He liked to say that this love was the result of a clinical error. He himself could not believe that it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion were concentrated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great frequency and no second thoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, and still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.
他总是津津乐道，说他们的爱情是一次误诊的果实。他自己也无法相信事情就那么发生了，特别是在那个时候，他正把自己积蓄的全部热情都倾注到这个城市的命运之中。对于这座城市，他常常不假思索地说，它是举世无双的。在巴黎，当他挽着某位临时女友漫步在姗姗来迟的秋色中，仿佛不会再有比那些金色的下午更为纯真的幸福了：到处弥漫着炭烤栗子的山野气息，手风琴声悠扬婉转，还有那一对对贪婪的情侣，在露天阳台上仿佛永远也亲吻不够似的。然而，他把手放在胸口，对自己说，眼前的这一切都不足以让他用故乡加勒比四月的一瞬间来抵换。他还太年轻，尚不知道回忆总是会抹去坏的，夸大好的，而也正是由于这种玄妙，我们才得以承担过去的重负。可当他站在甲板的栏杆前，再一次看到殖民区那白色的山冈，屋顶上一动不动的兀鹫，以及阳台上晒着的穷人的破衣烂衫——到了这个时候，他才明白自己是那么轻易地掉进了思乡之情设下的慈悲圈套。
At the age of twenty-eight, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been the most desirable of bachelors. He had returned from a long stay in Paris, where he had completed advanced studies in medicine and surgery, and from the time he set foot on solid ground he gave overwhelming indications that he had not wasted a minute of his time. He returned more fastidious than when he left, more in control of his nature, and none of his contemporaries seemed as rigorous and as learned as he in his science, and none could dance better to the music of the day or improvise as well on the piano. Seduced by his personal charms and by the certainty of his family fortune, the girls in his circle held secret lotteries to determine who would spend time with him, and he gambled, too, on being with them, but he managed to keep himself in a state of grace, intact and tempting, until he succumbed without resistance to the plebeian charms of Fermina Daza.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生二十八岁时，是最受人青睐的单身汉。他曾去巴黎进修药科和外科，待了很长时间才回来。刚一踏回这片土地，他就充分证明了自己没有在外虚度每一寸光阴。他比走的时候更加仪表堂堂，文质彬彬。同辈之中，没有一个人像他那样在学问上一丝不苟，知识渊博，同时，也没有一个人时髦舞跳得比他好，或是即兴钢琴弹得比他棒。他的翩翩风度和殷实家境迷倒了周围很多姑娘。她们靠私下里抽签来决定谁做他的女伴，而他也乐得与她们相处，但总是若即若离，始终保持着清雅，直到最后，他不可救药地被费尔明娜·达萨那种质朴的魅力迷住了。
The ship made its way across the bay through a floating blanket of drowned animals, and most of the passengers took refuge in their cabins to escape the stench. The young doctor walked down the gangplank dressed in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of a young Pasteur and his hair divided by a neat, pale part, and with enough self-control to hide the lump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded by barefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with his closest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectations despite their sophisticated airs; they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and foreign, but they all had an evasive tremor in their voices and an uncertainty in their eyes that belied their words. His mother moved him most of all. She was still young, a woman who had made a mark on life with her elegance and social drive, but who was now slowly withering in the aroma of camphor that rose from her widow’s crepe. She must have seen herself in her son’s confusion, and she asked in immediate self-defense why his skin was as pale as wax.
轮船从水面漂浮的一层溺水而亡的动物尸体间开出一条道来，驶进了港湾。为躲避恶臭，大部分旅客都进了船舱。年轻的医生从舷梯上走下船，身穿上好的羊驼毛西服和背心，外套一件长罩衣，留着巴斯德年轻时的那种胡子，头发由中间分开，露出一道清晰而苍白的中缝。他极好地掩饰了自己因恐惧而非伤感造成的哽咽。码头上几乎没什么人，只有几个没穿制服的赤脚士兵在看守。两个妹妹和母亲，以及几个最要好的朋友在那里等他。他发现他们尽管表面上开心，但脸色憔悴，毫无生气。谈到危机和内战时，他们仿佛在说距离自己很远、甚至毫不相干的事，可那隐隐颤抖的声音和游移不定的眼神背叛了他们的言辞。令他感触最深的还是他的母亲。她是一个还很年轻的女人，曾以热情火辣的社交活力从容优雅地投身于生活，而如今，在那身散发着一股樟脑味的寡妇黑绸丧服中，她就像被文火煎熬一般慢慢枯萎了。想必是在儿子一脸的困惑中察觉到了自己的改变，她先发制人，以攻为守，问儿子的脸色为何像石蜡一样苍白。
The former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, historic residence of the Urbino de la Calle family, had not escaped the surround ing wreckage. Dr. Juvenal Urbino discovered this with a broken heart when he entered the house through the gloomy portico and saw the dusty fountain in the interior garden and the wild brambles in flower beds where iguanas wandered, and he realized that many marble flagstones were missing and others were broken on the huge stairway with its copper railings that led to the principal rooms. His father, a physician who was more self-sacrificing than eminent, had died in the epidemic of Asian cholera that had devastated the population six years earlier, and with him had died the spirit of the house. Doña Blanca, his mother, smothered by mourning that was considered eternal, had substituted evening novenas for her dead husband’s celebrated lyrical soirées and chamber concerts. His two sisters, despite their natural inclinations and festive vocation, were fodder for the convent.
古老的卡萨尔杜埃罗侯爵府，即乌尔比诺·德拉卡列家族世代居住的宅邸，在这场浩劫中也未能独善其身。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺看到家中的景象，心都要碎了。他从阴暗的前厅走进来，看到花园的喷泉池里积满尘土，鬣蜥在一朵花也没有的杂草丛中乱爬。他发现通往主要居室的那段装着铜扶手的宽楼梯上，缺了好几块大理石板，还有的板已经裂了缝。他的父亲，一位献身精神超过医术水平的医生，死于六年前那场席卷整个城市的亚洲霍乱。从此，这个家的灵魂也随之而去。他的母亲布兰卡夫人，早已用黄昏时的九日祷告代替了亡夫生前常带她去的音乐晚会和室内音乐会，想到自己将穿着丧服度过余生，她压抑得喘不上气来。两个妹妹也违背了风趣快乐的本性，成了修道院的盘中餐。
A short while later, suffocating with the heat as he sat next to her in the closed carriage, he could no longer endure the unmerciful reality that came pouring in through the window. The ocean looked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succumb to a proliferation of beggars, and it was impossible to discern the ardent scent of jasmine behind the vapors of death from the open sewers. Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the streets that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the District of the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned his head away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.
稍后他挨着母亲坐在封闭的车子里，空气闷热得令人窒息，他再也无法忍受从车窗里钻进来的那一幕幕残酷的现实了。大海如死灰一般，一座座古老的侯爵府几乎被淹没在不断增多的乞丐之中，露天的污水沟散发出死亡的味道，再也闻不到昔日那浓郁的茉莉花香。他觉得一切都变得比他走的时候更渺小，更破败，更萧条。街道的垃圾堆上到处都是饥饿的老鼠，惊得拉车的马儿走得磕磕绊绊。从港口到他家这段漫长的路上，在总督区的中心地带，他没有碰到任何能对得起他的思乡之情的东西。他沮丧之极，为了不让母亲看见，便把头扭向一边，默默地淌下眼泪。
“It’s life over there, Mother,” he said. “You turn green in Paris.”
“是生活所迫，母亲。”他说，“人人在巴黎都会变得脸色发青。”
Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not sleep at all on the night of his return; he was frightened by the darkness and the silence, and he said three rosaries to the Holy Spirit and all the prayers he could remember to ward off calamities and shipwrecks and all manner of night terrors, while a curlew that had come in through a half-closed door sang every hour on the hour in his bedroom. He was tormented by the hallucinating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum next door, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resonated throughout the house, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his congenital fear of the dark, and the invisible presence of his dead father in the vast, sleeping mansion. When the curlew sang five o’clock along with the local roosters, Dr. Juvenal Urbino commend ed himself body and soul to Divine Providence because he did not have the heart to live another day in his rubble-strewn homeland. But in time the affection of his family, the Sundays in the country, and the covetous attentions of the unmarried women of his class mitigated the bitterness of his first impression. Little by little he grew accustomed to the sultry heat of October, to the excessive odors, to the hasty judgments of his friends, to the We’ll see tomorrow, Doctor, don’t worry, and at last he gave in to the spell of habit. It did not take him long to invent an easy justification for his surrender. This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.
回家的那天晚上，由于害怕黑暗和寂静，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生片刻也没有睡着。一只石鸻从没关严的门缝钻了进来，每隔一小时，刚好整点的时候，就在卧室里叫上一阵儿。他数着念珠念了三串《圣三光荣颂》，还念了所有他能记得的其他经文，以祈祷消除灾祸和不幸，驱散专在夜间窥视的各种鬼魅魂灵。附近圣牧羊女[1]疯人院里，传来疯女人在幻觉中发出的尖叫声，水瓮里的水一滴一滴落在水盆中，无情地在整幢房子里回荡，迷途的长腿石鸻在卧室里来回乱跑。他生性怕黑，再加上父亲无形的亡灵就存在于这座沉睡的宽阔宅邸，这一切都令他毛骨悚然。早上五点，石鸻和邻居家的公鸡一起啼鸣，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生把自己的肉身和灵魂完全交托给全能的上帝，因为他感到再也没有勇气在祖国这片废墟上多住一天。然而，亲戚们的关怀，几个星期日的郊游，以及那些和他门当户对的姑娘们的倾心仰慕，最终减轻了回家的第一印象所带来的苦涩。他慢慢习惯了十月的闷热，周遭刺鼻难耐的气味，以及朋友们不成熟的看法，习惯了大家的那句“明天见，医生，您不要担心”。最终，在习惯的魔力面前，他屈服了。很快，他便为自己的屈服想出了一个简单理由。这里就是他的世界，他对自己说，这个悲伤而压抑的世界是上帝安排给他的，他属于这里。（注：[1] 圣牧羊女，指圣母马利亚。）
The first thing he did was to take possession of his father’s office. He kept in place the hard, somber English furniture made of wood that sighed in the icy cold of dawn, but he consigned to the attic the treatises on viceregal science and romantic medicine and filled the bookshelves behind their glass doors with the writings of the new French school. He took down the faded pictures, except for the one of the physician arguing with Death for the nude body of a female patient, and the Hippocratic Oath printed in Gothic letters, and he hung in their place, next to his father’s only diploma, the many diverse ones he himself had received with highest honors from various schools in Europe.
他所做的第一件事，就是接管了父亲的诊所。他把那些英国家具原地不动地保留了下来，尽管它们硬邦邦的，非常古板，而且还会在清晨的寒风中吱扭作响。但是那些有关总督时期科学以及浪漫主义时期医学的著述，他都让人搬到了阁楼，带玻璃门的书柜中则放进了法国新一派的著作。他摘下那些褪了色的廉价彩画，只留下画着医生和死神争夺一位裸·体女病人的那幅，还有那张用哥特字体印刷的希波克拉底誓词。在空出的位置上，他挂上了自己在欧洲各所学校以优异成绩取得的各式各样的文凭，紧挨着父亲唯一的那张。
He tried to impose the latest ideas at Misericordia Hospital, but this was not as easy as it had seemed in his youthful enthusiasm, for the antiquated house of health was stubborn in its attachment to atavistic superstitions, such as standing beds in pots of water to prevent disease from climbing up the legs, or requiring evening wear and chamois gloves in the operating room because it was taken for granted that elegance was an essential condition for asepsis. They could not tolerate the young newcomer’s tasting a patient’s urine to determine the presence of sugar, quoting Charcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class against the mortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention of suppositories. He was in conflict with everything: his renovating spirit, his maniacal sense of civic duty, his slow humor in a land of immortal pranksters — everything, in fact, that constituted his most estimable virtues provoked the resentment of his older colleagues and the sly jokes of the younger ones.
他试图在仁爱医院推行新观念，但这并不像他曾满怀青春的激情所设想的那样。在这座古老的医院里，人们固执地恪守着代代相传的迷信观念。比如，把床腿分别放进四只装着水的罐子里，以防疾病爬上床来，又或者在手术室中要求穿礼服，戴羚羊皮手套，因为他们认定优雅是无菌操作的一个基本条件。他们无法忍受这个新来的年轻人用嘴去尝病人的尿液以检验是否含糖；无法忍受他动不动就提到沙可[2]和特鲁索[3]，好像他们是他的同窗室友；也无法忍受他在课堂上严肃地警告说接种牛痘有致命的危险，但同时又对栓剂这一新发明抱着令人怀疑的信念。他在所有方面都和别人格格不入：他的革新精神，他近乎偏执的社会责任感，以及，身处这片到处是嘻嘻哈哈的老顽童的土地上，他的幽默感却异常迟钝，所有这些其实都是他难能可贵的美德，却引起了年长同事的猜忌和年轻同事暗地里的嘲笑。（注：[2] 让—马丁·沙可（1825—1893），十九世纪法国神经学家、心理学家。[3] 阿尔芒·特鲁索（1801—1867），十九世纪法国著名医生。）
His obsession was the dangerous lack of sanitation in the city. He appealed to the highest authorities to fill in the Spanish sewers that were an immense breeding ground for rats, and to build in their place a closed sewage system whose contents would not empty into the cove at the market, as had always been the case, but into some distant drainage area instead. The well-equipped colonial houses had latrines with septic tanks, but two thirds of the population lived in shanties at the edge of the swamps and relieved themselves in the open air. The excrement dried in the sun, turned to dust, and was inhaled by everyone along with the joys of Christmas in the cool, gentle breezes of December. Dr. Juvenal Urbino attempted to force the City Council to impose an obligatory training course so that the poor could learn how to build their own latrines. He fought in vain to stop them from tossing garbage into the mangrove thickets that over the centuries had become swamps of putrefaction, and to have them collect it instead at least twice a week and incinerate it in some uninhabited area.
最令他苦恼的是城里危险的卫生状况。他向最高当局请求填平西班牙人建造的污水沟，因为那里是老鼠的巨大温床。他建议代之以封闭的下水管道，污水不应像一直以来这样排到市场港湾，而应该输往偏远的垃圾场。殖民时期建造的讲究一点的房子都有带化粪池的茅厕，但那些挤在沼泽边窝棚里的老百姓，有三分之二是在露天大小便。排泄物在太阳下风干，变成粉尘，随着十二月凉爽而幸福的微风，被所有人带着圣诞节的喜庆吸入体内。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生试图在市政府开办强制学习班，教穷人建造自家的厕所。他曾徒劳地斗争，希望人们别把垃圾扔到树林里，几个世纪下来，那里已经成了一片片腐烂的池塘。他建议至少一星期收两次垃圾，然后运到无人区烧掉。
He was aware of the mortal threat of the drinking water. The mere idea of building an aqueduct seemed fantastic, since those who might have supported it had underground cisterns at their disposal, where water rained down over the years was collected under a thick layer of scum. Among the most valued household articles of the time were carved wooden water collectors whose stone filters dripped day and night into large earthen water jars. To prevent anyone from drinking from the aluminum cup used to dip out the water, its edges were as jagged as the crown of a mock king. The water was crystalline and cool in the dark clay, and it tasted of the forest. But Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not taken in by these appearances of purity, for he knew that despite all precautions, the bottom of each earthen jar was a sanctuary for waterworms. He had spent the slow hours of his childhood watching them with an almost mystical astonishment, convinced along with so many other people at the time that waterworms were animes, supernatural creatures who, from the sediment in still water, courted young maidens and could inflict furious vengeance because of love. As a boy he had seen the havoc they had wreaked in the house of Lázara Conde, a schoolteacher who dared to rebuff the animes, and he had seen the watery trail of glass in the street and the mountain of stones they had thrown at her windows for three days and three nights. And so it was a long while before he learned that waterworms were in reality the larvae of mosquitoes, but once he learned it he never forgot it, because from that moment on he realized that they and many other evil animes could pass through our simple stone filters intact.
他明白，饮用水是致命的隐患。然而，单是建一条高架水渠都纯属幻想，因为凡是有能力推动此事的人，都拥有自己的地下雨水池，存着多年积蓄的雨水，被一层厚厚的浮藻覆盖着。当时最值钱的家具之一，便是装水瓮用的精雕细刻的木架柜，里面的石制过滤器日夜不停地把水滴到水瓮里。为了防止有人从汲水的铝罐中喝水，罐子的边缘有一圈锯齿，就像一个滑稽的王冠。在阴暗的陶制水瓮中，水看上去清清凉凉，带着一股树林的余味。但胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生没有被这种过滤的假象蒙蔽，因为他知道，尽管用了那么多防范措施，瓮底却还是孑孓的圣殿。童年时期，为了打发漫长的时间，他曾怀着莫名的惊恐观察这些孑孓，因为那时的他和很多人一样，相信它们是精灵，是超自然的生命，它们在水底静止的沉积物中追求少女，也会为了爱情而疯狂报复。小时候，他曾见学校的女老师拉萨拉·孔德因为竟敢对精灵出言不逊，家里的房子被砸得支离破碎。他看见她家的碎玻璃像河水一样流到了街上，还看见铺天盖地的一大堆石头——人们用这些石头朝她家的窗子扔了三天三夜。过了很久他才学到，原来孑孓是蚊子的幼虫。而一经知晓就再也忘不掉了，因为此后他发现不只孑孓，还有很多恶魔都可以安然无恙地通过我们那天真的石制过滤器。
For a long time the water in the cisterns had been honored as the cause of the scrotal hernia that so many men in the city endured not only without embarrassment but with a certain patriotic insolence. When Juvenal Urbino was in elementary school, he could not avoid a spasm of horror at the sight of men with ruptures sitting in their doorways on hot afternoons, fanning their enormous testicle as if it were a child sleeping between their legs. It was said that the hernia whistled like a lugubrious bird on stormy nights and twisted in unbearable pain when a buzzard feather was burned nearby, but no one complained about those discomforts because a large, well-carried rupture was, more than anything else, a display of masculine honor. When Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned from Europe he was already well aware of the scientific fallacy in these beliefs, but they were so rooted in local superstition that many people opposed the mineral enrichment of the water in the cisterns for fear of destroying its ability to cause an honorable rupture.
在很长一段时间里，人们都将阴囊疝气的来源归功于雨水池。城中很多男人都忍受着这种病的折磨，可他们不仅不以为耻，反而流露出某种爱国主义的傲慢。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺上小学时，总是不可避免地撞见令他胆战心惊的情景：患疝气的人在烈日炎炎的下午，坐在自家门口，用扇子给自己那硕大的睾丸扇风，那睾丸大得简直就像一个趴在两腿间睡着了的孩子。据说，在暴风雨的夜晚，疝气会发出凄楚的鸟叫声，而若在附近点燃一根兀鹫的羽毛，它便会绞起来，让人痛得死去活来。然而，没有人为这些倒霉事抱怨，因为有这样一个巨大的阴疝挂在下身，完全可以被视作男人的荣誉，比什么都值得炫耀。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生从欧洲回来时，已经非常清楚这种观念绝对是伪科学。但它在当地根深蒂固，很多人甚至反对在雨水池中加入各种矿物质，因为担心这样会使他们失去培养令人骄傲的硕大阴囊的能力。
Impure water was not all that alarmed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was just as concerned with the lack of hygiene at the public market, a vast extension of cleared land along Las Ánimas Bay where the sailing ships from the Antilles would dock. An illustrious traveler of the period described the market as one of the most varied in the world. It was rich, in fact, and profuse and noisy, but also, perhaps, the most alarming of markets. Set on its own garbage heap, at the mercy of capricious tides, it was the spot where the bay belched filth from the sewers back onto land. The offal from the adjoining slaughterhouse was also thrown away there — severed heads, rotting viscera, animal refuse that floated, in sunshine and starshine, in a swamp of blood. The buzzards fought for it with the rats and the dogs in a perpetual scramble among the deer and succulent capons from Sotavento hanging from the eaves of the market stalls, and the spring vegetables from Arjona displa yed on straw mats spread over the ground. Dr. Urbino wanted to make the place sanitary, he wanted a slaughterhouse built somewhere else and a covered market constructed with stained-glass turrets, like the one he had seen in the old boquerías in Barcelona, where the provisions looked so splendid and clean that it seemed a shame to eat them. But even the most complaisant of his notable friends pitied his illusory passion. That is how they were: they spent their lives proclaiming their proud origins, the historic merits of the city, the value of its relics, its heroism, its beauty, but they were blind to the decay of the years. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, on the other hand, loved it enough to see it with the eyes of truth.
和水质不净一样，公共市场的卫生状况也一直让胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生感到忧虑。市场位于灵魂湾正对面一片开阔的空地，那些来自安的列斯群岛的帆船就停靠在这个港湾。当时的一位著名旅行家曾把此地描绘成世界上货物最丰富的市场之一。的确，这里货品充足，种类繁多，热闹非凡，但同时，它或许也是最让人担心的一个市场。由于潮水无规律的涨落，海湾海水一漾一漾地把污水沟排出的垃圾又推回岸上，因此，整个市场就坐落在自己的垃圾堆中。紧邻的屠宰场也把乱七八糟的残渣丢到这里来：剁碎的脑袋，腐烂的内脏，动物的粪便，在阳光下静静地漂浮在一片血沼泽中。为了这些食物，兀鹫常常跟老鼠和狗争抢得无止无休，时而穿梭于挂在棚檐下的索塔文托美味鹿肉和阉鸡之间，时而跃过摆放在席子上的阿尔霍纳春季菜豆。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生想改善这里的卫生条件，比如让屠宰场换个地方，再重新建一个有彩色玻璃穹顶的市场，就像他在巴塞罗那看见的那些古老菜市场一样，那里供应的食物干净而漂亮，几乎让人不忍心吃掉。然而，他的那些有声望的朋友们，即便是那些一向对他有求必应的，也只能对这份不切实际的热情抱以同情。他们就是这样的人：一生都在喧嚷自己骄傲的出身，歌颂这座城市历史上的丰功伟绩、它珍贵的文物、它的英雄主义和它的美，却对时光对它的侵蚀视若无睹。而胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生与他们不同，他对这座城市的爱恋之深，使他能用真实的眼光来看待它。
“How noble this city must be,” he would say, “for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and we still have not succeeded,”
“这座城市还真是伟大，”他常常说，“我们用了四百年的时间来摧毁它，至今仍没有达成目的。”
They almost had, however. The epidemic of cholera morbus, whose first victims were struck down in the standing water of the market, had, in eleven weeks, been responsible for the greatest death toll in our history. Until that time the eminent dead were interred under the flagstones in the churches, in the exclusive vicinity of archbishops and capitulars, while the less wealthy were buried in the patios of convents. The poor were sent to the colonial cemetery, located on a windy hill that was separated from the city by a dry canal whose mortar bridge bore the legend carved there by order of some clairvoyant mayor: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’ entrate.
然而，它其实已经濒临毁灭的边缘了。先前那场肆意流行的霍乱，继最初暴毙在市场水坑里的几个牺牲者之后，在十一周内已创造了我们这里有史以来死亡人数最高的纪录。在那之前，凡地位显赫的死者都会被葬在教堂墓地的石板下，与主教和教士团成员专享的幽静场所为邻。而不那么富有的死者就葬在修道院的庭院中。穷人们则被埋在殖民时期的墓地里，位于一座当风而立的小山上，和城市隔着一条干涸的小河沟。河上有一座灰浆筑的小桥，桥头的避雨亭竖着一块牌子，一位未卜先知的市长曾命人在上面刻下了一句话：入此地者应抛开一切希望[4]。（注：[4] 但丁《神曲》中的名句，写在地狱之门上。）
After the first two weeks of the cholera epidemic, the cemetery was overflowing and there was no room left in the churches despite the fact that they had dispatched the decayed remains of many nameless civic heroes to the communal ossuary. The air in the Cathedral grew thin with the vapors from badly sealed crypts, and its doors did not open again until three years later, at the time that Fermina Daza saw Florentino Ariza at close quarters as she left Midnight Mass. By the third week the cloister of the Convent of St. Clare was full all the way to its poplar-lined walks, and it was necessary to use the Community’s orchard, which was twice as large, as a cemetery. There graves were dug deep enough to bury the dead on three levels, without delay and without coffins, but this had to be stopped because the brimming ground turned into a sponge that oozed sickening, infected blood at every step. Then arrangements were made to continue burying in The Hand of God, a cattle ranch less than a league from the city, which was later consecrated as the Universal Cemetery.
