世紀文學經典:《百年孤獨》第4章Part 6

Aureliano relaxed with the proof of the omen. He went back to concentrate on his work as if nothing had happened, and his voice took on a restful strength.
"I will recognize him," he said. "He'll bear my name."
José Arcadio Buendía finally got what he was looking for: he connected the mechanism of the clock to a mechanical ballerina, and the toy danced uninterruptedly to the rhythm of her own music for three days. That discovery excited him much more than any of his other harebrained undertakings.
He stopped eating. He stopped sleeping. Only the vigilance and care of Rebeca kept him from being dragged off by his imagination into a state of perpetual delirium from which he would not recover.
He would spend the nights walking around the room thinking aloud, searching for a way to apply the principles of the pendulum to oxcarts, to harrows, to everything that was useful when put into motion.
The fever of insomnia fatigued him so much that one dawn he could not recognize the old man with white hair and uncertain gestures who came into his bedroom. It was Prudencio Aguilar. When he finally identified him, startled that the dead also aged, José Arcadio Buendía felt himself shaken by nostalgia. "Prudencio," he exclaimed. "You've come from a long way off!"
After many years of death the yearning for the living was so intense, the need for company so pressing, so terrifying the neatness of that other death which exists within death, that Prudencio Aguilar had ended up loving his worst enemy. He had spent a great deal of time looking for him. He asked the dead from Riohacha about him, the dead who came from the Upar Valley, those who came from the swamp, and no one could tell him because Macondo was a town that was unknown to the dead until Melquíades arrived and marked it with a small black dot on the motley maps of death.

奧雷連諾相信自己的預感已經應驗，就感到鬆快了。他又在桌上埋頭幹活，彷彿什麼事情也沒發生，他的聲音既平靜又堅定。
“我承認他，”他說。“他就取我的名字吧。”
霍·阿·布恩蒂亞終於達到了自己的目的。他把鐘上的發條連接在一個自動芭蕾舞女演員身上，這玩具在本身的音樂伴奏之下不停地舞蹈了三天。這件發明比以往的任何荒唐把戲都叫他激動。
他不再吃飯，也不再睡覺。他失去了烏蘇娜的照顧和監督，就幻想聯翩，永遠陷入瞭如癡似狂的狀態，再也不能復原了。
他整夜整夜在房間裏踱來踱去，喃喃自語，想方設法要把鐘擺的原理應用到牛車上，應用到犁鏵上，應用到一動就對人有益的一切東西上。
失眠症把霍·阿·布恩蒂亞完全搞垮了，有一天早晨，一個頭發雪白、步履蹣跚的老頭兒走進他的臥室，他也沒有認出此人。原來這是普魯登希奧·阿吉廖爾。最後弄清楚了客人的身份，發現死人也會衰老，霍·阿·布恩蒂亞非常驚訝，而且產生了懷舊之情。“普魯登希奧，”他叫道，“你怎麼從老遠的地方跑到這兒來了？”
在死人國裏呆了多年，普魯登希奧強烈懷念活人，急切需要有個夥伴，畏懼陰曹地府另一種死亡的迫近，他終於喜歡自己最兇狠的冤家了。他花了許多時間尋找霍·阿·布恩蒂亞，他向列奧阿察來的死人打聽過，向烏帕爾山谷和沼澤地來的死人打聽過，可是誰也無法幫助他。因爲，梅爾加德斯來到陰間，在死亡簿上用小黑點劃了“到”之前，其他的死人還不知道馬孔多。