Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. He did not speak until they asked him for his last request.
"Tell my wife," he answered in a well-modulated voice, "to give the girl the name of Ursula." He paused and said it again: "Ursula, like her grandmother. And tell her also that if the child that is to be born is a boy, they should name him Jose Arcadio, not for his uncle, but for his grandfather."
Before they took him to the execution wall Father Nicanor tried to attend him. "I have nothing to repent," Arcadio said, and he put himself under the orders of the squad after drinking a cup of black coffee. The leader of the squad, a specialist in summary executions, had a name that had much more about it than chance: Captain Roque Carnicero, which meant butcher. On the way to the cemetery, under the persistent drizzle, Arcadio saw that a radiant Wednesday was breaking out on the horizon. His nostalgia disappeared with the mist and left an immense curiosity in its place. Only when they ordered him to put his back to the wall did Arcadio see Rebeca, with wet hair and a pink flowered dress, opening wide the door. He made an effort to get her to recognize him. And Rebeca did take a casual look toward the wall and was paralyzed with stupor, barely able to react and wave good-bye to Arcadio. Arcadio answered her the same way. At that instant the smoking mouths of the rifles were aimed at him and letter by letter he heard the encyclicals that Melquiades had chanted and he heard the lost steps of Santa Sofia de la Piedad, a virgin, in the classroom, and in his nose he felt the same icy hardness that had drawn his attention in the nostrils of the corpse of Remedios. "Oh, God damn it!" he managed to think. "I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her Remedios." Then, all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again all the terror that had tormented him in his life. The captain gave the order to fire. Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned his thighs was pouring from.
"Bastards!" he shouted. "Long live the Liberal party!"
THE WAR was over in May. Two weeks before the government made the official announcement in a high-sounding proclamation, which promised merciless punishment for those who had started the rebellion, Colonel Aureliano Buendia fell prisoner just as he was about to reach the western frontier disguised as an Indian witch doctor. Of the twenty-one men who had followed him to war, fourteen fell in combat, six were wounded, and only one accompanied him at the moment of final defeat: Colonel Gerineldo Marquez. The news of his capture was announced in Macondo with a special proclamation. "He's alive," Ursula told her husband. "Let's pray to God for his enemies to show him clemency." After three days of weeping, one afternoon as she was stirring some sweet milk candy in the kitchen she heard her son's voice clearly in her ear. "It was Aureliano," she shouted, running toward the chestnut tree to tell her husband the news. "I don't know how the miracle took place, but he's alive and we're going to see him very soon." She took it for granted. She had the floors of the house scrubbed and changed the position of the furniture. One week later a rumor from somewhere that was not supported by any proclamation gave dramatic confirmation to the prediction. Colonel Aureliano Buendia had been condemned to death and the sentence would be carried out in Macondo as a lesson to the population. One Monday, at ten-thirty in the morning, Amaranta was dressing Aureliano Jose when she heard the sound of a distant troop and the blast of a cornet one second before Ursula burst into the room with the shout: "They're bringing him now!" The troop struggled to subdue the overflowing crowd with their rifle butts. Ursula and Amaranta ran to the corner, pushing their way through, and then they saw him. He looked like a beggar. His clothing was torn, his hair and beard were tangled, and he was barefoot. He was walking without feeling the burning dust, his hands tied behind his back with a rope that a mounted officer had attached to the head of his horse. Along with him, also ragged and defeated, they were bringing Colonel Gerineldo Marquez. They were not sad. They seemed more disturbed by the crowd that was shouting all kinds of insults at the troops.
"My son!" Ursula shouted in the midst of the uproar, and she slapped the soldier who tried to hold her back. The officer's horse reared. Then Colonel Aureliano Buendia stopped, tremulous, avoided the arms of his mother, and fixed a stern look on her eyes.
"Go home, Mama," he said. "Get permission from the authorities to come see me in jail."
