Chapter 10 Chapter nine
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was the first to feel that war had become ethereal.In his capacity as the military and political head of Macondo, he had telegraph calls with Colonel Aureliano Buendia twice a week.In the beginning, this kind of talks determined the course of this flesh-and-blood war, and the outline and scope of the war were so clearly defined that it was possible to correctly point out where Colonel Aureliano Buendia was at any time and foreseeable his future movements.Although Colonel Aureliano Buendía had never been close enough to talk to even his closest friends, at that time he still maintained a family tone that made it easy to get out of the line immediately. The other end recognized him.Many times he went beyond the intended topic and extended the call to talk about family matters.But slowly, with the intensification and extension of the war, his image gradually blurred, as if he was in another world.The voice and tone of his speech became more and more erratic and elusive, and then they became mixed and became words that gradually lost all meaning.So all Colonel Gerineldo Márquez did was listen, and he had the feeling that he was telegraphing with a stranger in another world.
"Yes, Aureliano," he would always end up answering at the telegraph.
"Long live the Liberal Party!"
He eventually lost touch with the war entirely.What had been a real activity, the irrepressible passion of his youth, had now become for him a distant thing: a thing of nothingness.The only thing that could fill his void was Amaranta's sewing room.He visits her every afternoon.He loved watching her hands work the sewing machine into frothy lace, while Remedios the Beauty turned the wheel for her.
Hour by hour passed without either of them saying a word, content to be in each other's company.But while Amaranta rejoiced in keeping his admiration alive, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez did not know what secrets lay in that inscrutable heart.When she heard the news that he was coming back, Amaranta was so thirsty that she wanted to see him right away.But when he was seen coming in among the rowdy guards of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, he was worn out by the hardships of exile, worn out by age and forgetfulness. Old and tired, covered in sweat and grime, reeking of herds, with a bandage on his left arm, she nearly fainted with disappointment at the sight of his ugliness. "My God," she thought, "this is not the Gerinedo I was expecting!" However, when he came again the next day, he was shaved and clean, with sprinkles on his beard. The perfume and blood-stained bandages were also removed.He brought her a daily prayer book in a pearl-white hardcover.
"Look, how weird these men are!" She couldn't find anything else to say, so she just said that. "They have fought their whole life against priests, and they end up giving prayer books as gifts."
Since then, even in the most critical time of the war, he has visited her every afternoon.
Many times, in the absence of Remedios the Beauty, he would turn the wheel of the sewing machine.Amaranta was at a loss for the persistence, loyalty and obedience of this man, who had power and prestige, but who always took off his weapons and put them in the hall every time, just like entering the sewing room.For four years, he kept expressing his feelings to her, but she always found a way to reject his courtship without hurting his feelings, because even though she didn't love him, she couldn't live without him in the end. .Remedios the Beauty, who seemed to be indifferent to everything, was considered mentally retarded, but she couldn't help but be moved by Colonel Gerineldo Márquez's sincerity and spoke out for him.Amaranta saw at once that the girl she was raising, hardly a young girl, was already a beauty Macondo had never seen before.Feeling the resentment with which she had fought against Rebeca revived in her heart, she begged God not to drag her into wanting Remedios' death, and sent the Beauty out of the sewing room.
It was at this time that Colonel Gerineldo Márquez became weary of the war.With the help of his faculties of persuasion, with his deep and restrained tenderness, he was ready to give up for Amaranta the honor he had gained in his most precious years, but he could not persuade her.One afternoon in August, after giving her final answer to her indomitable suitor, Amaranta, unable to bear the pressure of her stubborn temper, locked herself in her room until she died of old age. lonely and miserable.She said to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez: "Let us forget this forever!" She said: "We are all too old for this kind of thing."
That afternoon Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was called to listen to a telegram from Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a usual conversation that would not have opened any gaps in the stalemate of the war.At the end of the conversation, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez looked at the deserted streets, at the glistening drops of water on the almond trees, feeling lost in this solitude.
