世紀文學經典:《百年孤獨》第16章Part4
Macondo was in ruins. In the swampy streets there were the remains of furniture, animal skeletons covered with red lilies, the last memories of the hordes of newcomers who had fled Macondo as wildly as they had arrived. The houses that had been built with such haste during the banana fever had been abandoned. The banana company tore down its installations. All that remained of the former wired-in city were the ruins. The wooden houses, the cool terraces for breezy card-playing afternoons, seemed to have been blown away in an anticipation of the prophetic wind that years later would wipe Macondo off the face of the earth. The only human trace left by that voracious blast was a glove belonging to Patricia Brown in an automobile smothered in wild pansies. The enchanted region explored by Jos?Arcadio Buendía in the days of the founding, where later on the banana plantations flourished, was a bog of rotting roots, on the horizon of which one could manage to see the silent foam of the sea. Aureliano Segundo went through a crisis of affliction on the first Sunday that he put on dry clothes and went out to renew his acquaintance with the town. The survivors of the catastrophe, the same ones who had been living in Macondo before it had been struck by the banana company hurricane, were sitting in the middle of the street enjoying their first sunshine. They still had the green of the algae on their skin and the musty smell of a corner that had been stamped on them by the rain, but in their hearts they seemed happy to have recovered the town in which they had been born. The Street of the Turks was again what it had been earlier, in the days when the Arabs with slippers and rings in their ears were going about the world swapping knickknacks for macaws and had found in Macondo a good bend in the road where they could find respite from their age-old lot as wanderers. Having crossed through to the other side of the rain. the merchandise in the booths was falling apart, the cloths spread over the doors were splotched with mold,the counters undermined by termites, the walls eaten away by dampness, but the Arabs of the third generation were sitting in the same place and in the same position as their fathers and grandfathers, taciturn, dauntless, invulnerable to time and disaster, as alive or as dead as they had been after the insomnia plague and Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s thirty-two wars. Their strength of spirit in the face of ruins of the gaming tables, the fritter stands, the shooting galleries, and the alley where they interpreted dreams and predicted the future made Aureliano Segundo ask them with his usual informality what mysterious resources they had relied upon so as not to have gone awash in the storm, what the devil they had done so as not to drown, and one after the other, from door to door, they returned a crafty smile and a dreamy look, and without any previous consultation they all gave the answer:
“Swimming.?
Petra Cotes was perhaps the only native who had an Arab heart. She had seen the final destruction of her stables, her barns dragged off by the storm. but she had managed to keep her house standing. During the second year she had sent pressing messages to Aureliano Segundo and he had answered that he did not know when he would go back to her house, but that in any case he would bring along a box of gold coins to pave the bedroom floor with. At that time she had dug deep into her heart, searching for the strength that would allow her to survive the misfortune, and she had discovered a reflective and just rage with which she had sworn to restore the fortune squandered by her lover and then wiped out by the deluge. It was such an unbreakable decision that Aureliano Segundo went back to her house eight months after the last message and found her green disheveled, with sunken eyelids and skin spangled with mange, but she was writing out numbers on small pieces of paper to make a raffle. Aureliano Segundo was astonished, and he was so dirty and so solemn that Petra Cotes almost believed that the one who had come to see her was not the lover of all her life but his twin brother.
“You’re crazy,?he told her. “Unless you plan to raffle off bones?
Then she told him to look in the bedroom and Aureliano Segundo saw the mule. Its skin was clinging to its bones like that of its mistress, but it was just as alive and resolute as she. Petra Cotes had fed it with her wrath, and when there was no more hay or corn or roots, she had given it shelter in her own bedroom and fed it on the percale sheets, the Persian rugs, the plush bedspreads, the velvet drapes, and the canopy embroidered with gold thread and silk tassels on the episcopal bed.
