"We'll finally have a man in the house again," Ursula said.
Amaranta was the first to suspect that they had lost him forever. One week before the armistice, when he entered the house without an escort, preceded by two barefoot orderlies who deposited on the porch the saddle from the mule and the trunk of poetry, all that was left of his former imperial baggage, she saw him pass by the sewing room and she called to him. Colonel Aureliano Buendia had trouble recognizing her.
"It's Amaranta," she said good-humoredly, happy at his return, and she showed him the hand with the black bandage. "Look."
Colonel Aureliano Buendia smiled at her the same way as when he had first seen her with the bandage on that remote morning when he had come back to Macondo condemned to death.
"How awful," he said, "the way time passes!"
The regular army had to protect the house. He arrived amid insults, spat upon, accused of having accelerated the war in order to sell it for a better price. He was trembling with fever and cold and his armpits were studded with sores again. Six months before, when she had heard talk about the armistice, Ursula had opened up and swept out the bridal chamber and had burned myrrh in the corners, thinking that he would come back ready to grow old slowly among Remedios' musty dolls. But actually, during the last two years he had paid his final dues to life, including growing old. When he passed by the silver shop, which Ursula had prepared with special diligence, he did not even notice that the keys were in the lock. He did not notice the minute, tearing destruction that time had wreaked on the house and that, after such a prolonged absence, would have looked like a disaster to any man who had kept his memories alive. He was not pained by the peeling of the whitewash on the walls or the dirty, cottony cobwebs in the corners or the dust on the begonias or the veins left on the beams by the termites or the moss on the hinges or any of the insidious traps that nostalgia offered him. He sat down on the porch, wrapped in his blanket and with his boots still on, as if only waiting for it to clear, and he spent the whole afternoon watching it rain on the begonias. Ursula understood then that they would not have him home for long. "If it's not the war," she thought, "it can only be death." It was a supposition that was so neat, so convincing that she identified it as a premonition.
That night, at dinner, the supposed Aureliano Segundo broke his bread with his right hand and drank his soup with his left. His twin brother, the supposed Jose Arcadio Segundo, broke his bread with his left hand and drank his soup with his right. So precise was their coordination that they did not look like two brothers sitting opposite each other but like a trick with mirrors. The spectacle that the twins had invented when they became aware that they were equal was repeated in honor of the new arrival. But Colonel Aureliano Buendia did not notice it. He seemed so alien to everything that he did not even notice Remedios the Beauty as she passed by naked on her way to her bedroom. Ursula was the only one who dared disturb his abstraction.
"If you have to go away again," she said halfway through dinner, "at least try to remember how we were tonight."
Then Colonel Aureliano Buendia realized, without surprise, that Ursula was the only human being who had succeeded in penetrating his misery, and for the first time in many years he looked her in the face. Her skin was leathery, her teeth decayed, her hair faded and colorless, and her look frightened. He compared her with the oldest memory that he had of her, the afternoon when he had the premonition that a pot of boiling soup was going to fall off the table, and he found her broken to pieces. In an instant he discovered the scratches, the welts, the sores, the ulcers, and the scars that had been left on her by more than half a century of daily life, and he saw that those damages did not even arouse a feeling of pity in him. Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away and he could not find it. On another occasion, he felt at least a confused sense of shame when he found the smell of Ursula on his own skin, and more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his. But all of that had been wiped out by the war. Even Remedios, his wife, at that moment was a hazy image of someone who might have been his daughter. The countless women he had known on the desert of love and who had spread his seed all along the coast had left no trace in his feelings. Most of them had come into his room in the dark and had left before dawn, and on the following day they were nothing but a touch of fatigue in his bodily memory. The only affection that prevailed against time and the war was that which he had felt for his brother Jose Arcadio when they both were children, and it was not based on love but on complicity.
"I'm sorry," he excused himself from Ursula's request. "It's just that the war has done away with everything."
During the following days he busied himself destroying all trace of his passage through the world. He stripped the silver shop until all that were left were impersonal objects, he gave his clothes away to the orderlies, and he buried his weapons in the courtyard with the same feeling of penance with which his father had buried the spear that had killed Prudencio Aguilar. He kept only one pistol with one bullet in it. Ursula did not intervene. The only time she dissuaded him was when he was about to destroy the daguerreotype of Remedios that was kept in the parlor lighted by an eternal lamp. "That picture stopped belonging to you a long time ago," she told him. "It's a family relic." On the eve of the armistice, when no single object that would let him be remembered was left in the house, he took the trunk of poetry to the bakery when Santa Sofia de la Piedad was making ready to light the oven.
"Light it with this," he told her, handing her the first roll of yellowish papers. "It will burn better because they're very old things."
Santa Sofia de la Piedad, the silent one, the condescending one, the one who never contradicted anyone, not even her own children, had the impression that it was a forbidden act.
"They're important papers," she said.
