1AMARANTA URSULA returned with the angels of December, driven on a sailor’s breeze, leading her

2husband by a silk rope tied around his neck. She appeared without warning, wearing an ivory-

3colored dress, a string of pearls that reached almost to her knees, emerald and topaz rings, and with

4her straight hair in a smooth bun held behind her ears by swallow-tail brooches. The man whom she

5had married six months before was a thin, older Fleming with the look of a sailor about him. She

6had only to push open the door to the parlor to realize that her absence had been longer and more

7destructive than she had imagined.

8“Good Lord,” she shouted, more gay than alarmed, “it’s obvious that there’s no woman in this

9house! ”

10The baggage would not fit on the porch. Besides Fernanda’s old tmnk, which they had sent her

11off to school with, she had two upright tmnks, four large suitcases, a bag for her parasols, eight

12hatboxes, a gigantic cage with half a hundred canaries, and her husband’s velocipede, broken down

13in a special case which allowed him to carry it like a cello. She did not even take a day of rest after

14the long trip. She put on some worn denim overalls that her husband had brought along with other

15automotive items and set about on a new restoration of the house. She scattered the red ants, who

16had already taken possession of the porch, brought the rose bushes back to life, uprooted the weeds,

17and planted ferns, oregano, and begonias again in the pots along the railing. She took charge of a

18crew of carpenters, locksmiths, and masons, who filled in the cracks in the floor, put doors and

19windows back on their hinges, repaired the furniture, and white-washed the walls inside and out, so

20that three months after her arrival one breathed once more the atmosphere of youth and festivity

21that had existed during the days of the pianola. No one in the house had ever been in a better mood

22at all hours and under any circumstances, nor had anyone ever been readier to sing and dance and

23toss all items and customs from the past into the trash. With a sweep of her broom she did away

24with the funeral mementos and piles of useless trash and articles of superstition that had been piling

25up in the corners, and the only thing she spared, out of gratitude to Ursula, was the daguerreotype of

26Remedios in the parlor. “My, such luxury,” she would shout, dying with laughter. “A fourteen-year-

27old grandmother!” When one of the masons told her that the house was full of apparitions and that

28the only way to drive them out was to look for the treasures they had left buried, she replied amid

29loud laughter that she did not think it was right for men to be superstitious. She was so spontaneous,

30so emancipated, with such a free and modern spirit, that Aureliano did not know what to do with his

31body when he saw her arrive. “My, my!” she shouted happily with open arms. “Look at how my

32darling cannibal has grown!” Before he had a chance to react she had already put a record on the

33portable phonograph she had brought with her and was trying to teach him the latest dance steps.

34She made him change the dirty pants that he had inherited from Colonel Aureliano Buendfa and

35gave him some youthful shirts and two-toned shoes, and she would push him into the street when

36he was spending too much time in Melquiades’ room.

37Active, small, and indomitable like Ursula, and almost as pretty and provocative as Remedios the

38Beauty, she was endowed with a rare instinct for anticipating fashion. When she received pictures of

39the most recent fashions in the mail, they only proved that she had not been wrong about the

40models that she designed herself and sewed on Amaranta’s primitive pedal machine. She subscribed

41to every fashion magazine, art publication, and popular music review published in Europe, and she

42had only to glance at them to realize that things in the world were going just as she imagined they

43were. It was incomprehensible why a woman with that spirit would have returned to a dead town

44burdened by dust and heat, and much less with a husband who had more than enough money to live anywhere in the world and who loved her so much that he let himself be led around by her on a silk

45leash. As time passed, however, her intention to stay was more obvious, because she did not make

46any plans that were not a long way off, nor did she do anything that did not have as an aim the

47search for a comfortable life and a peaceful old age in Macondo. The canary cage showed that those

48aims were made up on the spur of the moment. Remembering that her mother had told her in a

49letter about the extermination of the birds, she had delayed her trip several months until she found a

50ship that stopped at the Fortunate Isles and there she chose the finest twenty-five pairs of canaries

51so that she could repopulate the skies of Macondo. That was the most lamentable of her numerous

52frustrated undertakings. As the birds reproduced Amaranta Ursula would release them in pairs, and

53no sooner did they feel themselves free than they fled the town. She tried in vain to awaken love in

54them by means of the bird cage that Ursula had built during the first reconstruction of the house.

55Also in vain were the artificial nests built of esparto grass in the almond trees and the birdseed

56strewn about the roofs, and arousing the captives so that their songs would dissuade the deserters,

57because they would take flights on their first attempts and make a turn in the sky, just the time

58needed to find the direction to the Fortunate Isles.

59A year after her return, although she had not succeeded in making any friends or giving any

60parties, Amaranta Ursula still believed that it was possible to rescue the community which had been

61singled out by misfortune. Gaston, her husband, took care not to antagonize her, although since that

62fatal noon when he got off the train he realized that his wife’s determination had been provoked by

63a nostalgic mirage. Certain that she would be defeated by the realities, he did not even take the

64trouble to put his velocipede together, but he set about hunting for the largest eggs among the

65spider webs that the masons had knocked down, and he would open them with his fingernails and

66spend hours looking through a magnifying glass at the tiny spiders that emerged. Later on, thinking

67that Amaranta Ursula was continuing with her repairs so that her hands would not be idle, he

68decided to assemble the handsome bicycle, on which the front wheel was much larger than the rear

69one, and he dedicated himself to the capture and curing of every native insect he could find in the

70region, which he sent in jam jars to his former professor of natural history at the University of Liege

71where he had done advanced work in entomology, although his main vocation was that of aviator.

72When he rode the bicycle he would wear acrobat’s tights, gaudy socks, and a Sherlock Holmes cap,

73but when he was on foot he would dress in a spotless natural linen suit, white shoes, a silk bow tie, a

74straw boater, and he would carry a willow stick in his hand. His pale eyes accentuated his look of a

75sailor and his small mustache looked like the fur of a squirrel. Although he was at least fifteen years

76older than his wife, his alert determination to make her happy and his qualities as a good lover

77compensated for the difference. Actually, those who saw that man in his forties with careful habits,

78with the leash around his neck and his circus bicycle, would not have thought that he had made a

79pact of unbridled love with his wife and that they both gave in to the reciprocal drive in the least

80adequate of places and wherever the spirit moved them, as they had done since they had began to

81keep company, and with a passion that the passage of time and the more and more unusual

82circumstances deepened and enriched. Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and

83imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an

84emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a

85field of violets.

86They had met two years before they were married, when the sports biplane in which he was

87making rolls over the school where Amaranta Ursula was studying made an intrepid maneuver to

88avoid the flagpole and the primitive framework of canvas and aluminum foil was caught by the tail

89on some electric wires. From then on, paying no attention to his leg in splints, on weekends he

90would pick up Amaranta Ursula at the nun’s boardinghouse where she lived, where the rules were

91not as severe as Fernanda had wanted, and he would take her to his country club. They began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors, and they felt all

92the closer together as the beings on earth grew more and more minute. She spoke to him of

93Macondo as the brightest and most peaceful town on earth, and of an enormous house, scented

94with oregano, where she wanted to live until old age with a loyal husband and two strong sons who

95would be named Rodrigo and Gonzalo, never Aureliano and Jose Arcadio, and a daughter who

96would be named Virginia and never Remedios. She had evoked the town idealized by nostalgia with

97such strong tenacity that Gaston understood that she would not get married unless he took her to

98live in Macondo. He agreed to it, as he agreed later on to the leash, because he thought it was a

99passing fancy that could be overcome in time. But when two years in Macondo had passed and

100Amaranta Ursula was as happy as on the first day, he began to show signs of alarm. By that time he

101had dissected every dissectible insect in the region, he spoke Spanish like a native, and he had solved

102all of the crossword puzzles in the magazines that he received in the mail. He did not have the

103pretext of climate to hasten their return because nature had endowed him with a colonial liver which

104resisted the drowsiness of siesta time and water that had vinegar worms in it. He liked the native

105cooking so much that once he ate eighty-two iguana eggs at one sitting. Amaranta Ursula, on the

106other hand, had brought in by train fish and shellfish in boxes of ice, canned meats and preserved

107fruits, which were the only things she could eat, and she still dressed in European style and received

108designs by mail in spite of the fact that she had no place to go and no one to visit and by that time

109her husband was not in a mood to appreciate her short skirts, her tilted felt hat, and her seven-strand

