Although Aureliano felt himself linked to the four friends by a common affection and a common solidarity, even to the point where he thought of them as if they were one person, he was closer to Gabriel than to the others. The link was born on the night when he casually mentioned Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Gabriel was the only one who did not think that he was making fun of somebody. Even the proprietress, who normally did not take part in the conversation argued with a madam’s wrathful passion that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, of whom she had indeed heard speak at some time, was a figure invented by the government as a pretext for killing Liberals. Gabriel, on the other hand, did not doubt the reality of Colonel Aureliano Buendía because he had been a companion in arms and inseparable friend of his great-great-grandfather Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. Those fickle tricks of memory were even more critical when the killing of the workers was brought up. Every time that Aureliano mentioned the matter, not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana company had never existed. So that Aureliano and Gabriel were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained. Gabriel would sleep wherever time overtook him. Aureliano put him up several times in the silver workshop, but he would spend his nights awake, disturbed by the noise of the dead people who walked through the bedrooms until dawn. Later he turned him over to Nigromanta, who took him to her well-used room when she was free and put down his account with vertical marks behind the door in the few spaces left free by Aureliano’s debts.
pre:Chapter 18 next:Chapter 20