百年孤独这本书怎么样 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第19章Part2

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第19章Part2  

A year after her return
although she had not succeeded in making any friends or giving any parties
Amaranta ?rsula still believed that it was possible to rescue the munity which had been singled out by misfortune. Gaston
her husband
took care not to antagonize her
although since that fatal noon when he got off the train he realized that his wife’s determination had been provoked by a nostalgic mirage. Certain that she would be defeated by the realities
he did not even take the trouble to put his velocipede together
but he set about hunting for the largest eggs among the spider webs that the masons had knocked down
and he would open them with his fingernails and spend hours looking through a magnifying glass at the tiny spiders that emerged. Later on
thinking that Amaranta ?rsula was continuing with her repairs so that her hands would not be idle
he decided to assemble the handsome bicycle
on which the front wheel was much larger than the rear one
and he dedicated himself to the capture and curing of every native insect he could find in the region
which he sent in jam jars to his former professor of natural history at the University of Liège where he had done advanced work in entomology
although his main vocation was that of aviator. When he rode the bicycle he would wear acrobat’s tights
gaudy socks
and a Sherlock Holmes cap
but when he was on foot he would dress in a spotless natural linen suit
white shoes
a silk bow tie
a straw boater
and he would carry a willow stick in his hand. His pale eyes accentuated his look of a sailor and his small mustache looked like the fur of a squirrel. Although he was at least fifteen years older than his wife
his alert determination to make her happy and his qualities as a good lover pensated for the difference. Actually
those who saw that man in his forties with careful habits
with the leash around his neck and his circus bicycle
would not have thought that he had made a pact of unbridled love with his wife and that they both gave in to the reciprocal drive in the least adequate of places and wherever the spirit moved them
as they had done since they had began to keep pany
and with a passion that the passage of time and the more and more unusual circumstances deepened and enriched. Gaston was not only a fierce lover
with endless wisdom and imagination
but he was also
perhaps
the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had e close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.
They had met o years before they were married
when the sports biplane in which he was making rolls over the school where Amaranta ?rsula was studying made an intrepid maneuver to avoid the flagpole and the primitive framework of canvas and aluminum foil was caught by the tail on some electric wires. From then on
paying no attention to his leg in splints
on weekends he would pick up Amaranta ?rsula at the nun’s boardinghouse where she lived
where the rules were not as severe as Fernanda had wanted
and he would take her to his country club. They began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors
and they felt all the closer together as the beings on earth grew more and more minute. She spoke to him of Macondo as the brightest and most peaceful town on earth
and of an enormous house
scented with oregano
where she wanted to live until old age with a loyal husband and o strong sons who would be named Rodrigo and Gonzalo
never Aureliano and Jos?Arcadio
anda daughter who would be named Virginia and never Remedios. She had evoked the town idealized by nostalgia with such strong tenacity that Gaston understood that she would not get married unless he took her to live in Macondo. He agreed to it
as he agreed later on to the leash
because he thought it was a passing fancy that could be overe in time. But when o years in Macondo had passed and Amaranta ?rsula was as happy as on the first day
he began to show signs of alarm. By that time he had dissected every dissectible insect in the region
he spoke Spanish like a native
and he had solved all of the crossword puzzles in the magazines that he received in the mail. He did not have the pretext of climate to hasten their return because nature had endowed him with a colonial liver which resisted the drowsiness of siesta time and water that had vinegar worms in it. He liked the native cooking so much that once he ate eighty-o iguana eggs at one sitting. Amaranta ?rsula
on the other hand
had brought in by train fish and shellfish in boxes of ice
canned meats and preserved fruits
which were the only things she could eat
and she still dressed in European style and received designs by mail in spite of the fact that she had no place to go and no one to visit and by that time her husband was not in a mood to appreciate her short skirts
her tilted felt hat
and her seven-strand necklaces. Her secret seemed to lie in the fact that she always found a way to keep busy
resolving domestic problems that she herself had created
and doing a poor job on a thousand things which she would fix on the following day with a pernicious diligence that made one think of Fernanda and the hereditary vice of making something just to unmake it. Her festive genius was still so alive then that when she received new records she would invite Gaston to stay in the parlor until very late to practice the dance steps that her schoolmates described to her in sketches and they would generally end up making love on the Viennese rocking chairs or on the bare floor. The only thing that she needed to be pletely happy was the birth of her children
but she respected the pact she had made with her husband not to have any until they had been married for five years.
Looking for something to fill his idle hours with
Gaston became accustomed to spending the morning in Melquíades?room with the shy Aureliano. He took pleasure in recalling with him the most hidden corners of his country
which Aureliano knew as if he had spent much time there. When Gaston asked him what he had done to obtain knowledge that was not in the encyclopedia
he received the same answer as Jos?Arcadio: “Everything Is known.?In addition to Sanskrit he had learned English and French and a little Latin and Greek. Since he went out every afternoon at that time and Amaranta ?rsula had set aside a weekly sum for him for his personal expenses
his room looked like a branch of the wise Catalonian’s bookstore. He read avidly until late at night
although from the manner in which he referred to his reading
Gaston thought that he did not buy the books in order to learn but to verify the truth of his knowledge
and that none of them interested him more than the parchments
to which he dedicated most of histime in the morning. Both Gaston and his wife would have liked to incorporate him into the family life
but Aureliano was a hermetic man with a cloud of mystery that time was making denser. It was such an unfathomable condition that Gaston failed in his efforts to bee intimate with him and had to seek other pastimes for his idle hours. It was around that time that he conceived the idea of establishing an airmail service.
It was not a new project. Actually
he had it fairly well advanced when he met Amaranta ?rsula
except that it was not for Macondo
but for the Belgian Congo
where his family had investments in palm oil. The marriage and the decision to spend a few months in Macondo to please his wife had obliged him to postpone it. But when he saw that Amaranta ?rsula was determined to anize a mission for public improvement and even laughed at him when he hinted at the possibility of returning
he understood that things were going to take a long time and he reestablished contact with his fotten partners in Brussels
thinking that it was just as well to be a pioneer in the Caribbean as in Africa. While his steps were progressing he prepared a landing field in the old enchanted region which at that time looked like a plain of crushed flintstone
and he studied the wind direction
the geography of the coastal region
and the best routes for aerial navigation
without knowing that his diligence
so similar to that of Mr. Herbert
was filling the town with the dangerous suspicion that his plan was not to set up routes but to plant banana trees. Enthusiastic over the idea that
after all
might justify his permanent establishment in Macondo
he took several trips to the capital of the province
met with authorities
obtained licenses
and drew up contracts for exclusive rights. In the meantime he maintained a correspondence with his partners in Brussels which resembled that of Fernanda with the invisible doctors
and he finally convinced them to ship the first airplane under the care of an expert mechanic
who would assemble it in the nearest port and fly it to Macondo. One year after his first meditations and meteorological calculations
trusting in the repeated promises of his correspondents
he had acquired the habit of strolling through the streets
looking at the sky
hanging onto the sound of the breeze in hopes that the airplane would appear.