百年孤独是什么文学的代表作 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第5章Part 5

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第5章Part 5  

"Five pesos more from each one
" José Arcadio proposed
"and I'll share myself with both.
He made his living that way. He had been around the world sixty-five times
enlisted in a crew of sailors without a country. The women who went to bed with him that night in Catarino's store brought him naked into the dance salon so that people could see that there was not a square inch of his body that was not tattooed
front and back
and from his neck to his toes.
He did not succeed in being incorporated into the family. He slept all day and spent the night in the red-light district
making bets on his strength. On the rare occasions when úrsula got him to sit down at the table
he gave signs of radiant good humor
especially when he told about his adventures in remote countries. He had been shipwrecked and spent o weeks adrift in the Sea of Japan
feeding on the body of a rade who had succumbed to sunstroke and whose extremely salty flesh as it cooked in the sun had a sweet and granular taste. Under a bright noonday sun in the Gulf of Bengal his ship had killed a sea dragon
in the stomach of which they found the helmet
the buckles
and the weapons of a Crusader. In the Caribbean he had seen the ghost of the pirate ship of Victor Hugues
with its sails torn by the winds of death
the masts chewed by sea worms
and still looking for the course to Guadeloupe. úrsula would weep at the table as if she were reading the letters that had never arrived and in whichJosé Arcadio told about his deeds and misadventures. "And there was so much of a home here for you
my son
" she would sob
"and so much food thrown to the hogs!" But underneath it an she could not conceive that the boy the gypsies took away was the same lout who would eat half a suckling pig for lunch and whose flatulence withered the flowers. Something similar took place with the rest of the family. Amaranta could not conceal the repugnance that she felt at the table because of his bestial belching. Arcadio
who never knew the secret of their relationship
scarcely answered the questions that he asked with the obvious idea of gaining his affection. Aureliano tried to relive the times when they slept in the same room
tried to revive the plicity of childhood
but José Arcadio had fotten about it
because life at sea had saturated his memory with too many things to remember. Only Rebeca succumbed to the first impact. The day that she saw him pass by her bedroom she thought that Pietro Crespi was a sugary dandy next to that protomale whose volcanic breathing could be heard all over the house. She tried to get near him under any pretext. On a certain occasion José Arcadio looked at her body with shameless attention and said to her "You're a woman
little sister." Rebeca lost control of herself. She went back to eating earth and the whitewash on the walls with the avidity of previous days
and she sucked her finger with so much anxiety that she developed a callus on her thumb. She vomited up a green liquid with dead leeches in it. She spent nights awake shaking with fever
fighting against delirium
waiting until the house shook with the return of José Arcadio at dawn. One afternoon
when everyone was having a siesta
she could no longer resist and went to his bedroom. She found him in his shorts
lying in the hammock that he had hung from the beams with a ship's hawser. She was so impressed by his enormous motley nakedness that she felt an impulse to retreat. "Excuse me
" she said
"I didn't know you werehere." But she lowered her voice so as not to wake anyone up. "Come here
" he said. Rebeca obeyed. She stopped beside the hammock in an icy sweat
feeling knots forming in her intestines
while José Arcadio stroked her ankles with the tips of his fingers
then her calves
then her thighs
murmuring: "Oh
little sister
little sister." She had to make a supernatural effort not to die when a startlingly regulated cyclonic power lifted her up by the waist and despoiled her of her intimacy with three clashes of its claws and quartered her like a little bird. She managed to thank God for having been born before she lost herself in the inconceivable pleasure of that unbearable pain
splashing in the steaming marsh of the hammock which absorbed the explosion of blood like a blotter.