110necklaces. Her secret seemed to lie in the fact that she always found a way to keep busy, resolving

111domestic problems that she herself had created, and doing a poor job on a thousand things which

112she would fix on the following day with a pernicious diligence that made one think of Fernanda and

113the hereditary vice of making something just to unmake it. Her festive genius was still so alive then

114that when she received new records she would invite Gaston to stay in the parlor until very late to

115practice the dance steps that her schoolmates described to her in sketches and they would generally

116end up making love on the Viennese rocking chairs or on the bare floor. The only thing that she

117needed to be completely happy was the birth of her children, but she respected the pact she had

118made with her husband not to have any until they had been married for five years.

119Looking for something to fill his idle hours with, Gaston became accustomed to spending the

120morning in Melqufades’ room with the shy Aureliano. He took pleasure in recalling with him the

121most hidden corners of his country, which Aureliano knew as if he had spent much time there.

122When Gaston asked him what he had done to obtain knowledge that was not in the encyclopedia,

123he received the same answer as Jose Arcadio: “Everything Is known.” In addition to Sanskrit he had

124learned English and French and a little Latin and Greek. Since he went out every afternoon at that

125time and Amaranta Ursula had set aside a weekly sum for him for his personal expenses, his room

126looked like a branch of the wise Catalonian’s bookstore. He read avidly until late at night, although

127from the manner in which he referred to his reading, Gaston thought that he did not buy the books

128in order to learn but to verify the tmth of his knowledge, and that none of them interested him

129more than the parchments, to which he dedicated most of his time in the morning. Both Gaston and

130his wife would have liked to incorporate him into the family life, but Aureliano was a hermetic man

131with a cloud of mystery that time was making denser. It was such an unfathomable condition that

132Gaston failed in his efforts to become intimate with him and had to seek other pastimes for his idle

133hours. It was around that time that he conceived the idea of establishing an airmail service.

134It was not a new project. Actually, he had it fairly well advanced when he met Amaranta Ursula,

135except that it was not for Macondo, but for the Belgian Congo, where his family had investments in

136palm oil. The marriage and the decision to spend a few months in Macondo to please his wife had

137obliged him to postpone it. But when he saw that Amaranta Ursula was determined to organize a

138commission for public improvement and even laughed at him when he hinted at the possibility of returning, he understood that things were going to take a long time and he reestablished contact

139with his forgotten partners in Brussels, thinking that it was just as well to be a pioneer in the

140Caribbean as in Africa. While his steps were progressing he prepared a landing field in the old

141enchanted region which at that time looked like a plain of crushed flintstone, and he studied the

142wind direction, the geography of the coastal region, and the best routes for aerial navigation, without

143knowing that his diligence, so similar to that of Mr. Herbert, was filling the town with the dangerous

144suspicion that his plan was not to set up routes but to plant banana trees. Enthusiastic over the idea

145that, after all, might justify his permanent establishment in Macondo, he took several trips to the

146capital of the province, met with authorities, obtained licenses, and drew up contracts for exclusive

147rights. In the meantime he maintained a correspondence with his partners in Brussels which

148resembled that of Fernanda with the invisible doctors, and he finally convinced them to ship the

149first airplane under the care of an expert mechanic, who would assemble it in the nearest port and

150fly it to Macondo. One year after his first meditations and meteorological calculations, trusting in the

151repeated promises of his correspondents, he had acquired the habit of strolling through the streets,

152looking at the sky, hanging onto the sound of the breeze in hopes that the airplane would appear.

153Although she had not noticed it, the return of Amaranta Ursula had brought on a radical change

154in Aureliano’s life. After the death of Jose Arcadio he had become a regular customer at the wise

155Catalonian’s bookstore. Also, the freedom that he enjoyed then and the time at his disposal awoke in

156him a certain curiosity about the town, which he came to know without any surprise. He went

157through the dusty and solitary streets, examining with scientific interest the inside of houses in min,

158the metal screens on the windows broken by mst and the dying birds, and the inhabitants bowed

159down by memories. He tried to reconstruct in his imagination the annihilated splendor of the old

160banana-company town, whose dry swimming pool was filled to the brim with rotting men’s and

