One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Fernanda carried a delicate calendar with small golden keys on which her spiritual adviser had marked in purple ink the dates of venereal abstinence. Not counting Holy Week, Sundays, holy days of obligation, first Fridays, retreats, sacrifices, and cyclical impediments, her effective year was reduced to forty-two days that were spread out through a web of purple crosses. Aureliano Segundo, convinced that time would break up that hostile network, prolonged the wedding celebration beyond the expected time. Tired of throwing out so many empty brandy and champagne bottles so that they would not clutter up the house and at the same time intrigued by the fact that the newlyweds slept at different times and in separate rooms while the fireworks and music and the slaughtering of cattle went on, Úrsula remembered her own experience and wondered whether Fernanda might have a chastity belt too which would sooner or later provoke jokes in the town and give rise to a tragedy. But Fernanda confessed to her that she was just letting two weeks go by before allowing the first contact with her husband. Indeed, when the period was over, she opened her bedroom with a resignation worthy of an expiatory victim and Aureliano Segundo saw the most beautiful woman on earth, with her glorious eyes of a frightened animal and her long, copper-colored hair spread out across the pillow. He was so fascinated with that vision that it took him a moment to realize that Fernanda was wearing a white nightgown that reached down to her ankles, with long sleeves and with a large, round buttonhole, delicately trimmed, at the level of her lower stomach. Aureliano Segundo could not suppress an explosion of laughter.

  “That’s the most obscene thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he shouted with a laugh that rang through the house. “I married a Sister of Charity.”

  A month later, unsuccessful in getting his wife to take off her nightgown, he had the picture taken of Petra Cotes dressed as a queen. Later on, when he succeeded in getting Fernanda to come back home, she gave in to his urges in the fever of reconciliation, but she could not give him the repose he had dreamed about when he went to fetch her in the city with the thirty-two belfries. Aureliano Segundo found only a deep feeling of desolation in her. One night, a short time before their first child was born, Fernanda realized that her husband had returned in secret to the bed of Petra Cotes.

  “That’s what happened,” he admitted. And he explained in a tone of prostrated resignation: “I had to do it so that the animals would keep on breeding.”

  He needed a little time to convince her about such a strange expedient, but when he finally did so by means of proofs that seemed irrefutable, the only promise that Fernanda demanded from him was that he should not be surprised by death in his concubine’s bed. In that way the three of them continued living without bothering each other. Aureliano Segundo, punctual and loving with both of them, Petra Cotes, strutting because of the reconciliation, and Fernanda, pretending that she did not know the truth.

  The pact did not succeed, however, in incorporating Fernanda into the family. Úrsula insisted in vain that she take off the woolen ruff which she would have on when she got up from making love and which made the neighbors whisper. She could not convince her to use the bathroom or the night lavatory and sell the gold chamberpot to Colonel Aureliano Buendía so that he could convert it into little fishes. Amaranta felt so uncomfortable with her defective diction and her habit of using euphemisms to designate everything that she would always speak gibberish in front of her.

  “Thifisif,” she would say, “ifisif onefos ofosif thofosif whosufu cantantant statantand thefesef smufumellu ofosif therisir owfisown shifisifit.”

  One day, irritated by the mockery, Fernanda wanted to know what Amaranta was saying, and she did not use euphemisms in answering her.

  “I was saying,” she told her, “that you’re one of those people who mix up their ass and their ashes.”