霍乱刚刚流行两个星期，墓地就已经满了。尽管已将一大批不知名的贵人的枯骨迁进了集体掩埋的万人坑，教堂里还是腾不出一块可以使用的空墓地来。从没有封严的墓穴中逸出的水汽令大教堂内空气污浊，不得不将大门紧闭，直到三年以后，费尔明娜·达萨在子时弥撒中第一次近距离地看见弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的那个时候才再次打开。第三周时，圣克拉拉修道院的回廊里已堆满了死人，一直堆到两边种着杨树的林荫道。最后，只得把比回廊大两倍的教会菜园辟出来当墓地。人们在那里挖掘出一个个很深的墓穴，不带棺木地草草葬下三层死人。但很快又不得不放弃了这种方式，因为被填得满满当当的土地变成了一块海绵，脚一踩，就渗出一股令人作呕的血水来。于是，人们准备在“上帝之手”庄园开辟新战场。那里是一座育肥牧场，距离城市不到一里地，后来被誉为“普世公墓”。
From the time the cholera proclamation was issued, the local garrison shot a cannon from the fortress every quarter hour, day and night, in accordance with the local superstition that gunpowder purified the atmosphere. The cholera was much more devastating to the black population, which was larger and poorer, but in reality it had no regard for color or background. It ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the extent of its ravages was never known, not because this was impossible to establish but because one of our most widespread virtues was a certain reticence concerning personal misfortune.
自从发布了霍乱公告，本地驻军便不论白天黑夜，每隔一刻钟在碉堡上鸣炮一响。这么做是应迷信的市民要求，因为他们认为火药能净化环境。受霍乱之害最深的要数黑人，因为他们人数最多，也最贫穷。但实际上，这种疾病既不分肤色，也不分血统。而就如突然开始一样，它又突然停止了。从来没有人知道它到底造成了多大规模的伤害，不是因为无法统计，而是因为我们最常见的美德之一就是家丑不可外扬。
Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino, the father of Juvenal, was a civic hero during that dreadful time, as well as its most distinguished victim. By official decree he personally designed and directed public health measures, but on his own initiative he intervened to such an extent in every social question that during the most critical moments of the plague no higher authority seemed to exist. Years later, reviewing the chronicle of those days, Dr. Juvenal Urbino confirmed that his father’s methodology had been more charitable than scientific and, in many ways, contrary to reason, so that in large measure it had fostered the voraciousness of the plague. He confirmed this with the compassion of sons whom life has turned, little by little, into the fathers of their fathers, and for the first time he regretted not having stood with his father in the solitude of his errors. But he did not dispute his merits: his diligence and his self-sacrifice and above all his personal courage deserved the many honors rendered him when the city recovered from the disaster, and it was with justice that his name was found among those of so many other heroes of less honorable wars.
马可·奥雷里奥·乌尔比诺医生，胡维纳尔的父亲，是这段不幸岁月里的民间英雄，也是最受人瞩目的牺牲者。根据政府的指令，他本人实际上只需制订方案并领导卫生部署，可他自己却主动积极地参与到所有社会事务中去，事实上，在疫情最为严重的时刻，在他之上几乎就没有更高的权威了。多年以后，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生翻看当时的记录，证实了父亲所采用的方法仁爱多于科学，在很多方面都有悖医学原理，以致在很大程度上助长了疫情的迅速蔓延。他是怀着儿子对父亲的同情心证实这一点的——生活慢慢地把儿子变成了父亲的父亲，他第一次为自己当初没能和孤军作战而犯下错误的父亲站在一起感到心痛。但他也没有贬低父亲的功绩：他的勤奋、他的牺牲精神，尤其是他个人的胆识，这一切都让他无愧于这座城市从灾难中死而复生后给予他的那些荣耀，他的名字理所应当和那些不计其数的战争英雄列在一起，因为比起这场战斗，那些战争可要不光彩得多。
He did not live to see his own glory. When he recognized in himself the irreversible symptoms that he had seen and pitied in others, he did not even attempt a useless struggle but withdrew from the world so as not to infect anyone else. Locked in a utility room at Misericordia Hospital, deaf to the calls of his colleagues and the pleas of his family, removed from the horror of the plague victims dying on the floor in the packed corridors, he wrote a letter of feverish love to his wife and children, a letter of gratitude for his existence in which he revealed how much and with how much fervor he had loved life. It was a farewell of twenty heartrending pages in which the progress of the disease could be observed in the deteriorating script, and it was not necessary to know the writer to realize that he had signed his name with his last breath. In accordance with his instructions, his ashen body was mingled with others in the communal cemetery and was not seen by anyone who loved him.
父亲未能及身见证自己的荣耀。当他发现那种他在别人身上见到并深表同情的无法医治的病症出现在自己身上时，甚至都没有徒劳地去尝试抗争，便把自己隔离起来，以免传染给他人。他把自己关在仁爱医院的一个杂物间里，对同事的叫门声和亲人的哀求声充耳不闻，对人满为患的走廊地板上那些垂死挣扎的霍乱病人的惊恐号叫也泰然处之，他给自己的妻子儿女写下了一封充满炽烈爱意的信。在信中，他流露出对生命无比的热爱与眷恋，以及由此而生的感恩之情。那是一封长达二十页的诀别书。信纸被揉搓得皱皱巴巴，从越来越糟糕的字迹中可以看出他的病情每况愈下。不需要认识写信的人，也能看得出那个签名是用尽最后一口气写上去的。遵照他的遗愿，他那灰白色的遗体被混葬在公共墓地，没有让一个爱他的人看见。
Three days later, in Paris, Dr. Juvenal Urbino received a telegram during supper with friends, and he toasted the memory of his father with champagne. He said: “He was a good man.” Later he would reproach himself for his lack of maturity: he had avoided reality in order not to cry. But three weeks later he received a copy of the posthumous letter, and then he surrendered to the truth. All at once the image of the man he had known before he knew any other was revealed to him in all its profundity, the man who had raised him and taught him and had slept and fornicated with his mother for thirty-two years and yet who, before that letter, had never revealed himself body and soul because of timidity, pure and simple. Until then Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his family had conceived of death as a misfortune that befell others, other people’s fathers and mothers, other people’s brothers and sisters and husbands and wives, but not theirs. They were people whose lives were slow, who did not see themselves growing old, or falling sick, or dying, but who disappeared little by little in their own time, turning into memories, mists from other days, until they were absorbed into oblivion. His father’s posthumous letter, more than the telegram with the bad news, hurled him headlong against the certainty of death. And yet one of his oldest memories, when he was nine years old perhaps, perhaps when he was eleven, was in a way an early sign of death in the person of his father. One rainy afternoon the two of them were in the office his father kept in the house; he was drawing larks and sunflowers with colored chalk on the tiled floor, and his father was reading by the light shining through the window, his vest unbuttoned and elastic armbands on his shirt sleeves. Suddenly he stopped reading to scratch his back with a long-handled back scratcher that had a little silver hand on the end. Since he could not reach the spot that itched, he asked his son to scratch him with his nails, and as the boy did so he had the strange sensation of not feeling his own body. At last his father looked at him over his shoulder with a sad smile.
三天后，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生在巴黎接到了电报。当时，他正在和朋友共进晚餐，当即以香槟祝酒来纪念他的父亲，说道：“他是一个好人。”过后，他将为自己的不成熟而自责：为了不让自己哭出来，他竟不断地逃避现实。但三个星期后，他收到了父亲那封身后才被发现的遗书的抄本。那一刻，他向现实投降了。骤然间，那个他生命中最早认识的男人，那个养育他、教导他，和他的母亲同床共枕三十二年，却在这封信之前仅仅因为淳朴的腼腆，从未向他如此赤诚地袒露过心声的男人的形象，一下子深刻地浮现在他眼前。在那之前，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生和他的家人一直都将死亡视作发生在别人家的不幸，它发生在别人的父母、兄弟姐妹、丈夫妻子身上，却从来不会降临在自己的亲人头上。他们一家人的生命节奏都很缓慢，在他们身上看不出衰老、生病和死亡的迹象，他们只会在自己的时间里慢慢消失，然后变成一个时代的回忆和云雾，直至最终被遗忘吞没。父亲的遗书比那封传达噩耗的电报给了他更沉重的打击，让他确信人终有一死。尽管，他最早的回忆之一——九岁或十一岁时——在某种程度上便是从父亲身上看到了死亡早早发出的信号。那是一个下着雨的下午，他们两人待在家中的办公室。他正用彩色粉笔在地砖上画云雀和向日葵，父亲则对着窗子的亮光在看书，背心敞着扣，衬衫袖子上勒着橡皮筋。忽然，他停止了阅读，用一根末端带有银抓手的爪杖挠了挠后背。因为够不着，他又让儿子用指甲帮他抓一抓。儿子这样做时，他产生了一种奇怪的感觉，仿佛感觉不到自己的脊背似的。最后，父亲从肩膀上方看着儿子，凄惨地笑了笑。
“If I died now,” he said, “you would hardly remember me when you are my age.”
“如果我现在就死了，”他说，“等你到了我这个年纪，可能都不记得我了。”
He said it for no apparent reason, and the angel of death hovered for a moment in the cool shadows of the office and flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers fluttering in his wake, but the boy did not see them. More than twenty years had gone by since then, and Juvenal Urbino would very soon be as old as his father was that afternoon. He knew he was identical to him, and to that awareness had now been added the awful consciousness that he was also as mortal.
没有任何明显的理由，他就说出了这样一句话。死亡天使在办公室那凉爽的昏暗中一闪而过，又从窗子飞了出去，所到之处，散落下几片羽毛，但孩子却没有看见。自那时起，已经过去了二十多年，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺马上就要到父亲那天下午的那个年纪了。他知道自己和父亲很像，而现在除了这一点外，他还惊愕地意识到，和父亲一样，自己也终将会死的。
Cholera became an obsession for him. He did not know much more about it than he had learned in a routine manner in some marginal course, when he had found it difficult to believe that only thirty years before, it had been responsible for more than one hundred forty thousand deaths in France, including Paris. But after the death of his father he learned all there was to know about the different forms of cholera, almost as a penance to appease his memory, and he studied with the most outstanding epidemiologist of his time and the creator of the cordons sanitaires, Professor Adrien Proust, father of the great novelist. So that when he returned to his country and smelled the stench of the market while he was still out at sea and saw the rats in the sewers and the children rolling naked in the puddles on the streets, he not only understood how the tragedy had occurred but was certain that it would be repeated at any moment.
霍乱成了他的心病。之前，除了在某门边缘课程中学过一些常识外，他对此了解得并不多。他曾觉得很难置信，仅在三十年前，在包括巴黎在内的法国，霍乱就造成了十四万多人的死亡。但在父亲死后，为了抚平记忆的伤痛，也是作为一种悔过，他学习了一切能学到的有关各种形式的霍乱的知识。他成了当时最杰出的流行病学家、疫区封锁理论的创始人、那位伟大小说家[5]的父亲阿德里安—普鲁斯特的学生。因此，当他回到故土，从海上闻到市场的恶臭，看见污水沟中的老鼠和在街上的水坑里光着身子打滚的孩子们时，不但明白了这场不幸因何而起，而且确信它随时都会重演。（注：[5] 指马赛尔·普鲁斯特（1871—1922），法国作家，代表作《追忆似水年华》。）
The patient died in four days, choked by a grainy white vomit, but in the following weeks no other case was discovered despite constant vigilance. A short while later, The Commercial Daily published the news that two children had died of cholera in different locations in the city. It was learned that one of them had had common dysentery, but the other, a girl of five, appeared to have been, in fact, a victim of cholera. Her parents and three brothers were separated and placed under individual quarantine, and the entire neighborhood was subjected to strict medical supervision. One of the children contracted cholera but recovered very soon, and the entire family returned home when the danger was over. Eleven more cases were reported in the next three months, and in the fifth there was an alarming outbreak, but by the end of the year it was believed that the danger of an epidemic had been averted. No one doubted that the sanitary rigor of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, more than the efficacy of his pronouncements, had made the miracle possible. From that time on, and well into this century, cholera was endemic not only in the city but along most of the Caribbean coast and the valley of the Magdalena, but it never again flared into an epidemic. The crisis meant that Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s warnings were heard with greater seriousness by public officials. They established an obligatory Chair of Cholera and Yellow Fever in the Medical School, and realized the urgency of closing up the sewers and building a market far from the garbage dump. By that time, however, Dr. Urbino was not concerned with proclaiming victory, nor was he moved to persevere in his social mission, for at that moment one of his wings was broken, he was distracted and in disarray and ready to forget everything else in life, because he had been struck by the lightning of his love for Fermina Daza.
四天后，病人死了，被白色颗粒状的呕吐物窒息而死。但接下来的几个星期，大家一直保持着高度警惕，却没有再发现一起新病例。没过多久，《商业日报》刊登消息说，在本城的不同地方，两名儿童死于霍乱。经证实，其中一名得的是普通痢疾，而另外那个五岁的小女孩，看上去的确是霍乱的牺牲品。她的父母和三个兄弟姐妹被分别单独隔离起来，整个街区也被置于严格的医疗监控之下。三个孩子中的一个也感染了霍乱，但很快就康复了。危险过去后，一家人回了家。三个月内，又发现了十一例病例。第五个月时，出现了一次令人担心的爆发。但快到一年时，大家普遍认为疫情已得到了控制。没有一个人怀疑，是胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生严格的医疗措施创造了奇迹，效果比他的宣传还要切实有力。从那时起，直到进入本世纪很长一段时间，尽管霍乱仍然是本城，而且几乎是整个加勒比沿海地区及马格达莱纳河流域的常见病，但并没有再度发展成瘟疫。对霍乱的惊恐使得当局更加严肃地听取了胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生的警告。在医学院，霍乱和黄热病被规定为必修课；并且，大家明白了填堵污水沟、把市场建到远离垃圾堆的地方去的紧迫性。然而，此时的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生并没有热衷于宣告他的胜利，也没有精神百倍地去坚持他的社会使命——如今的他成了折翼的天使，不知所措，心神不宁，决意要忘掉生活中其余的一切，只因为他被自己对费尔明娜·达萨的爱火闪电般地击中了。
The moment was not long in coming. In less than a year his students at Misericordia Hospital asked for his help in treating a charity patient with a strange blue coloration all over his body. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had only to see him from the doorway to recognize the enemy. But they were in luck: the patient had arrived three days earlier on a schooner from Curaçao and had come to the hospital clinic by himself, and it did not seem probable that he had infected anyone else. In any event, Dr. Juvenal Urbino alerted his colleagues and had the authorities warn the neighboring ports so that they could locate and quarantine the contaminated schooner, and he had to restrain the military commander of the city who wanted to declare martial law and initiate the therapeutic strategy of firing the cannon every quarter hour.
果然，没过多久，事情就发生了。还不到一年，他在仁爱医院的几个学生请他帮忙去为一个浑身泛着罕见蓝色的病人义诊。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生只在门口看了一眼，便认出了他的敌人。但运气还不错：这个病人三天前乘坐一艘来自库拉索的轻便船到达此地，是自己来到医院门诊的，似乎还没有传染给其他人的可能。不管怎样，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生还是提醒了同事们，并最终说服当局向附近港口发出警报，以便找到并隔离被污染的轻便船。此外，他还劝阻了要塞军事长官，这位长官想发布戒严令，并立即施行每一刻钟鸣炮一响的治疗法。
“Save that powder for when the Liberals come,” he said with good humor. “We are no longer in the Middle Ages.”
“省下那些火药，等自由党人来的时候再用吧。”他温文尔雅地说，“现在已经不是中世纪了。”
It was, in fact, the result of a clinical error. A physician who was a friend of his thought he detected the warning symptoms of cholera in an eighteen-year-old patient, and he asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino to see her. He called that very afternoon, alarmed at the possibility that the plague had entered the sanctuary of the old city, for all the cases until that time had occurred in the poor neighborhoods, and almost all of those among the black population. He encountered other, less unpleasant, surprises. From the outside, the house, shaded by the almond trees in the Park of the Evangels, appeared to be in ruins, as did the others in the colonial district, but inside there was a harmony of beauty and an astonishing light that seemed to come from another age. The entrance opened directly into a square Sevillian patio that was white with a recent coat of lime and had flowering orange trees and the same tiles on the floor as on the walls. There was an invisible sound of running water, and pots with carnations on the cornices, and cages of strange birds in the arcades. The strangest of all were three crows in a very large cage, who filled the patio with an ambiguous perfume every time they flapped their wings. Several dogs, chained elsewhere in the house, began to bark, maddened by the scent of a stranger, but a woman’s shout stopped them dead, and numerous cats leapt all around the patio and hid among the flowers, frightened by the authority in the voice. Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of the birds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea.
的确，那是一次误诊的果实。他的一位医生朋友，认为自己在一个十八岁的女病人身上看出了霍乱的先兆症状，请求胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生前来看看。由于害怕疫情侵入老城的宝地——毕竟，之前的所有病例都发生在边缘地区，且几乎全是黑人——他当天下午就去了。结果，他收获了惊喜而非忧患。那所房子坐落在福音花园的杏树树荫下，外面看上去同殖民老区的其他房子一样破旧不堪，但里面却井井有条，美轮美奂，光彩照人得仿如世外桃源。房子的前厅直接通向一个塞维利亚式的方形庭院，院子里刚刚刷过白白的石灰，橘树盛开着鲜花，地上铺着和墙上一样的彩色瓷砖。虽然看不见泉水，却听见潺潺的流水声不绝于耳，屋檐下装饰着一盆盆康乃馨，连拱下吊着一只只装有珍禽的鸟笼。其中最为稀有的，是三只关在一个大鸟笼里的乌鸦，它们每一次振动翅膀，都会令院子里弥漫开一种莫名的香气。用链子拴在角落里的几条狗嗅出了生人的味道，突然狂吠起来，但一声女人的叫喊立刻又使之戛然而止。许多只猫被这声严厉的喊叫吓得从四处窜了出来，又藏进花丛中。之后，一片寂静，在鸟儿的扑腾声和流过石头的淙淙水声中，仿佛能隐隐听到大海忧伤的呼吸。
Shaken by the conviction that God was present, Dr. Juvenal Urbino thought that such a house was immune to the plague. He followed Gala Placidia along the arcaded corridor, passed by the window of the sewing room where Florentino Ariza had seen Fermina Daza for the first time, when the patio was still a shambles, climbed the new marble stairs to the second floor, and waited to be announced before going into the patient’s bedroom. But Gala Placidia came out again with a message:
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生真切地感觉到上帝就在此处，不由得浑身一颤。他想，如此一个家是不会受到瘟疫侵害的。他跟着加拉·普拉西迪娅穿过带拱顶的走廊，走过缝纫室的窗前，那里曾是弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨第一次看见费尔明娜·达萨的地方，当时院子还处在一片瓦砾之中。他沿着崭新的大理石台阶来到二楼，等候传禀，以进入女病人的卧室。可加拉·普拉西迪娅走出来时，带来了这样的口信：
“The señorita says you cannot come in now because her papa is not at home.”
“小姐说，您现在不能进去，因为她父亲不在家。”
And so he returned at five in the afternoon, in accordance with the maid’s instructions, and Lorenzo Daza himself opened the street door and led him to his daughter’s bedroom. There he remained, sitting in a dark corner with his arms folded, and making futile efforts to control his ragged breathing during the examination. It was not easy to know who was more constrained, the doctor with his chaste touch or the patient in the silk chemise with her virgin’s modesty, but neither one looked the other in the eye; instead, he asked questions in an impersonal voice and she responded in a tremulous voice, both of them very conscious of the man sitting in the shadows. At last Dr. Juvenal Urbino asked the patient to sit up, and with exquisite care he opened her nightdress down to the waist; her pure high breasts with the childish nipples shone for an instant in the darkness of the bedroom, like a flash of gunpowder, before she hurried to cover them with crossed arms. Imperturbable, the physician opened her arms without looking at her and examined her by direct auscultation, his ear against her skin, first the chest and then the back.
于是，他按照女仆的指示，下午五点钟又来了。洛伦索·达萨亲自为他打开大门，把他领到了女儿的卧室。医生为病人检查时，洛伦索·达萨坐在角落的一片昏暗之中，双臂交叉，徒劳地控制着自己杂乱的呼吸。很难说清楚究竟谁更拘谨：医生羞怯地抚摸着病人，病人则带着处女的矜持，把自己裹在丝绸睡袍里。两人谁也没有看对方的眼睛，只是他用仿佛不是自己的声音问着问题，而她则用颤抖的声音回答，不约而同地忌惮着那个坐在阴影中的长者。最后，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生请病人坐起来，小心翼翼地将她的睡衣解至腰间：霎时间，那对完美无瑕、高高隆起、有着孩子般稚嫩乳头的乳房，在昏暗的房中发出耀眼的光芒。她赶紧将双手抱在胸前遮住身体。而医生沉着地将她的手臂移开，没有看她的眼睛，直接用耳朵贴在她的皮肤上为她听诊，先是胸部，然后是背部。
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say that he experienced no emotion when he met the woman with whom he would live until the day of his death. He remembered the sky-blue chemise edged in lace, the feverish eyes, the long hair hanging loose over her shoulders, but he was so concerned with the outbreak of cholera in the colonial district that he took no notice of her flowering adolescence: he had eyes only for the slightest hint that she might be a victim of the plague. She was more explicit: the young doctor she had heard so much about in connection with the cholera epidemic seemed a pedant incapable of loving anyone but himself. The diagnosis was an intestinal infection of alimentary origin, which was cured by three days of treatment at home. Relieved by this proof that his daughter had not contracted cholera, Lorenzo Daza accompanied Dr. Juvenal Urbino to the door of his carriage, paid him a gold peso for the visit, a fee that seemed excessive even for a physician to the rich, and he said goodbye with immoderate expressions of gratitude. He was overwhelmed by the splendor of the Doctor’s family names, and he not only did not hide it but would have done anything to see him again, under less formal circumstances.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生总是说，他初识这位将与他共度一生的女人时，心里没有丝毫波澜。他记得，那件天蓝色的睡袍镶着花边，她的眼神炽热如火，长长的秀发披在肩上，但他当时极度担心霍乱侵入殖民老区，压根儿没有注意到正值花样年华的她所拥有的诸多美妙之处，而是全心查看她身上可能存在的哪怕微乎其微的瘟疫征兆。而她更是把自己撇得一干二净：这位因霍乱而常常被人提起的年轻医生，在她看来根本是个除了自己以外谁也不会爱的学究。诊断的结果是，这只是一次食物引起的肠道感染，在家中治疗三日即可痊愈。证实女儿没有染上霍乱，洛伦索·达萨松了一口气。他亲自把医生送上车，并付给他一个金比索的出诊费用。他认为即便是对专为富人看病的医生来说，这也算是过高的酬劳了，但告别时，他还是表达了自己的千恩万谢。他被医生那荣耀的姓氏弄得眼花缭乱，对于这一点，他非但没有丝毫掩饰，反而表示无论如何希望再次见到医生，当然，是在非正式的场合。
The case should have been considered closed. But on Tuesday of the following week, without being called and with no prior announcement, Dr. Juvenal Urbino returned to the house at the inconvenient hour of three in the afternoon. Fermina Daza was in the sewing room, having a lesson in oil painting with two of her friends, when he appeared at the window in his spotless white frock coat and his white top hat and signaled to her to come over to him. She put her palette down on a chair and tiptoed to the window, her ruffled skirt raised to keep it from dragging on the floor. She wore a diadem with a jewel that hung on her forehead, and the luminous stone was the same aloof color as her eyes, and everything in her breathed an aura of coolness. The Doctor was struck by the fact that she was dressed for painting at home as if she were going to a party. He took her pulse through the open window, he had her stick out her tongue, he examined her throat with an aluminum tongue depressor, he looked inside her lower eyelids, and each time he nodded in approval. He was less inhibited than on the previous visit, but she was more so, because she could not understand the reason for the unexpected examination if he himself had said that he would not come back unless they called him because of some change. And even more important: she did not ever want to see him again. When he finished his examination, the Doctor put the tongue depressor back into his bag, crowded with instruments and bottles of medicine, and closed it with a resounding snap.
事情本该就此结束了。然而第二周的星期二，没有受到邀请，也没有事先知会，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生又在下午三点这样一个不合时宜的时刻来了。费尔明娜·达萨正在缝纫室和两个女伴一起上油画课。他穿着一身一尘不染的白色长礼服、戴着一顶白色高顶帽出现在窗前，朝她做了个手势，示意她过来一下。她把画框放在椅子上，踮着脚尖向窗子走过去，为了不让裙子拖到地上，她把荷叶边提到了脚踝。她戴了一只发箍，亮闪闪的宝石坠子垂在额头上，与她那高傲的双眸有着同样的颜色，整个人都透出清爽。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生注意到，她在家中作画时竟也穿戴整齐，就好像参加节日庆典一般。他从窗外给她号了脉，又让她把舌头伸出来，用一块铝制压舌板为她检查了喉咙，还看了看她的内眼睑。每检查一项，他都做出放心的表情。他不再像上次那样拘束，但她却更拘谨了，因为她不明白他此次意外到访的原因，毕竟他曾亲口说过，若没有什么新情况需要叫他来，他就不再来了。更何况：她也并不想再见到他。检查完毕，医生把压舌板放进了装满各种工具和小药瓶的手提箱，然后啪的一声关上箱子。
“You are like a new-sprung rose,” he said.
“您就像一朵初开的玫瑰。”
“Thank God,” he said, and he misquoted St. Thomas: “Remember that everything that is good, whatever its origin, comes from the Holy Spirit. Do you like music?”
