"How wonderful!" he exclaimed. "We have a telegraph office in Macondo now."
His reply was definitive. In three months he expected to establish his headquarters in Macondo. If he did not find Colonel Gerineldo Marquez alive at that time he would shoot out of hand all of the officers he held prisoner at that moment, starting with the generals, and he would give orders to his subordinates to do the same for the rest of the war. Three months later, when he entered Macondo in triumph, the first embrace he received on the swamp road was that of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.
The house was full of children. Ursula had taken in Santa Sofia de la Piedad with her older daughter and a pair of twins, who had been born five months after Arcadio had been shot. Contrary to the victim's last wishes, she baptized the girl with the name Remedios. "I'm sure that was what Arcadio meant," she alleged. "We won't call her Ursula because a person suffers too much with that name." The twins were named Jose Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. Amaranta took care of them all. She put small wooden chairs in the living room and established a nursery with other children from neighboring families. When Colonel Aureliano Buendia returned in the midst of exploding rockets and ringing bells, a children's chorus welcomed him to the house. Aureliano Jose, tall like his grandfather, dressed as a revolutionary officer, gave him military honors.
Not all the news was good. A year after the flight of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadio and Rebeca went to live in the house Arcadio had built. No one knew about his intervention to halt the execution. In the new house, located on the best corner of the square, in the shade of an almond tree that was honored by three nests of redbreasts, with a large door for visitors and four windows for light, they set up a hospitable home. Rebeca's old friends, among them four of the Moscote sisters who were still single, once more took up the sessions of embroidery that had been interrupted years before on the porch with the begonias. Jose Arcadio continued to profit from the usurped lands, the title to which was recognized by the Conservative government. Every afternoon he could be seen returning on horseback, with his hunting dogs, and his double-barreled shotgun and a string of rabbits hanging from his saddle. One September afternoon, with the threat of a storm, he returned home earlier than usual. He greeted Rebeca in the dining room, tied the dogs up in the courtyard, hung the rabbits up in the kitchen to be salted later, and went to the bedroom to change his clothes. Rebeca later declared that when her husband went into the bedroom she was locked in the bathroom and did not hear anything. It was a difficult version to believe, but there was no other more plausible, and no one could think of any motive for Rebeca to murder the man who had made her happy. That was perhaps the only mystery that was never cleared up in Macondo. As soon as Jose Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jose, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
"Holy Mother of God!" Ursula shouted.
She followed the thread of blood back along its course, and in search of its origin she went through the pantry, along the begonia porch where Aureliano Jose was chanting that three plus three is six and six plus three is nine, and she crossed the dining room and the living rooms and followed straight down the street, and she turned first to the right and then to the left to the Street of the Turks, forgetting that she was still wearing her baking apron and her house slippers, and she came out onto the square and went into the door of a house where she had never been, and she pushed open the bedroom door and was almost suffocated by the smell of burned gunpowder, and she found Jose Arcadio lying face down on the ground on top of the leggings he had just taken off, and she saw the starting point of the thread of blood that had already stopped flowing out of his right ear. They found no wound on his body nor could they locate the weapon. Nor was it possible to remove the smell of powder from the corpse. First they washed him three times with soap and a scrubbing brush, then they rubbed him with salt and vinegar, then with ashes and lemon, and finally they put him in a barrel of lye and let him stay for six hours. They scrubbed him so much that the arabesques of his tattooing began to fade. When they thought of the desperate measure of seasoning him with pepper, cumin seeds, and laurel leaves and boiling him for a whole day over a slow fire, he had already begun to decompose and they had to bury him hastily. They sealed him hermetically in a special coffin seven and a half feet long and four feet wide, reinforced inside with iron plates and fastened together with steel bolts, and even then the smell could be perceived on the streets through which the funeral procession passed. Father Nicanor, with his liver enlarged and tight as a drum, gave him his blessing from bed. Although in the months that followed they reinforced the grave with walls about it, between which they threw compressed ash, sawdust, and quicklime, the cemetery still smelled of powder for many years after, until the engineers from the banana company covered the grave over with a shell of concrete. As soon as they took the body out, Rebeca closed the doors of her house and buried herself alive, covered with a thick crust of disdain that no earthly temptation was ever able to break. She went out into the street on one occasion, when she was very old, with shoes the color of old silver and a hat made of tiny flowers, during the time that the Wandering Jew passed through town and brought on a heat wave that was so intense that birds broke through window screens to come to die in the bedrooms. The last time anyone saw her alive was when with one shot she killed a thief who was trying to force the door of her house. Except for Argenida, her servant and confidante, no one ever had any more contact with her after that. At one time it was discovered that she was writing letters to the Bishop, whom she claimed as a first cousin, but it was never said whether she received any reply. The town forgot about her.
