1DAZZLED BY SO MANY and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo did not know where

2their amazement began. They stayed up all night looking at the pale electric bulbs fed by the plant

3that Aureliano Triste had brought back when the train made its second trip, and it took time and

4effort for them to grow accustomed to its obsessive toom-toom. They be. came indignant over the

5living images that the prosperous merchant Bmno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head

6ticket windows, for the character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose

7misfortune tears of affliction had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in

8the next one. The audience, who paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would

9not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno

10Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the

11emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many felt that they had

12been the victims of some new and showy gypsy business and they decided not to return to the

13movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out

14misfortunes of imaginary beings. Something similar happened with the cylinder phonographs that

15the merry matrons from France brought with them as a substitute for the antiquated hand organs

16and that for a time had serious effects on the livelihood of the band of musicians. At first curiosity

17increased the clientele on the forbidden street and there was even word of respectable ladies who

18disguised themselves as workers in order to observe the novelty of the phonograph from first hand,

19but from so much and such close observation they soon reached the conclusion that it was not an

20enchanted mill as everyone had thought and as the matrons had said, but a mechanical trick that

21could not be compared with something so moving, so human, and so full of everyday truth as a

22band of musicians. It was such a serious disappointment that when phonographs became so popular

23that there was one in every house they were not considered objects for amusement for adults but as

24something good for children to take apart. On the other hand, when someone from the town had

25the opportunity to test the crude reality of the telephone installed in the railroad station, which was

26thought to be a mdimentary version of the phonograph because of its crank, even the most

27incredulous were upset. It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise

28and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and

29disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the

30limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of Jose

31Arcadio Buendia under the chestnut tree with impatience and made him wander all through the

32house even in broad daylight. Ever since the railroad had been officially inaugurated and had begun

33to arrive with regularity on Wednesdays at eleven o’clock and the primitive wooden station with a

34desk, a telephone, and a ticket window had been built, on the streets of Macondo men and women

35were seen who had adopted everyday and normal customs and manners but who really looked like

36people out of a circus. In a town that had chafed under the tricks of the gypsies there was no future

37for those ambulatory acrobats of commerce who with equal effrontery offered a whistling kettle and

38a daily regime that would assure the salvation of the soul on the seventh day; but from those who let

39themselves be convinced out of fatigue and the ones who were always unwary, they reaped

40stupendous benefits. Among those theatrical creatures, wearing riding breeches and leggings, a pith

41helmet and steel-rimmed glasses, with topaz eyes and the skin of a thin rooster, there arrived in

42Macondo on one of so many Wednesdays the chubby and smiling Mr. Herbert, who ate at the

43house.

44No one had noticed him at the table until the first bunch of bananas had been eaten. Aureliano

45Segundo had come across him by chance as he protested In broken Spanish because there were no

46rooms at the Hotel Jacob, and as he frequently did with strangers, he took him home. He was in the

47captive-balloon business, which had taken him halfway around the world with excellent profits, but

48he had not succeeded in taking anyone up in Macondo because they considered that invention

49backward after having seen and tried the gypsies’ flying carpets. He was leaving, therefore, on the

50next train. When they brought to the table the tiger-striped bunch of bananas that they were

51accustomed to hang in the dining room during lunch, he picked the first piece of fruit without great

52enthusiasm. But he kept on eating as he spoke, tasting, chewing, more with the distraction of a wise

53man than with the delight of a good eater, and when he finished the first bunch he asked them to

54bring him another. Then he took a small case with optical instruments out of the toolbox that he

55always carried with him. With the auspicious attention of a diamond merchant he examined the

56banana meticulously, dissecting it with a special scalpel, weighing the pieces on a pharmacist’s scale,

57and calculating its breadth with a gunsmith’s calipers. Then he took a series of instruments out of

58the chest with which he measured the temperature, the level of humidity in the atmosphere, and the

59intensity of the light. It was such an intriguing ceremony that no one could eat in peace as everybody

60waited for Mr. Herbert to pass a final and revealing judgment, but he did not say anything that

61allowed anyone to guess his intentions.

