1PILAR TERNERA died in her wicker rocking chair during one night of festivities as she watched over

2the entrance to her paradise. In accordance with her last wishes she was not buried in a coffin but

3sitting in her rocker, which eight men lowered by ropes into a huge hole dug in the center of the

4dance floor. The mulatto girls, dressed in black, pale from weeping, invented shadowy rites as they

5took off their earrings, brooches, and rings and threw them into the pit before it was closed over

6with a slab that bore neither name nor dates, and that was covered with a pile of Amazonian

7camellias. After poisoning the animals they closed up the doors and windows with brick and mortar

8and they scattered out into the world with their wooden trunks that were lined with pictures of

9saints, prints from magazines, and the portraits of sometime sweethearts, remote and fantastic, who

10shat diamonds, or ate cannibals, or were crowned playing-card kings on the high seas.

11It was the end. In Pilar Ternera’s tomb, among the psalm and cheap whore jewelry, the ruins of

12the past would rot, the little that remained after the wise Catalonian had auctioned off his bookstore

13and returned to the Mediterranean village where he had been born, overcome by a yearning for a

14lasting springtime. No one could have foreseen his decision. He had arrived in Macondo during the

15splendor of the banana company, fleeing from one of many wars, and nothing more practical had

16occurred to him than to set up that bookshop of incunabula and first editions in several languages,

17which casual customers would thumb through cautiously, as if they were junk books, as they waited

18their turn to have their dreams interpreted in the house across the way. He spent half his life in the

19back of the store, scribbling in his extra-careful hand in purple ink and on pages that he tore out of

20school notebooks, and no one was sure exactly what he was writing. When Aureliano first met him

21he had two boxes of those motley pages that in some way made one think of Melquiades’

22parchments, and from that time until he left he had filled a third one, so it was reasonable to believe

23that he had done nothing else during his stay in Macondo. The only people with whom he

24maintained relations were the four friends, whom he had exchanged their tops and kites for books,

25and he set them to reading Seneca and Ovid while they were still in grammar school. He treated the

26classical writers with a household familiarity, as if they had all been his roommates at some period,

27and he knew many tilings that should not have been known, such as the fact that Saint Augustine

28wore a wool jacket under his habit that he did not take off for fourteen years and that Arnaldo of

29Villanova, the necromancer, was impotent since childhood because of a scorpion bite. His fervor for

30the written word was an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence. Not even his own

31manuscripts were safe from that dualism. Having learned Catalan in order to translate them, Alfonso

32put a roll of pages in his pockets, which were always full of newspaper clippings and manuals for

33strange trades, and one night he lost them in the house of the little girls who went to bed because of

34hunger. When the wise old grandfather found out, instead of raising a row as had been feared, he

35commented, dying with laughter, that it was the natural destiny of literature. On the other hand,

36there was no human power capable of persuading him not to take along the three boxes when he

37returned to his native village, and he unleashed a string of Carthaginian curses at the railroad

38inspectors who tried to ship them as freight until he finally succeeded in keeping them with him in

39the passenger coach. “The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class

40and literature goes as freight.” That was the last tiling he was heard to say. He had spent a dark week

41on the final preparations for the trip, because as the hour approached his humor was breaking down

42and things began to be misplaced, and what he put in one place would appear in another, attacked

43by the same elves that had tormented Fernanda.

44“ Collons ,” he would curse. “I shit on Canon Twenty-seven of the Synod of London.”

45German and Aureliano took care of him. They helped him like a child, fastening Inis tickets and

46immigration documents to his pockets with safety pins, making him a detailed list of what he must

47do from the time he left Macondo until he landed in Barcelona, but nonetheless he threw away a

48pair of pants with half of Inis money in it without realizing it. The night before the trip, after nailing

49up the boxes and putting his clothing into the same suitcase that he had brought when he first came,

50he narrowed his clam eyes, pointed with a kind of impudent benediction at the stacks of books with

51which he had endured during his exile, and said to Inis friends:

52“All that shit there I leave to you people!”

