"They can bring him out now," he ordered

But don't forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the fir.st sign of disrespect."

COLONEL GERINELDO MARQUEZ was the first to perceive the emptiness of the war. In his position as civil and military leader of Macondo he would have telegraphic conversations twice a week with Colonel Aureliano Buendia. At first those exchanges would determine the course of a fiesh-and-blood war, the perfectly defined outlines of which told them at any moment the exact spot where it was and the prediction of its future direction. Although he never let himself be pulled into the. area of confidences, no.t even by his closest friends, Colonel Aureliano Buendia still had at that time the familiar tone that made it possible to identifY him at the other end of the wire. Many times he would prolong the talks beyond the expected limit and let them drift into comments of a domestic nature. Little by little, how-ever, and as the war became more intense and widespread, his image was fading away into a universe of u.nreality. The characteristics of his speech were more and more uncertain, and they came together and combined to form words that were gradually losing all mean-ing. Colonel Gerineldo Marquez limited himself then to just listen-ing, burdened by the impression that he was in telegraphic contact with a stranger from another world

At the end, Colonel Gerineldo Marquez looked at the desolate streets, the crystal water on the almond trees, and he found himself lost in solitude.

as then that he decided that no human being, not even Ursula, could come closer to him than ten feet. In the center· of the chalk circle that his aides would draw wherever he stopped, and which only he could enter, he would decide with brief orders that had no appeal the fate of the world.

An inner coldness which shattered his bones and tortured him even in the heat of the sun would not let him sleep for several months, until it became a habit.

Alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, he sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories

ABOUT THIS TIME an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby's door and asked him if he had anything to say. , 'Mything to say about what?". inquired Gatsby politely. "Why-any statement to give out." It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby's name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn't reveal or didn't fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hur-ried out "to see."

"My God, 1 believe the man's coming," said Tom. "Doesn't he know she doesn't want him?" "She says she does want him." "She has a big dinner party and he won't know a soul there." He frowned. "1 wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, 1 may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish." Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses. "C "'d M Sl 'T'''' 1 "\Vl ' ome on, Sal r. oane to .lom, were ate. weve got to go." And then to me: "Tell him we couldn't wait, will you?

"These things excite me so)" she whispered. "If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I'll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card. I'm giving out green--"

We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault-Gatsby had been called to the phone, and I'd enjoyed these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now. "How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?" The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my shoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes. "Wha'?" A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local dub to-morrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker's defence: "Oh, she's all right now. When she's had five or six cock-tails she always starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone." "I do leave it alone," affirmed the accused hollowly. "We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: 'There's somebody that needs your help, Doc.'" "She's much obliged, I'm sure," said another friend, with-out gratitude, "but you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in the pool." ''Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool," mumbled Miss Baedeker. "They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey." "Then you ought to leave it alone," countered Doctor Civet. "Speak for yourself!" cried Miss Baedeker violently. "Your hand shakes. I wouldn't let you operate on me!"

"1 wouldn't ask too much of her," 1 ventured. "You can't repeat the past." "Can't repeat the past?" he cried incredulously. "Why of course you can!" He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. ''I'm going to fIx everything just the way it was before," he said, nodding determinedly. "She'll see." He talked a lot about the past, and 1 gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but ifhe could once return to a cer-tain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could fInd out what that thing was ....

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."

She never charged for the service. She never refused the favor, just as she never refused the coundess men who sought her out, even in the twilight of her maturity, without giving her money or love and only occasionally pleasure.

His pas-sion for Amaranta had been extin~ished without leaving any scars.

Aureliano and the last name. of the mother all the sons that the colonel had implanted up and down his theater of war: seven-teen

He had fled from her in an attempt to wipe out her memory, not only through distance but by means of a muddled fury that his companions at arms took to be boldness, but the more her image wallowed in the dunghill of the war, the more the war resembled Amaranta

Ten days after a joint communique by the government and the opposition announced the end of the war, there was news of the first armed uprising of Colonel Aureliano Buendia on the western bor-der. His small and poorly armed force was scattered in less than a week. But during that year, while Liberals and Conservatives tried to make the country believe in reconciliation, he attempted seven other revolts.

Early one morning during the time when she refused Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, AurelianoJose awoke with the feeling that he could not breathe. He felt Amaranta's fingers search-ing across his stomach like warm and anxious little caterpillars. Pre-tending to sleep, he changed his position to make it easier, and then he felt the hand without the black bandage diving like a blind shell-fish into the algae of his anxiety. Although they seemed to ignore what both of them knew and what each one knew that the other knew, from that night on they were yoked together in an inviolable complicity.

