Around the time of the riddle lottery, Aureliano Segundo 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 syrup. When the knot in his throat became so oppressive that it was difficult for him to breathe, Aureliano Segundo 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, clandestine brothel, did not trust therapeutic superstitions, so she turned the matter over to her cards. She saw the queen of diamonds with her throat wounded by the steel of the jack of spades, and she deduced that Fernanda was trying to get her husband back home by means of the discredited method of sticking pins into his picture but that she had brought on an internal tumor because of her clumsy knowledge of the black arts. Since Aureliano Segundo 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 of witchcraft 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 conjure away Fernanda’s alleged curse, she told Aureliano Segundo 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 her part, Fernanda interpreted the disappearance as a reprisal by the invisible doctors and she sewed a pocket of casing to the inside of her camisole where she kept the new pessaries that her son sent her.
Six months after he had buried the hen, Aureliano Segundo woke up at midnight with an attack of coughing and the feeling that he was being strangled within by the claws of a crab. It was then that he understood that for all of the magical pessaries that he destroyed and all the conjuring hens that he soaked, the single and sad piece of truth was that he was dying. He did not tell anyone. Tormented 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 miserable sections, trying to sell tickets with an anxiety that could only be conceivable in a dying man. “Here’s Divine Providence,” he hawked. “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 Aureliano, 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 tune, and it finally diminished into the growl of a dog, but he still had the drive to see that there should be no diminishing of the hope people brought to Petra Cotes’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 fabulous raffle of the lands destroyed by the deluge, which could easily be restored by a person with the money to do so. It was such a spectacular undertaking 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, and Aureliano Segundo, 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. Aureliano Segundo 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 clavichord, 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 Ángel gave her addressed to a boardinghouse run by nuns 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 coordination possible went forward, Aureliano Segundo, aided by Petra Cotes, prepared Amaranta Úrsula’s baggage. The night on which they were packing one of Fernanda’s bridal trunks, the things were so well organized that the schoolgirl knew by heart which were the suits and cloth slippers she would wear crossing the Atlantic and the blue cloth coat with copper 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 her 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 seasickness and a notebook written by Father Ángel in his own hand containing six prayers to be used against storms. Fernanda 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 of her. A few months later, at the hour of his death, Aureliano Segundo would remember her as he had seen her 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, her cordovan shoes, with buckles and low heels, and sateen stockings held up at the thighs with elastic garters. Her body was slim, her hair loose and long, and she had the lively eyes that Úrsula had had at her age and the way in which she said good-bye, without crying but without smiling either, revealed the same strength of character. Walking beside the coach as it picked up speed and holding Fernanda by the arm so that she would not stumble, Aureliano 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 scorching sun, looking at the train as it merged 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 Segundo was speaking to Aureliano 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 crabs that were eating his throat away. One week previously he had returned home, without any voice, unable to breathe, and almost skin and bones, with his wand
ering 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 her through the door.
“Put yourself in my place,” Petra Cotes begged. “Imagine how much I must have loved him to put up with this humiliation.”
“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 Segundo’s corpse with a kitchen knife to be sure that they would not bury him alive. The bodies were placed in identical coffins, and then it could be seen that once more in death they had become as identical as they had been until adolescence. Aureliano Segundo’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 irreverence that she had the wreath thrown onto the trash heap. In the tumult 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.
AURELIANO DID NOT leave Melquíades’ room for a long time. He learned by heart the fantastic legends of the crumbling book, the synthesis of the studies of Hermann the Cripple, the notes on the science of demonology, the keys to the philosopher’s stone, the Centuries of Nostradamus and his research concerning the plague, so that he reached adolescence without knowing a thing about his own time but with the basic knowledge of a medieval man. Any time that Santa Sofía de la Piedad would go into his room she would find him absorbed in his reading. At dawn she would bring him a mug of coffee without sugar and at noon a plate of rice and slices of fried plantain, which were the only things eaten in the house since the death of Aureliano Segundo. She saw that his hair was cut, picked off the nits, took in to his size the old clothing that she found in forgotten trunks, and when his mustache began to appear she brought him Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s razor and the small gourd he had used as a shaving mug. None of the latter’s children had looked so much like him, not even Aureliano José, particularly in respect to the prominent cheekbones and the firm and rather pitiless line of the lips. As had happened to Úrsula with Aureliano Segundo when the latter was studying in the room, Santa Sofía de la Piedad thought that Aureliano was talking to himself. Actually, he was talking to Melquíades. One burning noon, a short time after the death of the twins, against the light of the window he saw the gloomy old man with his crow’s-wing hat like the materialization of a memory that had been in his head since long before he was born. Aureliano had finished classifying the alphabet of the parchments, so that when Melquíades asked him if he had discovered the language in which they had been written he did not hesitate to answer.
“Sanskrit,” he said.
Melquíades revealed to him that his opportunities to return to the room were limited. But he would go in peace to the meadows of the ultimate death because Aureliano would have time to learn Sanskrit during the years remaining until the parchments became one hundred years old, when they could be deciphered. It was he who indicated to Aureliano that on the narrow street going down to the river, where dreams had been interpreted during the time of the banana company, a wise Catalonian had a bookstore where there was a Sanskrit primer, which would be eaten by the moths within six years if he did not hurry to buy it. For the first time in her long life Santa Sofía de la Piedad let a feeling show through, and it was a feeling of wonderment, when Aureliano asked her to bring him the book that could be found between Jerusalem Delivered and Milton’s poems on the extreme right-hand side of the second shelf of the bookcases. Since she could not read, she memorized what he had said and got some money by selling one of the seventeen little gold fishes left in the workshop, the whereabouts of which, after being hidden the night the soldiers searched the house, was known only by her and Aureliano.