62On the days that followed he was seen with a net and a small basket hunting butterflies on the

63outskirts of town. On Wednesday a group of engineers, agronomists, hydrologists, topographers,

64and surveyors arrived who for several weeks explored the places where Mr. Herbert had hunted his

65butterflies. Later on Mr. Jack Brown arrived in an extra coach that had been coupled onto the yellow

66train and that was silver-plated all over, with seats of episcopal velvet, and a roof of blue glass. Also

67arriving on the special car, fluttering around Mr. Brown, were the solemn lawyers dressed in black

68who in different times had followed Colonel Aureliano Buendia everywhere, and that led the people

69to think that the agronomists, hydrologists, topographers, and surveyors, like Mr. Herbert with his

70captive balloons and his colored butterflies and Mr. Brown with his mausoleum on wheels and his

71ferocious German shepherd dogs, had something to do with the war. There was not much time to

72think about it, however, because the suspicious inhabitants of Macondo barely began to wonder

73what the devil was going on when the town had already become transformed into an encampment

74of wooden houses with zinc roofs inhabited by foreigners who arrived on the train from halfway

75around the world, riding not only on the seats and platforms but even on the roof of the coaches.

76The gringos, who later on brought their languid wives in muslin dresses and large veiled hats, built a

77separate town across the railroad tracks with streets lined with palm trees, houses with screened win¬

78dows, small white tables on the terraces, and fans mounted on the ceilings, and extensive blue lawns

79with peacocks and quails. The section was surrounded by a metal fence topped with a band of

80electrified chicken wire which during the cool summer mornings would be black with roasted

81swallows. No one knew yet what they were after, or whether they were actually nothing but

82philanthropists, and they had already caused a colossal disturbance, much more than that of the old

83gypsies, but less transitory and understandable. Endowed with means that had been reserved for

84Divine Providence in former times, they changed the pattern of the rams, accelerated the cycle of

85harvest, and moved the river from where it had always been and put it with its white stones and icy

86currents on the other side of the town, behind the cemetery. It was at that time that they built a

87fortress of reinforced concrete over the faded tomb of Jose Arcadio, so that the corpses smell of

88powder would not contaminate the waters. For the foreigners who arrived without love they

89converted the street of the loving matrons from France into a more extensive village than it had

90been, and on one glorious Wednesday they brought in a trainload of strange whores, Babylonish

91women skilled in age-old methods and in possession of all manner of unguents and devices to

92stimulate the unaroused, to give courage to the timid, to satiate the voracious, to exalt the modest

93man, to teach a lesson to repeaters, and to correct solitary people. The Street of the Turks, enriched

94by well-lit stores with products from abroad, displacing the old bazaars with their bright colors,

95overflowed on Saturday nights with the crowds of adventurers who bumped into each other among

96gambling tables, shooting galleries, the alley where the future was guessed and dreams interpreted,

97and tables of fried food and drinks, and on Sunday mornings there were scattered on the ground

98bodies that were sometimes those of happy dmnkards and more often those of onlookers felled by

99shots, fists, knives, and bottles during the brawls. It was such a tumultuous and intemperate invasion

100that during the first days it was impossible to walk through the streets because of the furniture and

101trunks, and the noise of the carpentry of those who were building their houses in any vacant lot

102without asking anyone’s permission, and the scandalous behavior of couples who hung their

103hammocks between the almond trees and made love under the netting in broad daylight and in view

104of everyone. The only serene corner had been established by peaceful West Indian Negroes, who

105built a marginal street with wooden houses on piles where they would sit in the doors at dusk

106singing melancholy hymns in their disordered gabble. So many changes took place in such a short

107time that eight months after Mr. Herbert’s visit the old inhabitants had a hard time recognizing their

108own town.