When he was alone, Jose Arca-dio Buendia consoled himself with the dream of the infinite rooms. He dreamed that he was getting out of bed, opening the door, and going into an identical room with the same bed with a wrought-iron head, the same wicker chair, and the same small picture of the Virgin of Help on the back wall. From that room he would go into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another that was just the same, the door of which would open into another one just the same, and then into another exactly alike, and so on to infinity. He liked to go from room to room, as in a gallery of parallel mir-rors, until Prudencio Aguilar would touch him on the shoulder. Then he would go back from room to room, walking in reverse, going back over his trail, and he would find Prudencio Aguilar in the room o

I'm not going to marry anyone," she told him, "much less you. You love Aureliano so much that you want to marry me because you can't marry him."

n the haze of convalescence, surrounded by Remedios' dusty dolls, Colonel Aureliano Buendia brought back the decisive periods of his existence by reading his poetry. He started writing again. For many hours, balancing on the edge of the surprises of a war with no future, in rhymed verse he resolved his experience on the shores of death. Then his thoughts became so clear that he was able to examine them forward and backward.

Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

A brewer had built it early in the "period" craze a decade before, and there was a story that he'd agreed to pay five years' taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family-he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray.

Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy, who was sitting, frightened but graceful, on the edge of a stiff chair. "We've met before," muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me, and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand. ''I'm sorry about the clock," he said.

... old sport.

Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.

mation declared him victorious in Villanueva, defeated in Guaca-mayal, devoured by Motil6n Indians, dead in a village in the swamp, and up in arms again in Urumita. The Liberal leaders, who at that moment were negotiating for participation in the congress, branded him an adventurer who did not represent the party.

"Don't be simple, Crespi." She smiled. "I wouldn't marry you even if I were dead."

From the moment in which she entered the room Ursula felt inhibited by the maturity of her son, by his aura of command, by the glow of authority that radiated from his skin

He looked paler to Ursula than when he had left, a little tailer, and more solitary than ever

HE WAR WAS OVER in May. Two weeks before the gov-ernment made the official announcement in a high-sounding proclamation, which promised merciless punishment for those who had started the rebellion, Colonel Aureliano Buendia fell prisoner just as he was about to reach the western frontier disguised as an Indian witch doctor. Of the twenty-one men who had followed him to war, fourteen fell in combat, six were wounded, and only one accompanied him at the moment of final defeat: Colonel Gerineldo Marquez.

"Bastards!" he shouted. "Long live the Liberal party!"

Ursula was in the doorway waiting, indif-ferent to the cannon shots that had opened up a hole in the front of the house next door. The rain was letting up, but the streets were as slippery and as smooth as melted soap, and one had to guess dis-tances in the darkness. Arcadio left Amaranta with Ursula and made an attempt to face two soldiers who had opened up with heavy firing from the corner. The old pistols that had been kept for many years in the bureau did not work. Protecting Arcadio with her body, Ursula tried to drag him toward the house. "Come along in the name of God," she shouted at him. "There's been enough madness!

COLONEL AURELIANO BUENDIA organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty-five. He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse. He refused the Order of Merit, which the President of the Republic awarded him. He rose to be Commander in Chief of the revolutionary forces, with jurisdiction and command from one border to the other, and the man most feared by the government, but he never let himself be photographed.

It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn't think-ing of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, lim-ited person, who dealt in universal scepticism, and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: "There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.

A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ven-tura road one night, and ripped a front wheel offhis car. The girl who was with him got into the papers, too, because her arm was broken-she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

tragic nose

the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State sena-tor and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence, and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Qon S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. ("Rot-Gut") Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly-they came to gamble, and when Fer-ret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.

All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer.

"Not madness," Aurcliano said. "War. And don't call me Aure-lito anymore. Now I'm Colonel Aurcliano Buendia."

Aureliano Buendia, armed with table knives and sharpened tools, took the garrison by surprise, seized the weapons, and in the courtyard executed the captain and the four soldiers who had killed the woman.

They dragged out Dr. Noguera, tied him to a tree in the square, and shot him without any due process of law. Father Nicanor tried to impress the military authorities with the miracle of levitation and had his head split open by the butt of a soldier's ~ifle.

Only Rebeca succumbed to thc first impact.

He did not succeed in becoming incor-porated into the family

ompletely covered with tattoos of words in several languages intcr-hvincd in blue and red.

he link witll ti,e Buendias consolidated Don Apoli-nar Moscote's authority in the town

little Remedios woke up in the middle of the night soaked in a hot broth which had exploded in her insides with a kind of tearing belch, and she died three days later, poisoned by her own blood, with a pair of twins crossed in her stomach

One Saturday, not even having collected the price of the doors, he fell into a desperate confusion.

There was barely enough time to teach her how to wash herself, get dressed 'by her-selr, and understand the fundamental business of a home. They made her urinate over hot bricks in order to cure her of the habit of wetting her be

When Ursula and Amaranta returned he was still tied to the trunk of t.he chestnut tree by his hands and feel, soaked with rain and in a state of total innocence. They spoke to him and he looked at them without recognizing them, saying things they did not understand. Ursula untied his wrists and ankles, lacerated by the pressure of the rope, and left him tied only by the waist. Later on they built him a shelter of palm branches to protect him from the sun and the rain.