"Aureliano," he said sadly from the transmitter, "it is raining in Macondo."
There is no sound on the line for a long time.Suddenly, Colonel Aureliano Buendía's stern words jumped out of the machine.
"Don't be silly!" The characters showed: "It's August, of course it's going to rain."
It had been a long time since they had seen each other, and Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was overwhelmed by the aggressive response.But when Colonel Aureliano Buendía returned to Macondo two months later, this bewilderment turned into panic.Even Úrsula was surprised by how much her son had changed.He came back quietly and without guards this time, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat, lived in a room with his three mistresses, and spent most of the time lying in a hammock.He seldom read the telegrams that reported the general state of affairs.On one occasion Colonel Gerineldo Vulquez asked him for instructions on evacuating a place on the frontier so as to avoid the danger of an international conflict.
"Don't bother me with this sesame mung bean matter." He ordered: "Just ask God."
This time may be the most critical moment in the war.Liberal landowners who initially supported the revolution conspired secretly with conservative landowners to thwart the review of title deeds.
The politicians who had built their capital on the war in exile had publicly denounced Colonel Aureliano Buendía's sudden decision.But Colonel Aureliano Buendía seemed to take lightly even such a loss of his prestige.He did not reread his verses, which were more than five volumes long forgotten in the bottom of the box.At night or when he was taking a nap, he would call one of the three women into the hammock, and after being tender with her, he would fall asleep as heavy as a rock, without any sign of worrying about him.At this moment, he alone understood that his perplexed heart was doomed to be erratic forever.At first, he was dazzled by the triumphant glory and the unbelievable victory, coveting the prominent power in the abyss.
He was delighted to have the Duke of Marlborough as his right arm, his great teacher in the arts of war, his tiger-leather-clawed suit revered by adults and frightened by children.It was at this moment that he decided that no one, including Úrsula, should come within three meters of him.Wherever he went, his adjutant chalked a circle on the ground around him, and he stood in the center of the circle—in which only he could enter—with curt, irresistible orders dictating the outside world. fate.When he came to Manure for the first time after General Moncada was shot, he was in a hurry to fulfill his last wish.General Moncada's widow took glasses, medals, pocket watches and rings from him, but did not let him enter the house.
"Don't come in, Colonel." She said to him: "You are in charge on the battlefield, and I am in charge here."
Colonel Aureliano Buendía showed no signs of resentment, but his emotions calmed down only when his personal guards ransacked and leveled the house of General Moncada's widow. "Aureliano, you have to watch your conscience." Colonel Gerineldo Márquez said to him: "You are already rotting, a living creature." At this time, Aureliano Buendía The colonel convened a second meeting of the main leaders of the rebel army.There are all kinds of religions and types of people here: from idealists, careerists, adventurers, disaffected elements to the usual criminals.There was even a former Tory official convicted of embezzling state funds who took advantage of the chaos to avoid trial.Many of them had no idea why they were fighting.Among this motley crowd of differing opinions, who were on the verge of infighting, was a notoriously insidious chieftain, General Teofilo Vargas.He is a pure Indian, fierce and savage, illiterate, silent, but ruthless, and has the ability of a savior, and his men worship him like crazy.Colonel Aureliano Buendia convened this meeting to unify the command of the rebel army against the conspiracy of politicians.But General Teofilo Vargas preempted his intentions, and within hours he had broken up an alliance of the best commanders and seized central command. "This is a beast that must be looked out for," Colonel Aureliano Buendía told his officers. "He is more dangerous to us than the Conservative Minister of War." The young captain, who was notoriously shy, raised his index finger very cautiously.
He said:
"It's very simple, Colonel." He suggested: "He should be killed."
What surprised Colonel Aureliano Buendía was not so much the cruelty of the proposal as how he had expressed his own thoughts a second earlier.
"You don't expect me to give such an order," he said.