53Three months later they received in a large envelope twenty-nine letters and more than fifty

54pictures that he had accumulated during the leisure of the high seas. Although he did not date them,

55the order in which he had written the letters was obvious. In the first ones, with his customary good

56humor, he spoke about the difficulties of the crossing, the urge he had to throw the cargo officer

57overboard when he would not let him keep the three boxes in his cabin, the clear imbecility of a lady

58who was terrified at the number thirteen, not out of superstition but because she thought it was a

59number that had no end, and the bet that he had won during the first dinner because he had

60recognized in the drinking water on board the taste of the nighttime beets by the springs of Lerida.

61With the passage of the days, however, the reality of life on board mattered less and less to him and

62even the most recent and trivial happenings seemed worthy of nostalgia, because as the ship got

63farther away, his memory began to grow sad. That process of nostalgia was also evident in the

64pictures. In the first ones he looked happy, with his sport shirt which looked like a hospital jacket

65and his snowy mane, in an October Caribbean filled with whitecaps. In the last ones he could be

66seen to be wearing a dark coat and a milk scarf, pale in the face, taciturn from absence on the deck

67of a mournful ship that had come to be like a sleepwalker on the autumnal seas. German and Aureli¬

68ano answered his letters. He wrote so many during the first months that at that time they felt closer

69to him than when he had been in Macondo, and they were almost freed from the rancor that he had

70left behind. At first he told them that everything was just the same, that the pink snails were still in

71the house where he had been born, that the dry herring still had the same taste on a piece of toast,

72that the waterfalls in the village still took on a perfumed smell at dusk. They were the notebook

73pages again, woven with the purple scribbling, in which he dedicated a special paragraph to each

74one. Nevertheless, and although he himself did not seem to notice it, those letters of recuperation

75and stimulation were slowly changing into pastoral letters of disenchantment. One winter night

76while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat of the back of his store, the buzzing

77of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just

78as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the

79fleeting larks of springtime. Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his

80marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave

81Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that

82they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie,

83that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest

84and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

85Alvaro was the first to take the advice to abandon Macondo. He sold everything, even the tame

86jaguar that teased passersby from the courtyard of his house, and he bought an eternal ticket on a

87train that never stopped traveling. In the postcards that he sent from the way stations he would

88describe with shouts the instantaneous images that he had seen from the window of his coach, and it

89was as if he were tearing up and throwing into oblivion some long, evanescent poem: the chimerical

90Negroes in the cotton fields of Louisiana, the winged horses in the bluegrass of Kentucky, the

91Greek lovers in the infernal sunsets of Arizona, the girl in the red sweater painting watercolors by a

92lake in Michigan who waved at him with her bmshes, not to say farewell but out of hope, because she did not know that she was watching a train with no return passing by. Then Alfonso and

93German left one Saturday with the idea of coming back on Monday, but nothing more was ever

94heard of them. A year after the departure of the wise Catalonian the only one left in Macondo was

95Gabriel, still adrift at the mercy of Nigromanta’s chancy charity and answering the questions of a

96contest in a French magazine in which the first prize was a trip to Paris. Aureliano, who was the one

97who subscribed to it, helped him fill in the answers, sometimes in his house but most of the time

98among the ceramic bottles and atmosphere of valerian in the only pharmacy left in Macondo, where

99Mercedes, Gabriel’s stealthy girl friend, lived. It was the last that remained of a past whose

100annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself

101from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending. The town had reached such

102extremes of inactivity that when Gabriel won the contest and left for Paris with two changes of

103clothing, a pair of shoes, and the complete works of Rabelais, he had to signal the engineer to stop

104the train and pick him up. The old Street of the Turks was at that time an abandoned corner where

105the last Arabs were letting themselves be dragged off to death with the age-old custom of sitting in

106their doorways, although it had been many years since they had sold the last yard of diagonal cloth,

107and in the shadowy showcases only the decapitated manikins remained. The banana company’s city,

108which Patricia Brown may have tried to evoke for her grandchildren during the nights of intolerance

109and dill pickles in Prattville, Alabama, was a plain of wild grass. The ancient priest who had taken

110Father Angel’s place and whose name no one had bothered to find out awaited God’s mercy

111stretched out casually in a hammock, tortured by arthritis and the insomnia of doubt while the

112lizards and rats fought over the inheritance of the nearby church. In that Macondo forgotten even

113by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe,

114secluded by solitude and love and by the solitude of love in a house where it was almost impossible

115to sleep because of the noise of the red ants, Aureliano, and Amaranta Ursula were the only happy

116beings, and the most happy on the face of the earth.