  From that time on they did not speak to each other again. When circumstances demanded it they would send notes. In spite of the visible hostility of the family, Fernanda did not give up her drive to impose the customs of her ancestors. She put an end to the custom of eating in the kitchen and whenever anyone was hungry, and she imposed the obligation of doing it at regular hours at the large table in the dining room, covered with a linen cloth and with silver candlesticks and table service. The solemnity of an act which Úrsula had considered the most simple one of daily life created a tense atmosphere against which the silent José Arcadio Segundo rebelled before anyone else. But the custom was imposed, the same as that of reciting the rosary before dinner, and it drew the attention of the neighbors, who soon spread the rumor that the Buendías did not sit down to the table like other mortals but had changed the act of eating into a kind of high mass. Even Úrsula’s superstitions, with origins that came more from an inspiration of the moment than from tradition, came into conflict with those of Fernanda, who had inherited them from her parents and kept them defined and catalogued for every occasion. As long as Úrsula had full use of her faculties some of the old customs survived and the life of the family kept some quality of her impulsiveness, but when she lost her sight and the weight of her years relegated her to a corner, the circle of rigidity begun by Fernanda from the moment she arrived finally closed completely and no one but she determined the destiny of the family. The business in pastries and small candy animals that Santa Sofía de la Piedad had kept up because of Úrsula’s wishes was considered an unworthy activity by Fernanda and she lost no time in putting a stop to it. The doors of the house, wide open from dawn until bedtime, were closed during siesta time under the pretext that the sun heated up the bedrooms and in the end they were closed for good. The aloe branch and loaf of bread that had been hanging over the door since the days of the founding were replaced by a niche with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Colonel Aureliano Buendía became aware somehow of those changes and foresaw their consequences. “We’re becoming people of quality,” he protested. “At this rate we’ll end up fighting against the Conservative regime again, but this time to install a king in its place.” Fernanda very tactfully tried not to cross his path. Within herself she was bothered by his independent spirit, his resistance to all kinds of social rigidity. She was exasperated by his mugs of coffee at five in the morning, the disorder of his workshop, his frayed blanket, and his custom of sitting in the street door at dusk. But she had to tolerate that one loose piece in the family machinery because she was sure that the old colonel was an animal who had been tamed by the years and by disappointment and who, in a burst of senile rebellion, was quite capable of uprooting the foundations of the house. When her husband decided to give their first son the name of his great-grandfather, she did not dare oppose him because she had been there only a year. But when the first daughter was born she expressed her unreserved determination to name her Renata after her mother. Úrsula had decided to call her Remedios. After a tense argument, in which Aureliano Segundo acted as the laughing go-between, they baptized her with the name Renata Remedios, but Fernanda went on calling her just Renata while her husband’s family and everyone in town called her Meme, a diminutive of Remedios.

  At first Fernanda did not talk about her family, but in time she began to idealize her father. She spoke of him at the table as an exceptional being who had renounced all forms of vanity and was on his way to becoming a saint. Aureliano Segundo, startled at that unbridled glorification of his father-in-law, could not resist the temptation to make small jokes behind his wife’s back. The rest of the family followed his example. Even Úrsula, who was extremely careful to preserve family harmony and who suffered in secret from the domestic friction, once allowed herself the liberty of saying that her little great-great-grandson had his pontifical future assured because he was “the grandson of a saint and the son of a queen and a rustler.” In spite of that conspiracy of smiles, the children became accustomed to think of their grandfather as a legendary being who wrote them pious verses in his letters and every Christmas sent them a box of gifts that barely fitted through the outside door. Actually they were the last remains
of his lordly inheritance. They used them to build an altar of life-size saints in the children’s bedroom, saints with glass eyes that gave them a disquietingly lifelike look, whose artistically embroidered clothing was better than that worn by any inhabitant of Macondo. Little by little the funereal splendor of the ancient and icy mansion was being transformed into the splendor of the House of Buendía. “They’ve already sent us the whole family cemetery,” Aureliano Segundo commented one day. “All we need now are the weeping willows and the tombstones.” Although nothing ever arrived in the boxes that the children could play with, they would spend all year waiting for December because, after all, the antique and always unpredictable gifts were something new in the house. On the tenth Christmas, when little José Arcadio was getting ready to go to the seminary, the enormous box from their grandfather arrived earlier than usual, nailed tight and protected with pitch, and addressed in the usual Gothic letters to the Very Distinguished Lady Doña Fernanda del Carpio de Buendía. While she read the letter in her room, the children hastened to open the box. Aided as was customary by Aureliano Segundo, they broke the seals, opened the cover, took out the protective sawdust, and found inside a long lead chest closed by copper bolts. Aureliano Segundo took out the eight bolts as the children watched impatiently, and he barely had time to give a cry and push the children aside when he raised the lead cover and saw Don Fernando, dressed in black and with a crucifix on his chest, his skin broken out in pestilential sores and cooking slowly in a frothy stew with bubbles like live pearls.

