EXCERPT FROM 100YOS

EXCERPT FROM 100YOS

Colonel Aureliano Buendía started thirty-two uprisings and lost every single one of them. He sired seventeen sons with seventeen different women, and all of his sons were exterminated, one by one, in a single night, before the eldest had reached his thirty-fifth year of age. He escaped from fourteen terrorist attacks, seventy-three ambushes, and an execution by firing squad. He survived a cup of coffee laced with enough strychnine to kill a horse. He refused to accept the Medal of Merit, which he had been offered by the President of the Republic. He reached the rank of commander-in-chief of the revolutionary ranks, with jurisdiction and command from a border to the other, and became the most dreaded man in the eyes of the Government, but he never let anyone take a photo of him.