One Hundred Years of Solitude
Chapter I
Finally, one Tuesday in December, at lunchtime, all at once he released the whole weight of his torment. The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wrath of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: ..."
“The earth is round, like an orange.”
Úrsula lost her patience.
–“If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself!” she
shouted.
–“But don’t try to put your gypsy ideas into the heads of the
children.”
José Arcadio Buendía, impassive, did not let himself be frightened by
the desperation of his wife, who, in a seizure of rage, mashed the
astrolabe against the floor. He built another one, he gathered the men
of the village in his little room, and he demonstrated to them, with
theories that none of them could understand, the possibility of
returning to where one had set out by consistently sailing east.
The whole village was convinced that José Arcadio Buendía had lost his
reason, when Melquíades returned to set things straight. He gave public
praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure astronomical
speculation had evolved a theory that had already been proved in
practice, although unknown in Macondo until then, and as a proof of his
admiration he made him a gift that was to have a profound influence on
the future of the village: the laboratory of an alchemist.
By then Melquíades had aged with surprising rapidity. On his first trips he seemed to be the same age as José Arcadio Buendía. But while the latter had preserved his extraordinary strength, which permitted him to pull down a horse by grabbing its ears, the gypsy seemed to have been worn dowse by some tenacious illness. It was, in reality, the result of multiple and rare diseases contracted on his innumerable trips around the world. According to what he himself said as he spoke to José Arcadio Buendía while helping him set up the laboratory, death followed him everywhere, sniffing at the cuffs of his pants, but never deciding to give him the final clutch of its claws. He was a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind.
“He had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malayan archipelago
leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagascar
an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in the Strait of Magellan”
That prodigious creature, said to possess the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with widespread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of the centuries had skated. But in spite of his immense wisdom and his mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life.
He would complain of the ailments of old age, he suffered from the most insignificant economic difficulties, and he had stopped laughing a long time back because scurvy had made his teeth drop out. On that suffocating noontime when the gypsy revealed his secrets, José Arcadio Buendía had the certainty that it was the beginning of a great friendship. Aureliano, who could not have been more than five at the time, would remember him for the rest of his life as he saw him that afternoon, sitting against the metallic and quivering light from the window, lighting up with his deep organ voice the darkest reaches of the imagination, while down over his temples there flowed the grease that was being melted by the heat.