"MARQUES, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marques Gabriel Garcia)

Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera’s bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Josй had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, who was really the one destined to die that night, did indeed die, four hours before Aureliano Josй. As won as the shot was heard he was brought down by two simultaneous bullets whose origin was never established and a shout of many voices shook the night.
“Long live the Liberal party! Long live Colonel Aureliano Buendнa!”
At twelve o’clock, when Aureliano, Josй had bled to death and Carmelita Montiel found that the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the abandoned body of Captain Aquiles Ricardo. A patrol had to use a wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread.
Annoyed by the outrages of the regular army, General Josй Raquel Moncada used his political influence, put on his uniform again, and assumed the civil and military leadership of Macondo. He did not expect, however, that his conciliatory attitude would be able to prevent the inevitable. The news in September was contradictory. While the government announced that it was maintaining control throughout the country, the Liberals were receiving secret news of armed uprisings in the interior. The regime would not admit a state of war until it was proclaimed in a decree that had followed a court-martial which had condemned Colonel Aureliano Buendнa to death in absentia. The first unit that captured him was ordered to carry the sentence out. “This means he’s come back,” Ъrsula said joyfully to General Moncada. But he himself knew nothing about it.
Actually, Colonel Aureliano Buendнa had been in the country for more than a month. He was preceded by conflicting rumors, supposed to be in the most distant places at the same time, and even General Moncada did not believe in his return until it was officially announced that he had seized two states on the coast. “Congratulations, dear friend,” he told Ъrsula, showing her the telegram. “You’ll soon have him here.” Ъrsula was worried then for the first time. “And what will you do?” she asked. General Moncada had asked himself that same question many times.
“The same as he, my friend,” he answered. “I’ll do my duty.”
At dawn on the first of October Colonel Aureliano Buendнa attacked Macondo with a thousand well-armed men and the garrison received orders to resist to the end. At noon, while General Moncada was lunching with Ъrsula, a rebel cannon shot that echoed in the whole town blew the front of the municipal treasury to dust. “They’re as well armed as we are,” General Moncada sighed, “but besides that they’re fighting because they want to.” At two o’clock in the afternoon, while the earth trembled with the artillery fire from both sides, he took leave of Ъrsula with the certainty that he was fighting a losing battle.
“I pray to God that you won’t have Aureliano in the house tonight,” he said. “If it does happen that way, give him an embrace for me, because I don’t expect ever to see him again.”
That night he was captured when he tried to escape from Macondo, after writing a long letter to Colonel Aureliano Buendнa in which he reminded him of their common aim to humanize the war and he wished him a final victory over the corruption of the militarists and the ambitions of the politicians in both parties. On the following day Colonel Aureliano Buendнa had lunch with him in Ъrsula’s house, where he was being held until a revolutionary court-martial decided his fate. It was a friendly gathering. But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, Ъrsula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. She had felt it ever since she saw him come in protected by a noisy military retinue, which turned the bedrooms inside out until they were convinced there was no danger. Colonel Aureliano Buendнa not only accepted it but he gave strict orders that no one should come closer than ten feet, not even Ъrsula, while the members of his escort finished placing guards about the house. He was wearing an ordinary denim uniform with no insignia of any kind and high boots with spurs that were caked with mud and dried blood. On his waist he wore a holster with the flap open and his hand, which was always on the butt of the pistol, revealed the same watchful and resolute tension as his look. His head, with deep recessions in the hairline now, seemed to have been baked in a slow oven. His face, tanned by the salt of the Caribbean, had acquired a metallic hardness. He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia. “Good Lord,” Ъrsula said to herself. “Now he looks like a man capable of anything.” He was. The Aztec shawl that he brought Amaranta, the remembrances he spoke of at lunch, the funny stories her told were simple leftovers from his humor of a different time. As soon as the order to bury the dead in a common grave was carried out, he assigned Colonel Roque Carnicero the minion of setting up courts-martial and he went ahead with the exhausting task of imposing radical reforms which would not leave a stone of the reestablished Conservative regime in place. “We have to get ahead of the politicians in the party,” he said to his aides. “When they open their eyes to reality they’ll find accomplished facts.” It was then that he decided to review the titles to land that went back a hundred years and he discovered the legalized outrages of his brother, Josй Arcadio. He annulled the registrations with a stroke of the pen. As a last gesture of courtesy, he left his affairs for an hour and visited Rebeca to bring her up to date on what he was determined to do.
