One Hundred Years of Solitude 百年孤独 Chapter 17

úRSULA HAD to make a great effort to fulfill¹ her promise to die when it cleared. The waves of lucidity² that were so scarce during the rains became more frequent after August, when an and wind began to blow and suffocated⁴ the rose bushes and petrified⁵ the piles of mud, and ended up scattering⁶ over Macon-do the burning dust that covered the rusted⁷ zinc⁸ roofs and the age-old almond trees forever. úrsula cried in lamentation⁹ when she discovered that for more than three years she had been a plaything for the children. She washed her painted face, took off the strips of brightly colored cloth, the dried lizards¹⁰ and frogs, and the rosaries and old Arab necklaces that they had hung all over her body, and for the first time since the death of Amaranta she got up out of bed without anybody's help to join in the family life once more. The spirit of her invincible¹² heart guided her through the shadows. Those who noticed her stumbling and who bumped into the archangelic arm she kept raised at head level thought that she was having trouble body, but they still did not think she was blind. She did not need to see to realize that the flower beds, cultivated with such care since the first rebuilding, had been destroyed by the rain and ruined by Aureli-ano Segun-do's excavations¹³, and that the walls and the cement of the floors were cracked, the furniture mushy and discolored, the doors off their hinges, and the family menaced by a spirit of resignation and despair that was inconceivable in her time. Feeling her way along through the empty bedrooms she perceived the continuous rumble¹⁴ of the termites¹⁵ as they carved the wood, the snipping¹⁶ of the moths¹⁷ in the clothes closets, and the devastating¹⁸ noise of the enormous red ants that had prospered¹⁹ during the deluge²⁰ and were undermining the foundations of the house. One day she opened the trunk with the saints and had to ask Santa Sofía de la Piedad to get off her body the cockroaches²¹ that jumped out and that had already turned the clothing to dust. "A person can't live in neglect like this," she said. "If we go on like this we'll be devoured²² by animals." From then on she did not have a moment of repose²³. Up before dawn, she would use anybody available, even the children. She put the few articles of clothing that were still usable out into the sun, she drove the cockroaches off with powerful insecticide attacks, she scratched out the veins²⁴ that the termites had made on doors and windows and asphyxiated²⁵ the ants in their anthills quicklime. The fever of restoration finally brought her to the forgotten rooms. She cleared out the rubble²⁶ cobwebs in the room where José Arcadio Buendía had lost his wits looking for the Philosopher's stone, she put the silver shop which had been upset by the soldiers in order, and lastly she asked for the keys to Melquíades' room to see what state it was in. Faithful to the wishes of José Arcadio Segun-do, who had forbidden anyone to come in unless there was a clear indication that he had died, Santa Sofía de la Piedad tried all kinds of subterfuges²⁷ to throw úrsula off the track. But so inflexible²⁸ was her determination not to surrender even the most remote corner of the house to the insects that she knocked down every obstacle in her path, and after three days of insistence²⁹ she succeeded in getting them to open the door for her. She had to hold on to the doorjamb so that the stench would not knock her over, but she needed only two seconds to remember that the school-girls' seventy-two chamberpots were in there and that on one of the rainy nights a patrol of soldiers had searched the house looking for José Arcadio Segun-do and had been unable to find him.

 

"Lord save us!" she exclaimed, as if she could see everything. "So much trouble teaching you good manners and you end up living like a pig."

 

José Arcadio Segun-do was still reading over the parchments. The only thing visible in the intricate tangle³⁰ of hair was the teeth striped with green dime³¹ and his motionless eyes. When he recognized his great--grandmother's voice he turned his head toward the door, tried to smile, and without knowing it repeated an old phrase of úrsula's.

 

"What did you expect?" he murmured. "Time passes."

 

"That's how it goes," úrsula said, "but not so much."

 

When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía had given in his death cell, and once again she shuddered³² with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle. But even then she did not give resignation a chance. She scolded José Arcadio Segun-do as if he were a child and insisted that he take a bath and shave and lend a hand in fixing up the house. The simple idea of abandoning the room that had given him peace terrified José Arcadio Segun-do. He shouted that there was no human power capable of making him go out because he did not want to see the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people which left Macon-do every day at dusk on its way to the sea. "They were all of those who were at the station," he shouted. "Three thousand four hundred eight." Only then did úrsula realize that he was in a world of shadows more impenetrable than hers, as unreachable and solitary³³ as that of his great-grandfather. She left him in the room, but she succeeded in getting them to leave the padlock off, clean it every day, throw the chamberpots away except for one, and to keep José Arcadio Segun-do as clean and presentable as his great--grandfather had been during his long captivity³⁴ under the chestnut³⁵ tree. At first Fernanda interpreted that bustle³⁶ as an attack of senile madness and it was difficult for her to suppress her exasperation³⁷. But about that time José Arcadio told that he planned to come to Macon-do from Rome before taking his final vows³⁸, and the good news filled her with such enthusiasm that from morning to night she would be seen watering the flowers four times a day so that her son would not have a bad impression of the house. It was that same incentive³⁹ which induced her to speed up her correspondence with the invisible doctors and to replace the pots of ferns and oregano and the begonias on the porch even before úrsula found out that they had been destroyed by Aureli-ano Segun-do's exterminating⁴⁰ fury. Later on she sold the silver service and bought ceramic⁴¹ dishes, pewter bowls and soup spoons, and alpaca tablecloths⁴², and with them brought poverty to the cupboards that had been accustomed to India Company chinaware and Bohemian crystal. úrsula always tried to go a step beyond. "Open the windows and the doors," she shouted. "Cook some meat and fish, buy the largest turtles around, let strangers come and spread their mats in the corners and urinate in the rose bushes and sit down to eat as many times as they want and belch⁴⁴ and rant¹¹ and muddy everything with their boots, and let them do whatever they want to us, because that's the only way to drive off rain." But it was a vain illusion. She was too old then and living on borrowed time to repeat the miracle of the little candy animals, and none of her descendants had inherited her strength. The house stayed closed on Fernanda's orders.

