One Hundred Years of Solitude

ot realize how much ground he had lost on the night he could no longer bear the farce of indifference and went back to Amaranta's room. She rejected him with an inflexible and unmistakable determination, and she barred the door of her bedroom forever.

A few months after the return of Aureliano Jose, an exuberant woman perfumed with jasmine appeared at the house with a boy of five. She stated that he was the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendia and that she had brought him to Ursula to be baptized. No one doubted the origins of that nameless child: he looked exactly like the colonel at the time he was taken to see ice for the first time. The woman said that he had been born with his eyes open, looking at people with the judgment of an adult, and that she was frightened by his way of staring at things without blinking. "He's identical," Ursula said. "The only thing missing is for him to make chairs rock by simply looking at them." They christened him Aureliano and with his mother's last name, since the law did not permit a person to bear his father's name until he had recognized him. General Moncada was the godfather. Although Amaranta insisted that he be left so that she could take over his upbringing, his mother was against it.

Ursula at that time did not know about the custom of sending virgins to the bedrooms of soldiers in the same way that hens are turned loose with fine roosters, but in the course of that year she found out: nine more sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendia were brought to the house to be baptized. The oldest, a strange dark boy with green eyes, who was not at all like his father's family, was over ten years old. They brought children of all ages, all colors, but all males and all with a look of solitude that left no doubt as to the relationship. Only two stood out in the group. One, large for his age, made smithereens out of the flowerpots and china because his hands seemed to have the property of breaking everything they touched. The other was a blond boy with the same light eyes as his mother, whose hair had been left to grow long and curly like that of a woman. He entered the house with a great deal of familiarity, as if he had been raised there, and he went directly to a chest in Ursula's bedroom and demanded, "I want the mechanical ballerina." Ursula was startled. She opened the chest, searched among the ancient and dusty articles left from the days of Melquiades, and wrapped in a pair of stockings she found the mechanical ballerina that Pietro Crespi had brought to the house once and that everyone had forgotten about. In less than twelve years they baptized with the name Aureliano and the last name of the mother all the sons that the colonel had implanted up and down his theater of war: seventeen. At first Ursula would fill their pockets with money and Amaranta tried to have them stay. But they finally limited themselves to giving them presents and serving as godmothers. "We've done our duty by baptizing them," Ursula would say, jotting down in a ledger the name and address of the mother and the place and date of birth of the child. "Aureliano needs well-kept accounts so that he can decide things when he comes back." During lunch, commenting with General Moncada about that disconcerting proliferation, she expressed the desire for Colonel Aureliano Buendia to come back someday and gather all of his sons together in the house.

"Don't worry, dear friend," General Moncada said enigmatically. "He'll come sooner than you suspect."

What General Moncada knew and what he did not wish to reveal at lunch was that Colonel Aureliano Buendia was already on his way to head up the most prolonged, radical, and bloody rebellion of all those he had started up till then.

The situation again became as tense as it had been during the months that preceded the first war. The cockfights, instituted by the mayor himself, were suspended. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, the commander of the garrison, took over the exercise of municipal power. The Liberals looked upon him as a provocateur. "Something terrible is going to happen," Ursula would say to Aureliano Jose. "Don't go out into the street after six o'clock." The entreaties were useless. Aureliano Jose, just like Arcadio in other times, had ceased to belong to her. It was as if his return home, the possibility of existing without concerning himself with everyday necessities, had awakened in him the lewd and lazy leanings of his uncle Jose Arcadio. His passion for Amaranta had been extinguished without leaving any scars. He would drift around, playing pool, easing his solitude with occasional women, sacking the hiding places where Ursula had forgotten her money. He ended up coming home only to change his clothes. "They're all alike," Ursula lamented. "At first they behave very well, they're obedient and prompt and they don't seem capable of killing a fly, but as soon as their beards appear they go to ruin." Unlike Arcadio, who had never known his real origins, he found out that he was the son of Pilar Ternera, who had hung up a hammock so that he could take his siesta in her house. More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude. Pilar Ternera had lost the trail of all hope. Her laugh had taken on the tones of an organ, her breasts had succumbed to the tedium of endless caressing, her stomach and her thighs had been the victims of her irrevocable fate as a shared woman, but her heart grew old without bitterness. Fat, talkative, with the airs of a matron in disgrace, she renounced the sterile illusions of her cards and found peace and consolation in other people's loves. In the house where Aureliano Jose took his siesta, the girls from the neighborhood would receive their casual lovers. "Lend me your room, Pilar," they would simply say when they were already inside. "Of course," Pilar would answer. And if anyone was present she would explain:

"I'm happy knowing that people are happy in bed."

She never charged for the service. She never refused the favor, just as she never refused the countless men who sought her out, even in the twilight of her maturity, without giving her money or love and only occasionally pleasure. Her five daughters, who inherited a burning seed, had been lost on the byways of life since adolescence. Of the two sons she managed to raise, one died fighting in the forces of Colonel Aureliano Buendia and the other was wounded and captured at the age of fourteen when he tried to steal a crate of chickens in a town in the swamp. In a certain way, Aureliano Jose was the tall, dark man who had been promised her for half a century by the king of hearts, and like all men sent by the cards he reached her heart when he was already stamped with the mark of death. She saw it in the cards.

"Don't go out tonight," she told him. "Stay and sleep here because Carmelita Montiel is getting tired of asking me to put her in your room."

Aureliano Jose did not catch the deep feeling of begging that was in the offer.

"Tell her to wait for me at midnight," he said.

