One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

Melquíades,

It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could lead only to the past.

partly because he considered childhood as a period of mental insufficiency, and partly because he was always too absorbed in his fantastic speculations.

Those hallucinating sessions remained printed on the memories of the boys in such a way that many years later, a second before the regular army officer gave the firing squad the command to fire, Colonel Aureliano Buendía saw once more that warm March afternoon on which his father had interrupted the lesson in physics and stood fascinated, with his hand in the air and his eyes motionless, listening to the distant pipes, drums, and jingles of the gypsies,

And he really believed it, for during his prolonged imprisonment as he manipulated the material, he begged in the depth of his heart that the longed-for miracle should not be the discovery of the philosopher’s stone, or the freeing of the breath that makes metals live, or the faculty to convert the hinges and the locks of the house into gold, but what had just happened: Úrsula’s return.

He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.