百年孤独是什么文学的代表作 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第16章Part4

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第16章Part4  

Macondo was in ruins. In the swampy streets there were the remains of furniture
animal skeletons covered with red lilies
the last memories of the hordes of newers who had fled Macondo as wildly as they had arrived. The houses that had been built with such haste during the banana fever had been abandoned. The banana pany tore down its installations. All that remained of the former wired-in city were the ruins. The wooden houses
the cool terraces for breezy card-playing afternoons
seemed to have been blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth. The only human trace left by that voracious blast was a glove belonging to Patricia Brown in an automobile smothered in wild pansies. The enchanted region explored by Jos?Arcadio Buendía in the days of the founding
where later on the banana plantations flourished
was a bog of rotting roots
on the horizon of which one could manage to see the silent foam of the sea. Aureliano Segundo went through a crisis of affliction on the first Sunday that he put on dry clothes and went out to renew his acquaintance with the town. The survivors of the catastrophe
the same ones who had been living in Macondo before it had been struck by the banana pany hurricane
were sitting in the middle of the street enjoying their first sunshine. They still had the green of the algae on their skin and the musty smell of a corner that had been stamped on them by the rain
but in their hearts they seemed happy to have recovered the town in which they had been born. The Street of the Turks was again what it had been earlier
in the days when the Arabs with slippers and rings in their ears were going about the world swapping knickknacks for macaws and had found in Macondo a good bend in the road where they could find respite from their age-old lot as wanderers. Having crossed through to the other side of the rain. the merchandise in the booths was falling apart
the cloths spread over the doors were splotched with mold
the counters undermined by termites
the walls eaten away by dampness
but the Arabs of the third generation were sitting in the same place and in the same position as their fathers and grandfathers
taciturn
dauntless
invulnerable to time and disaster
as alive or as dead as they had been after the insomnia plague and Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s thirty-o wars. Their strength of spirit in the face of ruins of the gaming tables
the fritter stands
the shooting galleries
and the alley where they interpreted dreams and predicted the future made Aureliano Segundo ask them with his usual informality what mysterious resources they had relied upon so as not to have gone awash in the storm
what the devil they had done so as not to drown
and one after the other
from door to door
they returned a crafty smile and a dreamy look
and without any previous consultation they all gave the answer:
“Swimming.?
Petra Cotes was perhaps the only native who had an Arab heart. She had seen the final destruction of her stables
her barns dragged off by the storm. but she had managed to keep her house standing. During the second year she had sent pressing messages to Aureliano Segundo and he had answered that he did not know when he would go back to her house
but that in any case he would bring along a box of gold coins to pave the bedroom floor with. At that time she had dug deep into her heart
searching for the strength that would allow her to survive the misfortune
and she had discovered a reflective and just rage with which she had sworn to restore the fortune squandered by her lover and then wiped out by the deluge. It was such an unbreakable decision that Aureliano Segundo went back to her house eight months after the last message and found her green disheveled
with sunken eyelids and skin spangled with mange
but she was writing out numbers on small pieces of paper to make a raffle. Aureliano Segundo was astonished
and he was so dirty and so solemn that Petra Cotes almost believed that the one who had e to see her was not the lover of all her life but his in brother.
“You’re crazy
?he told her. “Unless you plan to raffle off bones?
Then she told him to look in the bedroom and Aureliano Segundo saw the mule. Its skin was clinging to its bones like that of its mistress
but it was just as alive and resolute as she. Petra Cotes had fed it with her wrath
and when there was no more hay or corn or roots
she had given it shelter in her own bedroom and fed it on the percale sheets
the Persian rugs
the plush bedspreads
the velvet drapes
and the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed.