Rebeca shuddered. As in the memory of a dream she saw herself entering the house as a very small girl, with the trunk and the little rocker, and a bag whose contents she had never known. She remembered a bald gentleman dressed in linen and with his collar closed by a gold button, who had nothing to do with the king of hearts. She remembered a very young and beautiful woman with warm and perfumed hands, who had nothing in common with the jack of diamonds and his rheumatic hands, and who used to put flowers in her hair and take her out walking in the afternoon through a town with green streets.
"I don't understand," she said.
Pilar Ternera seemed disconcerted:
"I don't either, but that's what the cards say."
Rebeca was so preoccupied with the enigma that she told it to José Arcadio Buendía, and he scolded her for believing in the predictions of the cards, but he undertook the silent task of searching closets and trunks, moving furniture and turning over beds and floorboards looking for the bag of bones. He remembered that he had not seen it since the time of the rebuilding. He secretly summoned the masons and one of them revealed that he had walled up the bag in some bedroom because it bothered him in his work. After several days of listening, with their ears against the walls, they perceived the deep cloccloc. They penetrated the wall and there were the bones in the intact bag. They buried it the same day in a grave without a stone next to that of Melquíades, and José Arcadio Buendía returned home free of a burden that for a moment had weighed on his conscience as much as the memory of Prudencio Aguilar. When he went through the kitchen he kissed Rebeca on the forehead.
"Get those bad thoughts out of your head," he told her. "You're going to be happy."
The friendship with Rebeca opened up to Pilar Ternera the doors of the house, closed by úrsula since the birth of Arcadio. She would arrive at any hour of the day, like a flock of goats, and would unleash her feverish energy in the hardest tasks. Sometimes she would go into the workshop and help Arcadio sensitize the daguerreotype plates with an efficiency and a tenderness that ended up by confusing him. That woman bothered him. The tan of her skin, her smell of smoke, the disorder of her laughter in the darkroom distracted his attention and made him bump into things.
On a certain occasion Aureliano was there working on his silver, and Pilar Ternera leaned over the table to admire his laborious patience. Suddenly it happened. Aureliano made sure that Arcadio was in the darkroom before raising his eyes and meeting those of Pilar Ternera, whose thought was perfectly visible, as if exposed to the light of noon.
"Well," Aureliano said. "Tell me what it is."
Pilar Ternera bit her lips with a sad smile.
"That you'd be good in a war," she said. "Where you put your eye, you put your bullet."