 

Aureli-ano Segun-do, who had taken his trunks back to the house of Petra Cotes, barely had enough means to see that the family did not starve to death. With the raffling⁴⁵ of the mule⁴⁶, Petra Cotes and he bought some more animals with which they managed to set up a primitive⁴⁷ lottery⁴⁸ business. Aureli-ano Segun-do would go from house to house selling the tickets that he himself painted with colored ink to make them more attractive and convincing, and perhaps he did not realize that many people bought them out of gratitude⁴⁹ and most of them out of pity. Nevertheless, even the most pitying purchaser was getting a chance to win a pig for twenty cents or a calf⁵⁰ for thirty-two, and they became so hopeful that on Tuesday nights Petra Cotes's courtyard overflowed⁵¹ with people waiting for the moment when a child picked at random⁵² drew the winning number from a bag. It did not take long to become a weekly fair, for at dusk food and drink stands would be set up in the courtyard and many of those who were favored would slaughter⁵³ the animals they had won right there on the condition that someone else supply the liquor and music, so that without having wanted to, Aureli-ano Segun-do suddenly found himself playing the accordion⁵⁴ again and participating in modest tourneys of voracity⁵⁵. Those humble⁵⁶ replicas⁵⁷ of the revelry of former times served to show Aureli-ano Segun-do himself how much his spirits had declined and to what a degree his skill as a masterful carouser⁵⁸ had dried up. He was a changed man. The two hundred forty pounds that he had attained⁵⁹ during the days when he had been challenged by The Elephant had been reduced to one hundred fifty-six; the glowing and bloated tortoise face had turned into that of an iguana⁶⁰, and he was always on the verge⁶¹ of boredom⁶² and fatigue⁶³. For Petra Cotes, however, he had never been a better man than at that time, perhaps because the pity that he inspired was mixed with love, and because of the feeling of solidarity⁶⁴ that misery⁶⁵ aroused in both of them. The broken-down bed ceased to be the scene of wild activities and was changed into an intimate refuge. Freed of the repetitious mirrors, which had been auctioned⁶⁶ off to buy animals for the lottery, and from the lewd⁶⁷ damasks and velvets, which the mule had eaten, they would stay up very late with the innocence⁶⁸ of two sleepless⁶⁹ grandparents, taking advantage of the time to draw up accounts and put away pennies which they formerly⁷⁰ wasted just for the sake of it. Sometimes the cock's crow would find them piling unpiling coins, taking a bit away from here to put there, to that this bunch would be enough to keep Fernanda happy and that would be for Amaranta úrsula's shoes, and that other one for Santa Sofía de la Piedad, who had not had a new dress since the time of all the noise, and this to order the coffin⁷¹ if úrsula died, and this for the coffee which was going up a cent a pound in price every three months, and this for the sugar which sweetened less every day, and this for the lumber⁷² which was still wet from the rains, and this other one for the paper and the colored ink to make tickets with, and what was left over to pay off the winner of the April calf whose hide they had miraculously⁷³ saved when it came down with a symptomatic carbuncle just when all of the numbers in the raffle⁷⁴ had already been sold. Those rites⁷⁵ of poverty were so pure that they nearly always set aside the largest share for Fernanda, and they did not do so out of remorse⁷⁶ or charity, but because her wellbeing was more important to them than their own. What was really happening to them, although neither of them realized it, was that they both thought of Fernanda as the daughter that they would have liked to have and never did, to the point where on a certain occasion they resigned themselves to eating crumbs⁷⁷ for three days, so that she could buy a Dutch tablecloth⁴³. Nevertheless, no matter how much they killed themselves with work, no matter how much money they eked⁷⁸ out, and no matter how many schemes they thought of, their guardian⁷⁹ angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just enough to live with. During the waking hours when the accounts were bad. they wondered what had happened in the world for the animals not to breed with the same drive as before, why money slipped through their fingers, and why people who a short time before had burned rolls of bills in the carousing⁸⁰ considered it highway robbery to charge twelve cents for a raffle of six hens. Aureli-ano Segun-do thought without saying so that the evil was not in the world but in some hidden place in the mysterious heart of Petra Cotes, where something had happened during the deluge that had turned the animals sterile⁸¹ and made money scarce. Intrigued⁸² by that enigma⁸³, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition⁸⁴ that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy⁸⁵ wealth, the unbridled fornication as an annoyance⁸⁶ and they lamented⁸⁷ that it had cost them so much of their lives to fund the paradise of shared solitude⁸⁸. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two wornout old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.

 

The raffles⁸⁹ never got very far. At first Aureli-ano Segun-do would spend three days of the week shut up in what had been his rancher's office drawing ticket after ticket, Painting with a fair skill a red cow, a green pig, or a group of blue hens, according to the animal being raffled⁹⁰, and he would sketch⁹¹ out a good imitation of printed numbers and the name that Petra Cotes thought good to call the business: Divine Providence⁹² Raffles. But with time he felt so tired after drawing up to two thousand tickets a week that he had the animals, the name, and the numbers put on rubber stamps, and then the work was reduced to moistening them on pads of different colors. In his last years it occurred to him to substitute riddles⁹³ for the numbers so that the prize could be shared by all of those who guessed it, but the system turned out to be so complicated and was open to so much suspicion that he gave it up after the second attempt.