He really didn't give such an order.But fifteen days later, General Teofilo Vargas was chopped up in an ambush, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía was promoted to Commander-in-Chief.On the night when his authority was recognized by all the generals of the rebel army, he woke up suddenly, screaming for a blanket.There was a sharp chill in him, which tormented him even in the sun, and kept him awake for months until it became a habitual feeling.The mood of being intoxicated with power began to become dull amidst the chills.As a means of beating the cold, he had the young officer shot who had suggested the murder of General Teofilo Vargas.His orders were always carried out before they were issued, before they were even formed in his mind, and always far beyond what he dared to achieve.He hated the people in the captured villages cheering him, the very same people, it seemed to him, cheering his enemies as well.Everywhere he met young men who looked at him with his eyes, spoke to him with his voice, saluted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and called him his son.He just felt that he was scattered and repeated everywhere, and he felt lonely like never before.He was convinced that even his own officers were lying to him.He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. "The best friends," he would often say, "are the ones who just died." He was tired of his hesitation, of the vicious cycle of this never-ending war.The war kept him in the same circle, but he was getting older, more worn out, less and less knowing why this war was fought, how and when it was fought.There is always someone outside his chalk circle who needs money, or who wants to go to sleep because his son has whooping cough, or because he can no longer bear the filth of war in his mouth, but who still has With the last of his strength he stood at attention and reported to him: "Everything is normal, my colonel." And normal is precisely the worst thing about this endless war: nothing happened.Alone, cast aside by the omens, he found his last shelter in Macondo in order to escape the cold that would accompany him to old age and death, in the joy of remembering the oldest things.He was so bored that when he was told that a party committee had arrived and was ordered to come and discuss with him the question of where the war was going, he just rolled over in his hammock, half asleep and said, "Take them to the whores."
The committee consisted of half a dozen lawyers in frock coats and top hats who endured the September sun with indomitable spirit.Úrsula left their money at home.They spent most of the day locked in their room, holding secret meetings in airtight.In the evening, they sent a guard to escort them, took an accordion team, and went to the Catalino Hotel to pay their own bills and drink.
"Don't bother them," Colonel Aureliano Buendía ordered. "Anyway, I know what they want to do." In early December, many people expected this long-awaited meeting to be It's endless, but it's over in less than an hour.
Colonel Aureliano Buendía stood next to the crumbling player piano in the stuffy living room, covered with a white sheet like a shroud over a corpse, this time without his adjutants drawing within the white circle of .He sat in a chair, wrapped in a woolen blanket, and flanked by his political advisers, listening in silence to their brief proposals.They demanded: first, the renunciation of censorship of title deeds in order to regain the support of liberal landowners; Advocates strongly protect the integrity of the family.
"That is to say," Colonel Aureliano Buendía smiled as soon as the proposals had been read, "we are only fighting for power."
"It's just a change in tactics." Some of the representatives retorted: "At present, the core issue is to expand the popular base of the war. As for the future, we will wait and see."
A political adviser to Colonel Aureliano Buendía preemptively said: "This is an absurd interpretation." He said: "If this change is good, that is to say, the conservative regime is good. If it is used to broaden the popular base of the war, as you have stated, then it means that the Conservative regime has a broad popular base. In short, this means that we have carried out a treachery for almost twenty years. A battle of national sentiments."
He wanted to go on, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía stopped him with a gesture.
"Don't waste time, Doctor," he said. "What matters is that from now on we are only fighting for power." Still smiling, he took the papers handed over by the delegates for signature.
"That being the case," he added at last, "we will accept this change of tactics without any inconvenience."
The people under him all looked at each other in blank dismay, astonished.
"Forgive me, Colonel," said Colonel Gerineldo Márquez mildly, "but this is a treason."
Colonel Aureliano Buendía stopped the quill dipped in ink in the air and poured out the full weight of his authority on Colonel Márquez: "Give me the gun, please," he ordered.
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez stood up and put the weapon on the table.
"Please report to the barracks," Colonel Aureliano Buendía ordered him: "You will be handed over to the Revolutionary Tribunal."
Then he signed the statement, handed the text back to the envoys, and said to them: "Gentlemen, take these papers with you, and take them at your convenience."
Two days later, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was sentenced to death for treason.Colonel Aureliano Buendía lay in his hammock and ignored the pleas for forgiveness of Gerineldo.On the eve of his execution, Úrsula met him in his bedroom despite orders not to disturb him.She was dressed in black, with a rare solemn expression, and she stood and talked for three minutes. "I know you're going to shoot Gerinaido." She said calmly, "I can't stop you in this matter. But you have to listen to this sentence: as soon as I see his body, I will now take my father's and my mother's. Bones, in memory of José Arcadio Buendía and before God, I swear to you that wherever you go, I will drag you out and kill you with my hands." In front of the room, without waiting for his answer, he finally added: "Just like what I would have done if you had a pig's tail when you were born."
During that long, endless night, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez recalled the evenings that passed away in Amaranta's sewing room, and Colonel Aureliano Buendía scratched his head for a long time. The itch on his body, trying to break the hard shell of his loneliness.Since that long afternoon when his father took him to know ice, his only happy moments had been spent in the silversmith's room.There, as time goes by, he is outfitted with little goldfish.He had to wage thirty-two wars, tear up all the pacts he had signed with death, and wallow like a pig in the dustbin of honor, and finally discover the peculiar virtue of simplicity and simplicity, a full forty years too late.
At dawn, an hour before the execution, he came to the cell, looking very tired from staying up all night.
"End this farce, old man." He said to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, "Let's get out of here before those bastards come and shoot you." Faced with this attitude, Gerineldo Márquez Colonel Adams could no longer hold back his contempt.
"No, Aureliano," he retorted, "I would rather die than see you turned into a ghost knife."
"You won't see it," said Colonel Aureliano Buendía. "Put on your shoes and help me end this shitty war."
When he said this, he did not expect that ending a war is far more difficult than starting it.
It took him almost a year of painstaking struggle to force the government to offer peace terms favorable to the rebels.It took another year to convince his staff that it was expedient to accept those terms.He even suppressed the mutiny of his officers with unimaginable cruelty, who persisted in refusing to betray the fruits of victory, so that he had to rely on the strength of the enemy to subdue them at last.
As a fighter, he has never been better than he is now.He has a clear goal, that is, he is ultimately fighting for his own liberation rather than for abstract ideals and slogans that politicians can turn around and interpret according to the situation, which arouses his high-spirited fighting enthusiasm.Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, a soldier who had fought for victory with the same conviction and devotion and was now fighting for defeat, reproached his old comrade-in-arms for his needless recklessness.
"Don't worry," Colonel Aureliano Buendía smiled. "Death is much harder than one imagines." As far as he was concerned, it was true.His conviction that his own death was fixed, which endowed him with a mysterious, undisturbed power, which kept him safe from the dangers of war, was his final defeat, and the attempt to achieve this Failure is more difficult and cruel than winning, and the price paid is even greater.
In almost twenty years of military service, Colonel Aureliano Buendía returned home many times, but the emergency that he presented each time he arrived, and the military establishment that accompanied him everywhere, gilded the legend of his presence The color—even Úrsula felt this—turned him into a stranger in the end.The last time he had put his three mistresses in one room in Macondo, he was not seen in his own house except two or three times when he came to dine at leisure.Remedios the Beauty and the twins born at the height of the war hardly knew him.Nor can Amaranta combine two images: the older brother who made little goldfishes in his youth, and the mythical warrior who puts a three-meter distance between him and the others.But when he knew that the truce was coming, and when he thought that he would return home again as an ordinary person, the family tenderness that had been numb for so many years revived unprecedentedly and fiercely.
"We finally have a man in our family again," Úrsula said.
But Amaranta was the first to suspect that the family might lose this man forever.
A week before the armistice he entered the house without a guard, following two barefoot orderlies.
The orderly carried the mule's harness and the box of his poems—the last remnants of his former royal gear—into the corridor.Amaranta called to him when she saw him pass by the sewing room.Colonel Aureliano Buendía seemed to have difficulty recognizing her.
"I am Amaranta." Enthusiastic, happy at his return, she raised her black bandaged hand and said, "Look!"
Colonel Aureliano Buendía smiled at her as he did that distant morning when he returned to Macondo after being sentenced to death and saw her bandaged for the first time.
"How fast!" he said. "I don't know how to pass the time."
The Buendia family must be protected by government forces.When Colonel Aureliano Buendía arrived, everyone cursed and spat at him, and people said that he only intensified the war in order to get a good price.He was feverish, cold, shivering, and boils appeared under his armpits.Six months ago, upon hearing that the war was about to cease, Ursula opened Aureliano’s new house and scanned it, and smoked the corners with myrrh, thinking that Aureliano’s return this time would be a Prepare to die of old age on Remedios' pile of rusty toys.But in fact, in the past two years, he has devoted his last bit of energy to life, including his old age.
Úrsula had arranged his silversmith's room with special care, but when he passed by, he didn't even notice that the key was in the lock.He was unaware of the small, heartbreaking damage time had wrought at home, which would have seemed like a disaster to anyone with a clear memory after so many days away.The plaster on the wall has eroded, cobwebs have formed dirty velvet flowers in the corners, the begonias are mottled with dust and mud, the veins have been gnawed by termites on the beams, and moss has grown in the door mortars. Missing has laid all kinds of cunning traps in front of him. , Colonel Aureliano Buendía felt no pain at all.He was sitting in the corridor, wrapped in a blanket and with his boots on, as if waiting with difficulty for the weather to clear.For a whole afternoon, he just watched the raindrops fall on the crabapple flowers.Úrsula understood now that this man would not be staying at home very long. "If it hadn't been for war," she thought, "it would have been death that had come and taken him away." Her conjecture was so clear and convincing that at last she took it for an omen.
That night at supper, the one called Aureliano Segundo would pinch the bread with his right hand and drink the soup with his left.His twin brother, José Arcadio Segundo, pinched bread with his left hand and ate soup with his right.Their movements were so coordinated and consistent that it looked like the brothers were not sitting opposite each other, but were eating in front of a mirror.The show, which the twins have dreamed up since they knew they looked alike, is now performing for their newly arrived elders.But Colonel Aureliano Buendía did not notice.It seemed that he ignored everything, not even a glance when Remedios the Beauty entered the room naked.Only Úrsula dared to interrupt his reverie.
"If you have to go away," she said to him in the middle of dinner, "you must at least try to remember how we passed the night."
Only then did Colonel Aureliano Buendía understand—but not be surprised—that Úrsula was the only one who could see his difficulty.For the first time in many years, he dared to look directly at her face.Her face was wrinkled, her teeth were decayed, her hair was dry and gray, and her eyes flashed with surprise.He compared her to the image he remembered long, long ago. That afternoon he had a premonition that a pot of boiling soup was about to slip off the table, and sure enough, the pot really broke.At this moment, he realized how many deep and shallow paw prints and whip marks, how many large and small wounds, ulcers and scars had been left on her body by the burden of daily life for more than half a century.He also affirmed that what had happened to his mother did not arouse the slightest pity in him.
He made the last effort to search for the place where tenderness died and rotted in his heart, but he still couldn't find it.In the past, when he smelled Ursula's body odor on his skin, he had felt at least vaguely ashamed, and more than once he felt that his thoughts were influenced by Ursula.But all of that has now been leveled by war.Even his wife, Remedios, was now only the image of someone who might have been his daughter.The number of women he had met in the loveless desert, who had sown his seed all over the Caribbean coast, had left no trace of his affection.Most of them came into the room in the dark and left before dawn. When he woke up the next day, he only had a little tasteless memory of their bodies.And despite the passage of time and the flames of war, the only tenderness he retained was his childhood sympathy for his brother José Arcadio, a tenderness based not on love but on partnership and complicity.
"Forgive me," he said apologetically to Ursula's plea, "because this war has ruined everything."
In the next few days, he was busy destroying all traces of himself in this world.
He cleaned out the silversmith's room, leaving only a few belongings; he gave clothes to his orderlies; In the same penitent mood, he buried his weapons in the yard.He kept a pistol and a bullet.Úrsula did not try to stop him, she did only once, when he was about to destroy the copperplate of Remedios that hung in the hall and was illuminated by an ever-burning lamp. "This portrait is not yours for a long time." She said: "This is a sacred object of the whole family." The boxes were taken to the bakery where Santa Sofía de la Peda was getting ready to light the oven.
"Burn this." As he spoke, he handed her a roll of yellowed paper: "Burn it well, these are old things."
Santa Sofía de la Peda had always been quiet and submissive to everyone, and she had never turned back to her own children, but this time she felt that she could not do it.
"These papers are very useful," she said.
"If not," said the colonel, "this is for myself."
"Then," she said, "you burn it yourself, Colonel."
He not only burned it himself, but also split the box with an axe, and threw the wood chips into the fire.A few hours before that, Pilar Ternera had come to visit him.Colonel Aureliano Buendía was amazed at the fact that she had grown so old and fat after so many years. Where was her crisp, healthy laugh?But he was also surprised that her card reading skills were so profound. "Watch your mouth," she said.Colonel Aureliano Buendía wondered to himself that perhaps it was not a surprising foretaste of his fate that she had said to him once, during the height of his reputation, "Be careful with your mouth."After a while, his personal doctor came to operate on the boils under his armpits, and he asked the doctor quietly where the exact location of the heart was.The doctor listened carefully, and then drew a circle on his chest with iodine cotton.
The day of the armistice was Tuesday, and the morning was mild and rainy.Colonel Aureliano Buendía came into the kitchen before five o'clock and drank his usual coffee without sugar. "When you were born into this world, it was the same weather as today," Úrsula told him. "You kept your eyes open back then, and you frightened everyone." But he didn't listen. At this moment, he was paying attention to the sound of regiments, bugles and officers' orders breaking through the quiet dawn.Speaking of which, he has been on the battlefield for so many years, and those voices are already very familiar to him, but this time he still feels his knees go weak, and his whole body trembles, just like when he was a naked man when he was young. What the woman experienced when she stood in front of him.
He vaguely felt that he had fallen into a trap of nostalgia after all.He thought that if he married the naked woman, maybe he would become a man who neither fought nor won honors, became an unknown craftsman, a happy animal.This belated, unexpected tremor made his breakfast bitter.At seven o'clock in the morning, when Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, accompanied by a detachment of rebel officers, came to look for him, he found that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had never been so taciturn, brooding and lonely as he was today. .Úrsula wanted to throw a new blanket over his shoulders. "What do people in the government think," she said. "They think you surrendered because you didn't even have the money to buy a new blanket." But he didn't accept it.He went to the door and, seeing that the rain was still falling, he put on his head one of José Arcadio Buendía's old felt hats.
"Aureliano," Úrsula called to him, "promise me that if anything goes wrong for you there, you will think of your mother."
He smiled at her from a distance, stretched out his five fingers and raised his hand, and left the house facing the shouting and scolding outside without saying a word.The shouting, cursing, and cursing continued until he was out of town.Úrsula bolted the door, determined that she would never open it again in this lifetime.
"We're all dead and rotten in there," she thought. "Even if we turn to ashes in this house without a man in charge, it won't make these damn neighbors happy to watch us cry." All morning, she searched for reasons to remember her son, but she couldn't find it.
The ceremony for signing the armistice agreement was held under a huge kapok tree two kilometers away from Macondo. Soon after, a village called Niland was built around the big tree.Representatives of the government and the two parties, as well as the delegation of the rebels who surrendered their arms, were greeted by a group of noisy novice nuns in white robes, who looked like a flock of white doves and were beaten by the rain.Colonel Aureliano Buendía rode a muddy mule, unshaven and dejected, not so much from the pain of his armpit sores, but from the utter shattering of a dream he had worked so hard for, he walked through honor and remembrance The stage of honor has reached the end of hope.According to his arrangements, there would be no music, no firecrackers, no joyous bells, no cheers, no indication of the desolation that might break the armistice.An itinerant photographer took the only photograph of him that might have survived, but was forced to destroy the plate before it could be developed.
The ceremony lasted just long enough to sign and seal, and the delegates sat in a patched circus tent with a rough table in the center, faithfully following Aureliano . Colonel Buendía's last officers gathered around the table.
Before signing it, the personal representative of the President of the Republic wanted to read the proclamation of surrender aloud, but Colonel Aureliano Buendía objected. "Let's not waste time on formalism." He was about to sign the document without even looking at it.One of his officers broke the uncomfortable silence in the tent.
"Colonel," he said, "please don't make us the first to sign."
Colonel Aureliano Buendía agreed.The tent was so silent that one could guess whose name was signed by the rustling of the quill pen on the paper.As the document circled the table, the space for the first signature on it was still empty.Colonel Aureliano Buendía is poised to fill the void.
"Colonel," another of his officers said to him at this moment, "you have time to be a good soldier."
Colonel Aureliano Buendía signed the first document calmly, and when he was about to sign the last one, a rebel colonel appeared at the door of the tent, leading one head and carrying two Box of mules.Although this person looks very young, he looks like he is working hard, but his expression is very calm.他是马贡多地区革命军方面的司库。他牵着这头快要饿死了的骡子，走了六天艰难的路程，赶在停战协定签字这天来到这里。他小心翼翼地卸下一只只箱子，谨慎得惹人发火，他把箱子一一打开，从里面一块一块地把七十二块金砖放到桌子上。
谁也记不得有这么一笔财富。最近一年里，中央指挥部四分五裂，革命蜕化成了各派头头之间的血腥残杀，要确定谁对这笔财产负责是不可能的。这些先铸成块状、然后包上陶土的起义者们的金子，已经不属任何人控制。奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校还是把这七十二块金砖包括在投降时应缴出的物资清单里。他没允许别人发言就结束了仪式。那位瘦削的青年站在上校对面，用他那双镇定自若的糖浆色的眼睛盯着他的双眼。
“还有事？”奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校问。
“收条。”他说。
奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校亲笔写了张收条递给他。接着他喝了一杯柠檬汁和一小块由见习修女们分发的甜面包后就退出帐篷到另一个营帐里去了，那营帐是人家为他一旦想休息而准备的。他在那儿脱下了衬衫，在行军床边上坐下。下午三时一刻，他把一粒手枪子弹射进他的私人医生在他胸脯上用碘酒画的圆圈里。这个时候，在马贡多乌苏拉正奇怪牛奶煮丁那么久怎么还没开，她揭开炉上的奶壶盖一看，里面全是蛆虫。
“他们杀死了奥雷良诺！”她惊叫起来。
出于她的孤独的习惯，她向院子望去，只见霍塞·阿卡迪奥·布恩地亚全身被雨水淋得湿透，神情很忧郁，比他死的时候老多了。“他们背信弃义地把他杀死了。”乌苏拉一口断定：“谁也不会好心地替他合上双眼。”傍晚时她抬起泪眼，看到一些急速旋转的发光的橘黄色圆盘象流星似地划过天空。她想，这就是死的标记。当人们把裹在因血迹发硬的毯子里、圆睁着双眼的奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校抬来的时候，她还在栗树下她丈夫的膝盖上啜泣。
奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校没有危险。子弹准确无误地沿着一条轨迹穿过身子，医生可以用一条浸过碘酒的布条，从前胸塞进去，从后背拉出来。“这是我的杰作。”医生得意地对他说：“这是唯一可以穿过一粒子弹而不会伤着任何要害部位的一个点。”奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校身边围着那些悲天悯人的见习修女，她们声嘶力竭地高唱赞美诗，祈求他的灵魂安息。这时上校懊悔没有象预先想的那样把子弹打进上颚上，他没有那样打，只是为了嘲弄一下庇拉·特内拉的预言。
“要是我现在还有权的话，”他对医生说，“我一定不经审判就叫人把你毙了，这倒不是因为你救了我的命，而是因为你让我出丑。”
他自杀未遂这件事很快便使他恢复了失去的威望。那些编造谎话说他所以出卖战争是为了换得一幢墙壁用金砖砌成的住所的人，现在把他的自杀企图描绘成一种保持荣誉的行动，称颂他是烈士。
以后当奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校拒绝接受共和国总统授于他的功绩勋章时，连最激烈反对他的对手也列队来到他房里，要求他不承认停战的条款，以发动一场新的战争。家里堆满了为赔礼道歉而送来的各种礼物。奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校为时已晚地意识到自己拥有老战友们的众多的支持。他没有排除让他们心满意足的可能。不仅如此，有些时候，他对发动一场新战争的想法是那么振奋激动，赫里奈多·马尔克斯上校甚至想，只要找一个借口就马上可以行动起来。实际上也给他提供了这样的借口。共和国总统在每份请求书未经一个特别委员会根据国民议会通过的拨款法审核以前，拒绝支付自由派和保守派老战士们的战争养老金。“这是对停战协定的践踏！”奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校吼道：“那些老战士等待邮局的通知将等到老死。”他第一次离开了乌苏拉为他养伤而买的摇椅，在卧室里踱来踱去，决定给共和国总统口授一封措词激烈的信件，在这份从未公布的电函里，他谴责政府方面首次违反了尼兰德协定，他说要是十五天之内不解决养老金的拨款问题的话，他将进行殊死的战斗。他的严正的态度，使人觉得甚至可以指望保守党的老战士们也会参加他的队伍。但是政府的唯一回答是借口保护他而加强了已在他门口站岗的军事卫队，以及禁止他跟任何人会见。全国各地对其他几位须小心防范的头头们也采取了类似的措施。这是一个多么及时、多么突然、而又多么有效的行动啊！停战后两个月，当奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校身体完全康复了的时候，他的那些最坚决的谋事者不是死了，就是被放逐出国，或者永远被民政局管住了？
十二月，奥雷良诺·布恩地亚上校离开了养伤的房间，对他来说，只要往走廊里看上一眼就足以使他不再想战争的事了。乌苏拉以一种在她那个年纪简直是不可能有的精力，重新使家里焕发青春。“现在让他们瞧瞧，我是什么人。”当她知道儿子不碍事了时这样说：“没有比这座疯子们的家更好、更向大伙儿敞开大门的人家了。”她叫人清扫和油漆了房屋，换了家具，修复了花园，种上了新的花卉，打开了门窗让夏天耀眼的亮光一直照到卧室里。她下令终止一次次叠加的举丧活动，自己也脱下严肃刻板的丧服，换上年轻人的服装。自动钢琴又使家里荡漾起欢乐的气氛。听到这音乐，阿玛兰塔想起了皮埃特罗·克雷斯庇，想起他黄昏时分佩带的桅子花和熏衣草香昧，此时她枯萎的心底开放出一朵由时间滤净了的怨恨之花。一天下午乌苏拉想整理一下客厅，便去请守卫的士兵来帮忙。年轻的卫队长答应了。以后渐渐地，乌苏拉又派给他们新的差使。她请他们吃饭，送给他们衣服和鞋子，还教他们读书写字。当政府俘止对布恩地亚家监视时，有位士兵就留下来跟家里人一起生活，为家里服务了很多年。
新年那天，年轻的卫队长被俏姑娘雷梅苔丝的冷淡激疯了，一早起来竟为爱情而死在她的窗下。
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