美食祈祷恋爱影评 《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 82 (190):赖爷的老婆

《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 82 (190):赖爷的老婆  

As for Ketut's wife
it takes me a while to align myself with her. Nyomo
as he calls her
is big and plump with a stiff-hip limp and teeth stained red by chewing on betel nut tobacco. Her toes are painfully crooked from arthritis. She has a shrewd eYe. She was scary to me from the first sight. She's got that fierce old lady vibe you see sometimes in Italian widows and righteous black churchgoing mamas. She looks like she'd whup your hide for the slightest of misdemeanors. She was blatantly suspicious of me at first—Who is this flamingo traipsing through my house every day? She would stare at me from inside the sooty shadows of her kitchen
unconvinced as to my right to exist. I would smile at her and she'd just keep staring
deciding whether she should chase me out with a broomstick or not.
But then something changed. It was after the whole photocopy incident.
Ketut Liyer has all these piles of old
lined notebooks and ledgers
filled with tiny little handwriting
of ancient Balinese-Sanskrit mysteries about healing. He copied these notes into these notebooks way back in the 1940s or 1950s
sometime after his grandfather died
so he would have all the medical information recorded. This stuff is beyond invaluable. There are volumes of data about rare trees and leaves and plants and all their medicinal properties. He's got some sixty pages of diagrams about palm-reading
and more notebooks full of astro-logical data
mantras
spells and cures. The only thing is
these notebooks had been through decades of mildew and mice and they're shredded almost to bits. Yellow and crumbling and musty
they look like disintegrating piles of autumn leaves. Every time he turns a page
he rips the page.
赖爷拥有一堆堆老旧的横线笔记本与账簿，里头以小小的古巴厘梵语写满治疗祕密。他远在祖父过世之后的20世纪40、50年代，就将一些疗方摘录抄写到这些笔记本上，把所有的医药资讯记录下来。这东西的价值难以估量。一册册资料记载了罕见的树木、叶子、植物及其医疗特性。他有六十页的图表在说明手相，还有写满占星资料、咒语、符咒与疗法的笔记本。问题是，数十年来的发霉和老鼠齧咬，使这些笔记本几乎残破不堪。枯黄、龟裂、发霉，彷若一堆堆逐渐瓦解的秋叶。他每翻一页，纸张便剥裂开来。
"Ketut
" I said to him last week
holding up one of his battered notebooks
"I'm not a doctor like you are
but I think this book is dying."
He laughed. "You think is dying?"
"Sir
" I said gravely
"here is my professional opinion—if this book does not get some help soon
it will be dead within the next six months."