世纪文学经典:《百年孤独》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！”她吐出了一句话。“我就要乘第一艘船到比利时去了。”
一天下午，阿尔伐罗来到博学的加泰隆尼亚人的书店，大叫大喊地宣布他的最新发现：一个“动物妓院”。这个地方叫做“金童”，是一个巨大的室外沙龙，那儿至少有二百多只麻形震耳欲聋地咯咯乱叫，报告时间。舞池周围的铁丝网里，大朵的亚马逊山茶花丛藏着各种颜色的苍鹭、肥猪似的鳄鱼、十二个响节的蛇，还有披着金铠潜伏在一座人造小海洋里的海龟。这里还有一条雪白的大狗，性情温顺，却是个乱伦的家伙，为了吃食，它会作出种马般的举动。气氛非常纯净浓郁，那个场所仿佛是刚刚出现的。花枝招展的混血姑娘绝望地守在鲜红的花丛中，陈旧的唱片播放着早就被尘世乐园里的人们忘却了的爱情老调。他们五人参观梦幻般的室外沙龙的头一个夜晚，坐在门口柳条摇椅里的一位衣着华丽、沉默寡言的老太婆感到时光仿佛正在回转。从走近的五个人中，她看见一个瘦瘦的人，长着鞑靼人的颧骨，患着黄疸病，从诞生之日起就永远标上了孤僻的印记。
“天啊！天啊！”她惊叹道，“奥雷连诺！”
她又一次看见了奥雷连诺上校，正象战前很久她在灯光下见到的那样，也象他在名誉扫地、幻想破灭以后即将流放之前那样。在那个遥远的黎明，他来到她的卧室，发出平生第一个命令，要求给他爱情。原来这是皮拉·苔列娜。多年以前，在她已经一百四十五岁时，她就已放弃了有害的计算年龄的习惯。她一直生活在平静和对往事的回忆中，一直是在一种完全清楚的、确信不疑的未来中生活，而不会受到扑克牌预卜的充满陷阱的前途不断滋扰。