Many years later, face before the snuff squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía must have remembered that remote afternoon in which his father took him to meet the glacier. Macondo was then a hamlet of twenty clay and cane shacks built at the bank of a river whose lubricious currents hustled over a bed of glossy white stones enormous as Pterodactyl eggs. The world was so fresh that many things went in want of name, so to mention them one had to brand them with the finger. Every year sometime around March this snaggletoothed gypsy family would plant their tent near town and run riot with whistles and kettledrums to give notice of their newest fabrications. The leading gypsy, a corpulent imam with hummingbird hands and a bristling wattle, introduced himself as Melquíades and made a violent public show of what he himself called the eighth marvel of the Macedonian alchemico-scholars. He went door to door hauling two metallic lumps, sending everyone into a dazed panic to see their cauldrons and forceps and hotplates collapsing to the floor. The nasty desperation of nails and screws trying to displace themselves rattled the timbers until they cracked; even objects lost awhile turned up from the spots that’d been so thoroughly rifled through and shuffled along in a loose flocked turbulence after Melquíades’ magic ingots.

“Things have their own life,” the gypsy divulged in gruff tones, “Is everything in dispute with spirit resuscitating?”

José Aureliano Buendía, whose reckless imagination always went further than the wit of nature, even past miraculous or magical agilities, thought that it was possible that useless invention could serve to eviscerate gold from the earth. Melquíades, ever an honorific man, forewarned him:

“It doesn’t work that way.”

But José Aureliano Buendía didn’t believe at that time in gypsy honesty, so he traded in his mule and a Scapegoat Certificate™ for the two magnetized lumps. Úrsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on these animals to stretch the thrift of domestic patrimony, didn’t manage to dissuade him.

“Very soon we’ll have too much gold. We’ll have to strew it about the floor of the house!” retorted her husband.

For several months he insisted on proving his knack for conjecture. He explored the region inch by inch, including river residues, dragging the iron rocks and reciting Melquíades’ exorcistic chant in a somber voice. The only thing he got to disinter was a 15th century armoire with its hinges soldered shut by debris and rust, the interior of which had the spongy resonance of a jail cell filled with stones. When José Aureliano Buendía and his four expeditionary homies succeeded in prying the armoire open, they found in it a calcified skeleton collared by a penny reliquary. Inside the locket was a snippet of some Renaissance broad’s hair.