The work seemed so laborious to him and the thought of Petra Cotes was so persistent and pressing that after three weeks he disappeared from the workshop. It was during that time that it occurred to Petra Cotes to raffle off rabbits. They reproduced and grew up so fast that there was barely time to sell the tickets for the raffle. At first Aureli-ano Segun-do did not notice the alarming proportions of the proliferation. But one night, when nobody in town wanted to hear about the rabbit raffle any more, he heard a noise by the courtyard door. "Don't get worried," Petra, Cotes said. "It's only the rabbits." They could not sleep, tormented by the uproar of the animals.

At dawn Aureli-ano Segun-do opened the door and saw the courtyard paved with rabbits, blue in the glow of dawn. Petra Cotes, dying with laughter, could not resist the temptation of teasing him."Those are the ones who were born last night," she aid."Oh my God!" he said. "Why don't you raffle off cows?"A few days later, in an attempt to clean out her courtyard, Petra Cotes exchanged the rabbits for a cow, who two months later gave birth to triplets. That was how things began. Overnight Aureli-ano Segun-do be. came the owner of land and livestock and he barely had time to enlarge his overflowing barns and pigpens. It was a delirious prosperity that even made him laugh, and he could not help doing crazy things to release his good humor. "Cease, cows, life is short," he would shout. úrsula wondered what entanglements he had got into, whether he might be stealing, whether he had become a rustler, and every time she saw him uncorking champagne just for the pleasure of pouring the foam over his head, she would shout at him and scold him for the waste Where youput youreye,youput your bullet..

that one day when he awoke in a merry mood, Aureli-ano Segun-do appeared a chest full of money, a can of paste, and a brush, and singing at the top of his lungs the old songs of Francisco the Man, he papered the house inside and out and from top to bottom, with one-peso banknotes. The old mansion, painted white since the time they had brought the pianola, took on the strange look of a mosque. In the midst of the excitement of the family the scandalization of úrsula, the joy of the people cramming the street to watch that apotheosis of squandering. Aureli-ano Segun-do finished by papering the house from the front to the kitchen, including bathrooms and bedrooms, and threw the leftover bills into thecourtyard.
 

"Now," he said in a final way, "I hope that nobody in this house ever talks to me about money again. "That was what happened. úrsula had the bills taken down, stuck to great cakes of whitewash, and the house was painted white again. "Dear Lord," she begged, "make us poor again the way we were when we founded this town so that you will not collect for this squandering in the other life." Her prayers were answered in reverse. One of the workmen removing the bills bumped into an enormous plaster statue of Saint Joseph that someone had left in the house during the last years of the war and the hollow figure broke to pieces on the floor. It had been stuffed with gold coins. No one could remember who had brought that life-sized saint. "Three men brought it," Amaranta explained. "They asked us to keep it until the rains were over and I told them to put it there in the corner where nobody would bump into it, and there they put it, very carefully, and there it's been ever since because they never came back for it.