When he finished the book, in which many of the stories had no endings because there were pages missing, Aureli-ano Segun-do set about deciphering the manuscripts. It was impossible. The letters looked like clothes hung out to dry on a line and they looked more like musical notation than writing. One hot noontime, while he was poring over the, manuscripts, he sensed that he was not alone in the room. Against the light from the window, sitting with his hands on his knees, was Melquíades. He was under forty years of age. He was wearing the same old-fashioned vest and the hat that looked like a raven's wings, and across his pale temples there flowed the grease from his hair that had been melted by the heat, just as Aureli-ano and José Arcadio had seen him when they were children. Aureli-ano Segun-do recognized him at once, because that hereditary memory had been transmitted from generation to generation and had come to him through the memory of his grandfather.
"Hello," Aureli-ano Segun-do said.
"Hello, young man," said Melquíades.
From then on, for several years, they saw each other almost every afternoon. Melquíades talked to him about the world, tried to infuse him with his old wisdom, but he refused to translate the manuscripts. "No one must know their meaning until he has reached one hundred years of age," he explained. Aureli-ano kept those meetings secret forever. On one occasion he felt that his private world had fallen apart because úrsula came in when Melquíades was in the room. But she did not see him.
"Who were you talking to?" she asked him.
"Nobody," Aureli-ano Segun-do said.
"That's what your great-grandfather did," úrsula, said. "He used to talk to himself too."
José Arcadio Segun-do, in the meantime, had satisfied his wish to see a shooting. For the rest of his life he would remember the livid flash of the six simultaneous shots-and the echo of the discharge as it broke against the hills and the sad smile and perplexed eyes of the man being shot, who stood erect while his shirt became soaked with blood, and who was still smiling even when they untied him from the post and put him in a box filled with quicklime. "He's alive," he thought. "They're going to bury him alive." It made such an impression on him that from then on he detested military practices and war, not because of the executions but because of the horrifying custom of burying the victims alive. No one knew then exactly when he began to ring the bells in the church tower and assist Father Antonio Isabel, the successor to "The Pup," at mass, and take can of the fighting cocks in the courtyard of the parish house. When Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez found out he scolded him strongly for learning occupations repudiated by the Liberals. "The fact is," he answered, "I think I've turned out to be a Conservative." He believed it as if it had been determined by fate. Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez, scandalized, told úrsula about it.
"It's better that way," she approved. "Let's hope that he becomes a priest so that God will finally come into this house."