spread the news of the good quality of its soil
and its privileged position with respect to the swamp, so that from
the narrow village of past times it changed into an active town
with stores and workshops and a permanent commercial route over
which the first Arabs arrived with their baggy pants and rings in
their ears, swapping glass beads for macaws. Jos?Arcadio Buendía
did not have a moment’s rest. Fascinated by an immediate reality
that came to be more fantastic than the vast universe of his
imagination, he lost all interest in the alchemist’s laboratory,
put to rest the material that had become attenuated with months of
manipulation, and went back to being the enterprising man of
earlier days when he had decided upon the layout of the streets and
the location of the new houses so that no one would enjoy
privileges that everyone did not have. He acquired such authority
among the new arrivals that foundations were not laid or walls
built without his being consulted, and it was decided that he
should be the one in charge of the distribution of the land. When
the acrobat gypsies returned, with their vagabond carnival
transformed now into a gigantic organization of games of luck and
chance, they were received with great joy, for it was thought that
Jos?Arcadio would be coming back with them. But Jos?Arcadio did not
return, nor did they come with the snake-man, who, according to
what ?rsula thought, was the only one who could tell them about
their son, so the gypsies were not allowed to camp in town or set
foot in it in the future, for they were considered the bearers of
concupiscence and perversion. Jos?Arcadio Buendía, however, was
explicit in maintaining that the old tribe of Melquíades, who had
contributed so much to the growth of the village with his age-old
wisdom and his fabulous inventions, would always find the gates
open. But Melquíades?tribe, according to what the wanderers said,
had been wiped off the face of the earth because they had gone
beyond the limits of human knowledge.
Emancipated for the moment at least from the torment
of fantasy, Jos?Arcadio Buendía in a short time set up a system of
order and work which allowed for only one bit of license: the
freeing of the birds, which, since the time of the founding, had
made time merry with their flutes, and installing in their place
musical clocks in every house. They were wondrous clocks made of
carved wood, which the Arabs had traded for macaws and which
Jos?Arcadio Buendía had synchronized with such precision that every
half hour the town grew merry with the progressive chords of the
same song until it reached the climax of a noontime that was as
exact and unanimous as a complete waltz. It was also Jos?Arcadio
Buendía who decided during those years that they should plant
almond trees instead of acacias on the streets, and who discovered,
without ever revealing it, a way to make them live forever. Many
years later, when Macondo was a field of wooden houses with zinc
roofs, the broken and dusty almond trees still stood on the oldest
streets, although no one knew who had planted them. While his
father was putting the town in order and his mother was increasing
their wealth with her marvelous business of candied little roosters
and fish, which left the house twice a day strung along sticks of
balsa wood, Aureliano spent interminable hours in the abandoned
laboratory, learning the art of silverwork by his own
experimentation. He had shot up so fast that in a short time the
clothing left behind by his brother no longer fit him and he began
to wear his father’s, but Visitación had to sew pleats in the shirt
and darts in the pants, because Aureliano had not sequined the
corpulence of the others. Adolescence had taken away the softness
of his voice and had made him silent and definitely solitary, but,
on the other hand, it had restored the intense expression that he
had had in his eyes when he was born. He concentrated so much on
his experiments in silverwork that he scarcely left the laboratory
to eat. Worried ever his inner withdrawal, Jos?Arcadio Buendía gave
him the keys to the house and a little money, thinking that perhaps
he needed a woman. But Aureliano spent the money on muriatic acid
to prepare some aqua regia and he beautified the keys by plating
them with gold. His excesses were hardly comparable to those of
Arcadio and Amaranta, who had already begun to get their second
teeth and still went about all day clutching at the Indians?cloaks,
stubborn in their decision not to speak Spanish but the Guajiro
language. “You shouldn’t complain.??rsula told her husband.
“Children inherit their parents?madness.?And as she was lamenting
her misfortune, convinced that the wild behavior of her children
was something as fearful as a pig’s tail, Aureliano gave her a look
that wrapped her in an atmosphere of uncertainty.
“Somebody is coming,?he told her.
?rsula, as she did whenever he made a prediction,
tried to break it down with her housewifely logic. It was normal
for someone to be coming. Dozens of strangers came through Macondo
every day without arousing suspicion or secret ideas. Nevertheless,
beyond all logic, Aureliano was sure of his prediction.
“I don’t know who it will be,?he insisted, “but
whoever it is is already on the way.?
That Sunday, in fact, Rebeca arrived. She was only
eleven years old. She had made the difficult trip from Manaure with
some hide dealers who had taken on the task of delivering her along
with a letter to Jos?Arcadio Buendía, but they could not explain
precisely who the person was who had asked the favor. Her entire
baggage consisted of a small trunk, a little rocking chair with
small hand-painted flowers, and a canvas sack which kept making a
cloc-cloc-cloc sound, where she carried her parents?bones. The
letter addressed to Jos?Arcadio Buendía was written is very warm
terms by someone who still loved him very much in spite of time and
distance, and who felt obliged by a basic humanitarian feeling to
do the charitable thing and send him that poor unsheltered orphan,
who was a second cousin of ?rsula’s and consequently also a
relative of Jos?Arcadio Buendía, although farther removed, because
she was the daughter of that unforgettable friend Nicanor Ulloa and
his very worthy wife Rebeca Montiel, may God keep them in His holy
kingdom, whose remains the girl was carrying so that they might be
given Christian burial. The names mentioned, as well as the
signature on the letter, were perfectly legible, but neither
Jos?Arcadio, Buendía nor ?rsula remembered having any relatives
with those names, nor did they know anyone by the name of the
sender of the letter, much less the remote village of Manaure. It
was impossible to obtain any further information from the girl.
From the moment she arrived she had been sitting in the rocker,
sucking her finger and observing everyone with her large, startled
eyes without giving any sign of understanding what they were asking
her. She wore a diagonally striped dress that had been dyed black,
worn by use, and a pair of scaly patent leather boots. Her hair was
held behind her ears with bows of black ribbon. She wore a scapular
with the images worn away by sweat, and on her right wrist the fang
of a carnivorous animal mounted on a backing of copper as an amulet
against the evil eye. Her greenish skin, her stomach, round and
tense as a drum. revealed poor health and hunger that were older
than she was, but when they gave her something to eat she kept the
plate on her knees without tasting anything. They even began to
think that she was a deaf-mute until the Indians asked her in their
language if she wanted some water and she moved her eyes as if she
recognized them and said yes with her head.
They kept her, because there was nothing else they
could do. They decided to call her Rebeca, which according to the
letter was her mother’s name, because Aureliano had the patience to
read to her the names of all the saints and he did not get a
reaction from any one of them. Since there was no cemetery in
Macondo at that time, for no one had died up till then, they kept
the bag of bones to wait for a worthy place of burial, and for a
long time it got in the way everywhere and would be found where
least expected, always with its clucking of a broody hen. A long
time passed before Rebeca became incorporated into the life of the
family. She would sit in her small rocker sucking her finger in the
most remote corner of the house. Nothing attracted her attention
except the music of the clocks, which she would look for every half
hour with her frightened eyes as if she hoped to find it someplace
in the air. They could not get her to eat for several days. No one
understood why she had not died of hunger until the Indians, who
were aware of everything, for they went ceaselessly about the house
on their stealthy feet, discovered that Rebeca only liked to eat
the damp earth of the courtyard and the cake of whitewash that she
picked of the walls with her nails. It was obvious that her
parents, or whoever had raised her, had scolded her for that habit
because she did it secretively and with a feeling of guilt, trying
to put away supplies so that she could eat when no one was looking.
From then on they put her under an implacable watch. They threw cow
gall onto the courtyard and, rubbed hot chili on the walls,
thinking they could defeat her pernicious vice with those methods,
but she showed such signs of astuteness and ingenuity to find some
earth that ?rsula found herself forced to use more drastic methods.
