Rebeca kept on waiting
"Let’s go, Buendía," he told him. "Our time has come."
"So that’s what it was," the colonel replied. "I was dreaming that my sores had burst."
Rebeca Buendía got up at three in the morning when she learned that Aureliano would be shot. She stayed in the bedroom in the dark, watching the cemetery wall through the half-opened window as the bed on which she sat shook with José Arcadio’s snoring. She had waited all week with the same hidden persistence with which during different times she had waited for Pietro Crespi’s letters. "They won’t shoot him here," José Arcadio, told her. "They’ll shoot him at midnight in the barracks so that no one will know who made up the squad, and they’ll bury him right there." Rebeca kept on waiting. "They’re stupid enough to shoot him here," she said. She was so certain that she had foreseen the way she would open the door to wave goodbye. "They won’t bring him through the streets," José Arcadio insisted, with six scared soldiers and knowing that the people are ready for anything." Indifferent to her husband’s logic, Rebeca stayed by the window.
"Don’t shoot," the captain said to José Arcadio. "You were sent by Divine Providence."
Another war began right there. Captain Roque Carnicero and his six men left with Colonel Aureliano Buendía to free the revolutionary general Victorio Medina, who had been condemned to death in Riohacha. They thought they could save time by crossing the mountains along the trail that José Arcadio Buendía had followed to found Macondo, but before a week was out they were convinced that it was an impossible undertaking. So they had to follow the dangerous route over the outcroppings; with no other munitions but what the firing squad had. They would camp near the towns and one of them, with a small gold fish in his hand, would go in disguise in broad daylight to contact the dormant Liberals, who would go out hunting on the following morning and never return. When they saw Riohacha from a ridge in the mountains, General Victorio Medina had been shot. Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s men proclaimed him chief of the revolutionary forces of the Caribbean coast with the rank of general. He assumed the position but refused the promotion and took the stand that he would never accept it as long as the Conservative regime was in power. At the end of three months they had succeeded in arming more than a thousand men, but they were wiped out.
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