117Gaston had returned to Brussels. Tired of waiting for the airplane, one day he put his

118indispensable things into a small suitcase, took his file of correspondence, and left with the idea of

119returning by air before his concession was turned over to a group of German pilots who had

120presented the provincial authorities with a more ambitious project than his. Since the afternoon of

121their first love, Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula had continued taking advantage of her husband’s

122rare unguarded moments, making love with gagged ardor in chance meetings and almost always

123intermpted by unexpected returns. But when they saw themselves alone in the house they

124succumbed to the delirium of lovers who were making up for lost time. It was a mad passion,

125unhinging, which made Fernanda’s bones tremble with horror in her grave and which kept them in a

126state of perpetual excitement. Amaranta Ursula’s shrieks, her songs of agony would break out the

127same at two in the afternoon on the dining-room table as at two in the morning in the pantry. “What

128hurts me most,” she would say, laughing, “is all the time that we wasted.” In the bewilderment of

129passion she watched the ants devastating the garden, sating their prehistoric hunger with the beam

130of the house, and she watched the torrents of living lava take over the porch again, but she bothered

131to fight them only when she found them in her bedroom. Aureliano abandoned the parchments, did

132not leave the house again, and carelessly answered the letters from the wise Catalonian. They lost

133their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and

134windows again so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as

135Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of the

136courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time

137they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness

138they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano

139Buendfa and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. Although Aureliano was just as ferocious a lover as his rival, it was Amaranta

140Ursula who ruled in that paradise of disaster with her mad genius and her lyrical voracity, as if she

141had concentrated in her love the unconquerable energy that her great-great-grandmother had given

142to the making of little candy animals. And yet, while she was singing with pleasure and dying with

143laughter over her own inventions, Aureliano was becoming more and more absorbed and silent, for

144his passion was self-centered and burning. Nevertheless, they both reached such extremes of

145virtuosity that when they became exhausted from excitement, they would take advantage of their

146fatigue. They would give themselves over to the worship of their bodies, discovering that the rest

147periods of love had unexplored possibilities, much richer than those of desire. While he would rub

148Amaranta Ursula’s erect breasts with egg whites or smooth her elastic thighs and peach-like stomach

149with cocoa butter, she would play with Aureliano’s portentous creature as if it were a doll and would

150paint clown’s eyes on it with her lipstick and give it a Turk’s mustache with her eyebrow pencil, and

151would put on organza bow ties and little tinfoil hats. One night they daubed themselves from head

152to toe with peach jam and licked each other like dogs and made mad love on the floor of the porch,

153and they were awakened by a torrent of carnivorous ants who were ready to eat them alive.

154During the pauses in their delirium, Amaranta Ursula would answer Gaston’s letters. She felt him

155to be so far away and busy that his return seemed impossible to her. In one of his first letters he told

156her that his Partners had actually sent the airplane, but that a shipping agent in Bmssels had sent it

157by mistake to Tanganyika, where it was delivered to the scattered tribe of the Makondos. That mix-

158up brought on so many difficulties that just to get the plane back might take two years. So Amaranta

159Ursula dismissed the possibility of an inopportune return. Aureliano, for his part, had no other

160contact with the world except for the letters from the wise Catalonian and the news he had of

161Gabriel through Mercedes, the silent pharmacist. At first they were real contacts. Gabriel had turned

162in his return ticket in order to stay in Paris, selling the old newspapers and empty bottles that the

163chambermaids threw out of a gloomy hotel on the Rue Dauphine. Aureliano could visualize him

164then in a turtleneck sweater which he took off only when the sidewalk Cafes on Montparnasse filled

165with springtime lovers, and sleeping by day and writing by night in order to confuse hunger in the

166room that smelled of boiled cauliflower where Rocamadour was to die. Nevertheless, news about

167him was slowly becoming so uncertain, and the letters from the wise man so sporadic and

168melancholy, that Aureliano grew to think about them as Amaranta Ursula thought about her

169husband, and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and

170eternal reality was love.

171Suddenly, like the stampede in that world of happy unawareness, came the news of Gaston’s

172return. Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula opened their eyes, dug deep into their souls, looked at the

173letter with their hands on their hearts, and understood that they were so close to each other that they

174preferred death to separation. Then she wrote her husband a letter of contradictory truths in which

175she repeated her love and said how anxious she was to see him again, but at the same time she

176admitted as a design of fate the impossibility of living without Aureliano. Contrary to what they had

177expected, Gaston sent them a calm, almost paternal reply, with two whole pages devoted to a

178warning against the fickleness of passion and a final paragraph with unmistakable wishes for them to

179be as happy as he had been during his brief conjugal experience. It was such an unforeseen attitude

180that Amaranta Ursula felt humiliated by the idea that she had given her husband the pretext that he

181had wanted in order to abandon her to her fate. The rancor was aggravated six months later when

182Gaston wrote again from Leopoldville, where he had finally recovered the airplane, simply to ask

183them to ship him the velocipede, which of all that he had left behind in Macondo was the only thing

184that had any sentimental value for him. Aureliano bore Amaranta Ursula’s spite patiently and made

185an effort to show her that he could be as good a husband in adversity as in prosperity, and the daily

186needs that besieged them when Gaston’s last money ran out created a bond of solidarity between them that was not as dazzling and heady as passion, but that let them make love as much and be as

187happy as during their uproarious and salacious days. At the time Pilar Ternera died they were

188expecting a child.

189In the lethargy of her pregnancy, Amaranta Ursula tried to set up a business in necklaces made

190out of the backbones of fish. But except for Mercedes, who bought a dozen, she could not find any

191customers. Aureiiano was aware for the first time that his gift for languages, his encyclopedic

192knowledge, his rare faculty for remembering the details of remote deeds and places without having

193been there, were as useless as the box of genuine jewelry that his wife owned, which must have been

194worth as much as all the money that the last inhabitants of Macondo could have put together. They

195survived miraculously. Although Amaranta Ursula did not lose her good humor or her genius for

196erotic mischief, she acquired the habit of sitting on the porch after lunch in a kind of wakeful and

197thoughtful siesta. Aureiiano would accompany her. Sometimes they would remain there in silence

198until nightfall, opposite each other, looking into each other’s eyes, loving each other as much as in

199their scandalous days. The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past.

200They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard,

201killing lizards to hang on Ursula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those

202memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had

203memory. Going deeper into the past, Amaranta Ursula remembered the afternoon on which she had

204gone into the silver shop and her mother told her that little Aureiiano was nobody’s child because he

205had been found floating in a basket. Although the version seemed unlikely to them, they did not

206have any information enabling them to replace it with the true one. All that they were sure of after

207examining an the possibilities was that Fernanda was not Aureliano’s mother. Amaranta Ursula was

208inclined to believe that he was the son of Petra Cotes, of whom she remembered only tales of

209infamy, and that supposition produced a twinge of horror in her heart.

210Tormented by the certainty that he was Iris wife’s brother, Aureiiano ran out to the parish house

211to search through the moldy and moth-eaten archives for some clue to his parentage. The oldest

212baptismal certificate that he found was that of Amaranta Buendfa, baptized in adolescence by Father

213Nicanor Reyna during the time when he was trying to prove the existence of God by means of tricks

214with chocolate. He began to have that feeling that he was one of the seventeen Aurelianos, whose

215birth certificates he tracked down as he went through four volumes, but the baptism dates were too

216far back for his age. Seeing him lost in the labyrinths of kinship, trembling with uncertainty, the arth¬

217ritic priest, who was watching him from his hammock, asked him compassionately what his name

218was.

