One Hundred Years of Solitude Read Online Free PDF Page A

do your wife a favor.”
    José Arcadio Buendía serenely picked up his rooster. “I’llbe right back,” he told everyone. And then to Prudencio Aguilar:
    “You go home and get a weapon, because I’m going to kill you.”
    Ten minutes later he returned with the notched spear that had belonged to hisgrandfather. At the door to the cockpit, where half the town had gathered, Prudencio Aguilar was waiting for him. There was no time to defend himself. José Arcadio Buendía’s spear, thrown with the strength of a bull and with the same good aim with which the first Aureliano Buendía had exterminated the jaguars in the region, pierced his throat. That night, as they held a wake over the corpse in thecockpit, José Arcadio Buendía went into the bedroom as his wife was putting on her chastity pants. Pointing the spear at her he ordered: “Take them off.” Úrsula had no doubt about her husband’s decision. “You’ll be responsible for what happens,” she murmured. José Arcadio Buendía stuck the spear into the dirt floor.
    “If you bear iguanas, we’ll raise iguanas,” he said. “But there’ll be no morekillings in this town because of you.”
    It was a fine June night, cool and with a moon, and they were awake and frolicking in bed until dawn, indifferent to the breeze that passed through the bedroom, loaded with the weeping of Prudencio Aguilar’s kin.
    The matter was put down as a duel of honor, but both of them were left with a twinge in their conscience. One night, when she could not sleep,Úrsula went out into the courtyard to get some water and she saw Prudencio Aguilar by the water jar. He was livid, a sad expression on his face, trying to cover the hole in his throat with a plug made of esparto grass. It did not bring on fear in her, but pity. She went back to the room and told her husband what she had seen, but he did not think much of it. “This just means that we can’t stand theweight of our conscience.” Two nights later Úrsula saw Prudencio Aguilar again, in the bathroom, using the espartoplug to wash the clotted blood from his throat. On another night she saw him strolling in the rain. José Arcadio Buendía, annoyed by his wife’s hallucinations, went out into the courtyard armed with the spear. There was the dead man with his sad expression.
    “You go to hell,” JoséArcadio Buendía shouted at him. “Just as many times as you come back, I’ll kill you again.”
    Prudencio Aguilar did not go away, nor did José Arcadio Buendía dare throw the spear. He never slept well after that. He was tormented by the immense desolation with which the dead man had looked at him through the rain, his deep nostalgia as he yearned for living people, the anxiety with which he searchedthrough the house looking for some water with which to soak his esparto plug. “He must be suffering a great deal,” he said to Úrsula. “You can see that he’s so very lonely.” She was so moved that the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house. One night when he found him washinghis wound in his own room, José Arcadio Buendía could no longer resist.
    “It’s all right, Prudencio,” he told him. “We’re going to leave this town, just as far away as we can go, and we’ll never come back. Go in peace now.”
    That was how they undertook the crossing of the mountains. Several friends of José Arcadio Buendía, young men like him, excited by the adventure, dismantled their houses andpacked up, along with their wives and children, to head toward the land that no one had promised them. Before he left, José Arcadio Buendía buried the spear in the courtyard and, one after the other, he cut the throats of his magnificent fighting cocks, trusting that in that way he could give some measure of peace to Prudencio Aguilar. All that Úrsula took along were a trunk with her bridal clothes,a few