世紀文學經典:《百年孤獨》第19章Part2

A year after her return, although she had not succeeded in making any friends or giving any parties, Amaranta ?rsula still believed that it was possible to rescue the community which had been singled out by misfortune. Gaston, her husband, took care not to antagonize her, although since that fatal noon when he got off the train he realized that his wife’s determination had been provoked by a nostalgic mirage. Certain that she would be defeated by the realities, he did not even take the trouble to put his velocipede together, but he set about hunting for the largest eggs among the spider webs that the masons had knocked down, and he would open them with his fingernails and spend hours looking through a magnifying glass at the tiny spiders that emerged. Later on, thinking that Amaranta ?rsula was continuing with her repairs so that her hands would not be idle, he decided to assemble the handsome bicycle, on which the front wheel was much larger than the rear one, and he dedicated himself to the capture and curing of every native insect he could find in the region, which he sent in jam jars to his former professor of natural history at the University of Liège where he had done advanced work in entomology, although his main vocation was that of aviator. When he rode the bicycle he would wear acrobat’s tights, gaudy socks, and a Sherlock Holmes cap, but when he was on foot he would dress in a spotless natural linen suit, white shoes, a silk bow tie, a straw boater, and he would carry a willow stick in his hand. His pale eyes accentuated his look of a sailor and his small mustache looked like the fur of a squirrel. Although he was at least fifteen years older than his wife, his alert determination to make her happy and his qualities as a good lover compensated for the difference. Actually, those who saw that man in his forties with careful habits, with the leash around his neck and his circus bicycle, would not have thought that he had made a pact of unbridled love with his wife and that they both gave in to the reciprocal drive in the least adequate of places and wherever the spirit moved them, as they had done since they had began to keep company, and with a passion that the passage of time and the more and more unusual circumstances deepened and enriched. Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.
They had met two years before they were married, when the sports biplane in which he was making rolls over the school where Amaranta ?rsula was studying made an intrepid maneuver to avoid the flagpole and the primitive framework of canvas and aluminum foil was caught by the tail on some electric wires. From then on, paying no attention to his leg in splints, on weekends he would pick up Amaranta ?rsula at the nun’s boardinghouse where she lived, where the rules were not as severe as Fernanda had wanted, and he would take her to his country club. They began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors, and they felt all the closer together as the beings on earth grew more and more minute. She spoke to him of Macondo as the brightest and most peaceful town on earth, and of an enormous house, scented with oregano, where she wanted to live until old age with a loyal husband and two strong sons who would be named Rodrigo and Gonzalo, never Aureliano and Jos?Arcadio, anda daughter who would be named Virginia and never Remedios. She had evoked the town idealized by nostalgia with such strong tenacity that Gaston understood that she would not get married unless he took her to live in Macondo. He agreed to it, as he agreed later on to the leash, because he thought it was a passing fancy that could be overcome in time. But when two years in Macondo had passed and Amaranta ?rsula was as happy as on the first day, he began to show signs of alarm. By that time he had dissected every dissectible insect in the region, he spoke Spanish like a native, and he had solved all of the crossword puzzles in the magazines that he received in the mail. He did not have the pretext of climate to hasten their return because nature had endowed him with a colonial liver which resisted the drowsiness of siesta time and water that had vinegar worms in it. He liked the native cooking so much that once he ate eighty-two iguana eggs at one sitting. Amaranta ?rsula, on the other hand, had brought in by train fish and shellfish in boxes of ice, canned meats and preserved fruits, which were the only things she could eat, and she still dressed in European style and received designs by mail in spite of the fact that she had no place to go and no one to visit and by that time her husband was not in a mood to appreciate her short skirts, her tilted felt hat, and her seven-strand necklaces. Her secret seemed to lie in the fact that she always found a way to keep busy, resolving domestic problems that she herself had created, and doing a poor job on a thousand things which she would fix on the following day with a pernicious diligence that made one think of Fernanda and the hereditary vice of making something just to unmake it. Her festive genius was still so alive then that when she received new records she would invite Gaston to stay in the parlor until very late to practice the dance steps that her schoolmates described to her in sketches and they would generally end up making love on the Viennese rocking chairs or on the bare floor. The only thing that she needed to be completely happy was the birth of her children, but she respected the pact she had made with her husband not to have any until they had been married for five years.
