One Hundred Years of Solitude (17 page)

In the shadows of her house, the solitary widow who at one time had been the confidante of his repressed loves and whose persistence had saved his life was a specter out of the past. Encased in black down to her knuckles, with her heart turned to ash, she scarcely knew anything about the war. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had the impression that the phosphorescence of her bones was showing through
her skin and that she moved in an atmosphere of Saint Elmo’s fire, in a stagnant air where one could still note a hidden smell of gunpowder. He began by advising her to moderate the rigor of her mourning, to ventilate the house, to forgive the world for the death of José Arcadio. But Rebeca was already beyond any vanity. After searching for it uselessly in the taste of earth, in the perfumed letters
from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms. Leaning back in her wicker rocking chair, looking at Colonel Aureliano Buendía as if he were the one who looked like a ghost out of the past, Rebeca was not even upset by
the news that the lands usurped by José Arcadio would be returned to their rightful owners.

“Whatever you decide will be done, Aureliano,” she sighed. “I always thought and now I have the proof that you’re a renegade.”

The revision of the deeds took place at the same time as the summary courts-martial presided over by Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, which ended with the execution of all officers
of the regular army who had been taken prisoner by the revolutionaries. The last court-martial was that of José Raquel Moncada. Úrsula intervened. “His government was the best we’ve ever had in Macondo,” she told Colonel Aureliano Buendía. “I don’t have to tell you anything about his good heart, about his affection for us, because you know better than anyone.” Colonel Aureliano Buendía gave her a
disapproving look.

“I can’t take over the job of administering justice,” he replied. “If you have something to say, tell it to the court-martial.”

Úrsula not only did that, she also brought all of the mothers of the revolutionary officers who lived in Macondo to testify. One by one the old women who had been founders of the town, several of whom had taken part in the daring crossing of the mountains,
praised the virtues of General Moncada. Úrsula was the last in line. Her gloomy dignity, the weight of her name, the convincing vehemence of her declaration made the scale of justice hesitate for a moment. “You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty,” she told the members of the court. “But don’t forget that as long as God gives
us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.” The court retired to deliberate as those words still echoed in the school that had been turned into a barracks. At midnight General José Raquel Moncada was sentenced to death. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, in spite of the violent
recriminations of Úrsula, refused to commute the sentence. A short while before dawn he visited the condemned man in the room used as a cell.

“Remember, old friend,” he told him. “I’m not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you.”

General Moncada did not even get up from the cot when he saw him come in.

“Go to hell, friend,” he answered.

Until that moment, ever since his return,
Colonel Aureliano Buendía had not given himself the opportunity to see him with his heart. He was startled to see how much he had aged, how his hands shook, and the rather punctilious conformity with which he awaited death, and then he felt a great disgust with himself, which he mingled with the beginnings of pity.

“You know better than I,” he said, “that all courts-martial are farces and that
you’re really paying for the crimes of other people, because this time we’re going to win the war at any price. Wouldn’t you have done the same in my place?”

General Moncada got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. “Probably,” he said. “But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it’s a natural death.” He laid his glasses on the bed
and took off his watch and chain. “What worries me,” he went on, “is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you’ve ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.” He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch.

“At this rate,” he concluded,
“you’ll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you’ll shoot my dear friend Úrsula in an attempt to pacify your conscience.”

Colonel Aureliano Buendía stood there impassively. General Moncada then gave him the glasses, medal, watch, and ring and he changed his tone.

“But I didn’t send for you to scold you,” he said. “I wanted to ask you the favor of sending these
things to my wife.”

Colonel Aureliano Buendía put them in his pockets.

“Is she still in Manaure?”

“She’s still in Manaure,” General Moncada confirmed, “in the same house behind the church where you sent the letter.”

“I’ll be glad to, José Raquel,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said.

When he went out into the blue air of the mist his face grew damp as on some other dawn in the past and only then
did he realize that he had ordered the sentence to be carried out in the courtyard and not at the cemetery wall. The firing squad, drawn up opposite the door, paid him the honors of a head of state.

“They can bring him out now,” he ordered.

C
OLONEL
G
ERINELDO
M
ÁRQUEZ
was the first to perceive the emptiness of the war. In his position as civil and military leader of Macondo he would have telegraphic conversations twice a week with Colonel Aureliano Buendía. At first those exchanges would determine the course of a flesh-and-blood war, the perfectly defined outlines of which told them at any moment the exact spot where it was and
the prediction of its future direction. Although he never let himself be pulled into the area of confidences, not even by his closest friends, Colonel Aureliano Buendía still had at that time the familiar tone that made it possible to identify him at the other end of the wire. Many times he would prolong the talks beyond the expected limit and let them drift into comments of a domestic nature. Little
by little, however,
and as the war became more intense and widespread, his image was fading away into a universe of unreality. The characteristics of his speech were more and more uncertain, and they came together and combined to form words that were gradually losing all meaning. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez limited himself then to just listening, burdened by the impression that he was in telegraphic
contact with a stranger from another world.

