The old man gave José Arcadio Buendía a drink of a gentle color and the light went on in his memory.

His eyes became moist from weeping even before he noticed himself in an absurd living room where objects were labeled and before he was ashamed of thesolemn nonsense written on the walls,and even before he recognized the newcomer with a dazzling glow of joy.

It was Melquíades.

While Macondo was celebrating the recovery of its memory,José Arcadio Buendía and Melquíades dusted off their old friendship.

The gypsy was inclined to stay in the town.

He really had been through death,but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.

Repudiatedby his tribe,having lost all of his supernatural faculties because of his faithfulness to life, he decided to take refuge in that corner of the world which had still not been discovered by death,dedicated to the operation of a daguerreotype laboratory.

José Arcadio Buendía had never heard of that invention.

But when he saw himself and his whole family fastened onto a sheet of iridescent metalfor an eternity, he was mute with stupefaction.

That was the date of the oxidized daguerreotype in which José Arcadio Buendía appeared with his bristly and graying hair, his cardboard collar attached to his shirt by a copper button,and an expression of startled solemnity,whom Úrsula described,dying with laughter, as a "frightened general."José Arcadio Buendía was,in fact, frightened on thatclear December morning when the daguerreotype was made,for he was thinking that people were slowly wearing away while his image would endure on a metallic plaque.