161women’s shoes, and in the houses of which, destroyed by rye grass, he found the skeleton of a

162German shepherd dog still tied to a ring by a steel chain and a telephone that was ringing, ringing,

163ringing until he picked it up and an anguished and distant woman spoke in English, and he said yes,

164that the strike was over, that three thousand dead people had been thrown into the sea, that the

165banana company had left, and that Macondo finally had peace after many years. Those wanderings

166led him to the prostrate red-light district, where in other times bundles of banknotes had been

167burned to liven up the revels, and which at that time was a maze of streets more afflicted and

168miserable than the others, with a few red lights still burning and with deserted dance halls adorned

169with the remnants of wreaths, where the pale, fat widows of no one, the French great-grandmothers

170and the Babylonian matriarchs, were still waiting beside their photographs. Aureliano could not find

171anyone who remembered his family, not even Colonel Aureliano Buendia, except for the oldest of

172the West Indian Negroes, an old man whose cottony hair gave him the look of a photographic nega¬

173tive and who was still singing the mournful sunset psalms in the door of his house. Aureliano would

174talk to him in the tortured Papiamento that he had learned in a few weeks and sometimes he would

175share his chicken-head soup, prepared by the great-granddaughter, with him. She was a large black

176woman with solid bones, the hips of a mare, teats like live melons, and a round and perfect head

177armored with a hard surface of wiry hair which looked like a medieval warrior’s mail headdress. Her

178name was Nigromanta. In those days Aureliano lived off the sale of silverware, candlesticks, and

179other bric-a-brac from the house. When he was penniless, which was most of the time, he got

180people in the back of the market to give him the chicken heads that they were going to throw away

181and he would take them to Nigromanta to make her soups, fortified with purslane and seasoned

182with mint. When the great-grandfather died Aureliano stopped going by the house, but he would run

183into Nigromanta under the dark almond trees on the square, using her wild-animal whistles to lure

184the few night owls. Many times he stayed with her, speaking in Papiamento about chicken-head soup

185and other dainties of misery, and he would have kept right on if she had not let him know that his presence frightened off customers. Although he sometimes felt the temptation and although

186Nigromanta herself might have seemed to him as the natural culmination of a shared nostalgia, he

187did not go to bed with her. So Aureliano was still a virgin when Amaranta Ursula returned to

188Macondo and gave him a sisterly embrace that left him breathless. Every time he saw her, and worse

189yet when she showed him the latest dances, he felt the same spongy release in his bones that had

190disturbed his great-great-grandfather when Pilar Ternera made her pretexts about the cards in the

191granary. Trying to squelch the torment, he sank deeper into the parchments and eluded the innocent

192flattery of that aunt who was poisoning his nights with a flow of tribulation, but the more he

193avoided her the more the anxiety with which he waited for her stony laughter, her howls of a happy

194cat, and her songs of gratitude, agonizing in love at all hours and in the most unlikely parts of the

195house. One night thirty feet from his bed, on the silver workbench, the couple with unhinged bellies

196broke the bottles and ended up making love in a pool of muriatic acid. Aureliano not only could not

197sleep for a single second, but he spent the next day with a fever, sobbing with rage. The first night

198that he waited for Nigromanta to come to the shadows of the almond trees it seemed like an

199eternity, pricked as he was by the needles of uncertainty and clutching in his fist the peso and fifty

200cents that he had asked Amaranta Ursula for, not so much because he needed it as to involve her,

201debase her, prostitute her in his adventure in some way. Nigromanta took him to her room, which

202was lighted with false candlesticks, to her folding cot with the bedding stained from bad loves, and

203to her body of a wild dog, hardened and without soul, which prepared itself to dismiss him as if he

204were a frightened child, and suddenly it found a man whose tremendous power demanded a

205movement of seismic readjustment from her insides.

