One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa

Aureliano spent interminable hours in the abandoned laboratory, learning the art of silverwork by his own experimentation. He had shot up so fast that in a short time the clothing left behind by his brother no longer fit him and he began to wear his father’s,but Visitación had to sew pleats in the shirt and darts in the pants, because Aureliano had notacquired the corpulence of the others. Adolescence had taken away the softness of his voice and had made him silent and definitely solitary, but, on the other hand, it had restored the intense expression that he had had in his eyes when he was born. He concentrated so much on his experiments in silverworkthat he scarcely left the laboratory to eat. Worried over his inner withdrawal, José Arcadio Buendía gave him the keys to the house and a little money, thinking that perhaps he needed a woman. But Aureliano spent the money on muriatic acid to prepare some aqua regia and he beautified the keys by plating them with gold. His excesses were hardly comparable to those of Arcadio and Amaranta, whohad already begun to get their second teeth and still went about all day clutching at the Indians’ cloaks, stubborn in their decision not to speak Spanish but the Guajiro language. “You shouldn’t complain,” Úrsula told her husband. “Children inherit their parents’ madness.” And as she was lamenting her misfortune, convinced that the wild behavior of her children was something as fearful as a pig’stail, Aureliano gave her a look that wrapped her in an atmosphere of uncertainty.
    “Somebody is coming,” he told her.
    Úrsula, as she did whenever he made a prediction, tried to break it down with her housewifely logic. It was normal for someone to be coming. Dozens of strangers came through Macondo every day without arousing suspicion or secret ideas. Nevertheless, beyond all logic, Aurelianowas sure of his prediction.
    “I don’t know who it will be,” he insisted, “but whoever it is is already on the way.”
    That Sunday, in fact, Rebeca arrived. She was only eleven years old. She had made the difficult trip from Manaure with some hide dealers who had taken on the task of delivering her along with a letter to José Arcadio Buendía, but they could not explain precisely who the person waswho had asked the favor. Her entire baggage consisted of a small trunk, a littlerocking chair with small hand-painted flowers, and a canvas sack which kept making a
cloc-cloc-cloc
sound, where she carried her parents’ bones. The letter addressed to José Arcadio Buendía was written in very warm terms by someone who still loved him very much in spite of time and distance, and who felt obliged bya basic humanitarian feeling to do the charitable thing and send him that poor unsheltered orphan, who was a second cousin of Úrsula’s and consequently also a relative of José Arcadio Buendía, although farther removed, because she was the daughter of that unforgettable friend Nicanor Ulloa and his very worthy wife Rebeca Montiel, may God keep them in His holy kingdom, whose remains the girl wascarrying so that they might be given Christian burial. The names mentioned, as well as the signature on the letter, were perfectly legible, but neither José Arcadio Buendía nor Úrsula remembered having any relatives with those names, nor did they know anyone by the name of the sender of the letter, much less the remote village of Manaure. It was impossible to obtain any further information from thegirl. From the moment she arrived she had been sitting in the rocker, sucking her finger and observing everyone with her large, startled eyes without giving any sign of understanding what they were asking her. She wore a diagonally striped dress that had been dyed black, worn by use, and a pair of scaly patent leather boots. Her hair was held behind her ears with bows of black ribbon. She wore ascapular with the images worn away by sweat, and on her right wrist the fang of a carnivorous animal mounted