One Hundred Years of Solitude

  The truth is that not even Jose Arcadio Segundo would have been able to draw the colonel out of his confinement. The invasion of schoolgirls had lowered the limits of his patience. With the pretext that his wedding bedroom was at the mercy of the moths in spite of the destruction of Remedios' appetizing dolls, he hung a hammock in the workshop and then he would leave it only to go into the courtyard to take care of his necessities. Ursula was unable to string together even a trivial conversation with him. She knew that he did not look at the dishes of food but would put them at one end of his workbench while he finished a little fish and it did not matter to him if the soup curdled or if the meat got cold. He grew harder and harder ever since Colonel Gerineldo Marquez refused to back him up in a senile war. He locked himself up inside himself and the family finally thought of him as if he were dead. No other human reaction was seen in him until one October eleventh, when he went to the street door to watch a circus parade. For Colonel Aureliano Buendia it had been a day just like all of those of his last years. At five o'clock in the morning the noise of the toads and crickets outside the wall woke him up. The drizzle had persisted since Saturday and there was no necessity for him to hear their tiny whispering among the leaves of the garden because he would have felt the cold in his bones in any case. He was, as always, wrapped in his woolen blanket and wearing his crude cotton long drawers, which he still wore for comfort, even though because of their musty, old-fashioned style he called them his "Goth drawers." He put on his tight pants but did not button them up, nor did he put the gold button into his shirt collar as he always did, because he planned to take a bath. Then he put the blanket over his head like a cowl, brushed his dripping mustache with his fingers, and went to urinate in the courtyard. There was still so much time left for the sun to come out that Jose Arcadio Buendia was still dozing under the shelter of palm fronds that had been rotted by the rain. He did not see him, as he had never seen him, nor did he hear the incomprehensible phrase that the ghost of his father addressed to him as he awakened, startled by the stream of hot urine that splattered his shoes. He put the bath off for later, not because of the cold and the dampness, but because of the oppressive October mist. On his way back to the workshop he noticed the odor of the wick that Santa Sofia de la Piedad was using to light the stoves, and he waited in the kitchen for the coffee to boil so that he could take along his mug without sugar. Santa Sofia de la Piedad asked him, as on every morning, what day of the week it was, and he answered that it was Tuesday, October eleventh. Watching the glow of the fire as it gilded the persistent woman who neither then nor in any instant of her life seemed to exist completely, he suddenly remembered that on one October eleventh in the middle of the war he had awakened with the brutal certainty that the woman with whom he had slept was dead. She really was and he could not forget the date because she had asked him an hour before what day it was. In spite of the memory he did not have an awareness this time either of to what degree his omens had abandoned him and while the coffee was boiling he kept on thinking out of pure curiosity but without the slightest risk of nostalgia about the woman whose name he had never known and whose face he had not seen because she had stumbled to his hammock in the dark. Nevertheless, in the emptiness of so many women who came into his life in the same way, he did not remember that she was the one who in the delirium of that first meeting was on the point of foundering in her own tears and scarcely an hour before her death had sworn to love him until she died. He did not think about her again or about any of the others after he went into the workshop with the steaming cup, and he lighted the lamp in order to count the little gold fishes, which he kept in a tin pail. There were seventeen of them. Since he had decided not to sell any, he kept on making two fishes a day and when he finished twenty-five he would melt them down and start all over again. He worked all morning, absorbed, without thinking about anything, without realizing that at ten o'clock the rain had grown stronger and someone ran past the workshop shouting to close the doors before the house was flooded, and without thinking even about himself until Ursula came in with his lunch and turned out the light.

  "What a rain!" Ursula said.

  "October," he said.

