One Hundred Years of Solitude (24 page)

“Be careful,” she exclaimed. “You’ll fall.”

“I just wanted to see you,” the foreigner murmured.

“Oh, all right,” she said. “But be careful, those tiles are rotten.”

The stranger’s face had a pained expression of stupor and he seemed
to be battling silently against his primary instincts so as not to break up the mirage. Remedios the Beauty thought that he was suffering from the fear that the tiles would break and she bathed herself more quickly than usual so that the man would not be in danger. While she was pouring water from the cistern she told him that the roof was in that state because she thought that the bed of leaves had
been rotted by the rain and that was what was filling the bathroom
with scorpions. The stranger thought that her small talk was a way of covering her complaisance, so that when she began to soap herself he gave into temptation and went a step further.

“Let me soap you,” he murmured.

“Thank you for your good intentions,” she said, “but my two hands are quite enough.”

“Even if it’s just your
back,” the foreigner begged.

“That would be silly,” she said. “People never soap their backs.”

Then, while she was drying herself, the stranger begged her, with his eyes full of tears, to marry him. She answered him sincerely that she would never marry a man who was so simple that he had wasted almost an hour and even went without lunch just to see a woman taking a bath. Finally, when she put
on her cassock, the man could not bear the proof that, indeed, she was not wearing anything underneath, as everyone had suspected, and he felt himself marked forever with the white-hot iron of that secret. Then he took two more tiles off in order to drop down into the bathroom.

“It’s very high,” she warned him in fright. “You’ll kill yourself!”

The rotten tiles broke with a noise of disaster
and the man barely had time to let out a cry of terror as he cracked his skull and was killed outright on the cement floor. The foreigners who heard the noise in the dining room and hastened to remove the body noticed the suffocating odor of Remedios the Beauty on his skin. It was so deep in his body that the cracks in his skull did not give off blood but an amber-colored oil that was impregnated
with that secret perfume, and then they understood that the smell of Remedios the Beauty kept on torturing men beyond death, right down to the dust of their bones. Nevertheless, they did not relate that horrible accident to the other two men who had died because of Remedios the Beauty. A victim was still needed before the
outsiders and many of the old inhabitants of Macondo would credit the legend
that Remedios Buendía did not give off a breath of love but a fatal emanation. The occasion for the proof of it came some months later on one afternoon when Remedios the Beauty went with a group of girl friends to look at the new plantings. For the girls of Macondo that novel game was reason for laughter and surprises, frights and jokes, and at night they would talk about their walk as if it
had been an experience in a dream. Such was the prestige of that silence that Úrsula did not have the heart to take the fun away from Remedios the Beauty, and she let her go one afternoon, providing that she wore a hat and a decent dress. As soon as the group of friends went into the plantings the air became impregnated with a fatal fragrance. The men who were working along the rows felt possessed
by a strange fascination, menaced by some invisible danger, and many succumbed to a terrible desire to weep. Remedios the Beauty and her startled friends managed to take refuge in a nearby house just as they were about to be assaulted by a pack of ferocious males. A short time later they were rescued by the four Aurelianos, whose crosses of ash inspired a sacred respect, as if they were caste marks,
stamps of invulnerability. Remedios the Beauty did not tell anyone that one of the men, taking advantage of the tumult, had managed to attack her stomach with a hand that was more like the claw of an eagle clinging to the edge of a precipice. She faced the attacker in a kind of instantaneous flash and saw the disconsolate eyes, which remained stamped on her heart like the hot coals of pity. That
night the man boasted of his audacity and swaggered over his good luck on the Street of the Turks a few minutes before the kick of a horse crushed his chest and a crowd of outsiders saw him die in the middle of the street, drowned in his own bloody vomiting.

The supposition that Remedios the Beauty possessed powers of death was then borne out by four irrefutable events.
Although some men who
were easy with their words said that it was worth sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the truth was that no one made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing that did not occur to anyone. Úrsula did not worry
about her any more. On another occasion, when she had not yet given up the idea of saving her for the world, she had tried to get her interested in basic domestic affairs. “Men demand much more than you think,” she would tell her enigmatically. “There’s a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you think.” She was deceiving herself within, trying to train
her for domestic happiness because she was convinced that once his passion was satisfied there would not be a man on the face of the earth capable of tolerating even for a day a negligence that was beyond all understanding. The birth of the latest José Arcadio and her unshakable will to bring him up to be Pope finally caused her to cease worrying about her great-granddaughter. She abandoned her
to her fate, trusting that sooner or later a miracle would take place and that in this world of everything there would also be a man with enough sloth to put up with her. For a long time already Amaranta had given up trying to make her into a useful woman. Since those forgotten afternoons when her niece barely had enough interest to turn the crank on the sewing machine, she had reached the conclusion
that she was simpleminded. “We’re going to have to raffle you off,” she would tell her, perplexed at the fact that men’s words would not penetrate her. Later on, when Úrsula insisted that Remedios the Beauty go to mass with her face covered with a shawl, Amaranta thought that a mysterious recourse like that would turn out to be so provoking that soon a man would come who would be intrigued enough
to search out patiently for the weak point of her heart. But
when she saw the stupid way in which she rejected a pretender who for many reasons was more desirable than a prince, she gave up all hope. Fernanda did not even make any attempt to understand her. When she saw Remedios the Beauty dressed as a queen at the bloody carnival she thought that she was an extraordinary creature. But when she
saw her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simplemindedness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long. In spite of the fact that Colonel Aureliano Buendía kept on believing and repeating that Remedios the Beauty was in reality the most lucid being that he had ever known and that she showed it at every moment
with her startling ability to put things over on everyone, they let her go her own way. Remedios the Beauty stayed there wandering through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her back, maturing in her dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, her unscheduled meals, her deep and prolonged silences that had no memory until one afternoon in March, when Fernanda wanted to fold her
brabant sheets in the garden and asked the women in the house for help. She had just begun when Amaranta noticed that Remedios the Beauty was covered all over by an intense paleness.

