Amaranta úrsula, who had inherited certain attractions of Remedios the Beauty, spent the time that she had formerly wasted tormenting úrsula at her schoolwork, and she began to show good judgment and a dedication to study that brought back to Aureli-ano Segun-do the high hopes that Meme had inspired in him. He had promised her to send her to finish her studies in Brussels, in accord with a custom established during the time of the banana company, and that illusion had brought to attempt to revive the lands devastated by the deluge. The few times that he appeared at the house were for Amaranta úrsula, because with time he had become a stranger to Fernan-da and little Aureli-ano was becoming withdrawn as he approached puberty. Aureli-ano Segun-do had faith that Fernanda's heart would soften with old age so that the child could join in the life of the town where no one certainly would make any effort to speculate suspiciously about his origins.
But Aureli-ano himself seemed to prefer the cloister of solitude and he did not show the least desire to know the world that began at the street door of the house. When úrsula had the door of Melquíades' room opened he began to linger about it, peeping through the half-opened door, and no one knew at what moment he became close to José Arcadio Segun-do in a link of mutual affection. Aureli-ano Segun-do discovered that friendship a long time after it had begun, when he heard the child talking about the killing at the station. It happened once when someone at the table complained about the ruin into which the town had sunk when the banana company had abandoned it, and Aureli-ano contradicted him with maturity and with the vision of a grown person. His point of view, contrary to the general interpretation, was that Macon-do had been a prosperous place and well on its way until it was disordered and corrupted and suppressed by the banana company, whose engineers brought on the deluge as a pretext to avoid promises made to the workers.
Speaking with such good sense that to Fernanda he was like a sacrilegious parody of Jews among the wise men, the child described with precise and convincing details how the army had machine-gunned more than three thousand workers penned up by the station and how they loaded the bodies onto a two-hundred-car train and threw them into the sea. Convinced as most people were by the official version that nothing had happened, Fernanda was scandalized with the idea that the child had inherited the anarchist ideas of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía and told him to be quiet. Aureli-ano Segun-do, on the othand, recognized his twin brother's version. Actually, in spite the fact that everyone considered him mad, José Arcadio Segun-do was at that time the most lucid inhabitant of the house. He taught little Aureli-ano how to read and write, initiated him in the study of the parchments, and he inculcated him with such a personal interpretation of what the banana company had meant to Macon-do that many years later, when Aureli-ano became part of the world, one would have thought that he was telling a hallucinated version, because it was radically opposed to the false one that historians had created and consecrated in the schoolbooks.
room where the arid air never penetrated, nor the dust, nor the heat, both had the atavistic vision of an old man, his back to the window, wearing a hat with a brim like the wings of a crow who spoke about the world many years before they had been born. Both described at the same time how it was always March there and always Monday, and then they understood that José Arcadio Buendía was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth of the fact that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room. José Arcadio Segun-do had managed, furthermore, to classify the cryptic letters of the parchments. He was certain that they corresponded to an alphabet of forty-seven to fifty-three characters, which when separated looked like scratching and scribbling, and which in the fine hand of Melquíades looked like pieces of clothing put out to dry on a line. Aureli-ano remembered having seen a similar table in the English encyclopedia, so he brought it to the room to compare it with that of José Arcadio Segun-do. They were indeed the same.