YEARS LATER on his deathbed Aureli-ano Segun-do would remember the rainy afternoon in June when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son. Even though the child was languid and weepy, with no mark of a Buendía, he did not have to think twice about naming him.
"We'll call him José Arcadio," he said.
Fernanda del Carpio, the beautiful woman he had married the year before, agreed. úrsula, on the other hand, could not conceal a vague feeling of doubt. Throughout the long history of the family the insistent repetition of names had made her draw some conclusions that seemed to be certain. While the Aureli-anos were withdrawn, but with lucid minds, the José Arcadios were impulsive and enterprising, but they were marked with a tragic sign. The only cases that were impossible to classify were those of José Arcadio Segun-do and Aureli-ano Segun-do. They were so much alike and so mischievous during childhood that not even Santa Sofía de la Piedad could tell them apart. On the day of their christening Amaranta put bracelets on them with their respective names and dressed them in different colored clothing marked with each one's initials, but when they began to go to school they decided to exchange clothing and bracelets and call each other by opposite names. The teacher, Melchor Escalona, used to knowing JoséArcadio Segun-do by his green shirt, went out of his mind when he discovered that the latter was wearing Aureli-ano Segun-do's bracelet and that the other one said, nevertheless, that his name was Aureli-ano Segun-do in spite of the fact that he was wearing the white shirt and the bracelet with José Arcadio Segun-do's name. -From then on he was never sure who was who. Even when they grew up and life made them different. úrsula still wondered if they themselves might not have made a mistake in some moment of their intricate game of confusion and had become changed forever. Until the beginning of adolescence they were two synchronized machines. They would wake up at the same time, have the urge to go to the bathroom at the same time, suffer the same upsets in health, and they even dreamed about the same things. In the house, where it was thought that they coordinated their actions with a simple desire to confuse, no one realized what really was happening until one day when Santa Sofía de la Piedad gave one ofthem a glass of lemonade and as soon as he tasted it the other one said that it needed sugar. Santa Sofía de la Piedad, who had indeed forgotten to put sugar in the lemonade, told úrsula about it. "That's what they're all like," she said without surprise. "crazy from birth." In time things became less disordered. The one who came out of the game of confusion with the name of Aureli-ano Segun-do grew to monumental size like his grandfathers, and the one who kept the name of José Arcadio Segun-do grew to be bony like the colonel, and the only thing they had in common was the family's solitary air. Perhaps it was that crossing of stature, names, and character that made úrsula suspect that they had been shuffled like a deck of cards since childhood.
The decisive difference was revealed in the midst of the war, when José Arcadio Segun-do asked Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez to let him see an execution. Against úrsula's better judgment his wishes were satisfied. Aureli-ano Segun-do, on the other hand, shuddered at the mere idea of witnessing an execution. He preferred to stay home. At the age of twelve he asked úrsula what was in the locked room. "Papers," she answered. "Melquíades' books and the strange things that he wrote in his last years." Instead of calming him, the answer increased his curiosity. He demanded so much, promised with such insistence that he would not mistreat the things, that úrsula, gave him the keys. No one had gone into the room again since they had taken Melquíades' body out and had put on the door a padlock whose parts had become fused together with rust. But when Aureli-ano Segun-do opened the windows a familiar light entered that seemed accustomed to lighting the room every day and there was not the slightest trace of dust orcobwebs, with everything swept and clean, better swept and cleaner than on the day of the burial, and the ink had not dried up in the inkwell nor had oxidation diminished the shine of the metals nor had the embers gone out under the water pipe where José Arcadio Buendía had vaporized mercury. On the shelves were the books bound in a cardboard--like material, pale, like tanned human skin, and the manuscripts were intact. In spite of the room's having been shut up for many years, the air seemed fresher than in the rest of the house. Everything was so recent that several weeks later, when úrsula went into the room with a pail of water and a brush to wash the floor, there was nothing for her to do. Aureli-ano Segun-do was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked úrsula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macon-do.
"What's happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here any more."