It was impossible to conceive of a man more like his mother. He was wearing a somber taffeta suit, a shirt with a round and hard collar, and a thin silk ribbon tied in a bow in place of a necktie. He was ruddy and languid with a startled look and weak lips. His black hair, shiny and smooth, parted in the middle of his head by a straight and tired line, had the same artificial appearance as the hair on the saints. The shadow of a well-uprooted beard on his paraffin face looked like a question of conscience. His hands were pale, with green veins and fingers that were like parasites, and he wore a solid gold ring with a round sunflower opal on his left index finger. When he opened the street door Aureliano did not have to be told who he was to realize that he came from far away. With his steps the house filled up with the fragrance of the toilet water that Úrsula used to splash on him when he was a child in order to find him in the shadows, in some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absence. José Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary. He went directly to his mother’s bedroom, where Aureliano had boiled mercury for four months in his grandfather’s grandfather’s water pipe to conserve the body according to Melquíades’ formula. José Arcadio did not ask him any questions. He kissed the corpse on the forehead and withdrew from under her skirt the pocket of casing which contained three as yet unused pessaries and the key to her cabinet. He did everything with direct and decisive movements, in contrast to his languid look. From the cabinet he took a small damascene chest with the family crest and found on the inside, which was perfumed with sandalwood, the long letter in which Fernanda unburdened her heart of the numerous truths that she had hidden from him. He read it standing up, avidly but without anxiety, and at the third page he stopped and examined Aureliano with a look of second recognition.
“So,” he said with a voice with a touch of razor in it, “You’re the bastard.”
“I’m Aureliano Buendía.”
“Go to your room,” José Arcadio said.
Aureliano went and did not come out again even from curiosity when he heard the sound of the solitary funeral ceremonies. Sometimes, from the kitchen, he would see José Arcadio strolling through the house, smothered by his anxious breathing, and he continued hearing his steps in the ruined bedrooms after midnight. He did not hear his voice for many months, not only because José Arcadio never addressed him, but also because he had no desire for it to happen or time to think about anything else but the parchments. On Fernanda’s death he had taken out the next-to-the-last little fish and gone to the wise Catalonian’s bookstore in search of the books he needed. Nothing he saw along the way interested him, perhaps because he lacked any memories for comparison and the deserted streets and desolate houses were the same as he had imagined them at a time when he would have given his soul to know them. He had given himself the permission denied by Fernanda and only once and for the minimum time necessary, so without pausing he went along the eleven blocks that separated the house from the narrow street where dreams had been interpreted in other days and he went panting into the confused and gloomy place where there was barely room to move. More than a bookstore, it looked like a dump for used books, which were placed in disorder on the shelves chewed by termites, in the corners sticky with cobwebs, and even in the spaces that were supposed to serve as passageways. On a long table, also heaped with old books and papers, the proprietor was writing tireless prose in purple letters, somewhat outlandish, and on the loose pages of a school notebook. He had a handsome head of silver hair which fell down over his forehead like the plume of a cockatoo, and his blue eyes, lively and close-set, revealed the gentleness of a man who had read all of the books. He was wearing short pants and soaking in perspiration, and he did not stop his writing to see who had come in. Aureliano had no difficulty in rescuing the five books that he was looking for from that fabulous disorder, because they were exactly where Melquíades had told him they would be. Without saying a word he handed them, along with the little gold fish, to the wise Catalonian and the latter examined them, his eyelids contracting like two clams. “You must be mad,” he said in his own language, shrugging his shoulders, and he handed back to Aureliano the five books and the little fish.
“You can have them” he said in Spanish. “The last man who read these books must have been Isaac the Blindman, so consider well what you’re doing.”
José Arcadio restored Meme’s bedroom and had the velvet curtains cleaned and mended along with the damask on the canopy of the viceregal bed, and he put to use once more the abandoned bathroom where the cement pool was blackened by a fibrous and rough coating. He restricted his vest-pocket empire of worn, exotic clothing, false perfumes, and cheap jewelry to those places. The only thing that seemed to worry him in the rest of the house were the saints on the family altar, which he burned down to ashes one afternoon in a bonfire he lighted in the courtyard. He would sleep until past eleven o’clock. He would go to the bathroom in a shabby robe with golden dragons on it and a pair of slippers with yellow tassels, and there he would officiate at a rite which for its care and length recalled Remedios the Beauty. Before bathing he would perfume the pool with the salts that he carried in three alabaster flacons. He did not bathe himself with the gourd but would plunge into the fragrant waters and remain there for two hours floating on his back, lulled by the coolness and by the memory of Amaranta. A few days after arriving he put aside his taffeta suit, which in addition to being too hot for the town was the only one that he had, and he exchanged it for some tight-fitting pants very similar to those worn by Pietro Crespi during his dance lessons and a silk shirt woven with thread from living caterpillars and with his initials embroidered over the heart. Twice a week he would wash the complete change in the tub and would wear his robe until it dried because he had nothing else to put on. He never ate at home. He would go out when the heat of siesta time had eased and would not return until well into the night. Then he would continue his anxious pacing, breathing like a cat and thinking about Amaranta. She and the frightful look of the saints in the glow of the nocturnal lamp were the two memories he retained of the house. Many times during the hallucinating Roman August he had opened his eyes in the middle of his sleep and had seen Amaranta rising out of a marble-edged pool with her lace petticoats and the bandage on her hand, idealized by the anxiety of exile. Unlike Aureliano José who tried to drown that image in the bloody bog of war, he tried to keep it alive in the sink of concupiscence while he entertained his mother with the endless fable of his pontifical vocation. It never occurred either to him or to Fernanda to think that their correspondence was an exchange of fantasies. José Arcadio, who left the seminary as soon as he reached Rome, continued nourishing the legend of theology and canon law so as not to jeopardize the fabulous inheritance of which his mother’s delirious letters spoke and which would rescue him from the misery and sordidness he shared with two friends in a Trastevere garret. When he received Fernanda’s last letter, dictated by the foreboding of imminent death, he put the leftovers of his false splendor into a suitcase and crossed the ocean in the hold of a ship where immigrants were crammed together like cattle in a slaughterhouse, eating cold macaroni and wormy cheese. Before he read Fernanda’s will, which was nothing but a detailed and tardy recapitulation of her misfortunes, the broken-down furniture and the weeds on the porch had indicated that he had fallen into a trap from which he would never escape, exiled forever from the diamond light and timeless air of the Roman spring. During the crushing insomnia brought on by his asthma he would measure and remeasure the depth of his misfortune as he went through the shadowy house where the senile fussing of Úrsula had instilled a fear of the world in him. In order to be sure that she would not lose him in the shadows, she had assigned him a corner of the bedroom, the only one where he would be safe from the dead people who wandered through the house after sundown. “If you do anything bad,” Úrsula would tell him, “the saints will let me know.” The terror-filled nights of his childhood were reduced to that corner where he would remain motionless until it was time to go to bed, perspiring with fear on a stool under the watchful and glacial eyes of the tattletale saints. It was useless torture because even at that time he already had a terror of everything around him and he was prepared to be frightened at anything he met in life: women on the street, who would ruin his blood; the women in the house, who bore children with the tail of a pig; fighting cocks, who brought on the death of men and remorse for the rest of one’s life; firearms, which with the mere touch would bring down twenty years of war; uncertain ventures, which led only to disillusionment and madness—everything, in short, everything that God had created in His infinite goodness and that the devil had perverted. When he awakened, pressed in the vise of his nightmares, the light in the window and the caresses of Amaranta in the bath and the pleasure of being powdered between the legs with a silk puff would release him from the terror. Even Úrsula was different under the radiant light in the garden because there she did not talk about fearful things but would brush his teeth with charcoal powder so that he would have the radiant smile of a Pope, and she would cut and polish his nails so that the pilgrims who came to Rome from all over the world would be startled at the beauty of the Pope’s hands as he blessed them, and she would comb his hair like that of a Pope, and she would sprinkle his body and his clothing with toilet water so that his body and his clothes would have the fragrance of a Pope. In the courtyard of Castel Gandolfo he had seen the Pope on a balcony making the same speech in seven languages for a crowd of pilgrims and the only thing, indeed, that had drawn his attention was the whiteness of his hands, which seemed to have been soaked in lye, the dazzling shine of his summer clothing, and the hidden breath of cologne.