馬孔多成了一片廢墟。街道上是一個個水潭，污泥裏到處都露出破爛的傢俱和牲畜的骸骨，骸骨上長出了紅百合花一－這是一羣外國佬最後的紀念品，他們匆忙地來到馬孔多，又匆忙地逃離了馬孔多。“香蕉熱”時期急速建築起來的房屋已經拋棄了。香蕉公司運走了自己所有的東西。在鐵絲網圍着的小鎮那兒，只留下了一堆堆垃圾，那一座座木房子，從前每天傍晚涼臺上都有人無憂無慮地玩紙牌，也象被狂風颳走了，這種狂風是未來十二級颶風的前奏；多年以後，那種颶風註定要把馬孔多從地面上一掃而光。在這一次致命的狂風之後，從前這兒住過人的唯一證明。是帕特里西婭。 布勞恩忘在小汽車裏的一隻手套，小汽車上爬滿了三色繭。霍.阿布恩蒂亞建村時期勘探過的“魔區”，嗣後香蕉園曾在這兒繁榮起來，現在卻是一片沼澤，到處都隱藏着爛掉的樹根，在遠處露出的地平線上，這片海洋在好幾年中仍然無聲地翻着泡沫。第一個禮拜日，奧雷連諾第二穿着乾衣服，出門看見這個市鎮的樣子，感到十分驚愕。雨後活下來的那些人——全是早在香蕉公司侵入之前定居馬孔多的人——都坐在街道中間，享受初露的陽光。他們的皮膚仍象水藻那樣微微發綠，下雨年間滲進皮膚的儲藏室黴味還沒消失可是他們臉上卻露出愉快的微笑，因爲意識到他們土生土長的市鎮重新屬於他們了。輝煌的土耳其人街又成了昔日的樣子，從前，那些浪跡天涯的阿拉伯人，穿着拖鞋，戴着粗大的金屬耳環，拿小玩意兒交換鸚鵡，在千年的流浪之後在馬孔多獲得了可靠的棲身之所。現在，下雨時擺在攤子上的貨品已經瓦解，陳列在商店裏的貨品已經發黴，櫃檯已被白蟻至壞，牆壁已給潮氣侵蝕，可是第三代的阿拉伯人卻坐在他們的祖輩坐過的地方，象祖輩一樣的姿勢，默不吭聲，泰然自若，不受時間和自然災害的支配，死活都象患失眠症以後那樣，或者象奧雷連諾上校的三十二次戰爭以後那樣。面對着毀了的賭桌和食品攤，面對着殘存的靶場，面對着人們曾在那裏圓夢和預卜未來的一片瓦礫的小街小巷，阿拉伯人依然精神飽滿，這使奧雷連諾第二覺得驚異，他就用往常那種不拘禮節的口吻詢問他們，他們依靠什麼神祕的力量纔沒給洪流沖走，沒給大水淹死；他從這家走到那家，一再提出這個問題，到處都遇到同樣巧妙的微笑。同樣沉思的目光以及同樣的回答：
“我們會游泳。”
在全鎮其他的居民中，僅僅佩特娜·柯特一個人還有阿拉伯人的胸懷。畜欄和馬廄在她眼前倒塌了，但她沒有泄氣，維持了自己的家。最近一年，她一直想把奧雷連諾第二叫來，寫了一張張字條給他，可他回答說，他不知道哪一天回到她的家裏，但是不管怎樣，他準會帶着一袋金幣到她家裏，用它們來鋪臥室的地面。那時她就冥思苦想，希望找到一種能夠幫助她忍受苦命的力量，但她在心裏找到的只是憤恨，一種公正的、無情的憤恨，於是她發誓要恢復情人浪費的和暴雨毀掉的財產。她的決心是那麼堅定，奧雷連諾第二收到最後一張字條之後過了八個月，終於來到了佩特娜。 柯特家裏，女主人臉色發青，披頭散髮，眼睛凹陷，皮膚長了疥瘡，正在一片片紙兒上寫號碼，想把它們做成彩票。奧雷連諾第二不勝驚訝，默不做聲地站在她面前，他是那麼瘦削和拘謹，佩特娜·柯特甚至覺得，她看見的不是跟她度過了整整一生的情人，而是他的孿生兄弟。
“你瘋啦，”他說。“你想用什麼抽彩？難道用屍骨嗎？”
於是，她要他到臥室裏去看看，他看見了一匹騾子。騾子象它的女主人一樣瘦骨嶙峋，但也象她一樣堅定、活躍。佩特娜。 柯特拼命飼養它，再也沒有乾草、玉米或樹根的時候，她就把它安頓在她的臥室裏，讓它去嚼棉布牀單、波斯毯子、毛絨被子、絲絨窗簾以及主教牀上的帳幔，這種帳幔是金線刺繡的，裝飾了絲線做成的穗子。