 

Aureli-ano Segun-do was so busy trying to maintain the prestige of his raffles that he barely had time to see the children. Fernanda put Amaranta úrsula in a small private school where they admitted only six girls, but she refused to allow Aureli-ano to go to public school. She considered that she had already relented too much in letting him leave the room. Besides, the schools in those days accepted only the legitimate⁹⁵ offspring of Catholic marriages on the birth certificate that had been pinned to Aureli-ano's clothing when they brought him to the house he was registered as a foundling. So he remained shut In at the mercy of Santa Sofía de la Piedad's loving eyes and úrsula's mental quirks⁹⁶, learning in the narrow world of the house whatever his grandmothers explained to him. He was delicate, thin, with a curiosity that unnerved the adults, but unlike the inquisitive⁹⁷ and sometimes clairvoyant⁹⁸ look that the colonel had at his age, his look was blinking and somewhat distracted. While Amaranta úrsula was in kindergarten, he would hunt earthworms torture insects in the garden. But once when Fernanda caught him putting scorpions⁹⁹ in a box to put in úrsula's bed, she locked him up in Meme's old room, where he spent his solitary hours looking through the pictures in the encyclopedia¹⁰⁰. úrsula found him there one afternoon when she was going about sprinkling the house with distilled¹⁰¹ water and a bunch of nettles¹⁰², and in spite of the fact that she had been with him many times she asked him who he was.

 

She had confused him with her son again, because the hot wind that came after the deluge and had brought occasional waves of lucidity to úrsula's brain had passed. She never got her reason back. When she went into the bedroom she found Petronila Iguarán there with the bothersome crinolines and the beaded jacket that she put on for formal visits, and she found Tranquilina Maria Miniata Alacoque Buendía, her grand-mother, fanning herself with a peacock feather in her invalid's rocking chair, and her great-grandfather Aure-liano Arcadio Buendía, with his imitation dolman of the viceregal guard, and Aureli-ano Iguarán, her father, who had invented a prayer to make the worms shrivel up and drop off cows, and her timid mother, and her cousin with the pig's tail, and José Arcadio Buendía, and her dead sons, all sitting in chairs lined up against the wall as if it were a wake and not a visit. She was tying a colorful string chatter¹⁰⁵ together, commenting on things from many separate places and many different times, so that when Amaranta úrsula returned from school Aureli-ano grew tired of the encyclopedia, they would find her sitting on her bed, talking to herself and lost in a labyrinth¹⁰⁶ of dead people. "Fire!" she shouted once in terror and for an instant panic spread through the house, but what she was telling about was the burning of a barn that she had witnessed when she was four years old. She finally mixed up the past with the present in such a way that in the two or three waves of lucidity that she had before she died, no one knew for certain whether she was speaking about she felt or what she remembered. Little by little she was shrinking, turning into a fetus¹⁰⁷, becoming mummified in life to the point that in her last months she was a cherry raisin¹⁰⁸ lost inside of her nightgown, and the arm that she always kept raised looked like the paw of a marimonda monkey. She was motionless for several days, and Santa Sofía de la Piedad had to shake her to convince herself that she was alive and sat her on her lap to feed her a few spoonfuls of sugar water. She looked like a newborn old woman. Amaranta úrsula Aureli-ano would take her in and out of the bedroom, they would lay her on the altar to see if she was any larger than the Christ child, and one afternoon they hid her in a closet in the Pantry where the rats could have eaten her. One Palm Sunday they went into the bedroom while Fernanda was in church and carried úrsula out by the neck and ankles.

 

"Poor great-great-grandmother," Amaranta úrsula said. "She died of old age."

 

úrsula was startled.

 

"I'm alive!" she said.

 

"You can see." Amaranta úrsula said, suppressing her laughter, "that she's not even breathing."

 

"I'm talking!" úrsula shouted.

 

"She can't even talk," Aureli-ano said. "She died like a little cricket."

 

Then úrsula gave in to the evidence. "My God," she exclaimed in a low voice. "So this is what it's like to be dead." She started an endless, stumbling, deep prayer that lasted more than two days, and that by Tuesday had degenerated¹⁰⁹ into a hodgepodge of requests to God and bits of practical advice to stop the red ants from bringing the house down, to keep the lamp burning by Remedios' daguerreotype¹¹⁰, and never to let any Buendía marry a person of the same blood because their children would be born with the tail of a pig. Aureli-ano Segun-do tried to take advantage of her delirium¹¹¹ to get her to ten him where the gold was buried, but his entreaties¹¹² were useless once more "When the owner appears," úrsula said, "God will illuminate¹¹³ him so that he will find it." Santa Sofía de la Piedad had the certainty that they would find her dead from one moment to the next, because she noticed during those days a certain confusion in nature: the roses smelled like goosefoot, a pod of chick peas fell down and the beans lay on the ground in a perfect geometrical pattern in the shape of a starfish and one night she saw a row of luminous¹¹⁴ orange disks pass across the sky.

 

They found her dead on the morning of Good Friday. The last time that they had helped her calculate her age, during the time the banana company, she had estimated it as between one hundred fifteen and one hundred twenty-two. They buried her in a coffin that was not much larger than the basket in which Aureli-ano had arrived, and very few people were at the funeral, partly because there wet not many left who remembered her, and partly because it was so hot that noon that the birds in their confusion were running into walls like day pigeons and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms.

