SITTNG IN THE WICKER ROCKING chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano, José , his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave. His blackheads bled and he cut his upper lip as he tried to shape a mustache of blond fuzz and when it was all over he looked the same as before, but the laborious process gave Amaranta the feeling that she had begun to grow old at that moment.
"You look just like Aureliano when he was your age," she said. "You're a man now."
He had been for a long time, ever since that distant day when Amaranta thought he was still a child and continued getting undressed in front of him in the bathroom as she had always done, as she had been used to doing ever since Pilar Ternera had turned him over to her to finish his upbringing. The first time that he saw her the only thing that drew his attention was the deep depression between her breasts. He was so innocent that he asked her what had happened to her and Amaranta pretended to dig into her breasts with the tips of her fingers and answered: "They gave me some terrible cuts." Some time later, when she had recovered from Pietro Crespi's suicide and would bathe with Aureliano José again, he no longer paid attention to the depression but felt a strange trembling at the sight of the splendid breasts with their brown nipples. He kept on examining her, discovering the miracle of her intimacy inch by inch, and he felt his skin tingle as he contemplated the way her skin tingled when it touched the water. Ever since he was a small child he had the custom of leaving his hammock and waking up in Amaranta's bed, because contact with her was a way of overcoming his fear of the dark. But since that day when he became aware of his own nakedness, it was not fear of the dark that drove him to crawl in under her mosquito netting but an urge to feel Amaranta's warm breathing at dawn. Early one morning during the time when she refused Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, Aureli-ano José awoke with the feeling that he could not breathe. He felt Amaranta's fingers searching across his stomach like warm and anxious little caterpillars. Pretending to sleep, he changed his position to make it easier, and then he felt the hand without the black bandage diving like a blind shellfish into the algae of his anxiety. Although they seemed to ignore what both of them knew and what each one knew that the other knew, from that night on they were yoked together in an inviolable complicity. Aureli-ano José could not get to sleep until he heard the twelve-o'clock waltz on the parlor dock, and the mature maiden whose skin was beginning to grow sad did not have a moments' rest until she felt slip in under her mosquito netting that sleepwalker whom she had raised, not thinking that he would be a palliative for her solitude. Later they not only slept together, naked, exchanging exhausting caresses, but they would also chase each other into the corners of the house and shut themselves up in the bedrooms at any hour of the day in a permanent state of unrelieved excitement. They were almost discovered by úrsula one afternoon when she went into the granary as they were starting to kiss. "Do you love your aunt a lot?" she asked Aureli-ano José in an innocent way. He answered that he did. "That's good of you," úrsula concluded and finished measuring the flour for the bread and returned to the kitchen. That episode drew Amaranta out of her delirium. She realized that she had gone too far, that she was no longer playing kissing games with a child, but was floundering about in an autumnal passion, one that was dangerous and had no future, and she cut it off with one stroke. Aureli-ano José, who was then finishing his military training, finally woke up to reality and went to sleep in the barracks. On Saturdays he would go with the soldiers to Catarino's store. He was seeking consolation for his abrupt solitude, for his premature adolescence with women who smelled of dead flowers, whom he idealized in the darkness and changed into Amaranta by means of the anxious efforts of his imagination.
A short time later contradictory news of the war began to come in. While the government itself admitted the progress of the rebellion, the officers in Macondo had confidential reports of the imminence of a negotiated peace. Toward the first of April a special emissary identified himself to Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. He confirmed the fact to him that the leaders of the party had indeed established contact with the rebel leaders in the interior and were on the verge of arranging an armistice in exchange for three cabinet posts for the Liberals, a minority representation in the congress, and a general amnesty for rebels who laid down their arms. The emissary brought a highly confidential order from Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía, who was not in agreement with the terms of the armistice. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was to choose five of his best men and prepare to leave the country with them. The order would be carried out with the strictest secrecy. One week before the agreement was announced, and in the midst of a storm of contradictory rumors, Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía and ten trusted officers, among them Colonel Roque Carnicero, stealthily arrived in Macondo after midnight, dismissed the garrison, buried their weapons, and destroyed their records. By dawn they had left town, along with Colonel Gerineldo Márquez and his five officers. It was such a quick and secret operation that úrsula did not find out about it until the last moment, when someone tapped on her bedroom window and whispered, "If you want to see Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía, come to the door right now." úrsula Jumped out of bed and went to the door in her night-gown and she was just able to see the horsemen who were leaving town gallop off in a mute cloud of dust. Only on the following day did she discover that Aureli-ano José had gone with his father.
Ten days after a joint communiqué by the government and the opposition announced the end of the war, there was news of the first armed uprising of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía on the western border. His small and poorly armed force was scattered in less than a week. But during that year, while Liberals and Conservatives tried to make the country believe in reconciliation, he attempted seven other revolts. One night he bombarded Riohacha from a schooner and the garrison dragged out of bed and shot the fourteen best-known Liberals in the town as a reprisal. For more than two weeks he held a customs post on the border and from there sent the nation a call to general war. Another of his expectations was lost for three months in the jungle in a mad attempt to cross more than a thousand miles of virgin territory in order to proclaim war on the outskirts of the capital. On one occasion he was lea than fifteen miles away from Macondo and was obliged by government patrols to hide in the mountains, very close to the enchanted region where his father had found the fossil of a Spanish galleon many years before.
Visitación died around that time. She had the pleasure of dying a natural death after having renounced a throne out of fear of insomnia, and her last wish was that they should dig up the wages she had saved for more than twenty years under her bed and send the money to Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía so that he could go on with the war. But úrsula did not bother to dig it up because it was rumored in those days that Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía had been killed in a landing near the provincial capital. The official announcement-the fourth in less than two years-was considered true for almost six months because nothing further was heard of him. Suddenly, when úrsula and Amaranta had added new mourning to the past period, unexpected news arrived. Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía was alive, but apparently he had stopped harassing the government of his country and had joined with the victorious federalism of other republics of the Caribbean. He would show up under different names farther and farther away from his own country. Later it would be learned that the idea that was working on him at the time was the unification of the federalist forms of Central America in order to wipe out conservative regimes from Alaska to Patagonia. The first direct news that úrsula received from him, several years after his departure, was a wrinkled and faded letter that had arrived, passing through various hands, from Santiago, Cuba.
"We've lost him forever," úrsula exclaimed on reading it. "If he follows this path he'll spend Christmas at the ends of the earth."