219“Aureiiano Buendfa,” he said.

220“Then don’t wear yourself out searching,” the priest exclaimed with final conviction. “Many years

221ago there used to be a street here with that name and in those days people had the custom of

222naming their children after streets. ”

223Aureiiano trembled with rage.

224“So!” he said. “You don’t believe it either.”

225“Believe what?”

226“That Colonel Aureiiano, Buendfa fought thirty-two civil wars and lost them all,” Aureiiano

227answered. “That the army hemmed in and machine-gunned three thousand workers and that their

228bodies were carried off to be thrown into the sea on a train with two hundred cars. ”

229The priest measured him with a pitying look.

230“Oh, my son,” he signed. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

231So Aureiiano and Amaranta Ursula accepted the version of the basket, not because they believed

232it, but because it spared them their terror. As the pregnancy advanced they were becoming a single

233being, they were becoming more and more integrated in the solitude of a house that needed only one last breath to be knocked down. They restricted themselves to an essential area, from

234Fernanda’s bedroom, where the charms of sedentary love were visible, to the beginning of the

235porch, where Amaranta Ursula would sit to sew bootees and bonnets for the newborn baby and

236Aureliano, would answer the occasional letters from the wise Catalonian. The rest of the house was

237given over to the tenacious assault of destmction. The silver shop, Melquiades’ room, the primitive

238and silent realm of Santa Sofia de la Piedad remained in the depths of a domestic jungle that no one

239would have had the courage to penetrate. Surrounded by the voracity of nature, Aureliano and

240Amaranta Ursula continued cultivating the oregano and the begonias and defended their world with

241demarcations of quicklime, building the last trenches in the age-old war between man and ant. Her

242long and neglected hair, the splotches that were beginning to appear on her face, the swelling of her

243legs, the deformation of her former lovemaking weasel’s body had changed Amaranta Ursula from

244the youthful creature she had been when she arrived at the house with the cage of luckless canaries

245and her captive husband, but it did not change the vivacity of her spirit. “Shit,” she would say,

246laughingly. “Who would have thought that we really would end up living like cannibals!” The last

247thread that joined them to the world was broken on the sixth month of pregnancy when they

248received a letter that obviously was not from the wise Catalonian. It had been mailed in Barcelona,

249but the envelope was addressed in conventional blue ink by an official hand and it had the innocent

250and impersonal look of hostile messages. Aureliano snatched it out of Amaranta Ursula’s hands as

251she was about to open it.

252“Not this one,” he told her. “I don’t want to know what it says.”

253Just as he had sensed, the wise Catalonian did not write again. The stranger’s letter, which no one

254read, was left to the mercy of the moths on the shelf where Fernanda had forgotten her wedding

255ring on occasion and there it remained, consuming itself in the inner fire of its bad news as the

256solitary lovers sailed against the tide of those days of the last stages, those impenitent and ill-fated

257times which were squandered on the useless effort of making them drift toward the desert of

258disenchantment and oblivion. Aware of that menace, Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula spent the hot

259months holding hands, ending with the love of loyalty for the child who had his beginning in the

260madness of fornication. At night, holding each other in bed, they were not frightened by the

261sublunary explosions of the ants or the noise of the moths or the constant and clean whistle of the

262growth of the weeds in the neighboring rooms. Many times they were awakened by the traffic of the

263dead. They could hear Ursula fighting against the laws of creation to maintain the line, and Jose

264Arcadio Buendia searching for the mythical truth of the great inventions, and Fernanda praying, and

265Colonel Aureliano Buendia stupefying himself with the deception of war and the little gold fishes,

266and Aureliano Segundo dying of solitude in the turmoil of his debauches, and then they learned that

267dominant obsessions can prevail against death and they were happy again with the certainty that they

268would go on loving each other in their shape as apparitions long after other species of future animals

269would steal from the insects the paradise of misery that the insects were finally stealing from man.

