On the ninth of August, before they received the first letter from Brussels, Jos?Arcadio Segundo was speaking to Aureliano in Melquíades?room and, without realizing it, he said:
“Always remember that they were more than three thousand and that they were thrown into the sea.?
Then he fell back on the parchments and died with his eyes open. At that same instant, in Fernanda’s bed, his twin brother came to the end of the prolonged and terrible martyrdom of the steel crabs that were eating his throat away. One week previously he had returned home, without any voice, unable to breathe, and almost skin and bones, with his wandering trunks and his wastrel’s accordion, to fulfill the promise of dying beside his wife. Petra Cotes helped him pack his clothes and bade him farewell without shedding a tear, but she forgot to give him the patent leather shoes that he wanted to wear in his coffin. So when she heard that he had died, she dressed in black, wrapped the shoes up in a newspaper, and asked Fernanda for permission to see the body. Fernanda would not let her through the door.
“Put yourself in my place,?Petra Cotes begged. “Imagine how much I must have loved him to put up with this humiliation.?
“There is no humiliation that a concubine does not deserve,?Fernanda replied. “So wait until another one of your men dies and put the shoes on him.?
In fulfillment of her promise, Santa Sofía de la Piedad cut the throat of Jos?Arcadio Segundo’s corpse with a kitchen knife to be sure that they would not bury him alive. The bodies were placed in identical coffins, and then it could be seen that once more in death they had become as Identical as they had been until adolescence. Aureliano Segundo’s old carousing comrades laid on his casket a wreath that had a purple ribbon with the words: Cease, cows, life is short. Fernanda was so indignant with such irreverence that she had the wreath thrown onto the trash heap. In the tumult of the last moment, the sad drunkards who carried them out of the house got the coffins mixed up and buried them in the wrong graves.