He went to the theater, where a Spanish company was putting on The Dagger of the Fox, which was really Zorrilla's play with the title changed by order of Captain Aquiles Ricardo, because the Liberals called the Conservatives Goths. Only when he handed in his ticket at the door did Aureliano Jose realize that Captain Aquiles Ricardo and two soldiers armed with rifles were searching the audience.

"Be careful, captain," Aureliano Jose warned him. "The man hasn't been born yet who can lay hands on me." The captain tried to search him forcibly and Aureliano Jose, who was unarmed, began to run. The soldiers disobeyed the order to shoot. "He's a Buendia," one of them explained. Blind with rage, the captain then snatched away the rifle, stepped into the center of the street, and took aim.

"Cowards!" he shouted. "I only wish it was Colonel Aureliano Buendia."

Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, who was really the one destined to die that night, did indeed die, four hours before Aureliano Jose. As soon as the shot was heard he was brought down by two simultaneous bullets whose origin was never established and a shout of many voices shook the night.

"Long live the Liberal party! Long live Colonel Aureliano Buendia!"

At twelve o'clock, when Aureliano Jose had bled to death and Carmelita Montiel found that the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the abandoned body of Captain Aquiles Ricardo. A patrol had to use a wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread.

Annoyed by the outrages of the regular army, General Jose Raquel Moncada used his political influence, put on his uniform again, and assumed the civil and military leadership of Macondo. He did not expect, however, that his conciliatory attitude would be able to prevent the inevitable. The news in September was contradictory. While the government announced that it was maintaining control throughout the country, the Liberals were receiving secret news of armed uprisings in the interior. The regime would not admit a state of war until it was proclaimed in a decree that had followed a court-martial which had condemned Colonel Aureliano Buendia to death in absentia. The first unit that captured him was, ordered to carry the sentence out. "This means he's come back," Ursula said joyfully to General Moncada. But he himself knew nothing about it.

Actually, Colonel Aureliano Buendia had been in the country for more than a month. He was preceded by conflicting rumors, supposed to be in the most distant places at the same time, and even General Moncada did not believe in his return until it was officially announced that he had seized two states on the coast. "Congratulations, dear friend," he told Ursula, showing her the telegram. "You'll soon have him here." Ursula was worried then for the first time. "And what will you do?" she asked. General Moncada had asked himself that same question many times.

"The same as he, my friend," he answered. "I'll do my duty."

At dawn on the first of October Colonel Aureliano Buendia attacked Macondo with a thousand well-armed men and the garrison received orders to resist to the end. At noon, while General Moncada was lunching with Ursula, a rebel cannon shot that echoed in the whole town blew the front of the municipal treasury to dust. "They're as well armed as we are," General Moncada sighed, "but besides that they're fighting because they want to." At two o'clock in the afternoon, while the earth trembled with the artillery fire from both sides, he took leave of Ursula with the certainty that he was fighting a losing battle.

"I pray to God that you won't have Aureliano in the house tonight," he said. "If it does happen that way, give him an embrace for me, because I don't expect ever to see him again."

That night he was captured when he tried to escape from Macondo after writing a long letter to Colonel Aureliano Buendia in which he reminded him of their common aim to humanize the war and he wished him a final victory over the corruption of the militarists and the ambitions of the politicians in both parties. On the following day Colonel Aureliano Buendia had lunch with him in Ursula's house, where he was being held until a revolutionary court-martial decided his fate. It was a friendly gathering. But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, Ursula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. She had felt it ever since she saw him come in protected by a noisy military retinue, which turned the bedrooms inside out until they were convinced there was no danger. Colonel Aureliano Buendia not only accepted it but he gave strict orders that no one should come closer than ten feet, not even Ursula, while the members of his escort finished placing guards about the house. He was wearing an ordinary denim uniform with no insignia of any kind and high boots with spurs that were caked with mud and dried blood. On his waist he wore a holster with the flap open and his hand, which was always on the butt of the pistol, revealed the same watchful and resolute tension as his look. His head, with deep recessions in the hairline now, seemed to have been baked in a slow oven. His face, tanned by the salt of the Caribbean, had acquired a metallic hardness. He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia. "Good Lord," Ursula said to herself. "Now he looks like a man capable of anything." He was. The Aztec shawl that he brought Amaranta, the remembrances he spoke of at lunch, the funny stories he told were simple leftovers from his humor of a different time. As soon as the order to bury the dead in a common grave was carried out, he assigned Colonel Roque Carnicero the mission of setting up courts-martial and he went ahead with the exhausting task of imposing radical reforms which would not leave a stone of the re-established Conservative regime in place. "We have to get ahead of the politicians in the party," he said to his aides. "When they open their eyes to reality they'll find accomplished facts." It was then that he decided to review the titles to land that went back a hundred years and he discovered the legalized outrages of his brother Jose Arcadio. He annulled the registrations with a stroke of the pen. As a last gesture of courtesy, he left his affairs for an hour and visited Rebeca to bring her up to date on what he was determined to do.

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 Buendia 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 Jose 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 Buendia 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 Jose 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 Marquez, 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 Jose Raquel Moncada. Ursula intervened. "His government was the best we've ever had in Macondo," she told Colonel Aureliano Buendia. "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 Buendia 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."

Ursula 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. Ursula 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 Jose Raquel Moncada was sentenced to death. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, in spite of the violent recriminations of Ursula, 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 Buendia 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 Ursula in an attempt to pacify your conscience."

Colonel Aureliano Buendia 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 Buendia put them in his pockets.

"Is she still in Manaure?"

"She's still in Manaure," General Moncada confirmed, "in the s