She realized that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had not
lost his love for the family because he had been hardened by the war, as she
had thought before, but that he had never loved anyone, not even his wife
Remedios or the countless one-night women who had passed through his life, and
much less his sons. She sensed that he had fought so many wars not out of
idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory
because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the
same reason, pure and sinful pride. She reached the conclusion that the son for
whom she would have given her life was simply a man incapable of love. One
night when she was carrying him in her belly she heard him weeping. It was such
a definite lament that José Arcadio Buendía woke up beside her and was happy
with the idea that his son was going to be a ventriloquist. Other people
predicted that he would be a prophet. She, on the other hand, shuddered from
the certainty that the deep moan was a first indication of the fearful pig tail
and she begged God to let the child die in her womb. But the lucidity of her
old age allowed her to see, and she said so many times, that the cries of
children in their mothers’ wombs are not announcements of ventriloquism or a
faculty for prophecy but an unmistakable sign of an incapacity for love. The
lowering of the image of her son brought out in her all at once all the compassion
that she owed him.
Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened
her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to
her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and
she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted
Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had
thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of
Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as
everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between
a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear
that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the
end. It was during that time that Úrsula, began to speak Rebeca’s name,
bringing back the memory of her with an old love that was exalted by tardy
repentance and a sudden admiration, coming to understand that only she, Rebeca,
the one who had never fed of her milk but only of the earth of the land and the
whiteness of the walls, the one who did not carry the blood of her veins in hers
but the unknown blood of the strangers whose bones were still clocing in
their grave. Rebeca, the one with an impatient heart, the one with a fierce
womb, was the only one who bad the unbridled courage that Úrsula had wanted for
her line.