Chapter 18 Chapter Seventeen

Úrsula had to go to great lengths to fulfill her promise not to die until the rain stopped.Moments of sobriety, rare during heavy rains, become more frequent in August.Then there was a hot wind that withered the roses and dried out the swamps, and finally covered Macondo with scorching dust, covering the rusty zinc roof and the century-old almond trees. The dust has never fallen off since then.Úrsula wept bitterly when she discovered that for more than three years she had been a plaything for children.She washed off the paint from her face, and peeled off the colored paper strips, lizards, dried toads, and glass beads from old Arab necklaces that the children hung on her.For the first time since Amaranta's death, she left her hospital bed unaided and returned to family life.An indomitable spiritual force guides her actions in the dark.When people saw her walking staggeringly, and sometimes bumped into the arms raised above her head like an archangel, people thought it was caused by inconvenient movement, and they didn't know that she was blind in both eyes.She did not need to look, however, to know that the flower beds she had carefully built when she first rebuilt the house had been washed away by the heavy rains and leveled by Piorellano Segundo when he dug the ground.She also knew that there were cracks in the walls and concrete floors, that the furniture was faded and falling apart, and that the doors were out of joint.A state of resignation and melancholy not seen in her day threatened the family.

She fumbled around the empty bedrooms, hearing the roar of termites nibbling on wood, the rattle of moths eating away at clothing, and the loud noise of red ants digging foundations after the heavy rain.One day, when she was opening the crate of the icons, some cockroaches jumped on her, and she had to call Santa Sofía de la Peda to help catch them. The clothes in the box were all eaten by cockroaches. "How are you going to live with your waste of things like this!" said Úrsula. "If this goes on, we will all be eaten by worms." She had not stopped for a moment since then.In the early morning, she would get up before dawn, and would scramble when she was free, even children.She put the few wearable clothes in the sun to dry, sprayed insecticide to drive away the cockroaches, dug out the termite ant paths on the doors and windows, and sprinkled quicklime to suffocate the ants in the ant nests.Her zeal to revive her home brings her to the forgotten house.She cleaned up the room where José Arcadio Buendía devoted himself to developing the philosopher's stone, cleared away the rubble and cobwebs, and tidied up the silversmith's workshop that was messed up by the soldiers. The key to Erquiades' room, and said he wanted to see what was going on inside.Santa Sofía de la Peda had always been obedient to José Arcadio Segundo, because he had said that no one would be allowed to enter the room unless there were signs that he was dead, so She tried every means to divert Úrsula's attention.But Úrsula believed that even the smallest and most useless corner of the house could not fall prey to worms, and her determination enabled her to break through all obstacles.She persisted for three days, and finally got someone to open the door of the house. The stench in the house was overwhelming. If she hadn't grabbed the door frame, she would have been suffocated by the stench.But within two seconds she remembered that there were seventy-two chamber pots hidden in the house, which had been used by the schoolgirls, and that one day, at the beginning of the heavy rain, soldiers from the patrol broke into the house and searched for José Arcadio. Second, the results were not found.

"My God," cried Úrsula, as if she could see everything, "I tried my best to make you learn, but in the end you're living like a pig." José Arcadio Segundo was still buried in the parchment, his mossy teeth and dull eyes were visible through his tangled hair, and he recognized the voice of his great-grandmother and looked back. With a slight smile on his face, he subconsciously repeated what Bird Sura had said. "What do you want? The time is passing," he murmured. "That's what it says," Úrsula replied, "but not so fast." As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she realized that they were the words that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had said to her in the cell.She froze again, because it proved that time would not pass.She herself admitted that time does go round and round.But she did not give in, she scolded José Arcadio Segundo like a child, made him bathe, shave, and made him do his part in rebuilding the house.José Arcadio Segundo was terrified at the thought of leaving this quiet room.He cried out that no human power could make him leave the house, and that he did not want to see a train of two hundred carriages full of dead bodies sailing every evening from Macondo to the sea. "Everyone on the station is dead," he cried, "3,408 people in all!" Úrsula understood that he had fallen into a world much worse than the one in which she lived. A dark world, as lonely and insurmountable as the world his great-grandfather lived in.She promised to let him stay in the house, but she asked him to agree not to lock the door, and she asked people to come in and clean it every day.She had the pots thrown into the trash, except for one.She also cleaned him up, leaving him as clean and presentable as his great-grandfather had been during his long captivity under the chestnut tree.At first, Fernanda thought that Úrsula's constant busyness was senile madness, so she endured the seizures.

