“Look at the mess we’ve got ourselves into,?Colonel Aureliano Buendía said at that time, “just because we invited a gringo to eat some bananas.?
Aureliano Segundo, on the other hand, could not contain his happiness over the avalanche of foreigners. The house was suddenly filled with unknown guests, with invincible and worldly carousers, and it became necessary to add bedrooms off the courtyard, widen the dining room, and exchange the old table for one that held sixteen people, with new china and silver, and even then they had to eat lunch in shifts. Fernanda had to swallow her scruples and their guests of the worst sort like kings as they muddied the porch with their boots, urinated in the garden. laid their mats down anywhere to take their siesta, and spoke without regard for the sensitivities of ladies or the proper behavior of gentlemen. Amaranta, was so scandalized with the plebeian invasion that she went back to eating in the kitchen as in olden days. Colonel Aureliano Buendía, convinced that the majority of those who came into his workshop to greet him were not doing it because of sympathy or regard but out of the curiosity to meet a historical relic, a museum fossil, decided to shut himself in by barring the door and he was not seen any more except on very rare occasions when he would sit at the street door. ?rsula, on the other hand, even during the days when she was already dragging her feet and walking about groping along the walls, felt a juvenile excitement as the time for the arrival of the train approached. “We have to prepare some meat and fish,?she would order the four cooks, who hastened to have everything ready under the imperturbable direction of Santa Sofía de la Piedad. “We have to prepare everything,?she insisted, “because we never know what these strangers like to eat.?The train arrived during the hottest time of day. At lunchtime the house shook with the bustle of a marketplace, and the perspiring guests—who did not even know who their hosts were—trooped in to occupy the best places at the table, while the cooks bumped into each other with enormous kettles of soup, pots of meat, large gourds filled with vegetables, and troughs of rice, and passed around the contents of barrels of lemonade with inexhaustible ladles. The disorder was such that Fernanda was troubled by the idea that many were eating twice and on more than one occasion she was about to burst out with a vegetable hawker’s insults because someone at the table in confusion asked her for the check. More than a year had gone by since Mr. Herbert’s visit and the only thing that was known was that the gringos were planning to plant banana trees in the enchanted region that Jos?Arcadio Buendía and his men had crossed in search of the route to the great inventions. Two other sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, with the cross of ashes on their foreheads, arrived, drawn by that great volcanic belch, and they justified their determination with a phrase that may have explained everybody’s reasons.
pre:Chapter 11 next:Chapter 13