The guests toasted in a chorus. Then the man of the house played the accordion, fireworks were set off, and drums celebrated the event throughout the town. At dawn the guests, soaked in champagne, sacrificed six cows and put them in the street at the disposal of the crowd. No one was scandalized. Since Aureli-ano Segun-do had taken charge of the house those festivities were a common thing, even when there was no motive as proper as the birth of a Pope. In a few years, without effort, simply by luck, he had accumulated one of the largest fortunes in the swamp thanks to the supernatural proliferation of his animals. His mares would bear triplets, his hens laid twice a day, and his hogs fattened with such speed that no one could explain such disorderly fecundity except through the use of black magic. "Save something now," úrsula would tell her wild great-grandson. "This luck is not going to last all your life." But Aureli-ano Segun-do paid no attention to her. The more he opened champagne to soak his friends, the more wildly his animals gave birth and the more he was convinced that his lucky star was not a matter of his conduct but an influence of Petra Cotes, his concubine, whose love had the virtue of exasperating nature. So convinced was he that this was the origin of his fortune that he never kept Petra Cotes far away from his breeding grounds and even when he married and had children he continued living with her with the consent of Fernanda. Solid, monumental like his grandfathers, but with a joie de vivre and an irresistible good humor that they did not have, Aureli-ano Segun-do scarcely had time to look after his animals. All he had to do was to take Petra Cores to his breeding grounds and have her ride across his land in order to have every animal marked with his brand succumb to the irremediable plague of proliferation.
Like all the good things that occurred in his long life, that tremendous fortune had its origins in chance. Until the end of the wars Petra Cotes continued to support herself with the returns from her raffles and Aureli-ano Segun-do was able to sack úrsula's savings from time to time. They were a frivolous couple, with no other worries except going to bed every night, even on forbidden days, and frolicking there until dawn. "That woman has been your ruination," úrsula would shout at her great-grandson when she saw him coming into the house like a sleepwalker. "She's got you so bewitched that one of these days I'm going to see you twisting around with colic and with a toad in your belly." José Arcadio Segun-do, who took a long time to discover that he had been supplanted, was unable to understand his brother's passion. He remembered Petra Cotes as an ordinary woman, rather lazy in bed, and completely lacking in any resources for lovemaking. Deaf to úrsula's clamor and the teasing of his brother, Aureli-ano Segun-do only thought at that time of finding a trade that would allow him to maintain a house for Petra Cotes, and to die with her, on top of her and underneath her, during a night of feverish license. When Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía opened up his workshop again, seduced at last by the peaceful charms of old age, Aureli-ano Segun-do thought that it would be good business to devote himself to the manufacture of little gold fishes. He spent many hours in the hot room watching how the hard sheets of metal, worked by the colonel with the inconceivable patience of disillusionment, were slowly being converted into golden scales. The work seemed so laborious to him and the thought of Petra Cotes was so persistent and pressing that after three weeks he disappeared from the workshop. It was during that time that it occurred to Petra Cotes to raffle off rabbits. They reproduced and grew up so fast that there was barely time to sell the tickets for the raffle. At first Aureli-ano Segun-do did not notice the alarming proportions of the proliferation. But one night, when nobody in town wanted to hear about the rabbit raffle any more, he heard a noise by the courtyard door. "Don't get worried," Petra, Cotes said. "It's only the rabbits." They could not sleep, tormented by the uproar of the animals. At dawn Aureli-ano Segun-do opened the door and saw the courtyard paved with rabbits, blue in the glow of dawn. Petra Cotes, dying with laughter, could not resist the temptation of teasing him.
"Those are the ones who were born last night," she aid.
"Oh my God!" he said. "Why don't you raffle off cows?"
A few days later, in an attempt to clean out her courtyard, Petra Cotes exchanged the rabbits for a cow, who two months later gave birth to triplets. That was how things began. Overnight Aureli-ano Segun-do be. came the owner of land and livestock and he barely had time to enlarge his overflowing barns and pigpens. It was a delirious prosperity that even made him laugh, and he could not help doing crazy things to release his good humor. "Cease, cows, life is short," he would shout. úrsula wondered what entanglements he had got into, whether he might be stealing, whether he had become a rustler, and every time she saw him uncorking champagne just for the pleasure of pouring the foam over his head, she would shout at him and scold him for the waste. It annoyed him so much that one day when he awoke in a merry mood, Aureli-ano Segun-do appeared with a chest full of money, a can of paste, and a brush, and singing at the top of his lungs the old songs of Francisco the Man, he papered the house inside and out and from top to bottom, with one-peso banknotes. The old mansion, painted white since the time they had brought the pianola, took on the strange look of a mosque. In the midst of the excitement of the family the scandalization of úrsula, the joy of the people cramming the street to watch that apotheosis of squandering. Aureli-ano Segun-do finished by papering the house from the front to the kitchen, including bathrooms and bedrooms, and threw the leftover bills into the courtyard.
"Now," he said in a final way, "I hope that nobody in this house ever talks to me about money again."