One Hundred Years of Solitude 百年孤独 Chapter 1

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad ¹, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe ² houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric ³ eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged ⁵ gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar ⁶ of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration ⁷ he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs ⁸, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades' magical irons. "Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls." José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels ⁹ of the earth. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: "It won't work for that." But José Arcadio Buendía at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule ¹⁰ and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. úrsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade ¹¹ him. "Very soon well have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house," her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth ¹² a suit fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered ¹³ together with rust ¹⁴ and inside of which there was the hollow resonance ¹⁵ of an enormous stone-filled gourd ¹⁶. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified ¹⁸ skeleton with a copper ¹⁹ locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.,In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance to the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope see the gypsy woman an arm's length away. "Science has eliminated distance," Melquíades proclaimed. "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house." A burning noonday sun brought out a startling demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they put a pile of dry hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by concentrating the sun's rays. José Arcadio Buendía, who had still not been consoled for the failure of big magnets, conceived the idea of using that invention as a weapon of war. Again Melquíades tried to dissuade him, but he finally accepted the two magnetized ingots and three colonial coins in exchange for the magnifying glass. úrsula wept in consternation ²⁰. That money was from a chest of gold coins that her father had put together ova an entire life of privation and that she had buried underneath ²¹ her bed in hopes of a proper occasion to make use of it. José Arcadio Buendía made no at. tempt ²² to console her, completely absorbed in his tactical experiments with the abnegation of a scientist and even at the risk of his own life. In an attempt to show the effects of the glass on enemy troops, he exposed himself to the concentration of the sun's rays and suffered burns which turned into sores that took a long time to heal. Over the protests of his wife, who was alarmed at such a dangerous invention, at one point he was ready to set the house on fire. He would spend hours on end in his room, calculating the strategic possibilities of his novel weapon until he succeeded in putting together a manual of startling instructional clarity and an irresistible ²³ power of conviction. He sent it to the government, accompanied by numerous descriptions of his experiments and several pages of explanatory sketches ²⁴; by a messenger who crossed the mountains, got lost in measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers, and was on the point of perishing under the lash ²⁵ of despair, plague, and wild beasts until he found a route that joined the one used by the mules ²⁶ that carried the mail. In spite of the fact that a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at that time, José Arcadio Buendía promised to undertake it as soon as the government ordered him to so that he could put on some practical demonstrations ²⁷ of his invention for the military authorities and could train them himself in the complicated art of solar war. For several years he waited for an answer. Finally, tired of waiting, he bemoaned ²⁸ to Melquíades the failure of his project and the gypsy then gave him a convincing proof of his honesty: he gave him back the doubloons in exchange for the magnifying glass, and he left him in addition some Portuguese ²⁹ maps and several instruments of navigation. In his own handwriting he set down a concise ³⁰ synthesis of the studies by Monk ³¹ Hermann. which he left José Arcadio so that he would be able to make use of the astrolabe, the compass, and the sextant. José Arcadio Buendía spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he had built in the rear the house so that no one would disturb his experiments. Having completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars and he almost contracted sunstroke from trying to establish an exact method to ascertain ³² noon. When he became an expert in the use and manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion of space that allowed him to navigate ³³ across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study. That was the period in which he acquired the habit of talking to himself, of walking through the house without paying attention to anyone, as úrsula and the children broke their backs in the garden, growing banana and caladium, cassava and yams, ahuyama roots and eggplants. Suddenly, without warning, his feverish ³⁴ activity was interrupted and was replaced by a kind of fascination ³⁵. He spent several days as if he were bewitched, softly repeating to himself a string of fearful conjectures ³⁶ without giving credit to his own understanding. Finally, one Tuesday in December, at lunchtime, all at once he released the whole weight of his torment ³⁷. The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated ³⁸ by his prolonged vigil and by the