"Nothing of the sort," the colonel said. "They're things that a person writes to himself."
"In that case," she said, "you burn them, colonel."
He not only did that, but he broke up the trunk with a hatchet and threw the pieces into the fire. Hours before, Pilar Ternera had come to visit him. After so many years of not seeing her, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was startled at how old and fat she had become and how much she had lost of the splendor of her laugh, but he was also startled at the depths she had reached in her reading of the cards. "Watch out for your mouth," she told him, and he wondered whether the other time she had told him that during the height of his glory it had not been a surprisingly anticipated vision of his fate. A short time later, when his personal physician finished removing his sores, he asked him, without showing any particular interest, where the exact location of his heart was. The doctor listened with his stethoscope and then painted a circle on his chest with a piece of cotton dipped in iodine.
The Tuesday of the armistice dawned warm and rainy. Colonel Aureliano Buendia appeared in the kitchen before five o'clock and had his usual black coffee without sugar. "You came into the world on a day like this," Ursula told him. "Everybody was amazed at your open eyes." He did not pay any attention because he was listening to the forming of the troops, the sound of the cornets, and the voices of command that were shattering the dawn. Even though after so many years of war they should have sounded familiar to him, this time he felt the same weakness in his knees and the same tingling in his skin that he had felt in his youth in the presence of a naked woman. He thought confusedly, finally captive in a trap of nostalgia, that perhaps if he had married her he would have been a man without war and without glory, a nameless artisan, a happy animal. That tardy shudder which had not figured in his forethought made his breakfast bitter. At seven in the morning, when Colonel Gerineldo Marquez came to fetch him, in the company of a group of rebel officers, he found him more taciturn than ever, more pensive and solitary. Ursula tried to throw a new wrap over his shoulders. "What will the government think," she told him. "They'll figure that you've surrendered because you did
n't have anything left to buy a cloak with." But he would not accept it. When he was at the door, he let her put an old felt hat of Jose Arcadio Buendia's on his head.
"Aureliano," Ursula said to him then, "promise me that if you find that it's a bad hour for you there that you'll think of your mother."
He gave her a distant smile, raising his hand with all his fingers extended, and without saying a word he left the house and faced the shouts, insults, and blasphemies that would follow him until he left the town. Ursula put the bar on the door, having decided not to take it down for the rest of her life. "We'll rot in here," she thought. "We'll turn to ashes in this house without men, but we won't give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing us weep." She spent the whole morning looking for a memory of her son in the most hidden corners, but she could find none.
The ceremony took place fifteen miles from Macondo in the shade of a gigantic ceiba tree around which the town of Neerlandia would be founded later. The delegates from the government and the party and the commission of the rebels who were laying down their arms were served by a noisy group of novices in white habits who looked like a flock of doves that had been frightened by the rain. Colonel Aureliano Buendia arrived on a muddy mule. He had not shaved, more tormented by the pain of the sores than by the great failure of his dreams, for he had reached the end of all hope, beyond glory and the nostalgia of glory. In accordance with his arrangements there was no music, no fireworks, no pealing bells, no shouts of victory, or any other manifestation that might alter the mournful character of the armistice. An itinerant photographer who took the only picture of him that could have been preserved was forced to smash his plates without developing them.
The ceremony lasted only the time necessary to sign the documents. Around the rustic table placed in the center of a patched circus tent where the delegates sat were the last officers who were faithful to Colonel Aureliano Buendia. Before taking the signatures, the personal delegate of the president of the republic tried to read the act of surrender aloud, but Colonel Aureliano Buendia was against it. "Let's not waste time on formalities," he said and prepared to sign the papers without reading them. One of his officers then broke the soporific silence of the tent.
"Colonel," he said, "please do us the favor of not being the first to sign."
Colonel Aureliano Buendia acceded. When the documents went all around the table, in the midst of a silence that was so pure that one could have deciphered the signatures from the scratching of the pen on the paper, the first line was still blank. Colonel Aureliano Buendia prepared to fill it.
"Colonel," another of his officers said, "there's still time for everything to come out right."
Without changing his expression, Colonel Aureliano Buendia signed the first copy. He had not finished signing the last one when a rebel colonel appeared in the doorway leading a mule carrying two chests. In spite of his extreme youth he had a dry look and a patient expression. He was the treasurer of the revolution in the Macondo region. He had made a difficult journey of six days, pulling along the mule, who was dying of hunger, in order to arrive at the armistice on time. With an exasperating parsimony he took down the chests, opened them, and placed on the table, one by one, seventy-two gold bricks. Everyone had forgotten about the existence of that fortune. In the disorder of the past year, when the central command fell apart and the revolution degenerated into a bloody rivalry of leaders, it was impossible to determine any responsibility. The gold of the revolution, melted into blocks that were then covered with baked clay, was beyond all control. Colonel Aureliano Buendia had the seventy-two gold bricks included in the inventory of surrender and closed the ceremony without allowing any speeches. The filthy adolescent stood opposite him, looking into his eyes with his own calm, syrup-colored eyes.