It was then that José Arcadio wrote to her from Rome that he wanted to go back to Macondo once before taking the oath for life.The good news lifted her spirits.In order not to make her son have a bad impression of this family, she uncharacteristically watered the flowers four times a day.The good news also prompted her to write to the invisible doctor quickly.The pots of oregano, bracken and crabapple that had been placed in the corridor had been destroyed by Aureliano Segundo in his anger, but Fernanda had rearranged them before Úrsula knew.Later, she sold silverware and added crockery, tin soup bowls and spoons, and alpaca tablecloths.The cupboards, which had traditionally housed West India Company china and Bohemian glass, were austere.Úrsula, who went further than she, gave orders in a loud voice: "Open all the doors and windows, cook the fish and meat, and buy the biggest turtle. Let the strangers make beds in the corner of the house, and let them piss in the rose bushes." Let them sit wherever they want, eat as many meals as they like, burp, swear, trample everything with their boots on, and do whatever they want. Only in this way will the house not collapse.” However, these It's all fantasy, she is too old, she has already lived too far, and she can no longer repeat the miracle of selling sugar beasts at that time.Among her descendants, no one inherited her exuberant energy.On Fernanda's orders, the door to the house remains closed.

During that time Aureliano Segundo returned to Petra Cote with the box.He barely maintained the family so that the family members would not starve to death.Petra Cote and he had earned money from mules as lotteries, and with the money they had bought other livestock, with which they had set up a crude lottery.Aureliano Segundo went door to door selling his homemade lottery tickets.He painted the lottery tickets red and green to make them look more believable and more attractive to customers.Perhaps he himself did not know that people bought lottery tickets to do good deeds, and most of them did so out of pity for him.But even the most sympathetic man is full of hope of winning the lottery when he wins a pig for twenty crowns, or a calf for thirty-two crowns. Came here uninvited.Petra Kote's yard was packed to the brim on a Tuesday night, waiting impatiently for the impromptu lottery kid to draw the winning number from the bag. , it won't be long before it turns into a week's fair here.In the evening, fried food and beverage stalls are set up in the yard.Many lottery winners slaughtered their winning animals there as long as they were played and given wine.So Aureliano Segundo suddenly played the accordion again and took part in a simple eating contest, which surprised even himself.Replaying the hilarious scenes of the past made him find that his energy was not what it had been before, that all the whims he had had at the Cumbienba ball had been exhausted, and he had become a completely different person.When the "mare elephant" challenged him back then, he weighed 120 kilograms, but now he has dropped to 78 kilograms; the original innocent, chubby tortoise face is now a lizard face.

He was tired and weary all day long, but to Petra Cotter he had never been better than he was then, perhaps because of her sympathy for him and the shared adversity of a life of poverty, which was overwhelmed by her. Mistaken for love.The bare mattress is no longer a place for crazy love, but it has become a corner for pouring out your heart.They auctioned off the mirrors at the head of the bed in order to buy the livestock for the colorful head; they sold the lustrous damask and velvet on the bed in order to feed the mules. Get rid of these things, they are like a pair of old insomniacs who have no evil thoughts and can't fall asleep until late at night.So, they began to use the previously wasted and wasted time to settle accounts and fiddle with piles of small money.Sometimes until the first roosters crowed, they were still moving from pile to pile of coins, taking some from this pile and putting some on that pile.This pile was for Fernanda, to make her happy; that pile was for Amaranta Úrsula to buy shoes for; Wearing a new dress; and this pile of money to buy a coffin when Úrsula dies, this pile to buy coffee whose pound has risen by a lifetime in three months, and this pile to buy sugar, which is getting less and less sweet every day ; this pile is for firewood that has been wet by the heavy rain; this pile is for paper and colored ink for making lottery tickets.The remaining pile was used to make up for the loss of the calf born in April. When all the lottery tickets were sold out, the calf showed symptoms of anthrax, and finally a cowhide was miraculously saved.Their Mass of Poverty is exceedingly holy.They always dedicated the biggest pile to Fernanda, never once out of guilt or compassion.They did this because they felt that Fernanda's comfort was more important than theirs.In fact, although neither of them knew it, both imagined Fernanda