 

At first they thought it was a plague. Housewives were exhausted¹¹⁵ from sweeping¹¹⁶ away so many dead birds, especially at siesta¹¹⁷ time, and the men dumped them into the river by the cartload. On Easter Sunday the hundred--year-old Father Antonio Isabel stated from the pulpit that the death of the birds was due to the evil influence of the Wandering Jew, whom he himself had seen the night before. He described him as a cross between a billy goat and a female heretic, an infernal beast whose breath scorched¹¹⁸ the air and whose look brought on the birth of monsters in newlywed women. There were not many who paid attention to his apocalyptic¹¹⁹ talk, for the town was convinced that the priest was rambling¹²⁰ because of his age. But one woman woke everybody up at dawn on Wednesday because she found the tracks of a biped with a cloven hoof¹²¹. They were so clear and unmistakable that those who went to look at them had no doubt about the existence of a fearsome creature similar to the one described by the parish priest and they got together to set traps in their courtyards. That was how they managed to capture it. Two weeks after úrsula's death, Petra Cotes and Aureli-ano Segun-do woke up frightened by the especially loud bellowing¹²² of a calf that was coming from nearby. When they got there a group of men were already pulling the monster off the sharpened stakes they had set in the bottom of a pit covered with dry leaves, and it stopped lowing. It was as heavy as an ox in spite of the fact that it was no taller than a young steer¹²³, and a green and greasy¹²⁴ liquid flowed from its wounds. Its body was covered with rough hair, plagued with small ticks, and the skin was hardened with the scales of a remora fish, but unlike the priest's description, its human parts were more like those of a sickly angel than a man, for its hands were tense and agile¹²⁵, its eyes large and gloomy, and on its shoulder blades it had the scarredover and calloused¹²⁶ stumps¹²⁷ of powerful wings which must have been chopped off by a woodsman's ax. They hung it to an almond tree in the square by its ankles so that everyone could see it, and when it began to rot they burned it in a bonfire, for they could not determine whether its bastard¹²⁸ nature was that of an animal to be thrown into the river or a human being to be buried. It was never established whether it had really caused the death of the birds, but the newly married women did not bear the predicted monsters, nor did the intensity¹²⁹ the heat decrease.

 

Rebeca died at the end of that year. Argénida, her lifelong servant, asked the authorities for help to knock down the door to the bedroom where her mistress had been locked in for three days, and they found her, on her solitary bed, curled up like a shrimp¹³⁰, with her head bald from ringworm and her finger in her mouth. Aureli-ano Segun-do took charge of the funeral and tried to restore the house in order to sell it, but the destruction was so far advanced in it that the walls became scaly¹³¹ as soon as they were painted and there was not enough mortar¹³² to stop the weeds from cracking the floors the ivy¹³³ from rotting the beams.

 

That was how everything went after the deluge. The indolence of the people was in contrast to the voracity of oblivion, which little by little was undermining memories in a pitiless way, to such an extreme that at that time, on another anniversary of the Treaty of Neerlandia, some emissaries from the president of the republic arrived in Macon-do to award at last the decoration rejected several times by Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía, and they spent a whole afternoon looking for someone who could tell them where they could find one of his descendants. Aureli-ano Segun-do was tempted¹³⁴ to accept it, thinking that it was a medal of solid gold, but Petra Cotes convinced him that it was not proper when the emissaries already had some proclamations and speeches ready for the ceremony. It was also around that time that the gypsies returned, the last heirs to Melquíades' science, and they found the town so defeated and its inhabitants so removed from the rest of the world that once more they went through the houses dragging magnetized ingots as if that really were the Babylonian wise men's latest discovery, and once again they concentrated the sun's rays with the giant magnifying glass, and there was no lack of people standing¹³⁵ open-mouthed watching kettles fall and pots roll and who paid fifty cents to be startled as a gypsy woman put in her false teeth took them out again. A broken-down yellow train that neither brought anyone in nor took anyone out and that scarcely paused at the deserted¹³⁶ station was the only thing that was left of the long train to which Mr. Brown would couple his glass-topped coach with the episcopal lounging chairs and of the fruit trains with one hundred twenty cars which took a whole afternoon to pass by. The ecclesiastical delegates who had come to investigate the report of the strange death of the birds and the sacrifice the Wandering Jew found Father Antonio Isabel playing blind man's buff with the children, and thinking that his report was the product of a hallucination, they took him off to an asylum¹³⁷. A short time later they sent Father Augusto Angel, a crusader of the new breed, intransigent, audacious, daring, who personally rang the bells several times a day so that the peoples spirits would not get drowsy¹³⁸, and who went from house to house waking up the sleepers¹³⁹ to go to mass but before a year was out he too was conquered by the negligence¹⁴⁰ that one breathed in with the air, by the hot dust that made everything old and clogged¹⁴¹ up, and by the drowsiness¹⁴² caused by lunchtime meatballs in the unbearable¹⁴³ heat of siesta time.

 

