The situation again became as tense as it had been during the months that preceded the first war. The cockfights, instituted by the mayor himself, were suspended. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, the commander of the garrison, took over the exercise of municipal power. The Liberals looked upon him as a provocateur. "Something terrible is going to happen," úrsula would say to Aureli-ano José. "Don't go out into the street after six o'clock." The entreaties were useless. Aureli-ano José, just like Arcadio in other times, had ceased to belong to her. It was as if his return home, the possibility of existing without concerning himself with everyday necessities, had awakened in him the lewd and lazy leanings of his uncle José Arcadio. His passion for Amaranta had been extinguished without leaving any scars. He would drift around, playing pool, easing his solitude with occasional women, sacking the hiding places where úrsula had forgotten her money. He ended up coming home only to change his clothes.
"They're all alike," úrsula lamented. "At first they behave very well, they're obedient and prompt and they don't seem capable of killing a fly, but as soon as their beards appear they go to ruin." Unlike Arcadio, who had never known his real origins, he found out that he was the son of Pilar Ternera, who had hung up a hammock so that he could take his siesta in her house. More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude. Pilar Ternera had lost the trail of all hope. Her laugh had taken on the tones of an organ, her breasts had succumbed to the tedium of endless caressing, her stomach and her thighs had been the victims of her irrevocable fate as a shared woman, but her heart grew old without bitterness. Fat, talkative, with the airs of a matron in disgrace, she renounced the sterile illusions of her cards and found peace and consolation in other people's loves. In the house where Aureli-ano José took his siesta, the girls from the neighborhood would receive their casual lovers. "Lend me your room, Pilar," they would simply say when they were already inside. "Of course," Pilar would answer.
And if anyone was present she would explain. "I'm happy knowing that people are happy in bed."
She never charged for the service. She never refused the favor, just as she never refused the countless men who sought her out, even in the twilight of her maturity, without giving her money or love and only occasionally pleasure. Her five daughters, who inherited a burning seed, had been lost on the byways of life since adolescence. Of the two sons she managed to raise, one died fighting in the forces of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía and the other was wounded and captured at the age of fourteen when he tried to steal a crate of chickens in a town in the swamp. In a certain way, Aureli-ano José was the tall, dark man who had been promised her for half a century by the king of hearts, and like all men sent by the cards he reached her heart when he was already stamped with the mark of death. She saw it in the cards.
"Don't go out tonight," she told him. "Stay and sleep here because Carmelita Montiel is getting tired of asking me to put her in your room."
Aureli-ano José did not catch the deep feeling of begging that was in the offer.
"Tell her to wait for me at midnight" he said. He went to the theater, where a Spanish company was putting on The Dagger of the Fox, which was really Zorzilla's play with the title changed by order of Captain Aquiles Ricardo, because the Liberals called the Conservatives Goths. Only when he handed in his ticket at the door did Aureli-ano José realize that Captain Aquiles Ricardo and two soldiers armed with rifles were searching the audience.
"Be careful, captain," Aureli-ano José warned him. "The man hasn't been born yet who can lay hands on me." The captain tried to search him forcibly and Aureli-ano José, who was unarmed, began to run. The soldiers disobeyed the order to shoot. "He's a Buendía," one of them explained. Blind with rage, the captain then snatched away the rifle, stepped into the center of the street, and took aim."
"Cowards!" he shouted. "I only wish it was Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía."