百年孤独为什么值得看 世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第18章Part8

世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》第18章Part8  

The discovery of the treasure was like a deflagration. Instead of returning to Rome with the sudden fortune
which had been his dream maturing in misery
Jos?Arcadio converted the house into a decadent paradise. He replaced the curtains and the canopy of the bed with new velvet
and he had the bathroom floor covered with paving stones and the walls with tiles. The cupboard in the dining room was filled with fruit preserves
hams
and pickles
and the unused pantry was opened again for the storage of wines and liqueurs which Jos?Arcadio himself brought from the railroad station in crates marked with his name. One night he and the four oldest children had a party that lasted until dawn. At six in the morning they came out naked from the bedroom
drained the pool
and filled it with champagne. They jumped in en masse
swimming like birds flying through a sky gilded with fragrant bubbles
while Jos?Arcadio
floated on his back on the edge of the festivities
remembering Amaranta with his eyes open. He remained that way
wrapped up in himself
thinking about the bitterness of his equivocal pleasures until after the children had bee tired and gone in a troop to the bedroom. where they tore down the curtains to dry themselves
and in the disorder they broke the rock crystal mirror into four pieces and destroyed the canopy of the bed in the tumult of lying down. When Jos?Arcadio came back from the bathroom
he found them sleeping in a naked heap in the shipwrecked bedroom. Inflamed
not so much because of the damage as because of the disgust and pity that he felt for himself in the emptiness of the saturnalia
he armed himself with an ecclesiastical cat-o-nine-tails that he kept in the bottom of his trunk along with a hair-shirt and other instruments of mortification and penance
and drove the children out of the house
howling like a madman and whipping them without mercy as a person would not even have done to a pack of coyotes. He was done in
with an attack of asthma that lasted for several days and that gave him the look of a man on his deathbed. On the third night of torture
overe by asphyxiation
he went to Aureliano’s room to ask him the favor of buying some powders to inhale at a nearby drugstore. So it was that Aureliano
went out for a second time. He had to go only o blocks to reach the small pharmacy with dusty windows and ceramic bottles with labels in Latin where a girl with the stealthy beauty of a serpent of the Nile gave him the medicine the name of which Jos?Arcadio had written down on a piece of paper. The second view of the deserted town
barely illuminated by the yellowish bulbs of the street lights
did not awaken in Aureliano any more curiosity than the first. Jos?Arcadio
had e to think that he had run away
when he reappeared
panting a little because of his haste
dragging legs that enclosure and lack of mobility had made weak and heavy. His indifference toward the world was so certain that a few days later Jos?Arcadio violated the promise he had made to his mother and left him free to go out whenever he wanted to.
“I have nothing to do outside
?Aureliano answered him.