as the daughter they wanted but never had.Once they even willingly drank batter soup for three days straight to save money for a Dutch tablecloth for Fernanda.Although they toiled and worked hard all day, trying to arrange money in different ways, and racked their brains for it, when they moved money from one pile to another to make ends meet, their guardian angel relieve their fatigue.When uneven accounts keep them awake, they don't understand what's going on in the world, why their livestock aren't breeding as much as they used to, why money is slipping from their hands, why not so long ago people were still in Kunming. A lot of money was spent at the Bianba dance, and now spending twelve taifu to buy a lottery ticket for six hens is regarded as being robbed by robbers.Aureliano Segundo said nothing, but he thought that the problem was not in this world, but in some mysterious corner of Petra Cote's heart, where something went wrong during the heavy rains, causing the animals to die. Sterility, money slips away.With this unsolved mystery he delved deep into her feelings, looking for something he was interested in, but found love because he wanted her to love him and fell in love with her.Petra Cotes felt his love for her grow, and love him more and more.Thus at noon they believed again the superstition of their youth—that poverty is love's servant.Both thought of the haphazard hilarity, considerable wealth, and unrestrained sex that had been obstacles to love, and they lamented how much time had been wasted in finding this paradise of shared solitude.After so many years of mad love in a childless life together, they were miraculously in love at the table and in bed.They lived so happily that even after they had become two feeble old men, they entertained like bunnies and fought like puppies.

The movie ticket business never made more money.At first, Aureliano Segundo spent three days a week locked in the former ranch owner's office, drawing lottery tickets one by one, carefully drawing a red cow, a green pig, or a group of lottery tickets according to the winning numbers. Blue pullet.The words "God's lottery ticket" were neatly written in print.Petra Cotter thought it was a good name.But after a long time, he felt very tired after drawing two thousand lottery tickets.So I asked someone to make custom rubber stamps for the names and dates of livestock and lottery tickets, so that the work is simple, just press on the stamp pads of various colors.In the last few years, he wanted to use riddles instead of lottery tickets, and the prizes would be divided equally among the winners. Unfortunately, this method was too complicated, which made people doubtful.They gave up after two tries.

Aureliano Segundo was so busy improving the reputation of the lottery that he hardly had time to visit the children.Fernanda sent Amaranta Úrsula to a private school for six pupils and Aureliano was not allowed to go to a public school because she thought it was too much to let the children out of the room.Besides, schools in that era only accepted the legitimate children of Christian couples, and when Aureliano was sent home, there was a small plate on his smock as proof of birth stating that he was an abandoned baby.In this way, under the tutelage of the good Santa Sofía de la Peda and the sometimes sober and sometimes confused Úrsula, and according to the teachings of the old women, he gradually became acquainted with the narrow world around him.He was handsome, tall, and possessed a curiosity that irritated grown-ups, but his eyes were not as clear as Colonel Aureliano's, and sometimes they were penetrating.When Amaranta Úrsula was babbling, he used to go into the garden to dig for earthworms and catch bugs.Once, Fernanda caught him putting the scorpion in a small box to put on Úrsula's mat, and she shut him up in the bedroom where Meme used to live.When he felt lonely, he read the encyclopedia for entertainment.

Úrsula discovered him one afternoon when she went to the house to sprinkle water and remove the sprigs of nettles.Although she had met him several times, she still asked who he was. "I am Aureliano Buendia," he said. "Oh, really," she said, "it's about time you started learning the art of silversmithing." She mistook him for her son again, for the hot wind that had brought her sobriety after the heavy rain had passed.Since then, she has never regained her sanity.When she entered the bedroom, she saw Petronilla Igualão in the cumbersome skirts and coat embellished with small glass beads that she only wore when she was a guest, and her grandmother Tranquilia Maria Miriam Nieda Arakorjan Buendía sits in the invalid's rocking chair, swinging a peacock feather fan, and sees his great-grandfather Aureliano Arcadio Buendía wearing the fake Governor's Guard uniform , seeing her father, Aureliano Iguaran, who had created a spell that could char the maggots on cows so that they fell.Also saw her timid mother, her pig-tailed cousin, José Arcadio Buendía and the other dead children.