“I understand, Aureliano,” he would conclude on the key. “Long live the Liberal party!”

He finally lost all contact with the war. What in other times had been a real activity, an irresistible passion of his youth, became a remote point of reference for him: an emptiness. His only refuge was Amaranta’s sewing room. He would visit her every afternoon.
He liked to watch her hands as she curled frothy petticoat cloth in the machine that was kept in motion by Remedios the Beauty. They spent many hours without speaking, content with their reciprocal company, but while Amaranta was inwardly pleased in keeping the fire of his devotion alive, he was unaware of the secret designs of that indecipherable heart. When the news of his return reached her,
Amaranta had been smothered by anxiety. But when she saw him enter the house in the middle of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s noisy escort and she saw how he had been mistreated by the rigors of exile, made old by age and oblivion, dirty with sweat and dust, smelling like a herd, ugly, with his left arm in a sling, she felt faint with disillusionment. “My God,” she thought. “This wasn’t the person I was
waiting for.” On the following day, however, he came back to the house shaved and clean, with his mustache perfumed with lavender water and without the bloody sling. He brought her a prayerbook bound in mother-of-pearl.

“How strange men are,” she said, because she could not think of anything else to say. “They spend their lives fighting against priests and then give prayerbooks as gifts.”

From
that time on, even during the most critical days of the war, he visited her every afternoon. Many times, when Remedios the Beauty was not present, it was he who turned the wheel on the sewing machine. Amaranta felt upset by the perseverance, the loyalty, the submissiveness of that man who was invested with so much authority and who nevertheless took off his sidearms in the living room so that he
could go into the sewing room without weapons. But for four years he kept repeating his love and she would always find a way to reject him without hurting him, for even though she had not succeeded in loving him she could no longer live without him. Remedios the Beauty, who seemed indifferent to everything and who was thought to be mentally retarded, was not insensitive to so much devotion and she
intervened in Colonel Gerineldo Márquez’s favor. Amaranta suddenly discovered that the girl she had raised, who was just entering adolescence, was already the most beautiful creature that had even been seen in Macondo. She felt reborn in her heart the rancor that she had felt in other days for Rebeca, and begging God not to impel her into the extreme state of wishing her dead, she banished her
from the sewing room. It was around that time that Colonel Gerineldo Márquez began to feel the boredom of the war. He summoned his reserves of persuasion, his broad and repressed tenderness, ready to give up for Amaranta a glory that had cost him the sacrifice of his best years. But he could not succeed in convincing her. One August afternoon, overcome by the unbearable weight of her own obstinacy,
Amaranta locked herself in her bedroom to weep over her solitude unto death after giving her final answer to her tenacious suitor:

“Let’s forget about each other forever,” she told him. “We’re too old for this sort of thing now.”

Colonel Gerineldo Márquez had a telegraphic call from Colonel Aureliano Buendía that afternoon. It was a routine conversation which was not going to bring about any
break
in the stagnant war. At the end, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez looked at the desolate streets, the crystal water on the almond trees, and he found himself lost in solitude.

“Aureliano,” he said sadly on the key, “it’s raining in Macondo.”

There was a long silence on the line. Suddenly the apparatus jumped with the pitiless letters from Colonel Aureliano Buendía.

“Don’t be a jackass, Gerineldo,”
the signals said. “It’s natural for it to be raining in August.”

They had not seen each other for such a long time that Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was upset by the aggressiveness of the reaction. Two months later, however, when Colonel Aureliano Buendía returned to Macondo, his upset was changed to stupefaction. Even Úrsula was surprised at how much he had changed. He came with no noise, no escort,
wrapped in a cloak in spite of the heat, and with three mistresses, whom he installed in the same house, where he spent most of his time lying in a hammock. He scarcely read the telegraphic dispatches that reported routine operations. On one occasion Colonel Gerineldo Márquez asked him for instructions for the evacuation of a spot on the border where there was a danger that the conflict would
become an international affair.

“Don’t bother me with trifles,” he ordered him. “Consult Divine Providence.”

It was perhaps the most critical moment of the war. The Liberal landowners, who had supported the revolution in the beginning, had made secret alliances with the Conservative landowners in order to stop the revision of property titles. The politicians who supplied funds for the war from
exile had publicly repudiated the drastic aims of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, but even that withdrawal of authorization did not seem to bother him. He had not returned to reading his poetry, which filled more than five volumes and lay forgotten
at the bottom of his trunk. At night or at siesta time he would call one of his women to his hammock and obtain a rudimentary satisfaction from her, and
then he would sleep like a stone that was not concerned by the slightest indication of worry. Only he knew at that time that his confused heart was condemned to uncertainty forever. At first, intoxicated by the glory of his return, by his remarkable victories, he had peeped into the abyss of greatness. He took pleasure in keeping by his right hand the Duke of Marlborough, his great teacher in the
art of war, whose attire of skins and tiger claws aroused the respect of adults and the awe of children. It was then that he decided that no human being, not even Úrsula, could come closer to him than ten feet. In the center of the chalk circle that his aides would draw wherever he stopped, and which only he could enter, he would decide with brief orders that had no appeal the fate of the world.
The first time that he was in Manaure after the shooting of General Moncada, he hastened to fulfill his victim’s last wish and the widow took the glasses, the medal, the watch, and the ring, but she would not let him in the door.

“You can’t come in, colonel,” she told him. “You may be in command of your war, but I’m in command of my house.”

Colonel Aureliano Buendía did not show any sign of
anger, but his spirit only calmed down when his bodyguard had sacked the widow’s house and reduced it to ashes. “Watch out for your heart, Aureliano,” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez would say to him then. “You’re rotting alive.” About that time he called together a second assembly of the principal rebel commanders. He found all types: idealists, ambitious people, adventurers, those with social resentments,
even common criminals. There was even a former Conservative functionary who had taken refuge in the revolt to escape a judgment for misappropriation of funds. Many of them did not even know why they were fighting. In the midst of that
motley crowd, whose differences of values were on the verge of causing an internal explosion, one gloomy authority stood out: General Teófilo Vargas. He was a full-blooded
Indian, untamed, illiterate, and endowed with quiet wiles and a messianic vocation that aroused a demented fanaticism in his men. Colonel Aureliano Buendía called the meeting with the aim of unifying the rebel command against the maneuvers of the politicians. General Teófilo Vargas came forward with his intentions: in a few hours he shattered the coalition of better-qualified commanders
and took charge of the main command. “He’s a wild beast worth watching,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía told his officers. “That man is more dangerous to us than the Minister of War.” Then a very young captain who had always been outstanding for his timidity raised a cautious index finger.

“It’s quite simple, colonel,” he proposed. “He has to be killed.”

Colonel Aureliano Buendía was not alarmed
by the coldness of the proposition but by the way in which, by a fraction of a second, it had anticipated his own thoughts.

“Don’t expect me to give an order like that,” he said.

He did not give it, as a matter of fact. But two weeks later General Teófilo Vargas was cut to bits by machetes in an ambush and Colonel Aureliano Buendía assumed the main command. The same night that his authority
was recognized by all the rebel commands, he woke up in a fright, calling for a blanket. An inner coldness which shattered his bones and tortured him even in the heat of the sun would not let him sleep for several months, until it became a habit. The intoxication of power began to break apart under waves of discomfort. Searching for a cure against the chill, he had the young officer who had proposed
the murder of General Teófilo Vargas shot. His orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have
them do. Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he imagined that they were the same cheers
they gave the enemy. Everywhere he met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. “The best
friend a person has,” he would say at that time, “is one who has just died.” He was weary of the uncertainty, of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when. There was always someone outside of the chalk circle. Someone who needed money, someone who had a son with whooping
cough, or someone who wanted to go off and sleep forever because he could not stand the shit taste of the war in his mouth and who, nevertheless, stood at attention to inform him: “Everything normal, colonel.” And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened. Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death,
he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories. His indolence was so serious that when they announced the arrival of a commission from his party that was authorized to discuss the stalemate of the war, he rolled over in his hammock without completely waking up.

“Take them to the whores,” he said.

They were six lawyers in frock coats and top hats who endured the violent
November sun with stiff stoicism. Úrsula put them up in her house. They spent the greater part of the day closeted in the bedroom in hermetic conferences and at dusk they asked for an escort and some accordion players and
took over Catarino’s store. “Leave them alone,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía ordered. “After all, I know what they want.” At the beginning of December the long-awaited interview,
which many had foreseen as an interminable argument, was resolved in less than an hour.

In the hot parlor, beside the specter of the pianola shrouded in a white sheet, Colonel Aureliano Buendía did not sit down that time inside the chalk circle that his aides had drawn. He sat in a chair between his political advisers and, wrapped in his woolen blanket, he listened in silence to the brief proposals
of the emissaries. They asked first that he renounce the revision of property titles in order to get back the support of the Liberal landowners. They asked, secondly, that he renounce the fight against clerical influence in order to obtain the support of the Catholic masses. They asked, finally, that he renounce the aim of equal rights for natural and illegitimate children in order to preserve
the integrity of the home.

“That means,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, smiling when the reading was over, “that all we’re fighting for is power.”

“They’re tactical changes,” one of the delegates replied. “Right now the main thing is to broaden the popular base of the war. Then we’ll have another look.”

One of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s political advisers hastened to intervene.

“It’s a contradiction,”
he said. “If these changes are good, it means that the Conservative regime is good. If we succeed in broadening the popular base of the war with them, as you people say, it means that the regime has a broad popular base. It means, in short, that for almost twenty years we’ve been fighting against the sentiments of the nation.”

He was going to go on, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía stopped him with
a signal. “Don’t waste your time, doctor,” he said. “The important thing is that from now on we’ll be
fighting only for power.” Still smiling, he took the documents the delegates gave him and made ready to sign them.