One Hundred Years of Solitude 百年孤独 Chapter 14

Meme had finished her course of study. The diploma that certified ¹ her as a concert clavichordist was ratified ³ by the virtuosity ⁴ with which she executed popular melodies the seventeenth century at the gathering ⁵ organized to celebrate the completion of her studies and with which the period of mourning came to in end. More than her art, the guests admired her duality. Her frivolous ⁶ and even slightly infantile character did not seem up to any serious activity, but when she sat down at the clavichord ² she became a different girl, one whose unforeseen maturity ⁷ gave the air of an adult. That was how she had always been. She really did am have any definite vocation ⁸, but she had earned the highest grades by means of inflexible ⁹ discipline simply in order not to annoy her mother. They could have imposed on her an apprenticeship ¹⁰ in any other field and the results would have been the same. Since she had been very small she had been troubled by Fernanda's strictness, her custom of deciding in favor of extremes; and she would have been capable of a much more difficult sacrifice than the clavichord lessons merely not to run up against her intransigence ¹¹. During the graduation ceremonies she had the impression that the parchment with Gothic letters and illuminated ¹² capitals was freeing her from a compromise that she had accepted not so much out of obedience ¹³ as out of convenience, and she thought that from then on not even the insistent ¹⁴ Fernanda would worry any more about an instrument that even the nuns ¹⁵ looked upon as a museum fossil. During the first years she thought that her calculations were mistaken because after she had put half the town to sleep, not only in the parlor ¹⁶ but also at all charitable functions, school ceremonies, and patriotic ¹⁷ celebrations that took place in Macon-do, her mother still invited to the house every newcomer whom she thought capable of appreciating her daughter's virtues ¹⁹. Only after the death of Amaranta, when the family shut itself up again in a period of mourning, was Meme able to lock the clavichord and forget the key in some dresser drawer without Fernanda's being annoyed on finding out when and through whose fault it had been lost. Meme bore up under the exhibitions with the same stoicism that she had dedicated ²⁰ to her apprenticeship. It was the price of her freedom. Fernanda was so pleased with her docility ²¹ and so proud of the admiration ²² that her art inspired that she was never against the house being fall of girl friends, her spending the afternoon in the groves ²³, and going to the movies with Aureli-ano Segun-do or some muted lady as long as the film was approved by Father Antonio Isabel from the pulpit. During those moments of relaxation ²⁶ Meme's real tastes were revealed. Her happiness lay at the otextreme from discipline, in noisy parties, in gossip about lovers, in prolonged sessions with her girl friends, where they learned to smoke and talked about male business, and where they once got their hands on some cane ²⁷ liquor and ended up naked, measuring and comparing the parts of their bodies. Meme would never forget that night when she arrived home chewing licorice lozenges, and without noticing their consternation ²⁸, sat down at the table where Fernanda and Amaranta were eating dinner without saying a word to each other. She had spent two tremendous hours in the bedroom of a girl friend, weeping with laughter and fear, and beyond an crises she had found the rare feeling of. bravery that she needed in order to run away from school and tell her mother in one way or another that she could use the clavichord as an enema. Sitting at the head of the table, drinking a chicken broth ²⁹ that landed in her stomach like an elixir ³⁰ of resurrection, Meme then saw Fernanda and Amaranta wrapped in an accusatory halo reality. She had to make a great effort not to throw at them their prissiness, their poverty of spirit their delusions ³¹ of grandeur ³². From the time of her second vacation she had known that her father was living at home only in order to keep up appearances, and knowing Fernanda as she did and having arranged later to meet Petra Cotes, she thought that her father was right. She also would have preferred being the daughter of the concubine. In the haziness ³³ of the alcohol Meme thought with pleasure about the scandal that would have taken place if she were to express her thoughts at that moment, and the intimate satisfaction of her roguishness was so intense that Fernanda noticed it., ,"What's the matter?" she asked., ,"Nothing," Meme answered. "I was only now discovering how much I loved you both.", , ,It might have been aid that peace and happiness reigned ⁶⁷ for a long time in the tired mansion ⁶⁸ of the Buendías if it had not been for the sudden death of Amaranta, which caused a new uproar ⁶⁹. It was an unexpected event. Although she was old isolated ⁷⁰ from everyone, she still looked firm and upright and with the health of a rock that she had always had. No one knew her thoughts since the afternoon on which she had given Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez his final rejection ⁷¹ shut herself up to weep. She was not seen to cry during the ascension to heaven of Remedios the Beauty or over the extermination ⁷² of the Aureli-anos or the death of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía, who was the person she loved most in this world, although she showed it only when they found his body under the chestnut ⁷³ tree. She helped pick up the body. She dressed him in his soldier's uniform, shaved him, combed his hair, and waxed his mustache better than