They sat in chairs reclining against the wall one by one, as if they were not visiting, but were keeping watch.She also concocted a colorful nonsense, commenting on events that happened in distant places and in an upside-down time, so that when Amaranta Úrsula came home from school or Aureliano was flipping through the encyclopedia When I get tired of watching, I often see her sitting on the bed talking to herself, as if she lost her way in a maze full of undead.Once, she yelled "fire" in horror, which frightened the family for a while, but it was caused by the fire in the stable she saw when she was four years old.She confused the past with the present, so much so that in the two or three flashbacks before her death, no one could tell whether she was talking about how she felt then or remembering the past.

Her body gradually shrank, turned into a fetus, and turned into a living zombie.In the last few months, she was transformed into a dried pear wrapped in a shirt, and her arm that was always raised looked like a monkey's paw.She didn't move for days and Santa Sofia de la Peda had to push her a few times to know if she was alive, put her on his lap and feed her by the spoonful syrup.She is like a newborn old woman.Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano led her around the bedroom and made her lie on the altar so that they could see that she was a little older than the Infant Jesus.They hid her in a barn cupboard one afternoon, and the mice almost ate her.One ordinary Sunday, when Fernanda was attending mass, two children entered the bedroom and lifted Úrsula up, one by the back of the neck and the other by her feet. "Poor great-grandmother, she is dying of old age," said Amaranta Úrsula. Startled, Úrsula said, "I'm still alive." "You see," Amaranta Úrsula said, suppressing a smile, "she's not breathing." Úrsula exclaimed: "I'm still talking!" "She stopped talking," said Aureliano. "She died like a cricket." So Ursula surrendered to the facts. "My Lord!" she cried softly, "then it is death." She began to pray, and that endless, hasty, deep prayer lasted more than two days, and on Wednesday the prayer became A bunch of pleadings to the Lord and advice to real life, such as don’t let the red ants eat into the house, don’t put out the ever-burning lamp in front of the portrait of Remedios, be careful not to let the Buendia family follow Marry people of blood, because that will produce offspring with pigtails and so on.Aureliano Segundo tried to take advantage of her talking in her dreams to get her to tell her where the gold was buried, but again his entreaties failed. "As long as the owner of the gold comes," said Úrsula, "the Lord will shine the gold so that the owner can find it." Santa Sofía de la Peda believed that she would die at any moment, because in those days she discovered that nature There are some abnormalities: roses smell of thistles; she accidentally dropped a gourd, but the lentils and millet in the gourd were arranged in a regular geometric pattern on the ground, all in the shape of starfish; one night, she saw Fly over a row of shining gold discs. She died early on Holy Thursday morning.The last time her age was calculated, back in the days of the Banana Company, they estimated her to be between one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and twenty. They buried her in a coffin not much larger than the little basket in which Aureliano had been lying in it when he arrived.Few people attended the funeral, one of the reasons is that there are not many people who remember her, and the second is because the weather was so hot at noon that day that even the birds were roasted dizzy, and flocks of blackbirds smashed to death on the wall like shotguns , Some even smashed through the iron screens, rushed into the bedroom and died. At first, people thought it was a plague.The housewives worked tirelessly to clean up the dead birds, especially at noon, while the men transported them in carts and dumped them in the river.On Easter Sunday, the centenarian Father Antonio Isabel said from the pulpit that the bird's death was due to the Jewish tramp whom he had seen