One Hundred Years of Solitude: Chapters 9–12

An itinerant photographer who took the only picture of him that could have been preserved was forced to smash his plates without developing them.

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.

José Arcadio Segundo, who took a long time to discover that he had been supplanted, was unable to understand his brother's passion.

That the concordat with the Holy See had finally been signed and a cardinal had come from Rome with a crown of diamonds and a throne of solid gold, and that the Liberal ministers had had their pictures taken on their knees in the act of kissing his ring.

Thirty-two belfries tolled a dirge at six in the afternoon. In the manor house, which was paved with tomblike slabs, the sun was never seen.

Until the day of her wedding she dreamed about a legendary kingdom, in spite of the fact that her father, Don Fernando, had to mortgage the house in order to buy her trousseau.

With the fierce temerity with which José Arcadio Buendía had crossed the mountains to found Macondo, with the blind pride with which Colonel Aureliano Buendía had undertaken his fruitless wars, with the mad tenacity with which Úrsula watched over the survival of the line, Aureliano Segundo looked for Fernanda, without a single moment of respite.

With the fierce temerity with which José Arcadio Buendía had crossed the mountains to found Macondo, with the blind pride with which Colonel Aureliano Buendía had undertaken his fruitless wars, with the mad tenacity with which Úrsula watched over the survival of the line, Aureliano Segundo looked for Fernanda, without a single moment of respite.

His eyes grew moist with indignation, with angry impotence, and for the first time since his defeat it pained him not to have the strength of youth so that he could begin a bloody war that would wipe out the last vestiges of the Conservative regime.

Aureliano Segundo did not let the chance go by to regale his cousins with a thunderous champagne and accordion party...

Aureliano Segundo decided that they would have to bring her to the house and take care of her, but his good intentions were frustrated by the firm intransigence of Rebeca, who had needed many years of suffering and misery in order to attain the privileges of solitude and who was not disposed to renounce them in exchange for an old age disturbed by the false attractions of charity.

Fernanda had to swallow her scruples and treat guests of the worst sort like kings as they muddied the porch with their boots, urinated in the garden, laid their mats down anywhere to take their siesta, and spoke without regard for the sensitivities of ladies or the proper behavior of gentlemen. Amaranta was so scandalized with the plebeian invasion that she went back to eating in the kitchen as in olden days.

“We have to prepare some meat and fish,” she would order the four cooks, who hastened to have everything ready under the imperturbable direction of Santa Sofía de la Piedad. “We have to prepare everything,” she insisted, “because we never know what these strangers like to eat.”

When he saw Mr. Brown in the first automobile to reach Macondo — an orange convertible with a horn that frightened dogs with its bark — the old soldier grew indignant with the servile excitement of the people and he realized that something had changed in the makeup of the men since the days when they would leave their wives and children and toss a shotgun on their shoulders to go off to war.