Actually, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had been in the country for more than a month. He was preceded by conflicting rumors, supposed to be in the most distant places at the same time, and even General Moncada did not believe in his return until it was officially announced that he had seized two states on the coast. “Congratulations, dear friend,?he told ?rsula, showing her the telegram. “You’ll soon have him here.??rsula was worried then for the first time. “And what will you do??she asked. General Moncada had asked himself that same question many times.
“The same as he, my friend,?he answered. “I’ll do my duty.?
At dawn on the first of October Colonel Aureliano Buendía attacked Macondo with a thousand well-armed men and the garrison received orders to resist to the end. At noon, while General Moncada was lunching with ?rsula, a rebel cannon shot that echoed in the whole town blew the front of the municipal treasury to dust. “They’re as well armed as we are,?General Moncada sighed, “but besides that they’re fighting because they want to.?At two o’clock in the afternoon, while the earth trembled with the artillery fire from both sides, he took leave of ?rsula with the certainty that he was fighting a losing battle.
“I pray to God that you won’t have Aureliano in the house tonight,?he said. “If it does happen that way, give him an embrace for me, because I don’t expect ever to see him again.?
That night he was captured when he tried to escape from Macondo, after writing a long letter to Colonel Aureliano Buendía in which he reminded him of their common aim to humanize the war and he wished him a final victory over the corruption of the militarists and the ambitions of the politicians in both parties. On the following day Colonel Aureliano Buendía had lunch with him in ?rsula’s house, where he was being held until a revolutionary court-martial decided his fate. It was a friendly gathering. But while the adversaries forgot the war to remember things of the past, ?rsula had the gloomy feeling that her son was an intruder. She had felt it ever since she saw him come in protected by a noisy military retinue, which turned the bedrooms inside out until they were convinced there was no danger. Colonel Aureliano Buendía not only accepted it but he gave strict orders that no one should come closer than ten feet, not even ?rsula, while the members of his escort finished placing guards about the house. He was wearing an ordinary denim uniform with no insignia of any kind and high boots with spurs that were caked with mud and dried blood. On his waist he wore a holster with the flap open and his hand, which was always on the butt of the pistol, revealed the same watchful and resolute tension as his look. His head, with deep recessions in the hairline now, seemed to have been baked in a slow oven. His face, tanned by the salt of the Caribbean, had acquired a metallic hardness. He was preserved against imminent old age by a vitality that had something to do with the coldness of his insides. He was taller than when he had left, paler and bonier, and he showed the first symptoms of resistance to nostalgia. “Good Lord,??rsula said to herself. “Now he looks like a man capable of anything.?He was. The Aztec shawl that he brought Amaranta, the remembrances he spoke of at lunch, the funny stories her told were simple leftovers from his humor of a different time. As soon as the order to bury the dead in a common grave was carried out, he assigned Colonel Roque Carnicero the minion of setting up courts-martial and he went ahead with the exhausting task of imposing radical reforms which would not leave a stone of the reestablished Conservative regime in place. “We have to get ahead of the politicians in the party,?he said to his aides. “When they open their eyes to reality they’ll find accomplished facts.?It was then that he decided to review the titles to land that went back a hundred years and he discovered the legalized outrages of his brother, Jos?Arcadio. He annulled the registrations with a stroke of the pen. As a last gesture of courtesy, he left his affairs for an hour and visited Rebeca to bring her up to date on what he was determined to do.