百年孤独这本书怎么样 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第17章Part4

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第17章Part4  

Then ?rsula gave in to the evidence. “My God
?she exclaimed in a low voice. “So this is what it’s like to be dead.?She started an endless
stumbling
deep prayer that lasted more than o days
and that by Tuesday had degenerated into a hodgepodge of requests to God and bits of practical advice to stop the red ants from bringing the house down
to keep the lamp burning by Remedios?daguerreotype
and never to let any Buendía marry a person of the same blood because their children would be born with the tail of a pig. Aureliano Segundo tried to take advantage of her delirium to get her to ten him where the gold was buried
but his entreaties were useless once more “When the owner appears
??rsula said
“God will illuminate him so that he will find it.?Santa Sofía de la Piedad had the certainty that they would find her dead from one moment to the next
because she noticed during those days a certain confusion in nature: the roses smelled like goosefoot
a pod of chick peas fell down and the beans lay on the ground in a perfect geometrical pattern in the shape of a starfish and one night she saw a row of luminous orange disks pass across the sky.
They found her dead on the morning of Good Friday. The last time that they had helped her calculate her age
during the time of the banana pany
she had estimated it as beeen one hundred fifteen and one hundred enty-o. They buried her in a coffin that was not much larger than the basket in which Aureliano had arrived
and very few people were at the funeral
partly because there wet not many left who remembered her
and partly because it was so hot that noon that the birds in their confusion were running into walls like day pigeons and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms.
At first they thought it was a plague. Housewives were exhausted from sweeping away so many dead birds
especially at siesta time
and the men dumped them into the river by the cartload. On Easter Sunday the hundred-year-old Father Antonio Isabel stated from the pulpit that the death of the birds was due to the evil influence of the Wandering Jew
whom he himself had seen the night before. He described him as a cross beeen a billy goat and a female heretic
an infernal beast whose breath scorched the air and whose look brought on the birth of monsters in newlywed women. There were not many who paid attention to his apocalyptic talk
for the town was convinced that the priest was rambling because of his age. But one woman woke everybody up at dawn on Wednesday because she found the tracks of a biped with a cloven hoof. They were so clear and unmistakable that those who went to look at them had no doubt about the existence of a fearsome creature similar to the one described by the parish priest and they got together to set traps in their courtyards. That was how they managed to capture it. Two weeks after ?rsula’s death
Petra Cotes and Aureliano Segundo woke up frightened by the especially loud bellowing of a calf that was ing from nearby. When they got there a group of men were already pulling the monster off the sharpened stakes they had set in the bottom of a pit covered with dry leaves
and it stopped lowing. It was as heavy as an ox in spite of the fact that it was no taller than a young steer
and a green and greasy liquid flowed from its wounds. Its body was covered with rough hair
plagued with small ticks
and the skin was hardened with the scales of a remora fish
but unlike the priest’s description
its human parts were more like those of a sickly angel than of a man
for its hands were tense and agile
its eyes large and gloomy
and on its shoulder blades it had the scarred-over and calloused stumps of powerful wings which must have been chopped off by a woodsman’s ax. They hung it to an almondtree in the square by its ankles so that everyone could see it
and when it began to rot they burned it in a bonfire
for they could not determine whether its bastard nature was that of an animal to be thrown into the river or a human being to be buried. It was never established whether it had really caused the death of the birds
but the newly married women did not bear the predicted monsters
nor did the intensity of the heat decrease.
Rebeca died at the end of that year. Argénida
her lifelong servant
asked the authorities for help to knock down the door to the bedroom where her mistress had been locked in for three days
and they found her
on her solitary bed
curled up like a shrimp
with her head bald from ringworm and her finger in her mouth. Aureliano Segundo took charge of the funeral and tried to restore the house in order to sell it
but the destruction was so far advanced in it that the walls became scaly as soon as they were painted and there was not enough mortar to stop the weeds from cracking the floors and the ivy from rotting the beams.
That was how everything went after the deluge. The indolence of the people was in contrast to the voracity of oblivion
which little by little was undermining memories in a pitiless way
to such an extreme that at that time
on another anniversary of the Treaty of Neerlandia
some emissaries from the president of the republic arrived in Macondo to award at last the decoration rejected several times by Colonel Aureliano Buendía
and they spent a whole afternoon looking for someone who could tell them where they could find one of his descendants. Aureliano Segundo was tempted to accept it
thinking that it was a medal of solid gold
but Petra Cotes convinced him that it was not proper when the emissaries already had some proclamations and speeches ready for the ceremony. It was also around that time that the gypsies returned
the last heirs to Melquíades?science
and they found the town so defeated and its inhabitants so removed from the rest of the world that once more they went through the houses dragging magized ingots as if that really were the Babylonian wise men’s latest discovery
and once again they concentrated the sun’s rays with the giant magnifying glass
and there was no lack of people standing open-mouthed watching kettles fall and pots roll and who paid fifty cents to be startled as a gypsy woman put in her false teeth and took them out again. A broken-down yellow train that neither brought anyone in nor took anyone out and that scarcely paused at the deserted station was the only thing that was left of the long train to which Mr. Brown would couple his glass-topped coach with the episcopal lounging chairs and of the fruit trains with one hundred enty cars which took a whole afternoon to pass by. The ecclesiastical delegates who had e to investigate the report of the strange death of the birds and the sacrifice of the Wandering Jew found Father Antonio Isabel playing blind man’s buff with the children
and thinking that his report was the product of a hallucination
they took him off toan asylum. A short time later they sent Father Augusto Angel
a crusader of the new breed
intransigent
audacious
daring
who personally rang the bells several times a day so that the peoples spirits would not get drowsy
and who went from house to house waking up the sleepers to go to mass but before a year was out he too was conquered by the negligence that one breathed in with the air
by the hot dust that made everything old and clogged up
and by the drowsiness caused by lunchtime meatballs in the unbearable heat of siesta time.