270One Sunday, at six in the afternoon, Amaranta Ursula felt the pangs of childbirth. The smiling

271mistress of the little girls who went to bed because of hunger had her get onto the dining-room

272table, straddled her stomach, and mistreated her with wild gallops until her cries were drowned out

273by the bellows of a formidable male child. Through her tears Amaranta Ursula could see that he was

274one of those great Buendias, strong and willful like the Jose Arcadios, with the open and clairvoyant

275eyes of the Aurelianos, and predisposed to begin the race again from the beginning and cleanse it of

276its pernicious vices and solitary calling, for he was the only one in a century who had been

277engendered with love.

278“He’s a real cannibal.” she said. “We’ll name him Rodrigo.”

279“No,” her husband countered. “We’ll name him Aureliano and he’ll win thirty-two wars.”

280After cutting the umbilical cord, the midwife began to use a cloth to take off the blue grease that

281covered his body as Aureliano held up a lamp. Only when they turned him on his stomach did they

282see that he had something more than other men, and they leaned over to examine him. It was the

283tail of a pig.

284They were not alarmed. Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula were not aware of the family precedent,

285nor did they remember Ursula’s frightening admonitions, and the midwife pacified them with the

286idea that the tail could be cut off when the child got his second teeth. Then they had no time to

287think about it again, because Amaranta Ursula was bleeding in an uncontainable torrent. They tried

288to help her with applications of spider webs and balls of ash, but it was like trying to hold back a

289spring with one’s hands. During the first hours she tried to maintain her good humor. She took the

290frightened Aureliano by the hand and begged him not to worry, because people like her were not

291made to die against their will, and she exploded with laughter at the ferocious remedies of the

292midwife. But as Aureliano’s hope abandoned him she was becoming less visible, as if the light on her

293were fading away, until she sank into drowsiness. At dawn on Monday they brought a woman who

294recited cauterizing prayers that were infallible for man and beast beside her bed, but Amaranta

295Ursula’s passionate blood was insensible to any artifice that did not come from love. In the after¬

296noon, after twenty-four hours of desperation, they knew that she was dead because the flow had

297stopped without remedies and her profile became sharp and the blotches on her face evaporated in a

298halo of alabaster and she smiled again.

299Aureliano did not understand until then how much he loved his friends, how much he missed

300them, and how much he would have given to be with them at that moment. He put the child in the

301basket that his mother had prepared for him, covered the face of the corpse with a blanket, and

302wandered aimlessly through the town, searching for an entrance that went back to the past. He

303knocked at the door of the pharmacy, where he had not visited lately, and he found a carpenter

304shop. The old woman who opened the door with a lamp in her hand took pity on his delirium and

305insisted that, no, there had never been a pharmacy there, nor had she ever known a woman with a

306thin neck and sleepy eyes named Mercedes. He wept, leaning his brow against the door of the wise

307Catalonian’s former bookstore, conscious that he was paying with his tardy sobs for a death that he

308had refused to weep for on time so as not to break the spell of love. He smashed his fists against the

309cement wall of The Golden Child, calling for Pilar Ternera, indifferent to the luminous orange disks

310that were crossing the sky and that so many times on holiday nights he had contemplated with

311childish fascination from the courtyard of the curlews. In the last open salon of the tumbledown

312red-light district an accordion group was playing the songs of Rafael Escalona, the bishop’s nephew,

313heir to the secrets of Francisco the Man. The bartender, who had a withered and somewhat

314crumpled arm because he had raised it against his mother, invited Aureliano to have a bottle of cane

315liquor, and Aureliano then bought him one. The bartender spoke to him about the misfortune of his

316arm. Aureliano spoke to him about the misfortune of his heart, withered and somewhat crumpled

317for having been raised against his sister. They ended up weeping together and Aureliano felt for a

318moment that the pain was over. But when he was alone again in the last dawn of Macondo, he

319opened up his arms in the middle of the square, ready to wake up the whole world, and he shouted

320with all his might:

321“Friends are a bunch of bastards!”

