order to identify them. When his father told him about his alarm at having forgotten even the most impressive
happenings of his childhood, Aureliano explained his method to him, and Jos?Arcadio Buendaa put it into
practice all through the house and later on imposed it on the whole village. With an inked brush he marked
everything with its name: table, chair, clock, door, wall, bed,runescape money, pan. He went to the corral and marked the animals
and plants: cow, goat, pig, hen, cassava, caladium, banana. Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a
loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but
that no one would remember their use. Then he was more explicit. The sign that he hung on the neck of the cow
was an exemplary proof of the way in which the inhabitants of Macondo were prepared to fight against loss of
memory: This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be
boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk. Thus they went on living in a reality that was
slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the
values of the written letters.
At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one
on the main street that said GOD EXISTS. In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been
written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an
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imaginary reality, one invented by themselves,runescape power leveling, which was less practical for them but more comforting. Pilar
Ternera was the one who contributed most to popularize that mystification when she conceived the trick of
reading the past in cards as she had read the future before. By means of that recourse the insomniacs began to
live in a world built on the uncertain alternatives of the cards,l2 adena, where a father was remembered faintly as the dark
man who had arrived at the beginning of April and a mother was remembered only as the dark woman who wore
a gold ring on her left hand, and where a birth date was reduced to the last Tuesday on which a lark sang in the
laurel tree. Defeated by those practices of consolation, Jos?Arcadio Buendaa then decided to build the memory
machine that he had desired once in order to remember the marvelous inventions of the gypsies. The artifact was
based on the possibility of reviewing every morning, from beginning to end, the totality of knowledge acquired
during one’s life. He conceived of it as a spinning dictionary that a person placed on the axis could operate by
means of a lever, so that in a very few hours there would pass before his eyes the notions most necessary for life.
He had succeeded in writing almost fourteen thousand entries when along the road from the swamp a strange-
looking old man with the sad sleepers?bell appeared, carrying a bulging suitcase tied with a rope and pulling a
cart covered with black cloth. He went straight to the house of Jos?Arcadio Buendaa.
Visitaci?n did not recognize him when she opened the door and she thought he had come with the idea of
selling something, unaware that nothing could be sold in a town that was sinking irrevocably into the quicksand
of forgetfulness. He was a decrepit man. Although his voice was also broken by uncertainty and his hands
seemed to doubt the existence of things,buy gw gold, it was evident that he came from the world where men could still sleep
and remember. Jos?Arcadio Buendaa found him sitting in the living room fanning himself with a patched black
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