109“Look at the mess we’ve got ourselves into,” Colonel Aureliano Buendia said at that time, “just

110because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas. ”

111Aureliano Segundo, on the other hand, could not contain his happiness over the avalanche of

112foreigners. The house was suddenly filled with unknown guests, with invincible and worldly

113carousers, and it became necessary to add bedrooms off the courtyard, widen the dining room, and

114exchange the old table for one that held sixteen people, with new china and silver, and even then

115they had to eat lunch in shifts. Fernanda had to swallow her scmples and their guests of the worst

116sort like kings as they muddied the porch with their boots, urinated in the garden, laid their mats

117down anywhere to take their siesta, and spoke without regard for the sensitivities of ladies or the

118proper behavior of gentlemen. Amaranta, was so scandalized with the plebeian invasion that she

119went back to eating in the kitchen as in olden days. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, convinced that the

120majority of those who came into Inis workshop to greet him were not doing it because of sympathy

121or regard but out of the curiosity to meet a historical relic, a museum fossil, decided to shut himself

122in by barring the door and he was not seen any more except on very rare occasions when he would

123sit at the street door. Ursula, on the other hand, even during the days when she was already dragging

124her feet and walking about groping along the walls, felt a juvenile excitement as the time for the

125arrival of the train approached. “We have to prepare some meat and fish,” she would order the four

126cooks, who hastened to have everything ready under the imperturbable direction of Santa Sofia de la

127Piedad. “We have to prepare everything,” she insisted, “because we never know what these strangers

128like to eat.” The train arrived during the hottest time of day. At lunchtime the house shook with the

129bustle of a marketplace, and the perspiring guests—who did not even know who their hosts were—

130trooped in to occupy the best places at the table, while the cooks bumped into each other with

131enormous kettles of soup, pots of meat, large gourds filled with vegetables, and troughs of rice, and

132passed around the contents of barrels of lemonade with inexhaustible ladles. The disorder was such

133that Fernanda was troubled by the idea that many were eating twice and on more than one occasion

134she was about to burst out with a vegetable hawker’s insults because someone at the table in

135confusion asked her for the check. More than a year had gone by since Mr. Herbert’s visit and the

136only thing that was known was that the gringos were planning to plant banana trees in the enchanted

137region that Jose Arcadio Buendia and his men had crossed in search of the route to the great

138inventions. Two other sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, with the cross of ashes on their

139foreheads, arrived, drawn by that great volcanic belch, and they justified their determination with a

140phrase that may have explained everybody’s reasons.

141“We came,” they said, “because everyone is coming.”

142Remedios the Beauty was the only one who was immune to the banana plague. She was becalmed

143in a magnificent adolescence, more and more impenetrable to formality, more and more indifferent

144to malice and suspicion, happy in her own world of simple realities. She did not understand why

145women complicated their lives with corsets and petticoats, so she sewed herself a coarse cassock that

146she simply put over her and without further difficulties resolved the problem of dress, without

147taking away the feeling of being naked, which according to her lights was the only decent way to be

148when at home. They bothered her so much to cut the rain of hair that already reached to her thighs

149and to make rolls with combs and braids with red ribbons that she simply shaved her head and used

150the hair to make wigs for the saints. The startling thing about her simplifying instinct was that the

151more she did away with fashion in a search for comfort and the more she passed over conventions

152as she obeyed spontaneity, the more disturbing her incredible beauty became and the more

153provocative she became to men. When the sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendfa were in Macondo for

154the first time, Ursula remembered that in their veins they bore the same blood as her great-

155granddaughter and she shuddered with a forgotten fright. “Keep your eyes wide open,” she warned

156her. “With any of them your children will come out with the tail of a pig.” The girl paid such little

157attention to the warning that she dressed up as a man and rolled around in the sand in order to

158climb the greased pole, and she was at the point of bringing on a tragedy among the seventeen

159cousins, who were driven mad by the unbearable spectacle. That was why none of them slept at the

160house when they visited the town and the four who had stayed lived in rented rooms at Ursula’s

161insistence. Remedios the Beauty, however, would have died laughing if she had known about that

162precaution. Until her last moment on earth she was unaware that her irreparable fate as a disturbing

163woman was a daily disaster. Every time she appeared in the dining room, against Ursula’s orders, she

164caused a panic of exasperation among the outsiders. It was all too evident that she was completely

165naked underneath her crude nightshirt and no one could understand that her shaved and perfect

166skull was not some kind of challenge, and that the boldness with which she uncovered her thighs to