With úrsula's death the house again fell into a neglect from which it could not be rescued even by a will as resolute¹⁴⁴ and vigorous as that of Amaranta úrsula, who many years later, being a happy, modern woman without prejudices, with her feet on the ground, opened doors and windows in order to drive away the rain, restored the garden, exterminated¹⁴⁵ the red ants who were already walking across the porch in broad daylight, and tried in vain to reawaken the forgotten spirit of hospitality. Fernanda's cloistered¹⁴⁶ passion built in impenetrable dike¹⁴⁸ against úrsula's torrential hundred years. Not only did she refuse to open doors when the arid¹⁴⁹ wind passed through, but she had the windows nailed shut with boards in the shape of a cross, obeying the paternal¹⁵⁰ order of being buried alive. The expensive correspondence with the invisible doctors ended in failure. After numerous postponements, she shut herself up in her room on the date and hour agreed upon, covered only by a white sheet and with her head pointed¹⁵¹ north, and at one o'clock in the morning she felt that they were covering her head with a handkerchief soaked in a glacial liquid. When she woke up the sun was shining in the window and she had a barbarous stitch in the shape of an arc that began at her crotch and ended at her sternum. But before she could complete the prescribed rest she received a disturbed letter from the invisible doctors, who mid¹⁰⁴ they had inspected her for six hours without finding anything that corresponded to the symptoms so many times and so scrupulously¹⁵² described by her. Actually, her pernicious habit of not calling things by their names had brought about a new confusion, for the only thing that the telepathic surgeons had found was a drop in the uterus which could be corrected by the use of a pessary. The disillusioned¹⁵³ Fernanda tried to obtain more precise information, but the unknown correspondents did not answer her letters any more. She felt so defeated by the weight of an unknown word that she decided¹⁵⁴ to put shame behind her and ask what a pessary was, and only then did she discover that the French doctor had hanged himself to a beam three months earlier and had been buried against the wishes the townspeople by a former companion in arms of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía. Then she confided¹⁵⁵ in her son José Arcadio and the latter sent her the pessaries from Rome along with a pamphlet explaining their use, which she flushed down the toilet after committing it to memory so that no one would learn the nature of her troubles. It was a useless precaution because the only people who lived in the house scarcely paid any attention to her. Santa Sofía de la Piedad was wandering about in her solitary old age, cooking the little that they ate and almost completely dedicated¹⁵⁶ to the care of José Arcadio Segun-do. Amaranta úrsula, who had inherited certain attractions of Remedios the Beauty, spent the time that she had formerly wasted tormenting¹⁵⁷ úrsula at her schoolwork, and she began to show good judgment¹⁵⁸ and a dedication¹⁵⁹ to study that brought back to Aureli-ano Segun-do the high hopes that Meme had inspired in him. He had promised her to send her to finish her studies in Brussels, in accord with a custom established during the time of the banana company, and that illusion had brought to attempt to revive the lands devastated¹⁶⁰ by the deluge. The few times that he appeared at the house were for Amaranta úrsula, because with time he had become a stranger to Fernan-da and little Aureli-ano was becoming withdrawn¹⁶¹ as he approached puberty. Aureli-ano Segun-do had faith that Fernanda's heart would soften¹⁶² with old age so that the child could join in the life of the town where no one certainly would make any effort to speculate suspiciously about his origins. But Aureli-ano himself seemed to prefer the cloister¹⁴⁷ of solitude and he did not show the least desire to know the world that began at the street door of the house. When úrsula had the door of Melquíades' room opened he began to linger about it, peeping through the half-opened door, and no one knew at what moment he became close to José Arcadio Segun-do in a link of mutual¹⁶³ affection. Aureli-ano Segun-do discovered that friendship a long time after it had begun, when he heard the child talking about the killing¹⁶⁴ at the station. It happened once when someone at the table complained about the ruin into which the town had sunk when the banana company had abandoned it, and Aureli-ano contradicted him with maturity¹⁶⁵ and with the vision of a grown person. His point of view, contrary to the general interpretation¹⁶⁶, was that Macon-do had been a prosperous place and well on its way until it was disordered and corrupted¹⁶⁷ and suppressed by the banana company, whose engineers brought on the deluge as a pretext¹⁶⁸ to avoid promises made to the workers. Speaking with such good sense that to Fernanda he was like a sacrilegious parody¹⁶⁹ of Jews among the wise men, the child described with precise and convincing details how the army had machine-gunned more than three thousand workers penned up by the station and how they loaded the bodies onto a two-hundred-car train and threw them into the sea. Convinced as most people were by the official version that nothing had happened, Fernanda was scandalized with the idea that the child had inherited the anarchist¹⁷⁰ ideas of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía and told him to be quiet. Aureli-ano Segun-do, on the othand, recognized his twin brother's version. Actually, in spite the fact that everyone considered him mad, José Arcadio Segun-do was at that time the most lucid³ inhabitant of the house. He taught little Aureli-ano how to read and write, initiated¹⁷¹ him in the study of the parchments, and he inculcated him with such a personal interpretation of what the banana company had meant to Macon-do that many years later, when Aureli-ano became part of the world, one would have thought that he was telling a hallucinated version, because it was radically¹⁷² opposed to the false one that historians had created and consecrated¹⁷³ in the schoolbooks. In the small isolated¹⁷⁴ room where the arid air never penetrated¹⁷⁵, nor the dust, nor the heat, both had the atavistic vision of an old man, his back to the window, wearing a hat with a brim like the wings of a crow who spoke¹⁷⁶ about the world many years before they had been born. Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room. José Arcadio Segun-do had managed, furthermore, to classify the cryptic¹⁷⁷ letters of the parchments. He was certain that they corresponded to an alphabet of forty-seven to fifty-three characters, which when separated looked like scratching and scribbling¹⁷⁸, and which in the fine hand of Melquíades looked like pieces of clothing put out to dry on a line. Aureli-ano remembered having seen a similar table in the English encyclopedia, so he brought it to the room to compare it with that of José Arcadio Segun-do. They were indeed the same.

 

Around the time of the riddle⁹⁴ lottery, Aureli-ano Segun-do began waking up with a knot in his throat, as if he were repressing a desire to weep. Petra Cotes interpreted it as one more of so many upsets brought on by the bad situation, and every morning for over a year she would touch his palate with a dash of honey and give him some radish syrup¹⁷⁹. When the knot in his throat became so oppressive that it was difficult for him to breathe, Aureli-ano Segun-do visited Pilar Ternera to see if she knew of some herb that would give him relief. The dauntless grandmother, who had reached a hundred years of age managing a small, clandestine¹⁸⁰ brothel, did not trust therapeutic¹⁸¹ superstitions¹⁸², so she turned the matter over to her cards. She saw the queen of diamonds with her throat wounded by the steel of the jack¹⁰³ of spades, and she deduced that Fernanda was trying to get her husband back home by means the discredited¹⁸³ method of sticking pins into his picture but that she had brought on an internal tumor¹⁸⁴ because clumsy knowledge of the black arts. Since Aureli-ano Segun-do had no other pictures except those of his wedding and the copies were all in the family album, he kept searching all through the house when his wife was not looking, and finally, in the bottom of the dresser, he came across a half-dozen pessaries in their original boxes. Thinking that the small red rubber rings were objects witchcraft¹⁸⁵ he put them in his pocket so that Pilar Ternera could have a look at them. She could not determine their nature, but they looked so suspicious to her that in any case she burned them in a bonfire she built in the courtyard. In order to conjure¹⁸⁶ away Fernanda's alleged¹⁸⁷ curse, she told Aureli-ano Segun-do that he should soak a broody hen and bury her alive under the chestnut tree, and he did it with such good faith that when he finished hiding the turned-up earth with dried leaves he already felt that he was breathing better. For part, Fernanda interpreted the disappearance¹⁸⁸ as a reprisal¹⁸⁹ by the invisible doctors and she sewed a pocket of casing to the inside of her camisole where she kept the new pessaries that son sent her.