he had ever done in his days of glory. No one thought that there was any love in that act because they were accustomed to the familiarity of Amaranta with the rites ⁷⁴ of death. Fernanda was scandalized that she did not understand the relationship of Catholicism with life but only its relationship with death, as if it were not a religion but a compendium ⁷⁵ of funeral conventions. Amaranta was too wrapped up in the eggplant patch of her memories to understand those subtle apologetics. She had reached old age with all of her nostalgias intact. When she listened to the waltzes of Pietro Crespi she felt the same desire to weep that she had had in adolescence ⁷⁶, as if time and harsh lessons had meant nothing. The rolls of music that she herself had thrown into the trash with the pretext ⁷⁷ that they had rotted from dampness kept spinning and playing in her memory. She had tried to sink them into the swampy ⁷⁸ passion that she allowed herself with her nephew Aureli-ano José and she tried to take refuge in the calm and virile ⁷⁹ protection of Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez, but she had not been able to overcome them, not even with the most desperate act of her old age when she would bathe the small José Arcadio three years before he was sent to the seminary caress ⁸⁰ him not as a grandmother would have done with a grandchild, but as a woman would have done with a man, as it was said that the French matrons did and as she had wanted to do with Pietro Crespi at the age of twelve, fourteen, when she saw him in his dancing tights and with the magic wand with which he kept time to the metronome. At times It pained her to have let that outpouring of misery ⁸¹ follow its course, and at times it made so angry that she would prick ⁸² her fingers with the needles, but what pained her most and enraged ⁸³ her most and made her most bitter was the fragrant ⁸⁵ and wormy guava grove ²⁴ of love that was dragging her toward death. Just as Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía thought about his war, unable to avoid it, so Amaranta thought about Rebeca. But while her brother had managed to sterilize ⁸⁶ his memories, she had only managed to make hers more scalding. The only thing that she asked of God for many years was that he would not visit on her the punishment of dying before Rebeca. Every time she passed by her house and noted ⁸⁷ the progress of destruction she took comfort in the idea that God was listening to her. One afternoon, when she was sewing on the porch, she was assailed ⁸⁸ by the certainty that she would be sitting in that place, in the same position, and under the same light when they brought her the news of Rebeca's death. She sat down to wait for it, as one waits for a letter, and the fact was that at one time she would pull off buttons to sew them on again so that inactivity would not make the wait longer and more anxious. No one in the house realized that at that time Amaranta was sewing a fine shroud ⁸⁹ for Rebeca. Later on, when Aureli-ano Triste told how he had seen her changed into an apparition ⁹⁰ leathery skin and a few golden threads on her skull ⁹¹, Amaranta was not surprised because the specter described was exactly what she had been imagining for some time. She had decided ⁹² to restore Rebeca's corpse ⁹³, to disguise with paraffin the damage to her face and make a wig ⁹⁴ for her from the hair of the saints. She would manufacture a beautiful corpse, with the linen ⁹⁵ shroud and a plush--lined coffin ⁹⁶ with purple trim. and she would put it at the disposition ⁹⁷ of the worms splendid funeral ceremonies. She worked out the plan with such hatred ⁹⁸ that it made her tremble to think about the scheme, which she would have carried out in exactly the same way if it had been done out love, but she would not allow herself to become upset by the confusion and went on perfecting the details so minutely that she came to be more than a specialist and was a virtuoso ⁹⁹ in the rites of death. The only thing that she did not keep In mind in her fearsome plan was that in spite of her pleas to God she might die before Rebeca. That was, in fact, what happened. At the final moment, however, Amaran-ta did not feel frustrated ¹⁰⁰, but on the contrary, free of all bitterness because death had awarded her the privi-lege of announcing itself several years ahead of time. She saw it on one burning afternoon sewing with her on the porch a short time after Meme had left for school. She saw it because it was a woman dressed in blue with long hair, with a sort of antiquated look, a certain resemblance to Pilar Ternera during the time when she had helped with the chores in the kitchen. Fernanda was present several times and did not see her, in spite of the fact that she was so real, so human, and on one occasion asked of Amaranta the favor of thread-ing a needle. Death did not tell her when she was going to die or whether her hour was assigned before that of Rebeca, but ordered her to begin sewing her own shroud on the next sixth of April. She was authorized ¹⁰¹ to make it as complicated and as fine as she wanted, but just as honestly executed as Rebeca's, and she was told that she would die without pain, fear, or bitterness at dusk on the day that she finished it. Trying to waste the most time possible, Amaranta ordered some rough flax and spun ¹⁰² the thread herself. She did it so carefully that the work alone took four years. Then she started the sewing. As she got closer to the unavoidable end she began to understand that only a miracle would allow her to prolong the work past Rebeca's death, but the very concentration gave her the calmness that she needed to accept the idea of frustration ¹⁰³. It was then that she understood the vicious circle of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía's little gold fishes. The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness. It pained her not to have had that revelation many years before when it had still been possible to purify memories and reconstruct the universe under a new light and evoke ¹⁰⁴ without trembling Pietro Crespi's smell of lavender at dusk and rescue Rebeca from her slough ¹⁰⁵ of misery, not out of hatred or out of love but because of the measureless understanding of solitude. The hatred that she noticed one night in Memes words did not upset because it was directed at her, but she felt the repetition of another adolescence that seemed as clean as hers must have seemed and that, however, was already tainted ¹⁰⁶ with rancor ¹⁰⁷. But by then her acceptance of her fate was so deep that she was not even upset by the certainty that all possibilities of rectification ¹⁰⁸ were closed to her. Her only objective was to finish the shroud. Instead slowing it down with useless detail as she had done in the beginning, she speeded up the work. One week before she calculated that she would take the last stitch on the night February 4, and without revealing the motives ¹⁰⁹, she suggested to Meme that she move up a clavichord concert that she had arranged for the day after, but the girl paid no attention to her. Amaranta then looked for a way to delay for forty-eight hours, and she even thought that death was giving her her way because on the night of February fourth a storm caused a breakdown ¹¹⁰ at the power plant. But on the following day, at eight in the morning, she took the last stitch in the most beautiful piece of work that any woman had ever finished, and she announced without the least bit of dramatics that she was going to die at dusk. She not only told the family but the whole town, because Amaranta had conceived of the idea that she could make up for a life of meanness with one last favor to the world, and she thought that no one was in a better position to take letters to the dead., ,The news that Amaranta Buendía was sailing at dusk carrying the mail of death spread throughout Macon-do before noon, and at three in the afternoon there was a whole carton full of letters in the parlor. Those who did not want to write gave Amaranta verbal messages, which she wrote down in a notebook with the name and date of death of the recipient ¹¹¹. "Don't worry," she told the senders. "The first thing I'll do when I get there is to ask for him and give him your message." It was farcical. Amaranta did not show any upset or the slightest sign of grief, and she even looked a bit rejuvenated ¹¹² by a duty accomplished ¹¹³. She was as straight and as thin as ever. If it had not been for her hardened cheekbones and a few missing teeth, she would have looked much younger than she really was. She herself arranged for them to put the letters in a box sealed with pitch and told them to place it in her grave in a way best to protect it from the dampness. In the morning she had a carpenter called who took her measurements for the coffin as she stood in the parlor, as if it were for a new dress. She showed such vigor ¹¹⁴ in her last hours that Fernanda thought she was making fun of everyone. úrsula, with the experience that Buendías died without any illness, did not doubt at all that Amaranta had received an omen ²⁵ of death, but in any case she was tormented by the fear that with the business of the letters and the anxiety of the senders for them to arrive quickly they would bury her alive in their confusion. So she set about clearing out the house, arguing with the intruders as she shouted at them, and by four in the afternoon she was successful. At that time Amaranta had finished dividing her things among the poor had left on the severe coffin of unfinished boards only the change of clothing and the simple cloth slippers ¹¹⁵ that she would wear in death. She did not neglect that precaution because she remembered that when Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía died they had to buy a pair of new shoes for him because all he had left were the bedroom slippers that he wore in the workshop. A little before five Aureli-ano Segun-do came to fetch Meme for the concert and was surprised that the house was prepared for the funeral. if anyone seemed alive at the moment it was the serene ¹¹⁶ Amaranta, who had even had enough time to cut corns. Aureli-ano Segun-do and Meme took leave of her with mocking farewells and promised that on the following Saturday they would have a big resurrection party. Drawn ¹¹⁷ by the public talk that Amaranta Buendía was receiving letters for the dead, Father Antonio Isabel arrived at five o'clock for the last rites and he had to wait for more than fifteen minutes for the recipient to come out of her bath. When he saw her appear in a madapollam nightshirt and with her hair loose over her shoulders, the decrepit ¹¹⁸ parish priest thought that it was a trick and sent the altar boy away. He thought however, that he would take advantage of the occasion to have Amaranta confess after twenty years of reticence ¹¹⁹. Amaranta answered simply that she did not need spiritual help of any kind because her conscience was clean. Fernanda was scandalized. Without caring that people could hear her she asked herself aloud what horrible sin Amaranta had committed to make her prefer an impious death to the shame confession ¹²⁰. Thereupon Amaranta lay down and made úrsula give public testimony ¹²¹ as to her virginity., ,The planes were certified airworthy. 飞机被证明适于航行 。,Our clavichord is kept in the living room.我们的击弦古钢琴是放在起居室里的。