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.?Jos?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 Jos?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. ?rsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals
to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. “Very soon
well 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 armor 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 Jos?Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take
the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket
containing a woman’s hair around its neck.
WHEN THE PIRATE Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century,
great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm
bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat
down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of
her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something
strange must have happened to her way of walking, for she never walked again in
public. She gave up all kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion that
her body gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard, for she
did not dare fall asleep lest she dream of the English and their ferocious attack
dogs as they came through the windows of her bedroom to submit her to shameful
tortures with their red-hot irons. Her husband, an Aragonese merchant by whom she
had two children, spent half the value of his store on medicines and pastimes in
an attempt to alleviate her terror. Finally he sold the business and took the family
to live far from the sea in a settlement of peaceful Indians located in the foothills,
where he built his wife a bedroom without windows so that the pirates of her dream
would have no way to get in.
   In that hidden village there was a native-born tobacco planter who had lived
there for some time, Don Jos?Arcadio Buendía, with whom ?rsula’s great-great-grandfather
established a partnership that was so lucrative that within a few years they made a
fortune. Several centuries later the great-great-grandson of the native-born planter
married the great-great-granddaughter of the Aragonese. Therefore, every time that ?
rsula became exercised over her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over three
hundred years of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha.
It was simply a way. of giving herself some relief, because actually they were joined
till death by a bond that was more solid that love: a common prick of conscience.
They were cousins. They had grown up together in the old village that both of their
ancestors, with their work and their good habits, had transformed into one of the
finest towns in the province. Although their marriage was predicted from the time
they had come into the world, when they expressed their desire to be married their
own relatives tried to stop it. They were afraid that those two healthy products of
two races that had interbred over the centuries would suffer the shame of breeding iguanas.
There had already been a horrible precedent. An aunt of ?rsula’s, married to an uncle of
Jos?Arcadio Buendía, had a son who went through life wearing loose, baggy trousers
and who bled to death after having lived forty-two years in the purest state of virginity,
for he had been born and had grown up with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of a
corkscrew and with a small tuft of hair on the tip. A pig’s tail that was never
allowed to be seen by any woman and that cost him his life when a butcher friend
did him the favor of chopping it off with his cleaver. Jos?Arcadio Buendía, with
the whimsy of his nineteen years, resolved the problem with a single phrase: “I
don’t care if I have piglets as long as they can talk.?So they were married amidst
a festival of fireworks and a brass band that went on for three days. They would
have been happy from then on if ?rsula’s mother had not terrified her with all
manner of sinister predictions about their offspring, even to the extreme of
advising her to refuse to consummate the marriage. Fearing that her stout and
willful husband would rape her while she slept, ?rsula, before going to bed,
would put on a rudimentary kind of drawers that her mother had made out of sailcloth
and had reinforced with a system of crisscrossed leather straps and that was closed
in the front by a thick iron buckle. That was how they lived for several months.
During the day he would take care of his fighting cocks and she would do frame
embroidery with her mother. At night they would wrestle for several hours in an
anguished violence that seemed to be a substitute for the act of love, until
popular intuition got a whiff of something irregular and the rumor spread that ?
rsula was still a virgin a year after her marriage because her husband was impotent.
Jos?Arcadio Buendía was the last one to hear the rumor.
PILAR TERNERA’S son was brought to his grand parents?house two weeks after he
was born. ?rsula admitted him grudgingly, conquered once more by the obstinacy
of her husband, who could not tolerate the idea that an offshoot of his blood
should be adrift, but he imposed the condition that the child should never know
his true identity. Although he was given the name Jos?Arcadio, they ended up calling
him simply Arcadio so as to avoid confusion. At that time there was so much activity
in the town and so much bustle in the house that the care of the children was relegated
to a secondary level. They were put in the care of Visitación, a Guajiro Indian woman
who had arrived in town with a brother in flight from a plague of insomnia that had
been scourging their tribe for several years. They were both so docile and willing
to help that ?rsula took them on to help her with her household chores. That was how
Arcadio and Amaranta came to speak the Guajiro language before Spanish, and they
learned to drink lizard broth and eat spider eggs without ?rsula’s knowing it, for
she was too busy with a promising business in candy animals. Macondo had changed.
The people who had come with ?rsula spread the news of the good quality of its soil
and its privileged position with respect to the swamp, so that from the narrow village
of past times it changed into an active town with stores and workshops and a permanent
commercial route over which the first Arabs arrived with their baggy pants and rings in
their ears, swapping glass beads for macaws. Jos?Arcadio Buendía did not have a
moment’s rest. Fascinated by an immediate reality that came to be more fantastic
than the vast universe of his imagination, he lost all interest in the alchemist’s
laboratory, put to rest the material that had become attenuated with months of manipulation,
and went back to being the enterprising man of earlier days when he had decided upon
the layout of the streets and the location of the new houses so that no one would enjoy
privileges that everyone did not have. He acquired such authority among the new arrivals
that foundations were not laid or walls built without his being consulted, and it was
decided that he should be the one in charge of the distribution of the land. When the
acrobat gypsies returned, with their vagabond carnival transformed now into a gigantic
organization of games of luck and chance, they were received with great joy, for it was
thought that Jos?Arcadio would be coming back with them. But Jos?Arcadio did not return,
nor did they come with the snake-man, who, according to what ?rsula thought, was the only
one who could tell them about their son, so the gypsies were not allowed to camp in town
or set foot in it in the future, for they were considered the bearers of concupiscence and
perversion. Jos?Arcadio Buendía, however, was explicit in maintaining that the old tribe
of Melquíades, who had contributed so much to the growth of the village with his age-old
wisdom and his fabulous inventions, would always find the gates open. But Melquíades?tribe,
according to what the wanderers said, had been wiped off the face of the earth because
they had gone beyond the limits of human knowledge.