“Don’t you feel well?” she asked her.

Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.

“Quite the opposite,” she said, “I never felt better.”

She had just finished saying
it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of
that determined wind and she left the sheets to the
mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not
even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.

The outsiders, of course, thought that Remedios the Beauty had finally succumbed to her irrevocable fate of a queen bee and that her family was trying to save her honor with that tale of levitation. Fernanda, burning with envy, finally accepted the miracle, and for a long time she kept on praying to God to send her back her sheets. Most
people believed in the miracle and they even lighted candles and celebrated novenas. Perhaps there might have been talk of nothing else for a long time if the barbarous extermination of the Aurelianos had not replaced amazement with horror. Although he had never thought of it as an omen, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had foreseen the tragic end of his sons in a certain way. When Aureliano Serrador and
Aureliano Arcaya, the two who arrived during the tumult, expressed a wish to stay in Macondo, their father tried to dissuade them. He could not understand what they were going to do in a town that had been transformed into a dangerous place overnight. But Aureliano Centeno and Aureliano Triste, backed by Aureliano Segundo, gave them work in their businesses. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had reasons
that were still very confused and were against that determination. When he saw Mr. Brown in the first automobile to reach Macondo—an orange convertible with a horn that frightened the dogs with its bark—the old soldier grew indignant with the servile excitement of the people and he realized that something had changed in the makeup of the men since the days when they would leave their wives and children
and toss a shotgun on their shoulders to go off to war. The local authorities, after
the armistice of Neerlandia, were mayors without initiative, decorative judges picked from among the peaceful and tired Conservatives of Macondo. “This is a regime of wretches,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía would comment when he saw the barefoot policemen armed with wooden clubs pass. “We fought all those wars and
all of it just so that we didn’t have to paint our houses blue.” When the banana company arrived, however, the local functionaries were replaced by dictatorial foreigners whom Mr. Brown brought to live in the electrified chicken yard so that they could enjoy, as he explained it, the dignity that their status warranted and so that they would not suffer from the heat and the mosquitoes and the countless
discomforts and privations of the town. The old policemen were replaced by hired assassins with machetes. Shut up in his workshop, Colonel Aureliano Buendía thought about those changes and for the first time in his quiet years of solitude he was tormented by the definite certainty that it had been a mistake not to have continued the war to its final conclusion. During that time a brother of
the forgotten Colonel Magnífico Visbal was taking his seven-year-old grandson to get a soft drink at one of the pushcarts on the square and because the child accidentally bumped into a corporal of police and spilled the drink on his uniform, the barbarian cut him to pieces with his machete, and with one stroke he cut off the head of the grandfather as he tried to stop him. The whole town saw the
decapitated man pass by as a group of men carried him to his house, with a woman dragging the head along by its hair, and the bloody sack with the pieces of the child.

For Colonel Aureliano Buendía it meant the limits of atonement. He suddenly found himself suffering from the same indignation that he had felt in his youth over the body of the woman who had been beaten to death because she had
been bitten by a rabid dog. He looked at the groups of bystanders in front of the house and with his old stentorian
voice, restored by a deep disgust with himself, he unloaded upon them the burden of hate that he could no longer bear in his heart.

“One of these days,” he shouted, “I’m going to arm my boys so we can get rid of these shitty gringos!”

During the course of that week, at different
places along the coast, his seventeen sons were hunted down like rabbits by invisible criminals who aimed at the center of their crosses of ash. Aureliano Triste was leaving the house with his mother at seven in the evening when a rifle shot came out of the darkness and perforated his forehead. Aureliano Centeno was found in the hammock that he was accustomed to hang up in the factory with an icepick
between his eyebrows driven in up to the handle. Aureliano Serrador had left his girl friend at her parents’ house after having taken her to the movies and was returning through the well-lighted Street of the Turks when someone in the crowd who was never identified fired a revolver shot which knocked him over into a caldron of boiling lard. A few minutes later someone knocked at the door of
the room where Aureliano Arcaya was shut up with a woman and shouted to him: “Hurry up, they’re killing your brothers.” The woman who was with him said later that Aureliano Arcaya jumped out of bed and opened the door and was greeted with the discharge of a Mauser that split his head open. On that night of death, while the house was preparing to hold a wake for the four corpses, Fernanda ran through
the town like a madwoman looking for Aureliano Segundo, whom Petra Cotes had locked up in a closet, thinking that the order of extermination included all who bore the colonel’s name. She would not let him out until the fourth day, when the telegrams received from different places along the coast made it clear that the fury of the invisible enemy was directed only at the brothers marked with the
crosses of ash. Amaranta fetched the ledger where she had written down the facts about her nephews and
as the telegrams arrived she drew lines through the names until only that of the eldest remained. They remembered him very well because of the contrast between his dark skin and his green eyes. His name was Aureliano Amador and he was a carpenter, living in a village hidden in the foothills.
After waiting two weeks for the telegram telling of his death, Aureliano Segundo sent a messenger to him in order to warn him, thinking that he might not know about the threat that hung over him. The emissary returned with the news that Aureliano Amador was safe. The night of the extermination two men had gone to get him at his house and had shot at him with their revolvers but they had missed the
cross of ashes. Aureliano Amador had been able to leap over the wall of the courtyard and was lost in the labyrinth of the mountains, which he knew like the back of his hand thanks to the friendship he maintained with the Indians, from whom he bought wood. Nothing more was heard of him.