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.
“Hello, cannibal,” she said to him. “Back in your cave
again?” She was irresistible, with a dress she had designed and one of the long
shad-vertebra necklaces that she herself had made. She had stopped using the
leash, convinced of her husband’s faithfulness, and for the first time since
her return she seemed to have a moment of ease. Aureliano did not need to see
her to know that she had arrived. She put her elbows on the table, so close and
so helpless that Aureliano heard the deep sound of her bones, and she became
interested in the parchments. Trying to overcome his disturbance, he grasped at
the voice that he was losing, the life that was leaving him, the memory that
was turning into a petrified polyp, and he spoke to her about the priestly
destiny of Sanskrit, the scientific possibility of seeing the future showing
through in time as one sees what is written on the back of a sheet of paper
through the light, the necessity of deciphering the predictions so that they
would not defeat themselves, and the Centuries of Nostradamus and the
destruction of Cantabria predicted by Saint Milanus. Suddenly, without
interrupting the chat, moved by an impulse that had been sleeping in him since
his origins, Aureliano put his hand on hers, thinking that that final decision
would put an end to his doubts. She grabbed his index finger with the
affectionate innocence with which she had done so in childhood, however, and
she held it while he kept on answering questions. They remained like that,
linked by icy index fingers that did not transmit anything in any way until she
awoke from her momentary dream and slapped her forehead with her hand. “The
ants!” she exclaimed.