206They became lovers. Aureliano would spend his mornings deciphering parchments and at siesta

207time he would go to the bedroom where Nigromanta was waiting for him, to teach him first how to

208do it like earthworms, then like snails, and finally like crabs, until she had to leave him and lie in wait

209for vagabond loves. Several weeks passed before Aureliano discovered that around her waist she

210wore a small belt that seemed to be made out of a cello string, but which was hard as steel and had

211no end, as if it had been born and grown with her. Almost always, between loves, they would eat

212naked in the bed, in the hallucinating heat and under the daytime stars that the mst had caused to

213shine on the zinc ceiling. It was the first time that Nigromanta had had a steady man, a bone cmsher

214from head to toe, as she herself said, dying with laughter, and she had even begun to get romantic

215illusions when Aureliano confided in her about his repressed passion for Amaranta Ursula, which he

216had not been able to cure with the substitution but which was twisting him inside all the more as

217experience broadened the horizons of love. After that Nigromanta continued to receive him with

218the same warmth as ever but she made him pay for her services so strictly that when Aureliano had

219no money she would make an addition to his bill, which was not figured in numbers but by marks

220that she made with her thumbnail behind the door. At sundown, while she was drifting through the

221shadows in the square, Aureliano, was going along the porch like a stranger, scarcely greeting

222Amaranta Ursula and Gaston, who usually dined at that time, and shutting herself up in his room

223again, unable to read or write or even think because of the anxiety brought on by the laughter, the

224whispering, the preliminary frolics, and then the explosions of agonizing happiness that capped the

225nights in the house. That was his life two years before Gaston began to wait for the airplane, and it

226went on the same way on the afternoon that he went to the bookstore of the wise Catalonian and

227found four ranting boys in a heated argument about the methods used to kill cockroaches in the

228Middle Ages. The old bookseller, knowing about Aureliano’s love for books that had been read only

229by the Venerable Bede, urged him with a certain fatherly malice to get into the discussion, and

230without even taking a breath, he explained that the cockroach, the oldest winged insect on the face

231of the earth, had already been the victim of slippers in the Old Testament, but that since the species

232was definitely resistant to any and all methods of extermination, from tomato dices with borax to flour and sugar, and with its one thousand six hundred three varieties had resisted the most ancient,

233tenacious, and pitiless persecution that mankind had unleashed against any living thing since the

234beginnings, including man himself, to such an extent that just as an instinct for reproduction was at¬

235tributed to humankind, so there must have been another one more definite and pressing, which was

236the instinct to kill cockroaches, and if the latter had succeeded in escaping human ferocity it was

237because they had taken refuge in the shadows, where they became invulnerable because of man’s

238congenital fear of the dark, but on the other hand they became susceptible to the glow of noon, so

239that by the Middle Ages already, and in present times, and per omnia secula seculomm , the only effective

240method for killing cockroaches was the glare of the sun.

241That encyclopedic coincidence was the beginning of a great friendship. Aureliano continued

242getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were Alvaro, German,

243Alfonso, and Gabriel, the first and last friends that he ever had in his life. For a man like him, holed

244up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the

245brothels were a revelation. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the

246best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people, as Alvaro demonstrated during

247one night of revels. Some time would have to pass before Aureliano realized that such arbitrary

248attitudes had their origins in the example of the wise Catalonian, for whom wisdom was worth

249nothing if it could not be used to invent a way of preparing chick peas.

250The afternoon on which Aureliano gave his lecture on cockroaches, the argument ended up in

251the house of the girls who went to bed because of hunger, a brothel of lies on the outskirts of

252Macondo. The proprietress was a smiling mamasanta , tormented by a mania for opening and closing

253doors. Her eternal smile seemed to have been brought on by the credulity of her customers, who

254accepted as something certain an establishment that did not exist except in the imagination, because

255even the tangible things there were unreal: the furniture that fell apart when one sat on it, the

256disemboweled phonograph with a nesting hen inside, the garden of paper flowers, the calendars

257going back to the years before the arrival of the banana company, the frames with prints cut out of

258magazines that had never been published. Even the timid little whores who came from the neigh¬

259borhood: when the proprietress informed them that customers had arrived they were nothing but an

260invention. They would appear without any greeting in their little flowered dresses left over from days

261when they were five years younger, and they took them off with the same innocence with which they

262had put them on, and in the paroxysms of love they would exclaim good heavens, look how that

263roof is falling in, and as soon as they got their peso and fifty cents they would spend it on a roll with

264cheese that the proprietress sold them, smiling more than ever, because only she knew that that meal

265was not true either. Aureliano, whose world at that time began with Melquiades’ parchments and