322Nigromanta rescued him from a pool of vomit and tears. She took him to her room, cleaned him

323up, made him drink a cup of broth. Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal

324and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own

325most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping. When he awoke, after a dull and

326brief sleep, Aureliano recovered the awareness of his headache. He opened his eyes and remembered

327the child.

328He could not find the basket. At first he felt an outburst of joy, thinking that Amaranta Ursula

329had awakened from death to take care of the child. But her corpse was a pile of stones under the

330blanket. Aware that when he arrived he had found the -door to the bedroom open, Aureliano went

331across the porch which was saturated with the morning sighs of oregano and looked into the dining

332room, where the remnants of the birth still lay: the large pot, the bloody sheets, the jars of ashes, and

333the twisted umbilical cord of the child on an opened diaper on the table next to the shears and the

334fishline. The idea that the midwife had returned for the child during the night gave him a pause of

335rest in which to think. He sank into the rocking chair, the same one in which Rebeca had sat during

336the early days of the house to give embroidery lessons, and in which Amaranta had played Chinese

337checkers with Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and in which Amaranta Ursula had sewn the tiny

338clothing for the child, and in that flash of lucidity he became aware that he was unable to bear in his

339soul the crushing weight of so much past. Wounded by the fatal lances of his own nostalgia and that

340of others, he admired the persistence of the spider webs on the dead rose bushes, the perseverance

341of the rye grass, the patience of the air in the radiant February dawn. And then he saw the child. It

342was a dry and bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes

343along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by

344horror but because at that prodigious instant Melqufades’ final keys were revealed to him and he saw

345the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the order of man’s time and space: The first of the

346line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.

347Aureliano, had never been more lucid in any act of his life as when he forgot about his dead ones

348and the pain of his dead ones and nailed up the doors and windows again with Fernanda’s crossed

349boards so as not to be disturbed by any temptations of the world, for he knew then that his fate was

350written in Melqufades’ parchments. He found them intact among the prehistoric plants and steaming

351puddles and luminous insects that had removed all trace of man’s passage on earth from the room,

352and he did not have the calmness to bring them out into the light, but right there, standing, without

353the slightest difficulty, as if they had been written in Spanish and were being read under the dazzling

354splendor of high noon, he began to decipher them aloud. It was the history of the family, written by

355Melqufades, down to the most trivial details, one hundred years ahead of time. He had written it in

356Sanskrit, which was his mother tongue, and he had encoded the even lines in the private cipher of

357the Emperor Augustus and the odd ones in a Lacedemonian military code. The final protection,

358which Aureliano had begun to glimpse when he let himself be confused by the love of Amaranta

359Ursula, was based on the fact that Melqufades had not put events in the order of man’s conventional

360time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one

361instant. Fascinated by the discovery, Aureliano, read aloud without skipping the chanted encyclicals

362that Melqufades himself had made Arcadio listen to and that were in reality the prediction of his

363execution, and he found the announcement of the birth of the most beautiful woman in the world

364who was rising up to heaven in body and soul, and he found the origin of the posthumous twins

365who gave up deciphering the parchments, not simply through incapacity and lack of drive, but also

366because their attempts were premature. At that point, impatient to know his own origin, Aureliano

367skipped ahead. Then the wind began, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, the murmurs of

368ancient geraniums, sighs of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia. He did not

369notice it because at that moment he was discovering the first indications of his own being in a

370lascivious grandfather who let himself be frivolously dragged along across a hallucinated plateau in

371search of a beautiful woman who would not make him happy. Aureliano recognized him, he pursued

372the hidden paths of his descent, and he found the instant of his own conception among the

373scorpions and the yellow butterflies in a sunset bathroom where a mechanic satisfied Iris lust on a

374woman who was giving herself out of rebellion. He was so absorbed that he did not feel the second

375surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the foundations. Only then did he discover that Amaranta

376Ursula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so that

377they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender

378the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. Macondo was already a fearful

379whirlwind of dust and mbble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane when

380Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he knew only too well, and he

381began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in

382the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror.