One Hundred Years of Solitude

  "Those are the ones who were born last night," she said.

  "Oh my God!" he said. "Why don't you raffle off cows?"

  A few days later, in an attempt to clean out her courtyard, Petra Cotes exchanged the rabbits for a cow, who two months later gave birth to triplets. That was how things began. Overnight Aureliano Segundo became the owner of land and livestock and he barely had time to enlarge his overflowing barns and pigpens. It was a delirious prosperity that even made him laugh, and he could not help doing crazy things to release his good humor. "Cease, cows, life is short," he would shout. Ursula wondered what entanglements he had got into, whether he might be stealing, whether he had become a rustler, and every time she saw him uncorking champagne just for the pleasure of pouring the foam over his head, she would shout at him and scold him for the waste. It annoyed him so much that one day when he awoke in a merry mood, Aureliano Segundo appeared with a chest full of money, a can of paste, and a brush, and singing at the top of his lungs the old songs of Francisco the Man, he papered the house inside and out and from top to bottom with one-peso banknotes. The old mansion, painted white since the time they had brought the pianola, took on the strange look of a mosque. In the midst of the excitement of the family, the scandalization of Ursula, the joy of the people cramming the street to watch that apotheosis of squandering, Aureliano Segundo finished by papering the house from the front to the kitchen, including bathrooms and bedrooms, and threw the leftover bills into the courtyard.

  "Now," he said in a final way, "I hope that nobody in this house ever talks to me about money again."

  That was what happened. Ursula had the bills taken down, stuck to great cakes of whitewash, and the house was painted white again. "Dear Lord," she begged, "make us poor again the way we were when we founded this town so that you will not collect for this squandering in the other life." Her prayers were answered in reverse. One of the workmen removing the bills bumped into an enormous plaster statue of Saint Joseph that someone had left in the house during the last years of the war and the hollow figure broke to pieces on the floor. It had been stuffed with gold coins. No one could remember who had brought that life-size saint. "Three men brought it," Amaranta explained. "They asked us to keep it until the rains were over and I told them to put it there in the corner where nobody would bump into it, and there they put it, very carefully, and there it's been ever since because they never came back for it." Later on, Ursula had put candles on it and had prostrated herself before it, not suspecting that instead of a saint she was adoring almost four hundred pounds of gold. The tardy evidence of her involuntary paganism made her even more upset. She spat on the spectacular pile of coins, put them in three canvas sacks, and buried them in a secret place, hoping that sooner or later the three unknown men would come to reclaim them. Much later, during the difficult years of her decrepitude, Ursula would intervene in the conversations of the many travelers who came by the house at that time and ask them if they had left a plaster Saint Joseph there during the war to be taken care of until the rains passed.

  Things like that, which gave Ursula such consternation, were commonplace in those days. Macondo was swamped in a miraculous prosperity. The adobe houses of the founders had been replaced by brick buildings with wooden blinds and cement floors which made the suffocating heat of two o'clock in the afternoon more bearable. All that remained at that time of Jose Arcadio Buendia's ancient village were the dusty almond trees, destined to resist the most arduous of circumstances, and the river of clear water whose prehistoric stones had been pulverized by the frantic hammers of Jose Arcadio Segundo when he set about opening the channel in order to establish a boat line. It was a mad dream, comparable to those of his great-grandfather, for the rocky riverbed and the numerous rapids prevented navigation from Macondo to the sea. But Jose Arcadio Segundo, in an unforeseen burst of temerity, stubbornly kept on with the project. Until then he had shown no sign of imagination. Except for his precarious adventure with Petra Cotes, he had never known a woman. Ursula had considered him the quietest example the family had ever produced in all its history, incapable of standing out even as a handler of fighting cocks, when Colonel Aureliano Buendia told him the story of the Spanish galleon aground eight miles from the sea, the carbonized frame of which he had seen himself during the war. The story, which for so many years had seemed fantastic to so many people, was a revelation for Jose Arcadio Segundo. He auctioned off his roosters to the highest bidder, recruited men, bought tools, and set about the awesome task of breaking stones, digging canals, clearing away rapids, and even harnessing waterfalls. "I know all of this by heart," Ursula would shout. "It's as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning." When he thought that the river was navigable, Jose Arcadio Segundo gave his brother a detailed account of his plans and the latter gave him the money he needed for the enterprise. He disappeared for a long time. It had been said that his plan to buy a boat was nothing but a trick to make off with his brother's money, when the news spread that a strange craft was approaching the town. The inhabitants of Macondo, who no longer remembered the colossal undertakings of Jose Arcadio Buendia, ran to the riverbank and saw with eyes popping in disbelief the arrival of the first and last boat ever to dock in the town. It was nothing but a log raft drawn by thick ropes pulled by twenty men who walked along the bank, In the prow, with a glow of satisfaction in his eyes, Jose Arcadio Segundo was directing the arduous maneuver. There arrived with him a rich group of splendid matrons who were protecting themselves from the burning sun with gaudy parasols, and wore on their shoulders fine silk kerchiefs, with colored creams on their faces and natural flowers in their hair and golden serpents on their arms and diamonds in their teeth. The log raft was the only vessel that Jose Arcadio Segundo was able to bring to Macondo, and only once, but he never recognized the failure of his enterprise, but proclaimed his deed as a victory of will power. He gave a scrupulous accounting to his brother and very soon plunged back into the routine of cockfights. The only thing that remained of that unfortunate venture was the breath of renovation that the matrons from France brought, as their magnificent arts transformed traditional methods of love and their sense of social well-being abolished Catarino's antiquated place and turned the street into a bazaar of Japanese lanterns and nostalgic hand organs. They were the promoters of the bloody carnival that plunged Macondo into delirium for three days and whose only lasting consequence was having given Aureliano Segundo the opportunity to meet Fernanda del Carpio.

