the tormenting hammering and the constant noise of wooden lathings ceased in a silence that was startled at the
order and neatness of the music. They all ran to the parlor. Jos?Arcadio Buendaa was as if struck by lightning, not
because of the beauty of the melody, but because of the automatic working of the keys of the pianola, and he set
up Melquaades?camera with the hope of getting a daguerreotype of the invisible player. That day the Italian had
lunch with them. Rebeca and Amaranta, serving the table, were intimidated by the way in which the angelic man
with pale and ringless hands manipulated the utensils. In the living room,cheap eve online isk, next to the parlor, Pietro Crespi taught
them how to dance. He showed them the steps without touching them, keeping time with a metronome,l2 power leveling, under the
friendly eye of 2rsula, who did not leave the room for a moment while her daughters had their lesson. Pietro
Crespi wore special pants on those days, very elastic and tight, and dancing slippers,runescape power leveling, “You don’t have to worry so
much,?Jos?Arcadio Buendaa told her. “The man’s a fairy.?But she did not leave off her vigilance until the
apprenticeship was over and the Italian left Macondo. Then they began to organize the party. 2rsula drew up a
strict guest list, in which the only ones invited were the descendants of the founders, except for the family of
Pilar Ternera, who by then had had two more children by unknown fathers. It was truly a high-class list, except
that it was determined by feelings of friendship, for those favored were not only the oldest friends of Jos?Arcadio
Buendaa’s house since before they undertook the exodus and the founding of Macondo, but also their sons and
grandsons, who were the constant companions of Aureliano and Arcadio since infancy, and their daughters, who
were the only ones who visited the house to embroider with Rebeca and Amaranta. Don Apolinar Moscote, the
benevolent ruler whose activity had been reduced to the maintenance from his scanty resources of two policemen
armed with wooden clubs, was a figurehead. In older to support the household expenses his daughters had
opened a sewing shop, where they made felt flowers as well as guava delicacies,conan power leveling, and wrote love notes to order.
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But in spite of being modest and hard-working, the most beautiful girls in Iowa, and the most skilled at the new
dances, they did not manage to be considered for the party.
While 2rsula and the girls unpacked furniture, polished silverware, and hung pictures of maidens in boats full
of roses, which gave a breath of new life to the naked areas that the masons had built, Jos?Arcadio Buendaa
stopped his pursuit of the image of God, convinced of His nonexistence, and he took the pianola apart in order to
decipher its magical secret. Two days before the party, swamped in a shower of leftover keys and hammers,
bungling in the midst of a mix-up of strings that would unroll in one direction and roll up again in the other, he
succeeded in a fashion in putting the instrument back together. There had never been as many surprises and as
much dashing about as in those days, but the new pitch lamps were lighted on the designated day and hour. The
house was opened, still smelling of resin and damp whitewash, and the children and grandchildren of the
founders saw the porch with ferns and begonias, the quiet rooms, the garden saturated with the fragrance of the
roses, and they gathered together in the parlor, facing the unknown invention that had been covered with a white
sheet. Those who were familiar with the piano, popular in other towns in the swamp, felt a little disheartened, but
more bitter was 2rsula’s disappointment when she put in the first roll so that Amaranta and Rebeca could begin
the dancing and the mechanism did not work. Melquaades, almost blind by then,wow power leveling, crumbling with decrepitude,
used the arts of his timeless wisdom in an attempt to fix it. Finally Jos?Arcadio Buendaa managed, by mistake, to
move a device that was stuck and the music came out, first in a burst and then in a flow of mixed-up notes.
Beating against the strings that had been put in without order or concert and had been tuned with temerity,aoc gold, the
hammers let go. But the stubborn descendants of the twenty-one intrepid people who plowed through the
mountains in search of the sea to the west avoided the reefs of the melodic mix-up and the dancing went on until
dawn.