In spite of his triumphal return, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was not enthusiastic over the looks of things. The government troops abandoned their positions without resistance and that aroused an illusion of victory among the Liberal population that it was not right to destroy, but the revolutionaries knew the truth, Colonel Aureliano Buendia better than any of them. Although at that moment he had more than five thousand men under his command and held two coastal states, he had the feeling of being hemmed in against the sea and caught in a situation that was so confused that when he ordered the restoration of the church steeple, which had been knocked down by army cannon fire, Father Nicanor commented from his sickbed: "This is silly; the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt." Looking for a loophole through which he could escape, he spent hours on end in the telegraph office conferring with the commanders of other towns, and every time he would emerge with the firmest impression that the war was at a stalemate. When news of fresh Liberal victories was received it was celebrated with jubilant proclamations, but he would measure the real extent of them on the map and could see that his forces were penetrating into the jungle, defending themselves against malaria and mosquitoes, advancing in the opposite direction from reality. "We're wasting time," he would complain to his officers. "We're wasting time while the bastards in the party are begging for seats in congress." Lying awake at night, stretched out on his back in a hammock in the same room where he had awaited death, he would evoke the image of lawyers dressed in black leaving the presidential palace in the icy cold of early morning with their coat collars turned up about their ears, rubbing their hands, whispe
ring, taking refuge in dreary early-morning cafes to speculate over what the president had meant when he said yes, or what he had meant when he said no, and even to imagine what the president was thinking when he said something quite different, as he chased away mosquitoes at a temperature of ninety-five degrees, feeling the approach of the fearsome dawn when he would have to give his men the command to jump into the sea.
One night of uncertainty, when Pilar Ternera was singing in the courtyard with the soldiers, he asked her to read the future in her cards. "Watch out for your mouth," was all that Pilar Ternera brought out after spreading and picking up the cards three times. "I don't know what it means, but the sign is very clear. Watch out for your mouth." Two days later someone gave an orderly a mug of black coffee and the orderly passed it on to someone else and that one to someone else until, hand to hand, it reached Colonel Aureliano Buendia's office. He had not asked for any coffee, but since it was there the colonel drank it. It had a dose of nux vomica strong enough to kill a horse. When they took him home he was stiff and arched and his tongue was sticking out between his teeth. Ursula fought against death over him. After cleaning out his stomach with emetics, she wrapped him in hot blankets and fed him egg whites for two days until his harrowed body recovered its normal temperature. On the fourth day he was out of danger. Against his will, pressured by Ursula and his officers, he stayed in bed for another week. Only then did he learn that his verses had not been burned. "I didn't want to be hasty," Ursula explained to him. "That night when I went to light the oven I said to myself that it would be better to wait until they brought the body." In the haze of convalescence, surrounded by Remedios' dusty dolls, Colonel Aureliano Buendia brought back the decisive periods of his existence by reading his poetry. He started writing again. For many hours, balancing on the edge of the surprises of a war with no future, in rhymed verse he resolved his experience on the shores of death. Then his thoughts became so clear that he was able to examine them forward and backward. One night he asked Colonel Gerineldo Marquez:
"Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?"
"What other reason could there be?" Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. "For the great Liberal party."
"You're lucky because you know why," he answered. "As far as I'm concerned, I've come to realize only just now that I'm fighting because of pride."
"That's bad," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. "Naturally," he said. "But in any case, it's better than not knowing why you're fighting." He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:
"Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone."
His pride had prevented him from making contact with the armed groups in the interior of the country until the leaders of the party publicly rectified their declaration that he was a bandit. He knew, however, that as soon as he put those scruples aside he would break the vicious circle of the war. Convalescence gave him time to reflect. Then he succeeded in getting Ursula to give him the rest of her buried inheritance and her substantial savings. He named Colonel Gerineldo Marquez civil and military leader of Macondo and he went off to make contact with the rebel groups in the interior.
Colonel Gerineldo Marquez was not only the man closest to Colonel Aureliano Buendia, but Ursula received him as a member of the family. Fragile, timid, with natural good manners, he was, however, better suited for war than for government. His political advisers easily entangled him in theoretical labyrinths. But he succeeded in giving Macondo the atmosphere of rural peace that Colonel Aureliano Buendia dreamed of so that he could die of old age making little gold fishes. Although he lived in his parents' house he would have lunch at Ursula's two or three times a week. He initiated Aureliano Jose in the use of firearms, gave him early military instruction, and for several months took him to live in the barracks, with Ursula's consent, so that he could become a man. Many years before, when he was still almost a child, Gerineldo Marquez had declared his love for Amaranta. At that time she was so illusioned with her lonely passion for Pietro Crespi that she laughed at him. Gerineldo Marquez waited. On a certain occasion he sent Amaranta a note from jail asking her to embroider a dozen batiste handkerchiefs with his father's initials on them. He sent her the money. A week later Amaranta brought the dozen handkerchiefs to him in jail along with the money and they spent several hours talking about the past. "When I get out of here I'm going to marry you," Gerineldo Marquez told her when she left. Amaranta laughed but she kept on thinking about him while she taught the children to read and she tried to revive her juvenile passion for Pietro Crespi. On Saturdays, visiting days for the prisoners, she would stop by the house of Gerineldo Marquez's parents and accompany them to the jail. On one of those Saturdays Ursula was surprised to see her in the kitchen, waiting for the biscuits to come out of the oven so that she could pick the best ones and wrap them in a napkin that she had embroidered for the occasion.
