One Hundred Years of Solitude

by Gabriel García Márquez

In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous.

“If they believe it in the Bible,” Fernanda replied, “I don’t see why they shouldn’t believe it from me.”

There were three regiments, whose march in time to a galley drum made the earth tremble.

Their snorting of a

many-headed dragon filled the glow of noon with a pestilential vapor. They were short, stocky, and brutelike. They perspired with the sweat of a horse and had a smell of suntanned hide and the taciturn and impenetrable perseverance of men from the uplands. Although it took them over an hour to pass by, one might have thought that they were only a few squads marching ...