She put some orange juice and rhubarb into a pan that she left in
the dew all night and she gave her the dose the following day on an
empty stomach. Although no one had told her that it was the
specific remedy for the vice of eating earth, she thought that any
bitter substance in an empty stomach would have to make the liver
react. Rebeca was so rebellious and strong in spite of her
frailness that they had to tie her up like a calf to make her
swallow the medicine, and they could barely keep back her kicks or
bear up under the strange hieroglyphics that she alternated with
her bites and spitting, and that, according to what the scandalized
Indians said, were the vilest obscenities that one could ever
imagine in their language. When ?rsula discovered that, she added
whipping to the treatment. It was never established whether it was
the rhubarb or the beatings that had effect, or both of them
together, but the truth was that in a few weeks Rebeca began to
show signs of recovery. She took part in the games of Arcadio and
Amaranta, who treated her like an older sister, and she ate
heartily, using the utensils properly. It was soon revealed that
she spoke Spanish with as much fluency as the Indian language, that
she had a remarkable ability for manual work, and that she could
sing the waltz of the clocks with some very funny words that she
herself had invented. It did not take long for them to consider her
another member of the family. She was more affectionate to ?rsula
than any of her own children had been, and she called Arcadio, and
Amaranta brother and sister, Aureliano uncle, and Jos?Arcadio
Buendía grandpa. So that she finally deserved, as much as the
others, the name of Rebeca Buendía, the only one that she ever had
and that she bore with dignity until her death.
One night about the time that Rebeca was cured of
the vice of eating earth and was brought to sleep in the other
children’s room, the Indian woman, who slept with them awoke by
chance and heard a strange, intermittent sound in the corner. She
got up in alarm, thinking that an animal had come into the room,
and then she saw Rebeca in the rocker, sucking her finger and with
her eyes lighted up in the darkness like those of a cat. Terrified,
exhausted by her fate, Visitación recognized in those eyes the
symptoms of the sickness whose threat had obliged her and her
brother to exile themselves forever from an age-old kingdom where
they had been prince and princess. It was the insomnia
plague.
Cataure, the Indian, was gone from the house by
morning. His sister stayed because her fatalistic heart told her
that the lethal sickness would follow her, no matter what, to the
farthest corner of the earth. No one understood Visitación’s alarm.
“If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,?Jos?Arcadio
Buendía said in good humor. “That way we can get more out of
life.?But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of
the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for
the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable
evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory.
She meant that when the sick person became used to his state of
vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from
his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the
identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until
he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past. Jos?Arcadio
Buendía, dying with laughter, thought that it was just a question
of one of the many illnesses invented by the Indians?superstitions.
But ?rsula, just to be safe, took the precaution of isolating
Rebeca from the other children.
After several weeks, when Visitación’s terror seemed
to have died down, Jos?Arcadio Buendía found himself rolling over
in bed, unable to fall asleep. ?rsula, who had also awakened, asked
him what was wrong, and he answered: “I’m thinking about Prudencio
Aguilar again.?They did not sleep a minute, but the following day
they felt so rested that they forgot about the bad night. Aureliano
commented with surprise at lunchtime that he felt very well in
spite of the fact that he had spent the whole night in the
laboratory gilding a brooch that he planned to give to ?rsula for
her birthday. They did not become alarmed until the third day, when
no one felt sleepy at bedtime and they realized that they had gone
more than fifty hours without sleeping.
“The children are awake too,?the Indian said with
her fatalistic conviction. “Once it gets into a house no one can
escape the plague.?
They had indeed contracted the illness of insomnia.
?rsula, who had learned from her mother the medicinal value of
plants, prepared and made them all drink a brew of monkshood, but
they could not get to sleep and spent the whole day dreaming on
their feet. In that state of hallucinated lucidity, not only did
they see the images of their own dreams, but some saw the images
dreamed by others. It was as if the house were full of visitors.
Sitting in her rocker in a corner of the kitchen, Rebeca dreamed
that a man who looked very much like her, dressed in white linen
and with his shirt collar closed by a gold button, was bringing her
a bouquet of roses. He was accompanied by a woman with delicate
hands who took out one rose and put it in the child’s hair. ?rsula
understood that the man and woman were Rebeca’s parents, but even
though she made a great effort to recognize them, she confirmed her
certainty that she had never seen them. In the meantime, through an
oversight that Jos?Arcadio Buendía never forgave himself for, the
candy animals made in the house were still being sold in the town.
Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little
green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia,
and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday
found the whole town awake. No one was alarmed at first. On the
contrary, they were happy at not sleeping because there was so much
to do in Macondo in those days that there was barely enough time.
They worked so hard that soon they had nothing else to do and they
could be found at three o’clock in the morning with their arms
crossed, counting the notes in the waltz of the clock. Those who
wanted to sleep, not from fatigue but because of the nostalgia for
dreams, tried all kinds of methods of exhausting themselves. They
would gather together to converse endlessly, to tell over and over
for hours on end the same jokes, to complicate to the limits of
exasperation the story about the capon, which was an endless game
in which the narrator asked if they wanted him to tell them the
story about the capon, and when they answered yes, the narrator
would say that he had not asked them to say yes, but whether they
wanted him to tell them the story about the capon, and when they
answered no, the narrator told them that he had not asked them to
say no, but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about
the capon, and when they remained silent the narrator told them
that he had not asked them to remain silent but whether they wanted
him to tell them the story about the capon, and no one could leave
because the narrator would say that he had not asked them to leave
but whether they wanted him to tell them the story about the capon,
and so on and on in a vicious circle that lasted entire
nights.
When Jos?Arcadio Buendía realized that the plague
had invaded the town, he gathered together the heads of families to
explain to them what he knew about the sickness of insomnia, and
they agreed on methods to prevent the scourge from spreading to
other towns in the swamp. That was why they took the bells off the
goats, bells that the Arabs had swapped them for macaws, and put
them at the entrance to town at the disposal of those who would not
listen to the advice and entreaties of the sentinels and insisted
on visiting the town. All strangers who passed through the streets
of Macondo at that time had to ring their bells so that the sick
people would know that they were healthy. They were not allowed to
eat or drink anything during their stay, for there was no doubt but
that the illness was transmitted by mouth, and all food and drink
had been contaminated by insomnia. In that way they kept the plague
restricted to the perimeter of the town. So effective was the
quarantine that the day came when the emergency situation was
accepted as a natural thing and life was organized in such a way
that work picked up its rhythm again and no one worried any more
about the useless habit of sleeping.
It was Aureliano who conceived the formula that was
to protect them against loss of memory for several months. He
discovered it by chance. An expert insomniac, having been one of
the first, he had learned the art of silverwork to perfection. One
day he was looking for the small anvil that he used for laminating
metals and he could not remember its name. His father told him:
“Stake.?Aureliano wrote the name on a piece of paper that he pasted
to the base of the small anvil: stake. In that way he was sure of
not forgetting it in the future. It did not occur to him that this
was the first manifestation of a loss of memory, because the object
had a difficult name to remember. But a few days later be,
discovered that he had trouble remembering almost every object in
the laboratory. Then he marked them with their respective names so
that all he had to do was read the inscription in order to identify
them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten
even the most impressive happenings of his childhood, Aureliano
explained his method to him, and Jos?Arcadio Buendía put it into
practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole
village. With an inked brush he marked everything with its name:
table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed, pan. He went to the corral
and marked the animals and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava,
caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite
possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might
come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that
no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The
sign that he hung on the neck of the cow was an exemplary proof of
the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight
against loss of memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every
morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled
in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they
went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily
captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they
forgot the values of the written letters.
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put
up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main
street that said GOD EXISTS. In all the houses keys to memorizing
objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so
much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell
of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less
practical for them but more comforting. Pilar Ternera was the one
who contributed most to popularize that mystification when she
conceived the trick of reading the past in cards as she had read
the future before. By means of that recourse the insomniacs began
to live in a world built on the uncertain alternatives of the
cards, where a father was remembered faintly as the dark man who
had arrived at the beginning of April and a mother was remembered
only as the dark woman who wore a gold ring on her left hand, and
where a birth date was reduced to the last Tuesday on which a lark
sang in the laurel tree. Defeated by those practices of
consolation, Jos?Arcadio Buendía then decided to build the memory
machine that he had desired once in order to remember the marvelous
inventions of the gypsies. The artifact was based on the
possibility of reviewing every morning, from beginning to end, the
totality of knowledge acquired during one’s life. He conceived of
it as a spinning dictionary that a person placed on the axis could
operate by means of a lever, so that in a very few hours there
would pass before his eyes the notions most necessary for life. He
had succeeded in writing almost fourteen thousand entries when
along the road from the swamp a strange-looking old man with the
sad sleepers?bell appeared, carrying a bulging suitcase tied with a
rope and pulling a cart covered with black cloth. He went straight
to the house of Jos?Arcadio Buendía.