In the shadows of her house, the solitary widow who at one time had been the confidante of his repressed loves and whose persistence had saved his life was a specter out of the past. Encased in black down to her knuckles, with her heart turned to ash, she scarcely knew anything about the war. Colonel Aureliano Buendнa had the impression that the phosphorescence of her bones was showing through her skin and that she moved in an atmosphere of Saint Elmo’s fire, in a stagnant air where one could still note a hidden smell of gunpowder. He began by advising her to moderate the rigor of her mourning, to ventilate the house, to forgive the world for the death of Josй Arcadio. But Rebeca was already beyond any vanity. After searching for it uselessly in the taste of earth, in, the perfumed letters from Pietro Crespi, in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms, Leaning back in her wicker rocking chair, looking at Colonel Aureliano Buendнa as if he were the one who looked like a ghost out of the past, Rebeca was not even upset by the news that the lands usurped by Josй Arcadio would be returned to their rightful owners.
“Whatever you decide will be done, Aureliano,” she sighed. “I always thought and now I have the proof that you’re a renegade.”
The revision of the deeds took place at the same time as the summary courts-martial presided over by Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez, which ended with the execution of all officers of the regular army who had been taken prisoner by the revolutionaries. The last court-martial was that of Josй Raquel Moncada. Ъrsula intervened. ‘”His government was the best we’ve ever had in Macondo,” she told Colonel Aureliano Buendнa. “I don’t have to tell you anything about his good heart, about his affection for us, because you know better than anyone.” Colonel Aureliano Buendнa gave her a disapproving look.
“I can’t take over the job of administering justice,” he replied. “If you have something to say, tell it to the court-martial.”
Ъrsula not only did that she also brought all of the mothers of the revolutionary officers who lived in Macondo to testify. One by one the old women who had been founders of the town, several of whom had taken part in the daring crossing of the mountains, praised the virtues of General Moncada. Ъrsula was the last in line. Her gloomy dignity, the weight of her name, the convincing vehemence of her declaration made the scale of justice hesitate for a moment. “You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty,” she told the members of the court. “But don’t forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.” The court retired to deliberate as those words still echoed in the school that had been turned into a barracks. At midnight General Josй Raquel Moncada was sentenced to death. Colonel Aureliano Buendнa, in spite of the violent recriminations of Ъrsula, refused to commute the sentence. A short while before dawn he visited the condemned man in the room used as a cell.
“Remember, old friend,” he told him. “I’m not shooting you. It’s the revolution that’s shooting you.”
General Moncada did not even get up from the cot when he saw him come in.
“Go to hell, friend,” he answered.
Until that moment, ever since his return. Colonel Aureliano Buendнa had not given himself the opportunity to see him with his heart. He was startled to see how much he had aged, how his hands shook, and the rather punctilious conformity with which he awaited death, and then he felt a great disgust with himself, which he mingled with the beginnings of pity.
“You know better than I,” he said, “that all courts-martial are farces and that you’re really paying for the crimes of other people, because this time we’re going to win the war at any price. Wouldn’t you have done the same in my place?”
General Moncada, got up to clean his thick horn-rimmed glasses on his shirttail. “Probably,” he said. “But what worries me is not your shooting me, because after all, for people like us it’s a natural death.” He laid his glasses on the bed and took off his watch and chain. “What worries me,” he went on, “is that out of so much hatred for the military, out of fighting them so much and thinking about them so much, you’ve ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness.” He took off his wedding ring and the medal of the Virgin of Help and put them alongside his glasses and watch.
“At this rate,” he concluded, “you’ll not only be the most despotic and bloody dictator in our history, but you’ll shoot my dear friend Ъrsula in an attempt to pacify your conscience.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendнa stood there impassively. General Moncada then gave him the glasses, medal, watch, and ring and he changed his tone.
“But I didn’t send for you to scold you,” he said. “I wanted to ask you the favor of sending these things to my wife.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendнa put them in his pockets.
“Is she still in Manaure?”
“She’s still in Manaure,” General Moncada confirmed, “in the same house behind the church where you sent the letter.”
“I’ll be glad to, Josй Raquel,” Colonel Aureliano Buendнa said.
When he went out into the blue air of the mist his face grew damp as on some other dawn in the past and only then did he realize that -he had ordered the sentence to be carried out in the courtyard and not at the cemetery wall. The firing squad, drawn up opposite the door, paid him the honors of a head of state.
“They can bring him out now,” he ordered.

Chapter 9
COLONEL GERINELDO MБRQUEZ was the first to perceive the emptiness of the war. In his position as civil and military leader of Macondo he would have telegraphic conversations twice a week with Colonel Aureliano Buendнa. At first those exchanges would determine the course of a flesh-and-blood war, the perfectly defined outlines of which told them at any moment the exact spot -where it was and the prediction of its future direction. Although he never let himself be pulled into the area of confidences, not even by his closest friends, Colonel Aureliano Buendнa still had at that time the familiar tone that made it possible to identify him at the other end of the wire. Many times he would prolong the talk beyond the expected limit and let them drift into comments of a domestic nature. Little by little, however, and as the war became more intense and widespread, his image was fading away into a universe of unreality. The characteristics of his speech were more and more uncertain, and they cam together and combined to form words that were gradually losing all meaning. Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez limited himself then to just listening, burdened by the impression that he was in telegraphic contact with a stranger from another world.
“I understand, Aureliano,” he would conclude on the key. “Long live the Liberal party!”
He finally lost all contact with the war. What in other times had been a real activity, an irresistible passion of his youth, became a remote point of reference for him: an emptiness. His only refuge was Amaranta’s sewing room. He would visit her every afternoon. He liked to watch her hands as she curled frothy petticoat cloth in the machine that was kept in motion by Remedios the Beauty. They spent many hours without speaking, content with their reciprocal company, but while Amaranta was inwardly pleased in keeping the fire of his devotion alive, he was unaware of the secret designs of that indecipherable heart. When the news of his return reached her, Amaranta had been smothered by anxiety. But when she saw him enter the house in the middle of Colonel Aureliano Buendнa’s noisy escort and she saw how he had been mistreated by the rigors of exile, made old by age and oblivion, dirty with sweat and dust, smelling like a herd, ugly, with his left arm in a sling, she felt faint with disillusionment. “My God,” she thought. “This wasn’t the person I was waiting for.” On the following day, however, he came back to the house shaved and clean, with his mustache perfumed with lavender water and without the bloody sling. He brought her a prayerbook bound in mother-of-pearl.
“How strange men are,” she said, because she could not think of anything else to say. “They spend their lives fighting against priests and then give prayerbooks as gifts.”
From that time on, even during the most critical days of the war, he visited her every afternoon. Many times, when Remedios the Beauty was not present, it was he who turned the wheel on the sewing machine. Amaranta felt upset by the perseverance, the loyalty, the submissiveness of that man who was invested with so much authority and who nevertheless took off his sidearm in the living room so that he could go into the sewing room without weapons, But for four years he kept repeating his love and she would always find a way to reject him without hurting him, for even though she had not succeeded in loving him she could no longer live without him. Remedios the Beauty, who seemed indifferent to everything and who was thought to be mentally retarded, was not insensitive to so much devotion and she intervened in Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez’s favor. Amaranta suddenly discovered that the girl she had raised, who was just entering adolescence, was already the most beautiful creature that had even been seen in Macondo. She felt reborn in her heart the rancor that she had felt in other days for Rebeca, and begging God not to impel her into the extreme state of wishing her dead, she banished her from the sewing room. It was around that time that Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez began to feel the boredom of the war. He summoned his reserves of persuasion, his broad and repressed tenderness, ready to give up for Amaranta a glory that had cost him the sacrifice of his best years. But he could not succeed in convincing her. One August afternoon, overcome by the unbearable weight of her own obstinacy, Amaranta locked herself in her bedroom to weep over her solitude unto death after giving her final answer to her tenacious suitor:
“Let’s forget about each other forever,” she told him. “We’re too old for this sort of thing now.”
Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez had a telegraphic call from Colonel Aureliano Buendнa that afternoon. It was a routine conversation which was not going to bring about any break in the stagnant war. At the end, Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez looked at the desolate streets, the crystal water on the almond trees, and he found himself lost in solitude.
“Aureliano,” he said sadly on the key, “it’s raining in Macondo.”
There was a long silence on the line. Suddenly the apparatus jumped with the pitiless letters from Colonel Aureliano Buendнa.
“Don’t be a jackass, Gerineldo,” the signals said. “It’s natural for it to be raining in August.”
They had not seen each other for such a long time that Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez was upset by the aggressiveness of the reaction. Two months later, however, when Colonel Aureliano Buendнa returned to Macondo, his upset was changed to stupefaction. Even Ъrsula was surprised at how much he had changed. He came with no noise, no escort, wrapped in a cloak in spite of the heat, and with three mistresses, whom he installed in the same house, where he spent most of his time lying in a hammock. He scarcely read the telegraphic dispatches that reported routine operations. On one occasion Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez asked him for instructions for the evacuation of a spot on the border where there was a danger that the conflict would become an international affair.
“Don’t bother me with trifles,” he ordered him. “Consult Divine Providence.”
