世紀文學經典:《百年孤獨》第19章Part8

“Fool!?she said as if she were spitting. “I’m sailing on the first ship leaving for Belgium.?
Alvaro had come to the wise Catalonian’s bookstore one of those afternoons proclaiming at the top of his lungs his latest discovery: a zoological brothel. It was called The Golden Child and it was a huge open air salon through which no less than two hundred bitterns who told the time with a deafening cackling strolled at will. In wire pens that surrounded the dance floor and among large Amazonian camellias there were herons of different colors, crocodiles as fat as pigs, snakes with twelve rattles, and a turtle with a gilded shell who dove in a small artificial ocean. There was a big white dog, meek and a pederast, who would give stud services nevertheless in order to be fed. The atmosphere had an innocent denseness, as if it had just been created, and the beautiful mulatto girls who waited hopelessly among the blood-red petals and the outmoded phonograph records knew ways of love that man had left behind forgotten in the earthly paradise. The first night that the group visited that greenhouse of illusions the splendid and taciturn old woman who guarded the entrance in a wicker rocking chair felt that time was turning back to its earliest origins when among the five who were arriving she saw a bony, jaundiced man with Tartar cheekbones, marked forever and from the beginning of the world with the pox of solitude.
“Lord, Lord,?she sighed, “Aureliano!?
She was seeing Colonel Aureliano Buendía once more as she had seen him in the light of a lamp long before the wars, long before the desolation of glory and the exile of disillusionment, that remote dawn when he went to her bedroom to give the first command of his life: the command to give him love. It was Pilar Ternera. Years before, when she had reached one hundred forty-five years of age, she had given up the pernicious custom of keeping track of her age and she went on living in the static and marginal time of memories, in a future perfectly revealed and established, beyond the futures disturbed by the insidious snares and suppositions of her cards.

“傻瓜！”她吐出了一句話。“我就要乘第一艘船到比利時去了。”
一天下午，阿爾伐羅來到博學的加泰隆尼亞人的書店，大叫大喊地宣佈他的最新發現：一個“動物妓院”。這個地方叫做“金童”，是一個巨大的室外沙龍，那兒至少有二百多隻麻形震耳欲聾地咯咯亂叫，報告時間。舞池周圍的鐵絲網裏，大朵的亞馬遜山茶花叢藏着各種顏色的蒼鷺、肥豬似的鱷魚、十二個響節的蛇，還有披着金鎧潛伏在一座人造小海洋裏的海龜。這裏還有一條雪白的大狗，性情溫順，卻是個亂倫的傢伙，爲了吃食，它會作出種馬般的舉動。氣氛非常純淨濃郁，那個場所彷彿是剛剛出現的。花枝招展的混血姑娘絕望地守在鮮紅的花叢中，陳舊的唱片播放着早就被塵世樂園裏的人們忘卻了的愛情老調。他們五人蔘觀夢幻般的室外沙龍的頭一個夜晚，坐在門口柳條搖椅裏的一位衣着華麗、沉默寡言的老太婆感到時光彷彿正在迴轉。從走近的五個人中，她看見一個瘦瘦的人，長着韃靼人的顴骨，患着黃疸病，從誕生之日起就永遠標上了孤僻的印記。
“天啊！天啊！”她驚歎道，“奧雷連諾！”
她又一次看見了奧雷連諾上校，正象戰前很久她在燈光下見到的那樣，也象他在名譽掃地、幻想破滅以後即將流放之前那樣。在那個遙遠的黎明，他來到她的臥室，發出平生第一個命令，要求給他愛情。原來這是皮拉·苔列娜。多年以前，在她已經一百四十五歲時，她就已放棄了有害的計算年齡的習慣。她一直生活在平靜和對往事的回憶中，一直是在一種完全清楚的、確信不疑的未來中生活，而不會受到撲克牌預卜的充滿陷阱的前途不斷滋擾。