He looked at Amaranta, who stood indecisively two steps behind Ursula, and he smiled as he asked her, "What happened to your hand?" Amaranta raised the hand with the black bandage. "A burn," she said, and took Ursula away so that the horses would not run her down. The troop took off. A special guard surrounded the prisoners and took them to the jail at a trot.
At dusk Ursula visited Colonel Aureliano Buendia in jail. She had tried to get permission through Don Apolinar Moscote, but he had lost all authority in the face of the military omnipotence. Father Nicanor was in bed with hepatic fever. The parents of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, who had not been condemned to death, had tried to see him and were driven off with rifle butts. Facing the impossibility of finding anyone to intervene, convinced that her son would be shot at dawn, Ursula wrapped up the things she wanted to bring him and went to the jail alone.
"I am the mother of Colonel Aureliano Buendia," she announced.
The sentries blocked her way. "I'm going in in any case," Ursula warned them. "So if you have orders to shoot, start right in." She pushed one of them aside and went into the former classroom, where a group of half-dressed soldiers were oiling their weapons. An officer in a field uniform, ruddy-faced, with very thick glasses and ceremonious manners, signaled to the sentries to withdraw.
"I am the mother of Colonel Aureliano Buendia," Ursula repeated.
"You must mean," the officer corrected her with a friendly smile, "that you are the mother of Mister Aureliano Buendia."
Ursula recognized in his affected way of speaking the languid cadence of the stuck-up people from the highlands.
"As you say, mister," she accepted, "just as long as I can see him."
There were superior orders that prohibited visits to prisoners condemned to death, but the officer assumed the responsibility of letting her have a fifteen-minute stay. Ursula showed him what she had in the bundle: a change of clean clothing, the short boots that her son had worn at his wedding, and the sweet milk candy that she had kept for him since the day she had sensed his return. She found Colonel Aureliano Buendia in the room that was used as a cell, lying on a cot with his arms spread out because his armpits were paved with sores. They had allowed him to shave. The thick mustache with twisted ends accentuated the sharp angles of his cheekbones. He looked paler to Ursula than when he had left, a little taller, and more solitary than ever. He knew all about the details of the house: Pietro Crespi's suicide, Arcadio's arbitrary acts and execution, the dauntlessness of Jose Arcadio Buendia underneath the chestnut tree. He knew that Amaranta had consecrated her virginal widowhood to the rearing of Aureliano Jose and that the latter was beginning to show signs of quite good judgment and that he had learned to read and write at the same time he had learned to speak. From the moment in which she entered the room Ursula felt inhibited by the maturity of her son, by his aura of command, by the glow of authority that radiated from his skin. She was surprised that he was so well-informed. "You knew all along that I was a wizard," he joked. And he added in a serious tone, "This morning, when they brought me in, I had the impression that I had already been through all that before." In fact, while the crowd was roaring alongside him, he had been concentrating his thoughts, startled at how the town had aged. The leaves of the almond trees were broken. The houses, painted blue, then painted red, had ended up with an indefinable coloration.
"What did you expect?" Ursula sighed. "Time passes."
"That's how it goes," Aureliano admitted, "but not so much."
In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation. When the guard announced the end of the visit, Aureliano took out a roll of sweaty papers from under the cot. They were his poetry, the poems inspired by Remedios, which he had taken with him when he left, and those he had written later on during chance pauses in the war. "Promise me that no one will read them," he said. "Light the oven with them this very night." Ursula promised and stood up to kiss him good-bye.
"I brought you a revolver," she murmured.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia saw that the sentry could not see. "It won't do me any good," he said in a low voice, "but give it to me in case they search you on the way out." Ursula took the revolver out of her bodice and put it under the mattress of the cot. "And don't say good-bye," he concluded with emphatic calmness. "Don't beg or bow down to anyone. Pretend that they shot me a long time ago." Ursula bit her lip so as not to cry.
"Put some hot stones on those sores," she said.
She turned halfway around and left the room. Colonel Aureliano Buendia remained standing, thoughtful, until the door closed. Then he lay down again with his arms open. Since the beginning of adolescence, when he had begun to be aware of his premonitions, he thought that death would be announced with a definite, unequivocal, irrevocable signal, but there were only a few hours left before he would die and the signal had not come. On a certain occasion a very beautiful woman had come into his camp in Tucurinca and asked the sentries' permission to see him. They let her through because they were aware of the fanaticism of some mothers, who sent their daughters to the bedrooms of the most famous warriors, according to what they said, to improve the breed. That night Colonel Aureliano Buendia was finishing the poem about the man who is lost in the rain when the girl came into his room. He turned his back to her to put the sheet of paper into the locked drawer where he kept his poetry. And then he sensed it. He grasped the pistol in the drawer without turning his head.
"Please don't shoot," he said.
When he turned around holding his pistol, the girl had lowered hers and did not know what to do. In that way he had avoided four out of eleven traps. On the other hand, someone who was never caught entered the revolutionary headquarters one night in Manaure and stabbed to death his close friend Colonel Magnifico Visbal, to whom he had given his cot so that he could sweat out a fever. A few yards away, sleeping in a hammock in the same room, he was not aware of anything. His efforts to systematize his premonitions were useless. They would come suddenly in a wave of supernatural lucidity, like an absolute and momentaneous conviction, but they could not be grasped. On occasion they were so natural that he identified them as premonitions only after they had been fulfilled. Frequently they were nothing but ordinary bits of superstition. But when they condemned him to death and asked him to state his last wish, he did not have the least difficulty in identifying the premonition that inspired his answer:
"I ask that the sentence be carried out in Macondo," he said.
The president of the court-martial was annoyed.
"Don't be clever, Buendia," he told him. "That's just a trick to gain more time."
"If you don't fulfill it, that will be your worry," the colonel said, "but that's my last wish."
Since then the premonitions had abandoned him. The day when Ursula visited him in jail, after a great deal of thinking he came to the conclusion that perhaps death would not be announced that time because it did not depend on chance but on the will of his executioners. He spent the night awake, tormented by the pain of his sores. A little before dawn he heard steps in the hallway. "They're coming," he said to himself, and for no reason he thought of Jose Arcadio Buendia, who at that moment was thinking about him under the dreary dawn of the chestnut tree. He did not feel fear or nostalgia, but an intestinal rage at the idea that this artificial death would not let him see the end of so many things that he had left unfinished. The door opened and a sentry came in with a mug of coffee. On the following day at the same hour he would still be doing what he was then, raging with the pain in his armpits, and the same thing happened. On Thursday he shared the sweet milk candy with the guards and put on his clean clothes, which were tight for him, and the patent leather boots. By Friday they had still not shot him.
Actually, they did not dare carry out the sentence. The rebelliousness of the town made the military men think that the execution of Colonel Aureliano Buendia might have serious political consequences not only in Macondo but throughout the area of the swamp, so they consulted the authorities in the capital of the province. On Saturday night, while they were waiting for an answer, Captain Roque Carnicero went with some other officers to Catarino's place. Only one woman, practically threatened, dared take him to her room. "They don't want to go to bed with a man they know is going to die," she confessed to him. "No one knows how it will come, but everybody is going around saying that the officer who shoots Colonel Aureliano Buendia and all the soldiers in the squad, one by one, will be murdered, with no escape, sooner or later, even if they hide at the ends of the earth." Captain Roque Carnicero mentioned it to the other officers and they told their superiors. On Sunday, although no one had revealed it openly, although no action on the part of the military had disturbed the tense calm of those days, the whole town knew that the officers were ready to use any manner of pretext to avoid responsibility for the execution. The official order arrived in the Monday mail: the execution was to be carried out within twenty-four hours. That night the officers put seven slips of paper into a cap, and Captain Roque Carnicero's unpeaceful fate was foreseen by his name on the prize slip. "Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch." At five in the morning he chose the squad by lot, formed it in the courtyard, and woke up the condemned man with a premonitory phrase.
