“Take me to Fernanda,” he managed to say.
His friends left him at the house thinking that they had helped him fulfill his promise to his wife not to die in his concubine’s bed. Petra Cotes had shined his patent leather boots that he wanted to wear in his coffin, and she was already looking for someone to take them when they came to tell her that Aureliano Segundo was out of danger. He did recover, indeed, in less than a week, and two weeks later he was celebrating the fact of his survival with unprecedented festivities. He continued living at Petra Cotes’s but he would visit Fernanda every day and sometimes he would stay to eat with the family, as if fate had reversed the situation and had made him the husband of his concubine and the lover of his wife.
It was a rest for Fernanda. During the boredom of her abandonment her only distractions were the clavichord lessons at siesta time and the letters from her children. In the detailed messages that she sent them every two weeks there was not a single line of truth. She hid her troubles from them. She hid from them the sadness of a house which, in spite of the light on the begonias, in spite of the heaviness at two in the afternoon, in spite of the frequent waves of festivals that came in from the street was more and more like the colonial mansion of her parents. Fernanda would wander alone among the three living ghosts and the dead ghost of José Arcadio Buendía, who at times would come to sit down with an inquisitive attention in the half-light of the parlor while she was playing the clavichord. Colonel Aureliano Buendía was a shadow. Since the last time that he had gone out into the street to propose a war without any future to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, he left the workshop only to urinate under the chestnut tree. He did not receive any visits except that of the barber every three weeks, He fed on anything that Úrsula brought him once a day, and even though he kept on making little gold fishes with the same passion as before, he stopped selling them when he found out that people were buying them not as pieces of jewelry but as historic relics. He made a bonfire in the courtyard of the dolls of Remedios which had decorated, their bedroom since their wedding. The watchful Úrsula realized what her son was doing but she could not stop him.
“You have a heart of stone,” she told him.
“It’s not a question of a heart,” he said. “The room’s getting full of moths.”
Amaranta was weaving her shroud. Fernanda did not understand why she would write occasional letters to Meme and even send her gifts and on the other hand did not even want to hear about José Arcadio. “They’ll die without knowing why,” Amaranta answered when she was asked through Úrsula, and that answer planted an enigma in Fernanda’s heart that she was never able to clarify. Tall, broad-shouldered, proud, always dressed in abundant petticoats with the lace and in air of distinction that resisted the years and bad memories, Amaranta seemed to carry the cross of ashes of virginity on her forehead. In reality she carried it on her hand in the black bandage, which she did not take off even to sleep and which she washed and ironed herself. Her life was spent in weaving her shroud. It might have been said that she wove during the day and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it.
The greatest worry that Fernanda had during her years of abandonment was that Meme would come to spend her first vacation and not find Aureliano Segundo at home. His congestion had put an end to that fear. When Meme returned, her parents had made an agreement that not only would the girl think that Aureliano Segundo was still a domesticated husband but also that she would not notice the sadness of the house. Every year for two months Aureliano Segundo played his role of an exemplary husband and he organized parties with ice cream and cookies which the gay and lively schoolgirl enhanced with the clavichord. It was obvious from then on that she had inherited very little of her mother’s character. She seemed more of a second version of Amaranta when the latter had not known bitterness and was arousing the house with her dance steps at the age of twelve or fourteen before her secret passion for Pietro Crespi was to twist the direction of her heart in the end. But unlike Amaranta, unlike all of them, Meme still did not reveal the solitary fate of the family and she seemed entirely in conformity with the world, even when she would shut herself up in the parlor at two in the afternoon to practice the clavichord with an inflexible discipline. It was obvious that she liked the house, that she spent the whole year dreaming about the excitement of the young people her arrival brought around, and that she was not far removed from the festive vocation and hospitable excesses of her father. The first sign of that calamitous inheritance was revealed on her third vacation, when Meme appeared at the house with four nuns and sixty-eight classmates whom she had invited to spend a week with her family on her own Initiative and without any previous warning.
“How awful!” Fernanda lamented. “This child is as much of a barbarian as her father!”
It was necessary to borrow beds and hammocks from the neighbors, to set up nine shifts at the table, to fix hours for bathing, and to borrow forty stools so that the girls in blue uniforms with masculine buttons would not spend the whole day running from one place to another. The visit was a failure because the noisy schoolgirls would scarcely finish breakfast before they had to start taking turns for lunch and then for dinner, and for the whole week they were able to take only one walk through the plantations. At nightfall the nuns were exhausted, unable to move, give another order, and still the troop of tireless adolescents was in the courtyard singing school songs out of tune. One day they were on the point of trampling Úrsula, who made an effort to be useful precisely where she was most in the way. On another day the nuns got all excited because Colonel Aureliano Buendía had urinated under the chestnut tree without being concerned that the schoolgirls were in the courtyard. Amaranta was on the point of causing panic because one of the nuns went into the kitchen as she was salting the soup and the only thing that occurred to her to say was to ask what those handfuls of white powder were.
“Arsenic,” Amaranta answered.
The night of their arrival the students carried on in such a way, trying to go to the bathroom before they went to bed, that at one o’clock in the morning the last ones were still going in. Fernanda then bought seventy-two chamberpots but she only managed to change the nocturnal problem into a morning one, because from dawn on there was a long line of girls, each with her pot in her hand, waiting for her turn to wash it. Although some of them suffered fevers and several of them were infected by mosquito bites, most of them showed an unbreakable resistance as they faced the most troublesome difficulties, and even at the time of the greatest heat they would scamper through the garden. When they finally left, the flowers were destroyed, the furniture broken, and the walls covered with drawings and writing, but Fernanda pardoned them for all of the damage because of her relief at their leaving. She returned the borrowed beds and stools and kept the seventy-two chamberpots in Melquíades’ room. The locked room, about which the spiritual life of the house revolved in former times, was known from that time on as the “chamberpot room.” For Colonel Aureliano Buendía it was the most appropriate name, because while the rest of the family was still amazed by the fact that Melquíades’ room was immune to dust and destruction, he saw it turned into a dunghill. In any case, it did not seem to bother him who was correct, and if he found out about the fate of the room it was because Fernanda kept passing by and disturbing his work for a whole afternoon as she put away the chamberpots.