Looking for something to fill his idle hours with, Gaston became accustomed to spending the morning in Melquíades?room with the shy Aureliano. He took pleasure in recalling with him the most hidden corners of his country, which Aureliano knew as if he had spent much time there. When Gaston asked him what he had done to obtain knowledge that was not in the encyclopedia, he received the same answer as Jos?Arcadio: “Everything Is known.?In addition to Sanskrit he had learned English and French and a little Latin and Greek. Since he went out every afternoon at that time and Amaranta ?rsula had set aside a weekly sum for him for his personal expenses, his room looked like a branch of the wise Catalonian’s bookstore. He read avidly until late at night, although from the manner in which he referred to his reading, Gaston thought that he did not buy the books in order to learn but to verify the truth of his knowledge, and that none of them interested him more than the parchments, to which he dedicated most of histime in the morning. Both Gaston and his wife would have liked to incorporate him into the family life, but Aureliano was a hermetic man with a cloud of mystery that time was making denser. It was such an unfathomable condition that Gaston failed in his efforts to become intimate with him and had to seek other pastimes for his idle hours. It was around that time that he conceived the idea of establishing an airmail service.
It was not a new project. Actually, he had it fairly well advanced when he met Amaranta ?rsula, except that it was not for Macondo, but for the Belgian Congo, where his family had investments in palm oil. The marriage and the decision to spend a few months in Macondo to please his wife had obliged him to postpone it. But when he saw that Amaranta ?rsula was determined to organize a commission for public improvement and even laughed at him when he hinted at the possibility of returning, he understood that things were going to take a long time and he reestablished contact with his forgotten partners in Brussels, thinking that it was just as well to be a pioneer in the Caribbean as in Africa. While his steps were progressing he prepared a landing field in the old enchanted region which at that time looked like a plain of crushed flintstone, and he studied the wind direction, the geography of the coastal region, and the best routes for aerial navigation, without knowing that his diligence, so similar to that of Mr. Herbert, was filling the town with the dangerous suspicion that his plan was not to set up routes but to plant banana trees. Enthusiastic over the idea that, after all, might justify his permanent establishment in Macondo, he took several trips to the capital of the province, met with authorities, obtained licenses, and drew up contracts for exclusive rights. In the meantime he maintained a correspondence with his partners in Brussels which resembled that of Fernanda with the invisible doctors, and he finally convinced them to ship the first airplane under the care of an expert mechanic, who would assemble it in the nearest port and fly it to Macondo. One year after his first meditations and meteorological calculations, trusting in the repeated promises of his correspondents, he had acquired the habit of strolling through the streets, looking at the sky, hanging onto the sound of the breeze in hopes that the airplane would appear.

