During the pauses in their delirium, Amaranta Úrsula would answer Gaston’s letters. She felt him to be so far away and busy that his return seemed impossible to her. In one of his first letters he told her that his Partners had actually sent the airplane, but that a shipping agent in Brussels had sent it by mistake to Tanganyika, where it was delivered to the scattered tribe of the Makondos. That mix-up brought on so many difficulties that just to get the plane back might take two years. So Amaranta Úrsula dismissed the possibility of an inopportune return. Aureliano, for his part, had no other contact with the world except for the letters from the wise Catalonian and the news he had of Gabriel through Mercedes, the silent pharmacist. At first they were real contacts. Gabriel had turned in his return ticket in order to stay in Paris, selling the old newspapers and empty bottles that the chambermaids threw out of a gloomy hotel on the Rue Dauphine. Aureliano could visualize him then in a turtleneck sweater which he took off only when the sidewalk Cafés on Montparnasse filled with springtime lovers, and sleeping by day and writing by night in order to confuse hunger in the room that smelled of boiled cauliflower where Rocamadour was to die. Nevertheless, news about him was slowly becoming so uncertain, and the letters from the wise man so sporadic and melancholy, that Aureliano grew to think about them as Amaranta Úrsula thought about her husband, and both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.
Suddenly, like the stampede in that world of happy unawareness, came the news of Gaston’s return. Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula opened their eyes, dug deep into their souls, looked at the letter with their hands on their hearts, and understood that they were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation. Then she wrote her husband a letter of contradictory truths in which she repeated her love and said how anxious she was to see him again, but at the same time she admitted as a design of fate the impossibility of living without Aureliano. Contrary to what they had expected, Gaston sent them a calm, almost paternal reply, with two whole pages devoted to a warning against the fickleness of passion and a final paragraph with unmistakable wishes for them to be as happy as he had been during his brief conjugal experience. It was such an unforeseen attitude that Amaranta Úrsula felt humiliated by the idea that she had given her husband the pretext that he had wanted in order to abandon her to her fate. The rancor was aggravated six months later when Gaston wrote again from Léopoldville, where he had finally recovered the airplane, simply to ask them to ship him the velocipede, which of all that he had left behind in Macondo was the only thing that had any sentimental value for him. Aureliano bore Amaranta Úrsula’s spite patiently and made an effort to show her that he could be as good a husband in adversity as in prosperity, and the daily needs that besieged them when Gaston’s last money ran out created a bond of solidarity between them that was not as dazzling and heady as passion, but that let them make love as much and be as happy as during their uproarious and salacious days. At the time Pilar Ternera died they were expecting a child.
In the lethargy of her pregnancy, Amaranta Úrsula tried to set up a business in necklaces made out of the backbones of fish. But except for Mercedes, who bought a dozen, she could not find any customers. Aureliano was aware for the first time that his gift for languages, his encyclopedic knowledge, his rare faculty for remembering the details of remote deeds and places without having been there, were as useless as the box of genuine jewelry that his wife owned, which must have been worth as much as all the money that the last inhabitants of Macondo could have put together. They survived miraculously. Although Amaranta Úrsula did not lose her good humor or her genius for erotic mischief, she acquired the habit of sitting on the porch after lunch in a kind of wakeful and thoughtful siesta. Aureliano would accompany her. Sometimes they would remain there in silence until nightfall, opposite each other, looking into each other’s eyes, loving each other as much as in their scandalous days. The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Úrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory. Going deeper into the past, Amaranta Úrsula remembered the afternoon on which she had gone into the silver shop and her mother told her that little Aureliano was nobody’s child because he had been found floating in a basket. Although the version seemed unlikely to them, they did not have any information enabling them to replace it with the true one. All that they were sure of after examining an the possibilities was that Fernanda was not Aureliano’s mother. Amaranta Úrsula was inclined to believe that he was the son of Petra Cotes, of whom she remembered only tales of infamy, and that supposition produced a twinge of horror in her heart.
Tormented by the certainty that he was his wife’s brother, Aureliano ran out to the parish house to search through the moldy and moth-eaten archives for some clue to his parentage. The oldest baptismal certificate that he found was that of Amaranta Buendía, baptized in adolescence by Father Nicanor Reyna during the time when he was trying to prove the existence of God by means of tricks with chocolate. He began to have that feeling that he was one of the seventeen Aurelianos, whose birth certificates he tracked down as he went through four volumes, but the baptism dates were too far back for his age. Seeing him lost in the labyrinths of kinship, trembling with uncertainty, the arthritic priest, who was watching him from his hammock, asked him compassionately what his name was.
“Aureliano Buendía,” he said.
“Then don’t wear yourself out searching,” the priest exclaimed with final conviction. “Many years ago there used to be a street here with that name and in those days people had the custom of naming their children after streets.”
Aureliano trembled with rage.
“So!” he said. “You don’t believe it either.”
“Believe what?”
“That Colonel Aureliano, Buendía fought thirty-two civil wars and lost them all,” Aureliano answered. “That the army hemmed in and machine-gunned three thousand workers and that their bodies were carried off to be thrown into the sea on a train with two hundred cars.”
The priest measured him with a pitying look.
“Oh, my son,” he signed. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
So Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula accepted the version of the basket, not because they believed it, but because it spared them their terror. As the pregnancy advanced they were becoming a single being, they were becoming more and more integrated in the solitude of a house that needed only one last breath to be knocked down. They restricted themselves to an essential area, from Fernanda’s bedroom, where the charms of sedentary love were visible, to the beginning of the porch, where Amaranta Úrsula would sit to sew bootees and bonnets for the newborn baby and Aureliano, would answer the occasional letters from the wise Catalonian. The rest of the house was given over to the tenacious assault of destruction. The silver shop, Melquíades’ room, the primitive and silent realm of Santa Sofía de la Piedad remained in the depths of a domestic jungle that no one would have had the courage to penetrate. Surrounded by the voracity of nature, Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula continued cultivating the oregano and the begonias and defended their world with demarcations of quicklime, building the last trenches in the age-old war between man and ant. Her long and neglected hair, the splotches that were beginning to appear on her face, the swelling of her legs, the deformation of her former lovemaking weasel’s body had changed Amaranta Úrsula from the youthful creature she had been when she arrived at the house with the cage of luckless canaries and her captive husband, but it did not change the vivacity of her spirit. “Shit,” she would say, laughingly. “Who would have thought that we really would end up living like cannibals!” The last thread that joined them to the world was broken on the sixth month of pregnancy when they received a letter that obviously was not from the wise Catalonian. It had been mailed in Barcelona, but the envelope was addressed in conventional blue ink by an official hand and it had the innocent and impersonal look of hostile messages. Aureliano snatched it out of Amaranta Úrsula’s hands as she was about to open it.