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As he laid on the hard cot staring up into nothing, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez found that the cell’s oppressive darkness reminded him of Amaranta. Those enigmatic bandages that dripped like tar from her fingers, the reason for which would now remain forever unknown to him, seemed to resemble the shadowed ceiling above him. He thought back to those musty, wordless afternoons in her sewing room and was filled with a sense of nostalgia.
All at once he was struck by the futility of it all. He could not take refuge even in these desiccated memories, for they had been severed by a moment after which all of his efforts had felt like the funeral melody of something that had already ceased to exist.
He remembered it very clearly. It was the day when he had repeated his wish to marry her. At the time he had believed it to be the reflexive accusation of one who had become so embittered, so utterly accustomed to and engrossed by solitude, that she could no longer conceive of a way to live without it. After all—he had declared his love for her when they were only children.
And yet, as he waited for an unceremonious death dwarfed only by the utter unceremoniousness of his life, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez allowed himself to wonder if there had not been a grain of truth in that spiteful utterance.
His memories of those distant years were vague and infected by sunbeams. Naturally, as the sons of founders who shared the names of their fathers, it had been expected that he and Magnífico Visbal would become friends with José Arcadio, the more energetic and outgoing of the Buendía children. But José Arcadio had been a little too old, a little too embroiled in his private passions, and when he left Macondo he had left as a stranger to them. Seeking to broaden the social circle of his only remaining son, José Arcadio Buendía had dragged Aureliano out of the workshop and led him by the hand to meet the sons of his fellow exodites. And so it was that on a cloudy day in August, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez first laid eyes on the boy who was to become his doom.
Of course, at that time he was not a colonel but merely an excited boy who had just discovered Chinese checkers. Always frail, often confined to the sickbed, his parents had until then barely let him leave the house. Out of guilt they bought him all sorts of knickknacks and curiosities, anything they could find, whatever they could afford to purchase from the travelers. It was precisely because he never complained that they continued to lavish him with playthings. Yet no matter what they brought him, he would say ‘thank you’ with the same small smile and return to sitting quietly in a shaft of sunlight, flipping through the pages of a tattered atlas and dreaming of rime-encrusted sea monsters off the Kamchatkan coast. In desperation, Gerineldo Márquez the elder finally presented him with a game for two and even invited his old acquaintance to their home, thinking that it would encourage his son to make friends.
To the surprise of all, it worked. Young Gerineldo was fascinated with the mechanics of Chinese checkers. He spent days in search of a way to play the game by himself, and when this became unsatisfying, counted the days until their visitor would arrive.
While José Arcadio Buendía spoke animatedly to his parents about his latest inventions in their drawing room, Gerineldo Márquez took the reticent Aureliano by the hand and led him to his room. He indicated the board on the floor. “See, you skip them like this.”
Aureliano, after a pause, sat down as well. They played seven rounds, one after the other, and Aureliano won all of them but Gerineldo Márquez did not mind even a bit. Aureliano Buendía seemed to possess a preternatural ability to predict the moves of his opponent. His eyes were bright and not a little cold. Although he had only ever read about it in the huge dog-eared atlas that his parents had found mysteriously in their luggage when they arrived in the place that was to become Macondo, Gerineldo Márquez thought that they looked like ice.
All through their games Aureliano did not speak. Only when Gerineldo showed him his drawings of the great sea-dragons with scales made of ice did he reveal his encounter with that miraculous substance. “They couldn’t live in the cold,” Aureliano insisted. His smile, keen-edged and asymmetrical, was nearly as unsettling as his eyes. “It would boil the water. Like a stove.”
After that they became the best of friends. Or, at any rate, friends as good as someone like Aureliano Buendía was capable of having. During their long quarantine from the illness of insomnia, Gerineldo Márquez would sometimes feel a twinge of worry for this not-person who lingered like a void at the back of his mind, as though the outline of a figure in a piece of paper after a doll had been cut out. Then he could only watch helplessly as Aureliano descended into his inexplicable obsession with Remedios Moscote, and then as they lived together their short life which ended in her death. He recalled with remarkable clarity the dryness of Aureliano’s eyes, and the matter-of-fact tone of voice with which he had said, staring down into his cup of coffee, “I killed her, didn’t I?” That was all he’d ever spoken on the matter, and Gerineldo could not answer him.
When war broke out he had followed Aureliano faithfully off to battle. What else was there to do? Despite the difficulty of imagining himself as a soldier, Gerineldo Márquez camped in the wilderness, slept under leaves that dripped water on them at all hours of the night, and sometimes did not sleep for weeks, dodging bullets and surviving fevers that made him see patterns like abstract paintings when he closed his eyes—until his childhood frailty, now visible only in his delicate wrists and the deep-carved moroseness of his face, had been almost entirely suppressed.
Owing largely to the successive deaths of their superiors, all three of them including Magnífico Visbal were eventually promoted to colonel, but it was understood even before he turned down the promotion that Aureliano should have been general.
Nevertheless, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was the one who truly believed. He believed in the ideals of the great Liberal Party, for which they shouted slogans and presumably for which they fought, in rights for illegitimate children and in the abolishment of the Church. He did not do this out of any personal stake in the matter. He did it because someone had to do it, and if Aureliano could not believe then he would have to do it for his sake.
For all this time Colonel Gerineldo Márquez had done this believing that he was performing a sort of service for his dear friend, the kind that required no acknowledgment and expected no repayment. But as he lay in the dark, with his hands folded on his chest like a corpse’s, he began to wonder if he had not been poisoning his friend all along.
If the war had changed all of them then it had transmuted Aureliano for the worst. He had always been cold, but it was at least a cold that shone in the light and refracted it into sunset colors, that could melt and be sculpted into various shapes. Now there was an emptiness to him, a kind of acidic weariness that permitted no ideals and much less human contact. He could no longer smile without making onlookers touch their faces for a trace of blood, so cutting was the expression.
If only, thought Colonel Gerineldo Márquez—if only he had made a greater effort to convince him of the righteousness of their cause. Perhaps he would still be himself. But his words had come far too late, and when Colonel Aureliano Buendía ordered him to surrender his arms and place himself at the mercy of the revolutionary court he had done so without a word of protest, obedient until the end.
From somewhere in the night the color of her funereal bandages, Amaranta’s words floated back to him. I’m not going to marry anyone, much less you. You love Aureliano so much that you want to marry me because you can’t marry him.
Was this love, after all? Suddenly he did not even know if he loved Amaranta. They were all this way, this family. They wrapped themselves in solitude so shining, so scaldingly cold, that one had no choice but to reach out and touch it. Colonel Gerineldo Márquez found himself thinking back to that singular, fatal afternoon when he was only thirteen. Upon hearing that he had felt nothing of that indescribable feeling for any girl, Aureliano’s face had brightened, brief and dazzling, in the way that could occur only on the face of one who almost never smiled.
“I’ll introduce you to Amaranta. If you marry her, you’ll be part of the family.”
In the morning when they came to take him to the firing squad, decided Gerineldo, he would tell him. There was no doubt in his heart that Colonel Aureliano Buendía would be there. He would tell him that it’s not your fault, Aurelito, because you are the kind of person with whom people tend to fall in love no matter how little you deserve it.
He would tell him all of this, and then he would die, and if any of it made the slightest crack in that heart like a globe of ice then Colonel Gerineldo Márquez would go to his perdition with a smile.