He was going to go on, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía stopped him with a signal. “Don’t waste your time, doctor,” he said. “The important thing is that from now on we’ll be fighting only for power.” Still smiling, he took the documents the delegates gave him and made ready to sign them.
“Since that’s the way it is,” he concluded, “we have no objection to accepting.”
His men looked at one another in consternation.
“Excuse me, colonel,” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez said softly, “but this is a betrayal.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendía held the inked pen in the air and discharged the whole weight of his authority on him.
“Surrender your weapons,” he ordered.
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez stood up and put his sidearms on the table.
“Report to the barracks,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía ordered him. “Put yourself at the disposition of the revolutionary court.”
Then he signed, the declaration and gave the sheets of paper to the emissaries, saying to them:
“Here are your papers, gentlemen. I hope you can get some advantage out of them.”
Two days later, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, accused of high treason, was condemned to death. Lying in his hammock, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was insensible to the pleas for clemency. On the eve of the execution, disobeying the orders not to bother him, Úrsula visited him in his bedroom. Encased in black, invested with a rare solemnity, she stood during the three minutes of the interview. “I know that you’re going to shoot Gerineldo,” she said calmly, “and that I can’t do anything to stop it. But I give you one warning: as soon as I see his body I swear to you by the bones of my father and mother, by the memory of José Arcadio Buendía, I swear to you before God that I will drag you out from wherever you’re hiding and kill you with my own two hands.” Before leaving the room, without waiting for any reply, she concluded:
“It’s the same as if you’d been born with the tail of a pig.”
During that interminable night, while Colonel Gerineldo Márquez thought about his dead afternoons in Amaranta’s sewing room, Colonel Aureliano Buendía scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude. His only happy moments, since that remote afternoon when his father had taken him to see ice, had taken place in his silver workshop where he passed the time putting little gold fishes together. He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dungheap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late.
At dawn, worn out by the tormented vigil, he appeared in the cell an hour before the execution. “The farce is over, old friend,” he said to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. “Let’s get out of here before the mosquitoes in here execute you.” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez could not repress the disdain that was inspired in him by that attitude.
“No, Aureliano,” he replied. “I’d rather be dead than see you changed into a bloody tyrant.”
“You won’t see me,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. “Put on your shoes and help me get this shitty war over with.”
When he said it he did not know that it was easier to start a war than to end one. It took him almost a year of fierce and bloody effort to force the government to propose conditions of peace favorable to the rebels and another year to convince his own partisans of the convenience of accepting them. He went to inconceivable extremes of cruelty to put down the rebellion of his own officers, who resisted and called for victory, and he finally relied on enemy forces to make them submit.
He was never a greater soldier than at that time. The certainty that he was finally fighting for his own liberation and not for abstract ideals, for slogans that politicians could twist left and right according to the circumstances, filled him with an ardent enthusiasm. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, who fought for defeat with as much conviction and loyalty as he had previously fought for victory, reproached him for his useless temerity. “Don’t worry,” he would say, smiling. “Dying is much more difficult than one imagines.” In his case it was true. The certainty that his day was assigned gave him a mysterious immunity, an immortality for a fixed period that made him invulnerable to the risks of war and in the end permitted him to win a defeat that was much more difficult, much more bloody and costly than victory.
In almost twenty years of war, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had been at his house many times, but the state of urgency with which he always arrived, the military retinue that accompanied him everywhere, the aura of legend that glowed about his presence and of which even Úrsula was aware, changed him into a stranger in the end. The last time that he was in Macondo and took a house for his three concubines, he was seen in his own house only on two or three occasions when he had the time to accept an invitation to dine. Remedios the Beauty and the twins, born during the middle of the war, scarcely knew him. Amaranta could not reconcile her image of the brother who had spent his adolescence making little gold fishes with that of the mythical warrior who had placed a distance of ten feet between himself and the rest of humanity. But when the approach of the armistice became known and they thought that he would return changed back into a human being, delivered at last for the hearts of his own people, the family feelings, dormant for such a long time, were reborn stronger than ever.
“We’ll finally have a man in the house again,” Úrsula said.
Amaranta was the first to suspect that they had lost him forever. One week before the armistice, when he entered the house without an escort, preceded by two barefoot orderlies who deposited on the porch the saddle from the mule and the trunk of poetry, all that was left of his former imperial baggage, she saw him pass by the sewing room and she called to him. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had trouble recognizing her.
“It’s Amaranta,” she said good-humoredly, happy at his return, and she showed him the hand with the black bandage. “Look.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendía smiled at her the same way as when he had first seen her with the bandage on that remote morning when he had come back to Macondo condemned to death.
“How awful,” he said, “the way time passes!”
