One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Page A

with an inexplicable fluidity, as if he were endowed with some instinct of direction based on an immediate prescience. One day he forgot to put in his false teeth, which at night he left in a glass of water beside his bed, and he never put them in again. When Úrsula undertook the enlargement of the house, she had them build him a special room next to Aureliano’s workshop, far fromthe noise and bustle of the house, with a window flooded with light and a bookcase where she herself put in order the books that were almost destroyed by dust and moths, the flaky stacks of paper covered with indecipherable signs, and the glass with his false teeth, where some aquatic plants with tiny yellow flowers had taken root. The new place seemed to please Melquíades, because he was neverseen any more, not even in the dining room. He only went to Aureliano’s workshop, where he would spend hours on end scribbling his enigmatic literature on the parchments that he had brought with him and that seemed to have been made out of some dry material that crumpled like puff paste. There he ate the meals that Visitación brought him twice a day, although in the last days he lost his appetiteand fed only on vegetables. He soon acquired the forlorn look that onesees in vegetarians. His skin became covered with a thin moss, similar to that which flourished on the antique vest that he never took off, and his breath exhaled the odor of a sleeping animal. Aureliano ended up forgetting about him, absorbed in the composition of his poems, but on one occasion he thought he understood somethingof what Melquíades was saying in his groping monologues, and he paid attention. In reality, the only thing that could be isolated in the rocky paragraphs was the insistent hammering on the word
equinox, equinox, equinox
, and the name of Alexander von Humboldt. Arcadio got a little closer to him when he began to help Aureliano in his silverwork. Melquíades answered that effort at communicationat times by giving forth with phrases in Spanish that had very little to do with reality. One afternoon, however, he seemed to be illuminated by a sudden emotion. Years later, facing the firing squad, Arcadio would remember the trembling with which Melquíades made him listen to several pages of his impenetrable writing, which of course he did not understand, but which when read aloud were like encyclicalsbeing chanted. Then he smiled for the first time in a long while and said in Spanish: “When I die, burn mercury in my room for three days.” Arcadio told that to José Arcadio Buendía and the latter tried to get more explicit information, but he received only one answer: “I have found immortality.” When Melquíades’ breathing began to smell, Arcadio took him to bathe in the river on Thursdaymornings. He seemed to get better. He would undress and get into the water with the boys, and his mysterious sense of orientation would allow him to avoid the deep and dangerous spots. “We come from the water,” he said on a certain occasion. Much time passed in that way without anyone’s seeing him in the house except on the night when he made a pathetic effort to fix the pianola, and when he wouldgo to the river with Arcadio, carrying under his arm a gourd and a bar of palm oil soap wrapped in a towel. One Thursday,before they called him to go to the river, Aureliano heard him say: “I have died of fever on the dunes of Singapore.” That day he went into the water at a bad spot and they did not find him until the following day, a few miles downstream, washed up on a bright bend in the riverand with a solitary vulture sitting on his stomach. Over the scandalized protests of Úrsula, who wept with more grief than she had had for her own father, José Arcadio Buendía was opposed to their burying him. “He is immortal,” he said, “and he himself revealed the formula of his resurrection.” He brought out the forgotten water pipe and put a kettle of mercury to boil next to