百年孤独是什么文学的代表作 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第16章Part3

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第16章Part3  

Fernanda
quite the contrary
raised her pitch. “I don’t have any reason to shut up
?she said. “Anyone who doesn’t want to listen to me can go someplace else.?Then Aureliano Segundo lost control. He stood up unhurriedly
as if he only intended to stretch
and with a perfectly regulated and methodical fury he grabbed the pots with the begonias one after the other
those with the ferns
the oregano
and one after the other he smashed them onto the floor. Fernanda was frightened because until then she had really not had a clear indication of the tremendous inner force of her singsong
but it was too late for any attempt at rectification. Intoxicated by the uncontained torrent of relief
Aureliano Segundo broke the glass on the china closet and piece by piece
without hurrying
he took out the chinaware and shattered it on the floor. Systematically
serenely
in the same parsimonious way in which he had papered the house with banknotes
he then set about smashing the Bohemian crystal ware against the walls
the hand-painted vases
the pictures of maidens in flower-laden boats
the mirrors in their gilded frames
everything that was breakable
from parlor to pantry
and he finished with the large earthen jar in the kitchen
which exploded in the middle of the courtyard with a hollow boom. Then he washed his hands
threw the oilcloth over himself
and before midnight he returned with a few strings of dried meat
several bags of rice
corn with weevils
and some emaciated bunches of bananas. From then on there was no more lack of food.
Amaranta ?rsula and little Aureliano would remember the rains as a happy time. In spite of Fernanda’s strictness
they would splash in the puddles in the courtyard
catch lizards and dissect them
and pretend that they were poisoning the soup with dust from butterfly wings when Santa Sofía de la Piedad was not looking ?rsula was their most amusing plaything. They looked upon her as a big
. broken-down doll that they carried back and forth from one corner to another wrapped in colored cloth and with her face painted with soot and annatto
and once they were on the point of plucking out her eyes with the pruning shears as they had done with the frogs. Nothing gave them as much excitement as the wanderings of her mind. Something
indeed
must have happened to her mind during the third year of the rain
for she was gradually losing her sense of reality and confusing present time with remote periods of her life to the point where
on one occasion
she spent three days weeping deeply over the death of Petronila Iguarán
her great-grandmother
buried for over a century. She sank into such an insane state of confusion that she thought little Aureliano was her son the colonel during the time he was taken to see ice
and that the Jos?Arcadio who was at that time in the seminary was her firstborn who had gone off with the gypsies. She spoke so much about the family that the children learned to make up imaginary visits with beings who had not only been dead for a long time
but who had existed at different times. Sitting on the bed
her hair covered with ashes and her face wrapped in a red kerchief
?rsula was happy in the midst of the unreal relatives whom the children described in all detail
as if they had really known them. ?rsula would converse with her forebears about events that took place before her own existence
enjoying the news they gave her
and she would weep with them over deaths that were much more recent than the guests themselves. The children did not take long to notice that in the course of those ghostly visits ?rsula would always ask a question destined to establish the one who had brought a life-size plaster Saint Joseph to the house to be kept until the rains stopped. It was in that way that Aureliano Segundo remembered the fortune buried in some place that only ?rsula knew
but the questions and astute maneuvering that occurred to him were of no use because in the labyrinth of her madness she seemed to preserve enough of a margin of lucidity to keep the secret which she would reveal only to the one who could prove that he was the real owner of the buried gold. She was so skillful and strict that when Aureliano Segundo instructed one of his carousing panions to pass himself off as the owner of the fortune
she got him all caught up in a minute interrogation sown with subtle traps.
Convinced that Usula would carry the secret to her grave
Aureliano Segundo hired a crew of diggers under the pretext that they were making some drainage canals in the courtyard and the backyard
and he himself took soundings in the earth with iron bars and all manner of metal-detectors without finding anything that resembled gold in three months of exhaustive exploration. Later on he went to Pilar Ternera with the hope that the cards would we more than the diggers
but she began by explaining that any attempt would be useless unless ?rsula cut the cards. On the other hand
she confirmed the existence of the treasure with the precision of its consisting of seven thousand o hundred fourteen coins buried in three canvas sacks reinforced with copper wire within a circle with a radius of three hundred eighty-eight feet with ?rsula’s bed as the center
but she warned that it would not be found until it stopped raining and the suns of three consecutive Junes had changed the piles of mud into dust. The profusion and meticulous vagueness of the information seemed to Aureliano Segundo so similar to the tales of spiritualists that he kept on with his enterprise in spite of the fact that they were in August and they would have to wait at least three years in order to satisfy the conditions of the prediction. The first thing that startled him
even though it increased his confusion at the same time
was the fact that it was precisely three hundred eighty-eight feet from ?rsula’s bed to the backyard wall. Fernanda feared that he was as crazy as his in brother when she saw him taking the measurements
and even more when he told the digging crew to make the ditches three feet deeper. Overe by an exploratory delirium parable only to that of his great-grandfather when he was searching for the route of inventions
Aureliano Segundo lost the last layers of fat that he had left and the old resemblance to his in brother was being accentuated again
not only because of his slim figure
but also because of the distant air and the withdrawn attitude. He no longer bothered with the children. He ate at odd hours
muddled from head to toe
and he did so in a corner in the kitchen
barely answering the occasional questions asked by Santa Sofía de la Piedad. Seeing him work that way
as she had never dreamed him capable of doing
Fernanda thought that his stubbornness was diligence
his greed abnegation
and his thick-headedness perseverance
and her insides tightened with remorse over the virulence with which she had attacked his idleness. But Aureliano Segundo was in no mood for merciful reconciliations at that time. Sunk up to his neck in a morass of dead brandies and rotting flowers
he flung the dirt of the garden all about after having finished with the courtyard and the backyard
and he excavated so deeply under the foundations of the east wing of the house that one night they woke up in terror at what seemed to be an earthquake
as much because of the trembling as the fearful underground creaking. Three of the rooms were collapsing and a frightening crack had opened up from the porch to Fernanda’s room. Aureliano Segundo did not give up the search because of that. Even when his last hopes had been extinguished and the only thing that seemed to make any sense was what the cards had predicted
he reinforced the jagged foundation
repaired the crack with mortar
and continued on the side to the west. He was still there on the second week of the following June when the rain began to abate and the clouds began to lift and it was obvious from one moment to the next that it was going to clear. That was what happened. On Friday at o in the afternoon the world lighted up with a crazy crimson sun as harsh as brick dust and almost as cool as water
and it did not rain again for ten years.