百年孤独为什么值得看 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第15章Part3

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第15章Part3  

The nun lunched at the house while she waited for the train back
and in accordance with the discretion they asked of her
she did not mention the child again
but Fernanda viewed her as an undesirable witness of her shame and lamented the fact that they had abandoned the medieval custom of hanging a messenger who bore bad news. It was then that she decided to drown the child in the cistern as soon as the nun left
but her heart was not strong enough and she preferred to wait patiently until the infinite goodness of God would free her from the annoyance.
The new Aureliano was a year old when the tension of the people broke with no forewarning. Jos?Arcadio Segundo and other union leaders who had remained underground until then suddenly appeared one weekend and anized demonstrations in towns throughout the banana region. The police merely maintained public order. But on Monday night the leaders were taken from their homes and sent to jail in the capital of the province with o-pound irons on their legs. Taken among them were Jos?Arcadio Segundo and Lorenzo Gavilán
a colonel in the Mexican revolution
exiled in Macondo
who said that he had been witness to the heroism of his rade Artemio Cruz. They were set free
however
within three months because of the fact that the government and the banana pany could not reach an agreement as to who should feed them in jail. The protests of the workers this time were based on the lack of sanitary facilities in their living quarters
the nonexistence of medical services
and terrible working conditions. They stated
furthermore
that they were not being paid in real money but in scrip
which was good only to buy Virginia ham in the pany missaries. Jos?Arcadio Segundo was put in jail because he revealed that the scrip system was a way for the pany to finance its fruit ships; which without the missary merchandise would have to return empty from New Orleans to the banana ports. The other plaints were mon knowledge. The pany physicians did not examine the sick but had them line up behind one another in the dispensaries and a nurse would put a pill the color of copper sulfate on their tongues
whether they had malaria
gonorrhea
or constipation. It was a cure that was so mon that children would stand in line several times and instead of swallowing the pills would take them home to use as bingo markers. The pany workers were crowded together in miserable barracks. The engineers
instead of putting in toilets
had a portable latrine for every fifty people brought to the camps at Christmas time and they held public demonstrations of how to use them so that they would last longer. The decrepit lawyers dressed in black who during other times had besieged Colonel Aureliano Buendía and who now were controlled by the banana pany dismissed those demands with decisions that seemed like acts of magic. When the workers drew up a list of unanimous petitions
a long time passed before they were able to notify the banana pany officially. As soon as he found out about the agreement Mr. Brown hitched his luxurious glassed-in coach to the train and disappeared from Macondo along with the more prominent representatives of his pany. Noheless some workers found one of them the following Saturday in a brothel and they made him sign a copy of the sheet with the demands while he was naked with the women who had helped to entrap him. The mournful lawyers showed in court that that man had nothing to do with the pany and in order that no one doubt their arguments they had him jailed as an impostor. Later on
Mr. Brown was surprised traveling incognito
in a third-class coach and they made him sign another copy of the demands. On the following day he appeared before the judges with his hair dyed black and speaking flawless Spanish. The lawyers showed that the man was not Mr. Jack Brown
the superintendent of the banana pany
born in Prattville Alabama
but a harmless vendor of medicinal plants
born in Macondo and baptized there with the name of Dagoberto Fonseca. A while later
faced with a new attempt by the workers the lawyers publicly exhibited Mr. Brown’s death certificate
attested to by consuls and foreign ministers which bore witness that on June ninth last he had been run over by a fire engine in Chicago. Tired of that hermeneutical delirium
the workers turned away from the authorities in Macondo and brought their plaints up to the higher courts. It was there that the sleight-of-hand lawyers proved that the demands lacked all validity for the simple reason that the banana pany did not have
never had had
and never would have any workers in its service because they were all hired on a temporary and occasional basis. So that the fable of the Virginia ham was nonsense
the same as that of the miraculous pills and the Yuletide toilets
and by a decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist.
The great strike broke out. Cultivation stopped halfway
the fruit rotted on the trees and the hundred-enty-car trains remained on the sidings. The idle workers overflowed the towns. The Street of the Turks echoed with a Saturday that lasted for several days and in the poolroom at the Hotel Jacob they had to arrange enty-four-hour shifts. That was where Jos?Arcadio Segundo was on the day it was announced that the army had been assigned to reestablish public order. Although he was not a man given to omens
the news was like an announcement of death that he had been waiting for ever since that distant morning when Colonel Gerineldo Márquez had let him see an execution. The bad omen did not change his solemnity
however. He took the shot he had planned and it was good. A short time later the drumbeats
the shrill of the bugle
the shouting and running of the people told him that not only had the game of pool e to an end
but also the silent and solitary game that he had been playing with himself ever since that dawn execution. Then he went out into the street and saw them. There were three regiments
whose march in time to a galley drum made the earth tremble. Their snorting of a many-headed dragon filled the glow of noon with a pestilential vapor. They were short
stocky
and brutelike. They perspired with the sweat of a horse and had a smell of suntanned hide and the taciturn and imperable perseverance of men from the uplands. Although it took them over an hour to pass by
one might have thought that they were only a few squads marching in a circle
because they were all identical
sons of the same bitch
and with the same stolidity they all bore the weight of their packs and canteens
the shame of their rifles with fixed bayos
and the chancre of blind obedience and a sense of honor. ?rsula heard them pass from her bed in the shadows and she made a crow with her fingers. Santa Sofía de la Piedad existed for an instant
leaning over the embroidered tablecloth that she had just ironed
and she thought of her son
Jos?Arcadio Segundo
who without changing expression watched the last soldiers pass by the door of the Hotel Jacob.