The regular army had to protect the house. He arrived amid insults, spat upon, accused of having accelerated the war in order to sell it for a better price. He was trembling with fever and cold and his armpits were studded with sores again. Six months before, when she had heard talk about the armistice, Úrsula had opened up and swept out the bridal chamber and had burned myrrh in the corners, thinking that he would come back ready to grow old slowly among Remedios’ musty dolls. But actually, during the last two years he had paid his final dues to life, including growing old. When he passed by the silver shop, which Úrsula had prepared with special diligence, he did not even notice that the keys were in the lock. He did not notice the minute, tearing destruction that time had wreaked on the house and that, after such a prolonged absence, would have looked like a disaster to any man who had kept his memories alive. He was not pained by the peeling of the whitewash on the walls or the dirty, cottony cobwebs in the corners or the dust on the begonias or the veins left on the beams by the termites or the moss on the hinges or any of the insidious traps that nostalgia offered him. He sat down on the porch, wrapped in his blanket and with his boots still on, as if only waiting for it to clear, and he spent the whole afternoon watching it rain on the begonias. Úrsula understood then that they would not have him home for long. “If it’s not the war,” she thought, “it can only be death.” It was a supposition that was so neat, so convincing that she identified it as a premonition.
That night, at dinner, the supposed Aureliano Segundo broke his bread with his right hand and drank his soup with his left. His twin brother, the supposed José Arcadio Segundo, broke his bread with his left hand and drank his soup with his right. So precise was their coordination that they did not look like two brothers sitting opposite each other but like a trick with mirrors. The spectacle that the twins had invented whe
n they became aware that they were equal was repeated in honor of the new arrival. But Colonel Aureliano Buendía did not notice it. He seemed so alien to everything that he did not even notice Remedios the Beauty as she passed by naked on her way to her bedroom. Úrsula was the only one who dared disturb his abstraction.
“If you have to go away again,” she said halfway through dinner, “at least try to remember how we were tonight.”
Then Colonel Aureliano Buendía realized, without surprise, that Úrsula was the only human being who had succeeded in penetrating his misery, and for the first time in many years he looked her in the face. Her skin was leathery, her teeth decayed, her hair faded and colorless, and her look frightened. He compared her with the oldest memory that he had of her, the afternoon when he had the premonition that a pot of boiling soup was going to fall off the table, and he found her broken to pieces. In an instant he discovered the scratches, the welts, the sores, the ulcers, and the scars that had been left on her by more than half a century of daily life, and he saw that those damages did not even arouse a feeling of pity in him. Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away and he could not find it. On another occasion, he felt at least a confused sense of shame when he found the smell of Úrsula on his own skin, and more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his. But all of that had been wiped out by the war. Even Remedios, his wife, at that moment was a hazy image of someone who might have been his daughter. The countless women he had known on the desert of love and who had spread his seed all along the coast had left no trace in his feelings. Most of them had come into his room in the dark and had left before dawn, and on the following day they were nothing but a touch of fatigue in his bodily memory. The only affection that prevailed against time and the war was that which he had felt for his brother José Arcadio when they both were children, and it was not based on love but on complicity.
“I’m sorry,” he excused himself from Úrsula’s request. “It’s just that the war has done away with everything.”
During the following days he busied himself destroying all trace of his passage through the world. He stripped the silver shop until all that were left were impersonal objects, he gave his clothes away to the orderlies, and he buried his weapons in the courtyard with the same feeling of penance with which his father had buried the spear that had killed Prudencio Aguilar. He kept only one pistol with one bullet in it. Úrsula did not intervene. The only time she dissuaded him was when he was about to destroy the daguerreotype of Remedios that was kept in the parlor lighted by an eternal lamp. “That picture stopped belonging to you a long time ago,” she told him. “It’s a family relic.” On the eve of the armistice, when no single object that would let him be remembered was left in the house, he took the trunk of poetry to the bakery when Santa Sofía de la Piedad was making ready to light the oven.
“Light it with this,” he told her, handing her the first roll of yellowish papers. “It will burn better because they’re very old things.”
Santa Sofía de la Piedad, the silent one, the condescending one, the one who never contradicted anyone, not even her own children, had the impression that it was a forbidden act.
“They’re important papers,” she said.
“Nothing of the sort,” the colonel said. “They’re things that a person writes to himself.”
“In that case,” she said, “you burn them, colonel.”
He not only did that, but he broke up the trunk with a hatchet and threw the pieces into the fire. Hours before, Pilar Ternera had come to visit him. After so many years of not seeing her, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was startled at how old and fat she had become and how much she had lost of the splendor of her laugh, but he was also startled at the depths she had reached in her reading of the cards. “Watch out for your mouth,” she told him, and he wondered whether the other time she had told him that during the height of his glory it had not been a surprisingly anticipated vision of his fate. A short time later, when his personal physician finished removing his sores, he asked him, without showing any particular interest, where the exact location of his heart was. The doctor listened with his stethoscope and then painted a circle on his chest with a piece of cotton dipped in iodine.
