世紀文學經典:《百年孤獨》第19章Part5

That encyclopedic coincidence was the beginning of a great friendship. Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were ?lvaro, Germán, Alfonso, and Gabriel, the first and last friends that he ever had in his life. For a man like him, holed up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people, as ?lvaro demonstrated during one night of revels. Some time would have to pass before Aureliano realized that such arbitrary attitudes had their origins in the example of the wise Catalonian, for whom wisdom was worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a way of preparing chick peas.
The afternoon on which Aureliano gave his lecture on cockroaches, the argument ended up in the house of the girls who went to bed because of hunger, a brothel of lies on the outskirts of Macondo. The proprietress was a smiling mamasanta, tormented by a mania for opening and closing doors. Her eternal smile seemed to have been brought on by the credulity of her customers, who accepted as something certain an establishment that did not exist except in the imagination, because even the tangible things there were unreal: the furniture that fell apart when one sat on it, the disemboweled phonograph with a nesting hen inside, the garden of paper flowers, the calendars going back to the years before the arrival of the banana company, the frames with prints cut out of magazines that had never been published. Even the timid little whores who came from the neighborhood: when the proprietress informed them that customers had arrived they were nothing but an invention. They would appear without any greeting in their little flowered dresses left over from days when they were five years younger, and they took them off with the same innocence with which they had put them on, and in the paroxysms of love they would exclaim good heavens, look how that roof is falling in, and as soon as they got their peso and fifty cents they would spend it on a roll with cheese that the proprietress sold them, smiling more than ever, because only she knew that that meal was not true either. Aureliano, whose world at that time began with Melquíades?parchments and ended in Nigromanta’s bed, found a stupid cure for timidity in the small imaginary brothel. At first he could get nowhere, in rooms where the proprietress would enter during the best moments of love and make all sorts of comments about the intimate charms of the protagonists. But with time he began to get so familiar with those misfortunes of the world that on one night that was more unbalanced than the others he got undressed in the small reception room and ran through the house balancing a bottle of beer on his inconceivable maleness. He was the one who made fashionable the extravagances that the proprietress celebrated with her eternal smile, without protesting, without believing in them just as when Germán tried to burn the house down to show that it did not exist, and as when Alfonso wrung the neck of the parrot and threw it into the pot where the chicken stew was beginning to boil. Although Aureliano felt himself linked to the four friends by a common affection and a common solidarity, even to the point where he thought of them as if they were one person, he was closer to Gabriel than to the others. The link was born on the night when he casually mentioned Colonel Aureliano Buendía and Gabriel was the only one who did not think that he was making fun of somebody. Even the proprietress, who normally did not take part in the conversation argued with a madam’s wrathful passion that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, of whom she had indeed heard speak at some time, was a figure invented by the government as a pretext for killing Liberals. Gabriel, on the other hand, did not doubt the reality of Colonel Aureliano Buendía because he had been a companion in arms and inseparable friend of his great-great-grandfather Colonel Gerineldo Márquez. Those fickle tricks of memory were even more critical when the killing of the workers was brought up. Every time that Aureliano mentioned the matter, not only the proprietress but some people older than she would repudiate the myth of the workers hemmed in at the station and the train with two hundred cars loaded with dead people, and they would even insist that, after all, everything had been set forth in judicial documents and in primary-school textbooks: that the banana company had never existed. So that Aureliano and Gabriel were linked by a kind of complicity based on real facts that no one believed in, and which had affected their lives to the point that both of them found themselves off course in the tide of a world that had ended and of which only the nostalgia remained. Gabriel would sleep wherever time overtook him. Aureliano put him up several times in the silver workshop, but he would spend his nights awake, disturbed by the noise of the dead people who walked through the bedrooms until dawn. Later he turned him over to Nigromanta, who took him to her well-used room when she was free and put down his account with vertical marks behind the door in thefew spaces left free by Aureliano’s debts.

學識上的一致是偉大友誼的開端。奧雷連諾。 布恩蒂亞下午繼續同四位爭論對手見面，他們是阿爾伐羅、傑爾曼、阿爾豐索和加布裏埃爾，這四位是他一生中的第一批也是最後一批朋友。象他這樣整天埋頭書堆的人，從書店開始到黎明時刻在妓院裏結束的暴風雨般的聚會，對他真是一種啓示。直到那時他還從未想到過，文藝是迄今爲止用來嘲弄人的一切發明中最好的玩意兒。阿爾伐羅在一天晚宴中就是這樣說的。過了一些時候奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞纔想到明白，此說來源於博學的加泰隆尼亞人。老頭子認爲：知識要是不能用來發明一種烹飪鷹嘴豆的方法，那就一文不值了。
奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞發表關於蟑螂的演說的那天下午，辯論是在馬孔多鎮邊一個妓院裏結束的，姑娘們因爲飢餓都睡覺去了。鴇母是一個面帶笑容的、假惺惺的人，不斷的開門關門使她有些不耐煩。她臉上的笑容似乎是爲容易上當的主顧裝出來的，主顧們卻認真地領受這種微笑，而這種微笑只是一種幻覺，實際上並不存在，因爲這裏可以觸摸的一切東西都是不真實的：這裏的椅子，人一坐上去就會散架；留聲機裏的零件換上了一隻抱蛋的母雞，花園裏都是紙花，日曆上的日子還是香蕉公司來到之前的日子，畫框裏鑲着的畫是從沒有出版過的雜誌上剪下來的，就拿附近地區來的那些羞怯的小娘兒們來說，鴇母一喊接客，她們除了裝模作樣，什麼也不會幹。她們穿着五年前剩下的瘦小的花布衫出現在嫖客面前，一句問候的話也不說，她們天真無邪地穿上這些衣服，同樣天真無邪地脫去這些衣服。情慾達到高潮時，她們會大叫“天哪”，並且看着天花板如何坍塌下來。拿到一比索五十生地之後，她們便立刻去向鴇母買夾乾酪的麪包捲來吃。那時鴇母會笑得更甜了，因爲只有她知道，那些食物也都是騙人貨。奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞當時的生活，開頭是閱讀梅爾加德斯的手稿，最後是到尼格羅曼塔的牀上。他在妓院裏，發現了一種醫治羞怯症的笨辦法。起初，他毫無進展，他呆在房間裏，鴇母在他們興致正濃的時刻走進來，把相親相愛的迷人之處向他倆作一番介紹。不過，時間一長，他開始熟悉人世間的不幸了，因此在一天夜裏，情況比往常更加令人心神不定，他在小小的接待室裏脫光了衣服，拿着一瓶啤酒，以他那不可思議的男子氣概，跑着穿過那座房子。奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞把鴇母始終笑臉迎客的態度看做一種時髦作風，既不反對，也不相信，就象傑爾曼爲了證明房子並不存在而要燒掉房子一樣，也象阿爾豐索擰斷鸚鵡的脖子，扔進滾沸的燉鍋裏一樣，他都無動於衷。奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞感到，有一種共同的感情和友誼把他跟四位朋友聯結在一起，他一想到他們，就彷彿他們是一個人。儘管如此，他還是比較接近加布裏埃爾。這種關係是一天晚上產生的，當時他偶然提到了奧雷連諾上校，只有加布裏埃爾一個人認爲他不是在說笑話。甚至通常並不參加爭論的鴇母，也擺出一副太太們特有的激憤樣兒，爭辯地說：她有時確實聽說過奧雷連諾上校這個人，他是政府爲了找個藉口來消滅自由黨而捏造出來的一個人物。加布裏埃爾卻不懷疑奧雷連諾上校真有其人，因爲他曾和他的曾祖父格林列爾多·馬克斯上校一起打過仗，他們是親密的朋友。大家提到屠殺工人的事件時，記憶中的那些陷坑就變得特別深了。奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞每次提起這件事，不僅鴇母，甚至比她年長的人，都會起來駁斥那些神話，說工人們在車站上被軍隊包圍，兩百節車廂裝滿了死屍運往海邊，這些都是虛構的，他們甚至還堅持說，在司法文件中以及小學教科書上，一切都講得明明白白：香蕉公司從來不曾有過。這樣，奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞和加布裏埃爾就有了一種共同的關係，這種關係的基礎就是他倆相信誰也不相信的事實。這對他倆的生活影響相當大，結果他倆都發現自己偏離了一切都已消亡、只剩下思鄉病的世界潮流。加布裏埃爾不管在什麼地方，有空就睡覺。奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞在首飾作坊裏接待過他好幾次，但是加布裏埃爾卻整夜整夜睡不着覺，被那些穿過臥室的死人鬧得無法安寧，直到天亮。後來，奧雷連諾·布恩蒂亞把加布裏埃爾交給尼格羅曼塔，她閒下時就把他帶到她那從不得空的房間裏，在門背後劃上幾條直槓，記下他的賬，這些記號與奧雷連諾的欠賬緊緊地挨着。