Marquez

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"One Hundred Years of Solitude" By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
painted on his chest. At that moment in Macondo Úrsula took the
cover off the pot of milk on the stove, wondering why it was taking so
long to boil, and found it full of worms.
“They’ve killed Aureliano,” she exclaimed.
She looked toward the courtyard, obeying a habit of her solitude,
and then she saw José Arcadio Buendía, soaking wet and sad in the
rain and much older than when he had died. “They shot him in the
back,” Úrsula said more precisely, “and no one was charitable
enough to close his eyes.” At dusk through her tears she saw the
swift and luminous disks that crossed the sky like an exhalation and
she thought that it was a signal of death. She was still under the
chestnut tree, sobbing at her husband’s knees, when they brought in
Colonel Aureliano Buendía, wrapped in a blanket that was stiff with
dry blood and with his eyes open in rage.
He was out of danger. The bullet had followed such a neat path that
the doctor was able to put a cord soaked in iodine in through the
chest and withdraw it from the back. “That was my masterpiece,” he
said with satisfaction. “It was the only point where a bullet could pass
through without harming any vital organ.” Colonel Aureliano Buendía
saw himself surrounded by charitable novices who intoned desperate
psalms for the repose of his soul and then he was sorry that he had
not shot himself in the roof of the mouth as he had considered doing if
only to mock the prediction of Pilar Ternera.
“If I still had the authority,” he told the doctor, “I’d have you shot out
of hand. Not for having saved my life but for having made a fool of
me.”
The failure of his death brought back his lost prestige in a few
hours. The same people who invented the story that he had sold the
war for a room with walls made of gold bricks defined the attempt at
suicide as an act of honor and proclaimed him a martyr. Then, when
he rejected the Order of Merit awarded him by the president of the
republic, even his most bitter enemies filed through the room asking
him to withdraw recognition of the armistice and to start a new war.
The house was filled with gifts meant as amends. Impressed finally by
the massive support of his former comrades in arms, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía did not put aside the possibility of pleasing them.
On the contrary, at a certain moment he seemed so enthusiastic with
the idea of a new war that Colonel Gerineldo Márquez thought that he
was only waiting for a pretext to proclaim it. The pretext was offered,
in fact, when the president of the republic refused to award any
military pensions to former combatants, Liberal or Conservative, until