“应该感谢上帝。”他说，之后又突兀地引用了一句圣多默[6]的名言：“您要记住，一切美好的东西，不论来自何处，都源自圣神。您喜欢音乐吗？”（注：[6] 圣多默，耶稣的十二门徒之一，又译圣多马。）
He really thought it was, and she was going to know very soon, and for the rest of her life, that the topic of music was almost a magic formula that he used to propose friendship, but at that moment she interpreted it as a joke. Besides, her two friends, who had pretended to paint while she and Dr. Juvenal Urbino were talking at the window, tittered and hid their faces behind their palettes, and this made Fermina Daza lose her self-control. Blind with fury, she slammed the window shut. The Doctor stared at the sheer lace curtains in bewilderment, he tried to find the street door but lost his way, and in his confusion he knocked into the cage with the perfumed crows. They broke into sordid shrieking, flapped their wings in fright, and saturated the Doctor’s clothing with a feminine fragrance. The thundering voice of Lorenzo Daza rooted him to the spot:
他是真的这样以为的，很快，她便会知道这一点，并将终身都深有体会——音乐这个话题是他用来建立友谊的一种几乎可以说是带有魔力的方式。而那时，她却把它理解成了一种嘲笑。更何况，他们在窗前谈话时，两个假装在画画的女伴发出了像老鼠一样的窃笑声，并用画框挡住了脸。这使得费尔明娜·达萨乱了方寸。她气晕了头，砰的一声关上了窗子。而医生面对着镶花边的薄纱帘不知所措，试图找到通往大门的路，可是却转了向。慌乱中，他撞上了香乌鸦的笼子，几只鸟惊得发出一阵凄厉的叫声，扑扇起翅膀来，顿时，医生的衣服沾染上一股女人的馨香。紧接着，洛伦索·达萨霹雳般的声音把医生钉在了那里：
When he asked, he had a charming smile on his face and made a casual appearance. But she did not answer.
他问话时，脸上露出迷人的微笑，做出很随意的样子。但她却没有回答。
“What is the point of that question?” she asked in turn.
“您为什么要问这个？”她反问道。
“Music is important for one’s health,” he said.
“因为音乐对健康至关重要。”他说。
“Thank you.”
“谢谢。”
“I told your daughter that she is like a rose.”
“我已经告诉您的女儿了，她健康得就像一朵玫瑰。”
“Doctor — wait for me there.”
“医生，请在那里等我一下。”
The Doctor tried to intervene and stop him, but Lorenzo Daza paid no attention to him. He insisted: “Hurry up.” She looked at her friends with a secret plea for understanding, and she said to her father that she had nothing to beg pardon for, she had only closed the window to keep out the sun. Dr. Urbino, with good humor, tried to confirm her words, but Lorenzo Daza insisted that he be obeyed. Then Fermina Daza, pale with rage, turned toward the window, and extending her right foot as she raised her skirt with her fingertips, she made a theatrical curtsy to the Doctor.
医生试图劝阻他，但洛伦索·达萨根本不加理会，斩钉截铁地说：“快点！”她看了一眼自己的女伴，默默地请求她们谅解。她反驳父亲说，她没有什么可道歉的，她关上窗子是避免阳光晒进来。乌尔比诺医生竭力想证明她的理由是正确的，但洛伦索·达萨坚持自己的命令。于是，费尔明娜·达萨再次走到窗前，气得脸色煞白，右脚向前，用指尖提起裙子，向医生戏剧性地躬了一下身子。
He had seen everything from the upper floor and, swollen and livid, he came down the stairs buttoning his shirt, his side-whiskers still in an uproar after a restless siesta. The Doctor tried to overcome his embarrassment.
他从楼上看见了刚才发生的一切，一边扣衬衫扣子一边走下楼梯，脸有些肿胀，且肤色发青，由于刚从午觉的噩梦中醒来，络腮胡还乱蓬蓬的。医生极力掩饰自己的尴尬。
“True enough,” said Lorenzo Daza, “but one with too many thorns.”
“是啊，”洛伦索·达萨说，“就是刺儿太多。”
He walked past Dr. Urbino without greeting him. He pushed open the sewing room window and shouted a rough command to his daughter:
他从乌尔比诺医生身边走过去，没有跟他寒暄，而是推开缝纫室的两扇窗子，粗野地冲女儿叫喊，命令她说：
“Come here and beg the Doctor’s pardon.”
“过来跟医生道歉！”
Dr. Juvenal Urbino imitated her with good humor, making a cavalier’s flourish with his top hat, but he did not win the compassionate smile he had hoped for. Then Lorenzo Daza invited him to have a cup of coffee in his office to set things right, and he accepted with pleasure so that there would be no doubt whatsoever that he did not harbor a shred of resentment in his heart.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生幽默地学着她的样子，像火枪手似的拿着他的高顶礼帽鞠躬还礼，却没有得到他所期望的和善微笑。洛伦索·达萨邀请他去办公室喝杯咖啡以示道歉。为了表示自己心里没有留下一点芥蒂，他欣然接受了。
“I give you my most heartfelt apologies, sir,” she said.
“我万分诚恳地向您道歉，先生。”她说。
The truth was that Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not drink coffee, except for a cup first thing in the morning. He did not drink alcohol either, except for a glass of wine with meals on solemn occasions, but he not only drank down the coffee that Lorenzo Daza offered him, he also accepted a glass of anisette. Then he accepted another coffee with another anisette, and then another and another, even though he still had to make a few more calls. At first he listened with attention to the excuses that Lorenzo Daza continued to offer in the name of his daughter, whom he defined as an intelligent and serious girl, worthy of a prince whether he came from here or anywhere else, whose only defect, so he said, was her mulish character. But after the second anisette, the Doctor thought he heard Fermina Daza’s voice at the other end of the patio, and his imagination went after her, followed her through the night that had just descended in the house as she lit the lights in the corridor, fumigated the bedrooms with the insecticide bomb, uncovered the pot of soup on the stove, which she was going to share that night with her father, the two of them alone at the table, she not raising her eyes, not tasting the soup, not breaking the rancorous spell, until he was forced to give in and ask her to forgive his severity that afternoon.
事实上，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生除了早餐前会喝上一杯咖啡，其余时间都是不喝的。他也不喝酒，只是偶尔在正式场合喝一杯佐餐的葡萄酒。但这一次他不仅喝了洛伦索·达萨给他端来的咖啡，还喝下了一杯茴香酒。之后，又喝了一杯咖啡和一杯茴香酒。接着，他一杯一杯地喝下去，尽管还需要赶去其他几个地方出诊。起初，他还认真地听着洛伦索·达萨以女儿的名义向他致歉，听他说自己的女儿是个聪明端庄的姑娘，配得上这里或者任何一个地方的王子，可她唯一的缺点，按他的话来说，就是像骡子一样的倔脾气。可当第二杯酒下肚后，医生似乎听见从院子深处传来费尔明娜·达萨的声音，他的思绪便随她而去了：他想象着自己跟随她穿行于刚刚被夜幕笼罩的房子里，点上走廊各处的灯，给各间卧室喷上杀虫剂，打开火炉上的汤锅盖子，里面盛着她和父亲当晚要喝的汤。他仿佛看见父女俩单独坐在桌前，都没有抬眼，也没有喝汤，因为谁都不愿打破这种斗气的乐趣，最终，父亲投降了，请求女儿原谅他下午的严厉。
Dr. Urbino knew enough about women to realize that Fermina Daza would not pass by the office until he left, but he stayed nevertheless because he felt that wounded pride would give him no peace after the humiliations of the afternoon. Lorenzo Daza, who by now was almost drunk, did not seem to notice his lack of attention, for he was satisfied with his own indomitable eloquence. He talked at full gallop, chewing the flower of his unlit cigar, coughing in shouts, trying to clear his throat, attempting with great difficulty to find a comfortable position in the swivel chair, whose springs wailed like an animal in heat. He had drunk three glasses of anisette to each one drunk by his guest, and he paused only when he realized that they could no longer see each other, and he stood up to light the lamp. Dr. Juvenal Urbino looked at him in the new light, he saw that one eye was twisted like a fish’s and that his words did not correspond to the movement of his lips, and he thought these were hallucinations brought on by his abuse of alcohol. Then he stood up, with the fascinating sensation that he was inside a body that belonged not to him but to someone who was still in the chair where he had been sitting, and he had to make a great effort not to lose his mind.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生非常了解女人，他知道，只要他不走，费尔明娜·达萨就不可能经过这间办公室。但无论如何，他还是拖延着离开的时间，因为他明白，下午的这场屈辱伤害了他的自尊，将不会让他好过。洛伦索·达萨几乎已经醉倒，似乎并没有发现他的心不在焉，只顾自己唠叨个没完。他一边滔滔不绝地说着，一边咀嚼已经熄灭的雪茄里上好的烟叶，大声咳嗽，使劲清着嗓子，竭力在旋转靠背椅上寻找舒服的姿势，弄得椅子的弹簧发出一阵阵发情动物般的呻吟。客人每喝一杯，他就会灌下三杯。最终他发现两人已经互相看不见对方，这才暂停下来，起身去点灯。借着新点亮的灯光，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生从正面打量他，只见他的眼睛像鱼一样斜了出去，而他说出来的话也和口形对不上。医生想，这一定是酒精过量带来的幻觉。于是他站起身来，但恍惚中感觉到身体仿佛不是自己的，而是别人的，而且那个别人此刻仍坐在自己刚才坐过的位置上。他费了好大的劲儿才没让自己失去理智。
It was after seven o’clock when he left the office, preceded by Lorenzo Daza. There was a full moon. The patio, idealized by anisette, floated at the bottom of an aquarium, and the cages covered with cloths looked like ghosts sleeping under the hot scent of new orange blossoms. The sewing room window was open, there was a lighted lamp on the worktable, and the unfinished paintings were on their easels as if they were on exhibit. “Where art thou that thou art not here,” said Dr. Urbino as he passed by, but Fermina Daza did not hear him, she could not hear him, because she was crying with rage in her bedroom, lying face down on the bed and waiting for her father so that she could make him pay for the afternoon’s humiliation. The Doctor did not renounce his hope of saying goodbye to her, but Lorenzo Daza did not suggest it. He yearned for the innocence of her pulse, her cat’s tongue, her tender tonsils, but he was disheartened by the idea that she never wanted to see him again and would never permit him to try to see her. When Lorenzo Daza walked into the entryway, the crows, awake under their sheets, emitted a funereal shriek. “They will peck out your eyes,” the Doctor said aloud, thinking of her, and Lorenzo Daza turned around to ask him what he had said.
当他在洛伦索·达萨的引领下走出办公室时，已经七点多了。一轮满月挂在空中。在茴香酒的作用下，院子变得如梦似幻，好像浮在一个水底世界。一只只罩着布的鸟笼仿似一个个熟睡的幽灵，沐浴在新开的橘树花散发出的暖香里。缝纫室的窗子敞开着，工作台上亮着一盏灯，一幅幅未完成的画作像参加画展似的摆在架子上。“不在这儿的你，会在哪儿呢？”乌尔比诺医生走过时这样说道。但费尔明娜·达萨没有听到，也无法听到，因为她正在卧室的床上愤怒地哭泣，等待着父亲过去，为自己下午所受的屈辱讨回公道。医生没有放弃向她道别的念想，可洛伦索·达萨却并未提议他这样做。他思念着她天真的脉搏、猫一样的舌头和柔软的扁桃体，可一想到她将再也不愿见到自己，甚至不会允许自己尝试与她见面，他立刻又垂头丧气起来。洛伦索·达萨走进前厅时，蒙在布中的乌鸦被惊醒了，发出令人毛骨悚然的尖叫。“它们会把你的眼睛啄出来。”医生心里想着她，大声说道。洛伦索·达萨回过头来，问他说什么。
His mother and sisters were having café con leche and crullers for supper at the formal table in the large dining room when they saw him appear in the door, his face haggard and his entire being dishonored by the whorish perfume of the crows. The largest bell of the adjacent Cathedral resounded in the immense empty space of the house. His mother asked him in alarm where in the world he had been, for they had looked everywhere for him so that he could attend General Ignacio María, the last grandson of the Marquis de Jaraíz de la Vera, who had been struck down that afternoon by a cerebral hemorrhage: it was for him that the bells were tolling. Dr. Juvenal Urbino listened to his mother without hearing her as he clutched the doorframe, and then he gave a half turn, trying to reach his bedroom, but he fell flat on his face in an explosion of star anise vomit.
他的母亲和两个妹妹正坐在大饭厅的正式餐桌前，喝着牛奶咖啡，吃着奶酪饼。正在此时，只见他带着一副痛苦不堪的面容出现在门口，浑身散发着从乌鸦那里沾染来的淫荡香味。隔壁大教堂的钟声在家里宽阔的水池上空回荡。母亲惊慌地问起他究竟去了哪里，因为大家到处找他去给伊格纳西奥·玛利亚将军看病，将军是哈拉依斯·德拉维拉侯爵的最后一个孙子，那天下午突发脑溢血去世了：丧钟就是为他敲响的。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生对母亲的话完全没有反应，他抓住门框，转过半个身子，试图走到卧室去，却一头栽倒在从自己嘴里喷吐出来、溅得到处都是的茴香酒中。
“It was not me,” he said. “It was the anisette.”
“不是我说的，”他说，“是茴香酒。”
Lorenzo Daza accompanied him to his carriage, trying to force him to accept a gold peso for the second visit, but he would not take it. He gave the correct instructions to the driver for taking him to the houses of the two patients he still had to see, and he climbed into the carriage without help. But he began to feel sick as they bounced along the cobbled streets, so that he ordered the driver to take a different route. He looked at himself for a moment in the carriage mirror and saw that his image, too, was still thinking about Fermina Daza. He shrugged his shoulders. Then he belched, lowered his head to his chest, and fell asleep, and in his dream he began to hear funeral bells. First he heard those of the Cathedral and then he heard those of all the other churches, one after another, even the cracked pots of St. Julian the Hospitaler.
洛伦索·达萨把他送到马车前，试图说服他收下这第二次出诊的一个金比索，但他没有接受。他准确无误地向车夫下达指令，让他把自己送到另外两个约好的病人家去，然后，没有靠别人帮忙就上了车。可马车在石子路上的颠簸让他开始感到难受，于是他让车夫掉转了方向。他对着车上的镜子看了好一会儿，发现镜中的自己也依然在想着费尔明娜·达萨。他耸了耸肩，然后打了个嗝，脑袋垂在胸前，睡着了。睡梦中，他听见丧钟敲响了。先是大教堂的钟声，而后，所有的教堂都传来钟声，一处接一处，连乐善好施者圣胡利安[7]修道院那破瓦似的钟声也响了起来。（注：[7] 乐善好施者圣胡利安，天主教传说中的圣人，许多旅店主视其为主保圣人。）
“Shit,” he murmured in his sleep, “the dead have died.”
“见鬼，”他在睡梦中嘟囔了一句，“有人死了。”
“Mother of God,” shouted his mother. “Something very strange must have happened for you to show up in your own house in this state.”
“圣母马利亚，”他的母亲喊道，“一定是出了什么怪事，才让你这副模样回到家里。”
The strangest thing, however, had not yet occurred. Taking advantage of the visit of the famous pianist Romeo Lussich, who played a cycle of Mozart sonatas as soon as the city had recovered from mourning the death of General Ignacio María, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had the piano from the Music School placed in a mule-drawn wagon and brought a history-making serenade to Fermina Daza. She was awakened by the first measures, and she did not have to look out the grating on the balcony to know who was the sponsor of that uncommon tribute. The only thing she regretted was not having the courage of other harassed maidens, who emptied their chamber pots on the heads of unwanted suitors. Lorenzo Daza, on the other hand, dressed without delay as the serenade was playing, and when it was over he had Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the pianist, still wearing their formal concert clothes, come in to the visitors” parlor, where he thanked them for the serenade with a glass of good brandy.
然而，最为奇怪的事还没有发生呢。著名钢琴家罗密欧·卢西奇造访本城，城中的民众刚刚从对伊格纳西奥·玛利亚将军的哀悼中恢复过来，他就献上了一组莫扎特的奏鸣曲。趁这个时机，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生叫人把音乐学校的钢琴搬上了骡车，为费尔明娜·达萨送去了一首划时代的小夜曲。乐曲刚开始演奏，她就醒了。无需从阳台的花边窗帘后探出身子，她就知道谁是这次不同寻常的献礼的策划者。她唯一感到遗憾的，便是她还没有胆量像那些刁钻的姑娘们一样，把尿盆一股脑儿地扣在不受青睐的追求者头上。而洛伦索·达萨呢，小夜曲演奏到一半，他便迅速穿好了衣服，乐曲一结束，他就把身着音乐会礼服的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生和钢琴家请进了会客厅，用一杯上好的白兰地对小夜曲表达了谢意。
Fermina Daza soon realized that her father was trying to soften her heart. The day after the serenade, he said to her in a casual manner: “Imagine how your mother would feel if she knew you were being courted by an Urbino de la Calle.” Her dry response was: “She would turn over in her grave.” The friends who painted with her told her that Lorenzo Daza had been invited to lunch at the Social Club by Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who had received a severe reprimand for breaking club rules. It was only then that she learned that her father had applied for membership in the Social Club on several occasions, and that each time he had been rejected with such a large number of black balls that another attempt was not possible. But Lorenzo Daza had an infinite capacity for assimilating humiliations, and he continued his ingenious strategies for arranging casual encounters with Juvenal Urbino, not realizing that it was Juvenal Urbino who went out of his way to let himself be encountered. At times they spent hours chatting in the office, while the house seemed suspended at the edge of time because Fermina Daza would not permit anything to run its normal course until he left. The Parish Café was a good intermediate haven. It was there that Lorenzo Daza gave Juvenal Urbino his first lessons in chess, and he was such a diligent pupil that chess became an incurable addiction that tormented him until the day of his death.
费尔明娜·达萨很快发现，父亲在试图软化她的心。小夜曲演奏次日，他便看似随意地对她说：“想想看，要是你母亲知道你被一个乌尔比诺·德拉卡列家族的人看上了，她会是什么感觉啊。”她冷冷地反驳道：“她会在棺材里再死一次。”和她一起画画的女友告诉她，洛伦索·达萨受胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生之邀，到社交俱乐部用了一次午餐，为此，医生因违反俱乐部章程而受到了严厉的警告。直到这时，她才知道了父亲曾多次申请加入社交俱乐部，次次都被拒绝，而每次所收到的反对票之多，已使他彻底地死了这条心。可洛伦索·达萨以桶匠[8]的大度吞下所受的侮辱，继续执著地依靠智慧创造偶遇胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺的机会，却没有发现其实是胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺付出了更为超常的努力，尽一切可能让两人相遇。有时，他们会在办公室里聊上好几个小时，而这时，家里的一切就像处在时间的边缘停滞了似的，因为只要医生不走，费尔明娜·达萨就不会让任何事照常进行。于是，教区咖啡馆成了理想的中间港。正是在那里，洛伦索·达萨给胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺上了象棋启蒙课。这位学生非常勤奋，象棋成了他无药可救的嗜好，直到他死的那一天。（注：[8] “桶匠”在西班牙文中有“大肚子的人”之意，转义指气量大的人。）
When she awoke she opened the letter. It was brief and proper, and all that Juvenal Urbino asked was permission to request her father’s permission to visit her. She was impressed by its simplicity and seriousness, and the rage she had cultivated with so much love for so many days faded away on the spot. She kept the letter in the bottom of her trunk, but she remembered that she had also kept Florentino Ariza’s perfumed letters there, and she took it out of the chest to find another place for it, shaken by a rush of shame. Then it seemed that the most decent thing to do was to pretend she had not received it, and she burned it in the lamp, watching how the drops of wax exploded into blue bubbles above the flame. She sighed: “Poor man.” And then she realized that it was the second time she had said those words in little more than a year, and for a moment she thought about Florentino Ariza, and even she was surprised at how removed he was from her life: poor man.
醒来后，她拆开了信。信写得简洁而得体。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺唯一恳求的，就是请她允许自己征得她父亲的同意前来拜访她。他的简单和认真打动了她，那么多天以来她用心培育出的恨突然平息了。她把信收在一个不用的珠宝盒里，压到箱底。但她忽然又记起来，那里曾经保存过弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨那些飘散着香味的信，一阵羞愧让她浑身一颤，于是她把信从珠宝盒里取出来，想换个地方。这时，她所能想到的最体面的做法就是权当没有收到过这封信。于是，她把它放到灯上烧起来，边烧边看着一滴滴火漆在火苗上飞溅，变成了缕缕青烟。她叹息道：“可怜的人。”突然，她意识到这是自己在一年多一点的时间里第二次说这句话了。片刻间，她又想起了弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨。她自己也很惊讶，他已经离她的生活那么遥远：可怜的人。
One night, a short while after the serenade by solo piano, Lorenzo Daza discovered a letter, its envelope sealed with wax, in the entryway to his house. It was addressed to his daughter and the monogram “J. U. C.” was imprinted on the seal. He slipped it under the door as he passed Fermina’s bedroom, and she never understood how it had come there, since it was inconceivable to her that her father had changed so much that he would bring her a letter from a suitor. She left it on the night table, for the truth was she did not know what to do with it, and there it stayed, unopened, for several days, until one rainy afternoon when Fermina Daza dreamed that Juvenal Urbino had returned to the house to give her the tongue depressor he had used to examine her throat. In the dream, the tongue depressor was made not of aluminum but of a delicious metal that she had tasted with pleasure in other dreams, so that she broke it in two unequal pieces and gave him the smaller one.
就在小夜曲风波后不久的一天晚上，洛伦索·达萨在家中的前厅发现了一封信，是写给女儿的，火漆上押着J。U。C。几个首字母[9]组成的花押字。从费尔明娜的卧室前走过时，他把信从门下滑了进去。费尔明娜想不通信是如何到她房间里来的，因为她怎么也不相信父亲竟然会替追求者送信：这简直是不可思议的转变。她把信放在床头柜上，不知该如何处理。就这样，信没被拆开，在那里放了好几天，直到一个飘雨的下午，费尔明娜·达萨梦见胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺又到家里来，要把那块曾经用来为她检查喉咙的压舌板送给她。梦中的压舌板并非铝制，而是用一种她曾在别的梦里开心品尝过的美味金属做成，于是，她开心地品尝着它，并把它掰成了大小不等的两段，小的那段给了他。（注：[9] 胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺·德拉卡列的缩写。）
Three more letters arrived with the last rains in October, the first of them accompanied by a little box of violet pastilles from Flavigny Abbey. Two had been delivered at the door by Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s coachman, and the Doctor had greeted Gala Placidia from the carriage window, first so that there would be no doubt that the letters were his, and second so that no one could tell him they had not been received. Moreover, both of them were sealed with his monogram in wax and written in the cryptic scrawl that Fermina Daza already recognized as a physician’s handwriting. Both of them said in substance what had been said in the first, and were conceived in the same submissive spirit, but underneath their propriety one could begin to detect an impatience that was never evident in the parsimonious letters of Florentino Ariza. Fermina Daza read them as soon as they were delivered, two weeks apart, and without knowing why, she changed her mind as she was about to throw them into the fire. But she never thought of answering them.
十月里，伴随着最后几场雨，又来了三封信。同其中的第一封一起送来的，还有一小盒弗拉维格尼修道院的紫罗兰香皂。三封信中前两封都是胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生的车夫送到大门口的，医生还从车窗里向加拉·普拉西迪娅打了个招呼，一来可以让大家确认信就是他写的，二来也让谁都没法否认收到过这些信。此外，这两封信都用押着花押字的火漆封着，费尔明娜·达萨已能辨认出医生那龙飞凤舞、密码似的字迹。两封信都简明扼要地表达了和此前那封同样的意思，也怀着同样的谦卑，但在那温婉措辞的背后，开始流露出一种迫不及待的渴望，这是在弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨那些含蓄委婉的信中从未显露过的。两封信之间相隔两个星期，费尔明娜·达萨每次一收到信便拆开来读，而她自己也无法解释，为何就在要烧掉它们的前一刻，她改变了主意。但是，她从未想过要给医生回信。
She felt herself the victim of a grave injustice, but her reaction was not vindictive. On the contrary: she would have liked to discover who the author of the anonymous letter was in order to convince him of his error with all the pertinent explanations, for she felt certain that never, for any reason, would she respond to the wooing of Juvenal Urbino. In the days that followed she received two more unsigned letters, as perfidious as the first, but none of the three seemed to be written by the same person. Either she was the victim of a plot, or the false version of her secret love affair had gone further than anyone could imagine. She was disturbed by the idea that it was all the result of a simple indiscretion on the part of Juvenal Urbino. It occurred to her that perhaps he was different from his worthy appearance, that perhaps he talked too much when he was making house calls and boasted of imaginary conquests, as did so many other men of his class. She thought about writing him a letter to reproach him for the insult to her honor, but then she decided against the idea because that might be just what he wanted. She tried to learn more from the friends who painted with her in the sewing room, but they had heard only benign comments concerning the serenade by solo piano. She felt furious, impotent, humiliated. In contrast to her initial feeling that she wanted to meet with her invisible enemy in order to convince him of his errors, now she only wanted to cut him to ribbons with the pruning shears. She spent sleepless nights analyzing details and phrases in the anonymous letters in the hope of finding some shred of comfort. It was a vain hope: Fermina Daza was, by nature, alien to the inner world of the Urbino de la Calle family, and she had weapons for defending herself from their good actions but not from their evil ones.
