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“Things have a life of their own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up their souls.”
It was, therefore, a route that did not interest him, for it could lead only to the past.
“A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.”
On a certain occasion he found the door barred, and he knocked several times, knowing that if he had the boldness to knock the first time he would have had to knock until the last, and after an interminable wait she opened the door for him.
for on one occasion when the latter was explaining in great detail the mechanisms of love, he interrupted him to ask: “What does it feel like?” José Arcadio gave an immediate reply: “It’s like an earthquake.”
They were two happy lovers among the crowd, and they even came to suspect that love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deep than the happiness, wild but momentary, of their secret nights.
He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.
because according to him he could never understand the sense of a contest in which the two adversaries have agreed upon the rules.
Arcadio had seen her many times working in her parents’ small food store but he had never taken a good look at her because she had that rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment.
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.
“Bad luck doesn’t have any chinks in it,”
Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.
When he said it he did not know that it was easier to start a war than to end one.
“How awful,” he said, “the way time passes!”
“If it’s not the war,” she thought, “it can only be death.” It was a supposition that was so neat, so convincing that she identified it as a premonition.
the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
“How are you, Colonel?” he asked in passing. “Right here,” he answered. “Waiting for my funeral procession to pass.”
which she did not take off even to sleep and which she washed and ironed herself. Her life was spent in weaving her shroud. It might have been said that she wove during the day and unwove during the night, and not with any hope of defeating solitude in that way, but, quite the contrary, in order to nurture it.
Fernanda was scandalized that she did not understand the relationship of Catholicism with life but only its relationship with death, as if it were not a religion but a compendium of funeral conventions.
He pronounced his whole name, letter by letter, in order to convince her that he was alive.
He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear.
The worst part was that the rain was affecting everything and the driest of machines would have flowers popping out among their gears if they were not oiled every three days, and the threads in brocades rusted, and wet clothing would break out in a rash of saffron-colored moss. The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms.
If it had not been for that suffering, which would have had nothing shameful about it for someone who did not suffer as well from shamefulness, and if it had not been for the loss of the letters, the rain would not have bothered Fernanda, because, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it had been raining.
“The world must be all fucked up,” he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”
Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.
