马尔克斯百年孤独经典语录 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第19章Part3

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第19章Part3  

Although she had not noticed it
the return of Amaranta ?rsula had brought on a radical change in Aureliano’s life. After the death of Jos?Arcadio he had bee a regular customer at the wise Catalonian’s bookstore. Also
the freedom that he enjoyed then and the time at his disposal awoke in him a certain curiosity about the town
which he came to know without any surprise. He went through the dusty and solitary streets
examining with scientific interest the inside of houses in ruin
the metal screens on the windows broken by rust and the dying birds
and the inhabitants bowed down by memories. He tried to reconstruct in his imagination the annihilated splendor of the old banana-pany town
whose dry swimming pool was filled to the brim with rotting men’s and women’s shoes
and in the houses of which
destroyed by rye grass
he found the skeleton of a German shepherd dog still tied to a ring by a steel chain and a telephone that was ringing
ringing
ringing until he picked it up and an anguished and distant woman spoke in English
and he said yes
that the strike was over
that three thousand dead people had been thrown into the sea
that the banana pany had left
and that Macondo finally had peace after many years. Those wanderings led him to the prostrate red-light district
where in other times bundles of banknotes had been burned to liven up the revels
and which at that time was a maze of streets more afflicted and miserable than the others
with a few red lights still burning and with deserted dance halls adorned with the remnants of wreaths
where the pale
fat widows of no one
the French great-grandmothers and the Babylonian matriarchs
were still waiting beside their photographs. Aureliano could not find anyone who remembered his family
not even Colonel Aureliano Buendía
except for the oldest of the West Indian Negroes
an old man whose cottony hair gave him the look of a photographic negative and who was still singing the mournful sunset psalms in the door of his house. Aureliano would talk to him in the tortured Papiamento that he had learned in a few weeks and sometimes he would share his chicken-head soup
prepared by the great-granddaughter
with him. She was a large black woman with solid bones
the hips of a mare
teats like live melons
and a round and perfect head armored with a hard surface of wiry hair which looked like a medieval warrior’s mail headdress. Her name was Nigromanta. In those days Aureliano lived off the sale of silverware
candlesticks
and other bric-a-brac from the house. When he was penniless
which was most of the time
he got people in the back of the market to give him the chicken heads that they were going to throw away and he would take them to Nigromanta to make her soups
fortified with purslane and seasoned with mint. When the great-grandfather died Aureliano stopped going by the house
but he would run into Nigromanta under the dark almond trees on the square
using her wild-animal whistles to lure the few night owls. Many times he stayed with her
speaking in Papiamento about chicken-head soup and other dainties of misery
and he would have kept right on if she had not let him know that his presence frightened off customers. Although he sometimes felt the temptation and although Nigromanta herself might have seemed to him as the natural culmination of a shared nostalgia
he did not go to bed with her. So Aureliano was still a virgin when Amaranta ?rsula returned to Macondo and gave him a sisterly embrace that left him breathless. Every time he saw her
and worse yet when she showed him the latest dances
he felt the same spongy release in his bones that had disturbed his great-great-grandfather when Pilar Ternera made her pretexts about the cards in the granary. Trying to squelch the torment
he sank deeper into the parchments and eluded the innocent flattery of that aunt who was poisoning his nights with a flow of tribulation
but the more he avoided her the more the anxiety with which he waited for her stony laughter
her howls of a happy cat
and her songs of gratitude
agonizing in love at all hours and in the most unlikely parts of the house. One night thirty feet from his bed
on the silver workbench
the couple with unhinged bellies broke the bottles and ended up making love in a pool of muriatic acid. Aureliano not only could not sleep for a single second
but he spent the next day with a fever
sobbing with rage. The first night that he waited for Nigromanta to e to the shadows of the almond trees it seemed like an eternity
pricked as he was by the needles of uncertainty and clutching in his fist the peso and fifty cents that he had asked Amaranta ?rsula for
not so much because he needed it as to involve her
debase her
prostitute her in his adventure in some way. Nigromanta took him to her room
which was lighted with false candlesticks
to her folding cot with the bedding stained from bad loves
and to her body of a wild dog
hardened and without soul
which prepared itself to dismiss him as if he were a frightened child
and suddenly it found aman whose tremendous power demanded a movement of seismic readjustment from her insides.