Among Meme's friends there were three young American girls who broke through the electrified chicken fence barrier and made friends with girls from Macondo. One of them was Patricia Brown. Grateful for the hospitality of Aureliano Segundo, Mr. Brown opened the doors of his house to Meme and invited her to the Saturday dances, which were the only ones where gringos and natives mingled. When Fernanda found out about it she forgot about Amaranta Ursula and the invisible doctors for a moment and became very melodramatic. "Just think," she said to Meme, "what the colonel must be thinking in his grave." She sought, of course, the backing of Ursula. But the blind old woman, contrary to what everyone expected, saw nothing reproachable in Meme's going to the dances and making friends with American girls her own age as long as she kept her strict habits and was not converted to the Protestant religion. Meme sensed the thought of her great-great-grandmother very well and the day after the dances she would get up earlier than usual to go to mass. Fernanda's opposition lasted until the day when Meme broke down her resistance with the news that the Americans wanted to hear her play the clavichord. The instrument was taken out of the house again and carried to Mr. Brown's, where the young concert artist really did receive very sincere applause and the most enthusiastic congratulations. From then on she was invited not only to the dances but also to the Sunday swim parties in the pool and to lunch once a week. Meme learned to swim like a professional, to play tennis, and to eat Virginia ham with slices of pineapple. Among dances, swimming, and tennis she soon found herself getting involved in the English language. Aureliano Segundo was so enthusiastic over the progress of his daughter that from a traveling salesman he bought a six-volume English encyclopedia with many color prints which Meme read in her spare time. The reading occupied the attention that she had formerly given to gossip about sweethearts and the experimental retreats that she would go through with her girl friends, not because it was imposed as discipline but because she had lost all interest by then in talking about mysteries that were in the public domain. She looked back on the drunken episode as an infantile adventure and it seemed so funny to her that she told Aureliano Segundo about it and he thought it was more amusing than she did. "If your mother only knew," he told her, doubling up with laughter, as he always said when he told her something in confidence. He had made her promise that she would let him know about her first love affair with the same confidence, and Meme told him that she liked a redheaded American boy who had come to spend his vacation with his parents. "What do you know," Aureliano Segundo said, laughing. "If your mother only knew." But Meme also told him that the boy had gone back to his country and had disappeared from sight. The maturity of her judgment ensured peace in the family. Aureliano Segundo then devoted more time to Petra Cotes, and although his body and soul no longer permitted him the debauches of days gone by, he lost no chance to arrange them and to dig out the accordion, which by then had some keys held in place by shoelaces. At home, Amaranta was weaving her interminable shroud and Ursula dragged about in her decrepitude through the depths of the shadows where the only thing that was still visible was the ghost of Jose Arcadio Buendia under the chestnut tree. Fernanda consolidated her authority. Her monthly letters to her son Jose Arcadio at that time did not carry a string of lies and she hid from him only her correspondence with the invisible doctors, who had diagnosed a benign tumor in her large intestine and were preparing her for a telepathic operation.
It might have been said that peace and happiness reigned for a long time in the tired mansion of the Buendias if it had not been for the sudden death of Amaranta, which caused a new uproar. It was an unexpected event. Although she was old and isolated from everyone, she still looked firm and upright and with the health of a rock that she had always had. No one knew her thoughts since the afternoon on which she had given Colonel Gerineldo Marquez his final rejection and shut herself up to weep. She was not seen to cry during the ascension to heaven of Remedios the Beauty or over the extermination of the Aurelianos or the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who was the person she loved most in this world, although she showed it only when they found his body under the chestnut tree. She helped pick up the body. She dressed him in his soldier's uniform, shaved him, combed his hair, and waxed his mustache better than he had ever done in his days of glory. No one thought that there was any love in that act because they were accustomed to the familiarity of Amaranta with the rites of death. Fernanda was scandalized that she did not understand the relationship of Catholicism with life but only its relationship with death, as if it were not a religion but a compendium of funeral conventions. Amaranta was too wrapped up in the eggplant patch of her memories to understand those subtle apologetics. She had reached old age with all of her nostalgias intact. When she listened to the waltzes of Pietro Crespi she felt the same desire to weep that she had had in adolescence, as if time and harsh lessons had meant nothing. The rolls of music that she herself had thrown into the trash with the pretext that they had rotted from dampness kept spinning and playing in her memory. She had tried to sink them into the swampy passion that she allowed herself with her nephew Aureliano Jose, and she tried to take refuge in the calm and virile protection of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, but she had not been able to overcome them, not even with the most desperate act of her old age when she would bathe the small Jose Arcadio three years before he was sent to the seminary and caress him not as a grandmother would have done with a grandchild, but as a woman would have done with a man, as it was said that the French matrons did and as she had wanted