“You’ll see that they’re just stupid enough,” she said.
On Tuesday, at five in the morning, José Arcadio had drunk his coffee and let the dogs out when Rebeca closed the window and held onto the head of the bed so as not to fall down. “There, they’re bringing him,” she sighed. “He’s so handsome.” José Arcadio looked out the window and saw him, tremulous in the light of dawn. He already had his back to the wall and his hands were on his hips because the burning knots in his armpits would not let him lower them. “A person fucks himself up so much,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. “Fucks himself up so much just so that six weak fairies can kill him and he can’t do anything about it.” He repeated it with so much rage that it almost seemed to be fervor, and Captain Roque Carnicero was touched, because he thought he was praying. When the squad took aim, the rage had materialized into a viscous and bitter substance that put his tongue to sleep and made him close his eyes. Then the aluminum glow of dawn disappeared and he saw himself again in short pants, wearing a tie around his neck, and he saw his father leading him into the tent on a splendid afternoon, and he saw the ice. When he heard the shout he thought that it was the final command to the squad. He opened his eyes with a shudder of curiosity, expecting to meet the incandescent trajectory of the bullets, but he only saw Captain Roque Carnicero with his arms in the air and José Arcadio crossing the street with his fearsome shotgun ready to go off.
“Don’t shoot,” the captain said to José Arcadio. “You were sent by Divine Providence.”
Another war began right there. Captain Roque Carnicero and his six men left with Colonel Aureliano Buendía to free the revolutionary general Victorio Medina, who had been condemned to death in Riohacha. They thought they could save time by crossing the mountains along the trail that José Arcadio Buendía had followed to found Macondo, but before a week was out they were convinced that it was an impossible undertaking. So they had to follow the dangerous route over the outcroppings with no other munitions but what the firing squad had. They would camp near the towns and one of them, with a small gold fish in his hand, would go in disguise in broad daylight to contact the dormant Liberals, who would go out hunting on the following morning and never return. When they saw Riohacha from a ridge in the mountains, General Victorio Medina had been shot. Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s men proclaimed him chief of the revolutionary forces of the Caribbean coast with the rank of general. He assumed the position but refused the promotion and took the stand that he would never accept it as long as the Conservative regime was in power. At the end of three months they had succeeded in arming more than a thousand men, but they were wiped out. The survivors reached the eastern frontier. The next thing that was heard of them was that they had landed on Cabo de la Vela, coming from the smaller islands of the Antilles, and a message from the government was sent all over by telegraph and included in jubilant proclamations throughout the country announcing the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. But two days later a multiple telegram which almost overtook the previous one announced another uprising on the southern plains. That was how the legend of the ubiquitous Colonel Aureliano Buendía began. Simultaneous and contradictory information declared him victorious in Villanueva, defeated in Guacamayal, devoured by Motilón Indians, dead in a village in the swamp, and up in arms again in Urumita. The Liberal leaders, who at that moment were negotiating for participation in the congress, branded him an adventurer who did not represent the party. The national government placed him in the category of a bandit and put a price of five thousand pesos on his head. After sixteen defeats, Colonel Aureliano Buendía left Guajira with two thousand well-armed Indians and the garrison, which was taken by surprise as it slept, abandoned Riohacha. He established his headquarters there and proclaimed total war against the regime. The first message he received from the government was a threat to shoot Colonel Gerineldo Márquez within forty-eight hours if he did not withdraw with his forces to the eastern frontier. Colonel Roque Carnicero, who was his chief of staff then, gave him the telegram with a look of consternation, but he read it with unforeseen joy.
“How wonderful!” he exclaimed. “We have a telegraph office in Macondo now.”
His reply was definitive. In three months he expected to establish his headquarters in Macondo. If he did not find Colonel Gerineldo Márquez alive at that time he would shoot out of hand all of the officers he held prisoner at that moment, starting with the generals, and he would give orders to his subordinates to do the same for the rest of the war. Three months later, when he entered Macondo in triumph, the first embrace he received on the swamp road was that of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez.
The house was full of children. Úrsula had taken in Santa Sofía de la Piedad with her older daughter and a pair of twins, who had been born five months after Arcadio had been shot. Contrary to the victim’s last wishes, she baptized the girl with the name Remedios. “I’m sure that was what Arcadio meant,” she alleged. “We won’t call her Úrsula because a person suffers too much with that name.” The twins were named José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo. Amaranta took care of them all. She put small wooden chairs in the living room and established a nursery with other children from neighboring families. When Colonel Aureliano Buendía returned in the midst of exploding rockets and ringing bells, a children’s chorus welcomed him to the house. Aureliano José, tall like his grandfather, dressed as a revolutionary officer, gave him military honors.
Not all the news was good. A year after the flight of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, José Arcadio and Rebeca went to live in the house Arcadio had built. No one knew about his intervention to halt the execution. In the new house, located on the best corner of the square, in the shade of an almond tree that was honored by three nests of redbreasts, with a large door for visitors and four windows for light, they set up a hospitable home. Rebeca’s old friends, among them four of the Moscote sisters who were still single, once more took up the sessions of embroidery that had been interrupted years before on the porch with the begonias. José Arcadio continued to profit from the usurped lands, the title to which was recognized by the Conservative government. Every afternoon he could be seen returning on horseback, with his hunting dogs, and his double-barreled shotgun and a string of rabbits hanging from his saddle. One September afternoon, with the threat of a storm, he returned home earlier than usual. He greeted Rebeca in the dining room, tied the dogs up in the courtyard, hung the rabbits up in the kitchen to be salted later, and went to the bedroom to change his clothes. Rebeca later declared that when her husband went into the bedroom she was locked in the bathroom and did not hear anything. It was a difficult version to believe, but there was no other more plausible, and no one could think of any motive for Rebeca to murder the man who had made her happy. That was perhaps the only mystery that was never cleared up in Macondo. As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
“Holy Mother of God!” Úrsula shouted.
She followed the thread of blood back along its course, and in search of its origin she went through the pantry, along the begonia porch where Aureliano José was chanting that three plus three is six and six plus three is nine, and she crossed the dining room and the living rooms and followed straight down the street, and she
turned first to the right and then to the left to the Street of the Turks, forgetting that she was still wearing her baking apron and her house slippers, and she came out onto the square and went into the door of a house where she had never been, and she pushed open the bedroom door and was almost suffocated by the smell of burned gunpowder, and she found José Arcadio lying face down on the ground on top of the leggings he had just taken off, and she saw the starting point of the thread of blood that had already stopped flowing out of his right ear. They found no wound on his body nor could they locate the weapon. Nor was it possible to remove the smell of powder from the corpse. First they washed him three times with soap and a scrubbing brush, then they rubbed him with salt and vinegar, then with ashes and lemon, and finally they put him in a barrel of lye and let him stay for six hours. They scrubbed him so much that the arabesques of his tattooing began to fade. When they thought of the desperate measure of seasoning him with pepper, cumin seeds, and laurel leaves and boiling him for a whole day over a slow fire, he had already begun to decompose and they had to bury him hastily. They sealed him hermetically in a special coffin seven and a half feet long and four feet wide, reinforced inside with iron plates and fastened together with steel bolts, and even then the smell could be perceived on the streets through which the funeral procession passed. Father Nicanor, with his liver enlarged and tight as a drum, gave him his blessing from bed. Although in the months that followed they reinforced the grave with walls about it, between which they threw compressed ash, sawdust, and quicklime, the cemetery still smelled of powder for many years after, until the engineers from the banana company covered the grave over with a shell of concrete. As soon as they took the body out, Rebeca closed the doors of her house and buried herself alive, covered with a thick crust of disdain that no earthly temptation was ever able to break. She went out into the street on one occasion, when she was very old, with shoes the color of old silver and a hat made of tiny flowers, during the time that the Wandering Jew passed through town and brought on a heat wave that was so intense that birds broke through window screens to come to die in the bedrooms. The last time anyone saw her alive was when with one shot she killed a thief who was trying to force the door of her house. Except for Argénida, her servant and confidante, no one ever had any more contact with her after that. At one time it was discovered that she was writing letters to the Bishop, whom she claimed as a first cousin, but it was never said whether she received any reply. The town forgot about her.
In spite of his triumphal return, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was not enthusiastic over the looks of things. The government troops abandoned their positions without resistance and that aroused an illusion of victory among the Liberal population that it was not right to destroy, but the revolutionaries knew the truth, Colonel Aureliano Buendía better than any of them. Although at that moment he had more than five thousand men under his command and held two coastal states, he had the feeling of being hemmed in against the sea and caught in a situation that was so confused that when he ordered the restoration of the church steeple, which had been knocked down by army cannon fire, Father Nicanor commented from his sickbed: “This is silly; the defenders of the faith of Christ destroy the church and the Masons order it rebuilt.” Looking for a loophole through which he could escape, he spent hours on end in the telegraph office conferring with the commanders of other towns, and every time he would emerge with the firmest impression that the war was at a stalemate. When news of fresh Liberal victories was received it was celebrated with jubilant proclamations, but he would measure the real extent of them on the map and could see that his forces were penetrating into the jungle, defending themselves against malaria and mosquitoes, advancing in the opposite direction from reality. “We’re wasting time,” he would complain to his officers. “We’re wasting time while the bastards in the party are begging for seats in congress.” Lying awake at night, stretched out on his back in a hammock in the same room where he had awaited death, he would evoke the image of lawyers dressed in black leaving the presidential palace in the icy cold of early morning with their coat collars turned up about their ears, rubbing their hands, whispering, taking refuge in dreary early-morning cafés to speculate over what the president had meant when he said yes, or what he had meant when he said no, and even to imagine what the president was thinking when he said something quite different, as he chased away mosquitoes at a temperature of ninety-five degrees, feeling the approach of the fearsome dawn when he would have to give his men the command to jump into the sea.
One night of uncertainty, when Pilar Ternera was singing in the courtyard with the soldiers, he asked her to read the future in her cards. “Watch out for your mouth,” was all that Pilar Ternera brought out after spreading and picking up the cards three times. “I don’t know what it means, but the sign is very clear. Watch out for your mouth.” Two days later someone gave an orderly a mug of black coffee and the orderly passed it on to someone else and that one to someone else until, hand to hand, it reached Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s office. He had not asked for any coffee, but since it was there the colonel drank it. It had a dose of nux vomica strong enough to kill a horse. When they took him home he was stiff and arched and his tongue was sticking out between his teeth. Úrsula fought against death over him. After cleaning out his stomach with emetics, she wrapped him in hot blankets and fed him egg whites for two days until his harrowed body recovered its normal temperature. On the fourth day he was out of danger. Against his will, pressured by Úrsula and his officers, he stayed in bed for another week. Only then did he learn that his verses had not been burned. “I didn’t want to be hasty,” Úrsula explained to him. “That night when I went to light the oven I said to myself that it would be better to wait until they brought the body.” In the haze of convalescence, surrounded by Remedios’ dusty dolls, Colonel Aureliano Buendía brought back the decisive periods of his existence by reading his poetry. He started writing again. For many hours, balancing on the edge of the surprises of a war with no future, in rhymed verse he resolved his experience on the shores of death. Then his thoughts became so clear that he was able to examine them forward and backward. One night he asked Colonel Gerineldo Márquez:
“Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?”
“What other reason could there be?” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez answered. “For the great Liberal party.”
“You’re lucky because you know why,” he answered. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve come to realize only just now that I’m fighting because of pride.”
