[Pilar Ternera's] five daughters, who inherited a burning seed, had been lost on the byways of life since… — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[Pilar Ternera's] five daughters, who inherited a burning seed, had been lost on the byways of life since adolescence. Of the two sons she managed to raise, one died fighting in the forces of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and the other was wounded and captured at the age of fourteen when he tried to steal a crate of chickens in a town in the swamp. In a certain way, Aureliano José was the tall, dark man who had been promised her for half a century by the king of hearts, and like all men sent by the cards he reached her heart when he was already stamped with the mark of death. She saw it in the cards.
Sus cino hijas, herederas de una semilla ardiente, se perdieron por los vericuetos de la vida desde la adolescencia. De los dos varones que alcanzó a criar, uno murió peleando en la huestes del coronel Aureliano Buendía y otro fue herido y capturado a los catorce años, cuando intentaba robarse un huacal de gallinas en un pueblo de la ciénaga. En cierto modo, Aureliano José fue el hombre alto y moreno que durante medio siglo le anunció el rey de copas, y que modo todos los enviados de las barajas llegó a su corazón cuando ya estaba marcado por el signo de la muerte. Ella lo vio en los naipes.
p. 188Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Úrsula Iguarán's great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days. [ . . . ] Her husband, an Aragonese merchant by whom she had two children, spent half the value of his store on medicines and pastimes in an attempt to alleviate her terror. Finally he sold the business and took the family to live far from the sea in a settlement of peaceful Indians [ . . . ] Several centuries later the great-great-grandson of the native-born planter married the great-great-granddaughter of the Aragonese. Therefore, every time that Úrsula became exercised over her husband’s mad ideas, she would leap back over three hundred years of fate and curse the day that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha.
p. 30
Aureliano gave her a look that wrapped her in an atmosphere of uncertainty.
"Somebody is coming," he told her.
Úrsula, as she did whenever he made a prediction, tried to break it down with her housewifely logic. It was normal for someone to be coming.
p. 55