to do with Pietro Crespi at the age of twelve, fourteen, when she saw him in his dancing tights and with the magic wand with which he kept time to the metronome. At times it pained her to have let that outpouring of misery follow its course, and at times it made her so angry that she would prick her fingers with the needles, but what pained her most and enraged her most and made her most bitter was the fragrant and wormy guava grove of love that was dragging her toward death. Just as Colonel Aureliano Buendia thought about his war, unable to avoid it, so Amaranta thought about Rebeca. But while her brother had managed to sterilize his memories, she had only managed to make hers more scalding. The only thing that she asked of God for many years was that he would not visit on her the punishment of dying before Rebeca. Every time she passed by her house and noted the progress of destruction she took comfort in the idea that God was listening to her. One afternoon, when she was sewing on the porch, she was assailed by the certainty that she would be sitting in that place, in the same position, and under the same light when they brought her the news of Rebeca's death. She sat down to wait for it, as one waits for a letter, and the fact was that at one time she would pull off buttons to sew them on again so that inactivity would not make the wait longer and more anxious. No one in the house realized that at that time Amaranta was sewing a fine shroud for Rebeca. Later on, when Aureliano Triste told how he had seen her, changed into an apparition with leathery skin and a few golden threads on her skull, Amaranta was not surprised because the specter described was exactly what she had been imagining for some time. She had decided to restore Rebeca's corpse, to disguise with paraffin the damage to her face and make a wig for her from the hair of the saints. She would manufacture a beautiful corpse, with the linen shroud and a plush-lined coffin with purple trim, and she would put it at the disposition of the worms with splendid funeral ceremonies. She worked out the plan with such hatred that it made her tremble to think about the scheme, which she would have carried out in exactly the same way if it had been done out of love, but she would not allow herself to become upset by the confusion and went on perfecting the details so minutely that she came to be more than a specialist and was a virtuoso in the rites of death. The only thing that she did not keep in mind in her fearsome plan was that in spite of her pleas to God she might die before Rebeca. That was, in fact, what happened. At the final moment, however, Amaranta did not feel frustrated, but, on the contrary, free of all bitterness because death had awarded her the privilege of annou
ncing itself several years ahead of time. She saw it on one burning afternoon sewing with her on the porch a short time after Meme had left for school. She saw it because it was a woman dressed in blue with long hair, with a sort of antiquated look, and with a certain resemblance to Pilar Ternera during the time when she had helped with the chores in the kitchen. Fernanda was present several times and did not see her, in spite of the fact that she was so real, so human, and on one occasion asked of Amaranta the favor of threading a needle. Death did not tell her when she was going to die or whether her hour was assigned before that of Rebeca, but ordered her to begin sewing her own shroud on the next sixth of April. She was authorized to make it as complicated and as fine as she wanted, but just as honestly executed as Rebeca's, and she was told that she would die without pain, fear, or bitterness at dusk on the day that she finished it. Trying to waste the most time possible, Amaranta ordered some rough flax and spun the thread herself. She did it so carefully that the work alone took four years. Then she started the sewing. As she got closer to the unavoidable end she began to understand that only a miracle would allow her to prolong the work past Rebeca's death, but the very concentration gave her the calmness that she needed to accept the idea of frustration. It was then that she understood the vicious circle of Colonel Aureliano Buendia's little gold fishes. The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness. It pained her not to have had that revelation many years before when it would have still been possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light and evoke without trembling Pietro. Crespi's smell of lavender at dusk and rescue Rebeca from her slough of misery, not out of hatred or out of love but because of the measureless understanding of solitude. The hatred that she noticed one night in Meme's words did not upset her because it was directed at her, but she felt the repetition of another adolescence that seemed as clean as hers must have seemed and that, however, was already tainted with rancor. But by then her acceptance of her fate was so deep that she was not even upset by the certainty that all possibilities of rectification were closed to her. Her only objective was to finish the shroud. Instead of slowing it down with useless detail as she had done in the beginning, she speeded up the work. One week before she calculated that she would take the last stitch on the night of February 4, and without revealing the motives, she suggested to Meme that she move up a clavichord concert that she had arranged for the day after, but the girl paid no attention to her. Amaranta then looked for a way to delay for forty-eight hours, and she even thought that death was giving her her way because on the night of February fourth a storm caused a breakdown at the power plant. But on the following day, at eight in the morning, she took the last stitch in the most beautiful piece of work that any woman had ever finished, and she announced without the least bit of dramatics that she was going to die at dusk. She not only told the family but the whole town, because Amaranta had conceived of the idea that she could make up for a life of meanness with one last favor to the world, and she thought that no one was in a better position to take letters to the dead.
