《百年孤独》,是哥伦比亚作家加西亚·马尔克斯创作的长篇小说,是其代表作,也是拉丁美洲魔幻现实主义文学的代表作,被誉为“再现拉丁美洲历史社会图景的鸿篇巨著”。故事讲述马孔多小镇和布恩地亚家族的兴衰变化与传奇故事,记录了家族命运与百年历史,是重复地叙述相同而荒唐的命运,是拉美国家几百年命运的缩影,独具意味地隐喻着人类“文明”史的建立、发展与终结,在荒凉失落与荒唐可笑中诠释宿命式的轮回。家族中人物名字是相同或相近的,预示着他们拥有殊途同归的孤独命运。《百年孤独》以布恩地亚被捆在树上为开端,以他被蚂蚁吃掉为结束,通过细腻丰富的笔触、大胆自由的想象、魔幻的叙事艺术,讲述布恩地亚家族命运与历史,刻画人物孤独的灵魂与自我救赎,进而体现出个人、家族及全人类的悲悯与孤独情怀,让人们重新思考时代发展与人性变化。《百年孤独》被世界文坛誉为魔幻现实主义文学的主峰,已被翻译成30多种文字出版,销量逾1000万册。
Chapter 20
PILAR TERNERA died in her wicker rocking chair during one night of festivities as she watched over the entrance to her paradise. In accordance with her last wishes she was not buried in a coffin but sitting in her rocker, which eight men lowered by ropes into a huge hole dug in the center of the dance floor. The mulatto girls, dressed in black, pale from weeping, invented shadowy rites as they took off their earrings, brooches, and rings and threw them into the pit before it was closed over with a slab that bore neither name nor dates, and that was covered with a pile of Amazonian camellias. After poisoning the animals they closed up the doors and windows with brick and mortar and they scattered out into the world with their wooden trunks that were lined with pictures of saints, prints from magazines, and the portraits of sometime sweethearts, remote and fantastic, who shat diamonds, or ate cannibals, or were crowned playing-card kings on the high seas.
It was the end. In Pilar Ternera’s tomb, among the psalm and cheap whore jewelry, the ruins of the past would rot, the little that remained after the wise Catalonian had auctioned off his bookstore and returned to the Mediterranean village where he had been born, overcome by a yearning for a lasting springtime. No one could have foreseen his decision. He had arrived in Macondo during the splendor of the banana company, fleeing from one of many wars, and nothing more practical had occurred to him than to set up that bookshop of incunabula and first editions in several languages, which casual customers would thumb through cautiously, as if they were junk books, as they waited their turn to have their dreams interpreted in the house across the way. He spent half his life in the back of the store, scribbling in his extra-careful hand in purple ink and on pages that he tore out of school notebooks, and no one was sure exactly what he was writing. When Aureliano first met him he had two boxes of those motley pages that in some way made one think of Melquíades?parchments, and from that time until he left he had filled a third one, so it was reasonable to believe that he had done nothing else during his stay in Macondo. The only people with whom he maintained relations were the four friends, whom he had exchanged their tops and kites for books, and he set them to reading Seneca and Ovid while they were still in grammar school. He treated the classical writers with a household familiarity, as if they had all been his roommates at some period, and he knew many things that should not have been known, such as the fact that Saint Augustine wore a wool jacket under his habit that he did not take off for fourteen years and that Arnaldo of Villanova, the necromancer, was impotent since childhood because of a scorpion bite. His fervor for the written word was an interweaving of solemn respect and gossipy irreverence. Not even his own manuscripts were safe from that dualism. Having learned Catalan in order to translate them, Alfonso put a roll of pages in his pockets, which were always full of newspaper clippings and manuals for strange trades, and one night he lost them in the house of the little girls who went to bed because of hunger. When the wise old grandfather found out, instead of raising a row as had been feared, he commented, dying with laughter, that it was the natural destiny of literature. On the other hand, there was no human power capable of persuading him not to take along the three boxes when he returned to his native village, and he unleashed a string of Carthaginian curses at the railroad inspectors who tried to ship them as freight until he finally succeeded in keeping them with him in the passenger coach. “The world must be all fucked up,?he said then, “when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.?That was the last thing he was heard to say. He had spent a dark week on the final preparations for the trip, because as the hour approached his humor was breaking down and things began to be misplaced, and what he put in one place would appear in another, attacked by the same elves that had tormented Fernanda.
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