百年孤独是什么文学的代表作 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第17章Part2

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第17章Part2  

When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendía had given in his death cell
and once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing
as she had just admitted
but that it was turning in a circle. But even then she did not give resignation a chance. She scolded Jos?Arcadio Segundo as if he were a child and insisted that he take a bath and shave and lend a hand in fixing up the house. The simple idea of abandoning the room that had given him peace terrified Jos?Arcadio Segundo. He shouted that there was no human power capable of making him go out because he did not want to see the train with o hundred cars loaded with dead people which left Macondo every day at dusk on its way to the sea. “They were all of those who were at the station
?he shouted. “Three thousand four hundred eight.?Only then did ?rsula realize that he was in a world of shadows more imperable than hers
as unreachable and solitary as that of his great-grandfather. She left him in the room
but she succeeded in getting them to leave the padlock off
clean it every day
throw the chamberpots away except for one
and to keep Jos?Arcadio Segundo as clean and presentable as his great-grandfather had been during his long captivity under the chestnut tree. At first Fernanda interpreted that bustle as an attack of senile madness and it was difficult for her to suppress her exasperation. But about that time Jos?Arcadio told her that he planned to e to Macondo from Rome before taking his final vows
and the good news filled her with such enthusiasm that from morning to night she would be seen watering the flowers four times a day so that her son would not have a bad impression of the house. It was that same incentive which induced her to speed up her correspondence with the invisible doctors and to replace the pots of ferns and oregano and the begonias on the porch even before ?rsula found out that they had been destroyed by Aureliano Segundo’s exterminating fury. Later on she sold the silver service and bought ceramic dishes
pewter bowls and soup spoons
and alpaca tablecloths
and with them brought poverty to the cupboards that had been accustomed to India Company chinaware and Bohemian crystal. ?rsula always tried to go a step beyond. “Open the windows and the doors
?she shouted. “Cook some meat and fish
buy the largest turtles around
let strangers e and spread their mats in the corners and urinate in the rose bushes and sit down to eat as many times as they want and belch and rant and muddy everything with their boots
and let them do whatever they want to us
because that’s the only way to drive off rain.?But it was a vain illusion. She was too old then and living on borrowed time to repeat the miracle of the little candy animals
and none of her descendants had inherited her strength. The house stayed closed on Fernanda’s orders.
Aureliano Segundo
who had taken his trunks back to the house of Petra Cotes
barely had enough means to see that the family did not starve to death. With the raffling of the mule
Petra Cotes and he bought some more animals with which they managed to set up a primitive lottery business. Aureliano Segundo would go from house to house selling the tickets that he himself painted with colored ink to make them more attractive and convincing
and perhaps he did not realize that many people bought them out of gratitude and most of them out of pity. Nevertheless
even the most pitying purchaser was getting a chance to win a pig for enty cents or a calf for thirty-o
and they became so hopeful that on Tuesday nights Petra Cotes’s courtyard overflowed with people waiting for the moment when a child picked at random drew the winning number from a bag. It did not take long to bee a weekly fair
for at dusk food and drink stands would be set up in the courtyard and many of those who were favored would slaughter the animals they had won right there on the condition that someone else supply the liquor and music
so that without having wanted to
Aureliano Segundo suddenly found himself playing the accordion again and participating in modest tourneys of voracity. Those humble replicas of the revelry of former times served to show Aureliano Segundo himself how much his spirits had declined and to what a degree his skill as a masterful carouser had dried up. He was a changed man. The o hundred forty pounds that he had attained during the days when he had been challenged by The Elephant had been reduced to one hundred fifty-six; the glowing and bloated tortoise face had turned into that of an iguana
and he was always on the verge of boredom and fatigue. For Petra Cotes
however
he had never been a better man than at that time
perhaps because the pity that he inspired was mixed with love
and because of the feeling of solidarity that misery aroused in both of them. The broken-down bed ceased to be the scene of wild activities and was changed into an intimate refuge. Freed of the repetitious mirrors
which had been auctioned off to buy animals for the lottery
and from the lewd damasks and velvets
which the mule had eaten
they would stay up very late with the innocence of o sleepless grandparents
taking advantage of the time to draw up accounts and put away pennies which they formerly wasted just for the sake of it. Sometimes the cock’s crow would find them piling and unpiling coins
