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Colonel Gerineldo Márquez couldn't remember the first time that he looked at his best friend in all the whole wide world and knew that he was doomed.
He figures it must have been sometime around the insomnia sickness. Those long viscous days that flowed into each other like molasses, syrupy lengths of unreality stretching like the strands from the little candy animals. Those short, violent jags of not-knowing and gripping panic. And then Melquiades came and the Buendias helped to give out the cure and Gerineldo suddenly knew, as if he had known all his life, that Aureliano, later the Colonel Aureliano Buendia, was doomed in a way so utter and severe that there was no possible avoidance or abrogation of his fate.
It was simply what was going to be.
He said as much, once, to one of the girls at Catalino’s. She simply looked at him with her dark eyes and laughed, low and strong as coffee. “Aren’t we all?”
The Buendias were the first family of Macondo, though the other families that had founded the town would insist on their position as equal co-founders alongside that clearwater river. Yes, they had followed from their old village, through the mountains and swamps, and yes, they had borne every hardship right alongside Ursula Iguarán and Jose Arcadio Buendia. They may have stopped when the Buendia’s did, the insistence went, but look at the houses, see their equal sunlight and positions, no one in the shade of another person, not here in Macondo
And they had kept following the Buendias after that. Gerineldo was born soon after Aureliano, within a matter of months, though of course a Buendia would always hold the distinction of being the first human creature born in Macondo.
Years later, the thing that Amaranta had said to him once, that he only courted her because he could not court Aureliano, stung not because it was untrue, but because of how close she had gotten while not understanding a single, solitary thing about Macondo, fate, love, doom, or even Gerineldo and Aureliano themselves.
–
There was a woman coming out of Aureliano’s tent. This was not unusual in and of itself, though right this moment it carried a little bit of strangeness. The war was not going well, right this particular moment. Perhaps the mother had sent her serviceably-pretty daughter with the pretty green eyes as a morale booster, Gerineldo mused, holding the tent flap open for her as she left.
The tent smelled of sex and dirt, but Aureliano wasn’t in his hammock anymore, standing in his underclothes at the table across which were spread some papers. He didn’t look up at his friend’s arrival. “She looked familiar. Has her mother sent her before?” Gerineldo joked with his friend.
Aureliano let out a bare huff of laughter. “Did she? I hadn’t noticed.”
Gerineldo supposed that wouldn’t be the sort of thing his friend would notice, even with her pretty green eyes. She wasn’t Remedios, after all. No one could ever be Remedios, for Aureliano. Gerineldo might have thought that his wife’s death might have broken Aureliano, but he had the idea, the idea that had snuck in and settled without him noticing, that Aureliano had always been doomed to break. If it hadn’t been the death of Remedios, it would have been some other tragedy the human condition was heir to, and where would they be now then?
Aureliano sighed deeply at something on one of the papers, giving his face a tired rub before seeming to remember his manners. He gestured Gerineldo to the other camp stool and sat himself. It was Gerineldo who uncapped the bottle, pouring the dark liquor into tiny glasses. It was terrible but it was strong. There had to be some perks to leading this little troop of loyal Liberals across the wilds and into the fields, after all.
“Why do you think they send them?” Gerineldo mused, halfway through the second glass.
Aureliano looked blankly back at him for a moment, like he couldn’t fathom the purpose of such a question. “I don’t know.”
The question seemed to fall out of Aureliano’s mind almost as soon as it had been asked, but it kept Gerineldo up at night sometimes. Lying in his hammock, thinking of the magnetic, doomed face of his best friend, he wondered if it might not be something about Colonel Aureliano Buendia that made men want to follow him and women want him, despite his exceeding disinterest in both. Despite the circumstances of war and desperation and dirt. Despite the doom Gerineldo could feel in his very bones.
–
The war seemed to be going well, for once.
The lass was somewhat put-out, it appeared, when she was informed that she was the second girl sent to the Colonel with the stature of a General. Gerineldo eyed his friend, already absorbed in the problem of the next mountain pass. He would be at it until he found his plan or sleep took him.
Gerineldo stood, offering his arm to the young woman. She was rather pretty, all told, big dark eyes and long, gently curling black hair. “Please, don’t let us send you away without refreshments.” He offered her his arm in the manner of a gentleman.
She paused only briefly, sizing up the other colonel, then nodded briefly and took Gerineldo’s arm. Later, afterward, when he returned to Aureliano’s tent, the other man seemed to have hardly noticed he was gone.
–
Gerineldo watched them lead his friend from the room, from this high-ceilinged, echoing schoolhouse out into the pre-dawn stillness sending the ghosts of light into the room. His head was held high, but even in the dim light he looked... distracted, Gerineldo supposed the word was. Like he was working on a problem in his head as he walked. Gerineldo himself thought it odd that his doom didn’t seem to look any different on him on this, the day that he was slated to die, than it had on any other day before that. The doom hung off of him like it always had, that constant over his shoulder.
So he was hardly surprised when, only an hour or so later, Aureliano walked back in at the head of the group, opening Gerineldo’s cell door without hesitation or explanation.
Gerineldo grasped his arm in a handshake and knew all over again that he would follow this man to the ends of the earth, doom or no.
–
Amaranta eyed him, the disdain she had lived with so long dripping from her like the black from her bandage, like the fine thread from her fingers. Like she could see all of Gerineldo, everything from the girl in town to that night in the tent in the field. Like she could see everything but her own doom, and her brother’s and maybe, Gerineldo thought, that was it. Maybe the whole Buendia family was doomed.
And so he shook his head and smiled, as one would at a small child with a wrong assumption. “No, no that isn’t it at all.”