她感到自己成了严重不公的牺牲品，但她的反应并非报复，而是相反：她想找出这封匿名信的作者，用种种适宜的解释向他证明他错了，因为她非常确定，自己永远也不会因为任何理由，被胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺的殷勤打动。接下来的几天，她又收到了两封没有署名的信，和第一封一样信口雌黄，但三封信中没有任何两封出自同一人手笔。看来，要么她是某个阴谋的牺牲品，要么就是关于她私订终身的虚假传闻传得比想象的要远。一想到这一切都可能是胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺某个简单的冒失行为造成的后果，她就惶恐不安。她想，或许他的为人与他那庄重的外表差距甚远，或许他在出诊时喜欢信口开河，就像他那个阶层的很多人那样，到处吹嘘自己幻想出来的对她的征服。她想写信给他，指责他玷污了自己的名誉，但随后又放弃了这个念头，因为万一这正是他想要的呢。她试图从那几个来缝纫室和她一起学画的女友们那里打听消息，但她们唯一听说的就是关于那次小夜曲独奏的无关痛痒的评论。她感到无比愤怒，却又无能为力，备受屈辱。和最初想找出这个看不见的敌人，说服他承认自己错误的想法完全不同，现在她只想用修枝剪把他碎尸万段。她整晚睡不着觉，分析那些匿名信中的细节和用词，幻想能从中找出一丝安慰。但这是徒劳的：从本性而言，费尔明娜·达萨和乌尔比诺·德拉卡列一家的内心世界相去甚远，对于他们的明枪，她尚有武器可以自保，但对于暗箭，她就束手无策了。
The third letter in October had been slipped under the street door, and was in every way different from the previous ones. The handwriting was so childish that there was no doubt it had been scrawled with the left hand, but Fermina Daza did not realize that until the text itself proved to be a poison pen letter. Whoever had written it took for granted that Fermina Daza had bewitched Dr. Juvenal Urbino with her love potions, and from that supposition sinister conclusions had been drawn. It ended with a threat: if Fermina Daza did not renounce her efforts to move up in the world by means of the most desirable man in the city, she would be exposed to public disgrace.
十月的第三封信是从大门底下滑进来的，和之前的几封截然不同。字体像孩子写的一样幼稚，无疑是出自左手。但费尔明娜·达萨起初并没有注意到这一点，直到读完了信的内容，才发现这是一封无耻的匿名信。写信的人认定费尔明娜·达萨用迷魂汤让胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生着了魔，并由这个假设出发得出了恶意的结论。信的结尾是一句威胁：倘若费尔明娜·达萨不放弃借由这个全城最受倾慕的男人飞上枝头的想法，一定会当众出丑。
This conviction became even more bitter after the fear caused by the black doll that was sent to her without any letter, but whose origin seemed easy to imagine: only Dr. Juvenal Urbino could have sent it. It had been bought in Martinique, according to the original tag, and it was dressed in an exquisite gown, its hair rippled with gold threads, and it closed its eyes when it was laid down. It seemed so charming to Fermina Daza that she overcame her scruples and laid it on her pillow during the day and grew accustomed to sleeping with it at night. After a time, however, she discovered when she awoke from an exhausting dream that the doll was growing: the original exquisite dress she had arrived in was up above her thighs, and her shoes had burst from the pressure of her feet. Fermina Daza had heard of African spells, but none as frightening as this. On the other hand, she could not imagine that a man like Juvenal Urbino would be capable of such an atrocity. She was right: the doll had been brought not by his coachman but by an itinerant shrimp monger whom no one knew. Trying to solve the enigma, Fermina Daza thought for a moment of Florentino Ariza, whose depressed condition caused her dismay, but life convinced her of her error. The mystery was never clarified, and just thinking about it made her shudder with fear long after she was married and had children and thought of herself as destiny’s darling: the happiest woman in the world.
这个信念在黑色洋娃娃带来的惊吓之后变得更加苦涩。娃娃也是那些天里送来的，没有附任何信件，但是其来源似乎显而易见：只有胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生会送她这样的东西。从上面带着的商标来看，娃娃是在马提尼克岛买的，身上穿着精美的衣服，鬈曲的头发用金丝做成，躺下时眼睛还会闭上。费尔明娜·达萨觉得十分好玩，于是便放松了警惕，白天让娃娃躺在她的枕头上，晚上则习惯了和它睡在一起。然而，过了一段时间，有一天，她从一个令人精疲力竭的梦中醒来，竟发现洋娃娃正在变大：它来时穿的那身漂亮衣服已遮不住它的大腿，鞋子也被脚撑破了。费尔明娜·达萨曾经听说过非洲的巫术，但都没有像眼前这件事这样令人毛骨悚然。况且，她也实在无法想象胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺这样的男人会做出如此残忍的事来。她是对的：娃娃不是车夫送来的，而是突然冒出的一个卖虾人带来的，他的来历谁也说不清楚。费尔明娜·达萨试图解开这个谜，甚至有那么一瞬间想到过弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨：他那忧郁的气质曾使她害怕，但生活渐渐让她相信，她想错了。这个谜一直悬而未解，只要一想起这件事，她就不寒而栗，直到婚后很久仍是如此，尽管那时她已经有了孩子，并且相信自己是被命运拣选的宠儿，是最幸福的女人。
Dr. Urbino’s last resort was the mediation of Sister Franca de la Luz, Superior of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, who could not deny the request of a family that had sup ported her Community since its establishment in the Americas. She appeared one morning at nine o’clock in the company of a novice, and for half an hour the two of them had to amuse themselves with the birdcages while Fermina Daza finished her bath. She was a masculine German with a metallic accent and an imperious gaze that had no relationship to her puerile passions. Fermina Daza hated her and everything that had to do with her more than anything in this world, and the mere memory of her false piety made scorpions crawl in her belly. Just the sight of her from the bathroom door was enough to revive the torture of school, the unbearable boredom of daily Mass, the terror of examinations, the servile diligence of the novices, all of that life distorted by the prism of spiritual poverty. Sister Franca de la Luz, on the other hand, greeted her with a joy that seemed sincere. She was surprised at how much she had grown and matured, and she praised the good judgment with which she managed the house, the good taste evident in the patio, the brazier filled with orange blossoms. She ordered the novice to wait for her without getting too close to the crows, who in a careless moment might peck out her eyes, and she looked for a private spot where she could sit down and talk alone with Fermina, who invited her into the drawing room.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生最后的尝试是请至圣童贞奉献日学校的校长弗兰卡·德拉路斯嬷嬷为他们撮合。嬷嬷无法拒绝医生的请求，因为自从她所属的修会在美洲建立以来，这个家族就给予了很多赞助。上午九点，她在一个新入会的修女的陪伴下，出现在费尔明娜·达萨家。两人不得不同笼子里的鸟儿逗趣了半个小时，才等到费尔明娜·达萨沐浴完毕。嬷嬷是个男性化的德国女人，说起话来像金属发出的声音一样，目光中带着命令的神色，同她那孩子般幼稚的喜好一点儿也不相符。在这世界上，没有什么比她以及和她有关的一切更令费尔明娜·达萨痛恨了，只要一想起她那假慈悲的模样，费尔明娜就感觉像五脏六腑里有蝎子在爬一样厌恶。刚一出浴室门，她就认出了她，学校里所受的种种折磨一股脑儿地涌上心头：每日弥撒那难以忍受的无聊，考试的惊恐，新入会修女的卑躬屈膝，以及被精神上的空虚所毁掉的全部生活。而弗兰卡·德拉路斯嬷嬷恰恰相反，她带着看似由衷的喜悦同费尔明娜打了招呼，对她长高了许多、也成熟了许多表示惊喜，夸奖她把家打理得井井有条，还称赞了院子的高雅品位和火盆中生长的橘树花。她吩咐新入会的修女在原地等候，并嘱咐她不要和那些乌鸦靠得太近，否则一不小心它们就会把她的眼睛啄出来。接着，她想找一处僻静的地方，坐下来和费尔明娜单独聊一聊。于是，费尔明娜邀请她来到客厅。
“It is the request of someone who deserves everything he desires and whose only wish is to make you happy,” said the nun. “Do you know who that is?”
“这是一位值得拥有一切的人的请求，而他唯一希望的，就是让你幸福。”修女说，“你知道他是谁吗？”
Fermina Daza’s anger grew more intense at the idea that her father was an accessory to the visit.
想到父亲也是这次会面的同谋，费尔明娜·达萨的怒火烧得更旺了。
It was a brief and bitter visit. Sister Franca de la Luz, wasting no time on formalities, offered honorable reinstatement to Fermina Daza. The reason for her expulsion would be erased not only from the records but also from the memory of the Community, and this would allow her to finish her studies and receive her baccalaureate degree. Fermina Daza was perplexed and wanted to know why.
这是一次简短而不愉快的会面。弗兰卡·德拉路斯嬷嬷没有把时间浪费在拐弯抹角上，而是单刀直入地提供给费尔明娜·达萨一次体面复学的机会。当初被开除的原因不仅可以从档案里而且可以从大家的记忆中一笔勾销，这样她便可以完成学业，获得文学学士的文凭。费尔明娜·达萨一头雾水，想知道这其中的缘故。
Then she understood. She asked herself with what authority a woman who had made her life miserable because of an innocent letter served as the emissary of love, but she did not dare to speak of it. Instead she said yes, she knew that man, and by the same token she also knew that he had no right to interfere in her life.
她明白了。她心想，一个因为一封纯洁无辜的信而毁掉了她的人生的女人有什么权利充当爱情的使者呢？但她没敢说出口。她只是说，是的，她认识这个人，但同样也知道他无权干涉她的生活。
“All he asks is that you allow him to speak with you for five minutes,” said the nun. “I am certain your father will agree.”
“他唯一恳求你的，是请你允许他同你谈五分钟。”修女说，“我相信，你的父亲一定会同意的。”
She continued to speak of his virtues, of his devotion, of his dedication to serving those in pain. As she spoke she pulled from her sleeve a gold rosary with Christ carved in marble, and dangled it in front of Fermina Daza’s eyes. It was a family heirloom, more than a hundred years old, carved by a goldsmith from Siena and blessed by Clement IV.
她继续述说着他的种种美德，他的虔诚，还有他救死扶伤的献身精神。她一边说，一边从袖中掏出一串坠有象牙雕刻的基督像的金念珠来，在费尔明娜·达萨的眼前晃了晃。这是件家族圣物，有上百年的历史，由一位锡耶纳的金匠雕琢而成，被克莱蒙四世[10]祝福过。（注：[10] 克莱蒙四世（1200—1268），1265至1268年间的天主教教皇。）
“For any woman with a shred of sense, that man is a gift from Divine Providence,” said the nun.
“只要是有点脑子的女人都明白，这个男人是全能上帝的恩赐。”修女说。
“We saw each other twice when I was sick,” she said. “Now there is no reason for us to see each other again.”
“我们见过两次，在我生病的时候。”她说，“现在没有任何必要再见面了。”
“It is yours,” she said.
“它是你的了。”她说。
Fermina Daza felt the blood pounding through her veins, and then she dared.
费尔明娜·达萨只觉得自己血管中血液翻涌，胆子一下大了起来。
“It would be better for you to come to an understanding with me,” she said, “because after me comes His Grace the Archbishop, and it is a different story with him.”
“你最好放明白些，”她说，“因为在我之后，大主教可能会来，跟他谈，情况可就完全不一样了。”
“I do not understand how you can lend yourself to this,” she said, “if you think that love is a sin.”
“我不明白您怎么会干这种事，”她说，“您不是一向认为爱情是罪过吗？”
Sister Franca de la Luz pretended not to notice the remark, but her eyelids flamed. She continued to dangle the rosary in front of Fermina Daza’s eyes.
弗兰卡·德拉路斯嬷嬷装作没把她的话放在心上，但眼皮却红得冒火。她依旧在她眼前晃着那串念珠。
“My poor child,” she sighed, “you are still thinking about that man.”
“我可怜的孩子，”她叹了口气，“你还在想着那个人。”
“Let him come,” said Fermina Daza.
“让他来好了。”费尔明娜·达萨说。
Sister Franca de la Luz tucked the gold rosary into her sleeve. Then from the other she took a well-used handkerchief squeezed into a ball and held it tight in her fist, looking at Fermina Daza from a great distance and with a smile of commiseration.
弗兰卡·德拉路斯嬷嬷把金念珠藏进衣袖，然后从另一只袖子里抽出一块很旧的手帕，攒成一个团，紧紧地握在拳头里。她带着同情的微笑，仿佛从很远的地方看着费尔明娜。
Fermina Daza chewed on the impertinence as she looked at the nun without blinking, looked her straight in the eye without speaking, chewing in silence, until she saw with infinite satisfaction that those masculine eyes had filled with tears. Sister Franca de la Luz dried them with the ball of the handkerchief and stood up.
费尔明娜·达萨努力咽下了一句无礼的话，眼睛眨都不眨地看着修女，目不转睛，也不说话，只是默默地咬着牙。最终，她满意地看见修女那男人般的眼睛被泪水淹没。弗兰卡·德拉路斯嬷嬷用手绢团擦掉眼泪，站起身来。
The Archbishop did not come. So the siege might have ended that day if Hildebranda Sánchez had not arrived to spend Christmas with her cousin, and life changed for both of them. They met her on the schooner from Riohacha at five o’clock in the morning, surrounded by a crowd of passengers half dead from seasickness, but she walked off the boat radiant, very much a woman, and excited after the bad night at sea. She arrived with crates of live turkeys and all the fruits of her fertile lands so that no one would lack for food during her visit. Lisímaco Sánchez, her father, sent a message asking if they needed musicians for their holiday parties, because he had the best at his disposal, and he promised to send a load of fireworks later on. He also announced that he could not come for his daughter before March, so there was plenty of time for them to enjoy life. The two cousins began at once.
大主教并没有来。而如果不是伊尔德布兰达·桑切斯来找表妹过圣诞节，让两个姑娘的生活都发生了改变，这件难缠的事情本该在那天就已结束。早晨五点，他们在来自里奥阿查的轻便船上接到了她。在一群因晕船而奄奄一息的混乱的旅客中，她容光焕发地下了船，举手投足尽显女性的妩媚，并为终于告别了昨夜的颠簸而兴奋不已。她背来了几篓子活火鸡，还有她家肥沃庄园里出产的各色水果，为的是在她做客期间谁也不缺吃的。她的父亲利希马科·桑切斯让她问问达萨家复活节时是否需要乐师，他有最好的乐师可以差遣，并许诺过些时候会用船运一些烟火来。他还说，自己三月份之前都不能来接女儿，所以她可以尽情地在这里住上一段日子。
“Your father is right when he says that you are a mule,” she said.
“你父亲说得一点儿不错，你就是一头骡子。”她说。
From the first afternoon they bathed together, naked, the two of them making their reciprocal ablutions with water from the cistern. They soaped each other, they removed each other’s nits, they compared their buttocks, their quiet breasts, each looking at herself in the other’s mirror to judge with what cruelty time had treated them since the last occasion when they had seen each other undressed. Hildebranda was large and solid, with golden skin, but all the hair on her body was like a mulatta’s, as short and curly as steel wool. Fermina Daza, on the other hand, had a pale nakedness, with long lines, serene skin, and straight hair. Gala Placidia had two identical beds placed in the bedroom, but at times they lay together in one and talked in the dark until dawn. They smoked long, thin highwaymen’s cigars that Hildebranda had hidden in the lining of her trunk, and afterward they had to burn Armenian paper to purify the rank smell they left behind in the bedroom. Fermina Daza had smoked for the first time in Valledupar, and had continued in Fonseca and Riohacha, where as many as ten cousins would lock themselves in a room to talk about men and to smoke. She learned to smoke backward, with the lit end in her mouth, the way men smoked at night during the wars so that the glow of their cigarettes would not betray them. But she had never smoked alone. With Hildebranda in her house, she smoked every night before going to sleep, and it was then that she acquired the habit although she always hid it, even from her husband and her children, not only because it was thought improper for a woman to smoke in public but because she associated the pleasure with secrecy.
表姐妹俩立即开始享受共度的时光。她们从第一个下午起便一同沐浴，赤身裸体，用浴池里的水互施洗礼。她们互相擦肥皂，捉虱卵，比臀部，比结实的乳房，把对方当作镜子，细细比较自上次两人赤身相见以来，无情的时光如何改变了各自的身体。伊尔德布兰达个头高大，身体结实，皮肤是金黄色的，但全身长着混血女人的毛发，短而鬈曲，如同一层金属丝形成的泡沫。而费尔明娜·达萨则不同，她赤裸的身体有些苍白，线条修长，皮肤光滑，毛发柔顺。加拉·普拉西迪娅为她们在卧室里摆好了两张一模一样的床，可她们有时却睡在一张床上，熄着灯一直聊到天亮。她们还会抽上几支拦路劫匪抽的那种细雪茄，这是伊尔德布兰达藏在箱子里衬带过来的。抽完后，烧上几张亚美尼亚纸，以祛除卧室里茅草房子似的浓烈气味。费尔明娜·达萨第一次抽烟是在巴耶杜帕尔镇，之后又在丰塞卡和里奥阿查抽过。在里奥阿查时，十几个表姐妹一起关在一间房里，一边谈论男人，一边偷偷抽烟。她还学会了反着吸烟，即把香烟有火的一头放进嘴里，就像战争中的夜晚，男人们为了不让香烟的火光暴露自己所做的那样。但她从未独自抽过烟。伊尔德布兰达住在她家的那段日子，她每天晚上睡觉前都要抽烟，正是那时她养成了烟瘾，不过始终是偷偷抽，甚至背着丈夫和孩子们，不仅因为女人当众抽烟很不雅，还因为偷偷做的事情别有一番乐趣。
She would not have recognized him, for there was nothing about him that corresponded to the image she had formed from Fermina Daza. At first glance it seemed impossible that her cousin could have been on the verge of madness because of that almost invisible clerk with his air of a whipped dog, whose clothing, worthy of a rabbi in disgrace, and whose solemn manner could not perturb anyone’s heart. But she soon repented of her first impression, for Florentino Ariza placed himself at her unconditional service without knowing who she was: he never found out. No one could have understood her as he did, so that he did not ask for identification or even for her address. His solution was very simple: she would pass by the telegraph office on Wednesday afternoons so that he could place her lover’s answers in her hand, and nothing more. And yet when he read the written message that Hildebranda brought him, he asked if she would accept a suggestion, and she agreed. Florentino Ariza first made some corrections between the lines, erased them, rewrote them, had no more room, and at last tore up the page and wrote a completely new message that she thought very touching. When she left the telegraph office, Hildebranda was on the verge of tears.
她起初没能认出他来，因为她根据费尔明娜·达萨的描述想象出来的样子与他本人完全不符。第一眼看到他时，她觉得表妹不可能为了这样一个不起眼的职员到了几乎疯狂的地步。他的气质就像一条挨了打的狗，衣着则像落难的犹太教士，那副一本正经的样子根本不会让任何人动心。但很快，她就推翻了对他的第一印象，因为弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨在不知道她是谁的情况下——即使到了最后，他也完全不知情——无条件地为她效劳。没有人像他这样善解人意，既没有要求她证明身份，也没有向她索要地址。他解决问题的方法很简单：每星期三下午，她到电报室来，他便会把回复交到她手中，仅此而已。另外，当他读完伊尔德布兰达写好带来的字条后，问她是否接受一点修改，她同意了。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨先是在行与行之间做了一些改动，而后又涂掉，重新写过，写到没有空地儿了，干脆把纸撕掉，重新写了一封和原来完全不同的电文，她觉得新的电文内容感人肺腑。走出电报室的时候，伊尔德布兰达差点掉下眼泪来。
Hildebranda’s trip had also been imposed by her parents in an effort to put distance between her and her impossible love, although they wanted her to think that it was to help Fermina decide on a good match. Hildebranda had accepted, hoping to mock forgetfulness as her cousin had done before her, and she had arranged with the telegraph operator in Fonseca to send her messages with the greatest prudence. And that is why her disillusion was so bitter when she learned that Fermina Daza had rejected Florentino Ariza. Moreover, Hildebranda had a universal conception of love, and she believed that whatever happened to one love affected all other loves throughout the world. Still, she did not renounce her plan. With an audacity that caused a crisis of dismay in Fermina Daza, she went to the telegraph office alone, intending to win the favor of Florentino Ariza.
伊尔德布兰达的旅行也是父母强迫的，为的是让她远离不可能的爱情，尽管他们想让她相信此行是为了帮费尔明娜拿个主意，定一门好亲事。伊尔德布兰达接受了旅行的建议，并计划像当初表妹所做的一样，再次对遗忘女神加以嘲弄。她已经和丰塞卡的电报员说好了，以最秘密的方式帮她传递消息。因此，当她得知费尔明娜·达萨已经拒绝了弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨时，不禁大失所望。而更糟的是，伊尔德布兰达抱有一种整体的爱情观，认为每一个人的爱情变故都会影响到全世界所有的爱情。然而，她并没有放弃计划，反而以一种令费尔明娜·达萨惊慌失措的胆量，独自一人去了电报室，准备取得弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的帮助。
“He is ugly and sad,” she said to Fermina Daza, “but he is all love.”
“他很丑，而且可怜兮兮的，”她对费尔明娜·达萨说，“但他身上洋溢着爱。”
What most struck Hildebranda was her cousin’s solitude. She seemed, she told her, an old maid of twenty. Accustomed to large scattered families in houses where no one was certain how many people were living or eating at any given time, Hildebranda could not imagine a girl her age reduced to the cloister of a private life. That was true: from the time she awoke at six in the morning until she turned out the light in the bedroom, Fermina Daza devoted herself to killing time. Life was imposed on her from outside. First, at the final rooster crow, the milkman woke her with his rapping on the door knocker. Then came the knock of the fishwife with her box of red snappers dying on a bed of algae, the sumptuous fruit sellers with vegetables from María la Baja and fruit from San Jacinto. And the n, for the rest of the day, everyone knocked at the door: beggars, girls with lottery tickets, the Sisters of Charity, the knife grinder with the gossip, the man who bought bottles, the man who bought old gold, the man who bought newspapers, the fake gypsies who offered to read one’s destiny in cards, in the lines of one’s palm, in coffee grounds, in the water in washbasins. Gala Placidia spent the week opening and closing the street door to say no, another day, or shouting from the balcony in a foul humor to stop bothering us, damn it, we already bought everything we need. She had replaced Aunt Escolástica with so much fervor and so much grace that Fermina confused them to the point of loving her. She had the obsessions of a slave. Whenever she had free time she would go to the workroom to iron the linens; she kept them perfect, she kept them in cupboards with lavender, and she ironed and folded not only what she had just washed but also what might have lost its brightness through disuse. With the same care she continued to maintain the wardrobe of Fermina Sánchez, Fermina’s mother, who had died fourteen years before. But Fermina Daza was the one who made the decisions. She ordered what they would eat, what they would buy, what had to be done in every circumstance, and in that way she determined the life in a house where in reality nothing had to be determined. When she finished washing the cages and feeding the birds, and making certain that the flowers wanted for nothing, she was at a loss. Often, after she was expelled from school, she would fall asleep at siesta and not wake up until the next day. The painting classes were only a more amusing way to kill time.