 

Six months after he had buried the hen, Aureli-ano Segun-do woke up at midnight with an attack coughing and the feeling that he was being strangled within by the claws of a crab¹⁹⁰. It was then that he understood that for all of the magical pessaries that he destroyed and all the conjuring¹⁹¹ hens that he soaked, the single and sad piece of truth was that he was dying. He did not tell anyone. Tormented¹⁹² by the fear of dying without having sent Amaranta úrsula to Brussels, he worked as he had never done, and instead of one he made three weekly raffles. From very early in the morning he could be seen going through the town, even in the most outlying and miserable¹⁹³ sections, trying to sell tickets with an anxiety that could only be conceivable in a dying man. "Here's Divine Providence," he hawked¹⁹⁴. "Don't let it get away, because it only comes every hundred years." He made pitiful efforts to appear gay, pleasant, talkative, but it was enough to see his sweat and paleness to know that his heart was not in it. Sometimes he would go to vacant lots, where no one could see him, and sit down to rest from the claws that were tearing him apart inside. Even at midnight he would be in the red-light district trying to console with predictions of good luck the lonely women who were weeping beside their phonographs. "This number hasn't come up in four months," he told them, showing them the tickets. "Don't let it get away, life is shorter than you think." They finally lost respect for him, made fun of him, and in his last months they no longer called him Don Aureli-ano, as they had always done, but they called him Mr. Divine Providence right to his face. His voice was becoming filled with wrong notes. It was getting out of tune¹⁹⁵, and it finally diminished into the growl¹⁹⁶ of a dog, but he still had the drive to see that there should be no diminishing of the hope people brought to Petra Cates's courtyard. As he lost his voice, however, and realized that in a short time he would be unable to bear the pain, he began to understand that it was not through raffled pigs and goats that his daughter would get to Brussels, so he conceived the idea of organizing the fabulous¹⁹⁷ raffle the lands destroyed by the deluge, which could easily be restored by a person the money to do so. It was such a spectacular undertaking¹⁹⁸ that the mayor himself lent his aid by announcing it in a proclamation, and associations were formed to buy tickets at one hundred pesos apiece and they were sold out in less than a week. The night of the raffle the winners held a huge celebration, comparable only to those of the good days of the banana company, Aureli-ano Segun-do, for the last time, played the forgotten songs of Francisco the Man on the accordion, but he could no longer sing them.

 

Two months later Amaranta úrsula went to Brussels. Aureli-ano Segun-do gave her not only the money from the special raffle, but also what he had managed to put aside over the previous months and what little he had received from the sale of the pianola, the clavichord¹⁹⁹, and other junk that had fallen into disrepair. According to his calculations, that sum would be enough for her studies, so that all that was lacking was the price of her fare back home. Fernanda was against the trip until the last moment, scandalized by the idea that Brussels was so close to Paris and its perdition, but she calmed down with the letter that Father Angel gave addressed to a boardinghouse run by nuns²⁰⁰ for Catholic young ladies where Amaranta úrsula promised to stay until her studies were completed. Furthermore, the parish priest arranged for her to travel under the care of a group of Franciscan nuns who were going to Toledo, where they hoped to find dependable people to accompany her to Belgium. While the urgent correspondence that made the coordination²⁰¹ possible went forward, Aureli-ano Segun-do, aided by Petra Cates, prepared Amaranta úrsula's baggage. The night on which they were packing one Fernanda's bridal trunks, the things were so well organized that the school-girl knew by heart which were the suits and cloth slippers²⁰² she could wear crossing the Atlantic and the blue cloth coat with copper²⁰³ buttons and the cordovan shoes she would wear when she landed. She also knew how to walk so as not to fall into the water as she went up the gangplank, that at no time was she to leave the company of the nuns or leave cabin except to eat, and that for no reason was she to answer the questions asked by people of any sex while they were at sea. She carried a small bottle with drops for seasickness²⁰⁴ and a notebook written by Father Angel in his own hand containing six prayers to be used against storms. Fernan-da made her a canvas belt to keep her money in, and she would not have to take it off even to sleep. She tried to give her the chamberpot, washed out with lye and disinfected with alcohol, but Amaranta úrsula refused it for fear that her schoolmates would make fun her. A few months later, at the hour of his death, Aureli-ano Segun-do would remember her as he had seen for the last time as she tried unsuccessfully to lower the window of the second-class coach to hear Fernanda's last piece of advice. She was wearing a pink silk dress with a corsage of artificial pansies pinned to her left shoulder, cordovan shoes with buckles²⁰⁵ and low heels, and sateen stockings held up at the thighs²⁰⁶ with elastic²⁰⁷ garters. Her body was slim, her hair loose and long, she had the lively eyes that úrsula had had at her age and the way in which she said goodbye, without crying but without smiling either, revealed the same strength of character. Walking beside the coach as it picked up speed holding Fernanda by the arm so that she would not stumble, Aureli-ano scarcely had time to wave at his daughter as she threw him a kiss with the tips of her fingers. The couple stood motionless under the scorching²⁰⁸ sun, looking at the train as it merged²⁰⁹ with the black strip of the horizon, linking arms for the first time since the day of their wedding.

 

On the ninth of August, before they received the first letter from Brussels, José Arcadio Segun-do was speaking to Aureli-ano in Melquíades' room and, without realizing it, he said:

 

"Always remember that they were more than three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea."

 

Then he fell back on the parchments and died with his eyes open. At that same instant, in Fernanda's bed, his twin brother came to the end of the prolonged and terrible martyrdom of the steel crabs²¹⁰ that were eating his throat away. One week previously²¹¹ he had returned home, without any voice, unable to breathe, and almost skin and bones, with his wandering trunks and his wastrel's accordion, to fulfill the promise of dying beside his wife. Petra Cotes helped him pack his clothes and bade him farewell without shedding a tear, but she forgot to give him the patent leather shoes that he wanted to wear in his coffin. So when she heard that he had died, she dressed in black, wrapped the shoes up in a newspaper, and asked Fernanda for permission to see the body. Fernanda would not let through the door.

 

"Put yourself in my place," Petra Cotes begged. "Imagine how much I must have loved him to put up with this humiliation²¹²."

 

"There is no humiliation that a concubine does not deserve," Fernanda replied. "So wait until another one of your men dies and put the shoes on him."

 

In fulfillment of her promise, Santa Sofía de la Piedad cut the throat of José Arcadio Segun-do's corpse²¹³ with a kitchen knife to be sure that they would not bury him alive. The bodies were placed in identical coffins²¹⁴, then it could be seen that once more in death they had become as Identical as they had been until adolescence²¹⁵. Aureli-ano Segun-do's old carousing comrades laid on his casket a wreath that had a purple ribbon with the words: Cease, cows, life is short. Fernanda was so indignant with such irreverence²¹⁶ that she had the wreath thrown onto the trash heap. In the tumult²¹⁷ of the last moment, the sad drunkards who carried them out of the house got the coffins mixed up and buried them in the wrong graves.

 

“普鲁登希奥，”他叫道，“你怎么从老远的地方跑到这儿来了？”在死人国里呆了多年，普鲁登希奥强烈怀念活人，急切需要有个伙伴，畏惧阴曹地府另一种死亡的迫近，他终于喜欢自己最凶狠的冤家了。他花了许多时间寻找霍·阿·布恩蒂亚，他向列奥阿察来的死人打听过，向乌帕尔山谷和沼泽地来的死人打听过，可是谁也无法帮助他。因为，梅尔加德斯来到阴间，在死亡簿上用小黑点划了“到”之前，其他的死人还不知道马孔多。

 

霍·阿·布恩蒂亚跟普鲁登希奥·阿吉廖尔一直谈到夭亮。几小时以后，他由于失眠变得疲惫不堪，走进奥雷连诺的作坊，问道：“今天是星期呀？”奥雷连诺回答他是星期二。“我也那么想，”霍·阿·布恩蒂亚说，“可我突然觉得，今天还是星期一，象昨天一样。

 

你瞧天空，瞧墙壁，瞧秋海棠。今天还是星期一。”奥雷连诺对他的怪里怪气已经习以为常，没有理睬这些话。

 

下一天，星期三，霍·阿·布恩蒂亚又来到作坊。“这简直是一场灾难，”他说。“你瞧瞧空气，听听太阳的声音，一切都跟昨天和前天一模一样。

 

今天还是星期一。”晚上，皮埃特罗·克列斯比遇见他在走廊上流泪：他不太雅观地、抽抽嗒嗒地哭诉普鲁登希奥·阿吉廖尔，哭诉梅尔加德斯，哭诉雷贝卡的双亲，哭诉自己的爸爸妈妈--哭诉他能想起的、还在阴间孤独生活的人。皮埃特罗·克列斯比给了他一只用后腿走钢丝的“自动狗熊”，可也未能使他摆脱愁思。

 

于是皮埃特罗·克列斯比就问，霍·阿·布恩蒂亚不久以前向他谈到过的计划--使人飞到空中的钟摆机器搞得如何了？霍·阿·布恩蒂亚回答说，制造这种机器是不可能的，因为钟摆能使任何东西升到空中，它自己却不能上。星期四，霍·阿·布恩蒂亚又来到作坊，他的面孔露出了完全的绝望。“时间机器坏啦，”他几乎号啕地说，“乌苏娜和阿玛兰塔又去得那么远！”奥雷连诺骂他象个小孩儿，他就顺从地一声不响了。

 

在六个小时之内，他仔细地观察了各种东西，打算确定它们的样子跟头一天有没有差别，并且坚持不渝地寻找变化，借以证明时间的推移。整个晚上他都睁着眼睛躺在床上，呼唤普鲁登希奥·阿古廖尔、梅尔加德斯和一切死人来分担他的忧虑，可是谁也没来。星期五早晨，家里的人还在睡觉，他又开始研究周围各种东西的形状，最后毫不怀疑这一天还是星期一。

 

接着，他抓住一根门闩，使出浑身非凡的力气，凶猛地砸烂了炼金器具、照相机洗印室和金银首饰作坊，同时，他象着了魔似的，快嘴快舌地尖声叫嚷，但是谁也不懂他叫些什么。他还想毁掉整座房子，可是奥雷连诺马上叫了左邻右舍的人来帮忙。按倒霍·阿·布恩蒂亚，需要十个人；捆起他来，需要十四个人，把他拖到院内大栗树下，需要二十个人；他们拿绳子把他捆在树干上。