Visitación did not recognize him when she opened the
door and she thought he had come with the idea of selling
something, unaware that nothing could be sold in a town that was
sinking irrevocably into the quicksand of forgetfulness. He was a
decrepit man. Although his voice was also broken by uncertainty and
his hands seemed to doubt the existence of things, it was evident
that he came from the world where men could still sleep and
remember. Jos?Arcadio Buendía found him sitting in the living room
fanning himself with a patched black hat as he read with
compassionate attention the signs pasted to the walls. He greeted
him with a broad show of affection, afraid that he had known him at
another time and that he did not remember him now. But the visitor
was aware of his falseness, He felt himself forgotten, not with the
irremediable forgetfulness of the heart, but with a different kind
of forgetfulness, which was more cruel and irrevocable and which he
knew very well because it was the forgetfulness of death. Then he
understood. He opened the suitcase crammed with indecipherable
objects and from among then he took out a little case with many
flasks. He gave Jos?Arcadio Buendía a drink of a gentle color and
the light went on in his memory. His eyes became moist from weeping
even before he noticed himself in an absurd living room where
objects were labeled and before he was ashamed of the solemn
nonsense written on the walls, and even before he recognized the
newcomer with a dazzling glow of joy. It was Melquíades.
While Macondo was celebrating the recovery of its
memory, Jos?Arcadio Buendía and Melquíades dusted off their old
friendship. The gypsy was inclined to stay in the town. He really
had been through death, but he had returned because he could not
bear the solitude. Repudiated by his tribe, having lost all of his
supernatural faculties because of his faithfulness to life, he
decided to take refuge in that corner of the world which had still
not been discovered by death, dedicated to the operation of a
daguerreotype laboratory. Jos?Arcadio Buendía had never heard of
that invention. But when he saw himself and his whole family
fastened onto a sheet of iridescent metal for an eternity, he was
mute with stupefaction. That was the date of the oxidized
daguerreotype in which Jos?Arcadio Buendía appeared with his
bristly and graying hair, his card board collar attached to his
shirt by a copper button, and an expression of startled solemnity,
whom ?rsula described, dying with laughter, as a “frightened
general.?Jos?Arcadio Buendía was, in fact, frightened on that dear
December morning when the daguerreotype was made, for he was
thinking that people were slowly wearing away while his image would
endure an a metallic plaque. Through a curious reversal of custom,
it was ?rsula who got that idea out of his head, as it was also she
who forgot her ancient bitterness and decided that Melquíades would
stay on in the house, although she never permitted them to make a
daguerreotype of her because (according to her very words) she did
not want to survive as a laughingstock for her grandchildren. That
morning she dressed the children in their best clothes, powdered
their faces, and gave a spoonful of marrow syrup to each one so
that they would all remain absolutely motionless during the nearly
two minutes in front of Melquíades fantastic camera. In the family
daguerreotype, the only one that ever existed, Aureliano appeared
dressed in black velvet between Amaranta and Rebeca. He had the
same languor and the same clairvoyant look that he would have years
later as he faced the firing squad. But he still had not sensed the
premonition of his fate. He was an expert silversmith, praised all
over the swampland for the delicacy of his work. In the workshop,
which he shared with Melquíades?mad laboratory, he could barely be
heard breathing. He seemed to be taking refuge in some other time,
while his father and the gypsy with shouts interpreted the
predictions of Nostradamus amidst a noise of flasks and trays and
the disaster of spilled acids and silver bromide that was lost in
the twists and turns it gave at every instant. That dedication to
his work, the good judgment with which he directed his attention,
had allowed Aureliano to earn in a short time more money than
?rsula had with her delicious candy fauna, but everybody thought it
strange that he was now a full-grown man and had not known a woman.
It was true that he had never had one.
Several months later saw the return of Francisco the
Man, as ancient vagabond who was almost two hundred years old and
who frequently passed through Macondo distributing songs that he
composed himself. In them Francisco the Man told in great detail
the things that had happened in the towns along his route, from
Manaure to the edge of the swamp, so that if anyone had a message
to send or an event to make public, he would pay him two cents to
include it in his repertory. That was how ?rsula learned of the
death of her mother, as a simple consequence of listening to the
songs in the hope that they would say something about her son
Jos?Arcadio. Francisco the Man, called that because he had once
defeated the devil in a duel of improvisation, and whose real name
no one knew, disappeared from Macondo during the insomnia plague
and one night he appeared suddenly in Catarino’s store. The whole
town went to listen to him to find out what had happened in the
world. On that occasion there arrived with him a woman who was so
fat that four Indians had to carry her in a rocking chair, and an
adolescent mulatto girl with a forlorn look who protected her from
the sun with an umbrella. Aureliano went to Catarino’s store that
night. He found Francisco the Man, like a monolithic chameleon,
sitting in the midst of a circle of bystanders. He was singing the
news with his old, out-of-tune voice, accompanying himself with the
same archaic accordion that Sir Walter Raleigh had given him in the
Guianas and keeping time with his great walking feet that were
cracked from saltpeter. In front of a door at the rear through
which men were going and coming, the matron of the rocking chair
was sitting and fanning herself in silence. Catarino, with a felt
rose behind his ear, was selling the gathering mugs of fermented
cane juice, and he took advantage of the occasion to go over to the
men and put his hand on them where he should not have. Toward
midnight the heat was unbearable. Aureliano listened to the news to
the end without hearing anything that was of interest to his
family. He was getting ready to go home when the matron signaled
him with her hand.
“You go in too.?she told him. “It only costs twenty
cents.?
Aureliano threw a coin into the hopper that the
matron had in her lap and went into the room without knowing why.
The adolescent mulatto girl, with her small bitch’s teats, was
naked on the bed. Before Aureliano sixty-three men had passed
through the room that night. From being used so much, kneaded with
sweat and sighs, the air in the room had begun to turn to mud. The
girl took off the soaked sheet and asked Aureliano to hold it by
one side. It was as heavy as a piece of canvas. They squeezed it,
twisting it at the ends until it regained its natural weight. They
turned over the mat and the sweat came out of the other side.
Aureliano was anxious for that operation never to end. He knew the
theoretical mechanics of love, but he could not stay on his feet
because of the weakness of his knees, and although he had goose
pimples on his burning skin he could not resist the urgent need to
expel the weight of his bowels. When the girl finished fixing up
the bed and told him to get undressed, he gave her a confused
explanation: “They made me come in. They told me to throw twenty
cents into the hopper and hurry up.?The girl understood his
confusion. “If you throw in twenty cents more when you go out, you
can stay a little longer,?she said softly. Aureliano got undressed,
tormented by shame, unable to get rid of the idea that-his
nakedness could not stand comparison with that of his brother. In
spite of the girl’s efforts he felt more and more indifferent and
terribly alone. “I’ll throw in other twenty cents,?he said with a
desolate voice. The girl thanked him in silence. Her back was raw.
Her skin was stuck to her ribs and her breathing was forced because
of an immeasurable exhaustion. Two years before, far away from
there, she had fallen asleep without putting out the candle and had
awakened surrounded by flames. The house where she lived with the
grandmother who had raised her was reduced to ashes. Since then her
grandmother carried her from town to town, putting her to bed for
twenty cents in order to make up the value of the burned house.
According to the girl’s calculations, she still had ten years of
seventy men per night, because she also had to pay the expenses of
the trip and food for both of them as well as the pay of the
Indians who carried the rocking chair. When the matron knocked on
the door the second time, Aureliano left the room without having
done anything, troubled by a desire to weep. That night he could
not sleep, thinking about the girl, with a mixture of desire and
pity. He felt an irresistible need to love her and protect her. At
dawn, worn out by insomnia and fever, he made the calm decision to
marry her in order to free her from the despotism of her
grandmother and to enjoy all the nights of satisfaction that she
would give the seventy men. But at ten o’clock in the morning, when
he reached Catarino’s store, the girl had left town.
Time mitigated his mad proposal, but it aggravated
his feelings of frustration. He took refuge in work. He resigned
himself to being a womanless man for all his life in order to hide
the shame of his uselessness. In the meantime, Melquíades had
printed on his plates everything that was printable in Macondo, and
he left the daguerreotype laboratory to the fantasies of
Jos?Arcadio Buendía who had resolved to use it to obtain
scientific proof of the existence of God. Through a complicated
process of superimposed exposures taken in different parts of the
house, he was sure that sooner or later he would get a
daguerreotype of God, if He existed, or put an end once and for all
to the supposition of His existence. Melquíades got deeper into his
interpretations of Nostradamus. He would stay up until very late,
suffocating in his faded velvet vest, scribbling with his tiny
sparrow hands, whose rings had lost the glow of former times. One
night he thought he had found a prediction of the future of
Macondo. It was to be a luminous city with great glass houses where
there was no trace remaining of the race of the Buendía. “It’s a
mistake,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía thundered. “They won’t be houses of
glass but of ice, as I dreamed, and there will always be a Buendía,
per omnia secula seculorum.??rsula fought to preserve common sense
in that extravagant house, having broadened her business of little
candy animals with an oven that went all night turning out baskets
and more baskets of bread and a prodigious variety of puddings,
meringues, and cookies, which disappeared in a few hours on the
roads winding through the swamp. She had reached an age where she
had a right to rest, but she was nonetheless more and more active.
So busy was she in her prosperous enterprises that one afternoon
she looked distractedly toward the courtyard while the Indian woman
helped her sweeten the dough and she saw two unknown and beautiful
adolescent girls doing frame embroidery in the light of the sunset.
They were Rebeca and Amaranta. As soon as they had taken off the
mourning clothes for their grandmother, which they wore with
inflexible rigor for three years, their bright clothes seemed to
have given them a new place in the world. Rebeca, contrary to what
might have been expected, was the more beautiful. She had a light
complexion, large and peaceful eyes, and magical hands that seemed
to work out the design of the embroidery with invisible threads.
Amaranta, the younger, was somewhat graceless, but she had the
natural distinction, the inner tightness of her dead grandmother.
Next to them, although he was already revealing the physical drive
of his father, Arcadio looked like a child. He set about learning
the art of silverwork with Aureliano, who had also taught him how
to read and write. ?rsula suddenly realized that the house had
become full of people, that her children were on the point of
marrying and having children, and that they would be obliged to
scatter for lack of space. Then she took out the money she had
accumulated over long years of hard labor, made some arrangements
with her customers, and undertook the enlargement of the house. She
had a formal parlor for visits built, another one that was more
comfortable and cool for daily use, a dining room with a table with
twelve places where the family could sit with all of their guests,
nine bedrooms with windows on the courtyard and a long porch
protected from the heat of noon by a rose garden with a railing on
which to place pots of ferns and begonias. She had the kitchen
enlarged to hold two ovens. The granary where Pilar Ternera had
read Jos?Arcadio’s future was torn down and another twice as large
built so that there would never be a lack of food in the house. She
had baths built is the courtyard in the shade of the chestnut tree,
one for the women and another for the men, and in the rear a large
stable, a fenced-in chicken yard, a shed for the milk cows, and an
aviary open to the four winds so that wandering birds could roost
there at their pleasure. Followed by dozens of masons and
carpenters, as if she had contracted her husband’s hallucinating
fever, ?rsula fixed the position of light and heat and distributed
space without the least sense of its limitations. The primitive
building of the founders became filled with tools and materials, of
workmen exhausted by sweat, who asked everybody please not to
molest them, exasperated by the sack of bones that followed them
everywhere with its dull rattle. In that discomfort, breathing
quicklime and tar, no one could see very well how from the bowels
of the earth there was rising not only the largest house is the
town, but the most hospitable and cool house that had ever existed
in the region of the swamp. Jos?Buendía, trying to surprise Divine
Providence in the midst of the cataclysm, was the one who least
understood it. The new house was almost finished when ?rsula drew
him out of his chimerical world in order to inform him that she had
an order to paint the front blue and not white as they had wanted.
She showed him the official document. Jos?Arcadio Buendía, without
understanding what his wife was talking about, deciphered the
signature.
“Who is this fellow??he asked:
“The magistrate,??rsula answered disconsolately.
They say he’s an authority sent by the government.?
Don Apolinar Moscote, the magistrate, had arrived in
Macondo very quietly. He put up at the Hotel Jacob—built by one of
the first Arabs who came to swap knickknacks for macaws—and on the
following day he rented a small room with a door on the street two
blocks away from the Buendía house. He set up a table and a chair
that he had bought from Jacob, nailed up on the wall the shield of
the republic that he had brought with him, and on the door he
painted the sign: Magistrate. His first order was for all the
houses to be painted blue in celebration of the anniversary of
national independence. Jos?Arcadio Buendía, with the copy of the
order in his hand, found him taking his nap in a hammock he had set
up in the narrow office. “Did you write this paper??he asked him.
Don Apolinar Moscote, a mature man, timid, with a ruddy complexion,
said yes. “By what right??Jos?Arcadio Buendía asked again. Don
Apolinar Moscote picked up a paper from the drawer of the table and
showed it to him. “I have been named magistrate of this
town.?Jos?Arcadio Buendía did not even look at the
appointment.
“In this town we do not give orders with pieces of
paper,?he said without losing his calm. “And so that you know it
once and for all, we don’t need any judge here because there’s
nothing that needs judging.?
Facing Don Apolinar Moscote, still without raising
his voice, he gave a detailed account of how they had founded the
village, of how they had distributed the land, opened the roads,
and introduced the improvements that necessity required without
having bothered the government and without anyone having bothered
them. “We are so peaceful that none of us has died even of a
natural death,?he said. “You can see that we still don’t have any
cemetery.?No once was upset that the government had not helped
them. On the contrary, they were happy that up until then it had
let them grow in peace, and he hoped that it would continue leaving
them that way, because they had not founded a town so that the
first upstart who came along would tell them what to do. Don
Apolinar had put on his denim jacket, white like his trousers,
without losing at any moment the elegance of his gestures.
“So that if you want to stay here like any other
ordinary citizen, you’re quite welcome,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía
concluded. “But if you’ve come to cause disorder by making the
people paint their houses blue, you can pick up your junk and go
back where you came from. Because my house is going to be white,
white, like a dove.?
Don Apolinar Moscote turned pale. He took a step
backward and tightened his jaws as he said with a certain
affliction:
“I must warn you that I’m armed.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendía did not know exactly when his
hands regained the useful strength with which he used to pull down
horses. He grabbed Don Apolinar Moscote by the lapels and lifted
him up to the level of his eyes.
“I’m doing this,?he said, “because I would rather
carry you around alive and not have to keep carrying you around
dead for the rest of my life.?
In that way he carried him through the middle of the
street, suspended by the lapels, until he put him down on his two
feet on the swamp road. A week later he was back with six barefoot
and ragged soldiers, armed with shotguns, and an oxcart in which
his wife and seven daughters were traveling. Two other carts
arrived later with the furniture, the baggage, and the household
utensils. He settled his family in the Hotel Jacob, while he looked
for a house, and he went back to open his office under the
protection of the soldiers. The founders of Macondo, resolving to
expel the invaders, went with their older sons to put themselves at
the disposal of Jos?Arcadio Buendía. But he was against it, as he
explained, because it was not manly to make trouble for someone in
front of his family, and Don Apolinar had returned with his wife
and daughters. So he decided to resolve the situation in a pleasant
way.
Aureliano went with him. About that time he had
begun to cultivate the black mustache with waxed tips and the
somewhat stentorian voice that would characterize him in the war.
Unarmed, without paying any attention to the guards, they went into
the magistrate’s office. Don Apolinar Moscote did not lose his
calm. He introduced them to two of his daughters who happened to be
there: Amparo, sixteen, dark like her mother, and Remedios, only
nine, a pretty little girl with lily-colored skin and green eyes.
They were gracious and well-mannered. As soon as the men came in,
before being introduced, they gave them chairs to sit on. But they
both remained standing.
“Very well, my friend,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía said,
“you may stay here, not because you have those bandits with
shotguns at the door, but out of consideration for your wife and
daughters.?
Don Apolinar Moscote was upset, but Jos?Arcadio
Buendía did not give him time to reply. “We only make two
conditions,?he went on. “The first: that everyone can paint his
house the color he feels like. The second: that the soldiers leave
at once. We will guarantee order for you.?The magistrate raised his
right hand with all the fingers extended.
“Your word of honor??
“The word of your enemy,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía said.
And he added in a bitter tone: “Because I must tell you one thing:
you and I are still enemies.?
The soldiers left that same afternoon. A few days
later Jos?Arcadio Buendía found a house for the magistrate’s
family. Everybody was at peace except Aureliano. The image of
Remedios, the magistrate’s younger daughter, who, because of her
age, could have been his daughter, kept paining him in some part of
his body. It was a physical sensation that almost bothered him when
he walked, like a pebble in his shoe.
Chapter 4
THE NEW HOUSE, white, like a dove, was inaugurated with a dance.
?rsula had got that idea from the afternoon when she saw Rebeca and
Amaranta changed into adolescents, and it could almost have been
said that the main reason behind the construction was a desire to
have a proper place for the girls to receive visitors. In order
that nothing would be lacking in splendor she worked like a galley
slave as the repairs were under way, so that before they were
finished she had ordered costly necessities for the decorations,
the table service, and the marvelous invention that was to arouse
the astonishment of the town and the jubilation of the young
people: the pianola. They delivered it broken down, packed in
several boxes that were unloaded along with the Viennese furniture,
the Bohemian crystal, the table service from the Indies Company,
the tablecloths from Holland, and a rich variety of lamps and
candlesticks, hangings and drapes. The import house sent along at
its own expense an Italian expert, Pietro Crespi, to assemble and
tune the pianola, to instruct the purchasers in its functioning,
and to teach them how to dance the latest music printed on its six
paper rolls.
Pietro Crespi was young and blond, the most handsome
and well mannered man who had ever been seen in Macondo, so
scrupulous in his dress that in spite of the suffocating heat he
would work in his brocade vest and heavy coat of dark cloth. Soaked
in sweat, keeping a reverent distance from the owners of the house,
he spent several weeks shut up is the parlor with a dedication much
like that of Aureliano in his silverwork. One morning, without
opening the door, without calling anyone to witness the miracle, he
placed the first roll in the pianola and the tormenting hammering
and the constant noise of wooden lathings ceased in a silence that
was startled at the order and neatness of the music. They all ran
to the parlor. Jos?Arcadio Buendía was as if struck by lightning,
not because of the beauty of the melody, but because of the
automatic working of the keys of the pianola, and he set up
Melquíades?camera with the hope of getting a daguerreotype of the
invisible player. That day the Italian had lunch with them. Rebeca
and Amaranta, serving the table, were intimidated by the way in
which the angelic man with pale and ringless hands manipulated the
utensils. In the living room, next to the parlor, Pietro Crespi
taught them how to dance. He showed them the steps without touching
them, keeping time with a metronome, under the friendly eye of
?rsula, who did not leave the room for a moment while her daughters
had their lesson. Pietro Crespi wore special pants on those days,
very elastic and tight, and dancing slippers, “You don’t have to
worry so much,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía told her. “The man’s a
fairy.?But she did not leave off her vigilance until the
apprenticeship was over and the Italian left Macondo. Then they
began to organize the party. ?rsula drew up a strict guest list, in
which the only ones invited were the descendants of the founders,
except for the family of Pilar Ternera, who by then had had two
more children by unknown fathers. It was truly a high-class list,
except that it was determined by feelings of friendship, for those
favored were not only the oldest friends of Jos?Arcadio Buendía’s
house since before they undertook the exodus and the founding of
Macondo, but also their sons and grandsons, who were the constant
companions of Aureliano and Arcadio since infancy, and their
daughters, who were the only ones who visited the house to
embroider with Rebeca and Amaranta. Don Apolinar Moscote, the
benevolent ruler whose activity had been reduced to the maintenance
from his scanty resources of two policemen armed with wooden clubs,
was a figurehead. In older to support the household expenses his
daughters had opened a sewing shop, where they made felt flowers as
well as guava delicacies, and wrote love notes to order. But in
spite of being modest and hard-working, the most beautiful girls in
Iowa, and the most skilled at the new dances, they did not manage
to be considered for the party.
While ?rsula and the girls unpacked furniture,
polished silverware, and hung pictures of maidens in boats full of
roses, which gave a breath of new life to the naked areas that the
masons had built, Jos?Arcadio Buendía stopped his pursuit of the
image of God, convinced of His nonexistence, and he took the
pianola apart in order to decipher its magical secret. Two days
before the party, swamped in a shower of leftover keys and hammers,
bungling in the midst of a mix-up of strings that would unroll in
one direction and roll up again in the other, he succeeded in a
fashion in putting the instrument back together. There had never
been as many surprises and as much dashing about as in those days,
but the new pitch lamps were lighted on the designated day and
hour. The house was opened, still smelling of resin and damp
whitewash, and the children and grandchildren of the founders saw
the porch with ferns and begonias, the quiet rooms, the garden
saturated with the fragrance of the roses, and they gathered
together in the parlor, facing the unknown invention that had been
covered with a white sheet. Those who were familiar with the piano,
popular in other towns in the swamp, felt a little disheartened,
but more bitter was ?rsula’s disappointment when she put in the
first roll so that Amaranta and Rebeca could begin the dancing and
the mechanism did not work. Melquíades, almost blind by then,
crumbling with decrepitude, used the arts of his timeless wisdom in
an attempt to fix it. Finally Jos?Arcadio Buendía managed, by
mistake, to move a device that was stuck and the music came out,
first in a burst and then in a flow of mixed-up notes. Beating
against the strings that had been put in without order or concert
and had been tuned with temerity, the hammers let go. But the
stubborn descendants of the twenty-one intrepid people who plowed
through the mountains in search of the sea to the west avoided the
reefs of the melodic mix-up and the dancing went on until
dawn.
Pietro Crespi came back to repair the pianola.
Rebeca and Amaranta helped him put the strings in order and helped
him with their laughter at the mix-up of the melodies. It was
extremely pleasant and so chaste in its way that ?rsula ceased her
vigilance. On the eve of his departure a farewell dance for him was
improvised with the pianola and with Rebeca he put on a skillful
demonstration of modern dance, Arcadio and Amaranta matched them in
grace and skill. But the exhibition was interrupted because Pilar
Ternera, who was at the door with the onlookers, had a fight,
biting and hair pulling, with a woman who had dared to comment that
Arcadio had a woman’s behind. Toward midnight Pietro Crespi took
his leave with a sentimental little speech, and he promised to
return very soon. Rebeca accompanied him to the door, and having
closed up the house and put out the lamps, she went to her room to
weep. It was an inconsolable weeping that lasted for several days,
the cause of which was not known even by Amaranta. Her hermetism
was not odd. Although she seemed expansive and cordial, she had a
solitary character and an impenetrable heart. She was a splendid
adolescent with long and firm bones, but she still insisted on
using the small wooden rocking chair with which she had arrived at
the house, reinforced many times and with the arms gone. No one had
discovered that even at that age she still had the habit of sucking
her finger. That was why she would not lose an opportunity to lock
herself in the bathroom and had acquired the habit of sleeping with
her face to the wall. On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a
group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of
the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when
she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the
earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes,
defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an
irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating
earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that
the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in
fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she
persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little
she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary
minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food.
She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in
small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure
and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult
needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the
sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of
them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that
show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground
that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another
part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the
temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh
aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart. One
afternoon, for no reason, Amparo Moscote asked permission to see
the house. Amaranta and Rebeca, disconcerted by the unexpected
visit, attended her with a stiff formality. They showed her the
remodeled mansion, they had her listen to the rolls on the pianola,
and they offered her orange marmalade and crackers. Amparo gave a
lesson in dignity, personal charm, and good manners that impressed
?rsula in the few moments that she was present during the visit.
After two hours, when the conversation was beginning to wane,
Amparo took advantage of Amaranta’s distraction and gave Rebeca a
letter. She was able to see the name of the Estimable Se?orita
Rebeca Buendía, written in the same methodical hand, with the same
green ink, and the same delicacy of words with which the
instructions for the operation of the pianola were written, and she
folded the letter with the tips of her fingers and hid it in her
bosom, looking at Amparo Moscote with an expression of endless and
unconditional gratitude and a silent promise of complicity unto
death.