The news that Amaranta Buendia was sailing at dusk carrying the mail of death spread throughout Macondo before noon, and at three in the afternoon there was a whole carton full of letters in the parlor. Those who did not want to write gave Amaranta verbal messages, which she wrote down in a notebook with the name and the date of death of the recipient. "Don't worry," she told the senders. "The first thing I'll do when I get there is to ask for him and give him your message." It was farcical. Amaranta did not show any upset or the slightest sign of grief, and she even looked a bit rejuvenated by a duty accomplished. She was as straight and as slim as ever. If it had not been for her hardened cheekbones and a few missing teeth, she would have looked much younger than she really was. She herself arranged for them to put the letters in a box sealed with pitch and told them to place it in her grave in a way best to protect it from the dampness. In the morning she had a carpenter call who took her measurements for the coffin as she stood in the parlor, as if it were for a new dress. She showed such vigor in her last hours that Fernanda thought she was making fun of everyone. Ursula, with the experience that Buendias died without any illness, did not doubt at all that Amaranta had received an omen of death, but in any case she was tormented by the fear that with the business of the letters and the anxiety of the senders for them to arrive quickly they would bury her alive in their confusion. So she set about clearing out the house, arguing with the intruders as she shouted at them, and by four in the afternoon she was successful. At that time Amaranta had finished dividing her things among the poor and had left on the severe coffin of unfinished boards only the change of clothing and the simple cloth slippers that she would wear in death. She did not neglect that precaution because she remembered that when Colonel Aureliano Buendia died they had to buy a pair of new shoes for him because all he had left were the bedroom slippers that he wore in the workshop. A little before five Aureliano Segundo came to fetch Meme for the concert and was surprised that the house was prepared for the funeral. If anyone seemed alive at that moment it was the serene Amaranta, who had even had enough time to cut her corns. Aureliano Segundo and Meme took leave of her with mocking farewells and promised her that on the following Saturday they would have a big resurrection party. Drawn by the public talk that Amaranta Buendia was receiving letters for the dead, Father Antonio Isabel arrived at five o'clock for the last rites and he had to wait for more than fifteen minutes for the recipient to come out of her bath. When he saw her appear in a madapollam nightshirt and with her hair loose over her shoulders, the decrepit parish priest thought that it was a trick and sent the altar boy away. He thought, however, that he would take advantage of the occasion to have Amaranta confess after twenty years of reticence. Amaranta answered simply that she did not need spiritual help of any kind because her conscience was clean. Fernanda was scandalized. Without caring that people could hear her she asked herself aloud what horrible sin Amaranta had committed to make her prefer an impious death to the shame of a confession. Thereupon Amaranta lay down and made Ursula give public testimony as to her virginity.
"Let no one have any illusions," she shouted so that Fernanda would hear her. "Amaranta Buendia is leaving this world just as she came into it."
She did not get up again. Lying on cushions, as if she really were ill, she braided her long hair and rolled it about her ears as death had told her it should be on her bier. Then she asked Ursula for a mirror and for the first time in more than forty years she saw her face, devastated by age and martyrdom, and she was surprised at how much she resembled the mental image that she had of herself. Ursula understood by the silence in the bedroom that it had begun to grow dark.
"Say good-bye to Fernanda," she begged her. "One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship."
"It's of no use now," Amaranta replied.
Meme could not help thinking about her when they turned on the lights on the improvised stage and she began the second part of the program. In the middle of the piece someone whispered the news in her ear and the session stopped. When he arrived home, Aureliano Segundo had to push his way through the crowd to see the corpse of the aged virgin, ugly and discolored, with the black bandage on her hand and wrapped in the magnificent shroud. She was laid out in the parlor beside the box of letters.
Ursula did not get up again after the nine nights of mourning for Amaranta, Santa Sofia de la Piedad took care of her. She took her meals to her bedroom and annatto water for her to wash in and she kept her up to date on everything that happened in Macondo. Aureliano Segundo visited her frequently and he brought her clothing which she would place beside the bed along with the things most indispensable for daily life, so that in a short time she had built up a world within reach of her hand. She managed to arouse a great love in little Amaranta Ursula, who was just like her, and whom she taught how to read. Her lucidity, the ability to be sufficient unto her
self made one think that she was naturally conquered by the weight of her hundred years, but even though it was obvious that she was having trouble seeing, no one suspected that she was totally blind. She had so much time at her disposal then and so much interior silence to watch over the life of the house that she was the first to notice Meme's silent tribulation.
"Come here," she told her. "Now that we're alone, confess to this poor old woman what's bothering you."