回來一年之後，阿瑪蘭塔·烏蘇娜雖然沒有結交什麼朋友，也沒有舉行任何宴會，但她仍然相信，要拯救這個災難深重的村鎮是辦得到的。她的丈夫加斯東怕冒犯她，總是小心翼翼的。從他走下火車的那個決定命運的下午起，他就覺得妻子的決心是懷鄉病引起的。他肯定她遲早會在現實生活中遭到挫折。他不肯花點功夫安裝自行車，卻在泥瓦匠們攪亂的蜘蛛網裏尋找最大的卵。他用指甲弄破這些卵，花費幾個小時在放大鏡下面觀察鑽出來的小蜘蛛。後來，他想到阿瑪蘭塔·烏蘇娜正在繼續她的修繕工作，雙手不得空閒，他才決定安裝那輛前輪比後輪大得多的漂亮自行車。他還努力捕捉本地所能找到的每一種昆蟲，給它們治病。他把昆蟲放在果醬瓶裏，送給列日（比利時城名。）大學教自然史的老師：儘管當時他的主要職務是飛行員，但他曾在那個大學裏學過昆蟲學的高年級課程。他騎自行車時總要穿上雜技師的緊身衣，套上華麗而俗氣的襪子，戴上福爾摩斯式的帽子；但他步行的時候，卻穿一塵不染的亞麻布西服，腳登白色鞋子，打一個絲領結，戴一頂硬草帽，手裏還握一根柳木手杖。他的淺色眼睛突出了他水手的容貌，小鬍子柔軟齊整，活象松鼠皮。他雖然比妻子起碼大十五歲，可是他的機敏和果決卻能使她感到愉快。他具有一個好丈夫必備的氣質，這就彌補了年齡上的差異。其實人們看到他已經四十來歲了，還保持着謹小慎微的習慣，脖子上繫着絲帶，騎着馬戲團用的自行車，怎麼也不會想到他和妻子之間曾經有過狂熱的愛情生活，而且在最不適宜的或者情緒衝動的場合，他倆還會象剛開始戀愛時那樣順從彼此的需要，幹出有傷風化的事來；隨着時光的消逝，經過越來越多不尋常的事情的磨鍊，他倆之間的這種激情就變得更加深沉和熾熱了。加斯東不僅是個具有無窮智慧和想象力的狂熱的情人，或許還是這樣一名駕駛員，爲了求得紫羅蘭地裏的片刻歡樂，他寧願緊急着陸，幾乎使自己和愛人喪命也在所不惜。
他倆是在認識兩年以後結婚的，當時他駕駛着運動用的雙翼飛機在阿瑪蘭塔·烏蘇娜就讀的學校上空盤旋。爲了躲開一根旗杆，他作了一個大膽的動作，老式的帆篷和鋁製機尾被電線纏住了。從那時起，他顧不上裝着夾板的腿，每逢週末都把阿瑪蘭塔。烏蘇哪從她居住的修女公寓接走；那裏的規矩不象菲蘭達想象得那麼嚴格，他可以帶她到他的鄉村俱樂部去。星期天，在一千五百英尺高處荒野的空氣中，他們開始相愛了。地面上的生物變得越來越小，他們彼此也就越來越親近了。她對他說起馬孔多，說它是世界上最美麗、最寧靜的城鎮；她又談起一座散發着薄荷香味的大房子，她想在那兒同一個忠實的丈夫、兩個強健的兒子和一個女兒生活到老。兒子取名羅德里格和貢澤洛，而決不能叫什麼奧雷連諾和霍·阿卡蒂奧；女兒要叫弗吉妮婭，決不能起雷麥黛絲之類的名字。她因思戀故鄉而把那個小鎮理想化了，她的感情那麼強烈堅定，使得加斯東明白，除非帶她回馬孔多定居，否則休想跟她結婚。他同意了，就象他後來同意繫上那條絲帶一樣，因爲這不過是暫時的喜好，早晚都要改變的。可是在馬孔多過了兩年以後，阿瑪蘭塔·烏蘇娜仍象剛來的頭一天那麼快活。他開始發出警號了。那時候，他已經解剖了這個地區每一種可以解剖的昆蟲。他的西班牙語說得象個本地人，他解開了寄來的雜誌上所有的字謎。他不能用氣候這個藉口來催促他倆返回，因爲大自然已經賦予他一個適合異鄉水土的肝臟，使他能夠對付午休時間的困勁，而且他還服用長了醋蟲的水。他非常喜愛本地的飯食，以致有一次他一頓吃了八十二隻鬣蜴（產於美洲或西印度的一種大蜥蜴蛋。）另外，阿瑪蘭塔·烏蘇娜已經從火車上運來了一箱箱冰凍的魚、罐頭肉和蜜餞水果——這是她唯一能吃的東西。