  When he said it he did not raise his eyes from the first little fish of the day because he was putting in the rubies for the eyes. Only when he finished it and put it with the others in the pail did he begin to drink the soup. Then, very slowly, he ate the piece of meat roasted with onions, the white rice, and the slices of fried bananas all on the same plate together. His appetite did not change under either the best or the harshest of circumstances. After lunch he felt the drowsiness of inactivity. Because of a kind of scientific superstition he never worked, or read, or bathed, or made love until two hours of digestion had gone by, and it was such a deep-rooted belief that several times he held up military operations so as not to submit the troops to the risks of indigestion. So he lay down in the hammock, removing the wax from his ears with a penknife, and in a few minutes he was asleep. He dreamed that he was going into an empty house with white walls and that he was upset by the burden of being the first human being to enter it. In the dream he remembered that he had dreamed the same thing the night before and on many nights over the past years and he knew that the image would be erased from his memory when he awakened because that recurrent dream had the quality of not being remembered except within the dream itself. A moment later, indeed, when the barber knocked at the workshop door, Colonel Aureliano Buendia awoke with the impression that he had fallen asleep involuntarily for a few seconds and that he had not had time to dream anything.

  "Not today," he told the barber. "We'll make it on Friday."

  He had a three-day beard speckled with white hairs, but he did not think it necessary to shave because on Friday he was going to have his hair cut and it could all be done at the same time. The sticky sweat of the unwanted siesta aroused the scars of the sores in his armpits. The sky had cleared but the sun had not come out. Colonel Aureliano Buendia released a sonorous belch which brought back the acidity of the soup to his palate and which was like a command from his organism to throw his blanket over his shoulders and go to the toilet. He stayed there longer than was necessary, crouched over the dense fermentation that was coming out of the wooden box until habit told him that it was time to start work again. During the time he lingered he remembered again that it was Tuesday and that Jose Arcadio Segundo had not come to the workshop because it was payday on the banana company farms. That recollection, as all of those of the past few years, led him to think about the war without his realizing it. He remembered that Colonel Gerineldo Marquez had once promised to get him a horse with a white star on its face and that he had never spoken about it again. Then he went on toward scattered episodes but he brought them back without any judgment because since he could not think about anything else, he had learned to think coldly so that inescapable memories would not touch any feeling. On his way back to the workshop, seeing that the air was beginning to dry out, he decided that it was a good time to take a bath, but Amaranta had got there ahead of him. So he started on the second little fish of the day. He was putting a hook on the tail when the sun came out with such strength that the light creaked like a fishing boat. The air, which had been washed by the three-day drizzle, was filled with flying ants. Then he came to the realization that he felt like urinating and he had been putting it off until he had finished fixing the little fish. He went out into the courtyard at ten minutes after four, when he heard the distant brass instruments, the beating of the bass drum, and the shouting of the children, and for the first time since his youth he knowingly fell into a trap of nostalgia and relived that prodigious afternoon of the gypsies when his father took him to see ice. Santa Sofia de la Piedad dropped what she was doing in the kitchen and ran to the door.

  "It's the circus," she shouted.

  Instead of going to the chestnut tree, Colonel Aureliano Buendia also went to the street door and mingled with the bystanders who were wa
tching the parade. He saw a woman dressed in gold sitting on the head of an elephant. He saw a sad dromedary. He saw a bear dressed like a Dutch girl keeping time to the music with a soup spoon and a pan. He saw the clowns doing cartwheels at the end of the parade and once more he saw the face of his miserable solitude when everything had passed by and there was nothing but the bright expanse of the street and the air full of flying ants with a few onlookers peering into the precipice of uncertainty. Then he went to the chestnut tree, thinking about the circus, and while he urinated he tried to keep on thinking about the circus, but he could no longer find the memory. He pulled his head in between his shoulders like a baby chick and remained motionless with his forehead against the trunk of the chestnut tree. The family did not find him until the following day at eleven o'clock in the morning when Santa Sofia de la Piedad went to throw out the garbage in back and her attention was attracted by the descending vultures.

  MEME'S LAST VACATIONS coincided with the period of mourning for Colonel Aureliano Buendia. The shuttered house was no place for parties. They spoke in whispers, ate in silence, recited the rosary three times a day, and even clavichord practice during the heat of siesta time had a funereal echo. In spite of her secret hostility toward the colonel, it was Fernanda who imposed the rigor of that mourning, impressed by the solemnity with which the government exalted the memory of its dead enemy. Aureliano Segundo, as was his custom, came back to sleep in the house during his daughter's vacation and Fernanda must have done something to regain her privileges as his legitimate wife because the following year Meme found a newborn little sister who against the wishes of her mother had been baptized with the name Amaranta Ursula.

