One Hundred Years of Solitude (19 page)

The ceremony took place fifteen miles from Macondo in the shade of a gigantic ceiba tree around which the town of Neerlandia would be founded later. The delegates from the
government and the party and the commission of the rebels who were laying down their arms were served by a noisy group of novices in white habits who looked like a flock of doves that had been frightened by the rain. Colonel Aureliano Buendía arrived on a muddy mule. He had not shaved, more tormented by the pain of the sores than by the great failure of his dreams, for he had reached the end of
all hope,
beyond glory and the nostalgia of glory. In accordance with his arrangements there was no music, no fireworks, no pealing bells, no shouts of victory, or any other manifestation that might alter the mournful character of the armistice. An itinerant photographer who took the only picture of him that could have been preserved was forced to smash his plates without developing them.

The
ceremony lasted only the time necessary to sign the documents. Around the rustic table placed in the center of a patched circus tent where the delegates sat were the last officers who were faithful to Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Before taking the signatures, the personal delegate of the president of the republic tried to read the act of surrender aloud, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía was against it.
“Let’s not waste time on formalities,” he said and prepared to sign the papers without reading them. One of his officers then broke the soporific silence of the tent.

“Colonel,” he said, “please do us the favor of not being the first to sign.”

Colonel Aureliano Buendía acceded. When the documents went all around the table, in the midst of a silence that was so pure that one could have deciphered
the signatures from the scratching of the pen on the paper, the first line was still blank. Colonel Aureliano Buendía prepared to fill it.

“Colonel,” another of his officers said, “there’s still time for everything to come out right.”

Without changing his expression, Colonel Aureliano Buendía signed the first copy. He had not finished signing the last one when a rebel colonel appeared in the
doorway leading a mule carrying two chests. In spite of his extreme youth he had a dry look and a patient expression. He was the treasurer of the revolution in the Macondo region. He had made a difficult journey of six days, pulling along the mule, who was dying of hunger, in order to arrive at the armistice on time. With an exasperating parsimony he took down the
chests, opened them, and placed
on the table, one by one, seventy-two gold bricks. Everyone had forgotten about the existence of that fortune. In the disorder of the past year, when the central command fell apart and the revolution degenerated into a bloody rivalry of leaders, it was impossible to determine any responsibility. The gold of the revolution, melted into blocks that were then covered with baked clay, was beyond all
control. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had the seventy-two gold bricks included in the inventory of surrender and closed the ceremony without allowing any speeches. The filthy adolescent stood opposite him, looking into his eyes with his own calm, syrup-colored eyes.

“Something else?” Colonel Aureliano Buendía asked him.

The young colonel tightened his mouth.

“The receipt,” he said.

Colonel Aureliano
Buendía wrote it out in his own hand. Then he had a glass of lemonade and a piece of biscuit that the novices were passing around and retired to a field tent which had been prepared for him in case he wished to rest. There he took off his shirt, sat on the edge of the cot, and at three-fifteen in the afternoon took his pistol and shot himself in the iodine circle that his personal physician
had painted on his chest. At that moment in Macondo Úrsula took the cover off the pot of milk on the stove, wondering why it was taking so long to boil, and found it full of worms.

“They’ve killed Aureliano,” she exclaimed.

She looked toward the courtyard, obeying a habit of her solitude, and then she saw José Arcadio Buendía, soaking wet and sad in the rain and much older than when he had died.
“They shot him in the back,” Úrsula said more precisely, “and no one was charitable enough to close his eyes.” At dusk through her tears she saw the swift and luminous disks that crossed the sky like an exhalation and she thought that it was a signal of death. She was still under the chestnut tree, sobbing at her husband’s knees, when they brought in Colonel
Aureliano Buendía, wrapped in a blanket
that was stiff with dry blood and with his eyes open in rage.

He was out of danger. The bullet had followed such a neat path that the doctor was able to put a cord soaked in iodine in through the chest and withdraw it from the back. “That was my masterpiece,” he said with satisfaction. “It was the only point where a bullet could pass through without harming any vital organ.” Colonel Aureliano
Buendía saw himself surrounded by charitable novices who intoned desperate psalms for the repose of his soul and then he was sorry that he had not shot himself in the roof of the mouth as he had considered doing if only to mock the prediction of Pilar Ternera.

“If I still had the authority,” he told the doctor, “I’d have you shot out of hand. Not for having saved my life but for having made a
fool of me.”

