Those
wanderings led him to the prostrate red-light district, where
in other times bundles of banknotes had been burned to
liven up the revels, and which at that time was a maze of
streets more afflicted and miserable than the others, with a
few red lights still burning and with deserted dance halls
adorned with the remnants of wreaths, where the pale, fat
widows of no one, the French great-grandmothers and the
Babylonian matriarchs, were still waiting beside their phonographs. Aureliano could not find anyone who remembered his family, not even Colonel Aureliano Buendia, except for
the oldest of the West Indian Negroes, an old man whose
cottony hair gave him the look of a photographic negative
and who was still singing the mournful sunset psalms in the
door of his house. Aureliano would talk to him in the tortured Papiamento that he had learned in a few weeks and sometimes he would share his chicken-head soup, prepared by
the great-granddaughter, with him. She was a large black
woman with solid bones, the hips of a mare, teats like live
melons, and a round and perfect head armored with a hard
surface of wiry hair which looked .like a medieval warrior''s
mail headdress. Her name was Nigromanta. In those days
Aureliano lived off the sale of silverware, candlesticks, and
other bric-a-brac from the house. When he was penniless,