The sudden friendship between Amparo Moscote and
Rebeca Buendía awakened the hopes of Aureliano. The memory of
little Remedios had not stopped tormenting him, but he had not
found a chance to see her. When he would stroll through town with
his closest friends, Magnífico Visbal and Gerineldo Márquez—the
sons of the founders of the same names—he would look for her in the
sewing shop with an anxious glance, but he saw only the older
sisters. The presence of Amparo Moscote in the house was like a
premonition. “She has to come with her,?Aureliano would say to
himself in a low voice. “She has to come.?He repeated it so many
times and with such conviction that one afternoon when he was
putting together a little gold fish in the work shop, he had the
certainty that she had answered his call. Indeed, a short time
later he heard the childish voice, and when he looked up his heart
froze with terror as he saw the girl at the door, dressed in pink
organdy and wearing white boots.
“You can’t go in there, Remedios, Amparo Moscote
said from the hall. They’re working.?
But Aureliano did not give her time to respond. He
picked up the little fish by the chain that came through its mouth
and said to her.
“Come in.?
Remedios went over and asked some questions about
the fish that Aureliano could not answer because he was seized with
a sudden attack of asthma. He wanted to stay beside that lily skin
forever, beside those emerald eyes, close to that voice that called
him “sir?with every question. showing the same respect that she
gave her father. Melquíades was in the corner seated at the desk
scribbling indecipherable signs. Aureliano hated him. All he could
do was tell Remedios that he was going to give her the little fish
and the girl was so startled by the offer that she left the
workshop as fast as she could. That afternoon Aureliano lost the
hidden patience with which he had waited for a chance to see her.
He neglected his work. In several desperate efforts of
concentration he willed her to appear but Remedios did not respond.
He looked for her in her sisters?shop, behind the window shades in
her house, in her father’s office, but he found her only in the
image that saturated his private and terrible solitude. He would
spend whole hours with Rebeca in the parlor listening to the music
on the pianola. She was listening to it because it was the music
with which Pietro Crespi had taught them how to dance. Aureliano
listened to it simply because everything, even music, reminded him
of Remedios.
The house became full of loves Aureliano expressed
it in poetry that had no beginning or end. He would write it on the
harsh pieces of parchment that Melquíades gave him, on the bathroom
walls, on the skin of his arms, and in all of it Remedios would
appear transfigured: Remedios in the soporific air of two in the
afternoon, Remedios in the soft breath of the roses, Remedios in
the water-clock secrets of the moths, Remedios in the steaming
morning bread, Remedios everywhere and Remedios forever. Rebeca
waited for her love at four in the afternoon, embroidering by the
window. She knew that the mailman’s mule arrived only every two
weeks, but she always waited for him, convinced that he was going
to arrive on some other day by mistake. It happened quite the
opposite: once the mule did not come on the usual day. Mad with
desperation, Rebeca got up in the middle of the night and ate
handfuls of earth in the garden with a suicidal drive, weeping with
pain and fury, chewing tender earthworms and chipping her teeth on
snail shells. She vomited until dawn. She fell into a state of
feverish prostration, lost consciousness, and her heart went into a
shameless delirium. ?rsula, scandalized, forced the lock on her
trunk and found at the bottom, tied together with pink ribbons, the
sixteen perfumed letters and the skeletons of leaves and petals
preserved in old books and the dried butterflies that turned to
powder at the touch.
Aureliano was the only one capable of understanding
such desolation. That afternoon, while ?rsula was trying to rescue
Rebeca from the slough of delirium, he went with Magnífico Visbal
and Gerineldo Márquez to Catarino’s store. The establishment had
been expanded with a gallery of wooden rooms where single women who
smelled of dead flowers lived. A group made up of an accordion and
drums played the songs of Francisco the Man, who had not been seen
in Macondo for several years. The three friends drank fermented
cane juice. Magnífico and Gerineldo, contemporaries of Aureliano
but more skilled in the ways of the world, drank methodically with
the women seated on their laps. One of the women, withered and with
goldwork on her teeth, gave Aureliano a caress that made him
shudder. He rejected her. He had discovered that the more he drank
the more he thought about Remedios, but he could bear the torture
of his recollections better. He did not know exactly when he began
to float. He saw his friends and the women sailing in a radiant
glow, without weight or mass, saying words that did not come out of
their mouths and making mysterious signals that did not correspond
to their expressions. Catarino put a hand on his shoulder and said
to him: “It’s going on eleven.?Aureliano turned his head, saw the
enormous disfigured face with a felt flower behind the ear, and
then he lost his memory, as during the times of forgetfulness, and
he recovered it on a strange dawn and in a room that was completely
foreign, where Pilar Ternera stood in her slip, barefoot, her hair
down, holding a lamp over him, startled with disbelief.
“Aureliano!?
Aureliano checked his feet and raised his head. He
did not know how he had come there, but he knew what his aim was,
because he had carried it hidden since infancy in an inviolable
backwater of his heart.
“I’ve come to sleep with you,?he said.
His clothes were smeared with mud and vomit. Pilar
Ternera, who lived alone at that time with her two younger
children, did not ask him any questions. She took him to the bed.
She cleaned his face with a damp cloth, took of his clothes, and
then got completely undressed and lowered the mosquito netting so
that her children would not see them if they woke up. She had
become tired of waiting for the man who would stay, of the men who
left, of the countless men who missed the road to her house,
confused by the uncertainty of the cards. During the wait her skin
had become wrinkled, her breasts had withered, the coals of her
heart had gone out. She felt for Aureliano in the darkness, put her
hand on his stomach and kissed him on the neck with a maternal
tenderness. “My poor child,?she murmured. Aureliano shuddered. With
a calm skill, without the slightest misstep, he left his
accumulated grief behind and found Remedios changed into a swamp
without horizons, smelling of a raw animal and recently ironed
clothes. When he came to the surface he was weeping. First they
were involuntary and broken sobs. Then he emptied himself out in an
unleashed flow, feeling that something swollen and painful had
burst inside of him. She waited, snatching his head with the tips
of her fingers, until his body got rid of the dark material that
would not let him live. They Pilar Ternera asked him: “Who is
it??And Aureliano told her. She let out a laugh that in other times
frightened the doves and that now did not even wake up the
children. “You’ll have to raise her first,?she mocked, but
underneath the mockery Aureliano found a reservoir of
understanding. When he went out of the room, leaving behind not
only his doubts about his virility but also the bitter weight that
his heart had borne for so many months, Pilar Ternera made him a
spontaneous promise.
“I’m going to talk to the girl,?she told him, “and
you’ll see what I’ll serve her on the tray.?
She kept her promise. But it was a bad moment,
because the house had lost its peace of former days. When she
discovered Rebeca’s passion, which was impossible to keep secret
because of her shouts, Amaranta suffered an attack of fever. She
also suffered from the barb of a lonely love. Shut up in the
bathroom, she would release herself from the torment of a hopeless
passion by writing feverish letters, which she finally hid in the
bottom of her trunk. ?rsula barely had the strength to take care of
the two sick girls. She was unable, after prolonged and insidious
interrogations, to ascertain the causes of Amaranta’s prostration.
Finally, in another moment of inspiration, she forced the lock on
the trunk and found the letters tied with a pink ribbon, swollen
with fresh lilies and still wet with tears, addressed and never
sent to Pietro Crespi. Weeping with rage, she cursed the day that
it had occurred to her to buy the pianola, and she forbade the
embroidery lessons and decreed a kind of mourning with no one dead
which was to be prolonged until the daughters got over their hopes.
Useless was the intervention of Jos?Arcadio Buendía, who had
modified his first impression of Pietro Crespi and admired his
ability in the manipulation of musical machines. So that when Pilar
Ternera told Aureliano that Remedios had decided on marriage, he
could see that the news would only give his parents more trouble.
Invited to the parlor for a formal interview, Jos?Arcadio Buendía
and ?rsula listened stonily to their son’s declaration. When he
learned the name of the fiancée, however, Jos?Arcadio Buendía grew
red with indignation. “Love is a disease,?he thundered. “With so
many pretty and decent girls around, the only thing that occurs to
you is to get married to the daughter of our enemy.?But ?rsula
agreed with the choice. She confessed her affection for the seven
Moscote sisters. for their beauty, their ability for work, their
modesty, and their good manners, and she celebrated her son’s
prudence. Conquered by his wife’s enthusiasm, Jos?Arcadio Buendía
then laid down one condition: Rebeca, who was the one he wanted,
would marry Pietro Crespi. ?rsula would take Amaranta on a trip to
the capital of the province when she had time, so that contact with
different people would alleviate her disappointment. Rebeca got her
health back just as soon as she heard of the agreement, and she
wrote her fianc?a jubilant letter that she submitted to her
parents?approval and put into the mail without the use of any
intermediaries. Amaranta pretended to accept the decision and
little by little she recovered from her fevers, but she promised
herself that Rebeca would marry only over her dead body.
