A few months after the return of Aureliano José an exuberant woman perfumed with jasmine appeared at the house with a boy of five. She stated that he was the son of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and that she had brought him to Úrsula to be baptized. No one doubted the origins of that nameless child: he looked exactly like the colonel at the time he was taken to see ice for the first time. The woman said that he had been born with his eyes open, looking at people with the judgment of an adult, and that she was frightened by his way of staring at things without blinking. “He’s identical,” Úrsula said. “The only thing missing is for him to make chairs rock by simply looking at them.” They christened him Aureliano and with his mother’s last name, since the law did not permit a person to bear his father’s name until he had recognized him. General Moncada was the godfather. Although Amaranta insisted that he be left so that she could take over his upbringing, his mother was against it. Úrsula at that time did not know about the custom of sending virgins to the bedrooms of soldiers in the same way that hens are turned loose with fine roosters, but in the course of that year she found out: nine more sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendía were brought to the house to be baptized. The oldest, a strange dark boy with green eyes, who was not at all like his father’s family, was over ten years old. They brought children of all ages, all colors, but all males and all with a look of solitude that left no doubt as to the relationship. Only two stood out in the group. One, large for his age, made smithereens out of the flowerpots and china because his hands seemed to have the property of breaking everything they touched. The other was a blond boy with the same light eyes as his mother, whose hair had been left to grow long and curly like that of a woman. He entered the house with a great deal of familiarity, as if he had been raised there, and he went directly to a chest in Úrsula’s bedroom and demanded, “I want the mechanical ballerina.” Úrsula was startled. She opened the chest, searched among the ancient and dusty articles left from the days of Melquíades, and wrapped in a pair of stockings she found the mechanical ballerina that Pietro Crespi had brought to the house once and that everyone had forgotten about. In less than twelve years they baptized with the name Aureliano and the last name of the mother all the sons that the colonel had implanted up and down his theater of war: seventeen. At first Úrsula would fill their pockets with money and Amaranta tried to have them stay. But they finally limited themselves to giving them presents and serving as godmothers. “We’ve done our duty by baptizing them,” Úrsula would say, jotting down in a ledger the name and address of the mother and the place and date of birth of the child. “Aureliano needs well-kept accounts so that he can decide things when he comes back.” During lunch, commenting with General Moncada about that disconcerting proliferation, she expressed the desire for Colonel Aureliano Buendía to come back someday and gather all of his sons together in the house.
“Don’t worry, dear friend,” General Moncada said enigmatically. “He’ll come sooner than you suspect.”
What General Moncada knew and what he did not wish to reveal at lunch was that Colonel Aureliano Buendía was already on his way to head up the most prolonged, radical, and bloody rebellion of all those he had started up till then.
The situation again became as tense as it had been during the months that preceded the first war. The cockfights, instituted by the mayor himself, were suspended. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, the commander of the garrison, took over the exercise of municipal power. The Liberals looked upon him as a provocateur. “Something terrible is going to happen,” Úrsula would say to Aureliano José. “Don’t go out into the street after six o’clock.” The entreaties were useless. Aureliano José, just like Arcadio in other times, had ceased to belong to her. It was as if his return home, the possibility of existing without concerning himself with everyday necessities, had awakened in him the lewd and lazy leanings of his uncle José Arcadio. His passion for Amaranta had been extinguished without leaving any scars. He would drift around, playing pool, easing his solitude with occasional women, sacking the hiding places where Úrsula had forgotten her money. He ended up coming home only to change his clothes. “They’re all alike,” Úrsula lamented. “At first they behave very well, they’re obedient and prompt and they don’t seem capable of killing a fly, but as soon as their beards appear they go to ruin.” Unlike Arcadio, who had never known his real origins, he found out that he was the son of Pilar Ternera, who had hung up a hammock so that he could take his siesta in her house. More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude. Pilar Ternera had lost the trail of all hope. Her laugh had taken on the tones of an organ, her breasts had succumbed to the tedium of endless caressing, her stomach and her thighs had been the victims of her irrevocable fate as a shared woman, but her heart grew old without bitterness. Fat, talkative, with the airs of a matron in disgrace, she renounced the sterile illusions of her cards and found peace and consolation in other people’s loves. In the house where Aureliano José took his siesta, the girls from the neighborhood would receive their casual lovers. “Lend me your room, Pilar,” they would simply say when they were already inside. “Of course,” Pilar would answer. And if anyone was present she would explain:
“I’m happy knowing that people are happy in bed.”
She never charged for the service. She never refused the favor, just as she never refused the countless men who sought her out, even in the twilight of her maturity, without giving her money or love and only occasionally pleasure. Her five daughters, who inherited a burning seed, had been lost on the byways of life since adolescence. Of the two sons she managed to raise, one died fighting in the forces of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and the other was wounded and captured at the age of fourteen when he tried to steal a crate of chickens in a town in the swamp. In a certain way, Aureliano José was the tall, dark man who had been promised her for half a century by the king of hearts, and like all men sent by the cards he reached her heart when he was already stamped with the mark of death. She saw it in the cards.
“Don’t go out tonight,” she told him. “Stay and sleep here because Carmelita Montiel is getting tired of asking me to put her in your room.”
Aureliano José did not catch the deep feeling of begging that was in the offer.
“Tell her to wait for me at midnight” he said. He went to the theater, where a Spanish company was putting on The Dagger of the Fox, which was really Zorzilla’s play with the title changed by order of Captain Aquiles Ricardo, because the Liberals called the Conservatives Goths. Only when he handed in his ticket at the door did Aureliano José realize that Captain Aquiles Ricardo and two soldiers armed with rifles were searching the audience.
“Be careful, captain,” Aureliano José warned him. “The man hasn’t been born yet who can lay hands on me.” The captain tried to search him forcibly and Aureliano José, who was unarmed, began to run. The soldiers disobeyed the order to shoot. “He’s a Buendía,” one of them explained. Blind with rage, the captain then snatched away the rifle, stepped into the center of the street, and took aim.”
“Cowards!” he shouted. “I only wish it was Colonel Aureliano Buendía.”