266ended in Nigromanta’s bed, found a stupid cure for timidity in the small imaginary brothel. At first

267he could get nowhere, in rooms where the proprietress would enter during the best moments of love

268and make all sorts of comments about the intimate charms of the protagonists. But with time he

269began to get so familiar with those misfortunes of the world that on one night that was more

270unbalanced than the others he got undressed in the small reception room and ran through the house

271balancing a bottle of beer on his inconceivable maleness. He was the one who made fashionable the

272extravagances that the proprietress celebrated with her eternal smile, without protesting, without

273believing in them just as when German tried to burn the house down to show that it did not exist,

274and as when Alfonso wrung the neck of the parrot and threw it into the pot where the chicken stew

275was beginning to boil.

276Although Aureliano felt himself linked to the four friends by a common affection and a common

277solidarity, even to the point where he thought of them as if they were one person, he was closer to

278Gabriel than to the others. The link was born on the night when he casually mentioned Colonel

279Aureliano Buendia and Gabriel was the only one who did not think that he was making fun of somebody. Even the proprietress, who normally did not take part in the conversation argued with a

280madam’s wrathful passion that Colonel Aureliano Buendla, of whom she had indeed heard speak at

281some time, was a figure invented by the government as a pretext for killing Liberals. Gabriel, on the

282other hand, did not doubt the reality of Colonel Aureliano Buendia because he had been a

283companion in arms and inseparable friend of his great-great-grandfather Colonel Gerineldo

284Marquez. Those fickle tricks of memory were even more critical when the killing of the workers was

285brought up. Every time that Aureliano mentioned the matter, not only the proprietress but some

286people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the

287train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all,

288everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the

289banana company had never existed. So that Aureliano and Gabriel were linked by a kind of complic¬

290ity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that

291both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only

292the nostalgia remained. Gabriel would sleep wherever time overtook him. Aureliano put him up

293several times in the silver workshop, but he would spend his nights awake, disturbed by the noise of

294the dead people who walked through the bedrooms until dawn. Later he turned him over to

295Nigromanta, who took him to her well-used room when she was free and put down his account with

296vertical marks behind the door in the few spaces left free by Aureliano’s debts.

297In spite of their disordered life, the whole group tried to do something permanent at the urging

298of the wise Catalonian. It was he, with his experience as a former professor of classical literature and

299his storehouse of rare books, who got them to spend a whole night in search of the thirty-seventh

300dramatic situation in a town where no one had any interest any more in going beyond primary

301school. Fascinated by the discovery of friendship, bewildered by the enchantments of a world which

302had been forbidden to him by Fernanda’s meanness, Aureliano abandoned the scmtiny of the

303parchments precisely when they were beginning to reveal themselves as predictions in coded lines of

304poetry. But the subsequent proof that there was time enough for everything without having to give

305up the brothels gave him the drive to return to Melquiades’ room, having decided not to flag in his

306efforts until he had discovered the last keys. That was during the time that Gaston began to wait for

307the airplane and Amaranta Ursula was so lonely that one morning she appeared in the room.

308“Hello, cannibal,” she said to him. “Back in your cave again?”

309She was irresistible, with a dress she had designed and one of the long shad-vertebra necklaces

310that she herself had made. She had stopped using the leash, convinced of her husband’s faithfulness,

311and for the first time since her return she seemed to have a moment of ease. Aureliano did not need

312to see her to know that she had arrived. She put her elbows on the table, so close and so helpless

313that Aureliano heard the deep sound of her bones, and she became interested in the parchments.

314Trying to overcome his disturbance, he grasped at the voice that he was losing, the life that was

315leaving him, the memory that was turning into a petrified polyp, and he spoke to her about the

316priestly destiny of Sanskrit, the scientific possibility of seeing the future showing through in time as

317one sees what is written on the back of a sheet of paper through the light, the necessity of

318deciphering the predictions so that they would not defeat themselves, and the Centuries of

319Nostradamus and the destruction of Cantabria predicted by Saint Milanus. Suddenly, without

320interrupting the chat, moved by an impulse that had been sleeping in him since his origins,

321Aureliano put his hand on hers, thinking that that final decision would put an end to Iris doubts. She

322grabbed his index finger with the affectionate innocence with which she had done so in childhood,

323however, and she held it while he kept on answering questions. They remained like that, linked by

324icy index fingers that did not transmit anything in any way until she awoke from her momentary

325dream and slapped her forehead with her hand. “The ants!” she exclaimed. And then she forgot

326about the manuscripts, went to the door with a dance step, and from there she threw Aureliano a kiss with the tips of her fingers as she had said good-bye to her father on the afternoon when they

327sent her to Brussels.