taking a bit away from here to put there
to that this bunch would be enough to keep Fernanda happy and that would be for Amaranta ?rsula’s shoes
and that other one for Santa Sofía de la Piedad
who had not had a new dress since the time of all the noise
and this to order the coffin if ?rsula died
and this for the coffee which was going up a cent a pound in price every three months
and this for the sugar which sweetened less every day
and this for the lumber which was still wet from the rains
and this other one for the paper and the colored ink to make tickets with
and what was left over to pay off the winner of the April calf whose hide they had miraculously saved when it came down with a symptomatic carbuncle just when all of the numbers in the raffle had already been sold. Those rites of poverty were so pure that they nearly always set aside the largest share for Fernanda
and they did not do so out of remorse or charity
but because her well-being was more important to them than their own. What was really happening to them
although neither of them realized it
was that they both thought of Fernanda as the daughter that they would have liked to have and never did
to the point where on a certain occasion they resigned themselves to eating crumbs for three days
so that she could buy a Dutch tablecloth. Nevertheless
no matter how much they killed themselves with work
no matter how much money they eked out
and no matter how many schemes they thought of
their guardian angels were asleep with fatigue while they put in coins and took them out trying to get just enough to live with. During the waking hours when the accounts were bad. they wondered what had happened in the world for the animals not to breed with the same drive as before
why money slipped through their fingers
and why people who a short time before had burned rolls of bills in the carousing considered it highway robbery to charge elve cents for a raffle of six hens. Aureliano Segundo thought without saying so that the evil was not in the world but in some hidden place in the mysterious heart of Petra Cotes
where something had happened during the deluge that had turned the animals sterile and made money scarce. Intrigued by that enigma
he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love
because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes
for her part
loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing
and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love. Both looked back then on the wild revelry
the gaudy wealth
and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to fund the paradise of shared solitude. Madly in love after so many years of sterile plicity
they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed
and they grew to be so happy that even when they were o worn-out old people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.
The raffles never got very far. At first Aureliano Segundo would spend three days of the week shut up in what had been his rancher’s office drawing ticket after ticket
Painting with a fair skill a red cow
a green pig
or a group of blue hens
according to the animal being raffled
and he would sketch out a good imitation of printed numbers and the name that Petra Cotes thought good to call the business: Divine Providence Raffles. But with time he felt so tired after drawing up to o thousand tickets a week that he had the animals
the name
and the numbers put on rubber stamps
and then the work was reduced to moistening them on pads of different colors. In his last years it occurred to him to substitute riddles for the numbers so that the prize could be shared by all of those who guessed it
but the system turned out to be so plicated and was open to so much suspicion that he gave it up after the second attempt. Aureliano Segundo was so busy trying to maintain the prestige of his raffles that he barely had time to see the children. Fernanda put Amaranta ?rsula in a small private school where they admitted only six girls
but she refused to allow Aureliano to go to public school. She considered that she had already relented too much in letting him leave the room. Besides
the schools in those days accepted only the legitimate offspring of Catholic marriages and on the birth certificate that had been pinned to Aureliano’s clothing when they brought him to the house he was registered as a foundling. So he remained shut In at the mercy of Santa Sofía de la Piedad’s loving eyes and ?rsula’s mental quirks
learning in the narrow world of the house whatever his grandmothers explained to him. He was delicate
thin
with a curiosity that unnerved the adults
but unlike the inquisitive and sometimes clairvoyant look that the colonel had at his age
his look was blinking and somewhat distracted. While Amaranta ?rsula was inkindergarten
he would hunt earthworms and torture insects in the garden. But once when Fernanda caught him putting scorpions in a box to put in ?rsula’s bed
she locked him up in Meme’s old room
where he spent his solitary hours looking through the pictures in the encyclopedia. ?rsula found him there one afternoon when she was going about sprinkling the house with distilled water and a bunch of tles
and in spite of the fact that she had been with him many times she asked him who he was.
“I’m Aureliano Buendía
?he said.
“That’s right?she replied. “And now it’s time for you to start learning how to be a silversmith.?