  A short time after the birth of their daughter, the unexpected jubilee for Colonel Aureliano Buendía, ordered by the government to celebrate another anniversary of the Treaty of Neerlandia, was announced. It was a decision so out of line with official policy that the colonel spoke out violently against it and rejected the homage. “It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of the word ‘jubilee,’ ” he said. “But whatever it means, it has to be a trick.” The small goldsmith’s shop was filled with emissaries. Much older and more solemn, the lawyers in dark suits who in other days had flapped about the colonel like crows had returned. When he saw them appear, the same as the other time, when they came to put a stop to the war, he could not bear the cynicism of their praise. He ordered them to leave him in peace, insisting that he was not a hero of the nation as they said but an artisan without memories whose only dream was to die of fatigue in the oblivion and misery of his little gold fishes. What made him most indignant was the word that the president of the republic himself planned to be present at the ceremonies in Macondo in order to decorate him with the Order of Merit. Colonel Aureliano Buendía had him told, word for word, that he was eagerly awaiting that tardy but deserved occasion in order to take a shot at him, not as payment for the arbitrary acts and anachronisms of his regime, but for his lack of respect for an old man who had not done anyone any harm. Such was the vehemence with which he made the threat that the president of the republic canceled his trip at the last moment and sent the decoration with a personal representative. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, besieged by pressures of all kinds, left his bed of a paralytic in order to persuade his former companion in arms. When the latter saw the rocking chair carried by four men appear and saw the friend who had shared his victories and defeats since youth sitting in it among some large pillows, he did not have a single doubt but that he was making that effort in order to express his solidarity. But when he discovered the real motive for his visit he had them take him out of the workshop.

  “Now I’m convinced too late,” he told him, “that I would have done you a great favor if I’d let them shoot you.”

  So the jubilee was celebrated without the attendance of any members of the family. Chance had it that it also coincided with carnival week, but no one could get the stubborn idea out of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s head that the coincidence had been foreseen by the government in order to heighten the cruelty of the mockery. From his lonely workshop he could hear the martial music, the artillery salutes, the tolling of the Te Deum, and a few phrases of the speeches delivered in front of the house as they named the street after him. His eyes grew moist with indignation, with angry impotence, and for the first time since his defeat it pained him not to have the strength of youth so that he could begin a bloody war that would wipe out the last vestiges of the Conservative regime. The echoes of the homage had not died down when Úrsula knocked at the workshop door.

  “Don’t bother me,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  “Open up,” Úrsula insisted in a normal voice. “This has nothing to do with the celebration.”