That woman bothered him. The tan of her skin, her smell of smoke, the disorder of her laughter in the dark-room distracted his altcntion and made him bump into things.

He lived at that time in a par-adise of disemboweled animals, of mechanisms that had been taken apart in an attemplto perfect t.he~ with a system of perpetual motion based upon the principles of the pendulum

That day he went into the water at a bad spot and they did not find him until the rollowing day, a few miles downstream, washed up on a bright bend in the river and with a solitary vulture sitting on his stomach

I've come to sleep with you," he said

The house became full of love

Aureliano listened to it simply because everything, even music, reminded him of Remedios.

She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation

Finally Jose Arcadio Buendia managed, by mistake, to move a device that was stuck and the music came Qut, first in a burst and then in a flow of mixed-up notes. Beating against the strings that had been put in without order or concert and had been tuned with temerity, the hammers let go

The image of Remedios, the magistrate's younger daughter, who, because of her age, could have been his daughter, kept paining him in some part or his body. It was a phys-ical sensaLion that almost bothered him when he walked, like a peb-ble in his shoe.

The magistrate," Ursula answered disconsolately. "They say he's an authority sent by the government."

at ten o'clock in the morning, when he reached Catarina's store, the girl had left town.

he would have years later as he faced the firing squad.

Melquiades.

But the system demanded so much vigi-lance and moral strength that many succumbed to Ule spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less prac-tical for Ulem but more comforting.

and so on and on in a vicious circle that lasted entire nights.

It was never established whelller it was the rhubarb or the beatings that had effect, or both of them together, but the truth was that in a few weeks Rebeca began to show signs of recovery

Somebody is coming," he told her

went back to being the cntcIprising man of earlier days when he had decided upon the layout of the streets and the location of the new houses so that no onc would enjoy privileges that everyone did not have. He acquired sllch authority among the new ~rr.ivals tl1at foundaLions were not laid or walls built without his being consulted, and it was decided that he shollid be the one in charge of the distribution of the land.

The people who had come with Ursula

He's become a gypsy!"

That was how they undertook the crossing of the mountains

had nothing to do with thc invisible power that taught him how to breathe {i'om within and con-trol his heartbeats, and that had permittcd him to understand why men are afraid of death.

They were afraid that those two healthy products of two races that had interbred over the centuries would suffer the shame of breeding iguanas.

All right," he said. "Tell them to come help me take the things out of the boxes."

Ursula replied with a soft firmness: "If I have to die for the rest of you to stay here, I will die."

Ursula lost her patience. ceir you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourselfl" she shouted. "But don't try to put your gypsy ideas into the heads of the children."

IZl"ading over what I have written so far,

"It came off," some one explained. He nodded. "At first I din' notice we'd stopped." A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders, he remarked in a determined voice: "Wonder'ff tell me where there's a gas'line station?" At least a dozen men, some of them a little better ofT than ~1~ was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer J01l1ed by any physical bond. "Back out," he suggested after a moment. "Put her in reverse." "But the wheel's om" He hesitated. "No harm in trying," he said.

. looked around. Most of the remaining women were now ILlvII1g fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jor-,LlIl's p~rty, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dl\senslOn. One of the men was talking with curious inten-"Iy to a :ou~g ac~ress, and his wife, after attempting to laugh .11 I he S1t~atlon m a dignified and indifferen t way, broke ,I"wn entlrely and resorted to flank attacks-at intervals .11,' ;tpp~ared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and III"cd: You promised!" into his ear. Ihe reluctance to go home was not confined to way-II .11 d men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably ., ,11('1" men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were \ III pa thizing with each other in slightly raised voices

ndingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-or seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey

Your face is familiar" he s'lid poll't"ly "\vr' . . .. . ,c', ~. weren t you In Ihe Thu·d DIvIsIOn during the war?"

a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop, too-didn't cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?"

"You'll give McKee a letter of introduction to your hus-band, so he can do some studies of him." His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. "George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump, or so

"Is it a boyar a girl?" she asked delicately. "That dog? That dog's a boy." "It's a bitch," said Tom decisively. "Here's your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it."

en I heard footsteps on a stairs and in Illoment the thickish figure of a woman blocked o~t the ligh: 110m the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and I.IIntly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as ',I IInc wome~ can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue : 111~',p~-de-chI~e, con~ained no fac~t or ~leam of beauty, but Ie was an ImmedIately perceptIble vItality about her as if ill(' nerves of her body were continually smouldering

You see I think everything's terrible anyhow," she went on in a convinced way. "Everybody thinks so-the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. "Sophisticated-God, I'm sophisticated!

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day