One Hundred Years of Solitude 百年孤独 Chapter 19

AMARANTA úRSULA returned with the angels of December, driven on a sailor's breeze, leading her husband by a silk rope tied around his neck. She appeared without warning, wearing an ivory-colored dress, a string of pearls that reached almost to her knees, emerald and topaz rings, and with her straight hair in a smooth bun held behind her ears by swallow-tail brooches. The man whom she had married six months before was a thin, older Fleming with the look of a sailor about him. She had only to push open the door to the parlor ¹ to realize that her absence had been longer and more destructive than she had imagined., ,"Good Lord," she shouted, more gay than alarmed, "it's obvious that there's no woman in this house!", ,The baggage would not fit on the porch. Besides Fernanda's old trunk, which they had sent her off to school with, she had two upright trunks, four large suitcases, a bag for parasols, eight hatboxes, a gigantic cage with half a hundred canaries, and her husband's velocipede, broken down in a special case which allowed him to carry it like a cello ². She did not even take a day of rest after the long trip. She put on some worn denim ³ overalls ⁴ that her husband had brought along with other automotive items and set about on a new restoration of the house. She scattered ⁵ the red ants, who had already taken possession of the porch, brought the rose bushes back to life, uprooted ⁶ the weeds, and planted ferns, oregano, and begonias again in the pots along the railing. She took charge of a crew of carpenters, locksmiths, and masons, who filled in the cracks in the floor, put doors and windows back on their hinges, repaired the furniture, and white-washed the walls inside and out, so that three months after her arrival one breathed once more the atmosphere of youth and festivity that had existed during the days of the pianola. No one in the house had ever been in a better mood at all hours and under any circumstances, nor had anyone ever been readier to sing and dance and toss all items and customs from the past into the trash. With a sweep of her broom she did away with the funeral mementos ⁷ and piles of useless trash and articles of superstition ⁸ that had been piling up in the corners, and the only thing she spared, out of gratitude ⁹ to úrsula, was the daguerreotype ¹⁰ of Remedios in the parlor. "My, such luxury," she would shout, dying with laughter. "A fourteen-year-old grandmother!" When one of the masons told her that the house was full of apparitions ¹¹ and that the only way to drive them out was to look for the treasures they had left buried, she replied amid loud laughter that she did not think it was right for men to be superstitious ¹². She was so spontaneous, so emancipated ¹³, with such a free and modern spirit, that Aureli-ano did not know what to do with his body when he saw her arrive. "My, my!" she shouted happily with open arms. "Look at how my darling cannibal has grown!" Before he had a chance to react she had already put a record on the portable phonograph she had brought with her and was trying to teach him the latest dance steps. She made change the dirty pants that he had inherited from Colonel Aureli-ano Buendía and gave him some youthful shirts and two-toned shoes, and she would push him into the street when he was spending too much time in Melquíades' room., , ,They had met two years before they were married, when the sports biplane in which he was making rolls over the school where Amaranta úrsula was studying made an intrepid ²⁷ maneuver ²⁸ to avoid the flagpole and the primitive framework of canvas and aluminum ²⁹ foil was caught by the tail on some electric wires. From then on, paying no attention to his leg in splints, on weekends he would pick up Amaranta úrsula at the nun's boardinghouse where she lived, where the rules were not as severe as Fernanda had wanted, and he would take her to his country club. They began to love each other at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet in the Sunday air of the moors ³⁰, and they felt all the closer togetas the beings on earth grew more and more minute. She spoke ³¹ to him of Macon-do as the brightest and most peaceful town on earth, and of an enormous house, scented ³² with oregano, where she wanted to live until old age with a loyal husband and two strong sons who would be named Rodrigo Gonzalo, never Aureli-ano and José Arcadio, and a daughter who would be named Virginia and never Remedios. She had evoked ³⁴ the town idealized by nostalgia ³⁵ with such strong tenacity ³⁶ that Gaston understood that she would not get married unless he took her to live in Macon-do. He agreed to it, as he agreed later on to the leash, because he thought it was a passing fancy that could be overcome in time. But when two years in Macon-do had passed Amaranta úrsula was as happy as on the first day, he began to show signs of alarm. By that time he had dissected ³⁷ every dissectible insect in the region, he spoke Spanish like a native, and he had solved all of the crossword ³⁸ puzzles in the magazines that he received in the mail. He did not have the pretext ³⁹ climate to hasten their return because nature had endowed him with a colonial liver which resisted the drowsiness ⁴⁰ siesta ⁴¹ time water that had vinegar worms in it. He liked the native cooking so much that once he ate eighty-two iguana ⁴² eggs at one sitting. Amaranta úrsula, on the other hand, had brought in by train fish and shellfish in boxes of ice, canned meats and preserved fruits, which were the only things she could eat, and she still dressed in European style and received designs by mail in spite of the fact that she had no place to go and no one to visit and by that time her husband was not in a mood to appreciate her short skirts, her tilted ⁴³ felt hat, and her seven-strand necklaces. Her secret seemed to lie in the fact that she always found a way to keep busy, resolving domestic problems that she herself had created, and doing a poor job on a thousand things which she would fix on the following day with a pernicious diligence that made one think of Fernanda and the hereditary ⁴⁴ vice ⁴⁵ of making something just to unmake it. Her festive ⁴⁶ genius was still so alive then that when she received new records she would invite Gaston to stay in the parlor until very late to practice the dance steps that her schoolmates described to her in sketches ⁴⁷ and they would generally end up making love on the Viennese rocking chairs or on the bare floor. The only thing that she needed to be completely happy was the birth children, but she respected the pact ⁴⁸ she had made with her husband not to have any until they had been married for five years., ,Looking for something to fill his idle hours with, Gaston became accustomed to spending the morning in Melquíades' room with the shy Aureli-ano. He took pleasure in recalling with him the most hidden corners of his country, which Aureli-ano knew as if he had spent much time there. When Gaston asked him what he had done to obtain knowledge that was not in the encyclopedia ⁴⁹, he received the same answer as José Arcadio: "Everything Is known." In addition to Sanskrit he had learned English and French and a little Latin and Greek. Since he went out every afternoon at that time and Amaranta úrsula had set aside a weekly sum for him for his personal expenses, his room looked like a branch of the wise Catalonian's bookstore. He read avidly ⁵⁰ until late at night, although from the manner in which he referred to his reading, Gaston thought that he did not buy the books in order to learn but to verify the truth of his knowledge, that none of them interested him more than the parchments, to which he dedicated ⁵¹ most his time in the morning. Both Gaston and his wife would have liked to incorporate him into the family life, but Aureli-ano was a hermetic man with a cloud of mystery that time was making denser ⁵². It was such an unfathomable condition that Gaston failed in his efforts to become intimate with him and had to seek other pastimes for his idle hours. It was around that time that he conceived the idea of establishing an airmail service., ,Is there a pizza parlor in the neighborhood?附近有没有比萨店？,The cello is a member of the violin family.大提琴是提琴家族的一员。