百年孤独这本书怎么样 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第19章Part5

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第19章Part5  

That encyclopedic coincidence was the beginning of a great friendship. Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers
whose names were ?lvaro
Germán
Alfonso
and Gabriel
the first and last friends that he ever had in his life. For a man like him
holed up in written reality
those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people
as ?lvaro demonstrated during one night of revels. Some time would have to pass before Aureliano realized that such arbitrary attitudes had their origins in the example of the wise Catalonian
for whom wisdom was worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a way of preparing chick peas.
The afternoon on which Aureliano gave his lecture on cockroaches
the argument ended up in the house of the girls who went to bed because of hunger
a brothel of lies on the outskirts of Macondo. The proprietress was a smiling mamasanta
tormented by a mania for opening and closing doors. Her eternal smile seemed to have been brought on by the credulity of her customers
who accepted as something certain an establishment that did not exist except in the imagination
because even the tangible things there were unreal: the furniture that fell apart when one sat on it
the disemboweled phonograph with a nesting hen inside
the garden of paper flowers
the calendars going back to the years before the arrival of the banana pany
the frames with prints cut out of magazines that had never been published. Even the timid little whores who came from the neighborhood: when the proprietress informed them that customers had arrived they were nothing but an invention. They would appear without any greeting in their little flowered dresses left over from days when they were five years younger
and they took them off with the same innocence with which they had put them on
and in the paroxysms of love they would exclaim good heavens
look how that roof is falling in
and as soon as they got their peso and fifty cents they would spend it on a roll with cheese that the proprietress sold them
smiling more than ever
because only she knew that that meal was not true either. Aureliano
whose world at that time began with Melquíades?parchments and ended in Nigromanta’s bed
found a stupid cure for timidity in the small imaginary brothel. At first he could get nowhere
in rooms where the proprietress would enter during the best moments of love and make all sorts of ments about the intimate charms of the protagonists. But with time he began to get so familiar with those misfortunes of the world that on one night that was more unbalanced than the others he got undressed in the small reception room and ran through the house balancing a bottle of beer on his inconceivable maleness. He was the one who made fashionable the extravagances that the proprietress celebrated with her eternal smile
without protesting
without believing in them just as when Germán tried to burn the house down to show that it did not exist
and as when Alfonso wrung the neck of the parrot and threw it into the pot where the chicken stew was beginning to boil. Although Aureliano felt himself linked to the four friends by a mon affection and a mon solidarity
even to the point where he thought of them as if they were one person
he was closer to Gabriel than to the others. The link was born on the night when he casually mentioned Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Gabriel was the only one who did not think that he was making fun of somebody. Even the proprietress
who normally did not take part in the conversation argued with a madam’s wrathful passion that Colonel Aureliano Buendía
of whom she had indeed heard speak at some time
was a figure invented by the government as a pretext for killing Liberals. Gabriel
on the other hand
did not doubt the reality of Colonel Aureliano Buendía because he had been a panion in arms and inseparable friend of his great-great-grandfather Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. Those fickle tricks of memory were even more critical when the killing of the workers was brought up. Every time that Aureliano mentioned the matter
not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with o hundred cars loaded with dead people
and they would even insist that
after all
everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana pany had never existed. So that Aureliano and Gabriel were linked by a kind of plicity based on real facts that no one believed in
and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained. Gabriel would sleep wherever time overtook him. Aureliano put him up several times in the silver workshop
but he would spend his nights awake
disturbed by the noise of the dead people who walked through the bedrooms until dawn. Later he turned him over to Nigromanta
who took him to her well-used room when she was free and put down his account with vertical marks behind the door in thefew spaces left free by Aureliano’s debts.