“What does he say??he asked.
“He’s very sad,??rsula answered, “because he thinks that you’re going to die.?
“Tell him,?the colonel said, smiling, “that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.?
The omen of the, dead father stirred up the last remnant of pride that was left in his heart, but he confused it with a sudden gust of strength. It was for that reason that he hounded ?rsula to tell him where in the courtyard the gold coins that they had found inside the plaster Saint Joseph were buried. “You’ll never know,?she told him with a firmness inspired by an old lesson. “One day,?she added, “the owner of that fortune will appear and only he can dig it up.?No one knew why a man who had always been so generous had begun to covet money with such anxiety, and not the modest amounts that would have been enough to resolve an emergency, but a fortune of such mad size that the mere mention of it left Aureliano Segundo awash in amazement. His old fellow party members, to whom he went asking for help, hid so as not to receive him. It was around that time that he was heard to say. “The only difference today between Liberals and Conservatives is that the Liberals go to mass at five o’clock and the Conservatives at eight.?Nevertheless he insisted with such perseverance, begged in such a way, broke his code of dignity to such a degree, that with a little help from here and a little more from there, sneaking about everywhere, with a slippery diligence and a pitiless perseverance, he managed to put together in eight months more money than ?rsula had buried. Then he visited the ailing Colonel Gerineldo Márquez so that he would help him start the total war.
At a certain time Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was really the only one who could have pulled, even from his paralytics chair, the musty strings of rebellion. After the armistice of Neerlandia, while Colonel Aureliano Buendía took refuge with his little gold fishes, he kept in touch with the rebel officers who had been faithful to him until the defeat. With them he waged the sad war of daily humiliation, of entreaties and petitions, of come-back-tomorrow, of any-time-now, of we’re-studying-your-case-with-the-proper-attention; the war hopelessly lost against the many yours-most-trulys who should have signed and would never sign the lifetime pensions. The other war, the bloody one of twenty years, did not cause them as much damage as the corrosive war of eternal postponements. Even Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, who escaped three attempts on his life, survived five wounds, and emerged unscathed from innumerable battles, succumbed to that atrocious siege of waiting and sank into the miserable defeat of old age, thinking of Amaranta among the diamond-shaped patches of light in a borrowed house. The last veterans of whom he had word had appeared photographed in a newspaper with their faces shamelessly raised beside an anonymous president of the republic who gave them buttons with his likeness on them to wear in their lapels and returned to them a flag soiled with blood and gunpowder so that they could place it on their coffins. The others, more honorable. were still waiting for a letter in the shadow of public charity, dying of hunger, living through rage, ratting of old age amid the exquisite shit of glory. So that when Colonel Aureliano Buendía invited him to start a mortal conflagration that would wipe out all vestiges of a regime of corruption and scandal backed by the foreign invader, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez could not hold back a shudder of compassion.