So Aureliano was still a virgin when Amaranta
Úrsula returned to Macondo and gave him a sisterly embrace that left him
breathless. Every time he saw her, and worse yet when she showed him the latest
dances, he felt the same spongy release in his bones that had disturbed his
great-great-grandfather when Pilar Ternera made her pretexts about the cards in
the granary. Trying to squelch the torment, he sank deeper into the parchments and
eluded the innocent flattery of that aunt who was poisoning his nights with a
flow of tribulation, but the more he avoided her the more the anxiety with
which he waited for her stony laughter, her howls of a happy cat, and her songs
of gratitude, agonizing in love at all hours and in the most unlikely parts of
the house. (...)
Aureliano, whose world at that time began with Melquíades’
parchments and ended in Nigromanta’s bed, found a stupid cure for timidity in
the small imaginary brothel. At first he could get nowhere, in rooms where the
proprietress would enter during the best moments of love and make all sorts of
comments about the intimate charms of the protagonists. But with time he began
to get so familiar with those misfortunes of the world that on one night that
was more unbalanced than the others he got undressed in the small reception
room and ran through the house balancing a bottle of beer on his inconceivable
maleness. He was the one who made fashionable the extravagances that the proprietress
celebrated with her eternal smile, without protesting, without believing in
them just as when Germán tried to burn the house down to show that it did not
exist, and as when Alfonso wrung the neck of the parrot and threw it into the
pot where the chicken stew was beginning to boil.
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