Aureliano made progress in his studies of Sanskrit as Melquíades’ visits became less and less frequent and he was more distant, fading away in the radiant light of noon. The last time that Aureliano sensed him he was only an invisible presence who murmured: “I died of fever on the sands of Singapore.” The room then became vulnerable to dust, heat, termites, red ants, and moths, who would turn the wisdom of the parchments into sawdust.
There was no shortage of food in the house. The day after the death of Aureliano Segundo, one of the friends who had brought the wreath with the irreverent inscription offered to pay Fernanda some money that he had owed her husband. After that every Wednesday a delivery boy brought a basket of food that was quite sufficient for a week. No one ever knew that those provisions were being sent by Petra Cotes with the idea that the continuing charity was a way of humiliating the person who had humiliated her. Nevertheless, the rancor disappeared much sooner than she herself had expected, and then she continued sending the food out of pride and finally out of compassion. Several times, when she had no animals to raffle off and people lost interest in the lottery, she went without food so that Fernanda could have something to eat, and she continued fulfilling the pledge to herself until she saw Fernanda’s funeral procession pass by.
For Santa Sofía de la Piedad the reduction in the number of inhabitants of the house should have meant the rest she deserved after more than half a century of work. Never a lament had been heard from that stealthy, impenetrable woman who had sown in the family the angelic seed of Remedios the Beauty and the mysterious solemnity of José Arcadio Segundo; who dedicated a whole life of solitude and diligence to the rearing of children although she could barely remember whether they were her children or grandchildren, and who took care of Aureliano as if he had come out of her womb, not knowing herself that she was his great-grandmother. Only in a house like that was it conceivable for her always to sleep on a mat she laid out on the pantry floor in the midst of the nocturnal noise of the rats, and without telling anyone that one night she had awakened with the frightened feeling that someone was looking at her in the darkness and that it was a poisonous snake crawling over her stomach. She knew that if she had told Úrsula, the latter would have made her sleep in her own bed, but those were times when no one was aware of anything unless it was shouted on the porch, because with the bustle of the bakery, the surprises of the war, the care of the children, there was not much room for thinking about other people’s happiness. Petra Cotes, whom she had never seen, was the only one who remembered her. She saw to it that she had a good pair of shoes for street wear, that she always had clothing, even during the times when the raffles were working only through some miracle. When Fernanda arrived at the house she had good reason to think that she was an ageless servant, and even though she heard it said several times that she was her husband’s mother it was so incredible that it took her longer to discover it than to forget it. Santa Sofía de la Piedad never seemed bothered by that lowly position. On the contrary, one had the impression that she liked to stay in the corners, without a pause, without a complaint, keeping clean and in order the immense house that she had lived in ever since adolescence and that, especially during the time of the banana company, was more like a barracks than a home. But when Úrsula died the superhuman diligence of Santa Sofía de la Piedad, her tremendous capacity for work, began to fall apart. It was not only that she was old and exhausted, but overnight the house had plunged into a crisis of senility. A soft moss grew up the walls. When there was no longer a bare spot in the courtyard, the weeds broke through the cement of the porch, breaking it like glass, and out of the cracks grew the same yellow flowers that Úrsula had found in the glass with Melquíades’ false teeth a century before. With neither the time nor the resources to halt the challenge of nature, Santa Sofía de la Piedad spent the
day in the bedrooms driving out the lizards who would return at night. One morning she saw that the red ants had left the undermined foundations, crossed the garden, climbed up the railing, where the begonias had taken on an earthen color, and had penetrated into the heart of the house. She first tried to kill them with a broom, then with insecticides, and finally with lye, but the next day they were back in the same place, still passing by, tenacious and invincible. Fernanda, writing letters to her children, was not aware of the unchecked destructive attack. Santa Sofía de la Piedad continued struggling alone, fighting the weeds to stop them from getting into the kitchen, pulling from the walls the tassels of spiderwebs which were rebuilt in a few hours, scraping off the termites. But when she saw that Melquíades’ room was also dusty and filled with cobwebs even though she swept and dusted three times a day, and that in spite of her furious cleaning it was threatened by the debris and the air of misery that had been foreseen only by Colonel Aureliano Buendía and the young officer, she realized that she was defeated. Then she put on her worn Sunday dress, some old shoes of Úrsula’s, and a pair of cotton stockings that Amaranta Úrsula had given her, and she made a bundle out of the two or three changes of clothing that she had left.
“I give up,” she said to Aureliano. “This is too much house for my poor bones.”
Aureliano asked her where she was going and she made a vague sign, as if she did not have the slightest idea of her destination. She tried to be more precise, however, saying that she was going to spend her last years with a first cousin who lived in Riohacha. It was not a likely explanation. Since the death of her parents she had not had contact with anyone in town or received letters or messages, nor had she been heard to speak of any relatives. Aureliano gave her fourteen little gold fishes because she was determined to leave with only what she had: one peso and twenty-five cents. From the window of the room he saw her cross the courtyard with her bundle of clothing, dragging her feet and bent over by her years, and he saw her reach her hand through an opening in the main door and replace the bar after she had gone out. Nothing was ever heard of her again.
One Hundred Years of Solitude Page 36