“Cowards!?he shouted. “I only wish it was Colonel Aureliano Buendía.?
Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera’s bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jos?had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards. Captain Aquiles Ricardo, who was really the one destined to die that night, did indeed die, four hours before Aureliano Jos? As won as the shot was heard he was brought down by two simultaneous bullets whose origin was never established and a shout of many voices shook the night.
“Long live the Liberal party! Long live Colonel Aureliano Buendía!?
At twelve o’clock, when Aureliano, Jos?had bled to death and Carmelita Montiel found that the cards showing her future were blank, more than four hundred men had filed past the theater and discharged their revolvers into the abandoned body of Captain Aquiles Ricardo. A patrol had to use a wheelbarrow to carry the body, which was heavy with lead and fell apart like a water-soaked loaf of bread.
Annoyed by the outrages of the regular army, General Jos?Raquel Moncada used his political influence, put on his uniform again, and assumed the civil and military leadership of Macondo. He did not expect, however, that his conciliatory attitude would be able to prevent the inevitable. The news in September was contradictory. While the government announced that it was maintaining control throughout the country, the Liberals were receiving secret news of armed uprisings in the interior. The regime would not admit a state of war until it was proclaimed in a decree that had followed a court-martial which had condemned Colonel Aureliano Buendía to death in absentia. The first unit that captured him was ordered to carry the sentence out. “This means he’s come back,??rsula said joyfully to General Moncada. But he himself knew nothing about it.