最引起伊尔德布兰达注意的，是表妹的孤独。她对表妹说，她就像个二十岁的老处女。伊尔德布兰达习惯了在一个人数众多且人员分散的庞杂家庭里生活，谁都无法准确说清家里到底住着多少人，也不知道每餐究竟会有谁来吃饭。她无法想象，一个像表妹这样年龄的姑娘会把自己封闭在一种修道院般的私人生活中。毫不夸张：每天从清晨六点起床开始，直至熄灭卧室里的灯光，她全然把自己献给流逝的时间。生活是从外部强加给她的。首先，伴随着最后的鸡鸣，送牛奶的男人叩响门环把她吵醒。接着，卖鱼的女人来敲门，带着一箱躺在一层海藻上的半死不活的红鲷鱼，还有那些豪爽的帕伦克女人，带着产自玛利亚·拉巴哈的蔬菜和圣哈辛托的水果。再往后，这一整天里，各色人等都会来敲门：乞丐，卖彩票的女郎，募捐的修女，吹着笛子的磨刀匠，收旧瓶子的，收碎金子的，收报纸的，还有用纸牌、手相、咖啡渣或水盆里的水算命的假吉卜赛女人。加拉·普拉西迪娅的一周都是在开门、关门中度过的，她反复地说着“不”、“请改天再来”，或者气急败坏地从阳台喊道：“别再来烦我们了，该死，该买的我们都买齐了！”她以极大的热情和风趣代替了埃斯科拉斯蒂卡姑妈，以至于费尔明娜·达萨已经把她当成姑妈，甚至喜欢上她了。她当女仆当上了瘾。只要有一小会儿空闲，就跑到工作间去熨烫白色的衬衣和床单，把它们熨得平平整整，再收入放有薰衣草的衣柜中，而且不仅是对刚洗过的衣服熨了又叠，对那些久置不用而褪了色的衣服，她也如此对待。她还同样精心地保管着费尔明娜·桑切斯的衣服，费尔明娜·桑切斯是费尔明娜的母亲，已经去世十四年了。不过，家里拿主意的还是费尔明娜·达萨。她下令该吃什么，该买什么，什么时候该做什么。就这样，她决定着一个根本不需要决定什么的家庭的全部生活。每当她清洗完鸟笼，给鸟儿们喂过食，又侍弄过那些其实不需要侍弄的花草后，就没有了方向。被学校开除后，好几次她都睡午觉一直睡到第二天才醒来。绘画课不过是又一种打发时间的方式罢了。
Her relationship with her father had lacked affection since the expulsion of Aunt Escolástica, although they had found the way to live together without bothering each other. When she awoke, he had already gone to his business. He rarely missed the ritual of lunch, although he almost never ate, for the aperitifs and Galician appetizers at the Parish Café satisfied him. He did not eat supper either: they left his meal on the table, everything on one plate covered by another, although they knew that he would not eat it until the next day when it was reheated for his breakfast. Once a week he gave his daughter money for expenses, which he calculated with care and she administered with rigor, but he listened with pleasure to any request she might make for unforeseen expenses. He never questioned a penny she spent, he never asked her for any explanations, but she behaved as if she had to make an accounting before the Tribunal of the Holy Office. He had never spoken to her about the nature or condition of his business, and he had never taken her to his offices in the port, which were in a location forbidden to decent young ladies even if accompanied by their fathers. Lorenzo Daza did not come home before ten o’clock at night, which was the curfew hour during the less critical periods of the wars. Until that time he would stay at the Parish Café, playing one game or another, for he was an expert in all salon games and a good teacher as well. He always came home sober, not disturbing his daughter, despite the fact that he had his first anisette when he awoke and continued chewing the end of his unlit cigar and drinking at regular intervals throughout the day. One night, however, Fermina heard him come in. She heard his cossack’s step on the stair, his heavy breathing in the second-floor hallway, his pounding with the flat of his hand on her bedroom door. She opened it, and for the first time she was frightened by his twisted eye and the slurring of his words.
自从埃斯科拉斯蒂卡姑妈被赶走后，她同父亲的关系就不再亲热，但两人找到了一种互不干扰的共同生活的方式。她起床时，他已经出门去做生意了。他很少不回家吃午饭，尽管几乎从来都吃不下什么，因为教区咖啡馆的开胃酒以及加利西亚的小菜和点心已经把他填饱了。他也不吃晚饭：她们把他的那份留在桌子上，所有的食物都放在一只盘子里，再用另外一只盘子扣在上面，尽管大家都知道他是不会吃的，直到第二天早上重新热过之后拿来当他的早餐。每个星期，他会给女儿一次钱，用于家中的花费。这笔钱他估算得很合适，女儿也精打细算，但每次她提出任何临时性开支，他都从容愉快地接受。他从不少给一分钱，也从不查账，但她却非常自律，就好像要向圣职部的法庭交账似的。他从未对女儿说起自己生意的性质和状况，也从没有带她去看过他在港口的那些办公室，因为它们所在的地方是正派小姐们的禁区，即便有父母陪同也不宜前往。洛伦索·达萨晚上十点前不会回家，这个钟点是战争不那么严重时宵禁开始的时间。在这之前，他会一直待在教区咖啡馆里，随便什么都玩，因为他是室内游戏的行家，样样精通。他总是神志清醒地回到家，从不吵醒女儿，尽管每天一睁开眼，他便喝下了第一杯茴香酒，白天则一直嚼着熄灭的雪茄烟头，时不时地再喝上几杯。然而一天晚上，费尔明娜·达萨感觉到了他进屋的声响。她听见他走在楼梯上那哥萨克人似的脚步声，他在二楼走廊上沉重的喘气声，还有他用手拍打她卧室门的声音。她给他开了门，头一次，他那歪斜的眼睛和笨拙的说话声让她感到害怕。
That was all he said, and he never said it again, and nothing happened to indicate whether he had told the truth, but after that night Fermina Daza knew that she was alone in the world. She lived in a social limbo. Her former schoolmates were in a heaven that was closed to her, above all after the dishonor of her expulsion, and she was not a neighbor to her neighbors, because they had known her without a past, in the uniform of the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin. Her father’s world was one of traders and stevedores, of war refugees in the public shelter of the Parish Café, of solitary men. In the last year the painting classes had alleviated her seclusion somewhat, for the teacher preferred group classes and would bring the other pupils to the sewing room. But they were girls of varying and undefined social circumstances, and for Fermina Daza they were no more than borrowed friends whose affection ended with each class. Hildebranda wanted to open the house, air it, bring in her father’s musicians and fireworks and castles of gunpowder, and have a Carnival dance whose gale winds would clear out her cousin’s moth-eaten spirit, but she soon realized that her proposals were to no avail, and for a very simple reason: there was no one to invite.
这是他所说的全部，后来再也没有重新提起过，也没有发生什么证明他所说的是真的。但从那晚起，费尔明娜·达萨意识到自己在这世界上竟是孤身一人，一直都生活在社会的净界[11]之中。昔日的同学处在一个禁止她入内的天堂里，尤其是她蒙受了被开除的耻辱后，更是如此；而她也没能融入到邻里之间，因为他们中没人知道她的过去，他们眼中的她仅仅是那个穿着至圣童贞奉献日学校校服的姑娘。父亲的世界里只有商人和码头搬运工，以及那些缩在教区咖啡馆里的战争流亡者，全都是些孤独的男人。最近这一年，绘画课稍稍为她减轻了一点幽居的寂寞，因为那位教画画的女老师喜欢上集体课，常常把其他学生带到缝纫室来。不过，这些姑娘的社会地位参差不齐，三教九流。在费尔明娜·达萨看来，她们不过是些借来的朋友，每次课一结束，情意也就随之消散。伊尔德布兰达想敞开房子的大门，让屋里透透气，还想把父亲的乐师、鞭炮和烟火塔一起弄来，搞一场狂欢舞会，让它的劲风把表妹的沉闷吹得烟消云散。但很快，她发现自己的设想是没有用的。原因很简单：根本没有人会来。（注：[11] 天堂与地狱的边界，是没有接受洗礼或没有机会认识上帝的义人等待救赎的地方。）
“We are ruined,” he said. “Total ruin, so now you know.”
“我们完了，”他说，“全完了，你马上就会知道的。”
In any case, it was she who thrust Fermina Daza into life. In the afternoon, after the painting classes, she allowed herself to be taken out to see the city. Fermina Daza showed her the route she had taken every day with Aunt Escolástica, the bench in the little park where Florentino Ariza pretended to read while he waited for her, the narrow streets along which he followed her, the hiding places for their letters, the sinister palace where the prison of the Holy Office had been located, later restored and converted into the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, which she hated with all her soul. They climbed the hill of the paupers” cemetery, where Florentino Ariza played the violin according to the direction of the winds so that she could listen to him in bed, and from there they viewed the entire historic city, the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands in the bay, the hovels of the poor around the swamps, the immense Caribbean.
不管怎样，是她把表妹带进了真正的生活。每天下午绘画课后，她都让表妹带她上街，去认识这座城市。费尔明娜·达萨指给她看以前自己和埃斯科拉斯蒂卡姑妈每日走过的路，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨一边假装看书一边等她时所坐的花园里的那条长凳，他们藏信的隐蔽处所，以及过去圣职部监狱所在的阴森宫殿，也就是后来经修缮后变成的至圣童贞奉献日学校，她对它简直恨之入骨。她们登上贫民墓地所在的小山，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨曾在那里根据风向为她拉小提琴，好让她躺在床上就能听到。在那里，她们俯瞰这座历史古城的全貌：破旧的屋顶，断壁残垣，杂草丛中城堡的废墟，海湾里断断续续、大大小小的岛屿，沼泽四周寒酸可怜的窝棚，还有那一望无际的加勒比海。
On Christmas Eve they went to Midnight Mass in the Cathedral. Fermina sat where she used to hear Florent ino Ariza’s confidential music with greatest clarity, and she showed her cousin the exact spot where, on a night like this, she had seen his frightened eyes up close for the first time. They ventured alone as far as the Arcade of the Scribes, they bought sweets, they were amused in the shop that sold fancy paper, and Fermina Daza showed her cousin the place where she suddenly discovered that her love was nothing more than an illusion. She herself had not realized that every step she took from her house to school, every spot in the city, every moment of her recent past, did not seem to exist except by the grace of Florentino Ariza. Hildebranda pointed this out to her, but she did not admit it because she never would have admitted that Florentino Ariza, for better or for worse, was the only thing that had ever happened to her in her life.
圣诞夜，她们到大教堂去望子时弥撒。费尔明娜·达萨站在当初可以最好地欣赏弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨秘密为她演奏的位置上，带表姐看了自己第一次那么近距离地看见他的准确地点，就在与此同样的一个夜晚，她的目光撞上了那双惊慌的眼睛。她们还冒险独自去了“代笔人门廊”，买了一些甜食，又在卖神奇纸的商店玩了一会儿。之后，费尔明娜·达萨向表姐指出了那个她猛然发现自己的爱情不过是海市蜃楼的地方。她并没有察觉，从家到学校，这座城市的每一个地方，她短暂过去的每一个时刻，都是因弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨而存在的。伊尔德布兰达向她指出了这一点，但她却不肯承认，因为她永远也不会承认这样一个事实，那就是，好也罢坏也罢，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨是她生活中唯一曾发生过的事。
It was during this time that a Belgian photographer came to the city and set up his studio at the end of the Arcade of the Scribes, and all those with the money to pay took advantage of the opportunity to have their pictures taken. Fermina and Hildebranda were among the first. They emptied Fermina Sanchez’s clothes closet, they shared the finest dresses, the parasols, the party shoes, the hats, and they dressed as midcentury ladies. Gala Placidia helped them lace up the corsets, she showed them how to move inside the wire frames of the hoop skirts, how to wear the gloves, how to button the high-heeled boots. Hildebranda preferred a broad-brimmed hat with ostrich feathers that hung down over her shoulder. Fermina wore a more recent model decorated with painted plaster fruit and crinoline flowers. At last they giggled when they looked in the mirror and saw the resemblance to the daguerreotypes of their grandmothers, and they went off happy, laughing for all they were worth, to have the photograph of their lives taken. Gala Placidia watched from the balcony as they crossed the park with their parasols open, tottering on their high heels and pushing against the hoop skirts with their bodies as if they were children’s walkers, and she gave them her blessing so that God would help them in their portraits.
就在那些日子，来了一个比利时照相师，在“代笔人门廊”的楼上开起了照相馆，所有能付得起钱的人都利用这个机会去给自己照张相片。费尔明娜和伊尔德布兰达是最先去的一批。她们把费尔明娜·桑切斯的衣柜翻了个底儿朝天，瓜分了那些最耀眼的衣服、阳伞以及节日里穿的鞋帽，把自己打扮得像世纪中叶的贵妇人似的。加拉·普拉西迪娅帮她们束紧身胸衣，教她们如何在裙撑的金属丝架子中扭动身体，如何戴手套，如何系上高跟靴上的扣子。伊尔德布兰达看中了一顶宽檐帽，上面插着几根驼鸟羽毛，一直垂到后背。费尔明娜则戴了一顶样式更新一些的，上面装饰着彩色石膏做成的水果和马鬃花。最后，她们在镜子里照见自己就像银版相片中的祖母一样，互相嘲笑起来。她们笑得前仰后合，兴高采烈地出门去拍人生中的第一张照片。加拉·普拉西迪娅从阳台上看着她们撑起遮阳伞，穿过花园，一边尽可能地在高高的鞋跟上保持身体的平衡，一边像孩子拖学步车似的使上全身的劲儿拖着裙撑，她祝福她们，祈求上帝帮她们拍张好照片。
There was a mob in front of the Belgian’s studio because photographs were being taken of Beny Centeno, who had won the boxing championship in Panama. He wore his boxing trunks and his boxing gloves and his crown, and it was not easy to photograph him because he had to hold a fighting stance for a whole minute and breathe as little as possible, but as soon as he put up his guard, his fans burst into cheers and he could not resist the temptation to please them by showing off his skill. When it was the cousins” turn, the sky had clouded over and rain seemed imminent, but they allowed their faces to be powdered with starch and they leaned against an alabaster column with such ease that they remained motionless for more time than seemed reasonable. It was an immortal portrait. When Hildebranda died on her ranch at Flores de María, when she was almost one hundred years old, they found her copy locked in the bedroom closet, hidden among the folds of the perfumed sheets along with the fossil of a thought in a letter that had faded with time. For many years Fermina Daza kept hers on the first page of a family album, then it disappeared without anyone’s knowing how, or when, and came into the possession of Florentino Ariza, through a series of unbelievable coincidences, when they were both over sixty years old.
比利时人的照相馆前人山人海，因为里边正在给近日刚刚赢得了巴拿马拳击冠军的贝尼·森特诺拍照。他穿着比赛时的裤子，戴着拳击手套，头上顶着桂冠。给他照相可不容易，因为他必须保持进攻姿势一分钟，并尽可能地屏住呼吸，可他刚刚抬起手臂，摆出防守的姿势，他的崇拜者们就爆发出一阵欢呼，而他便无法抵制取悦他们的诱惑，将本领尽数抖搂出来。轮到两个表姐妹时，天空已布满了乌云，眼看就要下雨，但两人还是任凭别人在她们脸上涂满淀粉，然后靠在雪花石膏柱上，姿势那么自然，一动不动，甚至超过了所需的时间。那是一张永恒的照片。当伊尔德布兰达活到近百岁，最终在马利亚之花庄园去世的时候，人们在锁着的卧室衣柜中发现了她保存的这张玉照，它被藏在一摞飘着香味的床单之间，放在一起的还有一封被岁月磨去了字迹的信，上面负载的情思早已凝成了化石。费尔明娜·达萨则一直把她的那张照片保存在家庭相册的第一页，但后来不知怎的，也不知何时，它突然不翼而飞，经过一番不可思议的巧合，最后竟到了弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的手中，而那时两人都已年过花甲了。
Although she had never seen him before, she recognized him immediately. The previous month, Fermina Daza had spoken about him, in an offhand way and with no sign of interest, one afternoon when she did not want to pass by the house of the Marquis de Casalduero because the landau with the golden horses was stopped in front of the door. She told her who the owner was and attempted to explain the reasons for her antipathy, although she did not say a word about his courting her. Hildebranda thought no more about him. But when she identified him as a vision out of legend, standing in the carriage door with one foot on the ground and the other on the footboard, she could not understand her cousin’s motives.
虽然她从未见过他，但立刻就把他认了出来。费尔明娜·达萨曾跟她提起过他，只是在不经意间，而且兴味索然。那是一个月前的一天下午，她死活都不愿从卡萨尔杜埃罗侯爵府门前经过，因为那辆金色马拉着的四轮马车正停在那里。她告诉表姐马车的主人是谁，并试图向她解释为何反感他，但对于他追求自己的事只字未提。伊尔德布兰达本来早已把他忘到脑后了。但当她在车门前认出他，看见他一只脚站在地上，一只脚放在马车的脚踏板上，像童话般出现在眼前，她不明白表妹为什么不喜欢他。
When Fermina and Hildebranda came out of the Belgian’s studio, there were so many people in the plaza across from the Arcade of the Scribes that even the balconies were crowded. They had forgotten that their faces were white with starch and that their lips were painted with a chocolate-colored salve and that their clothes were not appropriate to the time of day or the age. The street greeted them with catcalls and mockery. They were cornered, trying to escape public derision, when the landau drawn by the golden chestnuts opened a path through the crowd. The catcalls ceased and the hostile groups dispersed. Hildebranda was never to forget her first sight of the man who appeared on the footboard: his satin top hat, his brocaded vest, his knowing gestures, the sweetness in his eyes, the authority of his presence.
当费尔明娜和伊尔德布兰达走出比利时人的照相馆时，“代笔人门廊”对面的广场上挤满了人，连阳台上都站满了。她们忘了自己脸上还涂着白色的淀粉，嘴唇上涂了巧克力色的油膏，而她们的衣服也不合时宜且不属于这个时代。迎接她们的是满街的哄笑和嘘声。她们躲到角落里，试图逃避众人的嘲弄。就在这时，骚动的人群分作两边，一辆被几匹泛着金光的枣红马拉着的四轮马车驶了过来。哄笑停止了，不怀好意的人群散开去。伊尔德布兰达肯定永远也忘不了她第一次看见那个站在马车踏板上的男人时的情景：他那高高的缎子礼帽，他的锦缎背心，他的文质彬彬和他双眸的柔情，还有他出现时的威严。
“Please get in,” said Dr. Juvenal Urbino. “I will take you wherever you want to go.” Fermina Daza began a gesture of refusal, but Hildebranda had already accepted. Dr.
“请上车，”胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生对她们说，“想去哪儿两位尽管吩咐，我带你们去。”
The house was only three blocks away. The cousins did not realize that Dr. Urbino had given instructions to the coachman, but he must have done so, because it took the carriage almost half an hour to reach its destination. The girls were on the principal seat and he sat opposite them, facing, the back of the carriage. Fermina turned her head toward the window and was lost in the void. Hildebranda, on the other hand, was delighted, and Dr. Urbino was even more delighted by her delight. As soon as the carriage began to move, she sensed the warm odor of the leather seats, the intimacy of the padded interior, and she said that it seemed a nice place to spend the rest of one’s life. Very soon they began to laugh, to exchange jokes as if they were old friends, and they began to match wits in a simple word game that consisted of placing a nonsense syllable after every other syllable. They pretended that Fermina did not understand them, although they knew she not only understood but was listening as well, which is why they did it. After much laughter, Hildebranda confessed that she could no longer endure the torture of her boots.
她家离那里不过三个街口。表姐妹并没有发现乌尔比诺医生向车夫下了什么特别的指令，但想必如此，因为马车足足走了半个多小时。她们坐在主座上，而他坐在对面，背朝着车子前进的方向。费尔明娜把脸转向窗子，陷入一片茫然。伊尔德布兰达则恰恰相反，表现得十分开心，而乌尔比诺医生见她开心，自己更是高兴。车子刚一动起来，伊尔德布兰达就感觉到了座椅的天然皮革散发出的温暖气味，以及包厢内的严实温馨，她说，其实住在这里也挺不错。很快，两人便开始大笑，像老朋友一样互相开起玩笑来，接着又玩上了智力游戏。这是一种简单的暗语游戏，就是在每个音节之间都插入一个事先说好的音节。他们假装费尔明娜听不懂，但其实他们知道她不仅听得懂，而且还一直在留心听，而这正是他们玩这个游戏的目的。他们笑了一阵后，伊尔德布兰达坦白说，她再也受不了脚下那双靴子的折磨了。
Juvenal Urbino jumped down, and with his fingertips, almost without touching her, he helped her into the carriage. Fermina had no alternative but to climb in after her, her face blazing with embarrassment.
费尔明娜·达萨正要拒绝，可伊尔德布兰达已经接受了邀请。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生走下来，用指尖扶她上了马车，几乎没有触碰到她。费尔明娜别无选择，跟在她身后也上了车，脸涨得绯红。
“Nothing could be simpler,” said Dr. Urbino. “Let us see who finishes first.”
“这再简单不过了。”乌尔比诺医生说，“我们来比比，看谁先脱掉。”
“Now I realize,” she said, “that what bothered me was not my shoes but this wire cage.”
“现在我发现了，”她说，“让我不舒服的不是鞋，而是这个钢丝鸟笼。”
He began to unlace his own boots, and Hildebranda accepted the challenge. It was not easy for her to do because the stays in the corset did not allow her to bend, but Dr. Urbino dallied until she took her boots out from under her skirt with a triumphant laugh, as if she had just fished them out of a pond. Then both of them looked at Fermina and saw her magnificent golden oriole’s profile sharper than ever against the blaze of the setting sun. She was furious for three reasons: because of the undeserved situation in which she found herself, because of Hildebranda’s libertine behavior, and because she was certain that the carriage was driving in circles in order to postpone their arrival. But Hildebranda had lost all restraint.
他开始解靴子上的绑带，伊尔德布兰达也接受了挑战。但这对她来说并非易事，因为紧身胸衣的架子让她弯不下腰。乌尔比诺医生故意放慢了速度，一直等到她从裙子下面掏出自己的两只靴子，就好像刚刚从池塘里钓上来似的。这时，两人看了一眼费尔明娜，只见在黄昏火红的霞光映衬下，她那黄鹂般的倩影比任何时候都更加轮廓清晰。她正在为三件事愤怒不已：一是她的尴尬处境，二是伊尔德布兰达的放肆行为，三是她十分确信，为了拖延时间，车子一直在漫无目的地兜圈子。可伊尔德布兰达却像脱缰的野马。
Dr. Urbino understood that she was referring to her hoop skirt, and he seized the opportunity as it flew by. “Nothing could be simpler,” he said. “Take it off.” With the rapid movements of a prestidigitator, he removed his handkerchief from his pocket and covered his eyes with it.
乌尔比诺医生会意她指的是裙撑，于是赶紧抓住了这个良机。“这再简单不过了，”他说，“脱了它。”说着，他以魔术师般的敏捷动作，从兜里掏出一条手帕，绑在自己的眼睛上。
When Dr. Juvenal Urbino removed the blindfold he found her changed, and he understood that the game had ended, and had not ended well. At a sign from him, the coachman turned the carriage around and drove into the Park of the Evangels, just as the lamplighter was making his rounds. All the churches were ringing the Angelus. Hild ebranda hurried out of the carriage, somewhat disturbed at the idea that she had offended her cousin, and she said goodbye to the Doctor with a perfunctory handshake. Fermina did the same, but when she tried to withdraw her hand in its satin glove, Dr. Urbino squeezed her ring finger.
摘掉手帕，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生发现她变了脸色，于是明白游戏已经结束，而且结束得很糟糕。他做了个手势，车夫掉转方向，在街灯管理人开始点亮一盏盏街灯的时刻，把马车驶进了福音花园。所有的教堂都已念起了《三钟经》。伊尔德布兰达飞快地下了车，想到自己惹得表妹不悦而有些慌张，和医生随意地握了一下手，以示告别。费尔明娜也做了同样的动作，可当她想把戴着绸缎手套的手撤回来时，乌尔比诺医生却用力攥住了她的中指。
The blindfold emphasized the purity of his lips surrounded by his round black beard and his mustache with the waxed tips, and she felt herself shaken by a sudden surge of panic. She looked at Fermina, and now she saw that she was not furious but terrified that she might be capable of taking off her skirt. Hildebranda became serious and asked her in sign language: “What shall we do?” Fermina answered in the same code that if they did not go straight home she would throw herself out of the moving carriage.
蒙在眼睛上的手帕一下子让他那圆润下巴上的黑胡子和用胶刷出胡尖的短髭之间的两瓣嘴唇显得分外纯美，伊尔德布兰达突然惊得浑身一颤。她又瞥了费尔明娜一眼，这一次她看见她并没有生气，而是惊恐万状，害怕表姐真的会把裙子脱下来。伊尔德布兰达严肃起来，用手语问她：“我们该怎么办？”费尔明娜·达萨同样也用手势做了回答，告诉她若不直接回家，她就从行驶的马车上跳下去。
“I am waiting,” said the Doctor.
“我在等着呢。”医生说。
“I won’t look,” he said.
“我不看。”他说。
“You can look now,” said Hildebranda.
“已经可以看了。”伊尔德布兰达说。
“I am waiting for your answer,” he said.
“我在等您的回答。”他对她说。
“What a whore you are!” she said.
“你真是个小娼妇！”她说。
Her sleep was restless; she saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino everywhere, she saw him laughing, singing, emitting sulfurous sparks from between his teeth with his eyes blindfolded, mocking her with a word game that had no fixed rules, driving up to the paupers” cemetery in a different carriage. She awoke long before dawn and lay exhausted and wakeful, with her eyes closed, thinking of the countless years she still had to live. Later, while Hildebranda was bathing, she wrote a letter as quickly as possible, folded it as quickly as possible, put it in an envelope as quickly as possible, and before Hildebranda came out of the bathroom she had Gala Placidia deliver it to Dr. Juvenal Urbino. It was one of her typical letters, not a syllable too many or too few, in which she told the Doctor yes, he could speak to her father.
