Free One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa Page B

bedrooms with windows on the courtyard, and a long porch protected from the heat of noon by a rose garden with a railing on which to place pots of ferns and begonias. She had the kitchen enlarged to hold two ovens. The granary where Pilar Ternera had read José Arcadio’s future was torn down and another twice as large built so that there would never be a lack of food in the house.She had baths built in the courtyard in the shade of the chestnut tree, one for the women and another for the men, and in the rear a large stable, a fenced-in chicken yard, a shed for the milk cows, and an aviary open to the four winds so that wandering birds could roost there at their pleasure. Followed by dozens of masons and carpenters, as if she had contracted her husband’s hallucinating fever,Úrsula fixed the position of light and heat and distributed space without the least sense of its limitations. The primitive building of the founders became filled with tools and materials, of workmen exhausted by sweat, who asked everybody please not to molest them, exasperated by the sack of bones that followed them everywhere with its dull rattle. In that discomfort, breathing quicklime and tar,no one could see very well how from the bowels of the earth there was rising not only the largest house in the town, but the most hospitable and cool house that had ever existed in the region of the swamp. José Arcadio Buendía,trying to surprise Divine Providence in the midst of the cataclysm, was the one who least understood it. The new house was almost finished when Úrsula drew him out of hischimerical world in order to inform him that she had an order to paint the front blue and not white as they had wanted. She showed him the official document. José Arcadio Buendía, without understanding what his wife was talking about, deciphered the signature.
    “Who is this fellow?” he asked.
    “The magistrate,” Úrsula answered disconsolately. “They say he’s an authority sent by the government.”
    Don Apolinar Moscote, the magistrate, had arrived in Macondo very quietly. He put up at the Hotel Jacob—built by one of the first Arabs who came to swap knickknacks for macaws—and on the following day he rented a small room with a door on the street two blocks away from the Buendía house. He set up a table and a chair that he had bought from Jacob, nailed up on the wall the shield of the republicthat he had brought with him, and on the door he painted the sign:
Magistrate
. His first order was for all the houses to be painted blue in celebration of the anniversary of national independence. José Arcadio Buendía, with the copy of the order in his hand, found him taking his nap in a hammock he had set up in the narrow office. “Did you write this paper?” he asked him. Don Apolinar Moscote,a mature man, timid, with a ruddy complexion, said yes. “By what right?” José Arcadio Buendía asked again. Don Apolinar Moscote picked up a paper from the drawer of the table and showed it to him. “I have been named magistrate of this town.” José Arcadio Buendía did not even look at the appointment.
    “In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper,” he said without losing his calm. “Andso that you know it once and for all, we don’t need any judges here because there’s nothing that needs judging.”
    Facing Don Apolinar Moscote, still without raising hisvoice, he gave a detailed account of how they had founded the village, of how they had distributed the land, opened the roads, and introduced the improvements that necessity required without having bothered the government and withoutanyone having bothered them. “We are so peaceful that none of us has died even of a natural death,” he said. “You can see that we still don’t have any cemetery.” No one was upset that the government had not helped them. On the contrary, they were happy that up until then it had let them grow in peace, and he hoped that it would continue leaving them