wrath ³⁹ of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them:,"The earth is round, like an orange.",úrsula lost her patience. "If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all by yourself!" she shouted. "But don't try to put your gypsy ideas into the heads of the children." José Arcadio Buendía, impassive, did not let himself be frightened by the desperation of his wife, who, in a seizure ⁴⁰ of rage, mashed ⁴¹ the astrolabe against the floor. He built another one, he gathered the men of the village in his little room, and he demonstrated to them, with theories that none of them could understand, the possibility of returning to where one had set out by consistently sailing east. The whole village was convinced that José Arcadio Buendía had lost his reason, when Melquíades returned to set things straight. He gave public praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure astronomical ⁴² speculation ⁴³ had evolved a theory that had already been proved in practice, although unknown in Macondo until then, and as a proof of his admiration ⁴⁴ he made him a gift that was to have a profound influence on the future of the village: the laboratory of an alchemist.,By then Melquíades had aged ¹⁷ with surprising rapidity. On his first trips he seemed to be the same age as José Arcadio Buendía. But while the latter had preserved his extraordinary strength, which permitted him to pull down a horse by grabbing its ears, the gypsy seemed to have been worn dowse by some tenacious ⁴⁶ illness. It was, in reality, the result of multiple and rare diseases contracted on his innumerable trips around the world. According to what he himself said as he spoke ⁴⁷ to José Arcadio Buendía while helping ⁴⁸ him set up the laboratory, death followed him everywhere, sniffing ⁴⁹ at the cuffs ⁵⁰ of his pants, but never deciding to give him the final clutch of its claws. He was a fugitive ⁵¹ from all the plagues and catastrophes ⁵² that had ever lashed ⁵³ mankind. He had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy ⁵⁴ in the Malayan archipelago, leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous ⁵⁵ shipwreck ⁵⁶ in the Strait of Magellan. That prodigious ⁵⁷ creature, said to possess the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped ⁵⁸ in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven ⁵⁹ with widespread wings, and a velvet ⁶⁰ vest across which the patina ⁶¹ of the centuries had skated. But in spite of his immense wisdom and his mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life. He would complain of the ailments ⁶² of old age, he suffered from the most insignificant ⁶³ economic difficulties, and he had stopped laughing a long time back because scurvy had made his teeth drop out. On that suffocating ⁶⁴ noontime when the gypsy revealed his secrets, José Arcadio Buendía had the certainty that it was the beginning of a great friendship. The children were startled by his fantastic stories. Aureliano, who could not have been more than five at the time, would remember him for the rest of his life as he saw him that afternoon, sitting against the metallic ⁶⁵ and quivering light from the window, lighting ⁶⁶ up with his deep organ voice the darkest reaches of the imagination, while down over his temples there flowed the grease that was being melted by the heat. José Arcadio, his older brother, would pass on that wonderful image as a hereditary ⁶⁷ memory to all of his descendants. úrsula on the other hand, held a bad memory of that visit, for she had entered the room just as Melquíades had carelessly broken a flask ⁶⁸ of bichloride of mercury.,"It's the smell of the devil," she said.,Always didactic, he went into a learned exposition of the diabolical ⁷¹ properties of cinnabar, but úrsula paid no attention to him, although she took the children off to pray. That biting odor would stay forever in her mind linked to the memory of Melquíades., ,At first Jose Arcadio Buendía had been a kind of youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and advice for the raising of children and animals, and who collaborated ⁷² with everyone, even in the physical work, for the welfare of the community. Since his house from the very first had been the best in the village, the others had been built in its image and likeness ⁷³. It had a small, well-lighted living roost, a dining room in the shape of a terrace gaily ⁷⁴ colored flowers, two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut ⁷⁵ tree, a well kept garden, and a corral where goats, pigs, and hens lived in peaceful communion. The only animals that were prohibited, not just in his house but in the entire settlement, were fighting cocks.,úrsula's capacity for work was the same as that of her husband. Active, small, severe, that woman of unbreakable nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing seemed to be everywhere, from dawn until quite late at night, always pursued by the soft whispering stiff, starched ⁷⁶ petticoats. Thanks to her the floors of tamped ⁷⁷ earth, the unwhitewashed mud walls, the rustic ⁷⁸, wooden furniture they had built themselves were always dean, and the old chests where they kept their clothes exhaled ⁷⁹ the warm smell of basil.,José Arcadio Buendía, who was the most enterprising man ever to be seen in the village, had set up the placement of the houses in such a way that from all of them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort, and he had lined up the streets with such good sense that no house got more sun than another during the hot time of day. Within a few years Macondo was a village that was more orderly and hard working than any known until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died.,A squad is the smallest unit in an army.班是军队的最小构成单位。,They live in an adobe house.他们住在一间土坯屋里 。