167cool off was not a criminal provocation, nor was her pleasure when she sucked her fingers after,

168eating. What no member of the family ever knew was that the strangers did not take long to realize

169that Remedios the Beauty gave off a breath of perturbation, a tormenting breeze that was still

170perceptible several hours after she had passed by. Men expert in the disturbances of love,

171experienced all over the world, stated that they had never suffered an anxiety similar to the one

172produced by the natural smell of Remedios the Beauty. On the porch with the begonias, in the

173parlor, in any place in the house, it was possible to point out the exact place where she had been and

174the time that had passed since she had left it. It was a definite, unmistakable trace that no one in the

175family could distinguish because it had been incorporated into the daily odors for a long time, but it

176was one that the outsiders identified immediately. They were the only ones, therefore, who

177understood how the young commander of the guard had died of love and how a gentleman from a

178faraway land had been plunged into desperation. Unaware of the restless circle in which she moved,

179of the unbearable state of intimate calamity that she provoked as she passed by, Remedios the

180Beauty treated the men without the least bit of malice and in the end upset them with her innocent

181complaisance. When Ursula succeeded in imposing the command that she eat with Amaranta in the

182kitchen so that the outsiders would not see her, she felt more comfortable, because, after all, she was

183beyond all discipline. In reality, it made no difference to her where she ate, and not at regular hours

184but according to the whims of her appetite. Sometimes she would get up to have lunch at three in

185the morning, sleep all day long, and she spent several months with her timetable all in disarray until

186some casual incident would bring her back into the order of tilings. When things were going better

187she would get up at eleven o’clock in the morning and shut herself up until two o’clock, completely

188nude, in the bathroom, killing scorpions as she came out of her dense and prolonged sleep. Then

189she would throw water from the cistern over herself with a gourd. It was an act so prolonged, so

190meticulous, so rich in ceremonial aspects that one who did not know her well would have thought

191that she was given over to the deserved adoration of her own body. For her, however, that solitary

192rite lacked all sensuality and was simply a way of passing the time until she was hungry. One day, as

193she began to bathe herself, a stranger lifted a tile from the roof and was breathless at the tremendous

194spectacle of her nudity. She saw his desolate eyes through the broken tiles and had no reaction of

195shame but rather one of alarm.

196“Be careful,” she exclaimed. “You’ll fall.”

197“I just wanted to see you,” the foreigner murmured.

198“Oh, all right,” she said. “But be careful, those tiles are rotten.”

199The stranger’s face had a pained expression of stupor and he seemed to be battling silently

200against his primary instincts so as not to break up the mirage. Remedios the Beauty thought that he

201was suffering from the fear that the tiles would break and she bathed herself more quickly than usual

202so that the man would not be in danger. While she was pouring water from the, cistern she told him

203that the roof was in that state because she thought that the bed of leaves had been rotted by the rain

204and that was what was filling the bathroom with scorpions. The stranger thought that her small talk

205was a way of covering her complaisance, so that when she began to soap herself he gave into

206temptation and went a step further.

207“Let me soap you,” he murmured.

208“Thank you for your good intentions,” she said, “but my two hands are quite enough.”

209“Even if it’s just your back,” the foreigner begged.

210“That would be silly,” she said. “People never soap their backs.”

211Then, while she was drying herself, the stranger begged her, with his eyes full of tears, to marry

212him. She answered him sincerely that she would never marry a man who was so simple that he had

213wasted almost an hour and even went without lunch just to see a woman taking a bath. Finally, when

214she put on her cassock, the man could not bear the proof that, indeed, she was not wearing anything

215underneath, as everyone had suspected, and he felt himself marked forever with the white-hot iron

216of that secret. Then he took two more tiles off in order to drop down into the bathroom.

217“It’s very high,” she warned him in fright. “You’ll kill yourself!”

