“That Colonel Aureliano, Buendía fought thirty-two civil wars and lost them all,?Aureliano answered. “That the army hemmed in and machine-gunned three thousand workers and that their bodies were carried off to be thrown into the sea on a train with two hundred cars.?
The priest measured him with a pitying look.
“Oh, my son,?he signed. “It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.?
So Aureliano and Amaranta ?rsula accepted the version of the basket, not because they believed it, but because it spared them their terror. As the pregnancy advanced they were becoming a single being, they were becoming more and more integrated in the solitude of a house that needed only one last breath to be knocked down. They restricted themselves to an essential area, from Fernanda’s bedroom, where the charms of sedentary love were visible, to the beginning of the porch, where Amaranta ?rsula would sit to sew bootees and bonnets for the newborn baby and Aureliano, would answer the occasional letters from the wise Catalonian. The rest of the house was given over to the tenacious assault of destruction. The silver shop, Melquíades?room, the primitive and silent realm of Santa Sofía de la Piedad remained in the depths of a domestic jungle that no one would have had the courage to penetrate. Surrounded by the voracity of nature, Aureliano and Amaranta ?rsula continued cultivating the oregano and the begonias and defended their world with demarcations of quicklime, building the last trenches in the age-old war between man and ant. Her long and neglected hair, the splotches that were beginning to appear on her face, the swelling of her legs, the deformation of her former lovemaking weasel’s body had changed Amaranta ?rsula from the youthful creature she had been when she arrived at the house with the cage of luckless canaries and her captive husband, but it did not change the vivacity of her spirit. “Shit,?she would say, laughingly. “Who would have thought that we really would end up living like cannibals!?The last thread that joined them to the world was broken on the sixth month of pregnancy when they received a letter that obviously was not from the wise Catalonian. It had been mailed in Barcelona, but the envelope was addressed in conventional blue ink by an official hand and it had the innocent and impersonal look of hostile messages. Aureliano snatched it out of Amaranta ?rsula’s hands as she was aboutto open it.
“Not this one,?he told her. “I don’t want to know what it says.?