“That’s bad,” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía was amused at his alarm. “Naturally,” he said. “But in any case, it’s better than not knowing why you’re fighting.” He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile:
“Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn’t have any meaning for anyone.”
His pride had prevented him from making contact with the armed groups in the interior of the country until the leaders of the party publicly rectified their declaration that he was a bandit. He knew, however, that as soon as he put those scruples aside he would break the vicious circle of the war. Convalescence gave him time to reflect. Then he succeeded in getting Úrsula to give him the rest of her buried inheritance and her substantial savings. He named Colonel Gerineldo Márquez civil and military leader of Macondo and he went off to make contact with the rebel groups in the interior.
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was not only the man closest to Colonel Aureliano Buendía, but Úrsula received him as a member of the family. Fragile, timid, with natural good manners, he was, however, better suited for war than for government. His political advisers easily entangled him in theoretical labyrinths. But he succeeded in giving Macondo the atmosphere of rural peace that Colonel Aureliano Buendía dreamed of so that he could die of old age making little gold fishes. Although he lived in his parents’ house he would have lunch at Úrsula’s two or three times a week. He initia
ted Aureliano José in the use of firearms, gave him early military instruction, and for several months took him to live in the barracks, with Úrsula’s consent, so that he could become a man. Many years before, when he was still almost a child, Gerineldo Márquez had declared his love for Amaranta. At that time she was so illusioned with her lonely passion for Pietro Crespi that she laughed at him. Gerineldo Márquez waited. On a certain occasion he sent Amaranta a note from jail asking her to embroider a dozen batiste handkerchiefs with his father’s initials on them. He sent her the money. A week later Amaranta brought the dozen handkerchiefs to him in jail along with the money and they spent several hours talking about the past. “When I get out of here I’m going to marry you,” Gerineldo Márquez told her when she left. Amaranta laughed but she kept on thinking about him while she taught the children to read and she tried to revive her juvenile passion for Pietro Crespi. On Saturdays, visiting days for the prisoners, she would stop by the house of Gerineldo Márquez’s parents and accompany them to the jail. On one of those Saturdays Úrsula was surprised to see her in the kitchen, waiting for the biscuits to come out of the oven so that she could pick the best ones and wrap them in a napkin that she had embroidered for the occasion.
“Marry him,” she told her. “You’ll have a hard time finding another man like him.”
Amaranta feigned a reaction of displeasure.
“I don’t have to go around hunting for men,” she answered. “I’m taking these biscuits to Gerineldo because I’m sorry that sooner or later they’re going to shoot him.”
She said it without thinking, but that was the time that the government had announced its threat to shoot Colonel Gerineldo Márquez if the rebel forces did not surrender Riohacha. The visits stopped. Amaranta shut herself up to weep, overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt similar to the one that had tormented her when Remedios died, as if once more her careless words had been responsible for a death. Her mother consoled her. She assured her that Colonel Aureliano Buendía would do something to prevent the execution and promised that she would take charge of attracting Gerineldo Márquez herself when the war was over. She fulfilled her promise before the imagined time. When Gerineldo Márquez returned to the house, invested with his new dignity of civil and military leader, she received him as a son, thought of delightful bits of flattery to hold him there, and prayed with all her soul that he would remember his plan to marry Amaranta. Her pleas seemed to be answered. On the days that he would have lunch at the house, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez would linger on the begonia porch playing Chinese checkers with Amaranta. Úrsula would bring them coffee and milk and biscuits and would take over the children so that they would not bother them. Amaranta was really making an effort to kindle in her heart the forgotten ashes of her youthful passion. With an anxiety that came to be intolerable, she waited for the lunch days, the afternoons of Chinese checkers, and time flew by in the company of the warrior with a nostalgic name whose fingers trembled imperceptibly as he moved the pieces. But the day on which Colonel Gerineldo Márquez repeated his wish to marry her, she rejected him.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Page 14