The following Saturday Jos?Arcadio Buendía put on
his dark suit, his celluloid collar, and the deerskin boots that he
had worn for the first time the night of the party, and went to ask
for the hand of Remedios Moscote. The magistrate and his wife
received him, pleased and worried at the same time, for they did
not know the reason for the unexpected visit, and then they thought
that he was confused about the name of the intended bride. In order
to remove the mistake, the mother woke Remedios up and carried her
into the living room, still drowsy from sleep. They asked her if it
was true that she had decided to get married, and she answered,
whimpering, that she only wanted them to let her sleep. Jos?Arcadio
Buendía, understanding the distress of the Moscotes, went to clear
things up with Aureliano. When he returned, the Moscotes had put on
formal clothing, had rearranged the furniture and put fresh flowers
in the vases, and were waiting in the company of their older
daughters. Overwhelmed by the unpleasantness of the occasion and
the bothersome hard collar, Jos?Arcadio Buendía confirmed the fact
that Remedios, indeed, was the chosen one. “It doesn’t make
sense,?Don Apolinar Moscote said with consternation. “We have six
other daughters, all unmarried, and at an age where they deserve
it, who would be delighted to be the honorable wife of a gentleman
as serious and hard-working as your son, and Aurelito lays his eyes
precisely on the one who still wets her bed.?His wife, a
well-preserved woman with afflicted eyelids and expression, scolded
his mistake. When they finished the fruit punch, they willingly
accepted Aureliano’s decision. Except that Se?ora Moscote begged
the favor of speaking to ?rsula alone. Intrigued, protesting that
they were involving her in men’s affairs, but really feeling deep
emotion, ?rsula went to visit her the next day. A half hour later
she returned with the news that Remedios had not reached puberty.
Aureliano did not consider that a serious barrier. He had waited so
long that he could wait as long as was necessary until his bride
reached the age of conception.
The newfound harmony was interrupted by the death of
Melquíades. Although it was a foreseeable event, the circumstances
were not. A few months after his return, a process of aging had
taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was
treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about
the bedrooms like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better
times aloud, and whom no one bothers about or remembers really
until the morning they find them dead in their bed. At first
Jos?Arcadio Buendía helped him in his work, enthusiastic over the
novelty of the daguerreotypes and the predictions of Nostradamus.
But little by little he began abandoning him to his solitude, for
communication was becoming Increasingly difficult. He was losing
his sight and his hearing, he seemed to confuse the people he was
speaking to with others he had known in remote epochs of mankind,
and he would answer questions with a complex hodgepodge of
languages. He would walk along groping in the air, although he
passed between objects with an inexplicable fluidity, as if be were
endowed with some instinct of direction based on an immediate
prescience. One day he forgot to put in his false teeth, which at
night he left in a glass of water beside his bed, and he never put
them in again. When ?rsula undertook the enlargement of the house,
she had them build him a special room next to Aureliano’s workshop,
far from the noise and bustle of the house, with a window flooded
with light and a bookcase where she herself put in order the books
that were almost destroyed by dust and moths, the flaky stacks of
paper covered with indecipherable signs, and the glass with his
false teeth, where some aquatic plants with tiny yellow flowers had
taken root. The new place seemed to please Melquíades, because he
was never seen any more, not even in the dining room, He only went
to Aureliano’s workshop, where he would spend hours on end
scribbling his enigmatic literature on the parchments that he had
brought with him and that seemed to have been made out of some dry
material that crumpled like puff paste. There he ate the meals that
Visitación brought him twice a day, although in the last days he
lost his appetite and fed only on vegetables. He soon acquired the
forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians. His skin became covered
with a thin moss, similar to that which flourished on the antique
vest that he never took off, and his breath exhaled the odor of a
sleeping animal. Aureliano ended up forgetting about him, absorbed
in the composition of his poems, but on one occasion he thought he
understood something of what Melquíades was saying in his groping
monologues, and he paid attention. In reality, the only thing that
could be isolated in the rocky paragraphs was the insistent
hammering on the word equinox, equinox, equinox, and the name of
Alexander von Humboldt. Arcadio got a little closer to him when he
began to help Aureliano in his silverwork. Melquíades answered that
effort at communication at times by giving forth with phrases in
Spanish that had very little to do with reality. One afternoon,
however, he seemed to be illuminated by a sudden emotion. Years
later, facing the firing squad, Arcadio would remember the
trembling with which Melquíades made him listen to several pages of
his impenetrable writing, which of course he did not understand,
but which when read aloud were like encyclicals being chanted. Then
he smiled for the first time in a long while and said in Spanish:
“When I die, burn mercury in my room for three days.?Arcadio told
that to Jos?Arcadio Buendía and the latter tried to get more
explicit information, but he received only one answer: “I have
found immortality.?When Melquíades?breathing began to smell,
Arcadio took him to bathe in the river on Thursday mornings. He
seemed to get better. He would undress and get into the water with
the boys, and his mysterious sense of orientation would allow him
to avoid the deep and dangerous spots. “We come from the water,?he
said on a certain occasion. Much time passed in that way without
anyone’s seeing him in the house except on the night when he made a
pathetic effort to fix the pianola, and when he would go to the
river with Arcadio, carrying under his arm a gourd and a bar of
palm oil soap wrapped in a towel. One Thursday before they called
him to go to the river, Aureliano heard him say: “I have died of
fever on the dunes of Singapore.?That day he went into the water at
a bad spot and they did not find him until the following day, a few
miles downstream, washed up on a bright bend in the river and with
a solitary vulture sitting on his stomach. Over the scandalized
protests of ?rsula, who wept with more grief than she had had for
her own father, Jos?Arcadio Buendía was opposed to their burying
him. “He is immortal,?he said, “and he himself revealed the formula
of his resurrection.?He brought out the forgotten water pipe and
put a kettle of mercury to boil next to the body, which little by
little was filling with blue bubbles. Don Apolinar Moscote ventured
to remind him that an unburied drowned man was a danger to public
health. “None of that, because he’s alive,?was the answer of
Jos?Arcadio Buendía, who finished the seventy-two hours with the
mercurial incense as the body was already beginning to burst with a
livid fluorescence, the soft whistles of which impregnated the
house with a pestilential vapor. Only then did he permit them to
bury him, not in any ordinary way, but with the honors reserved for
Macondo’s greatest benefactor. It was the first burial and the
best-attended one that was ever seen in the town, only surpassed, a
century later, by Big Mama’s funeral carnival. They buried him in a
grave dug in the center of the plot destined for the cemetery, with
a stone on which they wrote the only thing they knew about him:
MELQU?ADES. They gave him his nine nights of wake. In the tumult
that gathered in the courtyard to drink coffee, tell jokes, and
play cards. Amaranta found a chance to confess her love to Pietro
Crespi, who a few weeks before had formalized his promise to Rebeca
and had set up a store for musical instruments and mechanical toys
in the same section where the Arabs had lingered in other times
swapping knickknacks for macaws, and which the people called the
Street of the Turks. The Italian, whose head covered with patent
leather curls aroused in women an irrepressible need to sigh, dealt
with Amaranta as with a capricious little girl who was not worth
taking seriously.
“I have a younger brother,?he told her. “He’s coming
to help me in the store.?
Amaranta felt humiliated and told Pietro Crespi with
a virulent anger that she was prepared to stop her sister’s wedding
even if her own dead body had to lie across the door. The Italian
was so impressed by the dramatics of the threat that he could not
resist the temptation to mention it to Rebeca. That was how
Amaranta’s trip, always put off by ?rsula’s work, was arranged in
less than a week. Amaranta put up no resistance, but when she
kissed Rebeca good-bye she whispered in her ear:
“Don’t get your hopes up. Even if they send me to
the ends of the earth I’ll find some way of stopping you from
getting married, even if I have to kill you.?