"Something else?" Colonel Aureliano Buendia asked him.
The young colonel tightened his mouth.
"The receipt," he said.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia wrote it out in his own hand. Then he had a glass of lemonade and a piece of biscuit that the novices were passing around and retired to a field tent which had been prepared for him in case he wished to rest. There he took off his shirt, sat on the edge of the cot, and at three-fifteen in the afternoon took his pistol and shot himself in the iodine circle that his personal physician had painted on his chest. At that moment in Macondo Ursula took the cover off the pot of milk on the stove, wondering why it was taking so long to boil, and found it full of worms.
"They've killed Aureliano," she exclaimed.
She looked toward the courtyard, obeying a habit of her solitude, and then she saw Jose Arcadio Buendia, soaking wet and sad in the rain and much older than when he had died. "They shot him in the back," Ursula said more precisely, "and no one was charitable enough to close his eyes." At dusk through her tears she saw the swift and luminous disks that crossed the sky like an exhalation and she thought that it was a signal of death. She was still under the chestnut tree, sobbing at her husband's knees, when they brought in Colonel Aureliano Buendia, wrapped in a blanket that was stiff with dry blood and with his eyes open in rage.
He was out of danger. The bullet had followed such a neat path that the doctor was able to put a cord soaked in iodine in through the chest and withdraw it from the back. "That was my masterpiece," he said with satisfaction. "It was the only point where a bullet could pass through without harming any vital organ." Colonel Aureliano Buendia saw himself surrounded by charitable novices who intoned desperate psalms for the repose of his soul and then he was sorry that he had not shot himself in the roof of the mouth as he had considered doing if only to mock the prediction of Pilar Ternera.
"If I still had the authority," he told the doctor, "I'd have you shot out of hand. Not for having saved my life but for having made a fool of me."
The failure of his death brought back his lost prestige in a few hours. The same people who invented the story that he had sold the war for a room with walls made of gold bricks defined the attempt at suicide as an act of honor and proclaimed him a martyr. Then, when he rejected the Order of Merit awarded him by the president of the republic, even his most bitter enemies filed through the room asking him to withdraw recognition of the armistice and to start a new war. The house was filled with gifts meant as amends. Impressed finally by the massive support of his former comrades in arms, Colonel Aureliano Buendia did not put aside the possibility of pleasing them. On the contrary, at a certain moment he seemed so enthusiastic with the idea of a new war that Colonel Gerineldo Marquez thought that he was only waiting for a pretext to proclaim it. The pretext was offered, in fact, when the president of the republic refused to award any military pensions to former combatants, Liberal or Conservative, until each case was examined by a special commission and the award approved by the congress. "That's an outrage," thundered Colonel Aureliano Buendia. "They'll die of old age waiting for the mail to come." For the first time he left the rocker that Ursula had bought for his convalescence, and, walking about the bedroom, he dictated a strong message to the president of the republic. In that telegram, which was never made public, he denounced the first violation of the Treaty of Neerlandia and threatened to proclaim war to the death if the assignment of pensions was not resolved within two weeks. His attitude was so just that it allowed him to hope even for the support of former Conservative combatants. But the only reply from the government was the reinforcement of the military guard that had been placed at the door of his house with the pretext of protecting him, and the prohibition of all types of visits. Similar methods were adopted all through the country with other leaders who bore watching. It was an operation that was so timely, drastic, and effective that two months after the armistice, when Colonel Aureliano Buendia had recovered, his most dedicated conspirators were dead or exiled or had been assimilated forever into public administration.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia left his room in December and it was sufficient for him to look at the porch in order not to think about war again.
With a vitality that seemed impossible at her age, Ursula had rejuvenated the house again. "Now they're going to see who I am," she said when she saw that her son was going to live. "There won't be a better, more open house in all the world than this madhouse." She had it washed and painted, changed the furniture, restored the garden and planted new flowers, and opened doors and windows so that the dazzling light of summer would penetrate even into the bedrooms. She decreed an end to the numerous superimposed periods of mourning and she herself exchanged her rigorous old gowns for youthful clothing. The music of the pianola again made the house merry. When she heard it, Amaranta thought of Pietro Crespi, his evening gardenia, and his smell of lavender, and in the depths of her withered heart a clean rancor flourished, purified by time. One afternoon when she was trying to put the parlor in order, Ursula asked for the help of the soldiers who were guarding the house. The young commander of the guard gave them permission. Little by little, Ursula began assigning them new chores. She invited them to eat, gave them clothing and shoes, and taught them how to read and write. When the government withdrew the guard, one of them continued living in the house and was in her service for many years. On New Year's Day, driven mad by rebuffs from Remedios the Beauty, the young commander of the guard was found dead under her window.