睡梦中，她惊吓连连，到处都看见胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生，看见他笑，看见他唱，看见他蒙着眼睛，两排牙齿间迸发出硫磺的火星，看见他坐着一辆和以前不同的马车，驶在通往贫民墓地的山坡上，用一种没有固定规则的暗语嘲笑她。距离天亮还有很久，她就醒了，精疲力竭，清醒地闭着双眼，想着她今后还要活的那无数个年头。之后，趁着伊尔德布兰达洗澡的时候，她飞快地写了一封信，飞快折好，又飞快地装进信封，赶在伊尔德布兰达走出浴室之前，交给加拉·普拉西迪娅，派她送到胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生府上。那是一封具有她独特风格的信，一字不多，一字不少，只是写着：可以，医生，去找我父亲谈吧。
Then Fermina pulled harder and her empty glove was left dangling in the Doctor’s hand, but she did not wait to retrieve it. She went to bed without eating. Hildebranda, as if nothing had happened, came into the bedroom after her supper with Gala Placidia in the kitchen, and with her inborn wit, commented on the events of the afternoon. She did not attempt to hide her enthusiasm for Dr. Urbino, for his elegance and charm, and Fermina refused to comment, but was brimming with anger. At one point Hildebranda confessed that when Dr. Juvenal Urbino covered his eyes and she saw the splendor of his perfect teeth between his rosy lips, she had felt an irresistible desire to devour him with kisses. Fermina Daza turned to the wall and with no wish to offend, but smiling and with all her heart, put an end to the conversation:
费尔明娜更用力地把手一抽，空空的手套挂在了医生的手上，但她并没有停下来索回它。这一天，她没吃晚饭便睡下了。可伊尔德布兰达却好像什么都没有发生似的，同加拉·普拉西迪娅一起在厨房吃过晚饭，这才走进卧室，用她那天生的风趣把下午的事评判了一番。她丝毫没有掩饰自己对乌尔比诺医生，对他的优雅和翩翩风度，都充满了兴奋与热情。费尔明娜没有做出任何回应，但已经从反感中冷静下来。终于，伊尔德布兰达坦白说，当胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生蒙上眼睛，她看见他那玫瑰色的双唇间两排闪亮的完美牙齿时，曾泛起过一种想去狂吻他的难以抑制的渴望。费尔明娜·达萨翻过身去，面向墙壁，用一句话结束了她们的谈话，不带丝毫恶意，而是挂着发自肺腑的微笑。
When Florentino Ariza learned that Fermina Daza was going to marry a physician with family and fortune, educated in Europe and with an extraordinary reputation for a man of his years, there was no power on earth that could raise him from his prostration. Tránsito Ariza did all she could and more, using all the stratagems of a sweetheart to console him when she realized that he had lost his speech and his appetite and was spending nights on end in constant weeping, and by the end of the week he was eating again. Then she spoke to Don Leo XII Loayza, the only one of the three brothers who was still alive, and without telling him the reason, she pleaded with him to give his nephew any job at all in the navigation company, as long as it was in a port lost in the jungle of the Magdalena, where there was no mail and no telegraph and no one who would tell him anything about this damnable city. His uncle did not give him the job out of deference to his brother’s widow, for she could not bear the very existence of her husband’s illegitimate son, but he did find him employment as a telegraph operator in Villa de Leyva, a dreamy city more than twenty days” journey away and almost three thousand meters above the level of the Street of Windows.
当弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨得知费尔明娜·达萨即将嫁给一位门第显赫、家财万贯、在欧洲受过教育而且在同龄人中声誉非比寻常的医生时，没有任何力量能让他从消沉之中振作起来。看到儿子不说一句话，不吃不喝，整夜不歇地流泪，特兰西多·阿里萨做出了超乎寻常的努力，用尽了情人间的甜言蜜语来安慰他，终于在一星期后让他重新开始进食。之后，她找到莱昂十二·罗阿依萨，也就是那三兄弟中唯一还活着的一个，和他谈了一次话。她没有说明原因，只是请求他在航运公司给侄子找份差事，不论干什么都行，但地点得是在马格达莱纳流域丛林中的某个偏僻的港口，那里既不能通信，也不能发电报，更不能让他看见什么人，打听到这座堕落的城市里发生的任何事情。叔叔最终并没能向他提供这样一份工作，主要是出于对哥哥遗孀的尊重——单是丈夫在外有个私生子的事实就让她无法忍受——但他还是给侄子在维拉·德雷伊瓦找了个电报员的职位。维拉·德雷伊瓦是一座梦幻般的城市，距本地有二十多天的路程，海拔比窗户街高出近三千米。
Florentino Ariza was never very conscious of that curative journey. He would remember it always, as he remembered everything that happened during that period, through the rarefied lenses of his misfortune. When he received the telegram informing him of his appointment, it did not even occur to him to consider it, but Lotario Thugut convinced him with Germanic arguments that a brilliant career awaited him in public administration. He told him: “The telegraph is the profession of the future.” He gave him a pair of gloves lined with rabbit fur, a hat worthy of the steppes, and an overcoat with a plush collar, tried and proven in the icy winters of Bavaria. Uncle Leo XII gave him two serge suits and a pair of waterproof boots that had belonged to his older brother, and he also gave him cabin passage on the next boat. Tránsito Ariza altered the clothing and made it smaller for her son, who was less corpulent than his father and much shorter than the German, and she bought him woolen socks and long underwear so that he would have everything he needed to resist the rigors of the mountain wastelands. Florentino Ariza, hardened by so much suffering, attended to the preparations for his journey as if he were a dead man attending to the preparations for his own funeral. The same iron hermeticism with which he had revealed to no one but his mother the secret of his repressed passion meant that he did not tell anyone he was going away and did not say goodbye to anyone, but on the eve of his departure he committed, with full awareness, a final mad act of the heart that might well have cost him his life. At midnight he put on his Sunday suit and went to stand alone under Fermina Daza’s balcony to play the love waltz he had composed for her, which was known only to the two of them and which for three years had been the emblem of their frustrated complicity. He played, murmuring the words, his violin bathed in tears, with an inspiration so intense that with the first measures the dogs on the street and then the dogs all over the city began to howl, but then, little by little, they were quieted by the spell of the music, and the waltz ended in supernatural silence. The balcony did not open, and no one appeared on the street, not even the night watchman, who almost always came running with his oil lamp in an effort to profit in some small way from serenades. The act was an exorcism of relief for Florentino Ariza, for when he put the violin back into its case and walked down the dead streets without looking back, he no longer felt that he was leaving the next morning but that he had gone away many years before with the irrevocable determination never to return.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨对那次疗伤之旅一直都没有什么清晰的印象。他将始终透过一层忧愁的薄雾来回忆这次旅行，就像那个时期发生的一切一样。当他收到委任电报时，甚至都没想接受，但洛达里奥·图古特用德国人的理由说服了他，那就是在公共管理领域有一份光辉的前途在等着他。他说：“电报员这一行大有可为。”他送给他一双带兔皮衬里的手套，一顶草原上用的帽子和一件经受过巴伐利亚冰冷一月考验的长毛绒领大衣。莱昂十二叔叔送了他两件呢子衣服，几双防水靴，都是他父亲的遗物，还给了他一张下一班船的寝舱船票。特兰西多·阿里萨按照儿子的身材改小了这些衣服——他不像父亲那样高大，比德国人也矮许多，她还给他买了几双羊毛袜和几条连体裤，好让他不缺少衣物去抵御寒冷荒原上的恶劣天气。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨经过了一系列的挫折后变得异常冷漠，就像死人为自己的葬礼做准备似的，参与着为这次远行所做的工作。他没有把自己要走的消息告诉任何人，也没有跟任何人道别，就像当初他只向母亲倾诉了心中悄悄压抑的激情一样。但临行的前一天晚上，他还是故意放纵了内心的最后一丝疯狂，做出了一个很可能断送自己性命的举动。半夜里，他穿上星期日的礼服，独自站在费尔明娜·达萨的阳台下，拉响了那曲他为她创作的爱的华尔兹。这支曲子只有他们俩知道，也是三年来他们所经历的种种挫折的象征。他一边拉，一边低诵着歌词，琴渐渐被泪水打湿。他拉得是那样激情澎湃，刚奏出头几小节，整条街上的狗便开始狂吠，接着，全城的狗都跟着吠叫起来。但过了一会儿，在音乐的魔力下，它们又慢慢安静下来，华尔兹最终结束在一片空灵的寂静之中。阳台的窗子没有打开，也没有人向街上探出头来，甚至连那位几乎总是拎着油灯赶来，试图从演奏小夜曲的人身上捞点油水的巡夜人也没有出现。而对弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨来说，这次演奏就像一道宽慰的符咒，因为当他把琴收进琴盒，头也不回地在死一般寂静的街道上渐行渐远时，心中感到的并不是明天即将远行，而是仿佛多年前就已抱定永不回来的决心离开了此地。
The boat, one of three identical vessels belonging to the River Company of the Caribbean, had been renamed in honor of the founder: Pius V Loayza. It was a floating two-story wooden house on a wide, level iron hull, and its maximum draft of five feet allowed it to negotiate the variable depths of the river. The older boats had been built in Cincinnati in midcentury on the legendary model of the vessels that traveled the Ohio and the Mississippi, with a wheel on each side powered by a wood-fed boiler. Like them, the boats of the River Company of the Caribbean had a lower deck almost level with the water, with the steam engines and the galleys and the sleeping quarters like henhouses where the crew hung their hammocks crisscrossed at different heights. On the upper deck were the bridge, the cabins of the Captain and his officers, and a recreation and dining room, where notable passengers were invited at least once to have dinner and play cards. On the middle deck were six first-class cabins on either side of a passage that served as a common dining room, and in the prow was a sitting room open to the river, with carved wood railings and iron columns, where most of the passengers hung their hammocks at night. Unlike the older boats, these did not have paddle wheels at the sides; instead, there was an enormous wheel with horizontal paddles at the stern, just underneath the suffocating toilets on the passenger deck. Florentino Ariza had not taken the trouble to explore the boat when he came aboard on a Sunday in July at seven o’clock in the morning, as those traveling for the first time did almost by instinct. He became aware of his new milieu only at dusk, as they were sailing past the hamlet of Calamar, when he went to the stern to urinate and saw, through the opening in the toilet, the gigantic paddle wheel turning under his feet with a volcanic display of foam and steam.
那船是加勒比河运公司所拥有的三条一模一样的船之一，为纪念公司的创建者被重新命名为“皮奥第五·罗阿依萨号”。那是座漂浮在水上的双层木屋，建在一个又宽又平的铁壳上，最深吃水五英尺，这让它能够更好地在水深莫测的河流中消灾避祸。最老的一批船是世纪中叶在辛辛那提建造的，依照的是往来于俄亥俄河和密西西比河上的轮船的传奇样式，两侧各有一个桨轮，靠烧柴的锅炉驱动。同这些老船一样，加勒比河运公司的船的底层甲板几乎与水面齐平，安有蒸汽发动机并设有厨房，还有一大排鸡笼似的舱室，船员们把自己的吊床横七竖八、高高低低地挂在里面。顶层则设有驾驶室、船长和高级船员的舱室，还有一间休息室和一间饭厅，身份高贵的旅客至少会被邀请到这里一次，用餐或者打牌。中间层有六间一等舱，设在一段被当作公共餐厅的甬道两侧。船头是一个露天起居室，配有雕花的木头栏杆和铁柱子，很多普通旅客晚上就把吊床挂在这里。但和那些老船不同的是，船的两侧并没有桨轮，而是在船尾有一个装有水平桨叶的巨轮，就位于旅客甲板上那令人窒息的便池下方。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨在七月一个星期日的早晨上了船，但他并没有像第一次旅行的人几乎出于本能所做的那样，一上船就不厌其烦地四处勘察。黄昏，当船经过卡拉玛尔村时，他到船尾去小便，透过便池洞，他看见巨大的桨轮在他脚下转动，卷起翻腾的泡沫和蒸汽，发出火山爆发般的隆隆巨响。直到这时，他才意识到自己所处的新环境。
He had never traveled before. He had with him a tin trunk with his clothes for the mountain wastelands, the illustrated novels that he bought in pamphlet form every month and that he himself sewed into cardboard covers, and the books of love poetry that he recited from memory and that were about to crumble into dust with so much reading. He had left behind his violin, for he identified it too closely with his misfortune, but his mother had obliged him to take his petate, a very popular and practical bedroll, with its pillow, sheet, small pewter chamber pot, and mosquito netting, all of this wrapped in straw matting tied with two hemp ropes for hanging a hammock in an emergency. Florentino Ariza had not wanted to take it, for he thought it would be useless in a cabin that provided bed and bedclothes, but from the very first night he had reason once again to be grateful for his mother’s good sense. At the last moment, a passenger dressed in evening clothes boarded the boat; he had arrived early that morning on a ship from Europe and was accompanied by the Provincial Governor himself. He wanted to continue his journey without delay, along with his wife and daughter and liveried servant and seven trunks with gold fittings, which were almost too bulky for the stair way. To accommodate the unexpected travelers, the Captain, a giant from Curaçao, called on the passengers” indigenous sense of patriotism. In a jumble of Spanish and Curaçao patois, he explained to Florentino Ariza that the man in evening dress was the new plenipotentiary from England, on his way to the capital of the Republic; he reminded him of how that kingdom had provided us with decisive resources in our struggle for independence from Spanish rule, and that as a consequence no sacrifice was too great if it would allow a family of such distinction to feel more at home in our country than in their own. Florentino Ariza, of course, gave up his cabin.
他从没出过远门。他带着一只马口铁皮箱子，里面装着荒原上要穿的衣服，几本他自己装订的插图小说——把买来的月刊连载小说订在一起，再加上硬纸作为封皮——还有几本烂熟于心、已经快翻碎了的爱情诗集。他把小提琴留在了家里，因为它与他的不幸关联得实在太紧密，母亲则逼他带上了铺盖卷。这是一套很普通也很实用的寝具：一只枕头，一条床单，一个白镴尿壶和一顶针织蚊帐，所有这些都卷在一张席子里，用两根龙舌兰绳捆着，席子和绳子在急需时还可以用来做吊床。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨本不想带这些，因为舱室里自有铺开的床铺，这些东西根本用不着。但到了第一个晚上，他不得不又一次感谢母亲的明智。原来，在最后时刻，上来一位身穿礼服的旅客。他是当天清晨乘坐一条欧洲船抵达这里的，此刻由省长亲自陪同登船。他带着妻子、女儿、身穿制服的男仆以及费了九牛二虎之力才勉强通过楼梯的七只镶着金边的箱子，希望即刻继续行程。为了将这几位不速之客安顿下来，船长，一位身材魁梧的库拉索人，试图唤起船上土生白人的爱国情怀。他用库拉索方言和西班牙语掺杂在一起向弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨解释，说那位身穿礼服的人是新上任的英国全权公使，正在前往共和国首都的途中，并且提醒他说，那个王国为了帮我们从西班牙人的统治下取得独立，向我们援助了决定性的物资，所以，为了能让一个如此高贵的家庭在船上有宾至如归的感觉，任何牺牲都是微不足道的。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨于是理所当然地让出了自己的舱室。
At first he did not regret it, for the river was high at that time of year and the boat navigated without any difficulty for the first two nights. After dinner, at five o’clock, the crew distributed folding canvas cots to the passengers, and each person opened his bed wherever he could find room, arranged it with the bedclothes from his petate, and set the mosquito netting over that. Those with hammocks hung them in the salon, and those who had nothing slept on the tables in the dining room, wrapped in the tablecloths that were not changed more than twice during the trip. Florentino Ariza was awake most of the night, thinking that he heard the voice of Fermina Daza in the fresh river breeze, ministering to his solitude with her memory, hearing her sing in the respiration of the boat as it moved like a great animal through the darkness, until the first rosy streaks appeared on the horizon and the new day suddenly broke over deserted pastureland and misty swamps. Then his journey seemed yet another proof of his mother’s wisdom, and he felt that he had the fortitude to endure forgetting.
起初，他并没有后悔，因为每年这个时期，河中都水量充足，所以前两个晚上船并无颠簸。每天吃过晚饭，下午五点钟，船员们会给旅客发一些帆布底的折叠床。每个人便找地方把自己的床打开，铺上行李中的铺盖，再在上面支起针织蚊帐。有吊床的人会把吊床挂在大厅里，什么都没有的人就睡在餐厅的桌上，把整个旅途中绝不会更换两次以上的桌布盖在身上。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨基本上大半宿都睡不着，他仿佛在河面凉爽的微风中听到了费尔明娜·达萨的声音，对她的回忆抚慰着他的寂寥。黑暗里，船踏着野兽般的大步前行，在它的喘息声中，他倾听着她的歌唱，直到第一缕霞光出现在地平线，新的一天突然绽放在荒无人烟的草原和烟雾弥漫的沼泽之上。他觉得这次旅行再一次证明了母亲的智慧，他感受到了在遗忘之中存活下来的勇气。
After three days of favorable water, however, it became more difficult to navigate between inopportune sandbanks and deceptive rapids. The river turned muddy and grew narrower and narrower in a tangled jungle of colossal trees where there was only an occasional straw hut next to the piles of wood for the ship’s boilers. The screeching of the parrots and the chattering of the invisible monkeys seemed to intensify the midday heat. At night it was necessary to anchor the boat in order to sleep, and then the simple fact of being alive became unendurable. To the heat and the mosquitoes was added the reek of strips of salted meat hung to dry on the railings. Most of the passengers, above all the Europeans, abandoned the pestilential stench of their cabins and spent the night walking the decks, brushing away all sorts of predatory creatures with the same towel they used to dry their incessant perspiration, and at dawn they were exhausted and swollen with bites.
然而，在顺畅的河水中走了三天后，船开始行进在意想不到的浅滩和迷惑人心的暗流之间，前进得格外艰难。河水变得浑浊，而且越来越窄，两岸是参天大树纵横交错的丛林，只能偶尔遇到一间茅屋，旁边堆着船上锅炉用的柴火。鹦鹉叽里呱啦的叫声和看不见的长尾猴的喧闹仿佛加剧了午间的闷热。晚上，船不得不停在岸边，让大家休息。在那种时候，单单是活着这件事，都变得让人无法忍受。除了闷热和蚊子的烦扰，还得加上晾在栏杆上的一块块腌肉发出的恶臭。大部分旅客，特别是欧洲人，都走出腐臭的舱室，在甲板上来回踱步以度过漫漫长夜，用毛巾一边擦拭不断渗出的汗水，一边驱赶各种活物。天亮时，他们都精疲力竭，个个被叮咬得鼻青脸肿。
Moreover, another episode of the intermittent civil war between Liberals and Conservatives had broken out that year, and the Captain had taken very strict precautions to maintain internal order and protect the safety of the passengers. Trying to avoid misunderstandings and provocations, he prohibited the favorite pastime during river voyages in those days, which was to shoot the alligators sunning themselves on the broad sandy banks. Later on, when some of the passengers divided into two opposing camps during an argument, he confiscated everyone’s weapons and gave his word of honor that they would be returned at the end of the journey. He was inflexible even with the British minister who, on the morning following their departure, appeared in a hunting outfit, with a precision carbine and a double-barreled rifle for killing tigers. The restrictions became even more drastic above the port of Tenerife, where they passed a boat flying the yellow plague flag. The Captain could not obtain any further information regarding that alarming sign because the other vessel did not respond to his signals. But that same day they encountered another boat, with a cargo of cattle for Jamaica, and were informed that the vessel with the plague flag was carrying two people sick with cholera, and that the epidemic was wreaking havoc along the portion of the river they still had to travel. Then the passengers were prohibited from leaving the boat, not only in the ports but even in the uninhabited places where they stopped to take on wood. So that until they reached the final port, a trip of six days, the passengers acquired the habits of prisoners, including the pernicious contemplation of a packet of pornographic Dutch postcards that circulated from hand to hand without anyone’s knowing where it came from, although no veteran of the river was unaware that this was only a tiny sampling of the Captain’s legendary collection. But, in the end, even that dis traction with no expectation only increased the tedium.
此外，由于那一年自由党和保守党之间时断时续的内战又爆发了新的事端，为了维持船上的秩序，保证旅客安全，船长采取了极为严格的防备措施。他禁止了那个时期旅途中人们最为热衷的一种消遣，即朝岸上晒太阳的短吻鳄开枪射击，以避免误会和冲突。后来，有旅客为此争论，分成敌对的两派，于是，船长没收了所有人的武器，并以荣誉保证旅行结束后悉数奉还。甚至对英国公使他也没有网开一面：这位公使在起锚后的第二天早晨，便穿上狩猎服，拿着一支精密卡宾枪和一支猎杀老虎的双筒猎枪出现在大家面前。过了特内里费岛，限制变得更为严格，因为在这个岛，他们遇上了一艘高高悬挂着瘟疫黄旗的船。关于这个警告标志，船长没能获得更多信息，因为那艘船没有回答他发出的信号。但就在同一天，他们遇到了另一艘前往牙买加运送牲口的船。船上的人告诉他们，挂瘟疫旗的那条船上有两个得霍乱的病人，疫情正在侵袭前方流域。于是，不仅在接下来的港口，甚至在那些为装柴火而停靠的无人区，旅客都一律禁止下船。就这样，在到达目的港之前最后的六天旅途中，旅客们染上了一些监狱中的习惯。其一便是恶劣地传看一套荷兰的色情明信片。这套明信片从一双手传到另一双手，谁也不知道它们从何而来，尽管没有一个跑船的老手不清楚，这不过是船长著名收藏中的一套样品而已。但就是这点儿没有盼头的消遣，最终也停止了，因为只会徒增烦闷。
Florentino Ariza endured the hardships of the journey with the mineral patience that had brought sorrow to his mother and exasperation to his friends. He spoke to no one. The days were easy for him as he sat at the rail, watching the motionless alligators sunning themselves on sandy banks, their mouths open to catch butterflies, watching the flocks of startled herons that rose without warning from the marshes, the manatees that nursed their young at large maternal teats and startled the passengers with their woman’s cries. On a single day he saw three bloated, green, human corpses float past, with buzzards sitting on them. First the bodies of two men went by, one of them without a head, and then a very young girl, whose medusan locks undulated in the boat’s wake. He never knew, because no one ever knew, if they were victims of the cholera or the war, but the nauseating stench contaminated his memory of Fermina Daza.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨以他那种令母亲忧伤不已、令朋友痛心疾首的矿石般的耐心忍受着旅途的艰辛。他没有跟任何人打交道。日子在他身上轻而易举地流逝。他坐在栏杆前，看着岸边一动不动晒太阳的短吻鳄张着血盆大口等着捕捉蝴蝶，看着受惊吓的草鹭突然从沼泽中飞起，看着海牛用巨大的乳头喂养幼崽，并发出如女人哭泣般的叫声，令旅客惊诧不已。在同一天，他看见河上漂过三具膨胀发绿的尸体，上面还站着几只兀鹫。最先是两具男尸，其中一具没了头，而后漂过一具只有几岁的女童的尸体，她那美杜莎般的头发在船尾的航迹中上下漂浮。他永远也不会知道，因为根本没人知道，他们到底是霍乱还是战争的牺牲品，但那令人恶心的强烈气味污染了他心中对费尔明娜·达萨的思念。
That was always the case: any event, good or bad, had some relationship to her. At night, when the boat was anchored and most of the passengers walked the decks in despair, he perused the illustrated novels he knew almost by heart under the carbide lamp in the dining room, which was the only one kept burning until dawn, and the dramas he had read so often regained their original magic when he replaced the imaginary protagonists with people he knew in real life, reserving for himself and Fermina Daza the roles of star-crossed lovers. On other nights he wrote anguished letters and then scattered their fragments over the water that flowed toward her without pause. And so the most difficult hours passed for him, at times in the person of a timid prince or a paladin of love, at other times in his own scalded hide of a lover in the middle of forgetting, until the first breezes began to blow and he went to doze in the lounge chairs by the railing.
向来如此：每一件事，无论好坏，都与她有着一定关联。晚上，船停泊下来，大部分旅客都在甲板上无所事事地走来走去，而他却在餐厅的瓦斯灯——唯一一盏直到天亮都不会熄灭的灯下，复习着那些他几乎可以背下来的连载插图小说。当他用现实中认识的人去代替小说中想象的人物时，那些反复读过多遍的情节又恢复了最初的魔力，而他向来把那些坏运气的情侣角色留给自己和费尔明娜·达萨。另外一些夜晚，他会给她写下一封封伤心欲绝的信，而后，任它们的碎片漂散在那一刻不停地向着她的方向奔流而去的河水之中。就这样，他挨着那些最难熬的分分秒秒，时而化身为一位腼腆的王子或爱情的卫士，时而又回到他那伤痕累累的皮囊，变回一个被遗忘的恋人，直到清晨吹来第一缕微风，他才坐到栏杆旁的靠背椅上打起盹来。
One night when he stopped his reading earlier than usual and was walking, distracted, toward the toilets, a door opened as he passed through the dining room, and a hand like the talon of a hawk seized him by the shirt sleeve and pulled him into a cabin. In the darkness he could barely see the naked woman, her ageless body soaked in hot perspiration, her breathing heavy, who pushed him onto the bunk face up, unbuckled his belt, unbuttoned his trousers, impaled herself on him as if she were riding horseback, and stripped him, without glory, of his virginity. Both of them fell, in an agony of desire, into the void of a bottomless pit that smelled of a salt marsh full of prawns. Then she lay for a moment on top of him, gasping for breath, and she ceased to exist in the darkness.
一天晚上，他比往常早一些中断了阅读。正当他漫不经心地朝厕所走去时，空无一人的餐厅里突然打开了一扇门，挡住了他的去路，一只鹰爪般的手抓住了他衬衫的袖子，把他拉进一间舱室，随即又关上了门。黑暗中，他甚至看不清这个不知年龄的裸体女人的样貌，她浑身淌着湿热的汗水，喘着粗气，一把将他仰面朝天地推倒在简易床上。她解开了他的皮带，又解开他裤上的扣子，接着便骑在他身上，毫无光荣可言地夺取了他的童贞。两人恣情陷落一个无底的深渊，四周泛着爬满青虾的咸水沼泽的味道。之后，她在他身上躺了一会儿，无声无息地喘着气，然后消失在黑暗中。
“Now go and forget all about it,” she said. “This never happened.”
