One Hundred Years of Solitude

  "He won't ever come into this house again," Fernanda said, "as long as he carries the rash of the foreigners."

  Such was the narrowness imposed in the house that Aureliano Segundo felt more comfortable at Petra Cotes's. First, with the pretext of taking the burden off his wife, he transferred his parties. Then, with the pretext that the animals were losing their fertility, he transferred his barns and stables. Finally, with the pretext that it was cooler in his concubine's house, he transferred the small office in which he handled his business. When Fernanda realized that she was a widow whose husband had still not died, it was already too late for things to return to their former state. Aureliano Segundo barely ate at home and the only appearances he put in, such as to sleep with his wife, were not enough to convince anyone. One night, out of carelessness, morning found him in Petra Cotes's bed. Fernanda, contrary to expectations, did not reproach him in the least or give the slightest sigh of resentment, but on the same day she sent two trunks with his clothing to the house of his concubine. She sent them in broad daylight and with instructions that they be carried through the middle of the street so that everyone could see them, thinking that her straying husband would be unable to bear the shame and would return to the fold with his head hung low. But that heroic gesture was just one more proof of how poorly Fernanda knew not only the character of her husband but the character of a community that had nothing to do with that of her parents, for everyone who saw the trunks pass by said that it was the natural culmination of a story whose intimacies were known to everyone, and Aureliano Segundo celebrated the freedom he had received with a party that lasted for three days. To the greater disadvantage of his wife, as she was entering into a sad maturity with her somber long dresses, her old-fashioned medals, and her out-of-place pride, the concubine seemed to be bursting with a second youth, clothed in gaudy dresses of natural silk and with her eyes tiger-striped with a glow of vindication. Aureliano Segundo gave himself over to her again with the fury of adolescence, as before, when Petra Cotes had not loved him for himself but because she had him mixed up with his twin brother and as she slept with both of them at the same time she thought that God had given her the good fortune of having a man who could make love like two. The restored passion was so pressing that on more than one occasion they would look each other in the eyes as they were getting ready to eat and without saying anything they would cover their plates and go into the bedroom dying of hunger and of love. Inspired by the things he had seen on his furtive visits to the French matrons, Aureliano Segundo bought Petra Cotes a bed with an archepiscopal canopy, put velvet curtains on the windows, and covered the ceiling and the walls of the bedroom with large rock-crystal mirrors. At the same time he was more of a carouser and spendthrift than ever. On the train, which arrived every day at eleven o'clock, he would receive cases and more cases of champagne and brandy. On the way back from the station he would drag the improvised cumbiamba along in full view of all the people on the way, natives or outsiders, acquaintances or people yet to be known, without distinctions of any kind. Even the slippery Mr. Brown, who talked only in a strange tongue, let himself be seduced by the tempting signs that Aureliano Segundo made him and several times he got dead drunk in Petra Cotes's house and he even made the fierce German shepherd dogs that went everywhere with him dance to some Texas songs that he himself mumbled in one way or another to the accompaniment of the accordion.

  "Cease, cows," Aureliano Segundo shouted at the height of the party. "Cease, because life is short."