  Remedios the Beauty was proclaimed queen. Ursula, who shuddered at the disquieting beauty of her great-granddaughter, could not prevent the choice. Until then she had succeeded in keeping her off the streets unless it was to go to mass with Amaranta, but she made her cover her face with a black shawl. The most impious men, those who would disguise themselves as priests to say sacrilegious masses in Catarino's store, would go to church with an aim to see, if only for an instant, the face of Remedios the Beauty, whose legendary good looks were spoken of with alarming excitement throughout the swamp. It was a long time before they were able to do so, and it would have been better for them if they never had, because most of them never recovered their peaceful habits of sleep. The man who made it possible, a foreigner, lost his serenity forever, became involved in the sloughs of abjection and misery, and years later was cut to pieces by a train after he had fallen asleep on the tracks. From the moment he was seen in the church, wearing a green velvet suit and an embroidered vest, no one doubted that he came from far away, perhaps from some distant city outside of the country, attracted by the magical fascination of Remedios the Beauty. He was so handsome, so elegant and dignified, with such presence, that Pietro Crespi would have been a mere fop beside him, and many women whispered with spiteful smiles that he was the one who really should have worn the shawl. He did not speak to anyone in Macondo. He appeared at dawn on Sunday like a prince in a fairy tale, riding a horse with silver stirrups and a velvet blanket, and he left town after mass.

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nbsp; The power of his presence was such that from the first time he was seen in the church everybody took it for granted that a silent and tense duel had been established between him and Remedios the Beauty, a secret pact, an irrevocable challenge that would end not only in love but also in death. On the sixth Sunday the gentleman appeared with a yellow rose in his hand. He heard mass standing, as he always did, and at the end he stepped in front of Remedios the Beauty and offered her the solitary rose. She took it with a natural gesture, as if she had been prepared for that homage, and then she uncovered her face and gave her thanks with a smile. That was all she did. Not only for the gentleman, but for all the men who had the unfortunate privilege of seeing her, that was an eternal instant.

  From then on the gentleman had a band of musicians play beside the window of Remedios the Beauty, sometimes until dawn. Aureliano Segundo was the only one who felt a cordial compassion for him and he tried to break his perseverance. "Don't waste your time any more," he told him one night. "The women in this house are worse than mules." He offered him his friendship, invited him to bathe in champagne, tried to make him understand that the females of his family had insides made of flint, but he could not weaken his obstinacy. Exasperated by the interminable nights of music, Colonel Aureliano Buendia threatened to cure his affliction with a few pistol shots. Nothing made him desist except his own lamentable state of demoralization. From a well-dressed and neat individual he became filthy and ragged. It was rumored that he had abandoned power and fortune in his distant nation, although his origins were actually never known. He became argumentative, a barroom brawler, and he would wake up rolling in his own filth in Catarino's store. The saddest part of his drama was that Remedios the Beauty did not notice him, not even when he appeared in church dressed like a prince. She accepted the yellow rose without the least bit of malice, amused, rather, by the extravagance of the act, and she lifted her shawl to see his face better, not to show hers.

  Actually, Remedios the Beauty was not a creature of this world. Until she was well along in puberty Santa Sofia de la Piedad had to bathe and dress her, and even when she could take care of herself it was necessary to keep an eye on her so that she would not paint little animals on the walls with a stick daubed in her own excrement. She reached twenty without knowing how to read or write, unable to use the silver at the table, wandering naked through the house because her nature rejected all manner of convention. When the young commander of the guard declared his love for her, she rejected him simply because his frivolity startled her. "See how simple he is," she told Amaranta. "He says that he's dying because of me, as if I were a bad case of colic." When, indeed, they found him dead beside her window, Remedios the Beauty confirmed her first impression.

  "You see," she commented. "He was a complete simpleton."