 

他仍在用古里古怪的话乱骂，嘴里冒出绿色的唾沫。乌苏娜和阿玛兰塔回来的时候，他的手脚仍然是捆着的，浑身被雨水淋得透湿，但已完全平静、无害了。她们跟他讲话，但他不认得她们，他回答的话也叫人莫名其妙。

 

乌苏娜松开了他已经磨出血来的手腕和脚踝，只留下了捆在腰间的绳子。随后，她们用棕榈枝叶给他搭了个棚子，免得他受到日晒雨淋。　　

 

根据尼康诺·莱茵纳神父的指示，客厅里搭了个圣坛；三月里的一个星期天，奥雷连诺和雷麦黛丝·摩斯柯特在圣坛前面举行了婚礼。

 

在摩斯柯特家中，这一天是整整一个月不安的结束，因为小雷麦黛丝到了成熟时期，却还没有抛弃儿童的习惯。母亲及时把青春期的变化告诉了她，但在二月间的一个下午，几个姐姐正在客厅里跟奥雷连诺谈话，雷麦黛丝却尖声怪叫地冲进客厅，让大家瞧她的裤子，这裤子已给粘搭搭的褐色东西弄脏了。婚礼定于一月之后举行。

 

教她学会自己洗脸、穿衣、做些最简单的家务，是费了不少时间的。为了治好她尿床的毛病，家里的人就要她在热砖上撒尿。而且，让她保守合欢床上的秘密，也花了不少工夫，因为她一知道初夜的细节，就那么惊异，同时又那么兴奋，甚至想把自己知道的这些细节告诉每一个人。

 

在她身上是伤了不少脑筋的。但是，到了举行婚礼的一天，这姑娘对日常生活的了解就不亚于她的任何一个姐姐了。在噼哩啪啦的花炮声中，在几个乐队的歌曲声中，阿·摩斯柯特先生牵着女儿，走过彩花烂漫的街头，左邻右舍的人从自家的窗口向雷麦黛丝祝贺，她就挥手含笑地表示感谢。

 

奥雷连诺身穿黑呢服装，脚踩金属扣子的漆皮鞋（几年以后，他站在行刑队面前的时候，穿的也是这双皮鞋），在房门前面迎接新娘，把她领到圣坛前去--他紧张得脸色苍白，喉咙发哽。雷麦黛丝举止自然，大大方方；奥雷连诺给她戴戒指时，即使不慎把它掉到地上，她仍镇定自若。宾客们却惊惶失措，周围响起了一片窃窃私语，可是雷麦黛丝把戴着花边手套的手微微举起，伸出无名指，继续泰然自若地等着，直到未婚夫用脚踩住戒指，阻止它滚向房门，然后满脸通红地回到圣坛跟前。

 

雷麦黛丝的母亲和姐姐们生怕她在婚礼上违反规矩，终于很不恰当地暗示她首先去吻未婚夫。正是从这一天起，在不利的情况下，雷麦黛丝都表现了责任心、天生的温厚态度和自制能力。她自动分出一大块结婚蛋糕，连同叉子一起放在盘子里，拿给霍·阿·布恩蒂亚。

 

这个身躯魁梧的老人，蜷缩在棕榈棚下，捆在栗树上，由于日晒雨淋，已经变得十分萎靡，但却感激地微微一笑，双手抓起蛋糕就吃，鼻子里还哼着什么莫名其妙的圣歌。热闹的婚礼一直延续到星期一早晨，婚礼上唯一不幸的人是雷贝卡。她的婚事遭到了破坏。

 

照乌苏娜的安排，雷贝卡是应当在这同一天结婚的，可是皮埃特罗·克列斯比星期五收到一封信，信中说他母亲病危。婚礼也就推延了。收信之后过了一小时，皮埃特罗·克列斯比就回省城去了。

 

她的母亲却在星期六晚上按时到达，路上没有跟他相遇；她甚至在奥雷连诺的婚礼上唱了一支歌儿，这支歌儿本来是她为儿子的婚礼准备的。皮埃特罗·克列斯比打算回来赶上自己的婚礼，路上把五匹马部累得精疲力尽，可是星期天半夜到达时，别人的婚礼就要结束了。那封倒霉的信究竟是谁写的，始终没弄清楚。

 

阿玛兰塔受到乌苏娜的盘问，气得痛哭流涕，在木匠还没拆除的圣坛前面发誓说她没有过错。

 

为了举行婚礼，阿·摩斯柯特先生从邻近的城市请来了尼康诺·莱茵纳神父；由于自己的职业得不到奉承，这老头儿总是阴阴沉沉。他的皮肤是浅灰色的，几乎皮包骨，圆鼓鼓的肚子很突出，他那老朽的面孔所显露的与其说是善良，不如说是憨厚。

 

他准备婚礼之后就返回自己的教区，但他见到马孔多居民一切无所顾忌的样子就感到惊愕，因为他们虽然安居乐业，却生活在罪孽之中：他们仅仅服从自然规律，不给孩子们举行洗礼，不承认宗教节日。神父认为这块土地急切需要上帝的种子，就决定在马孔多再留一个星期，以便给行过割礼的人和异教徒举行一次洗礼，让非法的同居合法化，并且给垂死的人一顿圣餐。可是谁也不愿听他的。

 

大家回答他说，他们多年没有教士也过得挺好，可以直接找上帝解决拯救灵魂的问题，而且不会犯不可宽恕之罪。

 

尼康诺神父讨厌在旷地上继续布道，决定竭尽全力建筑一座世界上最大的教堂，有圣徒的等身雕像和彩绘玻璃窗，以便罗马来的人也能在无神论者的中心地区向上帝祈祷。他拿着一个铜盘，四处募捐。

分享到：