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

the body, whichlittle by little was filling with blue bubbles. Don Apolinar Moscote ventured to remind him that an unburied drowned man was a danger to public health. “None of that, because he’s alive,” was the answer of José Arcadio Buendía, who finished the seventy-two hours with the mercurial incense as the body was already beginning to burst with a livid fluorescence, the soft whistles of which impregnatedthe house with a pestilential vapor. Only then did he permit them to bury him, not in any ordinary way, but with the honors reserved for Macondo’s greatest benefactor. It was the first burial and the best-attended one that was ever seen in the town, only surpassed, a century later, by Big Mama’s funeral carnival. They buried him in a grave dug in the center of the plot destined for the cemetery, witha stone on which they wrote the only thing they knew about him: MELQUÍADES . They gave him his nine nights of wake. In the tumult that gathered in the courtyard to drink coffee, tell jokes, and play cards, Amaranta found a chance to confess her love to Pietro Crespi, who a few weeks before had formalized his promise to Rebeca and had set up a store for musical instruments and mechanical toys inthe same section where the Arabs had lingered in other times swapping knick-knacks for macaws, and which the people called the Street of the Turks. The Italian, whose head covered with patentleather curls aroused in women an irrepressible need to sigh, dealt with Amaranta as with a capricious little girl who was not worth taking seriously.
    “I have a younger brother,” he told her. “He’s comingto help me in the store.”
    Amaranta felt humiliated and told Pietro Crespi with a virulent anger that she was prepared to stop her sister’s wedding even if her own dead body had to lie across the door. The Italian was so impressed by the dramatics of the threat that he could not resist the temptation to mention it to Rebeca. That was how Amaranta’s trip, always put off by Úrsula’s work, was arrangedin less than a week. Amaranta put up no resistance, but when she kissed Rebeca good-bye she whispered in her ear:
    “Don’t get your hopes up. Even if they send me to the ends of the earth I’ll find some way of stopping you from getting married, even if I have to kill you.”
    With the absence of Úrsula, with the invisible presence of Melquíades, who continued his stealthy shuffling through the rooms,the house seemed enormous and empty. Rebeca took charge of domestic order, while the Indian woman took care of the bakery. At dusk, when Pietro Crespi would arrive, preceded by a cool breath of lavender and always bringing a toy as a gift, his fiancée would receive the visitor in the main parlor with doors and windows open to be safe from any suspicion. It was an unnecessary precaution, for theItalian had shown himself to be so respectful that he did not even touch the hand of the woman who was going to be his wife within the year. Those visits were filling the house with remarkable toys. Mechanical ballerinas, music boxes, acrobatic monkeys, trotting horses, clowns who played the tambourine: the rich and startling mechanical fauna that Pietro Crespi brought dissipated José Arcadio Buendía’saffliction over the death of Melquíades and carried him back to his old days as an alchemist. He lived at that time in a paradise of disemboweledanimals, of mechanisms that had been taken apart in an attempt to perfect them with a system of perpetual motion based upon the principles of the pendulum. Aureliano, for his part, had neglected the workshop in order to teach little Remedios to readand write. At first the child preferred her dolls to the man who would come every afternoon and who was responsible for her being separated from her toys in order to be bathed and dressed and seated in the parlor to receive the visitor. But Aureliano’s patience and devotion finally won her over, up to the point where she would spend many hours