the night before.It was, he found, a hybrid of a ram and a heathen woman, a hideous monster that scorched the air with one breath and impregnated newly married women.Not many people paid attention to his apocalyptic nonsense, because the whole town was convinced that the parish priest was too old to talk nonsense.But early Wednesday morning, a woman woke everyone up when she discovered the deep toe prints of a biped. This was so certain and so obvious that no one who looked at the toe-prints could doubt the existence of the horrible monster described by the priest.So they teamed up and set traps in their own yard, and finally caught it.Two weeks after Úrsula's death, Petra Cote and Aureliano Segundo woke up startled when they heard the whimpering of a huge calf from a neighbor's house.When they got up, a group of men were already pulling sharpened stakes from the monster.This is what they inserted into the trap in advance, and the mouth of the trap was covered with dead leaves. The monster didn't howl anymore, it was only as big as a lad, but as heavy as a cow, and sticky green blood was still flowing from the wound.There are dense numbers of small lice growing on the rough hair, and a layer of hard skin like crucian carp has formed on the skin.However, unlike the description of the priest, it is better to say that it looks like a delicate angel than a human.Its hands are smooth and dexterous, its eyes are big and blindfolded, and on its shoulder blades are the remnants of a pair of powerful wings, which have been scarred and covered with old fleas, probably cut off by a farmer's axe.It was bound by the ankles and hung upside down from an almond tree in the square so that all could see it.When he started to rot, a fire was set up to cremate him.Because it was a hybrid, it was not certain whether it was thrown into the river as an animal or buried in the ground as a Christian.Whether or not he caused the bird's death has never been clarified, but the newlyweds were not impregnated, and the heat did not abate after its death. At the end of that year, Rebeca died.Her lifelong maid, Agenida, begged the authorities to open the door of the bedroom, where the mistress had locked herself in three days before, and Rebeca was seen lying alone in bed, curled up like a shrimp, with a long hair on her head. Ringworm and bald, thumb still in mouth.Aureliano Segundo took care of her funeral.Then he planned to fix up the house and sell it.But the house was in a state of dilapidation, the walls peeling off in great chunks from the moment it was painted, and there was no sticky mortar that could stop the wild wheat from breaking through the ground and the ivy from eating away at the pillars. It's been that way since the rain.The indolence of the people is contrasted with the greed of forgetfulness, and the memory of the past is gradually eroded, and finally reached the point where, on the anniversary of the signing of the Nierand agreement, some envoys sent by the president of the republic came to Malawi. Gondo, to deliver the medal that Colonel Aureliano Buendía has repeatedly rejected.But they spent the afternoon in vain finding no one who could tell them where the descendants of Colonel Aureliano Buendía lived.Aureliano Segundo, thinking that the medal was a solid gold nugget, wanted to claim it, but Petra Cote dissuaded him, telling him not to make a fool of himself, while the envoys had posted the notice and prepared the commemorative assembly speech.It was also at that time that the gypsies came again.They are the last successors of the science of Melquíades.Seeing that the town was run down and its inhabitants utterly isolated from the rest of the world, they resumed lugging magnets from house to house as if they were the latest creation of Babylonian scholars, and gathering sunlight with gigantic magnifying glasses.There are still many people in the town who are stunned to see the pot and kettle rolling on the ground, and those who are willing to pay fifty cents to watch a gypsy girl put on and take off her false teeth. Of the train that once hung Mr. Brown's carriages with glass roofs and bishop chairs, and those fruit trains with 120 carriages that took an afternoon to run, there is only one train left now. It is a broken yellow car, and because there are no passengers, it hardly stops at this desolate station.When the forensic team came down to investigate the strange mass death of birds and the tragic death of Jewish homeless men, they saw Father Antonio Isabel playing blindfolded with a group of children.They believed that the priest's report was just a product of the old man's hallucinations, so they sent him to a nursing home.Soon, another priest named Augusto Angel was sent, a biracial who had just graduated from the seminary.He was harsh, bold, and reckless, and struck the clock himself several times a day to keep the elves from falling asleep.He also went from door to door to wake up those who were sleepy and urge them to attend Mass.And yet he did so for less than a year, with the smell of carelessness in the air, the hot dust that ages and hinders everything, and the slumber that makes one drowsy in the unbearable heat of the afternoon. , The meatballs he ate at lunch finally broke him down too. After Úrsula's death, the house fell into a state of decay which not even the strong-willed and energetic Amaranta Úrsula could save.After many years, when she was already an unscrupulous, cheerful and fashionable woman who stepped into society, she still opened the doors and windows wide, drove away the stale smell, trimmed the garden, and killed the daytime creeping into the corridor. The red ants come, and try in vain to call forth the forgotten spirit of hospitality.Fernanda's penchant for living in seclusion was an insurmountable obstacle to Úrsula's one hundred years of dominance.During the time of eating hot air, she not only refused to open the door of the house, but even the windows were nailed to death with cross-cut wooden lattices.Her correspondence with the invisible doctors was costly and failed.After several delays, once she locked herself in the room at the agreed date and time, wrapped only in a white sheet, lying there head to toe.At one o'clock in the night, she felt that someone had covered her face with a handkerchief soaked in cold liquid.When she awoke, the sun was already lighting up the windows, and she had a long, arched scar running from the heel of her leg to her chest.However, before she could rest for the scheduled day, she received a confusingly worded letter from the invisible doctors.The letter said they had spent six hours examining and found no paralysis related to the symptoms she had repeatedly described in detail.It was, in fact, the new confusion created by her malady of not calling things by their names, for the telepathic surgeons found only a prolapsed uterus, which could be reset with a pessary.Disappointed, Fernanda wanted to know more, but the unknown letters never returned.A word she didn't know made her feel uncomfortable, so she decided to find out what a pessary is, regardless of shame.Only then did she know that the French doctor had hanged himself three months earlier and that an old comrade in arms of Colonel Aureliano Buendía had buried him against the wishes of the whole town.So she told all about it to her son, José Arcadio, who sent her the pessary from Rome, along with an instruction sheet.After she memorized the contents, she threw the manual into the toilet so that no one would know about her illness.In fact, it was unnecessary caution, because the few people who stayed at home didn't pay attention to her at all.Santa Sofía de la Peda lived alone in her old age, cooking a little food for everyone every day and devoting almost all her energies to the care of José Arcadio Segundo.Amaranta Úrsula looked a little like Remedios the Beauty.The time she had wasted playing tricks on Úrsula was now being spent doing schoolwork.The intelligence and diligence she had begun to show in her studies revived in Aureliano Segundo the hope that Meme had brought him.He promised to send her to Brussels for further studies, as was the custom in the days of the banana company. This hope gave him the idea of ​​revisiting the lands that had been washed away by the heavy rains and left barren.He came home occasionally only to see Amaranta Úrsula.Over time, Fernanda also regarded him as an outsider.As Aureliano Jr. grew into a young man, he became more and more withdrawn and brooding all day long.Aureliano Segundo believed that old age would soften Fernanda's heart and make her agree to let the child participate in the life of the whole town, so that no one in the town would doubt the origin of little Aureliano anymore. up.However, Aureliano himself loved the solitary life of staying at home, and he had no evil thoughts about knowing the world outside the gate. When Úrsula opened the door of Melquíades' room, he was walking outside and peeping in through the gap in the door.No one knew when he and José Arcadio Segundo got together and were on good terms.After a long time, Aureliano Segundo discovered their friendship when he heard the boy talk about the massacre at the station.One day, someone said at the dinner table that since the banana company left, the town has declined.Aureliano demurred, telling the story in such a manner as if he were a grown-up man.His point of view is different from that of ordinary people. He said that Macondo was picked, corrupted and squeezed dry by the banana company. Before that, it was a prosperous and prosperous place.The heavy rain was also created by the engineers of the banana company to find excuses to avoid fulfilling their promises to the workers.He spoke so well that it seemed to Fernanda that it was a sacrilegious satire imitating the teachings of Jesus to the saints.Using conclusive and convincing facts, the child described how the army surrounded more than 3,000 workers at the station and shot them with machine guns, and how they loaded the corpses into a train with 200 carriages and threw them into the sea.Fernanda, who, like most people, believes in whatever official announcements come out, was shocked by what the child had said, which he felt he had inherited from Colonel Aureliano Buendía. nature, so ordered him to shut up.Aureliano Segundo, on the other hand, recognized the words from his twin brother.Although everyone thought José Arcadio Segundo was crazy, in reality he was the most sober member of the family at the time.He taught Aureliano to read and write, and inspired him to study parchments.As far as the significance of the banana company to Macondo was concerned, he instilled in Aureliano an extremely subjective view, so that when Aureliano set foot in society a few years later, he felt that it was an illusion, because The erroneous view that historians have adopted and written into school textbooks is the exact opposite of his.In that secluded cabin, sheltered from hot wind, dust, and heat, the two of them recalled an atavistic scene: an old man in a raven-wing hat, many years before they were born. , talking about what happened in the world with his back to the window.They also discovered that it was always March and it was always Monday at the same time, so they understood that José Arcadio Buendia was not as crazy as his family said, on the contrary, only he was sober enough. The mind sees the fact that time can slip, that it can malfunction, that it can be torn to pieces, leaving an eternal crumb in a room.José Arcadio Segundo was already able to sort the ciphered letters of the parchment.He was sure that they belonged to an alphabet of forty-seven to fifty-three letters, which, when taken apart, looked like little spiders or lice, while the Sanskrit written by Melquíades looked like Pieces of clothing on wire.Aureliano remembered a similar alphabet in the Encyclopedia Britannica.So he moved the encyclopedia into the hut and compared it with José Arcadio Segundo, and the result was exactly the same. When he was still thinking of the idea of ​​the riddle lottery, Aureliano Segundo woke up one morning with a knot in his throat, like wanting to cry but trying to hold back.Petra. Kurt thought it was a physical disorder caused by a poor family. For more than a year, she insisted on rubbing his palate with a swab dipped in honey every morning, and also gave him radish decoction.When the knot in his throat made it difficult for him to breathe, Aureliano Segundo went to Pilar Ternera, thinking that she might know some herbs that would relieve the pain.This tough old woman, already a hundred years old, still runs an underground brothel. She doesn't believe in the superstition of healing, but she believes in divination with cards.She saw a horse of Jinyuanhua with its throat stabbed by the sword of Jianhua's servant. She speculated that Fernanda used the cruel method of acupuncture in the portrait to get him home, but because of her clumsiness, he There is a dark tumor.Aureliano Segundo had no photographs except the wedding one, and all the printed photographs were in the family album.While his wife was not paying attention, he searched around the house, and found half a dozen pessary in the box intact under the closet.He thought the red rubber bands were for witchcraft, and he kept one in his pocket to show Pilar Ternera.She didn't know what it was, but felt very suspicious, so she asked him to fetch half a dozen of them, and lit a fire in the yard and burned them.In order to break Fernanda's sorcery, she had Aureliano Segundo soak a laying hen in water and bury him alive under a chestnut tree.He worked so earnestly that when he sprinkled dry leaves on the loose soil, he immediately felt much easier to breathe.菲南达发现子宫托不见了，还以为是隐身医生们的报复，于是她在背心的夹里上缝了一只卷边袋，把她儿子新寄来的子宫托藏在里面。 活埋母鸡六个月之后的一天深夜，奥雷良诺第二被一阵咳嗽咳醒了，喉咙里感到被蟹螯钳住了，这时他才明白，无论他毁掉多少施魔法的子宫托，也无论他弄湿多少辟邪的母鸡，摆在面前唯一的可悲事实就是他要死了。他谁也没有告诉，使他感到痛苦的是，他担心在去世以前不能把阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉送到布鲁塞尔去。他拚命地工作，每星期不是抽一次彩而是抽三次。大清早就看到他到镇子里去转了，甚至到那些最偏僻、最贫穷的居民区去兜售彩票。那副焦急的样子，只有在垂死者的身上才能看到。“这里是神圣的上帝！”他高声叫着，“别错过机会了，一百年才来一次呀！”为了装出高兴、和蔼和健谈的样子，他作出了惊人的努力，但是只要看一下他汗流浃背、脸色苍白的模样，就可以知道他已经力不从心。有时他溜到荒芜的田野上，那里谁也见不到他，他可以坐下来歇一会儿，缓解一下那蟹螯给他带来的撕肝裂肺的苦痛。午夜时分，他逐在烟花巷里，用时来运转的说教安慰那些在留声机旁啜泣的单身女人。“这个号码四个月没有出现过，”说着，他拿出彩票给她们看，“别坐失良机，要知道生命比想象的还要短暂。”到头来大家都不再尊敬他，拿他开玩笑。最后几个月里，人们不再象过去那样称他为堂奥雷良诺，而是当面叫他堂神圣的上帝。他的声音里充满了假声，说话常常走调，最后声音嘶哑，讲话象狗叫，可他还是顽强地支撑着，不使佩特拉·科特院子里的彩票生意萧条。但是，随着失音逐渐加剧，他感到自己不久就会无法忍受病痛，他逐渐明白，靠猪羊彩票是不可能把女儿送到布鲁塞尔去的；于是他想利用被大雨冲毁了的土地——只要有资金就能把它修复——来做巨额彩票生意。这项建议十分引入注目，镇长亲自出告示宣布，人们纷纷合伙购买面额为一百比索的彩票，不到一个星期，彩票销售一空。开票抽彩的那一晚，中奖者举行了一次盛大的庆祝会，只有香蕉公司的鼎盛时期才能与之相媲美。奥雷良诺第二最后一次拉起了手风琴演奏好汉弗朗西斯科的被人遗忘了的歌曲，可是他已经不能唱了。 两个月以后，阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉夫布鲁塞尔了。奥雷良诺第二不仅给了她用巨额彩票挣得的钱，还把前儿个月省下来的钱和卖掉自动钢琴、击弦钢琴和其他破旧杂物的钱一并交给了她。按他的计算，这笔钱供地上学已经足够，只是回家的旅费尚无着落。菲南达直到最后一刻还在反对阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉出国学习，她一想到布鲁塞尔离堕落的巴黎那么近就放心不下，但是安赫尔神父的一封信使她平静了下来，他让阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉带着信去找一家基督教女青年公寓，那是有修女照管，阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉答应在那里住到学习结束。此外，神父还设法让一批方济各会的修女在旅途中照料她，她们是去托雷多的，到了那里另有人送她去比利时。在通过频繁的信札来往协调接送事宜的那些日子，佩特拉·科特帮助奥雷良诺第二一起为阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉准备行装。一天晚上，他们正要整理菲南达的一只结婚用的箱子，发现东西已经放得整整齐齐，而阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉早就记住哪里是横渡大西洋时穿的衣服和灯芯绒拖鞋，还知道缀铜扣的蓝呢大衣和羊毛皮鞋是上岸时穿的，知道从码头到船上怎样走路才不会掉在水里，知道在任何时侯都不要离开修女们，而且除非吃饭不要走出船舱，知道在远洋中，素不相识的人——不管是男是女——提的问题都不要回答。她带着一瓶预防晕船的药水，还有一本由安赫尔神父亲自抄写的笔记本，上面有六句抵御风暴的祷告词。菲南达为她缝了一条藏钱用的帆布腰带，还教会了她如何束在身上使用，即使睡觉时也不必解下来。菲南边还想送她一只用碱水洗净又用酒精消毒过的金便壶，但阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉怕她学校里的女同学们笑话，不肯收下。几个月以后，在临终的时刻，奥雷良诺第二将会记起最后一次见到阿玛兰塔·乌苏拉时的情景。当时她想把二等车厢沾满灰尘的玻璃窗放下来，想听听菲南达最后的嘱咐，但没有成功。她穿着粉红色的丝长裙，左肩还缀上了一束人造三色堇，脚蹬低跟羊皮鞋，鞋面上系着饰带，还穿了一双半统的丝袜。她体态娇小，披着长发，一双活泼的眼睛跟乌苏拉小时候一模一样。她告别时不哭也不笑的那副神态，显示了与乌苏拉相同的性格。火车越开越快，奥雷良诺第二在火车边上跟着奔跑起来，他手臂上挎着菲南达，怕她跌倒。当女儿用指尖给他一个飞吻时，他只能招招手表示回答。夫妻俩在烈日下呆呆地站着，看着火车在地平线上变成了一个小黑点。从结婚以来，他俩第一次手挽手站在一起。 八月九日，在收到从布鲁塞尔寄来的第一封信之前，霍塞·阿卡迪奥第二在墨尔基阿德斯房间里同奥雷良诺聊天，突然没头没脑地说： “要永远记住，有三千多人，他们把尸体扔到了海里。” 说完，猛然扑倒在羊皮书上，睁着双眼死去了。与此同时，他的孪生兄弟遭受了长时期铁蟹啃喉咙的可怕的磨难，躺在菲南达的床上咽了气。他是一星期前回家的，回来时差不多已经皮包骨头，没有声音、没有气息，带着他那几只游牧人的箱子和浪人的手风琴，来履行死在妻子身边的诺言。佩特拉·科特帮他收拾衣物，她没掉一滴眼泪就把他送走了，可是忘了给他带走那双他想穿着进棺材的漆皮靴子。所以，当她知道他已经死了时，便穿起了一身黑色丧服，用一张报纸包了靴子，去请求菲南达让她看一下遗体，但菲南达没让她进门。 “您设身处地想一想，”佩特拉·科特哀求说，“我多么想见见他，郡样我受这些侮辱也心甘了。” “当人家的姘头还能不受侮辱！”菲南达抢白道，“等你那些姘头里再死掉一个，你去给他穿这双鞋吧！” 圣塔索菲娅·德·拉·佩达为了履行自己的诺言，用厨房的菜刀割下了霍塞·阿卡迪奥第二的脑袋，以保证不至于把他活埋。两具尸体安放在两只一模一样的棺材中，他俩看起来又象年轻时那样，变成了同一个人。奥雷良诺第二当初寻欢作乐时的老朋友们，在他的棺材上放了一只花圈，紫色的挽带上写着：“别生了，母牛啊！生命是短促的。”菲南达对他们的不恭行径大发雷霆，让人把花圈扔进了垃圾堆。 在最后一刻的慌乱中，那些抬棺材的可怜的醉鬼，把两口棺材搞混了，结果埋错了坟墓。