218The rotten tiles broke with a noise of disaster and the man barely had time to let out a cry of

219terror as he cracked his skull and was killed outright on the cement floor. The foreigners who heard

220the noise in the dining room and hastened to remove the body noticed the suffocating odor of

221Remedios the Beauty on his skin. It was so deep in his body that the cracks in his skull did not give

222off blood but an amber-colored oil that was impregnated with that secret perfume, and then they

223understood that the smell of Remedios the Beauty kept on torturing men beyond death, right down

224to the dust of their bones. Nevertheless, they did not relate that horrible accident to the other two

225men who had died because of Remedios the Beauty. A victim was still needed before the outsiders

226and many of the old inhabitants of Macondo would credit the legend that Remedios Buendia did not

227give off a breath of love but a fatal emanation. The occasion for the proof of it came some months

228later on one afternoon when Remedios the Beauty went with a group of girl friends to look at the

229new plantings. For the girls of Macondo that novel game was reason for laughter and surprises,

230frights and jokes, and at night they would talk about their walk as if it had been an experience in a

231dream. Such was the prestige of that silence that Ursula did not have the heart to take the fun away

232from Remedios the Beauty, and she let her go one afternoon, providing that she wore a hat and a

233decent dress. As soon as the group of friends went into the plantings the air became impregnated

234with a fatal fragrance. The men who were working along the rows felt possessed by a strange

235fascination, menaced by some invisible danger, and many succumbed to a terrible desire to weep.

236Remedios the Beauty and her startled friends managed to take refuge in a nearby house just as they

237were about to be assaulted by a pack of ferocious males. A short time later they were rescued by the

238flour Aurelianos, whose crosses of ash inspired a sacred respect, as if they were caste marks, stamps

239of invulnerability. Remedios the Beauty did not tell anyone that one of the men, taking advantage of

240the tumult, had managed to attack her stomach with a hand that was more like the claw of an eagle

241clinging to the edge of a precipice. She faced the attacker in a kind of instantaneous flash and saw

242the disconsolate eyes, which remained stamped on her heart like the hot coals of pity. That night the

243man boasted of his audacity and swaggered over his good luck on the Street of the Turks a few

244minutes before the kick of a horse cmshed his chest and a crowd of outsiders saw him die in the

245middle of the street, drowned in his own bloody vomiting.

246The supposition that Remedios the Beauty Possessed powers of death was then borne out by

247four irrefutable events. Although some men who were easy with their words said that it was worth

248sacrificing one’s life for a night of love with such an arousing woman, the tmth was that no one

249made any effort to do so. Perhaps, not only to attain her but also to conjure away her dangers, all

250that was needed was a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love, but that was the only thing

251that did not occur to anyone. Ursula did not worry about her any more. On another occasion, when

252she had not yet given up the idea of saving her for the world, she had tried to get her interested in

253basic domestic affairs. “Men demand much more than you think,” she would tell her enigmatically.

254“There’s a lot of cooking, a lot of sweeping, a lot of suffering over little things beyond what you

255think.” She was deceiving herself within, trying to train her for domestic happiness because she was

256convinced that once his passion was satisfied them would not be a man on the face of the earth

257capable of tolerating even for a day a negligence that was beyond all understanding. The birth of the

258latest Jose Arcadio and her unshakable will to bring him up to be Pope finally caused her to cease

259worrying about her great-granddaughter. She abandoned her to her fate, trusting that sooner or later

260a miracle would take place and that in this world of everything there would also be a man with

261enough sloth to put up with her. For a long time already Amaranta had given up trying to make her

262into a useful woman. Since those forgotten afternoons when her niece barely had enough interest to

263turn the crank on the sewing machine, she had reached the conclusion that she was simpleminded.

264“Were going to have to raffle you off,” she would tell her, perplexed at the fact that men’s words

265would not penetrate her. Later on, when Ursula insisted that Remedios the Beauty go to mass with

266her face covered with a shawl, Amaranta thought that a mysterious recourse like that would turn out

267to be so provoking that soon a man would come who would be intrigued enough to search out

268patiently for the weak point of her heart. But when she saw the stupid way in which she rejected a

269pretender who for many reasons was more desirable than a prince, she gave up all hope. Fernanda

270did not even make any attempt to understand her. When she saw Remedios the Beauty dressed as a

271queen at the bloody carnival she thought that she was an extraordinary creature. But when she saw

272her eating with her hands, incapable of giving an answer that was not a miracle of simplemind¬

273edness, the only thing that she lamented was the fact that the idiots in the family lived so long. In

274spite of the fact that Colonel Aureliano Buendia kept on believing and repeating that Remedios the

275Beauty was in reality the most lucid being that he had ever known and that she showed it at every

276moment with her startling ability to put things over on everyone, they let her go her own way.

277Remedios the Beauty stayed there wandering through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her

278back, maturing in her dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, her unscheduled meals,

279her deep and prolonged silences that had no memory until one afternoon in March, when Fernanda

280wanted to fold her brabant sheets in the garden and asked the women in the house for help. She had

281just begun when Amaranta noticed that Remedios the Beauty was covered all over by an intense

282paleness.

283“Don’t you feel well?” she asked her.

284Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.

285“Quite the opposite,” she said, “I never felt better.”

286She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of

287her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her

288petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which

289Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was

290sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy

291of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping

292sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and

293passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost

294forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could

295reach her.

296The outsiders, of course, thought that Remedios the Beauty had finally succumbed to her

297irrevocable fate of a queen bee and that her family was trying to save her honor with that tale of

298levitation. Fernanda, burning with envy, finally accepted the miracle, and for a long time she kept on

299praying to God to send her back her sheets. Most people believed in the miracle and they even

300lighted candles and celebrated novenas. Perhaps there might have been talk of nothing else for a

301long time if the barbarous extermination of the Aurelianos had not replaced amazement with honor.

302Although he had never thought of it as an omen, Colonel Aureliano Buendia had foreseen the tragic

303end of his sons in a certain way. When Aureliano Serrador and Aureliano Arcaya, the two who

304arrived during the tumult, expressed a wish to stay in Macondo, their father tried to dissuade them.

305Fie could not understand what they were going to do in a town that had been transformed into a

306dangerous place overnight. But Aureliano Centeno and Aureliano Triste, backed by Aureliano

307Segundo. gave them work in their businesses. Colonel Aureliano Buendia had reasons that were still

308very confused and were against that determination. When he saw Mr. Brown in the first automobile

309to reach Macondo—an orange convertible with a horn that frightened dogs with its bark—the old

310soldier grew indignant with the servile excitement of the people and he realized that something had

311changed in the makeup of the men since the days when they would leave their wives and children

312and toss a shotgun on their shoulders to go off to war. The local authorities, after the armistice of

313Neerlandia, were mayors without initiative, decorative judges picked from among the peaceful and

314tired Conservatives of Macondo. “This is a regime of wretches,” Colonel Aureliano Buendia would

315comment when he saw the barefoot policemen armed with wooden clubs pass. “We fought all those

316wars and all of it just so that we didn’t have to paint our houses blue.” When the banana company

317arrived, however, the local functionaries were replaced by dictatorial foreigners whom Mr. Brown

318brought to live in the electrified chicken yard so that they could enjoy, as he explained it, the dignity

319that their status warranted and so that they would not suffer from the heat and the mosquitoes and

320the countless discomforts and privations of the town. The old policemen were replaced by hired

321assassins with machetes. Shut up in his workshop, Colonel Aureliano Buendia thought about those

322changes and for the first time in his quiet years of solitude he was tormented by the definite certainty

323that it had been a mistake not to have continued the war to its final conclusion. During that time a

324brother of the forgotten Colonel Magnlfico Visbal was taking his seven-year-old grandson to get a

325soft drink at one of the pushcarts on the square and because the child accidentally bumped into a

326corporal of police and spilled the drink on his uniform, the barbarian cut him to pieces with his

327machete, and with one stroke he cut off the head of the grandfather as he tried to stop him. The

328whole town saw the decapitated man pass by as a group of men carried him to his house, with a

329woman dragging the head along by its hair, and the bloody sack with the pieces of the child.

330For Colonel Aureliano Buendia it meant the limits of atonement. He suddenly found himself

331suffering from the same indignation that he had felt in his youth over the body of the woman who

332had been beaten to death because she had been bitten by a rabid dog. He looked at the groups of

333bystanders in front of the house and with his old stentorian voice, restored by a deep disgust with

334himself, he unloaded upon them the burden of hate that he could no longer bear in his heart.

