The regular army had to protect the house. He arrived amid insults, spat upon, accused of having accelerated the war in order to sell it for a better price. He was trembling with fever and cold and his armpits were studded with sores again. Six months before, when she had heard talk about the armistice, úrsula had opened up and swept out the bridal chamber and had burned myrrh in the corners, thinking that he would come back ready to grow old slowly among Remedios' musty dolls. But actually, during the last two years he had paid his final dues to life, including growing old. When he passed by the silver shop, which úrsula had prepared with special diligence, he did not even notice that the keys were in the lock. He did not notice the minute, tearing destruction that time had wreaked on the house and that, after such a prolonged absence, would have looked like a disaster to any man who had kept his memories alive. He was not pained by the peeling of the whitewash on the walls or the dirty, cottony cobwebs inthe corners or the dust on the begonias or the veins left on the beams by the termites or the moss on the hinges or any of the insidious traps that nostalgia offered him. He sat down on the porch, wrapped in his blanket and with his boots still on, as if only waiting for it to clear, and he spent the whole afternoon watching it rain on the begonias. úrsula understood then that they would not have him home for long. "If it's not the war," she thought, "it can only be death." It was a supposition that was so neat, so convincing that she identified it as a premonition.
That night, at dinner, the supposed Aureli-ano Segun-do broke his bread with his right hand and drank his soup with his left. His twin brother, the supposed José Arcadio Segundo, broke his bread with his left hand and drank his soup with his right. So precise was their coordination that they did not look like two brothers sitting opposite each other but like a trick with mirrors. The spectacle that the twins had invented when they became aware that they were equal was repeated in honor of the new arrival. But Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía did not notice it. He seemed so alien to everything that he did not even notice Remedios the Beauty as she passed by naked on her way to her bedroom. úrsula was the only one who dared disturb his, abstraction.
"If you have to go away again," she said halfway through dinner, "at least try to remember how we were tonight."
Then Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía realized, without surprise, that úrsula was the only human being who had succeeded in penetrating his misery, and for the first time in many years he looked her in the face. Her skin was leathery, her teeth decayed, her hair faded and colorless, and her look frightened. He compared her with the oldest memory that he had of her, the afternoon when he had the premonition that a pot of boiling soup was going to fall off the table, and he found her broken to pieces. In an instant he discovered the scratches, the welts, the sores, the ulcers, and the scan that had been left on her by more than half a century of daily life, and he saw that those damages did not even arouse a feeling of pity in him. Then he made one last effort to search in his heart for the place where his affection had rotted away and he could not find it. On another occasion, he felt at least a confused sense of shame when he found the smell of úrsula on his own skin, and more than once he felt her thoughts interfering with his. But all of that had been wiped out by the war. Even Remedios, his wife, at that moment was a hazy image of someone who might have been his daughter. The countless women he had known on the desert of love and who had spread his seed all along the coast had left no trace in his feelings. Most of them had come into his room in the dark and had left before dawn, and on the following day they were nothing but a touch of fatigue in his bodily memory. The only affection that prevailed against time and the war was that which he had felt for his brother José Arcadio when they both were children, and it was not based on love but on complicity.
"I'm sorry," he excused himself from úrsula's request. "It's just that the war has done away with everything."