Pietro Crespi came back to repair the pianola. Rebeca and Amaranta helped him put the strings in order and
helped him with their laughter at the mix-up of the melodies. It was extremely pleasant and so chaste in its way
that 2rsula ceased her vigilance. On the eve of his departure a farewell dance for him was improvised with the
pianola and with Rebeca he put on a skillful demonstration of modern dance,cheap eve online isk, Arcadio and Amaranta matched
them in grace and skill. But the exhibition was interrupted because Pilar Ternera, who was at the door with the
onlookers, had a fight, biting and hair pulling, with a woman who had dared to comment that Arcadio had a
woman’s behind. Toward midnight Pietro Crespi took his leave with a sentimental little speech, and he promised
to return very soon. Rebeca accompanied him to the door, and having closed up the house and put out the lamps,
she went to her room to weep. It was an inconsolable weeping that lasted for several days, the cause of which
was not known even by Amaranta. Her hermetism was not odd. Although she seemed expansive and cordial, she
had a solitary character and an impenetrable heart. She was a splendid adolescent with long and firm bones, but
she still insisted on using the small wooden rocking chair with which she had arrived at the house, reinforced
many times and with the arms gone. No one had discovered that even at that age she still had the habit of sucking
her finger. That was why she would not lose an opportunity to lock herself in the bathroom and had acquired the
habit of sleeping with her face to the wall. On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the
begonia porch,runescape power leveling, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when
she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those
secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to
weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would
be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered,
overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of
primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her
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pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she
instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the
sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man
who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his
fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of
his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart. One
the beach at Singapore and that his body had been thrown into the deepest part of the Java Sea. The children had
no interest in the news. They insisted that their father take them to see the overwhelming novelty of the sages of
Memphis that was being advertised at the entrance of a tent that, according to what was said, had belonged to
King Solomon. They insisted so much that Jos?Arcadio Buendaa paid the thirty reales and led them into the
center of the tent, where there was a giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head,cheap eve online isk, with a copper ring in his nose
and a heavy iron chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest
gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles
in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were
waiting for an immediate explanation, Jos?Arcadio Buendaa ventured a murmur:
“It’s the largest diamond in the world.?
“No,?the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.?
Jos?Arcadio Buendaa, without understanding, stretched out his hand toward the cake, but the giant moved it
away. “Five reales more to touch it,?he said. Jos?Arcadio Buendaa paid them and put his hand on the ice and held
it there for several minutes as his heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery. Without
knowing what to say, he paid ten reales more so that his sons could have that prodigious experience. Little Jos?
Arcadio refused to touch it. Aureliano, on the other hand, took a step forward and put his hand on it, withdrawing
it i mmediately. “It’s boiling,?he exclaimed, startled. But his father paid no attention to him. Intoxicated by the
evidence of the miracle, he forgot at that moment about the frustration of his delirious undertakings and
Melquaades?body, abandoned to the appetite of the squids. He paid another five reales and with his hand on the
cake, as if giving testimony on the holy scriptures, he exclaimed:
“This is the great invention of our time.?
Chapter 2
WHEN THE PIRATE Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, 2rsula Iguarn’s great-great-
grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control
of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days.
She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of
walking, for she never walked again in public. She gave up all kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion
that her body gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard,swg power leveling, for she did not dare fall asleep lest
she dream of the English and their ferocious attack dogs as they came through the windows of her bedroom to
submit her to shameful tortures with their red-hot irons. Her husband, an Aragonese merchant by whom she had
two children, spent half the value of his store on medicines and pastimes in an attempt to alleviate her terror.
Finally he sold the business and took the family to live far from the sea in a settlement of peaceful Indians
located in the foothills, where he built his wife a bedroom without windows so that the pirates of her dream
would have no way to get in.
In that hidden village there was a native-born tobacco planter who had lived there for some time, Don Jos?
Arcadio Buendaa, with whom 2rsula’s great-great-grandfather established a partnership that was so lucrative that
within a few years they made a fortune. Several centuries later the great-great-grandson of the native-born