328“You can tell me later,” she said. “I forgot that today’s the day to put quicklime on the anthills.”

329She continued going to the room occasionally when she had something to do in that part of the

330house and she would stay there for a few minutes while her husband continued to scrutinize the sky.

331Encouraged by that change, Aureliano stayed to eat with the family at that time as he had not done

332since the first months of Amaranta Ursula’s return. Gaston was pleased. During the conversations

333after meals, which usually went on for more than an hour, he complained that his partners were

334deceiving him. They had informed him of the loading of the airplane on board a ship that did not

335arrive, and although his shipping agents insisted, that it would never arrive because it was not on the

336list of Caribbean ships, his partners insisted that the shipment was correct and they even insinuated

337that Gaston was lying to them in his letters. The correspondence reached such a degree of mutual

338suspicion that Gaston decided not to write again and he began to suggest the possibility of a quick

339trip to Brussels to clear things up and return with the airplane. The plan evaporated, however, as

340soon as Amaranta Ursula reiterated her decision not to move from Macondo even if she lost a

341husband. During the first days Aureliano shared the general opinion that Gaston was a fool on a

342velocipede, and that brought on a vague feeling of pity. Later, when he obtained deeper information

343on the nature of men in the brothels, he thought that Gaston’s meekness had its origins in unbridled

344passion. But when he came to know him better and realized his tme character was the opposite of

345his submissive conduct, he conceived the malicious suspicion that even the wait for the airplane was

346an act. Then he thought that Gaston was not as foolish as he appeared, but, quite the contrary, was a

347man of infinite steadiness, ability, and patience who had set about to conquer his wife with the

348weariness of eternal agreement, of never saying no, of simulating a limitless conformity, letting her

349become enmeshed in her own web until the day she could no longer bear the tedium of the illusions

350close at hand and would pack the bags herself to go back to Europe. Aureliano’s former pity turned

351into a violent dislike. Gaston’s system seemed so perverse to him, but at the same time so effective,

352that he ventured to warn Amaranta Ursula. She made fun of his suspicions, however, without even

353noticing the heavyweight of love, uncertainty, and jealousy that he had inside. It had not occurred to

354her that she was arousing something more than fraternal affection in Aureliano until she pricked her

355finger trying to open a can of peaches and he dashed over to suck the blood out with an avidity and

356a devotion that sent a chill up her spine.

357“Aureliano!” She laughed, disturbed. “You’re too suspicious to be a good bat.”

358Then Aureliano went all out. Giving her some small, orphaned kisses in the hollow of her

359wounded hand, he opened up the most hidden passageways of his heart and drew out an

360interminable and lacerated intestine, the terrible parasitic animal that had incubated in his mar¬

361tyrdom. He told her how he would get up at midnight to weep in loneliness and rage over the

362underwear that she had left to dry in the bathroom. He told her about the anxiety with which he had

363asked Nigromanta to howl like a cat and sob gaston gaston gaston in his ear, and with how much

364astuteness he had ransacked her vials of perfume so that he could smell it on the necks of the little

365girls who went to bed because of hunger. Frightened by the passion of that outburst, Amaranta

366Ursula was closing her fingers, contracting them like a shellfish until her wounded hand, free of all

367pain and any vestige of pity, was converted into a knot of emeralds and topazes and stony and

368unfeeling bones.

369“Fool!” she said as if she were spitting. “I’m sailing on the first ship leaving for Belgium.”

370Alvaro had come to the wise Catalonian’s bookstore one of those afternoons proclaiming at the

371top of his lungs his latest discovery: a zoological brothel. It was called The Golden Child and it was

372a huge open air salon through which no less than two hundred bitterns who told the time with a

373deafening cackling strolled at will. In wire pens that surrounded the dance floor and among large Amazonian camellias there were herons of different colors, crocodiles as fat as pigs, snakes with