  It seemed as if some penetrating lucidity permitted her to see the reality of things beyond any formalism. That at least was the point of view of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, for whom Remedios the Beauty was in no way mentally retarded, as was generally believed, but quite the opposite. "It's as if she's come back from twenty years of war," he would say. Ursula, for her part, thanked God for having awarded the family with a creature of exceptional purity, but at the same time she was disturbed by her beauty, for it seemed a contradictory virtue to her, a diabolical trap at the center of her innocence. It was for that reason that she decided to keep her away from the world, to protect her from all earthly temptation, not knowing that Remedios the Beauty, even from the time when she was in her mother's womb, was safe from any contagion. It never entered her head that they would elect her beauty queen of the carnival pandemonium. But Aureliano Segundo, excited at the caprice of disguising himself as a tiger, brought Father Antonio Isabel to the house in order to convince Ursula that the carnival was not a pagan feast, as she said, but a Catholic tradition. Finally convinced, even though reluctantly, she consented to the coronation.

  The news that Remedios Buendia was going to be the sovereign ruler of the festival went beyond the limits of the swamp in a few hours, reached distant places where the prestige of her beauty was not known, and it aroused the anxiety of those who still thought of her last name as a symbol of subversion. The anxiety was baseless. If anyone had become harmless at that time it was the aging and disillusioned Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who was slowly losing all contact with the reality of the nation. Enclosed in his workshop, his only relationship with the rest of the world was his business in little gold fishes. One of the soldiers who had guarded his house during the first days of peace would go sell them in the villages of the swamp and return loaded down with coins and news. That the Conservative government, he would say, with the backing of the Liberals, was reforming the calendar so that every president could remain in power for a hundred years. That the concordat with the Holy See had finally been signed and a cardinal had come from Rome with a crown of diamonds and a throne of solid gold, and that the Liberal ministers had had their pictures taken on their knees in the act of kissing his ring. That the leading lady of a Spanish company passing through the capital had been kidnapped by a band of masked highwaymen and on the following Sunday she had danced in the nude at the summer house of the president of the republic. "Don't talk to me about politics," the colonel would tell him. "Our business is selling little fishes." The rumor that he did not want to hear anything about the situation in the country because he was growing rich in his workshop made Ursula laugh when it reached her ears. With her terrible practical sense she could not understand the colonel's business as he exchanged little fishes for gold coins and then converted the coins into little fishes, and so on, with the result that he had to work all the harder with the more he sold in order to satisfy an exasperating vicious circle. Actually, what interested him was not the business but the work. He needed so much concentration to link scales, fit minute rubies into the eyes, laminate gills, and put on fins that there was not the smallest empty moment left for him to fill with his disillusionment of the war. So absorbing was the attention required by the delicacy of his artistry that in a short time he had aged more than during all the years of the war, and his position had twisted his spine and the close work had used up his eyesight, but the implacable concentration awarded him with a peace of the spirit. The last time he was seen to take an interest in some matter related to the war was when a group of veterans from both parties sought his support for the approval of lifetime pensions, which had always been promised and were always about to be put into effect. "Forget about it," he told them. "You can see how I refuse my pension in order to get rid of the torture of waiting for it until the day I died." At first Colonel Gerineldo Marquez would visit him at dusk and they would both sit in the street door and talk about the past. But Amaranta could not bear the memories that that man, whose baldness had plunged him into the abyss of premature old age, aroused in her, and she would torment him with snide remarks until he did not come back except on special occasions and he finally disappeared, extinguished by paralysis. Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendia could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. He would get up at five in the morning after a light sleep, have his eternal mug of bitter coffee in the kitchen, shut himself up all day in the workshop, and at four in the afternoon he would go along the porch dragging a stool, not even noticing the fire of the rose bushes or the brightness of the hour or the persistence of Amaranta, whose melancholy made the noise of a boiling pot, which was perfectly perceptible at dusk, and he would sit in the street door as long as the mosquitoes would allow him to. Someone dared to disturb his solitude once.

  "How are you, Colonel?" he asked in passing.

  "Right here," he answered. "Waiting for my funeral procession to pass."

  So that the anxiety caused by the public reappearance of his family name, having to do with the coronation of Remedios the Beauty, was baseless. Many people did not think that way,
however. Innocent of the tragedy that threatened it, the town poured into the main square in a noisy explosion of merriment. The carnival had reached its highest level of madness and Aureliano Segundo had satisfied at last his dream of dressing up like a tiger and was walking along the wild throng, hoarse from so much roaring, when on the swamp road a parade of several people appeared carrying in a gilded litter the most fascinating woman that imagination could conceive. For a moment the inhabitants of Macondo took off their masks in order to get a better look at the dazzling creature with a crown of emeralds and an ermine cape, who seemed invested with legitimate authority, and was not merely a sovereign of bangles and crepe paper. There were many people who had sufficient insight to suspect that it was a question of provocation. But Aureliano Segundo immediately conquered his perplexity and declared the new arrivals to be guests of honor, and with the wisdom of Solomon he seated Remedios the Beauty and the intruding queen on the same dais. Until midnight the strangers, disguised as bedouins, took part in the delirium and even enriched it with sumptuous fireworks and acrobatic skills that made one think of the art of the gypsies. Suddenly, during the paroxysm of the celebration, someone broke the delicate balance.