It was perhaps the most critical moment of the war. The Liberal landowners, who had supported the revolution in the beginning, had made secret alliances with the Conservative landowners in order to stop the revision of property titles. The politicians who supplied funds for the war from exile had Publicly repudiated the drastic aims of Colonel Aureliano Buendнa, but even that withdrawal of authorization did not seem to bother him. He had not returned to reading his poetry, which filled more than five volumes and lay forgotten at the bottom of his trunk. At night or at siesta time he would call one of his women to his hammock and obtain a rudimentary satisfaction from her, and then he would sleep like a stone that was not concerned by the slightest indication of worry. Only he knew at that time that his confused heart was condemned to uncertainty forever. At first, intoxicated by the glory of his return, by his remarkable victories, he had peeped into the abyss of greatness. He took pleasure in keeping by his right hand the Duke of Marlborough, his great teacher in the art of war, whose attire of skins and tiger claws aroused the respect of adults and the awe of children. It was then that he decided that no human being, not even Ъrsula, could come closer to him than ten feet. In the center of the chalk circle that his aides would draw wherever he stopped, and which only he could enter, he would decide with brief orders that had no appeal the fate of the world. The first time that he was in Manaure after the shooting of General Moncada, he hastened to fulfill his victim’s last wish and the widow took the glasses, the medal, the watch, and the ring, but she would not let him in the door.
“You can’t come in, colonel,” she told him. “You may be in command of your war, but I’m in command of my house.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendнa did not show any sign of anger, but his spirit only calmed down when his bodyguard had sacked the widow’s house and reduced it to ashes. “Watch out for your heart, Aureliano,” Colonel Gerineldo Mбrquez would say to him then. “You’re rotting alive.” About that time he called together a second assembly of the principal rebel commanders. He found all types: idealists, ambitious people, adventurers, those with social resentments, even common criminals. There was even a former Conservative functionary who had taken refuge in the revolt to escape a judgment for misappropriation of funds. Many of them did not even know why they were fighting in the midst of that motley crowd, whose differences of values were on the verge of causing an internal explosion, one gloomy authority stood out: General Te6filo Vargas. He was a full-blooded Indian, untamed, illiterate, and endowed with quiet wiles and a messianic vocation that aroused a demented fanaticism in his men. Colonel Aureliano Buendнa called the meeting with the aim of unifying the rebel command against the maneuvers of the politicians. General Teуfilo Vargas came forward with his intentions: in a few hours he shattered the coalition of better-qualified commanders and took charge of the main command. “He’s a wild beast worth watching,” Colonel Aureliano Buendнa told his officers. “That man is more dangerous to us than the Minister of War.” Then a very young captain who had always been outstanding for his timidity raised a cautious index finger.
“It’s quite simple, colonel,” he proposed. “He has to be killed.”
Colonel Aureliano Buendнa was not alarmed by the coldness of the proposition but by the way in which, by a fraction of a second, it had anticipated his own thoughts.
“Don’t expect me to give an order like that,” he said.
He did not give it, as a matter of fact. But two weeks later General Teуfilo Vargas was cut to bits by machetes in an ambush and Colonel Aureliano Buendнa assumed the main command. The same night that his authority was recognized by all the rebel commands, he woke up in a fright, calling for a blanket. An inner coldness which shattered his bones and tortured him even in the heat of the sun would not let him sleep for several months, until it became a habit. The intoxication of power began to break apart under waves of discomfort. Searching for a cure against the chill, he had the young officer who had proposed the murder of General Teуfilo Vargas shot. His orders were being carried out even before they were given, even before he thought of them, and they always went much beyond what he would have dared have them do. Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction. He was bothered by the people who cheered him in neighboring villages, and he imagined that they were the same cheers they gave the enemy. Everywhere he met adolescents who looked at him with his own eyes, who spoke to him with his own voice, who greeted him with the same mistrust with which he greeted them, and who said they were his sons. He felt scattered about, multiplied, and more solitary than ever. He was convinced that his own officers were lying to him. He fought with the Duke of Marlborough. “The best friend a person has,” he would say at that time, “is one who has just died.” He was weary of the uncertainty, of the vicious circle of that eternal war that always found him in the same place, but always older, wearier, even more in the position of not knowing why, or how, or even when. There was always someone outside of the chalk circle. Someone who needed money, someone who had a son with whooping cough, or someone who wanted to go off and sleep forever because he could not stand the shit taste of the war in his mouth and who, nevertheless, stood at attention to inform him: “Everything normal, colonel.” And normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened. Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories. His indolence was so serious that when they announced the arrival of a commission from his party that was authorized to discuss the stalemate of the war, he rolled over in his hammock without completely waking up.