335“One of these days,” he shouted, I’m going to arm my boys so we can get rid of these shitty

336gringos! ”

337During the course of that week, at different places along the coast, his seventeen sons were

338hunted down like rabbits by invisible criminals who aimed at the center of their crosses of ash.

339Aureliano Triste was leaving the house with his mother at seven in the evening when a rifle shot

340came out of the darkness and perforated his forehead. Aureliano Centeno was found in the

341hammock that he was accustomed to hang up in the factory with an icepick between his eyebrows

342driven in up to the handle. Aureliano Serrador had left his girl friend at her parents’ house after

343having taken her to the movies and was returning through the well-lighted Street of the Turks when

344someone in the crowd who was never identified fired a revolver shot which knocked him over into a

345caldron of boiling lard. A few minutes later someone knocked at the door of the room where

346Aureliano Arcaya was shut up with a woman and shouted to him: “Hurry up, they’re killing your

347brothers.” The woman who was with him said later that Aureliano Arcaya jumped out of bed and

348opened the door and was greeted with the discharge of a Mauser that split his head open. On that

349night of death, while the house was preparing to hold a wake for the four corpses, Fernanda ran

350through the town like a madwoman looking for Aureliano Segundo, whom Petra Cotes had locked

351up in a closet, thinking that the order of extermination included all who bore the colonel’s name.

352She would not let him out until the fourth day, when the telegrams received from different places

353along the coast made it clear that the fury of the invisible enemy was directed only at the brothers

354marked with the crosses of ash. Amaranta fetched the ledger where she had written down the facts

355about her nephews and as the telegrams arrived she drew lines through the names until only that of

356the eldest remained. They remembered him very well because of the contrast between his dark skin

357and his green eyes. His name was Aureliano Amador and he was a carpenter, living in a village

358hidden in the foothills. After waiting two weeks for the telegram telling of his death, Aureliano

359Segundo sent a messenger to him in order to warn him, thinking that he might not know about the

360threat that hung over him. The emissary returned with the news that Aureliano Amador was safe.

361The night of the extermination two men had gone to get him at his house and had shot at him with

362their revolvers but they had missed the cross of ashes. Aureliano Amador had been able to leap over

363the wall of the courtyard and was lost in the labyrinth of the mountains, which he knew like the back

364of his hand thanks to the friendship he maintained with the Indians, from whom he bought wood.

365Nothing more was heard of him.

366Those were dark days for Colonel Aureliano Buendia. The president of the republic sent him a

367telegram of condolence in which he promised an exhaustive investigation and paid homage to the

368dead men. At his command, the mayor appeared at the services with four funeral wreaths, which he

369tried to place on the coffins, but the colonel ordered him into the street. After the burial he drew up

370and personally submitted to the president of the republic a violent telegram, which the telegrapher

371refused to send. Then he enriched it with terms of singular aggressiveness, put it in an envelope, and

372mailed it. As had happened with the death of his wife, as had happened to him so many times during

373the war with the deaths of his best friends, he did not have a feeling of sorrow but a blind and

374directionless rage, a broad feeling of impotence. He even accused Father Antonio Isabel of

375complicity for having marked his sons with indelible ashes so that they-could be identified by their

376enemies. The decrepit priest, who could no longer string ideas together and who was beginning to

377startle his parishioners with the wild interpretations he gave from the pulpit, appeared one afternoon

378at the house with the goblet in which he had prepared the ashes that Wednesday and he tried to

379anoint the whole family with them to show that they could be washed off with water. But the horror

380of the misfortune had penetrated so deeply that not even Fernanda would let him experiment on her

381and never again was a Buendia seen to kneel at the altar rail on Ash Wednesday.

382Colonel Aureliano Buendia did not recover his calm for a long time. He abandoned the

383manufacture of little fishes, ate with great difficulty, and wandered all through the house as if

384walking in his sleep, dragging his blanket and chewing on his quiet rage. At the end of three months