“Take them to the whores,” he said.
They were six lawyers in frock coats and top hats who endured the violent November sun with stiff stoicism. Úrsula put them up in her house. They spent the greater part of the day closeted in the bedroom in hermetic conferences and at dusk they asked for an escort and some accordion players and took over Catarino’s store. “Leave them alone,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía ordered. “After all, I know what they want.” At the beginning of December the long-awaited interview, which many had foreseen as an interminable argument, was resolved in less than an hour.
In the hot parlor, beside the specter of the pianola shrouded in a white sheet, Colonel Aureliano Buendía did not sit down that time inside the chalk circle that his aides had drawn. He sat in a chair between his political advisers and, wrapped in his woolen blanket, he listened in silence to the brief proposals of the emissaries. They asked first that he renounce the revision of property titles in order to get back the support of the Liberal landowners. They asked, secondly, that he renounce the fight against clerical influence in order to obtain the support of the Catholic masses. They asked, finally, that he renounce the aim of equal rights for natural and illegitimate children in order to preserve the integrity of the home.
“That means,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said, smiling when the reading was over, “that all we’re fighting for is power.”
“They’re tactical changes,” one of the delegates replied. “Right now the main thing is to broaden the popular base of the war. Then we’ll have another look.”
One of Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s political advisers hastened to intervene.
“It’s a contradiction” he said. “If these changes are good, it means that the Conservative regime is good. If we succeed in broadening the popular base of the war with them, as you people say, it means that the regime his a broad popular base. It means, in short, that for almost twenty years we’ve been fighting against the sentiments of the nation.”
He was going to go on, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía stopped him with a signal. “Don’t waste your time, doctor.” he said. “The important thing is that from now on we’ll be fighting only for power.” Still smiling, he took the documents the delegates gave him and made ready to sign them.
“Since that’s the way it is,” he concluded, “we have no objection to accepting.”
His men looked at one another in consternation. “Excuse me, colonel,” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez said softly, “but this is a betrayal.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendía held the inked pen in the air and discharged the whole weight of his authority on him.
“Surrender your weapons,” he ordered.
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez stood up and put his sidearms on the table.
“Report to the barracks,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía ordered him. “Put yourself at the disposition of the revolutionary court.”
Then he signed the declaration and gave the sheets of paper to the emissaries, saying to them:
“Here an your papers, gentlemen. I hope you can get some advantage out of them.”
Two days later, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, accused of high treason, was condemned to death. Lying in his hammock, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was insensible to the pleas for clemency. On the eve of the execution, disobeying the order not to bother him, Úrsula visited him in his bedroom. Encased in black, invested with a rare solemnity, she stood during the three minutes of the interview. “I know that you’re going to shoot Gerineldo,” she said calmly, “and that I can’t do anything to stop it. But I give you one warning: as soon as I see his body I swear to you by the bones of my father and mother, by the memory of José Arcadio Buendía, I swear to you before God that I will drag you out from wherever you’re hiding and kill you with my own two hands.” Before leaving the room, without waiting for any reply, she concluded:
“It’s the same as if you’d been born with the tail of a pig.”
During that interminable night while Colonel Gerineldo Márquez thought about his dead afternoons in Amaranta’s sewing room, Colonel Aureliano Buendía scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude. His only happy moments, since that remote afternoon when his father had taken him to see ice, had taken place in his silver workshop where he passed the time putting little gold fishes together. He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dungheap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late.
At dawn, worn out by the tormented vigil, he appeared in the cell an hour before the execution. “The farce is over, old friend,” he said to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. “Let’s get out of here before the mosquitoes in here execute you.” Colonel Gerineldo Márquez could not repress the disdain that was inspired in him by that attitude.
“No, Aureliano,” he replied. “I’d rather be dead than see you changed into a bloody tyrant.”
“You won’t see me,” Colonel Aureliano Buendía said. “Put on your shoes and help me get this shitty war over with.”
When he said it he did not know that it was easier to start a war than to end one. It took him almost a year of fierce and bloody effort to force the government to propose conditions of peace favorable to the rebels and another year to convince his own partisans of the convenience of accepting them. He went to inconceivable extremes of cruelty to put down the rebellion of his own officers, who resisted and called for victory, and he finally relied on enemy forces to make them submit.
He was never a greater soldier than at that time. The certainty that he was finally fighting for his own liberation and not for abstract ideals, for slogans that politicians could twist left and right according to the circumstances, filled him with an ardent enthusiasm. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, who fought for defeat with as much conviction and loyalty as he had previously fought for victory, reproached him for his useless temerity. “Don’t worry,” he would say, smiling. “Dying is much more difficult than one imagines.” In his case it was true. The certainty that his day was assigned gave him a mysterious immunity, an immortality or a fixed period that made him invulnerable to the risks of war and in the end permitted him to win a defeat that was much more difficult, much more bloody and costly than victory.
In almost twenty years of war, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had been at his house many times, but the state of urgency with which he always arrived, the military retinue that accompanied him everywhere, the aura of legend that glowed about his presence and of which even Úrsula was aware, changed him into a stranger in the end. The last time that he was in Macondo and took a house for his three concubines, he was seen in his own house only on two or three occasions when he had the time to accept an invitation to dine. Remedios the Beauty and the twins, born during the middle of the war, scarcely knew him. Amaranta could not reconcile her image of the brother who had spent his adolescence making little gold fishes with that of the mythical warrior who had placed a distance of ten feet between himself and the rest of humanity. But when the approach of the armistice became known and they thought that he would return changed back into a human being, delivered at last for the hearts of his own people, the family feelings, dormant for such a long time, were reborn stronger than ever.
“We’ll finally have a man in the house again,” Úrsula 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 Buendía had trouble recognizing her.