Aureli-ano Segun-do and Meme took leave of her with mocking farewells and promised that on the following Saturday they would have a big resurrection party. Drawn by the public talk that Amaranta Buendía was receiving letters for the dead, Father Antonio Isabel arrived at five o'clock for the last rites and he had to wait for more than fifteen minutes for the recipient to come out of her bath. When he saw her appear in a madapollam nightshirt and with her hair loose over her shoulders, the decrepit parish priest thought that it was a trick and sent the altar boy away. He thought however, that he would take advantage of the occasion to have Amaranta confess after twenty years of reticence. Amaranta answered simply that she did not need spiritual help of any kind because her conscience was clean.

. Without caring that people could hear her she asked herself aloud what horrible sin Amaranta had committed to make her prefer an impious death to the shame confession. Thereupon Amaranta lay down and made úrsula give public testimony as to her virginity.Let no one have any illusions," she shouted so that Fernanda would hear her. "Amaranta Buendía is leaving this world just as she came into it.She did not get up again. Lying on cushions, as if she really were ill, she braided her long hair and rolled it about her ears as death had told her it should be on her bier. Then she asked úrsula for a mirror and for the first time in more than forty years she saw her face, devastated by age and martyrdom, and she was surprised at how much she resembled the mental image that she had of herself. úrsula understood by the silence in the bedroom that it had begun to grow dark the othersideofabandonment at that instant..
"

Say goodbye to Fernanda," she begged her. One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship.""It's of no use now," Amaranta replied.Meme could not help thinking about her when they turned on the lights on the improvised stage and she began the second part of the program. In the middle of the piece someone whispered the news in her ear and the session stopped. When he arrived home, Aureli-ano Segun-do had to push his way through the crowd to see the corpse of the aged virgin, ugly and discolored, with the black bandage on her hand and wrapped in the magnificent shroud. She was laid out in the parlor beside the box of letters.
 

"Come here," she told her. "Now that were alone, confess to this poor old woman what's bothering you."Meme avoided the conversation with a short laugh. úrsula did not insist, but she ended up confirming her suspicions when Meme did not come back to visit her. She knew that she was getting up earlier than usual, that she did not have a moment's rest as she waited for the time for her to go out, that she spent whole nights walking back and forth in the adjoining bedroom, and that the fluttering of a butterfly would bother her. On one occasion she said that she was going to see Aureli-ano Segun-do and úrsula was surprised that Fernanda's imagination was so limited when her husband came to the house looking for his daughter. It was too obvious that Meme was involved in secret matters, in pressing matters, in repressed anxieties long before the night that Fernanda upset the house because she caught her kissing a man in the movies.
Meme was so wrapped up in herself at that time that she accused úrsula of having told on her. Actually, she told on herself.