  Then Colonel Aureliano Buendía took down the bar and saw at the door seventeen men of the most varied appearance, of all types and colors, but all with a solitary air that would have been enough to identify them anywhere on earth. They were his sons. Without any previous agreement, without knowing each other, they had arrived from the most distant corners of the coast, captivated by the talk of the jubilee. They all bore with pride the name Aureliano and the last name of their mothers. The three days that they stayed in the house, to the satisfaction of Úrsula and the scandal of Fernanda, were like a state of war. Amaranta searched among old papers for the ledger where Úrsula had written down the names and birth and baptism dates of all of them, and beside the space for each one she added his present address. That list could well have served as a recapitulation of twenty years of war. From it the nocturnal itinerary of the colonel from the dawn he left Macondo at the head of twenty-one men on his way to a fanciful rebellion until he returned for the last time wrapped in a blanket stiff with blood could have been reconstructed. Aureliano Segundo did not let the chance go by to regale his cousins with a thunderous champagne and accordion party that was interpreted as a tardy adjustment of accounts with the carnival, which went awry because of the jubilee. They smashed half of the dishes, they destroyed the rose bushes as they chased a bull they were trying to hog-tie, they killed the hens by shooting at them, they made Amaranta dance the sad waltzes of Pietro Crespi, they got Remedios the Beauty to put on a pair of men’s pants and climb a greased pole, and in the dining room they turned loose a pig daubed with lard, which prostrated Fernanda, but no one regretted the destruction because the house shook with a healthy earthquake. Colonel Aureliano Buendía who at first received them with mistrust and even doubted the parentage of some, was amused by their wildness, and before they left he gave each one a little gold fish. Even the withdrawn José Arcadio Segundo offered them an afternoon of cockfights, which was at the point of ending in tragedy because several of the Aurelianos were so expert in matters of the cockpit that they spotted Father Antonio Isabel’s tricks at once. Aureliano Segundo, who saw the limitless prospect of wild times offered by those mad relatives, decided that they should all stay and work for him. The only one who accepted was Aureliano Triste, a big mulatto with the drive and explorer’s spirit of his grandfather. He had already tested his fortune in half the world and it did not matter to him where he stayed. The others, even though they were unmarried, considered their destinies established. They were all skillful craftsmen, the men of their houses, peace-loving people. The Ash Wednesday before they went back to scatter out along the coast, Amaranta got them to put on Sunday clothes and accompany her to church. More amused than devout, they let themselves be led to the altar rail where Father Antonio Isabel made the sign of the cross in ashes on them. Back at the house, when the youngest tried to clean his forehead, he discovered that the mark was indelible and so were those of his brothers. They tried soap and water, earth and a scrubbing brush, and lastly a pumice stone and lye, but they could not remove the crosses. On the other hand, Amaranta and the others who had gone to mass took it off without any trouble. “It’s better that way,” Úrsula stated as she said good-bye to them. “From now on everyone will know who you are.” They went off in a troop, preceded by a band of musicians and shooting off fireworks, and they left behind in the town an impression that the Buendía line had enough seed for many cen
turies. Aureliano Triste, with the cross of ashes on his forehead, set up on the edge of town the ice factory that José Arcadio Buendía had dreamed of in his inventive delirium.

  Some months after his arrival, when he was already well-known and well-liked, Aureliano Triste went about looking for a house so that he could send for his mother and an unmarried sister (who was not the colonel’s daughter), and he became interested in the run-down big house that looked abandoned on a corner of the square. He asked who owned it. Someone told him that it did not belong to anyone, that in former times a solitary widow who fed on earth and whitewash from the walls had lived there, and that in her last years she was seen only twice on the street with a hat of tiny artificial flowers and shoes the color of old silver when she crossed the square to the post office to mail a letter to the Bishop. They told him that her only companion was a pitiless servant woman who killed dogs and cats and any animal that got into the house and threw their corpses into the middle of the street in order to annoy people with the rotten stench. So much time had passed since the sun had mummified the empty skin of the last animal that everybody took it for granted that the lady of the house and the maid had died long before the wars were over, and that if the house was still standing it was because in recent years there had not been a rough winter or destructive wind. The hinges had crumbled with rust, the doors were held up only by clouds of cobwebs, the windows were soldered shut by dampness, and the floor was broken by grass and wildflowers and in the cracks lizards and all manner of vermin had their nests, all of which seemed to confirm the notion that there had not been a human being there for at least half a century. The impulsive Aureliano Triste did not need such proof to proceed. He pushed on the main door with his shoulder and the worm-eaten wooden frame fell down noiselessly amid a dull cataclysm of dust and termite nests. Aureliano Triste stood on the threshold waiting for the dust to clear and then he saw in the center of the room the squalid woman, still dressed in clothing of the past century, with a few yellow threads on her bald head, and with two large eyes, still beautiful, in which the last stars of hope had gone out, and the skin of her face was wrinkled by the aridity of solitude. Shaken by that vision from another world, Aureliano Triste barely noticed that the woman was aiming an antiquated pistol at him.