"Report to the barracks," Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía ordered him. "Put yourself at the disposition of the revolutionary court."
Then he signed the declaration and gave the sheets of paper to the emissaries, saying to them:
"Here an your papers, gentlemen. I hope you can get some advantage out of them."
Two days later, Colonel Gerineldo Márquez, accused of high treason, was condemned to death. Lying in his hammock, Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía was insensible to the pleas for clemency. On the eve of the execution, disobeying the order not to bother him, úrsula visited him in his bedroom. Encased in black, invested with a rare solemnity, she stood during the three minutes of the interview. "I know that you're going to shoot Geri-neldo," she said calmly, "and that I can't do anything to stop it. But I give you one warning: as soon as I see his body I swear to you by the bones of my father and mother, by the memory of José Arcadio Buendía, I swear to you before God that I will drag you out from wherever you're hiding and kill you with my own two hands." Before leaving the room, without waiting for any reply, she concluded: "It's the same as if you'd been born with the tail of a pig."
During that interminable night while Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez thought about his dead afternoons in Amaranta's sewing room, Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude. His only happy moments, since that remote afternoon when his father had taken him to see ice, had taken place in his silver workshop where he passed the time putting little gold fishes together. He had had to start thirty-two wars and had had to violate all of his pacts with death and wallow like a hog in the dungheap of glory in order to discover the privileges of simplicity almost forty years late.
At dawn, worn out by the tormented vigil, he appeared in the cell an hour before the execution. "The farce is over, old friend," he said to Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez. "Let's get out of here before the mosquitoes in here execute you." Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez could not repress the disdain that was inspired in him by that attitude.
"No, Aureli-ano," he replied. "I'd rather be dead than see you changed into a bloody tyrant."