With the absence of ?rsula, with the invisible
presence of Melquíades, who continued his stealthy shuffling
through the rooms, the house seemed enormous and empty. Rebeca took
charge of domestic order, while the Indian woman took care of the
bakery. At dusk, when Pietro Crespi would arrive, preceded by a
cool breath of lavender and always bringing a toy as a gift, his
fiancée would receive the visitor in the main parlor with doors and
windows open to be safe from any suspicion. It was an unnecessary
precaution, for the Italian had shown himself to be so respectful
that he did not even touch the hand of the woman who was going to
be his wife within the year. Those visits were filling the house
with remarkable toys. Mechanical ballerinas, music boxes, acrobatic
monkeys, trotting horses, clowns who played the tambourine: the
rich and startling mechanical fauna that Pietro Crespi brought
dissipated Jos?Arcadio Buendía’s affliction over the death of
Melquíades and carried him back to his old days as an alchemist. He
lived at that time in a paradise of disemboweled animals, of
mechanisms that had been taken apart in an attempt to perfect them
with a system of perpetual motion based upon the principles of the
pendulum. Aureliano, for his part, had neglected the workshop in
order to teach little Remedios to read and write. At first the
child preferred her dolls to the man who would come every afternoon
and who was responsible for her being separated from her toys in
order to be bathed and dressed and seated in the parlor to receive
the visitor. But Aureliano’s patience and devotion finally won her
over, up to the point where she would spend many hours with him
studying the meaning of the letters and sketching in a notebook
with colored pencils little houses with cows in the corral and
round suns with yellow rays that hid behind the hills.
Only Rebeca was unhappy, because of Amaranta’s
threat. She knew her sister’s character, the haughtiness of her
spirit, and she was frightened by the virulence of her anger. She
would spend whole hours sucking her finger in the bathroom, holding
herself back with an exhausting iron will so as not to eat earth.
In search of some relief for her uncertainty, she called Pilar
Ternera to read her future. After a string of conventional
vagaries, Pilar Ternera predicted:
“You will not be happy as long as your parents
remain unburied.?
Rebeca shuddered. As in the memory of a dream she
saw herself entering the house as a very small girl, with the trunk
and the little rocker, and a bag whose contents she had never
known. She remembered a bald gentleman dressed in linen and with
his collar closed by a gold button, who had nothing to do with the
king of hearts. She remembered a very young and beautiful woman
with warm and perfumed hands, who had nothing in common with the
jack of diamonds and his rheumatic hands, and who used to put
flowers in her hair and take her out walking in the afternoon
through a town with green streets.
“I don’t understand,?she said.
Pilar Ternera seemed disconcerted:
“I don’t either, but that’s what the cards
say.?
Rebeca was so preoccupied with the enigma that she
told it to Jos?Arcadio Buendía, and he scolded her for believing in
the predictions of the cards, but he undertook the silent task of
searching closets and trunks, moving furniture and turning over
beds and floorboards looking for the bag of bones. He remembered
that he had not seen it since the time of the rebuilding. He
secretly summoned the masons and one of them revealed that he had
walled up the bag in some bedroom because it bothered him in his
work. After several days of listening, with their ears against the
walls, they perceived the deep cloc-cloc. They penetrated the wall
and there were the bones in the intact bag. They buried it the same
day in a grave without a stone next to that of Melquíades, and
Jos?Arcadio Buendía returned home free of a burden that for a
moment had weighed on his conscience as much as the memory of
Prudencio Aguilar. When he went through the kitchen he kissed
Rebeca on the forehead.
“Get those bad thoughts out of your head,?he told
her. “You’re going to be happy.?
The friendship with Rebeca opened up to Pilar
Ternera the doors of the house, closed by ?rsula since the birth of
Arcadio. She would arrive at any hour of the day, like a flock of
goats, and would unleash her feverish energy in the hardest tasks.
Sometimes she would go into the workshop and help Arcadio sensitize
the daguerreotype plates with an efficiency and a tenderness that
ended up by confusing him. That woman bothered him. The tan of her
skin, her smell of smoke, the disorder of her laughter in the
darkroom distracted his attention and made him bump into
things.
On a certain occasion Aureliano was there working on
his silver, and Pilar Ternera leaned over the table to admire his
laborious patience. Suddenly it happened. Aureliano made sure that
Arcadio was in the darkroom before raising his eyes and meeting
those of Pilar Ternera, whose thought was perfectly visible, as if
exposed to the light of noon.
“Well,?Aureliano said. “Tell me what it is.?
Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile.
“That you’d be good in a war,?she said. “Where you
put your eye, you put your bullet.?
Aureliano relaxed with the proof of the omen. He
went back to concentrate on his work as if nothing had happened,
and his voice took on a restful strength.
“I will recognize him,?he said. “He’ll bear my
name.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendía finally got what he was looking
for: he connected the mechanism of the clock to a mechanical
ballerina, and the toy danced uninterruptedly to the rhythm of her
own music for three days. That discovery excited him much more than
any of his other harebrained undertakings. He stopped eating. He
stopped sleeping. Only the vigilance and care of Rebeca kept him
from being dragged off by his imagination into a state of perpetual
delirium from which he would not recover. He would spend the nights
walking around the room thinking aloud, searching for a way to
apply the principles of the pendulum to oxcarts, to harrows, to
everything that was useful when put into motion. The fever of
insomnia fatigued him so much that one dawn he could not recognize
the old man with white hair and uncertain gestures who came into
his bedroom. It was Prudencio Aguilar. When he finally identified
him, startled that the dead also aged, Jos?Arcadio Buendía felt
himself shaken by nostalgia. “Prudencio,?he exclaimed. “You’ve come
from a long way off!?After many years of death the yearning for the
living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so
terrifying the neatness of that other death which exists within
death, that Prudencio Aguilar had ended up loving his worst enemy.
He had spent a great deal of time looking for him. He asked the
dead from Riohacha about him, the dead who came from the Upar
Valley, those who came from the swamp, and no one could tell him
because Macondo was a town that was unknown to the dead until
Melquíades arrived and marked it with a small black dot on the
motley maps of death. Jos?Arcadio Buendía conversed with Prudencio
Aguilar until dawn. A few hours later, worn out by the vigil, he
went into Aureliano’s workshop and asked him: “What day is
today??Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. “I was thinking the
same thing,?Jos?Arcadio Buendía said, “but suddenly I realized that
it’s still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the
walls, look at the begonias. Today is Monday too.?Used to his
manias, Aureliano paid no attention to him. On the next day,
Wednesday, Jos?Arcadio Buendía went back to the workshop. “This is
a disaster,?he said. “Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the
sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday
too.?That night Pietro Crespi found him on the porch, weeping for
Prudencio Aguilar, for Melquíades, for Rebeca’s parents, for his
mother and father, for all of those he could remember and who were
now alone in death. He gave him a mechanical bear that walked on
its hind legs on a tightrope, but he could not distract him from
his obsession. He asked him what had happened to the project he had
explained to him a few days before about the possibility of
building a pendulum machine that would help men to fly and he
answered that it was impossible because a pendulum could lift
anything into the air but it could not lift itself. On Thursday he
appeared in the workshop again with the painful look of plowed
ground. “The time machine has broken,?he almost sobbed, “and ?rsula
and Amaranta so far away!?Aureliano scolded him like a child and he
adopted a contrite air. He spent six hours examining things, trying
to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in
the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the
passage of time. He spent the whole night in bed with his eyes
open, calling to Prudencio Aguilar, to Melquíades, to all the dead,
so that they would share his distress. But no one came. On Friday.
before anyone arose, he watched the appearance of nature again
until he did not have the slightest doubt but that it was Monday.
Then he grabbed the bar from a door and with the savage violence of
his uncommon strength he smashed to dust the equipment in the
alchemy laboratory, the daguerreotype room, the silver workshop,
shouting like a man possessed in some high-sounding and fluent but
completely incomprehensible language. He was about to finish off
the rest of the house when Aureliano asked the neighbors for help.
Ten men were needed to get him down, fourteen to tie him up, twenty
to drag him to the chestnut tree in the courtyard, where they left
him tied up, barking in the strange language and giving off a green
froth at the mouth. When ?rsula and Amaranta returned he was still
tied to the trunk of the chestnut tree by his hands and feet,
soaked with rain and in a state of total innocence. They spoke to
him and he looked at them without recognizing them, saying things
they did not understand. ?rsula untied his wrists and ankles,
lacerated by the pressure of the rope, and left him tied only by
the waist. Later on they built him a shelter of palm brandies to
protect him from the sun and the rain.