The failure of his death brought back his lost prestige in a few hours. The same people who invented the story that he had sold the war for a room with walls made of gold bricks defined the attempt at suicide as an act of honor and proclaimed him a martyr. Then, when he rejected the Order of Merit awarded him by the president of the republic, even his most bitter enemies filed through
the room asking him to withdraw recognition of the armistice and to start a new war. The house was filled with gifts meant as amends. Impressed finally by the massive support of his former comrades in arms, Colonel Aureliano Buendía did not put aside the possibility of pleasing them. On the contrary, at a certain moment he seemed so enthusiastic with the idea of a new war that Colonel Gerineldo
Márquez thought that he was only waiting for a pretext to proclaim it. The pretext was offered, in fact, when the president of the republic refused to award any military pensions to former combatants, Liberal or Conservative, until each case was examined by a special commission and the award approved by the congress. “That’s an
outrage,” thundered Colonel Aureliano Buendía. “They’ll die of old
age waiting for the mail to come.” For the first time he left the rocker that Úrsula had bought for his convalescence, and, walking about the bedroom, he dictated a strong message to the president of the republic. In that telegram, which was never made public, he denounced the first violation of the Treaty of Neerlandia and threatened to proclaim war to the death if the assignment of pensions was
not resolved within two weeks. His attitude was so just that it allowed him to hope even for the support of former Conservative combatants. But the only reply from the government was the reinforcement of the military guard that had been placed at the door of his house with the pretext of protecting him, and the prohibition of all types of visits. Similar methods were adopted all through the country
with other leaders who bore watching. It was an operation that was so timely, drastic, and effective that two months after the armistice, when Colonel Aureliano Buendía had recovered, his most dedicated conspirators were dead or exiled or had been assimilated forever into public administration.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía left his room in December and it was sufficient for him to look at the porch
in order not to think about war again. With a vitality that seemed impossible at her age, Úrsula had rejuvenated the house again. “Now they’re going to see who I am,” she said when she saw that her son was going to live. “There won’t be a better, more open house in all the world than this madhouse.” She had it washed and painted, changed the furniture, restored the garden and planted new flowers,
and opened doors and windows so that the dazzling light of summer would penetrate even into the bedrooms. She decreed an end to the numerous superimposed periods of mourning and she herself exchanged her rigorous old gowns for youthful clothing. The music of the pianola again made the house merry. When she heard it, Amaranta thought of Pietro Crespi, his evening gardenia,
and his smell of lavender,
and in the depths of her withered heart a clean rancor flourished, purified by time. One afternoon when she was trying to put the parlor in order, Úrsula asked for the help of the soldiers who were guarding the house. The young commander of the guard gave them permission. Little by little, Úrsula began assigning them new chores. She invited them to eat, gave them clothing and shoes, and taught
them how to read and write. When the government withdrew the guard, one of them continued living in the house and was in her service for many years. On New Year’s Day, driven mad by rebuffs from Remedios the Beauty, the young commander of the guard was found dead under her window.

Y
EARS LATER
on his deathbed Aureliano Segundo would remember the rainy afternoon in June when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son. Even though the child was languid and weepy, with no mark of a Buendía, he did not have to think twice about naming him.

“We’ll call him José Arcadio,” he said.

Fernanda del Carpio, the beautiful woman he had married the year before, agreed. Úrsula,
on the other hand, could not conceal a vague feeling of doubt. Throughout the long history of the family the insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aurelianos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were
marked with a tragic sign. The only cases that were impossible to classify
were those of José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. They were so much alike and so mischievous during childhood that not even Santa Sofía de la Piedad could tell them apart. On the day of their christening Amaranta put bracelets on them with their respective names and dressed them in different colored clothing marked with each one’s initials, but when they began to go to school they decided
to exchange clothing and bracelets and call each other by opposite names. The teacher, Melchor Escalona, used to knowing José Arcadio Segundo by his green shirt, went out of his mind when he discovered that the latter was wearing Aureliano Segundo’s bracelet and that the other one said, nevertheless, that his name was Aureliano Segundo in spite of the fact that he was wearing the white shirt and
the bracelet with José Arcadio Segundo’s name. From then on he was never sure who was who. Even when they grew up and life made them different, Úrsula still wondered if they themselves might not have made a mistake in some moment of their intricate game of confusion and had become changed forever. Until the beginning of adolescence they were two synchronized machines. They would wake up at the
same time, have the urge to go to the bathroom at the same time, suffer the same upsets in health, and they even dreamed about the same things. In the house, where it was thought that they coordinated their actions with a simple desire to confuse, no one realized what really was happening until one day when Santa Sofía de la Piedad gave one of them a glass of lemonade and as soon as he tasted it the
other one said that it needed sugar. Santa Sofía de la Piedad, who had indeed forgotten to put sugar in the lemonade, told Úrsula about it. “That’s what they’re all like,” she said without surprise, “crazy from birth.” In time things became less disordered. The one who came out of the game of confusion with the name of Aureliano Segundo grew to monumental size like his
grandfathers, and the one
who kept the name of José Arcadio Segundo grew to be bony like the colonel, and the only thing they had in common was the family’s solitary air. Perhaps it was that crossing of stature, names, and character that made Úrsula suspect that they had been shuffled like a deck of cards since childhood.

