One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Read Free Book Online

on and there she was, changed into practically nothing. She was a languid little frog,with incipient breasts and legs so thin that they did not even match the size of José Arcadio’s arms, but she had a decision and a warmth that compensated for her fragility. Nevertheless, José Arcadio could not respond to her because they were in a kind of public tent where the gypsies passed through with their circus things and did their business, and would even tarry by the bed for a game of dice.The lamp hanging from the center pole lighted the wholeplace up. During a pause in the caresses, José Arcadio stretched out naked on the bed without knowing what to do, while the girl tried to inspire him. A gypsy woman with splendid flesh came in a short time after accompanied by a man who was not of the caravan but who was not from the village either, and they both began to undress in frontof the bed. Without meaning to, the woman looked at José Arcadio and examined his magnificent animal in repose with a kind of pathetic fervor.
    “My boy,” she exclaimed, “may God preserve you just as you are.”
    José Arcadio’s companion asked them to leave them alone, and the couple lay down on the ground, close to the bed. The passion of the others woke up José Arcadio’s fervor. On the first contactthe bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud. But she bore the impact with a firmness of character and a bravery that were admirable. José Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air towarda state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her language. It was Thursday. On Saturday night, José Arcadio wrapped a red cloth around his head and left with the gypsies.
    When Úrsula discovered his absence she searched for him all through the village. In theremains of the gypsy camp there was nothing but a garbage pit among the still smoking ashes of the extinguished campfires. Someone who was there looking for beads among the trash told Úrsula that the night before he had seen her son in the tumult of the caravan pushing the snake-man’s cage on a cart. “He’s become a gypsy!” she shouted to her husband, who had not shown the slightest sign of alarmover the disappearance.
    “I hope it’s true,” José Arcadio Buendía said, grinding in his mortar the material that had been ground a thousand times and reheated and ground again. “That way he’ll learn to be a man.”
    Úrsula asked where the gypsies had gone. She went along asking and following the road she had been shown, thinking that she still had time to catch up to them. She kept getting fartheraway from the village until she felt so far away that she did not think about returning. José Arcadio Buendía did not discover that his wife was missing until eight o’clock at night, when he left the material warming in a bed of manure and went to see what was wrong with little Amaranta, who was getting hoarse from crying. In a few hours he gathered a group of well-equipped men, put Amaranta inthe hands of a woman who offered to nurse her, and was lost on invisible paths in pursuit of Úrsula. Aureliano went with them. Some Indian fishermen, whose language they could not understand, told them with signs that they had not seen anyone pass. After three days of useless searching they returned to the village.
    For several weeks José Arcadio Buendía let himself be overcome by consternation.He took care of little Amaranta like a mother. He bathed and dressed her, took her to be nursed four times a day, and even sang to her at night the songs that Úrsula never knew how to sing. On a certain occasion Pilar Ternera volunteered to do the household chores until