  Meme had finished her course of study. The diploma that certified her as a concert clavichordist was ratified by the virtuosity with which she executed popular melodies of the seventeenth century at the gathering organized to celebrate the completion of her studies and with which the period of mourning came to an end. More than her art, the guests admired her duality. Her frivolous and even slightly infantile character did not seem up to any serious activity, but when she sat down at the clavichord she became a different girl, one whose unforeseen maturity gave her the air of an adult. That was how she had always been. She really did not have any definite vocation, but she had earned the highest grades by means of an inflexible discipline simply in order not to annoy her mother. They could have imposed on her an apprenticeship in any other field and the results would have been the same. Since she had been very small she had been troubled by Fernanda's strictness, her custom of deciding in favor of extremes; and she would have been capable of a much more difficult sacrifice than the clavichord lessons merely not to run up against her intransigence. During the graduation ceremonies she had the impression that the parchment with Gothic letters and illuminated capitals was freeing her from a compromise that she had accepted not so much out of obedience as out of convenience, and she thought that from then on not even the insistent Fernanda would worry any more about an instrument that even the nuns looked upon as a museum fossil. During the first years she thought that her calculations were mistaken because after she had put half the town to sleep, not only in the parlor but also at all charitable functions, school ceremonies, and patriotic celebrations that took place in Macondo, her mother still invited to the house every newcomer whom she thought capable of appreciating her daughter's virtues. Only after the death of Amaranta, when the family shut itself up again in a period of mourning, was Meme able to lock the clavichord and forget the key in some dresser drawer without Fernanda's being annoyed on finding out when and through whose fault it had been lost. Meme bore up under the exhibitions with the same stoicism that she had dedicated to her apprenticeship. It was the price of her freedom. Fernanda was so pleased with her docility and so proud of the admiration that her art inspired that she was never against the house being full of girl friends, her spending the afternoon in the groves, and going to the movies with Aureliano Segundo or some trusted lady as long as the film was approved by Father Antonio Isabel from the pulpit. During those moments of relaxation Meme's real tastes were revealed. Her happiness lay at the other extreme from discipline, in noisy parties, in gossip about lovers, in prolonged sessions with her girl friends, where they learned to smoke and talked about male business, and where they once got their hands on some cane liquor and ended up naked, measuring and comparing the parts of their bodies. Meme would never forget that night when she arrived home chewing licorice lozenges, and without noticing their consternation, sat down at the table where Fernanda and Amaranta were eating dinner without saying a word to each other. She had spent two tremendous hours in the bedroom of a girl friend, weeping with laughter and fear, and beyond all crises she had found the rare feeling of bravery that she needed in order to run away from school and tell her mother in one way or another that she could use the clavichord as an enema. Sitting at the head of the table, drinking a chicken broth that landed in her stomach like an elixir of resurrection, Meme then saw Fernanda and Amaranta wrapped in an accusatory halo of reality. She had to make a great effort not to throw at them their prissiness, their poverty of spirit, their delusions of grandeur. From the time of her second vacation she had known that her father was living at home only in order to keep up appearances, and knowing Fernanda as she did and having arranged later to meet Petra Cotes, she thought that her father was right. She also would have preferred being the daughter of the concubine. In the haziness of the alcohol Meme thought with pleasure about the scandal that would have taken place if she were to express her thoughts at that moment, and the intimate satisfaction of her roguishness was so intense that Fernanda noticed it.

  "What's the matter?" she asked.

  "Nothing," Meme answered. "I was only now discovering how much I loved you both."

  Amaranta was startled by the obvious burden of hate that the declaration carried. But Fernanda felt so moved that she thought she would go mad when Meme awoke at midnight with her head splitting with pain and drowning in vomited gall. She gave her a vial of castor oil, put compresses on her stomach and ice cubes on her head, and she made her stay in bed for five days and follow the diet ordered by the new and outlandish French doctor, who after examining her for more than two hours reached the foggy conclusion that she had an ailment peculiar to women. Having lost her courage, in a miserable state of demoralization, Meme had no other recourse but to bear up under it. Ursula, completely blind by then but still active and lucid, was the only one who guessed the exact diagnosis. "As far as I can see," she thought, "that's the same thing that happens to drunken people." But she not only rejected the idea, she reproached herself for the frivolity of her thought. Aureliano Segundo felt a twinge of conscience when he saw Meme's state of prostration and he promised himself to take better care of her in the future. That was how the relationship of jolly comradeship was born between father and daughter, which freed him for a time from the bitter solitude of his revels and freed her from Fernanda's watchful eye without the necessity of provoking the domestic crisis that seemed inevitable by then. At that time Aureliano Segundo postponed any appointments in order to be with Meme, to take her to the movies or the circus, and he spent the greater part of his idle time with her. In recent times his annoyance with the absurd obesity that prevented him from tying his shoes and his abusive satisfaction with all manner of appetites had begun to sour his character. The discovery of his daughter restored his former joviality and the pleasure of being with her was slowly leading him away from dissipation. Meme was entering a fruitful age. She was not beautiful, as Amaranta had never been, but on the other hand she was pleasant, uncomplicated, and she had the virtue of making a good impression on people from the first moment. She had a modern spirit that wounded the antiquated sobriety and poorly disguised miserly heart of Fernanda, and that, on the other hand, Aureliano Segundo took pleasure in developing. It was he who resolved to take her out of the bedroom she had occupied since childhood, where the fearful eyes of
the saints still fed her adolescent terrors, and he furnished for her a room with a royal bed, a large dressing table, and velvet curtains, not realizing that he was producing a second version of Petra Cotes's room. He was so lavish with Meme that he did not even know how much money he gave her because she herself would take it out of his pockets, and he kept abreast of every kind of new beauty aid that arrived in the commissary of the banana company. Meme's room became filled with pumice-stone cushions to polish her nails with, hair curlers, toothbrushes, drops to make her eyes languid, and so many and such new cosmetics and artifacts of beauty that every time Fernanda went into the room she was scandalized by the idea that her daughter's dressing table must have been the same as those of the French matrons. Nevertheless, Fernanda divided her time in those days between little Amaranta Ursula, who was mischievous and sickly, and a touching correspondence with the invisible physicians. So that when she noticed the complicity between father and daughter the only promise she extracted from Aureliano Segundo was that he would never take Meme to Petra Cotes's house. It was a meaningless demand because the concubine was so annoyed with the comradeship between her lover and his daughter that she did not want anything to do with her, Petra was tormented by an unknown fear, as if instinct were telling her that Meme, by just wanting it, could succeed in what Fernanda had been unable to do: deprive her of a love that by then she considered assured until death. For the first time Aureliano Segundo had to tolerate the harsh expressions and the violent tirades of his concubine, and he was even afraid that his wandering trunks would make the return journey to his wife's house. That did not happen. No one knew a man better than Petra Cotes knew her lover and she knew that the trunks would remain where they had been sent because if Aureliano Segundo detested anything it was complicating his life with modifications and changes. So the trunks stayed where they were and Petra Cotes set about re-conquering the husband by sharpening the only weapons that his daughter could not use on him. It too was an unnecessary effort because Meme had no desire to intervene in her father's affairs and if she had, it would certainly have been in favor of the concubine. She had no time to bother anybody. She herself swept her room and made her bed, as the nuns had taught her. In the morning she took care of her clothes, sewing on the porch or using Amaranta's old pedal machine. While the others were taking their siestas she would practice the clavichord for two hours, knowing that the daily sacrifice would keep Fernanda calm. For the same reason she continued giving concerts at church fairs and school parties, even though the requests were less and less frequent. At nightfall she would fix herself up, put on one of her simple dresses and her stiff high shoes, and if she had nothing to do with her father she would go to the homes of her girl friends, where she would stay until dinnertime. It was rare that Aureliano Segundo would not call for her then to take her to the movies.