雖然她無處可走，無人要訪問，她的衣着仍舊是歐洲式樣的，她仍然不斷地收到郵寄來的新樣式。然而她的丈夫沒有心思欣賞她的短裙、歪戴的氈帽和七股項圈。她的祕訣似乎在於她總是能夠變戲法似的忙忙碌碌，不停地解決自己製造的一些家務困難。她爲第二天安排了許多事情，結果什麼也沒幹成。她幹活的勁頭很足，但是效果很糟，使人想起菲蘭達，想起“做”只是爲了“拆”的那種傳統惡習。她愛好玩樂的情趣仍然很濃，她收到了新唱片，就叫加斯東到客廳裏呆到很晚，教他跳舞，那舞姿是她的同學畫在草圖上寄給她的。孩子的誕生是她唯一感到欣慰的事，但她尊重與丈夫的約定，直到婚後五年才生了孩子。
爲了找些事來填補空虛和無聊，加斯東常常同膽小的奧雷連諾。 布恩蒂亞在梅爾加德斯的房間裏呆上一個早晨。他愉快地同奧雷連諾。 布恩蒂亞回憶他的回家陰暗角落裏的生活。奧雷連諾。 布恩蒂亞也知道這些事，彷彿在那兒生活過很久似的。加斯東問起他爲了獲得百科全書上沒有的知識作過什麼努力。加斯東得到的回答是與霍·阿卡蒂奧相同的：“一切都能認識嘛。”除了梵文，奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞還學了英語、法語以及一點拉丁語和希臘語。當時由於他每天下午都要出去，阿瑪蘭塔。 烏蘇娜便每週拿出一點錢供他花銷。他的房間就象博學的加泰隆尼亞人那家書店的分店。他經常貪婪地閱讀到深夜，從他閱讀時採取的方式看來，加斯東認爲他買書不是爲了學習，而是爲了驗證他已有的知識是否正確。書裏的內容與羊皮紙手稿一樣引不起他的興趣，但是讀書佔去了他上午的大部分時間。加斯東和妻子都希望奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞變成他們家庭的一員，但是奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞是一個性格內向的人，老是處在一團令人莫測的迷霧裏。加斯東努力跟他親近，但是沒有成功，只得去找其他的事情來做，藉以排遣無聊的時光。就在這時，他產生了開辦航空郵政的想法。
這並不是個新計劃。加斯東認識阿瑪蘭塔。 烏蘇娜的時候就想好了這個計劃，但那不是爲了馬孔多，而是爲了比屬剛果，他家裏的人在那裏的棕櫚油事業方面投了資。結婚以及婚後爲了取悅妻子到馬孔多生活了幾個月，這就使他不得不把這項計劃暫時擱置起來。嗣後，他看到阿瑪蘭塔。 烏蘇娜決心組織一個改善公共環境的委員會，並且在他暗示可能回去時，遭到了阿瑪蘭塔·烏蘇娜的一番嘲笑，他就意識到事情要大大地延擱了。他跟布魯塞爾失去聯繫的合夥人重新建立了聯繫，想到在加勒比地區作一名創業者並不比在非洲差。在他穩步前進的過程中，他準備在這迷人的古老地區建築一個機場，這個地域在當時看來象是碎石鋪成的平地。他研究風向，研究海邊的地勢，研究飛機航行最好的路線；他還不知道，他的這番類似赫伯特式的奮鬥精神使小鎮產生了一種極大的懷疑，人家說他不是在籌劃航線，而是打算種植香蕉樹。他滿腔熱情地抱定了一個想法——這個想法也許終究會證明他在馬孔多長遠的做法是對的——到省城去了幾次，拜訪了一些專家，獲得了許可證，又草擬了取得專利權的合同。同時，他跟布魯塞爾的合夥人保持着通信聯繫，就象菲蘭達同沒有見過的醫生通信一樣。在一名熟練技師照管下，第一架飛機將用船運來，那位技師要在抵達最近的港口後將飛機裝配好，飛到馬孔多，這終於使人們信服了。在他首次勘察並且作出氣象計算一年之後，他的通信朋友的多次承諾使他充滿了信心。他養成了一個習慣：在樹叢間漫步，仰望天空，傾聽風聲，期待飛機出現。