"Marry him," she told her. "You'll have a hard time finding another man like him."
Amaranta feigned a reaction of displeasure.
"I don't have to go around hunting for men," she answered. "I'm taking these biscuits to Gerineldo because I'm sorry that sooner or later they're going to shoot him."
She said it without thinking, but that was the time that the government had announced its threat to shoot Colonel Gerineldo Marquez if the rebel forces did not surrender Riohacha. The visits stopped. Amaranta shut herself up to weep, overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt similar to the one that had tormented her when Remedios died, as if once more her careless words had been responsible for a death. Her mother consoled her. She assured her that Colonel Aureliano Buendia would do something to prevent the execution and promised that she would take charge of attracting Gerineldo Marquez herself when the war was over. She fulfilled her promise before the imagined time. When Gerineldo Marquez returned to the house, invested with his new dignity of civil and military leader, she received him as a son, thought of delightful bits of flattery to hold him there, and prayed with all her soul that he would remember his plan to marry Amaranta. Her pleas seemed to be answered. On the days that he would have lunch at the house, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez would linger on the begonia porch playing Chinese checkers with Amaranta. Ursula would bring them coffee and milk and biscuits and would take over the children so that they would not bother them. Amaranta was really making an effort to kindle in her heart the forgotten ashes of her youthful passion. With an anxiety that came to be intolerable, she waited for the lunch days, the afternoons of Chinese checkers, and time flew by in the company of the warrior with a nostalgic name whose fingers trembled imperceptibly as he moved the pieces. But the day on which Colonel Gerineldo Marquez repeated his wish to marry her, she rejected him.
"I'm not going to marry anyone," she told him, "much less you. You love Aureliano so much that you want to marry me because you can't marry him."
Colonel Gerineldo Marquez was a patient man. "I'll keep on insisting," he said. "Sooner or later I'll convince you." He kept on visiting the house. Shut up in her bedroom, biting back her secret tears, Amaranta put her fingers in her ears so as not to hear the voice of the suitor as he gave Ursula the latest war news, and in spite of the fact that she was dying to see him, she had the strength not to go out and meet him.
At that time Colonel Aureliano Buendia took the time to send a detailed account to Macondo every two weeks. But only once, almost eight months after he had left, did he write to Ursula. A special messenger brought a sealed envelope to the house with a sheet of paper inside bearing the colonel's delicate hand: Take good care of Papa because he is going to die. Ursula became alarmed. "If Aureliano says so it's because Aureliano knows," she said. And she had them help her take Jose Arcadio Buendia to his bedroom. Not only was he as heavy as ever, but during his prolonged stay under the chestnut tree he had developed the faculty of being able to increase his weight at will, to such a degree that seven men were unable to li
ft him and they had to drag him to the bed. A smell of tender mushrooms, of wood-flower fungus, of old and concentrated outdoors impregnated the air of the bedroom as it was breathed by the colossal old man weather-beaten by the sun and the rain. The next morning he was not in his bed. In spite of his undiminished strength, Jose Arcadio Buendia was in no condition to resist. It was all the same to him. If he went back to the chestnut tree it was not because he wanted to but because of a habit of his body. Ursula took care of him, fed him, brought him news of Aureliano. But actually, the only person with whom he was able to have contact for a long time was Prudencio Aguilar. Almost pulverized at that time by the decrepitude of death, Prudencio Aguilar would come twice a day to chat with him. They talked about fighting cocks. They promised each other to set up a breeding farm for magnificent birds, not so much to enjoy their victories, which they would not need then, as to have something to do on the tedious Sundays of death. It was Prudencio Aguilar who cleaned him, fed him, and brought him splendid news of an unknown person called Aureliano who was a colonel in the war. When he was alone, Jose Arcadio Buendia consoled himself with the dream of the infinite rooms. He dreamed that he was getting out of bed, opening the door and going into an identical room with the same bed with a wrought-iron head, the same wicker chair, and the same small picture of the Virgin of Help on the back wall. From that room he would go into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another one just the same, and then into another exactly alike, and so on to infinity. He liked to go from room to room, as in a gallery of parallel mirrors, until Prudencio Aguilar would touch him on the shoulder. Then he would go back from room to room, walking in reverse, going back over his trail, and he would find Prudencio Aguilar in the room of reality. But one night, two weeks after they took him to his bed, Prudencio Aguilar touched his shoulder in an intermediate room and he stayed there forever, thinking that it was the real room. On the following morning Ursula was bringing him his breakfast when she saw a man coming along the hall. He was short and stocky, with a black suit on and a hat that was also black, enormous, pulled down to his taciturn eyes. "Good Lord," Ursula thought, "I could have sworn it was Melquiades." It was Cataure, Visitacion's brother, who had left the house fleeing from the insomnia plague and of whom there had never been any news. Visitacion asked him why he had come back, and he answered her in their solemn language: