百年孤独 英文版 One Hundred Years of Solitude
加西亚.马尔克斯 Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Chapter 18 Page 2
"So," he said with a voice with a touch of razor in it, "You're the bastard."
"I'm Aureli-ano Buendía."
"Go to your room," José Arcadio said.
Aureli-ano went and did not come out again even from curiosity when he heard the sound of the solitary funeral ceremonies. Sometimes, from the kitchen, he would see José Arcadio strolling through the house, smothered by his anxious breathing, and he continued hearing his steps in the ruined bedrooms after midnight. He did not hear his voice for many months, not only because José Arcadio never addressed him, but also because he had no desire for it to happen or time to think about anything else but the parchments. On Fernanda's death he had taken out the next-to-the-last little fish and gone to the wise Catalonian's bookstore in search of the books he needed. Nothing he saw along the way interested him, perhaps because he lacked any memories for comparison and the deserted streets and desolate houses were the same as he had imagined them at a time when he would have given his soul to know them. He had given himself the permission denied by Fernanda and only once and for the minimum time necessary, so without pausing he went along the eleven blocks that separated the house from the narrow street where dreams had been interpreted in other days and he went panting into the confused and gloomy place where there was barely room to move. More than a bookstore, it looked like a dump for used books, which were placed in disorder on the shelves chewed by termites, in the corners sticky with cobwebs, and even in the spaces that were supposed to serve as passageways. On a long table, also heaped with old books and papers, the proprietor was writing tireless prose in purple letters, somewhat outlandish, and on the loose pages of a school notebook. He had a handsome head of silver hair which fell down over his forehead like the plume of a cockatoo, and his blue eyes, lively and close-set, revealed the gentleness of a man who had read all of the books. He was wearing short pants and soaking in perspiration, and he did not stop his writing to see who had come in. Aureli-ano had no difficulty in rescuing the five books that he was looking for from that fabulous disorder, because they were exactly where Melquíades had told him they would be. Without saying a word he handed them, along with the little gold fish, to the wise Catalonian and the latter examined them, his eyelids contracting like two clams. "You must be mad," he said in his own language, shrugging his shoulders, and he handed back to Aureli-ano the five books and the little fish.
"You can have them" he said in Spanish. "The last man who read these books must have been Isaac the Blindman, so consider well what you're doing."
José Arcadio restored Meme's bedroom and had the velvet curtains cleaned and mended along with the damask on the canopy of the viceregal bed, and he put to use once more the abandoned bathroom where the cement pool was blackened by a fibrous and rough coating. He restricted his vest-pocket empire of worn, exotic clothing, false perfumes, and cheap jewelry to those places. The only thing that seemed to worry him in the rest of the house were the saints on the family altar, which he burned down to ashes one afternoon in a bonfire he lighted in the courtyard. He would sleep until past eleven o'clock. He would go to the bathroom in a shabby robe with golden dragons on it and a pair of slippers with yellow tassels, and there he would officiate at a rite which for its care and length recalled Remedios the Beauty. Before bathing he would perfume the pool with the salts that he carried in three alabaster flacons. He did not bathe himself with the gourd but would plunge into the fragrant waters and remain there for two hours floating on his back, lulled by the coolness and by the memory of Amaranta. A few days after arriving he put aside his taffeta suit, which in addition to being too hot for the town was the only one that he had, and he exchanged it for some tight-fitting pants very similar to those worn by Pietro Crespi during his dance lessons and a silk shirt woven with thread from living caterpillars and with his initials embroidered over the heart. Twice a week he would wash the complete change in the tub and would wear his robe until it dried because he had nothing else to put on. He never ate at home. He would go out when the heat of siesta time had eased and would not return until well into the night. Then he would continue his anxious pacing, breathing like a cat and thinking about Amaranta. She and the frightful look of the saints in the glow of the nocturnal lamp were the two memories he retained of the house. Many times during the hallucinating Roman August he had opened his eyes in the middle of his sleep and had seen Amaranta rising out of a marble--edged pool with her lace petticoats and the bandage on her hand, idealized by the anxiety of exile. Unlike Aureli-ano José who tried to drown that image in the bloody bog of war, he tried to keep it alive in the sink of concupiscence while he entertained his mother with the endless fable of his pontifical vocation. It never occurred either to him or to Fernanda to think that their correspondence was an exchange of fantasies. José Arcadio, who left the seminary as soon as he reached Rome, continued nourishing the legend of theology and canon law so as not to jeopardize the fabulous inheritance of which his mother's delirious letters spoke and which would rescue him from the misery and sordidness he shared with two friends in a Trastevere garret. When he received Fernanda's last letter, dictated by the foreboding of imminent death, he put the leftovers of his false splendor into a suitcase and crossed the ocean in the hold of a ship where immigrants were crammed together like cattle in a slaughterhouse, eating cold macaroni and wormy cheese. Before he read Fernanda's will, which was nothing but a detailed and tardy recapitulation of her misfortunes, the broken-down furniture and the weeds on the porch had indicated that he had fallen into a trap from which he would never escape, exiled forever from the diamond light and timeless air of the Roman spring. During the crushing insomnia brought on by his asthma he would measure and remeasure the depth of his misfortune as he went through the shadowy house where the senile fussing of Úrsula had instilled a fear of the world in him. In order to be sure that she would not lose him in the shadows, she had assigned him a corner of the bedroom, the only one where he would be safe from the dead people who wandered through the house after sundown. "If you do anything bad," Úrsula would tell him, "the saints will let me know." The terror-filled nights of his childhood were reduced to that corner where he would remain motionless until it was time to go to bed, perspiring with fear on a stool under the watchful and glacial eyes of the tattletale saints. It was useless torture because even at that time he already had a terror of everything around him and he was prepared to be frightened at anything he met in life: women on the street, who would ruin his blood; the women in the house, who bore children with the tail of a pig; fighting cocks, who brought on the death of men and remorse for the rest of one's life; firearms, which with the mere touch would bring down twenty years of war; uncertain ventures, which led only to disillusionment and madness--everything, in short, everything that God had created in His infinite goodness and that the devil had perverted. When he awakened, pressed in the vise of his nightmares, the light in the window and the caresses of Amaranta in the bath and the pleasure of being powdered between the legs with a silk puff would release him from the terror. Even Úrsula was different under the radiant light in the garden because there she did not talk about fearful things but would brush his teeth with charcoal powder so that he would have the radiant smile of a Pope, and she would cut and polish his nails so that the pilgrims who came to Rome from all over the world would be startled at the beauty of the Pope's hands as he blessed them, and she would comb his hair like that of a Pope, and she would sprinkle his body and his clothing with toilet water so that his body and his clothes would have the fragrance of a Pope. In the courtyard of Castel Gandolfo he had seen the Pope on a balcony making the same speech in seven languages for a crowd of pilgrims and the only thing, indeed, that had drawn his attention was the whiteness of his hands, which seemed to have been soaked in lye, the dazzling shine of his summer clothing, and the hidden breath of cologne.
Almost a year after his return home, having sold the silver candlesticks and the heraldic chamberpot-which at the moment of truth turned out to have only a little gold plating on the crest-in order to eat, the only distraction of José Arcadio was to pick up children in town so that they could play in the house. He would appear with them at siesta time and have them skip rope in the garden, sing on the porch, and do acrobatics on the furniture in the living room while he would go among the groups giving lessons in good manners. At that time he had finished with the tight pants and the silk shirts and was wearing an ordinary suit of clothing that he had bought in the Arab stores, but he still maintained his languid dignity and his papal air. The children took over the house just as Meme's schoolmates had done in the past. Until well into the night they could be heard chattering and singing and tap-dancing, so that the house resembled a boarding school where there was no discipline. Aureli-ano did not worry about the invasion as long as they did not bother him in Melquíades' room. One morning two children pushed open the door and were startled at the sight of a filthy and hairy man who was still deciphering the parchments on the worktable. They did not dare go in, but they kept on watching the room. They would peep in through the cracks, whispering, they threw live animals in through the transom, and on one occasion they nailed up the door and the window and it took Aureli-ano half a day to force them open. Amused at their unpunished mischief, four of the children went into the room one morning while Aureli-ano was in the kitchen, preparing to destroy the parchments. But as soon as they laid hands on the yellowed sheets an angelic force lifted them off the ground and held them suspended in the air until Aureli-ano returned and took the parchments away from them. From then on they did not bother him.
The four oldest children, who wore short pants in spite of the fact that they were on the threshold of adolescence, busied themselves with José Arcadio's personal appearance. They would arrive earlier than the others and spend the morning shaving him, giving him massages with hot towels, cutting and polishing the nails on his hands and feet, and perfuming him with toilet water. On several occasions they would get into the pool to soap him from head to toe as he floated on his back thinking about Amaranta. Then they would dry him, powder his body, and dress him. One of the children, who had curly blond hair and eyes of pink glass like a rabbit, was accustomed to sleeping in the house. The bonds that linked him to José Arcadio were so strong that he would accompany him in his asthmatic insomnia, without speaking, strolling through the house with him in the darkness. One night in the room where Úrsula had slept they saw a yellow glow coming through the crumbling cement as if an underground sun had changed the floor of the room into a pane of glass. They did not have to turn on the light. It was sufficient to lift the broken slabs in the corner where Úrsula's bed had always stood and where the glow was most intense to find the secret crypt that Aureli-ano Segun-do had worn himself out searching for during the delirium of his excavations. There were the three canvas sacks closed with copper wire, and inside of them the seven thousand two hundred fourteen pieces of eight, which continued glowing like embers in the darkness.
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, José 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 José 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 José 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 become 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 José 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, overcome by asphyxiation, he went to Aureli-ano's room to ask him the favor of buying some powders to inhale at a nearby drugstore. So it was that Aureli-ano, went out for a second time. He had to go only two 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 José 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 Aureli-ano any more curiosity than the first. José Arcadio, had come 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 José 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," Aureli-ano answered him.
He remained shut up, absorbed in the parchments, which he was slowly unraveling and whose meaning, nevertheless, he was unable to interpret. José Arcadio would bring slices of ham to him in his room, sugared flowers which left a spring-like aftertaste in his mouth, and on two occasions a glass of fine wine. He was not interested in the parchments, which he thought of more as an esoteric pastime, but his attention was attracted by the rare wisdom and the inexplicable knowledge of the world that his desolate kinsman had. He discovered then that he could understand written English and that between parchments he had gone from the first page to the last of the six volumes of the encyclopedia as if it were a novel. At first he attributed to that the fact that Aureli-ano could speak about Rome as if he had lived there many years, but he soon became aware that he knew things that were not in the encyclopedia, such as the price of items. "Everything is known," was the only reply he received from Aureli-ano when he asked him where he had got that information from. Aureli-ano, for his part, was surprised that José Arcadio when seen from close by was so different from the image that he had formed of him when he saw him wandering through the house. He was capable of laughing, of allowing himself from time to time a feeling of nostalgia for the past of the house, and of showing concern for the state of misery present in Melquíades' room. That drawing closer together of two solitary people of the same blood was far from friendship, but it did allow them both to bear up better under the unfathomable solitude that separated and united them at the same time. José Arcadio could then turn to Aureli-ano to untangle certain domestic problems that exasperated him. Aureli-ano, in turn, could sit and read on the porch, waiting for the letters from Amaranta Úrsula, which still arrived with the usual punctuality, and could use the bathroom, from which José Arcadio had banished him when he arrived.
One hot dawn they both woke up in alarm at an urgent knocking on the street door. It was a dark old man with large green eyes that gave his face a ghostly phosphorescence and with a cross of ashes on his forehead. His clothing in tatters, his shoes cracked, the old knapsack on his shoulder his only luggage, he looked like a beggar, but his bearing had a dignity that was in frank contradiction to his appearance. It was only necessary to look at him once, even in the shadows of the parlor, to realize that the secret strength that allowed him to live was not the instinct of self-preservation but the habit of fear. It was Aureli-ano Amador, the only survivor of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía's seventeen sons, searching for a respite in his long and hazardous existence as a fugitive. He identified himself, begged them to give him refuge in that house which during his nights as a pariah he had remembered as the last redoubt of safety left for him in life. But José Arcadio and Aureli-ano did not remember him. Thinking that he was a tramp, they pushed him into the street. They both saw from the doorway the end of a drama that had began before José Arcadio had reached the age of reason. Two policemen who had been chasing Aureli-ano Amador for years, who had tracked him like blood-hounds across half the world, came out from among the almond trees on the opposite sidewalk and took two shots with their Mausers which neatly penetrated the cross of ashes.
Ever since he had expelled the children from the house, José Arcadio was really waiting for news of an ocean liner that would leave for Naples before Christmas. He had told Aureli-ano and had even made plans to set him up in a business that would bring him a living, because the baskets of food had stopped coming since Fernanda's burial. But that last dream would not be fulfilled either. One September morning, after having coffee in the kitchen with Aureli-ano, José Arcadio was finishing his daily bath when through the openings in the tiles the four children he had expelled from the house burst in. Without giving him time to defend himself, they jumped into the pool fully clothed, grabbed him by the hair, and held his head under the water until the bubbling of his death throes ceased on the surface and his silent and pale dolphin body dipped down to the bottom of the fragrant water. Then they took out the three sacks of gold from the hiding place which was known only to them and their victim. It was such a rapid, methodical, and brutal action that it was like a military operation. Aureli-ano, shut up in his room, was not aware of anything. That afternoon, having missed him in the kitchen, he looked for José Arcadio all over the house and found him floating on the perfumed mirror of the pool, enormous and bloated and still thinking about Amaranta. Only then did he understand how much he had began to love him.