One Hundred Years of Solitude (43 page)

“Friends are a bunch of bastards!”

Nigromanta rescued him from a pool of vomit and tears.
She took him to her room, cleaned him up, made him drink a cup of broth. Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping. When he awoke, after a dull and brief sleep, Aureliano recovered the awareness of his headache.
He opened his eyes and remembered the child.

He could not find the basket. At first he felt an outburst of joy, thinking that Amaranta Úrsula had awakened from death to take care of the child. But her corpse was a pile of stones under the blanket. Aware that when he arrived he had found the door to the bedroom open, Aureliano went
across the porch which was saturated with the morning sighs of
oregano and looked into the dining room, where the remnants of the birth still lay: the large pot, the bloody sheets, the jars of ashes, and the twisted umbilical cord of the child on an opened diaper on the table next to the shears and the fishline. The idea that the midwife had returned for the child during the night gave him a pause of rest in which to think. He sank into the rocking chair, the
same one in which Rebeca had sat during the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, and in which Amaranta Úrsula had sewn the tiny clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. Wounded by the fatal lances
of his own nostalgia and that of others, he admired the persistence of the spiderwebs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn. And then he saw the child. It was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because
he was paralyzed by horror but because at that prodigious instant Melquíades’ final keys were revealed to him and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space:
The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants
.

Aureliano had never been more lucid in any act of his life as when he forgot about his dead ones and the pain
of his dead ones and nailed up the doors and windows again with Fernanda’s crossed boards so as not to be disturbed by any temptations of the world, for he knew then that his fate was written in Melquíades’ parchments. He found them intact among the prehistoric plants and steaming puddles and luminous insects that had removed all trace of man’s passage on earth from the room, and he did not have
the calmness to
bring them out into the light, but right there, standing, without the slightest difficulty, as if they had been written in Spanish and were being read under the dazzling splendor of high noon, he began to decipher them aloud. It was the history of the family, written by Melquíades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in Sanskrit,
which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a Lacedemonian military code. The final protection, which Aureliano had begun to glimpse when he let himself be confused by the love of Amaranta Úrsula, was based on the fact that Melquíades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional time, but had concentrated
a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant. Fascinated by the discovery, Aureliano read aloud without skipping the chanted encyclicals that Melquíades himself had made Arcadio listen to and that were in reality the prediction of his execution, and he found the announcement of the birth of the most beautiful woman in the world who was rising up to heaven in body
and soul, and he found the origin of the posthumous twins who gave up deciphering the parchments, not simply through incapacity and lack of drive, but also because their attempts were premature. At that point, impatient to know his own origin, Aureliano skipped ahead. Then the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that
preceded the most tenacious nostalgia. He did not notice it because at that moment he was discovering the first indications of his own being in a lascivious grandfather who let himself be frivolously dragged along across a hallucinated plateau in search of a beautiful woman who would not make him happy. Aureliano recognized him, he pursued the hidden paths of his descent, and he found the instant
of his own conception among the scorpions and the yellow butterflies in a sunset
bathroom where a mechanic satisfied his lust on a woman who was giving herself out of rebellion. He was so absorbed that he did not feel the second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations. Only then
did he discover that Amaranta Úrsula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical
hurricane when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date and circumstances
of his death. Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time
immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

COLLECTED STORIES

IN EVIL HOUR

INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

LEAF STORM

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

OF LOVE AND OTHER
DEMONS

STRANGE PILGRIMS

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

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‘My favourite book by one of the world’s greatest authors. You’re in the hands of a master’ Mariella Frostrup

‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop
was coming on …’

When newly-wed Ángela Vicario and Bayardo San Román are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Ángela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.

As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night’s
revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Ángela’s brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.

‘A masterpiece’
Evening Standard

‘A work of high explosiveness – the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel’
The Times

‘Brilliant writer, brilliant book’
Guardian

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