THE MARRIAGE was on the point of breaking up after two months because Aureli-ano Segun-do, in an attempt to placate Petra Cotes, had a picture taken of her dressed as the Queen of Madagascar. When Fernan-da found out about it she repacked her bridal trunks and left Macon-do without saying goodbye. Aureli-ano Segun-do caught up with her on the swamp road. After much pleading and promises of reform he succeeded in getting her to come home and he abandoned his concubine.

Petra Cotes, aware of her strength, showed no signs of worry. She had made a man of him. While he was still a child she had drawn him out of Melquíades' room, his head full of fantastic ideas and lacking any contact with reality, she had given him a place in the world. Nature had made reserved and withdrawn. with tendencies toward solitary meditation, and she had molded an opposite character in him, one that was vital, expansive, open, and she had injected him with a joy for living and a pleasure in spending and celebrating until she had converted him inside and out, into the man she had dreamed of for herself ever since adolescence. Then he married, as all sons marry sooner or later. He did not dare tell her the news. He assumed an attitude that was quite childish under the circumstances, feigning anger and imaginary resentment so that Petra Cotes would be the one who would bring about the break hong kong offshore company registration.

One day, when Aureli-ano Segun-do reproached her unjustly, she eluded the trap and put things in their proper place.What it all means," she said, "is that you want to marry the queen."Aureli-ano Segun-do, ashamed, pretended an attack of rage, said that he was misunderstood and abused, and did not visit her again. Petra Cotes, without losing her poise of a wild beast in repose for a single instant, heard the music and the fireworks from the wedding, the wild bustle of the celebration as if all of it were nothing but some new piece of mischief on the part of Aureli-ano Segun-do. Those who pitied her fate were calmed with a smile. "Don't worry," she told them. "Queens run errands for me." To a neighbor woman who brought her a set of candles so that she could light up the picture of her lost lover with them, she said withy Cruises from Hong Kong:
 

The only candle that will make him come is always lighted."Just as she had foreseen, Aureli-ano Segun-do went back to her house as soon as the honeymoon was over. He brought his usual old friends, a traveling photographer, and the gown and ermine cape soiled with blood that Fernanda had worn during the carnival. In the heat of the merriment that broke out that evening, he had Petra Cotes dress up as queen, crowned her absolute and lifetime ruler of Madagascar, and handed out copies of the picture to his friends, she not only went along with the game, but she felt sorry for him inside, thinking that he must have been very frightened to have conceived of that extravagant means of reconciliation. At seven in the evening, still dressed as the queen, she received him in bed. He had been married scarcely two months, but she realized at once that things were not going well in the nuptial bed, and she had the delicious pleasure of vengeance fulfilled UTAS.