The decisive difference was revealed in the midst of the war, when José Arcadio Segundo asked Colonel
Gerineldo Márquez to let him see an execution. Against Úrsula’s better judgment his wishes were satisfied. Aureliano Segundo, on the other hand, shuddered at the mere idea of witnessing an execution. He preferred to stay home. At the age of twelve he asked Úrsula what was in the locked room. “Papers,” she answered. “Melquíades’ books and the strange things that he wrote in his last years.” Instead
of calming him, the answer increased his curiosity. He demanded so much, promised with such insistence that he would not mistreat the things, that Úrsula gave him the keys. No one had gone into the room again since they had taken Melquíades’ body out and had put on the door a padlock whose parts had become fused together with rust. But when Aureliano Segundo opened the windows a familiar light
entered that seemed accustomed to lighting the room every day and there was not the slightest trace of dust or cobwebs, with everything swept and clean, better swept and cleaner than on the day of the burial, and the ink had not dried up in the inkwell nor had oxidation diminished the shine of the metals nor had the embers gone out under the water pipe where José Arcadio Buendía had vaporized mercury.
On the shelves were the books bound in a cardboard-like material, pale, like tanned human skin, and the manuscripts were intact. In spite of the room’s having been shut up for many years, the air seemed fresher than in the rest of the house. Everything was so recent that several weeks later, when Úrsula went into the room with a pail of water and a brush to wash the floor, there was nothing
for her
to do. Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond
in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Úrsula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.

“What’s happening,” she sighed, “is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don’t come here any more.”

When he finished
the book, in which many of the stories had no endings because there were pages missing, Aureliano Segundo set about deciphering the manuscripts. It was impossible. The letters looked like clothes hung out to dry on a line and they looked more like musical notation than writing. One hot noontime, while he was poring over the manuscripts, he sensed that he was not alone in the room. Against the light
from the window, sitting with his hands on his knees, was Melquíades. He was under forty years of age. He was wearing the same old-fashioned vest and the hat that looked like a raven’s wings, and across his pale temples there flowed the grease from his hair that had been melted by the heat, just as Aureliano and José Arcadio had seen him when they were children. Aureliano Segundo recognized him
at once, because that hereditary memory had been transmitted from generation to generation and had come to him through the memory of his grandfather.

“Hello,” Aureliano Segundo said.

“Hello, young man,” said Melquíades.

From then on, for several years, they saw each other almost every afternoon. Melquíades talked to him about the world,
tried to infuse him with his old wisdom, but he refused
to translate the manuscripts. “No one must know their meaning until he has reached one hundred years of age,” he explained. Aureliano kept those meetings secret forever. On one occasion he felt that his private world had fallen apart because Úrsula came in when Melquíades was in the room. But she did not see him.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked him.

“Nobody,” Aureliano Segundo said.

“That’s
what your great-grandfather did,” Úrsula said. “He used to talk to himself too.”

José Arcadio Segundo, in the meantime, had satisfied his wish to see a shooting. For the rest of his life he would remember the livid flash of the six simultaneous shots and the echo of the discharge as it broke against the hills and the sad smile and perplexed eyes of the man being shot, who stood erect while his
shirt became soaked with blood, and who was still smiling even when they untied him from the post and put him in a box filled with quicklime. “He’s alive,” he thought. “They’re going to bury him alive.” It made such an impression on him that from then on he detested military practices and war, not because of the executions but because of the horrifying custom of burying the victims alive. No one
knew then exactly when he began to ring the bells in the church tower and assist Father Antonio Isabel, the successor to “The Pup,” at mass, and take care of the fighting cocks in the courtyard of the parish house. When Colonel Gerineldo Márquez found out he scolded him strongly for learning occupations repudiated by the Liberals. “The fact is,” he answered, “I think I’ve turned out to be a Conservative.”
He believed it as if it had been determined by fate. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, scandalized, told Úrsula about it.

“It’s better that way,” she approved. “Let’s hope that he becomes a priest so that God will finally come into this house.”