  He never looked better, nor had he been loved more, nor had the breeding of his animals been wilder. There was a slaughtering of so many cows, pigs, and chickens for the endless parties that the ground in the courtyard turned black and muddy with so much blood. It was an eternal execution ground of bones and innards, a mud pit of leftovers, and they had to keep exploding dynamite bombs all the time so that the buzzards would not pluck out the guests' eyes. Aureliano Segundo grew fat, purple-colored, turtle-shaped, because of an appetite comparable only to that of Jose Arcadio when he came back from traveling around the world. The prestige of his outlandish voracity, of his immense capacity as a spendthrift, of his unprecedented hospitality went beyond the borders of the swamp and attracted the best-qualified gluttons from all along the coast. Fabulous eaters arrived from everywhere to take part in the irrational tourneys of capacity and resistance that were organized in the house of Petra Cotes. Aureliano Segundo was the unconquered eater until the luckless Saturday when Camila Sagastume appeared, a totemic female known all through the land by the good name of "The Elephant." The duel lasted until dawn on Tuesday. During the first twenty-four hours, having dispatched a dinner of veal, with cassava, yams, and fried bananas, and a case and a half of champagne in addition, Aureliano Segundo was sure of victory. He seemed more enthusiastic, more vital than his imperturbable adversary, who possessed a style that was obviously more professional, but at the same time less emotional for the large crowd that filled the house. While Aureliano Segundo ate with great bites, overcome by the anxiety of victory, The Elephant was slicing her meat with the art of a surgeon and eating it unhurriedly and even with a certain pleasure. She was gigantic and sturdy, but over her colossal form a tenderness of femininity prevailed and she had a face that was so beautiful, hands so fine and well cared for, and such an irresistible personal charm that when Aureliano Segundo saw her enter the house he commented in a low voice that he would have preferred to have the tourney in bed and not at the table. Later on, when he saw her consume a side of veal without breaking a single rule of good table manners, he commented seriously that that delicate, fascinating, and insatiable proboscidian was in a certain way the ideal woman. He was not mistaken. The reputation of a bone crusher that had preceded The Elephant had no basis. She was not a beef cruncher or a bearded lady from a Greek circus, as had been said, but the director of a school of voice. She had learned to eat when she was already the respectable mother of a family, looking for a way for her children to eat better and not by means of any artificial stimulation of their appetites but through the absolute tranquillity of their spirits. Her theory, demonstrated in practice, was based on the principle that a person who had all matters of conscience in perfect shape should be able to eat until overcome by fatigue. And it was for moral reasons and sporting interest that she left her school and her home to compete with a man whose fame as a great, unprincipled eater had spread throughout the country. From the first moment she saw him she saw that Aureliano Segundo would lose not his stomach but his character. At the end of the first night, while The Elephant was boldly going on, Aureliano Segundo was wearing himself out with a great deal of talking and laughing. They slept four hours. On awakening each one had the juice of forty oranges, eight quarts of coffee, and thirty raw eggs. On the second morning, after many hours without sleep and having put away two pigs, a bunch of bananas, and four cases of champagne, The Elephant suspected that Aureliano Segundo had unknowingly discovered the same method as hers, but by the absurd route of total irresponsibility. He was, therefore, more dangerous than she had thought. Nevertheless, when Petra Cotes brought two roast turkeys to the table, Aureliano Segundo was a step away from being stuffed.

  "If you can't, don't eat any more," The Elephant said to him. "Let's call it a tie."

  She said it from her heart, understanding that she could not eat another mouthful either, out of remorse for bringing on the death of her adversary. But Aureliano Segundo interpreted it as another challenge and he filled himself with turkey beyond his incredible capacity. He lost consciousness. He fell face down into the plate filled with bones, frothing at the mouth like a dog, and drowning in moans of agony. He felt, in the midst of the darkness, that they were throwing him from the top of a tower into a bottomless pit and in a last flash of consciousness he realized that at the end of that endless fall death was waiting for him.

  "Take me to Fernanda," he managed to say.

  His friends left him at the house thinking that the
y had helped him fulfill his promise to his wife not to die in his concubine's bed. Petra Cotes had shined his patent leather boots that he wanted to wear in his coffin, and she was already looking for someone to take them when they came to tell her that Aureliano Segundo was out of danger. He did recover, indeed, in less than a week, and two weeks later he was celebrating the fact of his survival with unprecedented festivities. He continued living at Petra Cotes's but he would visit Fernanda every day and sometimes he would stay to eat with the family, as if fate had reversed the situation and had made him the husband of his concubine and the lover of his wife.

