“You see,?she commented. “He was a complete Simpleton.?
It seemed as if some penetrating lucidity permitted her to see the reality of things beyond any formalism. That at least was the point of view of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, for whom Remedios the Beauty was in no way mentally retarded, as was generally believed, but quite the opposite. “It’s as if she’s come back from twenty years of war,?he would say. ?rsula, for her part, thanked God for having awarded the family with a creature of exceptional purity, but at the same time she was disturbed by her beauty, for it seemed a contradictory virtue to her, a diabolical trap at the center of her innocence. It was for that reason that she decided to keep her away from the world, to protect her from all earthly temptation, not knowing that Remedios the Beauty, even from the time when she was in her mother’s womb, was safe from any contagion. It never entered her head that they would elect her beauty queen of the carnival pandemonium. But Aureliano, Segundo, excited at the caprice of disguising himself as a tiger, brought Father Antonio Isabel to the house in order to convince ?rsula that the carnival was not a pagan feast, as she said, but a Catholic tradition. Finally convinced, even though reluctantly, she consented to the coronation.
The news that Remedios Buendía was going to be the sovereign ruler of the festival went beyond the limits of the swamp in a few hours, reached distant places where the prestige of her beauty was not known, and it aroused the anxiety of those who still thought of her last name as a symbol of subversion. The anxiety was baseless. If anyone had become harmless at that time it was the aging and disillusioned Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who was slowly losing all contact with the reality of the nation. Enclosed in his workshop, his only relationship with the rest of the world was his business in little gold fishes. One of the soldiers who had guarded his house during the first days of peace would go sell them in the villages of the swamp and return loaded down with coins and news. That the Conservative government, he would say, with the backing of the Liberals, was reforming the calendar so that every president could remain in power for a hundred years. 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. That the leading lady of a Spanish company passing through the capital had been kidnapped by a band of masked highwaymen and on the following Sunday she had danced in the nude at the summer house of the president of the republic. “Don’t talk to me about politics,?the colonel would tell him. “Our business is selling little fishes.?The rumor that he did not want to hear anything about the situation in the country because he was growing rich in his workshop made ?rsula laugh when it reached her ears. With her terrible practical sense she could not understand the colonel’s business as he exchanged little fishes for gold coins and then converted the coins into little fishes, and so on, with the result that he had to work all the harder with the more he sold in order to satisfy an exasperating vicious circle. Actually, what interested him was not the business but the work. He needed so much concentration to link scales, fit minute rubies into the eyes, laminate gills, and put on fins that there was not the smallest empty moment left for him to fill with his disillusionment of the war. So absorbing was the attention required by the delicacy of his artistry that in a short time he had aged more than during all the years of the war, and his position had twisted his spine and the close work had used up his eyesight, but the implacable concentration awarded him with a peace of the spirit. The last time he was seen to take an interest in some matter related to the war was when a group of veterans from both parties sought his support for the approval of lifetime pensions, which had always been promised and were always about to be put into effect. “Forget about it,?he told them. “You can see how I refuse my pension in order to get rid of the torture of waiting for it until the day I died.?At first Colonel Gerineldo Márquez would visit him at dusk and they would both sit in the street door and talk about the past. But Amaranta could not bear the memories that that man, whose baldness had plunged him into the abyss of premature old age, aroused in her, and she would torment him with snide remarks until he did not come back except on special occasions and he finally disappeared, extinguished by paralysis. Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendía could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude. He would get up at five in the morning after a light sleep, have his eternal mug of bitter coffee in the kitchen, shut himself up all day in the workshop, and at four in the afternoon he would go along the porch dragging a stool, not even noticing the fire of the rose bushes or the brightness of the hour or the persistence of Amaranta, whose melancholy made the noise of a boiling pot, which was perfectly perceptible at dusk, and he would sit in the street door as long as the mosquitoes would allow him to. Someone dared to disturb his solitude once.