It was soon discovered that Father Antonio Isabel was preparing him for his first communion. He was teaching him the catechism as he shaved the necks of his
roosters. He explained to him with simple examples, as he put the brooding hens into their nests, how it had occurred to God on the second day of creation that chickens would be formed inside of an egg. From that time on the parish priest began to show the signs of senility that would lead him to say years later that the devil had probably won his rebellion against God, and that he was the one who
sat on the heavenly throne, without revealing his true identity in order to trap the unwary. Warmed up by the persistence of his mentor, in a few months José Arcadio Segundo came to be as adept in theological tricks used to confuse the devil as he was skilled in the tricks of the cockpit. Amaranta made him a linen suit with a collar and tie, bought him a pair of white shoes, and engraved his name
in gilt letters on the ribbon of the candle. Two nights before the first communion, Father Antonio Isabel closeted himself with him in the sacristy to hear his confession with the help of a dictionary of sins. It was such a long list that the aged priest, used to going to bed at six o’clock, fell asleep in his chair before it was over. The interrogation was a revelation for José Arcadio Segundo.
It did not surprise him that the priest asked him if he had done bad things with women, and he honestly answered no, but he was upset with the question as to whether he had done them with animals. The first Friday in May he received communion, tortured by curiosity. Later on he asked Petronio, the sickly sexton who lived in the belfry and who, according to what they said, fed himself on bats, about
it, and Petronio answered him: “There are some corrupt Christians who do their business with female donkeys.” José Arcadio Segundo still showed so much curiosity and asked so many questions that Petronio lost his patience.

“I go Tuesday nights,” he confessed. “If you promise not to tell anyone I’ll take you next Tuesday.”

Indeed, on the following Tuesday Petronio came down out of the tower with
a wooden stool which until then no one had known the use of, and he took José Arcadio Segundo to a nearby pasture. The boy became so taken with those nocturnal raids that it was a long time before he was seen at Catarino’s. He became a cockfight man. “Take those creatures somewhere else,” Úrsula ordered him the first time she saw him come in with his fine fighting birds. “Roosters have already
brought too much bitterness to this house for you to bring us any more.” José Arcadio Segundo took them away without any argument, but he continued breeding them at the house of Pilar Ternera, his grandmother, who gave him everything he needed in exchange for having him in her house. He soon displayed in the cockpit the wisdom that Father Antonio Isabel had given him, and he made enough money not
only to enrich his brood but also to look for a man’s satisfactions. Úrsula compared him with his brother at that time and could not understand how the twins, who looked like the same person in childhood, had ended up so differently. Her perplexity did not last very long, for quite soon Aureliano Segundo began to show signs of laziness and dissipation. While he was shut up in Melquíades’ room he
was drawn into himself, the way Colonel Aureliano Buendía had been in his youth. But a short time after the Treaty of Neerlandia, a piece of chance took him out of his withdrawn self and made him face the reality of the world. A young woman who was selling numbers for the raffle of an accordion greeted him with a great deal of familiarity. Aureliano Segundo was not surprised, for he was frequently
confused with his brother. But he did not clear up the mistake, not even when the girl tried to soften his heart with sobs, and she ended taking him to her room. She liked him so much from that first meeting that she fixed things so that he would win the accordion in the raffle. At the end of two weeks Aureliano Segundo realized that the woman had been going to bed
alternately with him and his
brother, thinking that they were the same man, and instead of making things clear, he arranged to prolong the situation. He did not return to Melquíades’ room. He would spend his afternoons in the courtyard, learning to play the accordion by ear over the protests of Úrsula, who at that time had forbidden music in the house because of the mourning and who, in addition, despised the accordion as an
instrument worthy only of the vagabond heirs of Francisco the Man. Nevertheless, Aureliano Segundo became a virtuoso on the accordion and he still was after he had married and had children and was one of the most respected men in Macondo.

For almost two months he shared the woman with his brother. He would watch him, mix up his plans, and when he was sure that José Arcadio Segundo was not going
to visit their common mistress that night, he would go and sleep with her. One morning he found that he was sick. Two days later he found his brother clinging to a beam in the bathroom, soaked in sweat and with tears pouring down, and then he understood. His brother confessed to him that the woman had sent him away because he had given her what she called a low-life sickness. He also told him how
Pilar Ternera had tried to cure him. Aureliano Segundo submitted secretly to the burning baths of permanganate and to diuretic waters, and both were cured separately after three months of secret suffering. José Arcadio Segundo did not see the woman again. Aureliano Segundo obtained her pardon and stayed with her until his death.

Her name was Petra Cotes. She had arrived in Macondo in the middle
of the war with a chance husband who lived off raffles, and when the man died she kept up the business. She was a clean young mulatto woman with yellow almond-shaped eyes that gave her face the ferocity of a panther, but she had a generous heart and a magnificent vocation for love. When Úrsula realized that José Arcadio Segundo was a cock-fight
man and that Aureliano Segundo played the accordion
at his concubine’s noisy parties, she thought she would go mad with the combination. It was as if the defects of the family and none of the virtues had been concentrated in both. Then she decided that no one again would be called Aureliano or José Arcadio. Yet when Aureliano Segundo had his first son she did not dare go against his will.