During the course of that week, at different places along the coast, his seventeen sons were hunted down like rabbits by invisible criminals who aimed at the center of their crosses of ash. Aureli-ano Triste was leaving the house with his mother at seven in the evening when a rifle shot came out of the darkness and perforated his forehead. Aureli-ano Centeno was found in the hammock that he was accustomed to hang up in the factory with an icepick between his eyebrows driven in up to the handle. Aureli-ano Serrador had left his girl friend at her parents' house after having taken her to the movies and was returning through the well-lighted Street of the Turks when someone in the crowd who was never identified fired a revolver shot which knocked him over into a caldron of boiling lard. A few minutes later someone knocked at the door of the room where Aureli-ano Arcaya was shut up with a woman and shouted to him: "Hurry up, they're killing your brothers." The woman who was with him said later that Aureli-ano Arcaya jumped out of bed and opened the door and was greeted with the discharge of a Mauser that split his head open. On that night of death, while the house was preparing to hold a wake for the four corpses, Fernanda ran through the town like a madwoman looking for Aureli-ano Segun-do, whom Petra Cotes had locked up in a closet, thinking that the order of extermination included all who bore the colonel's name. She would not let him out until the fourth day, when the telegrams received from different places along the coast made it clear that the fury of the invisible enemy was directed only at the brothers marked with the crosses of ash. Amaranta fetched the ledger where she had written down the facts about her nephews and as the telegrams arrived she drew lines through the names until only that of the eldest remained. They remembered him very well because of the contrast between his dark skin and his green eyes. His name was Aureli-ano Amador and he was a carpenter, living in a village hidden in the foothills. After waiting two weeks for the telegram telling of his death, Aureli-ano Segun-do sent a messenger to him in order to warn him, thinking that he might not know about the threat that hung over him. The emissary returned with the news that Aureli-ano Amador was safe. The night of the extermination two men had gone to get him at his house and had shot at him with their revolvers but they had missed the cross of ashes. Aureli-ano Amador had been able to leap over the wall of the courtyard and was lost in the labyrinth of the mountains, which he knew like the back of his hand thanks to the friendship he maintained with the Indians, from whom he bought wood. Nothing more was heard of him.
Those were dark days for Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía. The president of the republic sent him a telegram of condolence in which he promised an exhaustive investigation and paid homage to the dead men. At his command, the mayor appeared at the services with four funeral wreaths, which he tried to place on the coffins, but the colonel ordered him into the street. After the burial he drew up and personally submitted to the president of the republic a violent telegram, which the telegrapher refused to send. Then he enriched it with terms of singular aggressiveness, put it in an envelope, and mailed it. As had happened with the death of his wife, as had happened to him so many times during the war with the deaths of his best friends, he did not have a feeling of sorrow but a blind and directionless rage, a broad feeling of impotence. He even accused Father Antonio Isabel of complicity for having marked his sons with indelible ashes so that they-could be identified by their enemies. The decrepit priest, who could nolonger string ideas together and who was beginning to startle his parishioners with the wild interpretations he gave from the pulpit, appeared one afternoon at the house with the goblet in which he had prepared the ashes that Wednesday and he tried to anoint the whole family with them to show that they could be washed off with water. But the horror of the misfortune had penetrated so deeply that not even Fernanda would let him experiment on her and never again was a Buendía seen to kneel at the altar rail on Ash Wednesday.
Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía did not recover his calm for a long time. He abandoned the manufacture of little fishes, ate with great difficulty, and wandered all through the house as if walking in his sleep, dragging his blanket and chewing on his quiet rage. At the end of three months his hair was ashen, his old waxed mustache poured down beside his colorless lips, but, on the other hand, his eyes were once more the burning coals that had startled those who had seen him born and that in other days had made chairs rock with a simple glance. In the fury of his torment he tried futilely to rouse the omens that had guided his youth along dangerous paths into the desolate wasteland of glory. He was lost, astray in a strange house where nothing and no one now stirred in him the slightest vestige of affection. Once he opened Melquíades' room, looking for the traces of a past from before the war, and he found only rubble, trash, piles of waste accumulated over all the years of abandonment. Between the covers of thebooks that no one had ever read again, in the old parchments damaged by dampness, a livid flower had prospered, and in the air that had been the purest and brightest in the house an unbearable smell of rotten memories floated. One morning he found úrsula weeping under the chestnut tree at the knees of her dead husband. Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía was the only inhabitant of the house who still did not see the powerful old man who had been beaten down by half a century in the open air. "Say hello to your father," úrsula told him. He stopped for an instant in front of the chestnut tree and once again he saw that the empty space before him did not arouse an affection either.
"What does he say?" he asked.