Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
From "Love in the Time of Cholera":
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
“Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.”
“She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: You are either born knowing how, or you never know.”
“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
From “One Hundred Years of Solitude”:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took
him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses,
built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished
stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so
recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was
necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged
gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of
pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the
magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced
himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself
called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from
house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans,
tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the
desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had
been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most
and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades' magical
irons. 'Things have a life of their own,' the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh
accent. 'It's simply a matter of waking up their souls.' José Arcadio Buendía,
whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even
beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of
that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth.
Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: 'It won't work for that.' But
José Arcadio Buendía at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so
he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. Úrsula
Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic
holdings, was unable to dissuade him. 'Very soon we'll have gold enough and
more to pave the floors of the house,' her husband replied. For several months
he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of
the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting
Melquíades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to
unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armour which had all of its pieces soldered
together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an
enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his
expedition managed to take the armour apart, they found inside a calcified
skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.
In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a
telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as
the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one
end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance to the tent. For
the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the
gypsy woman an arm's length away. 'Science has eliminated distance,' Melquíades
proclaimed. 'In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any
place in the world without leaving his own house.' A burning noonday sun
brought out a startling demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they
put a pile of dry hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by
concentrating the sun's rays. José Arcadio Buendía, who had still not been
consoled for the failure of his magnets, conceived the idea of using that
invention as a weapon of war. Again Melquíades tried to dissuade him, but he
finally accepted the two magnetized ingots and three colonial coins in exchange
for the magnifying glass. Úrsula wept in consternation. That money was from a
chest of gold coins that her father had put together over an entire life of
privation and that she had buried underneath her bed in hopes of a proper
occasion to make use of it. José Arcadio Buendía made no attempt to console
her, completely absorbed in his tactical experiments with the abnegation of a
scientist and even at the risk of his own life. In an attempt to show the
effects of the glass on enemy troops, he exposed himself to the concentration
of the sun's rays and suffered burns which turned into sores that took a long
time to heal. Over the protests of his wife, who was alarmed at such a
dangerous invention, at one point he was ready to set the house on fire. He would
spend hours on end in his room, calculating the strategic possibilities of his
novel weapon until he succeeded in putting together a manual of startling
instructional clarity and an irresistible power of conviction. He sent it to
the government, accompanied by numerous descriptions of his experiments and
several pages of explanatory sketches, by a messenger who crossed the
mountains, got lost in measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers, and was on the
point of perishing under the lash of despair, plague, and wild beasts until he
found a route that joined the one used by the mules that carried the mail. In
spite of the fact that a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at
that time, José Arcadio Buendía promised to undertake it as soon as the government
ordered him to so that he could put on some practical demonstrations of his
invention for the military authorities and could train them himself in the
complicated art of solar war. For several years he waited for an answer.
Finally, tired of waiting, he bemoaned to Melquíades the failure of his project
and the gypsy then gave him a convincing proof of his honesty: he gave him back
the doubloons in exchange for the magnifying glass, and he left him in addition
some Portugues maps and several instruments of navigation. In his own
handwriting he set down a concise synthesis of the studies by Monk Hermann,
which he left José Arcadio so that he would be able to make use of the
astrolabe, the compass, and the sextant. José Arcadio Buendía spent the long
months of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he had built in the
rear of the house so that no one would disturb his experiments. Having
completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the
courtyard watching the course of the stars and he almost contracted sunstroke
from trying to establish an exact method to ascertain noon. When he became an
expert in the use and manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion of
space that allowed him to navigate across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited
territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to
leave his study. That was the period in which he acquired the habit of talking
to himself, of walking through the house without paying attention to anyone, as
Úrsula and the children broke their backs in the garden, growing banana and
caladium, cassava and yams, ahuyama roots and eggplants. Suddenly, without
warning, his feverish activity was interrupted and was replaced by a kind of
fascination. He spent several days as if he were bewitched, softly repeating to
himself a string of fearful conjectures without giving credit to his own
understanding. Finally, one Tuesday in December, at lunchtime, all at once he
released the whole weight of his torment. The children would remember for the
rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by
his prolonged vigil and by the wrath of his imagination, revealed his discovery
to them:
“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”
From the moment he entered, sideways and trying not to make a noise, he caught the smell. He was still in the hallway, where the woman's three brothers had their hammocks in positions that he could not see and that he could not determine in the darkness as he felt his way along the hall to push open the bedroom door and get his bearings there so as not to mistake the bed. He found it. He bumped against the ropes of the hammocks, which were lower than he had suspected, and a man who had been snoring until then turned in his sleep and said in a kind of delusion, "It was Wednesday." When he pushed open the bedroom door, he could not prevent it from scraping against the uneven floor. Suddenly, in the absolute darkness, he understood with a hopeless nostalgia that he was completely disoriented. Sleeping in the narrow room were the mother, another daughter with her husband and two children, and the woman, who may not have been there. He could have guided himself by the smell if the smell had not been all over the house, so devious and at the same time so definite, as it had always been on his skin. He did not move for a long time, wondering in fright how he had ever got to that abyss of abandonment, when a hand with all its fingers extended and feeling about in the darkness touched his face. He was not surprised, for without knowing, he had been expecting it. Then he gave himself over to that hand, and in a terrible state of exhaustion he let himself be led to a shapeless place where his clothes were taken off and he was heaved about like a sack of potatoes and thrown from one side to the other in a bottomless darkness in which his arms were useless, where it no longer smelled of woman but of ammonia, and where he tried to remember her face and found before him the face of Orsula, confusedly aware that he was doing something that for a very long time he had wanted to do but that he had imagined could really never be done, not knowing what he was doing because he did not know where his feet were or where his head was, or whose feet or whose head, and feeling that he could no longer resist the glacial rumbling of his kidneys and the air of his intestines, and fear, and the bewildered anxiety to flee and at the same time stay forever in that exasperated silence and that fearful solitude.
She stopped beside the hammock in an icy sweat, feeling knots forming in her intestines, while Jos‚ Arcadio stroked her ankles with the tips of his fingers, then her calves, then her thighs, murmuring: "Oh, little sister, little sister." She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three slashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain, splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter.
As soon as Jos‚ Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buend¡a house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jos‚, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurement for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals that slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by
in the tempestuous bed of her husband, she had found peace in that house where memories materialized through the strength of implacable evocation and walked like human beings through the cloistered rooms
Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
