The Tuesday of the armistice dawned warm and rainy. Colonel Aureliano Buendía appeared in the kitchen before five o’clock and had his usual black coffee without sugar. “You came into the world on a day like this,??rsula told him. “Everybody was amazed at your open eyes.?He did not pay any attention because he was listening to the forming of the troops, the sound of the comets, and the voices of command that were shattering the dawn. Even though after so many years of war they should have sounded familiar to him this time he felt the same weakness in his knees and the same tingling in his skin that he had felt in his youth in the presence of a naked woman. He thought confusedly, finally captive in a trap of nostalgia, that perhaps if he had married her he would have been a man without war and without glory, a nameless artisan, a happy animal. That tardy shudder which had not figured in his forethought made his breakfast bitter. At seven in the morning, when Colonel Gerineldo Márquez came to fetch him, in the company of a group of rebel officers, he found him more taciturn than ever, more pensive and solitary. ?rsula tried to throw a new wrap over his shoulders. “What will the government think,?she told him. “They’ll figure that you’ve surrendered because you didn’t have anything left to buy a cloak with.?But he would not accept it. When he was at the door, he let her put an old felt hat of Jos?Arcadio Buendía’s on his head.
“Aureliano,??rsula said to him then, “Promise me that if you find that it’s a bad hour for you there that you’ll think of your mother.?
He gave her a distant smile, raising his hand with all his fingers extended, and without saying a word he left the house and faced the shouts, insults, and blasphemies that would follow him until he left the town. ?rsula put the bar on the door, having decided not to take it down for the rest of her life. “We’ll rot in here,?she thought. “We’ll turn to ashes in this house without men, but we won’t give this miserable town the pleasure of seeing us weep.?She spent the whole morning looking for a memory of her son in the most hidden corners, but she could find none.
pre:Chapter 8 next:Chapter 10