One Hundred Years of Solitude Read Online Free PDF Page B

to read the future in cards. Úrsula spoke to her about her son. She thought that his disproportionate size was something as unnatural as her cousin’s tail of a pig. Thewoman let out an expansive laugh that resounded through the house like a spray of broken glass. “Just the opposite,” she said. “He’ll be very lucky.” In order to confirm her prediction she brought her cards to the house a fewdays later and locked herself up with José Arcadio in a granary off the kitchen. She calmly placed her cards on an old carpenter’s bench, saying anything that came into her head, while the boy waited beside her, more bored than intrigued. Suddenly she reached out her hand and touched him. “Lordy!” she said, sincerely startled, and that was all she could say. José Arcadio felt his bones fillingup with foam, a languid fear, and a terrible desire to weep. The woman made no insinuations. But José Arcadio kept looking for her all night long, for the smell of smoke that she had under her armpits and that had got caught under his skin. He wanted to be with her all the time, he wanted her to be his mother, for them never to leave the granary, and for her to say “Lordy!” to him. One day he couldnot stand it any more and he went looking for her at her house. He made a formal visit, sitting uncomprehendingly in the living room without saying a word. At that moment he had no desire for her. He found her different, entirely foreign to the image that her smell brought on, as if she were someone else. He drank his coffee and left the house in depression. That night, during the frightful timeof lying awake, he desired her again with a brutal anxiety, but he did not want her that time as she had been in the granary but as she had been that afternoon.
    Days later the woman suddenly called him to her house, where she was alone with her mother, and she had him come into the bedroom with the pretext of showing him a deck of cards. Then she touched him with such freedom that he suffereda delusion after the initial shudder, and he felt more fear than pleasure. She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, heunderstood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother’s calm breathing, the dry cough ofhis father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out into the sleeping street. With all his heart he wanted the door to be barred and not just closed as she had promised him. But it was open. He pushed it with the tips of his fingers and thehinges yielded with a mournful and articulate moan that left a frozen echo inside of him. From the moment he entered, sideways and trying not to make a noise, he caught the smell. He was still in the hallway, where the woman’s three brothers had their hammocks in positions that he could not see and that he could not determine in the darkness as he felt his way along the hall to push open the bedroomdoor and get his bearings there so as not to mistake the bed. He found it. He bumped against the ropes of the hammocks, which were lower than he had suspected, and a man who had been snoring until then turned in his sleep and said in a kind of delusion, “It was Wednesday.” When he pushed open the bedroom door, he could not prevent it from scraping against the uneven floor. Suddenly, in the absolutedarkness, he understood with a hopeless nostalgia that he was completely disoriented. Sleeping in the narrow room were the mother, another daughter with her husband and two children, and the woman, who may not have been there. He could have guided himself by the smell if the smell had not been all over the house, so devious and at the same time so definite, as it had always been on