"Let's go, Buendia," he told him. "Our time has come."
"So that's what it was," the colonel replied. "I was dreaming that my sores had burst."
Rebeca Buendia got up at three in the morning when she learned that Aureliano would be shot. She stayed in the bedroom in the dark, watching the cemetery wall through the half-opened window as the bed on which she sat shook with Jose Arcadio's snoring. She had waited all week with the same hidden persistence with which during different times she had waited for Pietro Crespi's letters. "They won't shoot him here," Jose Arcadio told her. "They'll shoot him at midnight in the barracks so that no one will know who made up the squad, and they'll bury him right there." Rebeca kept on waiting. "They're stupid enough to shoot him here," she said. She was so certain that she had foreseen the way she would open the door to wave good-bye. "They won't bring him through the streets," Jose Arcadio insisted, "with six scared soldiers and knowing that the people are ready for anything." Indifferent to her husband's logic, Rebeca stayed by the window.
"You'll see that they're just stupid enough," she said.
On Tuesday, at five in the morning, Jose Arcadio had drunk his coffee and let the dogs out when Rebeca closed the window and held onto the head of the bed so as not to fall down. "There, they're bringing him," she sighed. "He's so handsome." Jose Arcadio looked out the window and saw him, tremulous in the light of dawn. He already had his back to the wall and his hands were on his hips because the burning knots in his armpits would not let him lower them. "A person fucks himself up so much," Colonel Aureliano Buendia said. "Fucks himself up so much just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can't do anything about it." He repeated it with so much rage that it almost seemed to be fervor, and Captain Roque Carnicero was touched, because he thought he was praying. When the squad took aim, the rage had materialized into a viscous and bitter substance that put his tongue to sleep and made him close his eyes. Then the aluminum glow of dawn disappeared and he saw himself again in short pants, wearing a tie around his neck, and he saw his father leading him into the tent on a splendid afternoon, and he saw the ice. When he heard the shout he thought that it was the final command to the squad. He opened his eyes with a shudder of curiosity, expecting to meet the incandescent trajectory of the bullets, but he only saw Captain Roque Carnicero with his arms in the air and Jose Arcadio crossing the street with his fearsome shotgun ready to go off.
"Don't shoot," the captain said to Jose Arcadio. "You were sent by Divine Providence."
Another war began right there. Captain Roque Carnicero and his six men left with Colonel Aureliano Buendia to free the revolutionary general Victorio Medina, who had been condemned to death in Riohacha. They thought they could save time by crossing the mountains along the trail that Jose Arcadio Buendia had followed to found Macondo, but before a week was out they were convinced that it was an impossible undertaking. So they had to follow the dangerous route over the outcroppings with no other munitions but what the firing squad had. They would camp near the towns and one of them, with a small gold fish in his hand, would go in disguise in broad daylight to contact the dormant Liberals, who would go out hunting on the following morning and never return. When they saw Riohacha from a ridge in the mountains, General Victorio Medina had been shot. Colonel Aureliano Buendia's men proclaimed him chief of the revolutionary forces of the Caribbean coast with the rank of general. He assumed the position but refused the promotion and took the stand that he would never accept it as long as the Conservative regime was in power. At the end of three months they had succeeded in arming more than a thousand men, but they were wiped out. The survivors reached the eastern frontier. The next thing that was heard of them was that they had landed on Cabo de la Vela, coming from the smaller islands of the Antilles, and a message from the government was sent all over by telegraph and included in jubilant proclamations throughout the country announcing the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendia. But two days later a multiple telegram which almost overtook the previous one announced another uprising on the southern plains. That was how the legend of the ubiquitous Colonel Aureliano Buendia began. Simultaneous a