One Hundred Years of Solitude 百年孤独 Chapter 16

IT RAINED FOR four years, eleven months, and two days. There were periods of drizzle ¹ during which everyone put on his full dress a convalescent look to celebrate the clearing, but the people soon grew accustomed to interpret the pauses as a sign of redoubled rain. The sky crumbled ² into a set of destructive storms and out of the north came hurricanes that scattered ³ roofs about and knocked down walls and uprooted ⁴ every last plant of the banana groves ⁵. Just as during the insomnia ⁶ plague, as úrsula came to remember during those days, the calamity ⁷ itself inspired defenses against boredom ⁸. Aureli-ano Segun-do was one of those who worked hardest not to be conquered by idleness. He had gone home for some minor ⁹ matter on the night that Mr. Brown unleashed ¹⁰ the storm, and Fernanda tried to help him with a half-blown-out umbrella that she found in a closet. "I don't need it," he said. "I'll stay until it clears." That was not, of course, an ironclad promise, but he would accomplish it literally ¹¹. Since his clothes were at Petra Cotes's, every three days he would take off what he had on and wait in his shorts until they washed. In order not to become bored, he dedicated ¹² himself to the task of repairing the many things that needed fixing in the house. He adjusted hinges, oiled locks, screwed knockers tight, and planed doorjambs. For several months he was seen wandering about with a toolbox that the gypsies must have left behind in José Arcadio Buendía's days, and no one knew whether because of the involuntary exercise, the winter tedium ¹³ or the imposed abstinence, but his belly ¹⁴ was deflating little by little like a wineskin and his face of a beatific ¹⁵ tortoise was becoming less bloodshot and his double chin less prominent until he became less pachydermic all over and was able to tie his own shoes again. Watching him putting in latches ¹⁶ and repairing clocks, Fernanda wondered whether or not he too might be falling into the vice ¹⁷ of building so that he could take apart like Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía and his little gold fishes, Amaranta and her shroud ¹⁸ and her buttons, José Arca-dio and the parchments, and úrsula and her memories. But that was not the case. The worst part was that the rain was affecting everything and the driest of machines would have flowers popping out among their gears they were not oiled every three days, and the threads in brocades rusted ¹⁹, and wet clothing would break out in a rash of saffron-colored moss ²⁰. The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms. One morning úrsula woke up feeling that she was reaching her end in a placid ²¹ swoon and she had already asked them to take her to Father Antonio Isabel, even if it had to be on a stretcher, when Santa Sofía de la Piedad discovered that her back was paved with leeches ²². She took them off one by one, crushing them with a firebrand before they bled her to death. It was necessary to dig canals to get the water out of the house and rid it of the frogs and snails ²³ so that they could dry the floors and take the bricks from under the bedposts and walk in shoes once more. Occupied with the many small details that called for his attention, Aureli-ano Segun-do did not realize that he was getting old until one afternoon when he found himself contemplating ²⁴ the premature ²⁵ dusk from a rocking chair and thinking about Petra Cotes without quivering. There would have been no problem in going back to Fernan-da's insipid ²⁶ love, because her beauty had become solemn with age, but the rain had spared him from all emergencies of passion and had filled him with the spongy serenity ²⁷ of a lack of appetite. He amused himself thinking about the things that he could have done in other times with that rain which had already lasted a year. He had been one of the first to bring zinc ²⁸ sheets to Macon-do, much earlier than their popularization by the banana company, simply to roof Petra Cotes's bedroom with them and to take pleasure in the feeling of deep intimacy ²⁹ that the sprinkling of the rain produced at that time. But even those wild memories of his mad youth left him unmoved, just as during his last debauch ³⁰ he had exhausted ³¹ his quota ³² of salaciousness and all he had left was the marvelous gift of being able to remember it without bitterness or repentance ³³. It might have been thought that the deluge ³⁴ had given him the opportunity to sit and reflect and that the business of the pliers and the oilcan had awakened ³⁵ in him the tardy ³⁶ yearning ³⁷ of so many useful trades that he might have followed in his life and did not; but neither case was true, because the temptation of a sedentary domesticity that was besieging ³⁸ him was not the result of any rediscovery or moral lesion. it came from much farther off, unearthed ³⁹ by the rain's pitchfork from the days when in Melquíades' room he would read the prodigious ⁴⁰ fables ⁴¹ about flying carpets and whales that fed on entire ships and their crews. It was during those days that in a moment of carelessness little Aureli-ano appeared on the porch and his grandfather recognized the secret of his identity. He cut his hair, dressed him taught him not to be afraid of people, and very soon it was evident that he was a legitimate ⁴² Aureli-ano Buendía, with his high cheekbones, his startled look, and his solitary ⁴³ air. It was a relief for Fernanda. For some time she had measured the extent of her pridefulness, but she could not find any way to remedy it because the more she thought of solutions the less rational they seemed to her. If she had known that Aureli-ano Segun-do was going to take things the way he did, with the fine pleasure of a grandfather, she would not have taken so many turns or got so mixed up, but would have freed herself from mortification ⁴⁴ the year before Amaranta úrsula, who already had her second teeth, thought of her nephew as a scurrying ⁴⁵ toy who was a consolation ⁴⁶ for the tedium of the rain. Aureli-ano Segun-do remembered then the English ency-clopedia that no one had since touched in Meme's old room. He began to show the children the pictures, especially those of animals, and later on the maps and photographs remote countries and famous people. Since he did not know any English and could identify only the most famous cities and people, he would invent names and legends to satisfy the children's insatiable curiosity., ,Fernanda really believed that her husband was waiting for it to clear to return to his concubine. During the first months of the rain she was afraid that he would try to slip into her bedroom that she would have to undergo the shame revealing to him that she was incapable ⁴⁷ of reconciliation ⁴⁸ since the birth of Amaranta úrsula. That was the reason for her anxious correspondence with the invisible doctors, interrupted by frequent disasters of the mail. During the first months when it was learned that the trains were jumping their tracks in the rain, a letter from the invisible doctors told her that hers were not arriving. Later on, when contact with the unknown correspondents was broken, she had seriously thought of putting on the tiger mask that her husband had worn in the bloody ⁴⁹ carnival ⁵⁰ and having herself examined under a fictitious ⁵¹ name by the banana company doctors. But one of the many people who regularly brought unpleasant news of the deluge had told her that the company was dismantling ⁵² its dispensaries to move them to where it was not raining. Then she gave up hope. She resigned herself to waiting until the rain stopped and the mail service was back to normal, and in the meantime she sought relief from her secret ailments ⁵³ with recourse to her imagination, because she would rather have died than put herself in the hands of the only doctor left in Macon-do, the extravagant ⁵⁴ Frenchman who ate grass like a donkey. She drew close to úrsula, trusting that she would know of some palliative for her attacks. But her twisted habit of not calling things by their names made her put first things last and use "expelled" for "gave birth" and "burning" for "flow" so that it would all be less shameful ⁵⁵, with the result that úrsula reached the reasonable conclusion that her trouble was intestinal ⁵⁶ rather than uterine, and she advised her to take a dose of calomel on an empty stomach. If it had not been for that suffering, which would have had nothing shameful about it for someone who did not suffer as well from shamefulness ⁵⁷, and if it had not been for the loss of the letters, the rain would not have bothered Fernanda, because, after all, her whole life had been spent as if it had been raining. She did not change her schedule or modify her ritual. When the table was still raised up on bricks and the chairs put on planks ⁵⁸ so that those at the table would not get their feet wet, she still served with linen ⁵⁹ tablecloths ⁶⁰ and fine chinaware and with lighted candles, because she felt that the calamities ⁶² should not be used as a pretext ⁶³ for any relaxation ⁶⁴ in customs. No one went out into the street any more. If it had depended on Fernanda, they would never have done so, not only since it started raining but since long before that, because she felt that doors had been invented to stay closed that curiosity for what was going on in the street was a matter for harlots. Yet she was the first one to look out when they were told that the funeral procession for Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez was passing by and even though she only watched it through the half-opened window it left her in such a state of affliction that for a long time she repented ⁶⁵ in her weakness., ,She could not have conceived of a more desolate ⁶⁶ cortege. They had put the coffin ⁶⁷ in an oxcart over which they built a canopy ⁶⁸ of banana leaves, but the pressure of the rain was so intense and the streets so muddy that with every step the wheels got stuck and the covering was on the verge ⁶⁹ of falling apart. The streams of sad water that fell on the coffin were soaking the flag that had been placed on top which was actually the flag stained with blood and gunpowder ⁷⁰ that had been rejected by more honorable veterans. On the coffin they had also placed the saber with tassels ⁷¹ of silver and copper ⁷², the same one that Colonel Geri-neldo Márquez used to hang on the coat rack in order to go into Amaranta's sewing room unarmed. Behind the cart, some barefoot and all of them with their pants rolled up, splashing in the mud were the last survivors ⁷³ of the surrender at Neerlandia carrying a drover's staff in one hand and in the other a wreath of paper flowers that had become discolored in the rain. They appeared like an unreal vision along the street which still bore the name of Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía and they all looked at the house as they passed and turned the corner at the square, where they had to ask for help to move the cart, which was stuck. úrsula had herself carried to the door by Santa Sofía de la Piedad. She followed the difficulties of the procession with such attention that no one doubted that she was seeing it, especially because raised hand of an archangelic messenger was moving with the swaying of the cart., , ,Aureli-ano Segun-do helped her back to bed and with the same informality with which he always treated her, he asked her the meaning of her farewell., ,"It's true," she said. "I'm only waiting for the rain to stop in order to die.", ,Yesterday the radio forecast drizzle,and today it is indeed raining.昨天预报有小雨 ，今天果然下起来了 。,He crumbled the bread in his fingers. 他用手指把面包捻碎
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