La Fundación José Arcadio Buendía, el Hielo y los Gitanos - Cien Años de Soledad

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE — PART 1 "The Founding: José Arcadio Buendía, the Ice, and the Gypsies" Part One — The origin of Macondo, the family that founded it, the gypsies who brought the outside world, and the man who believed the earth was round. Macondo was founded by a man who had killed another man over a matter of honor and who could not stop listening to the dead man. José Arcadio Buendía killed Prudencio Aguilar in a duel. It was not a crime without cause—Prudencio had questioned José Arcadio's manhood in front of the entire town, and in the Caribbean code of that time, that was exactly the kind of offense that was washed away with blood. He killed him with a lance. And then Prudencio Aguilar began to appear to him. Not as a ghost of terror, but as a ghost of companionship: melancholic, with the lance still in his throat, searching for water to wash away the dried blood. He saw him at dawn by the washbasin. He saw him in the courtyard. The house became filled with the dead man's presence in a way that Úrsula—his wife, the woman who would organize and sustain everything her husband dreamed of and destroyed in the years to come—could no longer tolerate. So José Arcadio Buendía decided to leave. He gathered the town's most daring young men and organized an expedition to cross the mountains and find the sea. Not because he knew where the sea was—he didn't—but because he needed to put enough distance between himself and the dead man's ghost so that the apparition couldn't follow him. They walked for weeks. Twenty-one families accompanied them. They crossed the mountains, descended to the other side, and when they reached a place where a river of white stones flowed between banks of fine sand, José Arcadio Buendía decided that this was the place. Macondo was born there—on the bank of that river, in the middle of the jungle, far from everything.