  It was a rest for Fernanda. During the boredom of her abandonment her only distractions were the clavichord lessons at siesta time and the letters from her children. In the detailed messages that she sent them every two weeks there was not a single line of truth. She hid her troubles from them. She hid from them the sadness of a house which, in spite of the light on the begonias, in spite of the heaviness at two in the afternoon, in spite of the frequent waves of festivals that came in from the street, was more and more like the colonial mansion of her parents. Fernanda would wander alone among the three living ghosts and the dead ghost of Jose Arcadio Buendia, who at times would come to sit down with an inquisitive attention in the half-light of the parlor while she was playing the clavichord. Colonel Aureliano Buendia was a shadow. Since the last time that he had gone out into the street to propose a war without any future to Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, he left the workshop only to urinate under the chestnut tree. He did not receive any visits except that of the barber every three weeks. He fed on anything that Ursula brought him once a day, and even though he kept on making little gold fishes with the same passion as before, he stopped selling them when he found out that people were buying them not as pieces of jewelry but as historic relics. He made a bonfire in the courtyard of the dolls of Remedios which had decorated their bedroom since their wedding. The watchful Ursula realized what her son was doing but she could not stop him.

  "You have a heart of stone," she told him.

  "It's not a question of a heart," he said. "The room's getting full of moths."

  Amaranta was weaving her shroud. Fernanda did not understand why she would write occasional letters to Meme and even send her gifts and on the other hand did not even want to hear about Jose Arcadio. "They'll die without knowing why," Amaranta answered when she was asked through Ursula, and that answer planted an enigma in Fernanda's heart that she was never able to clarify. Tall, broad-shouldered, proud, always dressed in abundant petticoats with lace and an air of distinction that resisted the years and bad memories, Amaranta seemed to carry the cross of ashes of virginity on her forehead. In reality she carried it on her hand in the black bandage, which she did not take off even to sleep and which she washed and ironed herself. Her life was spent in weaving her shroud. It might have been said that she wove during the day and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it.

  The greatest worry that Fernanda had during her years of abandonment was that Meme would come to spend her first vacation and not find Aureliano Segundo at home. His congestion had put an end to that fear. When Meme returned, her parents had made an agreement that not only would the girl think that Aureliano Segundo was still a domesticated husband but also that she would not notice the sadness of the house. Every year for two months Aureliano Segundo played his role of an exemplary husband and he organized parties with ice cream and cookies which the gay and lively schoolgirl enhanced with the clavichord. It was obvious from then on that she had inherited very little of her mother's character. She seemed more of a second version of Amaranta when the latter had not known bitterness and was arousing the house with her dance steps at the age of twelve or fourteen before her secret passion for Pietro Crespi was to twist the direction of her heart in the end. But unlike Amaranta, unlike all of them, Meme still did not reveal the solitary fate of the family and she seemed entirely in conformity with the world, even when she would shut herself up in the parlor at two in the afternoon to practice the clavichord with an inflexible discipline. It was obvious that she liked the house, that she spent the whole year dreaming about the excitement of the young people her arrival brought around, and that she was not far removed from the festive vocation and hospitable excesses of her father. The first sign of that calamitous inheritance was revealed on her third vacation, when Meme appeared at the house with four nuns and sixty-eight classmates whom she had invited to spend a week with her family on her own initiative and without any previous warning.

  "How awful!" Fernanda lamented. "This child is as much of a barbarian as her father!"

  It was necessary to borrow beds and hammocks from the neighbors, to set up nine shifts at the table, to fix hours for bathing, and to borrow forty stools so that the girls in blue uniforms with masculine buttons would not spend the whole day running from one place to another. The visit was a failure because the noisy schoolgirls would scarcely finish breakfast before they had to start taking turns for lunch and then for dinner, and for the whole week they were able to take only one walk through the plantations. At nightfall the nuns were exhausted, unable to move, give another order, and still the troop of tireless adolescents was in the courtyard singing school songs out of tune. One day they were on the point of trampling Ursula, who made an effort to be useful precisely where she was most in the way. On another day the nuns got all excited because Colonel Aureliano Buendia had urinated under the chestnut tree without being concerned that the schoolgirls were in the courtyard. Amaranta was on the point of causing panic because one of the nuns went into the kitchen as she was salting the soup and the only thing that occurred to her to say was to ask what those handfuls of white powder were.