“现在，您走吧，忘了它。”她对他说，“就当这件事从没有发生过。”
The assault had been so rapid and so triumphant that it could only be understood not as a sudden madness caused by boredom but as the fruit of a plan elaborated over time and down to its smallest detail. This gratifying certainty increased Florentino Ariza’s eagerness, for at the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion. And so it was that he felt compelled to discover the identity of the mistress of violation in whose panther’s instincts he might find the cure for his misfortune. But he was not successful. On the contrary, the more he delved into the search the further he felt from the truth.
这次突袭是如此迅速而成功，令人无法视之为一次无聊时突发奇想的疯狂举动。它必然是从容计划的结果，甚至连细枝末节都考虑到了。这个令人愉悦的信念增加了弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的躁动，因为当他处于欢愉的顶峰时，曾有一个连他自己都无法相信，甚至也不愿承认的发现，那就是，他对费尔明娜·达萨的虚无缥渺的爱可以用世俗的激情来替代。于是，他千方百计想找出那个技艺精湛的强奸者，或许在她那豹子般的本能中，他能找到医治自己痛苦的良方。但他没有找到。相反，调查越是深入，他感到自己距离真相越发遥远。
The assault had taken place in the last cabin, but this communicated with the one next to it by a door, so that the two rooms had been converted into family sleeping quarters with four bunks. The occupants were two young women, another who was rather mature but very attractive, and an infant a few months old. They had boarded in Barranco de Loba, the port where cargo and passengers from Mompox were picked up ever since that city had been excluded from the itineraries of the steamboats because of the river’s caprices, and Florentino Ariza had noticed them only because they carried the sleeping child in a large birdcage.
袭击发生在最后的那间舱室中，但这一间和倒数第二间有一扇门相通，所以两间舱室组成了一间有四个床位的家庭卧室。里面住着两个年轻女人、一个上了年岁但风韵犹存的妇人，还有一个几个月大的男孩。她们是从巴兰哥·德洛巴上的船，自从蒙波斯城因其河水变化无常而被从蒸汽船的航线上取消后，该城的货物和旅客都是从巴兰哥·德洛巴港上船的。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨之前就曾注意到她们，但那只是因为她们把熟睡的孩子放在一只巨大的鸟笼里随身携带。
They dressed as if they were traveling on a fashionable ocean liner, with bustles under their silk skirts and lace gorgets and broad-brimmed hats trimmed with crinoline flowers, and the two younger women changed their entire outfits several times a day, so that they seemed to carry with them their own springlike ambience while the other passengers were suffocating in the heat. All three were skilled in the use of parasols and feathered fans, but their intentions were as indecipherable as those of other women from Mompox. Florentino Anza could not even determine their relationship to one another, although he had no doubt they came from the same family. At first he thought that the older one might be the mother of the other two, but then he realized she was not old enough for that, and that she also wore partial mourning that the others did not share. He could not imagine that one of them would have dared to do what she did while the others were sleeping in the nearby bunks, and the only reasonable supposition was that she had taken advantage of a fortuitous, or perhaps prearranged, moment when she was alone in the cabin. He observed that at times two of them stayed out for a breath of cool air until very late, while the third remained behind, caring for the infant, but one night when it was very hot all three of them left the cabin, carrying the baby, who was asleep in the wicker cage covered with gauze.
她们穿得仿佛是在时髦的远洋轮船上旅行似的：丝绸裙底衬有裙撑，蕾丝饰领，宽檐帽上缀着马鬃花。年龄较小的那两个女人每天都要从头到脚换好几身华丽衣服，就在其他旅客热得快要窒息的时候，她们却仿佛置身于自己随身携带的一片春光之中。三人灵巧地撑着阳伞，摇着羽毛扇，但就像所有的蒙波斯女人一样，她们的意图令人费解。毫无疑问，她们是一家人，但弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨甚至连她们之间的关系都搞不清楚。起初，他认为那个年长的妇人可能是另外两个的母亲。但随后他注意到，她的年纪根本不足以当她们的母亲，而且她戴着半孝[12]，而另两个女人却没有着孝。他无法想象，她们中的一个敢在另外两人睡在旁边的床铺时做出那种事来，唯一合理的假设就是这个女人利用了偶然的，又或者是安排好的空当，在舱室里只有她一个人的时候下手。他观察到有时她们中的两人会出去乘凉，很晚才回来，而第三个人就留下来照看孩子。但在一个更热的晚上，她们三人带着孩子一起出了门，孩子睡在柳条编的鸟笼里，外面还罩着纱幔。（注：[12] 根据西方习惯，守丧后期可以穿黑色以外的深色衣服，称为“半孝”。）
Despite the tangle of clues, Florentino Ariza soon rejected the possibility that the oldest had been the perpetrator of the assault, and with as much dispatch he also absolved the youngest, who was the most beautiful and the boldest of the three. He did so without valid reasons, but only because his avid observations of the three women had persuaded him to accept as truth the profound hope that his sudden lover was in fact the mother of the caged infant. That supposition was so seductive that he began to think about her with more intensity than he thought about Fermina Daza, ignoring the evidence that this recent mother lived only for her child. She was no more than twenty-five, she was slender and golden, she had Portuguese eyelids that made her seem even more aloof, and any man would have been satisfied with only the crumbs of the tenderness that she lavished on her son. From breakfast until bedtime she was busy with him in the salon, while the other two played Chinese checkers, and whe n at last she managed to put him to sleep she would hang the wicker cage from the ceiling on the cooler side of the railing. She did not ignore him, however, even when he was asleep, but would rock the cage, singing love songs under her breath while her thoughts flew high above the miseries of the journey. Florentino Ariza clung to the illusion that sooner or later she would betray herself, if only with a gesture. He even observed the changes in her breathing, watching the reliquary that hung on her batiste blouse as he looked at her without dissimulation over the book he pretended to read, and he committed the calculated impertinence of changing his seat in the dining room so that he would face her. But he could not find the slightest hint that she was in fact the repository of the other half of his secret. The only thing of hers he had, and that only because her younger companion called to her, was her first name: Rosalba.
尽管迹象混乱如麻，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨还是很快就排除了年长妇女是那次袭击的罪魁祸首的可能性。接着，又宣布了最小的那位，也是她们中最漂亮、最大胆的那位的清白。他做出如此判断并没有充分的理由，只因为通过对她们的密切监视，他最终倾向于将自己内心的希望当作真相：他发自肺腑地希望自己那一夜的情人是鸟笼孩子的母亲。这种假设是如此地吸引他，以至于他开始想念她胜过了想念费尔明娜·达萨，而忽略了这位新晋的年轻母亲心里只有孩子这一明显事实。她应该还不到二十五岁，身材纤瘦，头发金黄，一双葡萄牙人的眼睛更令她显得遥不可及，她在孩子身上慷慨倾注的无限温柔，任何男人只要能分得一丁半点就会心满意足。从早餐直至入寝，她都在大厅里照顾孩子，而另外两个女人则在玩中国跳棋。等孩子睡着了，她便把柳条鸟笼挂在天花板上，靠近栏杆凉爽的那一侧。即便是孩子睡觉时，她也不会对他置之不理，而是一边摇着鸟笼，一边哼着少女情歌，任由思绪飞离这枯燥的旅行。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨执著地幻想着她迟早会露出马脚，哪怕只是一个表情。他毫不掩饰地越过假装在读的书看她，甚至借由她挂在细布衬衫上的圣物盒的一起一伏，观察她呼吸的变化，还甘冒无礼之嫌，明目张胆地在餐厅调换座位，只为能与她对面而坐。但最终，他都没有看出哪怕最细微的一点迹象，能够表明她当真就是收藏着他另一半秘密的人。他唯一得到的，只是一个没有姓氏的名字，因为那位年轻的女伴是这样叫她的：罗萨尔芭。
On the eighth day, the boat navigated with great difficulty through a turbulent strait squeezed between marble cliffs, and after lunch it anchored in Puerto Nare. This was the disembarkation point for those passengers who would continue their journey into Antioquia, one of the provinces most affected by the new civil war. The port consisted of half a dozen palm huts and a store made of wood, with a zinc roof, and it was protected by several squads of barefoot and ill-armed soldiers because there had been rumors of a plan by the insurrectionists to plunder the boats. Behind the houses, reaching to the sky, rose a promontory of uncultivated highland with a wrought-iron cornice at the edge of the precipice. No one on board slept well that night, but the attack did not materialize, and in the morning the port was transformed into a Sunday fair, with Indians selling Tagua amulets and love potions amid packs of animals ready to begin the six-day ascent to the orchid jungles of the central mountain range.
第八天，船艰难地在水流湍急的狭窄河道里航行，两边是大理石的悬崖峭壁，午饭后，船停靠在纳雷港。那些去往安蒂奥基亚省的旅客要在此地下船，安蒂奥基亚省是受新一轮内战影响最深的省份之一。港口由六间棕榈屋和一间锌顶的木制仓库组成，几队武器简陋的赤脚士兵在此巡逻守卫，因为有消息说，暴动者正计划抢劫船只。房屋背后，杂草丛生的山峰高耸入云，一块马蹄铁似的岩石为悬崖镶上了飞檐。夜晚，船上没有一个人睡得安稳，但是并没有袭击发生。天亮时，港口摇身变成了一个星期日的集市，印第安人兜售着用植物象牙做成的护身符和爱情药水，夹杂在一群群整装待发、准备用六天的时间攀到中部山区那长满兰科植物的丛林中去的牲口之间。
Florentino Ariza passed the time watching black men unload the boat onto their backs, he watched them carry off crates of china, and pianos for the spinsters of Envigado, and he did not realize until it was too late that Rosalba and her party were among the passengers who had stayed on shore. He saw them when they were already sitting sidesaddle, with their Amazons” boots and their parasols in equatorial colors, and then he took the step he had not dared to take during, the preceding days: he waved goodbye to Rosalba, and the three women responded in kind, with a familiarity that cut him to the quick because his boldness came too late. He saw them round the corner of the store, followed by the mules carrying their trunks, their hatboxes, and the baby’s cage, and soon afterward he saw them ascend along the edge of the precipice like a line of ants and disappear from his life. Then he felt alone in the world, and the memory of Fermina Daza, lying in ambush in recent days, dealt him a mortal blow.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨看着黑人们把货物背下船，以此打发时间。他看见他们卸下一箱箱中国瓷器，还有运给恩维加多独身姑娘们的三角钢琴。当他发现下船的旅客中也包括罗萨尔芭一行人时，已经太晚了：她们已经侧坐在马背上，脚踏亚马逊皮靴，手撑厄瓜多尔的彩色阳伞。这时，他迈出了之前这些天都未敢迈出的一步：向罗萨尔芭挥手告别，三个女人也用同样的动作回答了他，那股亲切劲儿让他为自己迟来的大胆痛彻心扉。他看着她们从仓库后面绕过去，身后跟着几头骡子，驮着箱子、帽盒和婴儿的鸟笼。不一会儿，就看见她们像一队搬运东西的小蚂蚁似的，攀行在悬崖上，从他的生活中消失了。这时，他突然感到自己在这个世界上孤身一人，而这几日一直在暗中窥视他的对费尔明娜·达萨的思念，突然用它那锋利的爪子给了他致命的一击。
He knew that she was to have an elaborate wedding, and then the being who loved her most, who would love her forever, would not even have the right to die for her. Jealousy, which until that time had been drowned in weeping, took possession of his soul. He prayed to God that the lightning of divine justice would strike Fermina Daza as she was about to give her vow of love and obedience to a man who wanted her for his wife only as a social adornment, and he went into rapture at the vision of the bride, his bride or no one’s, lying face up on the flagstones of the Cathedral, her orange blossoms laden with the dew of death, and the foaming torrent of her veil covering the funerary marbles of the fourteen bishops who were buried in front of the main altar. Once his revenge was consummated, however, he repented of his own wickedness, and then he saw Fermina Daza rising from the ground, her spirit intact, distant but alive, because it was not possible for him to imagine the world without her. He did not sleep again, and if at times he sat down to pick at food, it was in the hope that Fermina Daza would be at the table or, conversely, to deny her the homage of fasting for her sake. At times his solace was the certainty that during the intoxication of her wedding celebration, even during the feverish nights of her honeymoon, Fermina Daza would suffer one moment, one at least but one in any event, when the phantom of the sweetheart she had scorned, humiliated, and insulted would appear in her thoughts, and all her happiness would be destroyed.
他知道她即将举行隆重的婚礼，而他这个最爱她、且将永远爱她的人却连为她而死的权利都没有。之前一直被压抑在哭泣之中的忌妒，此刻占据了他的整个灵魂。他祈求上帝，就在费尔明娜·达萨即将为爱情宣誓，顺从于那个只为把她当作社交点缀而娶她为妻的男人时，让公正的闪电从天而降，劈在她身上。这位新娘，只能是他的新娘，否则就谁的也不是。他满心狂喜地想象着，她仰面朝天躺在大教堂的石板上，四周满是沾染了死亡露珠的雪白的橘树花，那泡沫般倾泻而下的头纱垂落在主祭台前安葬着十四位主教的大理石棺之上。然而，复仇的幻想刚一结束，他便为自己的邪恶后悔起来，于是他又看见费尔明娜·达萨完好无损地站了起来，虽然于他遥不可及，但却活着，因为他无法想象一个没有她的世界会是什么样子。他没有再睡着过，而如果说他偶尔能坐下来随便吃口东西，那也是因为幻想着费尔明娜·达萨坐在桌前，或者相反，是因为他不愿给予她那种殊荣，不愿让她认为自己是在为她禁食。有时，他会用这样的信念来安慰自己：在醉人的婚礼中，甚至在火热的蜜月里，费尔明娜·达萨会有那么片刻的心痛，至少有片刻，无论怎样，一定会有那么片刻，她的心里会浮现出这个被嘲弄，被侮辱，被唾弃了的恋人的影子，而她的幸福也将会荡然无存。
The night before they reached the port of Caracolí, which was the end of the journey, the Captain gave the traditional farewell party, with a woodwind orchestra composed of crew members, and fireworks from the bridge. The minister from Great Britain had survived the odyssey with exemplary stoicism, shooting with his camera the animals they would not allow him to kill with his rifles, and not a night went by that he was not seen in evening dress in the dining room. But he came to the final party wearing the tartans of the MacTavish clan, and he played the bagpipe for everyone’s entertainment and taught those who were interested how to dance his national dances, and before daybreak he almost had to be carried to his cabin. Florentino Ariza, prostrate with grief, had gone to the farthest corner of the deck where the noise of the revelry could not reach him, and he put on Lotario Thugut’s overcoat in an effort to overcome the shivering in his bones. He had awakened at five that morning, as the condemned man awakens at dawn on the day of his execution, and for that entire day he had done nothing but imagine, minute by minute, each of the events at Fermina Daza’s wedding. Later, when he returned home, he realized that he had made a mistake in the time and that everything had been different from what he had imagined, and he even had the good sense to laugh at his fantasy.
到达旅途终点卡拉科利港的前一天晚上，船长举行了传统的告别晚会，船员组成一支吹奏乐队，驾驶室里还放出了五彩的烟花。那位大不列颠公使以堪称典范的克制力忍受了一路的艰辛，用照相机猎获了那些不允许他用猎枪屠杀的动物，并且，没有一个晚上不是穿着礼服走进餐厅。但在这最后的欢庆活动中，他穿了一身苏格兰麦克塔维什部族的服装，兴致勃勃地吹起风笛，还教所有想学的人跳他们的民族舞蹈。还没到天亮，大家便不得不半扶半拖地把他搀回舱室。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨正被痛苦折磨得垂头丧气，躲在甲板最偏远的角落，完全听不到人们的欢闹声。他把洛达里奥·图古特的大衣裹在身上，努力抵御着发自骨髓的寒意。就像死刑犯在行刑的清晨一样，早晨五点他就醒了，一整天什么也没做，只是一分钟一分钟地想象着费尔明娜·达萨婚礼的每一步骤。后来，他回到家时，才发现自己弄错了日期，而且一切都和他想象的不同，他甚至清醒地嘲笑起自己的幻想来。
It was not difficult to persuade them to give him return passage in exchange for the cabin he had surrendered to the representative of Queen Victoria. The Captain also attempted to dissuade him, arguing that the telegraph was the science of the future. So much so, he said, that they were already devising a system for installing it on boats. But he resisted all arguments, and in the end the Captain took him home, not because he owed him the price of the cabin but because he knew of his excellent connections to the River Company of the Caribbean.
鉴于之前曾把舱室让给维多利亚女王的代表，他要求随船返航并不是一件难事。船长以电报是一项前途无量的科学为由试图说服他。他对弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨说，这一点千真万确，因为已经有人发明了一种可以安装在船上的电报系统。但弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨不为任何理由所动，船长最后只得带他返航，并不是为了舱室里的人情，而是因为他知道弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨和加勒比河运公司的真正关系。
But in any case, it was a Saturday of passion, which culminated in a new crisis of fever when he thought the moment had come for the newlyweds to flee in secret through a false door to give themselves over to the delights of their first night. Someone saw him shivering with fever and informed the Captain, who, fearing a case of cholera, left the party with the ship’s doctor, and the doctor took the precaution of sending Florentino to the quarantine cabin with a dose of bromides. The next day, however, when they sighted the cliffs of Caracolí, his fever had disappeared and his spirits were elated, because in the marasmus of the sedatives he had resolved once and for all that he did not give a damn about the brilliant future of the telegraph and that he would take this very same boat back to his old Street of Windows.
但不管怎样，那是一个受难的星期六，最终他发起了高烧，因为他仿佛看到一对新人正悄悄地从一扇假门溜走，去尽情享受新婚之夜的狂欢。有人看到他烧得发抖，便报告了船长。船长担心这是一起霍乱病例，带着随船医生离开了晚会。医生出于谨慎，把他送进了隔离舱室，还给他用了大剂量的溴化物。然而第二天，当人们远远看见卡拉科利的礁石时，他的烧已经退了，而且精神抖擞，因为在镇静药物所导致的沉滞中，他义无反顾地做出了一个决定，那就是让电报员的光辉前途见鬼去吧，他要乘这同一条船回他的窗户街去。
The trip downriver took less than six days, and Florentino Ariza felt that he was home again from the moment they entered Mercedes Lagoon at dawn and he saw the trail of lights on the fishing canoes undulating in the wake of the boat. It was still dark when they docked in Niño Perdido Cove, nine leagues from the bay and the last port for riverboats until the old Spanish channel was dredged and put back into service. The passengers would have to wait until six o’clock in the morning to board the fleet of sloops for hire that would carry them to their final destination. But Florentino Ariza was so eager that he sailed much earlier on the mail sloop, whose crew acknowledged him as one of their own. Before he left the boat he succumbed to the temptation of a symbolic act: he threw his petate into the water, and followed it with his eyes as it floated past the beacon lights of the invisible fishermen, left the lagoon, and disappeared in the ocean. He was sure he would not need it again for all the rest of his days. Never again, because never again would he abandon the city of Fermina Daza.
下水航行用了不到六天的时间。自从他们清晨驶入梅塞德斯湖，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨看见捕鱼的独木舟上点点灯火在轮船激起的回头浪中波动起伏，便感觉自己重新回到了家里。当他们在迷失的男孩湾靠岸时，已经是晚上了。在西班牙人的古航道被疏通并投入使用之前，那里是蒸汽船的最后一个港口，距离海湾还有九里。旅客必须等到早晨六点，才能登上租用的小艇，驶往最后的目的地。但弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨归心似箭，提前坐上邮局的小艇走了，因为邮局的职员认出他是自己人。下船之前，他忍不住做了一个具有象征意义的举动：把铺盖卷扔进水里，目送它穿过那些看不见的渔夫手中的火把，直到离开潟湖，消失在大海之中。他确信，在今后的日子里，他再也不需要它了。永远不，因为他将永远不再离开费尔明娜·达萨的城市。
The bay was calm at daybreak. Above the floating mist Florentino Ariza saw the dome of the Cathedral, gilded by the first light of dawn, he saw the dovecotes on the flat roofs, and orienting himself by them, he located the balcony of the palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, where he supposed that the lady of his misfortune was still dozing, her head on the shoulder of her satiated husband. That idea broke his heart, but he did nothing to suppress it; on the contrary, he took pleasure in his pain. The sun was beginning to grow hot as the mail sloop made its way through the labyrinth of sailing ships that lay at anchor where the countless odors from the public market and the decaying matter on the bottom of the bay blended into one pestilential stench. The schooner from Riohacha had just arrived, and gangs of stevedores in water up to their waists lifted the passengers over the side and carried them to shore. Florentino Ariza was the first to jump on land from the mail sloop, and from that time on he no longer detected the fetid reek of the bay in the city, but was aware only of the personal fragrance of Fermina Daza. Everything smelled of her.
黎明时分，海湾里风平浪静，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨透过第一缕阳光，在飘浮的大雾上方看见了金色大教堂的拱顶，看见了屋顶上那一座座的鸽子屋，并顺着它们找到了卡萨尔杜埃罗侯爵府的阳台，想象着在那座房子里，那个带给他不幸的女人还倚在餍足的丈夫肩上贪睡。这个假想令他肝肠寸断，但他并没有制止它，相反，他在痛苦中感到满足。太阳开始升温，邮局小艇在停泊帆船组成的迷宫中穿梭。公共市场的无数种气味裹挟着水底散发出的腐烂味，混合成一股恶臭。来自里奥阿查的轻便船刚刚抵达，一队队搬运工蹚着齐腰深的水去接船上旅客，一直把他们背到岸上。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨第一个从邮局小艇跳上岸。从那一刻起，他就再没有闻到海湾的臭气，只闻到弥漫在城市中的费尔明娜·达萨特有的气息。一切都散发着她的味道。
He did not return to the telegraph office. His only interest seemed to be the serialized love novels and the volumes of the Popular Library that his mother continued to buy for him and that he continued to read again and again, lying in his hammock, until he learned them by heart. He did not even ask for his violin. He reestablished relations with his closest friends, and sometimes they played billiards or conversed in the outdoor cafés under the arches around the Plaza of the Cathedral, but he did not go back to the Saturday night dances: he could not conceive of them without her.
他没有回电报室去工作。他唯一关心的似乎只是连载的爱情小说和“人民图书馆”的书籍，母亲继续给他买，而他则躺在吊床上一遍又一遍地读，直到把它们背下来为止。他甚至都没有问小提琴在哪儿。他和最亲近的朋友恢复了来往，有时一起打打台球，或者到大教堂广场拱门下的露天咖啡馆聊聊天。但他再没有去过星期六的舞会：没有她，他无心跳舞。
On the morning of his return from his inconclusive journey, he learned that Fermina Daza was spending her honeymoon in Europe, and his agitated heart took it for granted that she would live there, if not forever then for many years to come. This certainty filled him with his first hope of forgetting. He thought of Rosalba, whose memory burned brighter as the other’s dimmed. It was during this time that he grew the mustache with the waxed tips that he would keep for the rest of his life and that changed his entire being, and the idea of substituting one love for another carried him along surprising paths. Little by little the fragrance of Fermina Daza became less frequent and less intense, and at last it remained only in white gardenias.
从那次未完成的旅行回来的当天早上，他就得知费尔明娜·达萨正在欧洲度蜜月。他那颗茫然的心当即认定，她即使不会在那里永远住下去，也会住上很多年。这个信念为他注入了忘记过往的第一线希望。他想念起罗萨尔芭来，随着对另一个人的回忆慢慢平息，对她的思念变得越来越炽热。正是在那个时期，他蓄起了小胡子，胡子尖还涂上胶，决意在有生之年都不再剃掉它。他仿佛变了一个人，用一段爱情来取代另一段爱情的想法让他误入歧途。渐渐地，费尔明娜·达萨的味道变得越来越淡，越来越难以闻见，最后只留在了白色的栀子花上。
One night during the war, when he was drifting, not knowing what direction his life should take, the celebrated Widow Nazaret took refuge in his house because hers had been destroyed by cannon fire during the siege by the rebel general Ricardo Gaitán Obeso. It was Tránsito Ariza who took control of the situation and sent the widow to her son’s bedroom on the pretext that there was no space in hers, but actually in the hope that another love would cure him of the one that did not allow him to live. Florentino Ariza had not made love since he lost his virginity to Rosalba in the cabin on the boat, and in this emergency it seemed natural to him that the widow should sleep in the bed and he in the hammock. But she had already made the decision for him. She sat on the edge of the bed where Florentino Ariza was lying, not knowing what to do, and she began to speak to him of her inconsolable grief for the husband who had died three years earlier, and in the meantime she removed her widow’s weeds and tossed them in the air until she was not even wearing her wedding ring. She took off the taffeta blouse with the beaded embroidery and threw it across the room onto the easy chair in the corner, she tossed her bodice over her shoulder to the other side of the bed, with one pull she removed her long ruffled skirt, her satin garter belt and funereal stockings, and she threw everything on the floor until the room was carpeted with the last remnants of her mourning. She did it with so much joy, and with such well-measured pauses, that each of her gestures seemed to be saluted by the cannon of the attacking troops, which shook the city down to its foundations. Florentino Ariza tried to help her unfasten her stays, but she anticipated him with a deft maneuver, for in five years of matrimonial devotion she learned to depend on herself in all phases of love, even the preliminary stages, with no help from anyone. Then she removed her lace panties, sliding them down her legs with the rapid movements of a swimmer, and at last she was naked.