The Tuesday of the armistice dawned warm and rainy. Colonel Aureliano Buendía appeared in the kitchen before five o’clock and had his usual black coffee without sugar. “You came into the world on a day like this,” Úrsula told him. “Everybody was amazed at your open eyes.” He did not pay any attention because he was listening to the forming of the troops, the sound of the cornets, and the voices of command that were shattering the dawn. Even though after so many years of war they should have sounded familiar to him, this time he felt the same weakness in his knees and the same tingling in his skin that he had felt in his youth in the presence of a naked woman. He thought confusedly, finally captive in a trap of nostalgia, that perhaps if he had married her he would have been a man without war and without glory, a nameless artisan, a happy animal. That tardy shudder which had not figured in his forethought made his breakfast bitter. At seven in the morning, when Colonel Gerineldo Márquez came to fetch him, in the company of a group of rebel officers, he found him more taciturn than ever, more pensive and solitary. Úrsula tried to throw a new wrap over his shoulders. “What will the government think,” she told him. “They’ll figure that you’ve surrendered because you didn’t have anything left to buy a cloak with.” But he would not accept it. When he was at the door, he let her put an old felt hat of José Arcadio Buendía’s on his head.
“Aureliano,” Úrsula said to him then, “promise me that if you find that it’s a bad hour for you there that you’ll think of your mother.”
He gave her a distant smile, raising his hand with all his fingers extended, and without saying a word he left the house and faced the shouts, insults, and blasphemies that would follow him until he left the town. Úrsula put the bar on the door, having decided not to take it down for the rest of her life. “We’ll rot in here,” she thought. “We’ll turn to ashes in this house without men, but we won’t give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing us weep.” She spent the whole morning looking for a memory of her son in the most hidden corners, but she could find none.
The ceremony took place fifteen miles from Macondo in the shade of a gigantic ceiba tree around which the town of Neerlandia would be founded later. The delegates from the government and the party and the commission of the rebels who were laying down their arms were served by a noisy group of novices in white habits who looked like a flock of doves that had been frightened by the rain. Colonel Aureliano Buendía arrived on a muddy mule. He had not shaved, more tormented by the pain of the sores than by the great failure of his dreams, for he had reached the end of all hope, beyond glory and the nostalgia of glory. In accordance with his arrangements there was no music, no fireworks, no pealing bells, no shouts of victory, or any other manifestation that might alter the mournful character of the armistice. An itinerant photographer who took the only picture of him that could have been preserved was forced to smash his plates without developing them.
The ceremony lasted only the time necessary to sign the documents. Around the rustic table placed in the center of a patched circus tent where the delegates sat were the last officers who were faithful to Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Before taking the signatures, the personal delegate of the president of the republic tried to read the act of surrender aloud, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía was against it. “Let’s not waste time on formalities,” he said and prepared to sign the papers without reading them. One of his officers then broke the soporific silence of the tent.
“Colonel,” he said, “please do us the favor of not being the first to sign.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendía acceded. When the documents went all around the table, in the midst of a silence that was so pure that one could have deciphered the signatures from the scratching of the pen on the paper, t
he first line was still blank. Colonel Aureliano Buendía prepared to fill it.
“Colonel,” another of his officers said, “there’s still time for everything to come out right.”
Without changing his expression, Colonel Aureliano Buendía signed the first copy. He had not finished signing the last one when a rebel colonel appeared in the doorway leading a mule carrying two chests. In spite of his extreme youth he had a dry look and a patient expression. He was the treasurer of the revolution in the Macondo region. He had made a difficult journey of six days, pulling along the mule, who was dying of hunger, in order to arrive at the armistice on time. With an exasperating parsimony he took down the chests, opened them, and placed on the table, one by one, seventy-two gold bricks. Everyone had forgotten about the existence of that fortune. In the disorder of the past year, when the central command fell apart and the revolution degenerated into a bloody rivalry of leaders, it was impossible to determine any responsibility. The gold of the revolution, melted into blocks that were then covered with baked clay, was beyond all control. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had the seventy-two gold bricks included in the inventory of surrender and closed the ceremony without allowing any speeches. The filthy adolescent stood opposite him, looking into his eyes with his own calm, syrup-colored eyes.
“Something else?” Colonel Aureliano Buendía asked him.
The young colonel tightened his mouth.
“The receipt,” he said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía wrote it out in his own hand. Then he had a glass of lemonade and a piece of biscuit that the novices were passing around and retired to a field tent which had been prepared for him in case he wished to rest. There he took off his shirt, sat on the edge of the cot, and at three-fifteen in the afternoon took his pistol and shot himself in the iodine circle that his personal physician had painted on his chest. At that moment in Macondo Úrsula took the cover off the pot of milk on the stove, wondering why it was taking so long to boil, and found it full of worms.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Page 18