  K

  "Arsenic," Amaranta answered.

  The night of their arrival the students carried on in such a way, trying to go to the bathroom before they went to bed, that at one o'clock in the morning the last ones were still going in. Fernanda then bought seventy-two chamberpots but she only managed to change the nocturnal problem into a morning one, because from dawn on there was a long line of girls, each with her pot in her hand, waiting for her turn to wash it. Although some of them suffered fevers and several of them were infected by mosquito bites, most of them showed an unbreakable resistance as they faced the most troublesome difficulties, and even at the time of the greatest heat they would scamper through the garden. When they finally left, the flowers were destroyed, the furniture broken, and the walls covered with drawings and writing, but Fernanda pardoned them for all of the damage because of her relief at their leaving. She returned the borrowed beds and stools and kept the seventy-two chamberpots in Melquiades' room. The locked room, about which the spiritual life of the house revolved in former times, was known from that time on as the "chamberpot room." For Colonel Aureliano Buendia it was the most appropriate name, because while the rest of the family was still amazed by the fact that Melquiades' room was immune to dust and destruction, he saw it turned into a dunghill. In any case, it did not seem to bother him who was correct, and if he found out about the fate of the room it was because Fernanda kept passing by and disturbing his work for a whole afternoon as she put away the chamberpots.

  During those days Jose Arcadio Segundo reappeared in the house. He went along the porch without greeting anyone and he shut himself up in the workshop to talk to the colonel. In spite of the fact that she could not see him, Ursula analyzed the clicking of his foreman's boots and was surprised at the unbridgeable distance that separated him from the family, even from the twin brother with whom he had played ingenious games of confusion in childhood and with whom he no longer had any traits in common. He was linear, solemn, and had a pensive air and the sadness of a Saracen and a mournful glow on his face that was the color of autumn. He was the one who most resembled his mother, Santa Sofia de la Piedad. Ursula reproached herself for the habit of forgetting about him
when she spoke about the family, but when she sensed him in the house again and noticed that the colonel let him into the workshop during working hours, she re-examined her old memories and confirmed the belief that at some moment in childhood he had changed places with his twin brother, because it was he and not the other one who should have been called Aureliano. No one knew the details of his life. At one time it was discovered that he had no fixed abode, that he raised fighting cocks at Pilar Ternera's house and that sometimes he would stay there to sleep but that he almost always spent the night in the rooms of the French matrons. He drifted about, with no ties of affection, with no ambitions, like a wandering star in Ursula's planetary system.

  In reality, Jose Arcadio Segundo was not a member of the family, nor would he ever be of any other since that distant dawn when Colonel Gerineldo Marquez took him to the barracks, not so that he could see an execution, but so that for the rest of his life he would never forget the sad and somewhat mocking smile of the man being shot. That was not only his oldest memory, but the only one he had of his childhood. The other one, that of an old man with an old-fashioned vest and a hat with a brim like a crow's wings who told him marvelous things framed in a dazzling window, he was unable to place in any period. It was an uncertain memory, entirely devoid of lessons or nostalgia, the opposite of the memory of the executed man, which had really set the direction of his life and would return to his memory clearer and clearer as he grew older, as if the passage of time were bringing him closer to it. Ursula tried to use Jose Arcadio Segundo to get Colonel Aureliano Buendia to give up his imprisonment. "Get him to go to the movies," she said to him. "Even if he doesn't like the picture, at least he'll breathe a little fresh air." But it did not take her long to realize that he was as insensible to her begging as the colonel would have been, and that they were armored by the same impermeability of affection. Although she never knew, nor did anyone know, what they spoke about in their prolonged sessions shut up in the workshop, she understood that they were probably the only members of the family who seemed drawn together by some affinity.