他随波逐流，不知道生活该从哪里继续。战争时期的一个晚上，那位远近闻名的拿撒勒[13]的寡妇惊慌失措地躲到他家，因为在叛军将军里卡多·加依坦·奥贝索围城的时候，她自己的家被炮弹炸塌了。特兰西多·阿里萨立即抓住这个机会，借口说自己的房间没有地方，把寡妇安排在了儿子的卧室，实际上，她是盼望用另一段爱情来疗愈那份让儿子痛不欲生的爱。自从在船上的舱室被罗萨尔芭夺去了童贞，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨就再没有做过爱。他觉得，在这样一个有紧急情况的夜晚，寡妇睡床上，自己睡吊床是很自然的事。可寡妇已经替他做了决定。躺在床上的弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨不知道该做些什么，而她坐在床沿，开始讲述三年前丈夫的死给她带来的无法慰藉的痛苦，边讲边脱掉外面披着的一层守寡黑纱，把它抛向空中，甚至把结婚戒指也从手上摘了下来。她脱掉镶着小珠子的塔夫绸衬衣，抛到房间另一头角落里的安乐椅上，又把紧身背心从肩膀上方扔出去，丢到了床的另一头，然后，迅速褪掉了长至脚踝、带荷叶边的百褶裙、绸缎束腹带，还有守寡的黑丝袜。她把东西扔得到处都是，整个房间都被她那身丧服的零七八碎覆盖了。她兴高采烈地做着这一切，而且间隔恰到好处，仿佛每个动作都有进攻部队那震得城市地基颤抖的炮声为之庆祝。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨想帮她解开胸衣上的按扣，但她以娴熟的动作抢在前面，因为在五年恩爱的夫妻生活中，她已经学会了做·爱的每一个步骤都自给自足，甚至包括前戏，无需任何人帮忙。最后，她脱掉蕾丝花边的内裤，以游泳运动员的敏捷将它从双腿上褪下来，露出自己的玉体。（注：[13] 拿撒勒，位于今天的以色列，传说耶稣在此度过青年时期，故常被称为“拿撒勒的耶稣”。）
She was twenty-eight years old and had given birth three times, but her naked body preserved intact the giddy excitement of an unmarried woman. Florentino Ariza was never to understand how a few articles of penitential clothing could have hidden the drives of that wild mare who, choking on her own feverish desire, undressed him as she had never been able to undress her husband, who would have thought her perverse, and tried, with the confusion and innocence of five years of conjugal fidelity, to satisfy in a single assault the iron abstinence of her mourning. Before that night, and from the hour of grace when her mother gave birth to her, she had never even been in the same bed with any man other than her dead husband.
她二十八岁，生育过三个孩子，但她的裸体还完美地保持着独身时那动人心魄的魅力。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨永远也不会明白，之前那几件忏悔服是如何掩盖住这匹未被驯服的小母马的热情的。她脱光了弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的衣服，被自己的狂热弄得喘不过气来，要知道，她对丈夫都不曾这么做过，怕他认为自己是个淫荡的女人。她带着五年忠贞婚姻生活的迷茫与无知，试图一举满足守丧期间被严酷禁止的欲望。自她从娘胎里生下来的那个美好时刻起，到这个夜晚之前，除了死去的丈夫，她甚至从未跟别的男人共过一张床。
She did not permit herself the vulgarity of remorse. On the contrary. Kept awake by the gunfire whizzing over the roofs, she continued to evoke her husband’s excellent qualities until daybreak, not reproaching him for any disloyalty other than his having died without her, which was mitigated by her conviction that he had never belonged to her as much as he did now that he was in the coffin nailed shut with a dozen three-inch nails and two meters under the ground.
她并没有让内疚扫自己的兴。而是恰恰相反。屋顶上呼啸而过的火球让她睡不着觉，她继续讲述丈夫的种种优点，直到天亮。除了抛下她死去这一点，她没有责怪他的任何不忠。事实上，她感到释然，因为她确信丈夫如今比任何时候都更完全地属于自己，他已躺在那个钉了十二枚三英寸钉的棺材里，埋在地下两米深的地方。
“I am happy,” she said, “because only now do I know for certain where he is when he is not at home.”
“我很幸福，”她说，“因为只有现在我才十分肯定地知道，他不在家时到底在哪儿。”
That night she stopped wearing mourning once and for all, without passing through the useless intermediate stage of blouses with little gray flowers, and her life was filled with love songs and provocative dresses decorated with macaws and spotted butterflies, and she began to share her body with anyone who cared to ask for it. When the troops of General Gaitán Obeso were defeated after a sixty-three-day siege, she rebuilt the house that had been damaged by cannon fire, adding a beautiful sea terrace that overlooked the breakwater where the surf would vent its fury during the stormy season. That was her love nest, as she called it without irony, where she would receive only men she liked, when she liked, how she liked, and without charging one red cent, because in her opinion it was the men who were doing her the favor. In a very few cases she would accept a gift, as long as it was not made of gold, and she managed everything with so much skill that no one could have presented conclusive evidence of improper conduct. On only one occasion did she hover on the edge of public scandal, when the rumor circulated that Archbishop Dante de Luna had not died by accident after eating a plate of poisonous mushrooms but had eaten them intentionally because she threatened to expose him if he persisted in his sacrilegious solicitations. As she used to say between peals of laughter, she was the only free woman in the province.
那天晚上，她一步到位地脱掉了丧服，没有经过穿灰色小花衬衫的多余的过渡阶段。她的生活一下子充满了情歌和撩人的衣衫，件件都绘着五彩的鹦鹉和蝴蝶。她开始把身体分给所有向她索取的人。围城六十三天后，加依坦·奥贝索将军的军队被击退了，她重建了被大炮炸穿了底儿的房子，还在防波堤上建起一座漂亮的观海露台，暴风雨来时，可以观赏愤怒咆哮的海浪。这里是她的爱之巢，她毫无讥讽之意地如是说。在这里，她只接待合她胃口的人，想什么时候就什么时候，想以何种方式就以何种方式，不向任何人收取一分钱，因为她认为，是那些男人施惠于她。只在极少的情况下，她才接受礼物，而且不能是黄金。她做得如此恰到好处，谁也拿不出她行为不端的确凿证据。只有一次，她险些在公众中闹出丑闻，当时谣言四起，说大主教但丁·德鲁纳并非死于误食了一盘毒蘑菇，而是有意服毒，因为她威胁他说，如果他再继续亵渎神明地纠缠她，她就抹脖子自尽。但没有人问过她这是不是真的，她自己也从来没有提起过，她的生活毫无变化。确实，正如她自己常常大笑着说的那样，她是全省唯一的自由女人。
The Widow Nazaret never missed her occasional appointments with Florentino Ariza, not even during her busiest times, and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved, although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love. Sometimes he went to her house, and then they liked to sit on the sea terrace, drenched by salt spray, watching the dawn of the whole world on the horizon. With all his perseverance, he tried to teach her the tricks he had seen others perform through the peepholes in the transient hotel, along with the theoretical formulations preached by Lotario Thugut on his nights of debauchery. He persuaded her to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn-and-quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as they were trying to devise something new in a hammock. The lessons were to no avail. The truth is that she was a fearless apprentice but lacked all talent for guided fornication. She never understood the charm of serenity in bed, never had a moment of invention, and her orgasms were inopportune and epidermic: an uninspired lay. For a long time Florentino Ariza lived with the deception that he was the only one, and she humored him in that belief until she had the bad luck to talk in her sleep. Little by little, listening to her sleep, he pieced together the navigation chart of her dreams and sailed among the countless islands of her secret life. In this way he learned that she did not want to marry him, but did feel joined to his life because of her immense gratitude to him for having corrupted her. She often said to him:
对于弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的偶尔相邀，拿撒勒的寡妇即便在最忙的时候也从不爽约，而且也从不抱着爱上他或被他爱上的假想，只是希望能找到某种类似爱情却又没有爱情之烦恼的东西。有时他也会去她家，两人喜欢坐在观海露台上，浑身被硝石味儿的海水泡沫打得湿漉漉的，眺望地平线上即将照亮整个世界的黎明之光。他尽全力地教她那些他从旅馆的小孔里学来的颠鸾倒凤的花样，并实践洛达里奥·图古特在狂欢之夜吹嘘的那些理论成规。他说服她在两人做爱的时候让人观看，并改变常规的传教士体位，代之以“海上自行车”，“烤架上的烤鸡”，又或者“被肢解的天使”等等姿势。当他们试图在吊床上发明出与众不同的花样，吊床的挂绳断了，两人摔下来差点送了命。这些课程的效果微乎其微，因为事实上，她虽然是个无所畏惧的莽撞学徒，却缺乏最起码的天赋，难以消化这些指导。她永远也不理解在床上保持肃穆的乐趣，从未有过灵光乍现的瞬间，性高潮也总是来得不合时宜，且浮于表面：一种乏味的欢愉。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨有很长时间都受到蒙骗，以为自己是她唯一的男人，而她也乐意让他这样以为，直到有一回她运气不佳，睡着的时候说漏了嘴。渐渐地，通过偷听到的梦话，他把她梦中的航海地图拼凑起来，然后穿梭于那不可计数的秘密岛屿之间。由此，他知道了她并不想嫁给他，但又觉得与他的生活紧密相连，因为她无限感激他让她得以堕落。有好几次，她对他说：
“I adore you because you made me a whore.”
“我崇敬你，因为是你把我变成了娼妇。”
Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginity or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love. And something else that from that time on would be her reason for living: he convinced her that one comes into the world with a predetermined allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them for whatever reason, one’s own or someone else’s, willingly or unwillingly, loses them forever. It was to her credit that she took him at his word. Still, because he thought he knew her better than anyone else, Florentino Ariza could not understand why a woman of such puerile resources should be so popular — a woman, moreover, who never stopped talking in bed about the grief she felt for her dead husband. The only explanation he could think of, one that could not be denied, was that the Widow Nazaret had enough tenderness to make up for what she lacked in the marital arts. They began to see each other with less frequency as she widened her horizons and he exploited his, trying to find solace in other hearts for his pain, and at last, with no sorrow, they forgot each other.
如果换个方式说，其实她不无道理。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨从她这里夺走了正常夫妻间所保有的那种贞洁，这比夺走童贞或让寡妇失节更加有破坏力。他让她明白，只要是为了让爱情长久，床上所做的任何事都算不上不道德。另外，还有些东西自此成为她生活的信条：他说服她，一个人在这世上能交欢的次数是有限的，如果不充分利用，那不论是自己还是他人的原因，也不论是自愿还是被迫，都永远失去了这些机会。她的优点就在于一字不差地听从了他的话。然而，正是因为弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨自认为比任何人都了解她，他不能理解，为何这样一个缺乏情趣、喜欢在床上不停唠叨丈夫之死给她带来的痛苦的女人，会有这么多的追求者。他唯一能想到的不可辩驳的解释，就是拿撒勒的寡妇的温柔弥补了她床上功夫的不足。随着她领地的扩大，而他也开始慢慢探索自己的领地，试图在另外一些支离破碎的心灵中寻找抹平旧日伤痕的慰藉，两人见面越来越少，最后毫无痛苦地忘掉了对方。
That was Florentino Ariza’s first bedroom love. But instead of their forming a permanent union, of the kind his mother dreamed about, both used it to embark on a profligate way of life. Florentino Ariza developed methods that seemed incredible in someone like him, taciturn and thin and dressed like an old man from another time. He had two advantages working in his favor, however. One was an unerring eye that promptly spotted the woman, even in a crowd, who was waiting for him, though even then he courted her with caution, for he felt that nothing was more embarrassing or more demeaning than a refusal. The other was that women promptly identified him as a solitary man in need of love, a street beggar as humble as a whipped dog, who made them yield without conditions, without asking him for anything, without hoping for anything from him except the tranquillity of knowing they had done him a favor. These were his only weapons, and with them he joined in historic battles of absolute secrecy, which he recorded with the rigor of a notary in a coded book, recognizable among many others by the title that said everything: Women. His first notation was the Widow Nazaret. Fifty years later, when Fermina Daza was freed from her sacramental sentence, he had some twenty-five notebooks, with six hundred twenty-two entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless fleeting adventures that did not even deserve a charitable note.
这是弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的第一次床上之爱。但他没有像母亲做梦都盼望的那样和她结成稳固的关系，相反，两人都利用这次机会，投入到各自的生活当中。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨发明出许多方法，对像他这样一个郁郁寡欢、骨瘦如柴、穿得仿佛另一个时代的老头儿的男人来说，颇不可思议。然而，有两个优势可以助他一臂之力。其一就是他独具慧眼，即便在人群中也能一下子认出哪个女人正期待着他这样的男人，但尽管如此，他献殷勤的时候也小心翼翼，因为他觉得没有什么比遭到拒绝更让人感到羞辱了。他的另一个优势在于，她们会当即认定他是一个急需爱情抚慰的孤独者，一个流浪街头、丧家犬般的可怜人，这使得她们无条件地投降，没有任何索求，也不期待从他身上得到任何东西，只求能够施恩于他，让自己的良心得到安宁。这是他仅有的两样武器，凭借它们，他展开了一系列历史性的绝密战斗，并以公证人的严谨把它们一一记录在一个密码本上。这个本子在众多本子中能一眼辨认出来，因为上面写着一个说明一切的标题：她们。他做的第一个记录就是拿撒勒的寡妇。五十年后，当费尔明娜·达萨从她那通过神圣仪式所领受的判决中解脱出来时，他已经拥有了二十五个本子，里面有六百二十二条较长恋情的记录，这还不包括那无数次的短暂艳遇，因为它们甚至都不值得他怜悯地提上一笔。
After six months of furious lovemaking with the Widow Nazaret, Florentino Ariza himself was convinced that he had survived the torment of Fermina Daza. He not only believed it, he also discussed it several times with Tránsito Ariza during the two years of Fermina Daza ‘s wedding trip, and he continued to believe it with a feeling of boundless freedom until one fateful Sunday when, with no warning and no presentiments, he saw her leaving High Mass on her husband’s arm, besieged by the curiosity and flattery of her new world. The same ladies from fine families who at first had scorned and ridiculed her for being an upstart without a name went out of their way to make her feel like one of them, and she intoxicated them with her charm. She had assumed the condition of woman of the world to such perfection that Florentino Ariza needed a moment of reflection to recognize her. She was another person: the composure of an older woman, the high boots, the hat with the veil and colored plume from some Oriental bird — everything about her was distinctive and confident, as if it had been hers from birth. He found her more beautiful and youthful than ever, but more lost to him than she had ever been, although he did not understand why until he saw the curve of her belly under the silk tunic: she was in her sixth month of pregnancy. But what impressed him most was that she and her husband made an admirable couple, and both of them negotiated the world with so much fluidity that they seemed to float above the pitfalls of reality. Florentino Ariza did not feel either jealousy or rage — only great contempt for himself. He felt poor, ugly, inferior, and unworthy not only of her but of any other woman on the face of the earth.
和拿撒勒的寡妇疯狂而放肆地爱恋了六个月后，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨自信已经从费尔明娜·达萨之痛中幸存下来。他不只相信这一点，还在费尔明娜·达萨持续了近两年之久的新婚旅行期间，多次向特兰西多·阿里萨说起过。他相信自己的感情已经获得了无限制的解放，直到一个灾难的星期日，他在没有任何预感的情况下突然看见了她。当时，她刚望完大弥撒，正挽着丈夫的手臂，被她新圈子里的人好奇而又谄媚地包围着。当初，这些门第高贵的夫人们看不起她，嘲笑她家是无名无姓的暴发户，而如今，她用自己的魅力把她们迷得晕头转向，她们殷切地希望她能感觉到自己是她们中的一员。她如此驾轻就熟地胜任了尘世中妻子的角色，以至于弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨必须定睛反应片刻才把她认出来。她变成了另一个人：成年人的装扮，高高的靴子，面纱帽上插着一根东方鸟的彩色羽毛。她身上的一切都变了样，而且是那么的自然而然，仿佛她天生就是如此。他发现她比以往任何时候都更美、更年轻，却也比以往任何时候都更遥不可及，他不明白这其中的缘故，直到看见她真丝长裙下腹部隆起的曲线：她已经有了六个月的身孕。然而，最让他感慨万千的，是她和丈夫组成了令人羡慕的一对，两人应付裕如地周旋于他们的世界，仿佛超然于现实的艰难险阻。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨没有忌妒，也没有愤怒，而是感到一种巨大的自卑。他觉得自己可怜，丑陋，低贱，不仅配不上她，也配不上世界上任何一个女人。
So she had returned. She came back without any reason to repent of the sudden change she had made in her life. On the contrary, she had fewer and fewer such reasons, above all after surviving the difficulties of the early years, which was especially admirable in her case, for she had come to her wedding night still trailing clouds of innocence. She had begun to lose them during her journey through Cousin Hildebranda’s province. In Valledupar she realized at last why the roosters chase the hens, she witnessed the brutal ceremony of the burros, she watched the birth of calves, and she listened to her cousins talking with great naturalness about which couples in the family still made love and which ones had stopped, and when, and why, even though they continued to live together. That was when she was initiated into solitary love, with the strange sensation of discovering something that her instincts had always known, first in bed, holding her breath so she would not give herself away in the bedroom she shared with half a dozen cousins, and then, with eagerness and unconcern, sprawling on the bathroom floor, her hair loose, smoking her first mule drivers” cigarette. She always did it with certain pangs of conscience, which she could overcome only after she was married, and always in absolute secrecy, although her cousins boasted to each other not only about the number of orgasms they had in one day but even about their form and size. But despite those bewitching first rites, she was still burdened by the belief that the loss of virginity was a bloody sacrifice.
就这样，她回来了，对生活中翻天覆地的变化没有丝毫后悔地回来了。不仅如此，经历了最初几年的坎坷后，她越来越没有什么可后悔了。对于带着天真的懵懂步入新婚之夜的她来说，这种情况可以说尤其值得庆贺。其实，在去伊尔德布兰达表姐家省份的那次旅行中，她就已经开始褪去天真。在巴耶杜帕尔，她终于明白了为什么公鸡要追着母鸡跑，还亲眼目睹了驴子交配的野蛮场面，看见过牛犊出生的情形，甚至听过表姐妹们大大方方地谈论家中的哪些夫妻还在做爱，而哪些尽管生活在一起却已经不做了，是从何时起，又是为什么不做的。正是在那时，她开始了独自一人的爱，奇怪地感觉到自己发现了某些本能中一早就知道的事，起先是在床上，屏住呼吸，以免被同屋的六个表姐妹发觉，后来则是放松地躺在浴室的地板上，用两只手，披头散发，还抽着她最初的几支脚夫的细雪茄。这样做时，她总是带着良心上的疑虑，直到婚后才消除，而且也总是秘密进行，不像那些表姐妹们，不仅炫耀每天能达到多少次高潮，甚至还讨论其形式和程度。然而，尽管享受过这些先导仪式的美妙，她始终还是怀着最初的信念，认为失去童贞定是一项血腥的祭祀。
So that her wedding, one of the most spectacular of the final years of the last century, was for her the prelude to horror. The anguish of the honeymoon affected her much more than the social uproar caused by her marriage to the most incomparably elegant young man of the day. When the banns were announced at High Mass in the Cathedral, Fermina Daza received anonymous letters again, some of them containing death threats, but she took scant notice of them because all the fear of which she was capable was centered on her imminent violation. Although that was not her intention, it was the correct way to respond to anonymous letters from a class accustomed by the affronts of history to bow before faits accomplis. So that little by little they swallowed their opposition as it became clear that the marriage was irrevocable. She noticed the gradual changes in the attention paid her by livid women, degraded by arthritis and resentment, who one day were convinced of the uselessness of their intrigues and appeared unannounced in the little Park of the Evangels as if it were their own home, bearing recipes and engagement gifts. Tránsito Ariza knew that world, although this was the only time it caused her suffering in her own person, and she knew that her clients always reappeared on the eve of great parties to ask her please to dig down into her jars and lend them their pawned jewels for only twenty-four hours in exchange for the payment of additional interest. It had been a long while since this had occurred to the extent it did now, the jars emptied so that the ladies with long last names could emerge from their shadowy sanctuaries and, radiant in their own borrowed jewels, appear at a wedding more splendid than any that would be seen for the rest of the century and whose ultimate glory was the sponsorship of Dr. Rafael Núñez, three times President of the Republic, philosopher, poet, and author of the words to the national anthem, as anyone could learn, from that time on, in some of the more recent dictionaries. Fermina Daza came to the main altar of the Cathedral on the arm of her father, whose formal dress lent him, for the day, an ambiguous air of respectability. She was married forever after at the main altar of the Cathedral, with a Mass at which three bishops officiated, at eleven o’clock in the morning on the day of the Holy Trinity, and without a single charitable thought for Florentino Ariza, who at that hour was delirious with fever, dying because of her, lying without shelter on a boat that was not to carry him to forgetting. During the ceremony, and later at the reception, she wore a smile that seemed painted on with white lead, a soulless grimace that some interpreted as a mocking smile of victory, but in reality was her poor attempt at disguising the terror of a virgin bride.
因此，那场在上世纪末最为轰动的婚礼，对她来说，却仿佛灾难的前夕。比起和一位当时堪称独一无二的绅士缔结婚约所引起的流言蜚语，对蜜月的恐惧对她影响更大。自从在大教堂的大弥撒中发布了结婚公告，费尔明娜·达萨又收到了多封匿名信，有些甚至以死相胁，但她也只是草草地看上一眼，因为她将所有的恐惧都集中在自己即将被强奸这件事上了。尽管并非有意，但这样处理匿名信的方式是正确的，其实那些不敢留名的人所属的阶层，在历史的嘲弄下，早已习惯了对既成的事实低头。渐渐地，由于知道婚礼势在必行，她们吞下了反对的声音。她从那些被关节炎和忌恨之心折磨得憔悴失色、面色惨白的女人越来越殷勤的态度中，看出了这一点。她们终于意识到自己的阴谋是徒劳的，于是不请自来地出现在福音花园，就好像那里是她们自己家似的，还带来了菜谱和祝福吉祥的礼物。特兰西多·阿里萨了解那些人的世界，但只有那一次，她为此感到切肤之痛。她知道，主顾们会在重大庆典的前夕出现在她家，求她把罐子从地下挖出来，把典当的首饰借给她们二十四个小时，并额外支付利息。已经有很长时间没出现过这种情形了：罐子全都空了，为的是让那些拥有一长串姓氏的夫人们走出她们阴暗的圣殿，戴着租来的曾经属于自己的首饰，珠光宝气地出现在那场盛况空前的世纪末婚礼上。婚礼的至高荣耀莫过于由拉法埃尔·努涅斯博士主婚。博士曾三次担任共和国总统，是哲学家、诗人和国歌的词作者，这些都已写入了当时一些新出版的辞典。费尔明娜·达萨挽着父亲的手臂，走到大教堂的主祭台前。那天，父亲的礼服为他注入了一种模糊的受人尊重的气质。在大教堂的主祭台前，在一台由三位主教共同主持的弥撒中，在圣三主日[14]早上十一时，她永远地结婚了，甚至不曾怜悯地想到弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨片刻。而此时的弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨，正坐在一条风浪之中、最终也没能将他带入忘却之境的船上，烧得直说胡话，几乎为她而死。在整个婚礼仪式以及后来的庆祝活动中，她始终保持着仿佛被铅白定住的微笑，这种并非发自内心的表情被某些人理解为胜利者的嘲笑，但其实不过是她用来掩饰新婚处女恐惧的一种可怜手段罢了。（注：[14] 圣三主日，天主教传统节日，旨在纪念三位一体的奥秘，日期依复活节而定，即圣神降临节之后的第一个主日。）
It was fortunate that unforeseen circumstances, combined with her husband’s understanding, resolved the first three nights without pain. It was providential. The ship of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, its itinerary upset by bad weather in the Caribbean, announced only three days in advance that its departure had been moved ahead by twenty-four hours, so that it would not sail for La Rochelle on the day following the wedding, as had been planned for the past six months, but on that same night. No one believed that the change was not another of the many elegant surprises the wedding had to offer, for the reception ended after midnight on board the brightly lit ocean liner, with a Viennese orchestra that was premiering the most recent waltzes by Johann Strauss on this voyage. So that various members of the wedding party, soggy with champagne, had to be dragged ashore by their long-suffering wives when they began to ask the stewards if there were any free cabins so they could continue the celebration all the way to Paris. The last to leave saw Lorenzo Daza outside the port taverns, sitting on the ground in the middle of the street, his tuxedo in ruins. He was crying with tremendous loud wails, the way Arabs cry for their dead, sitting in a trickle of fouled water that might well have been a pool of tears.
幸运的是，一些突发的状况，加上丈夫的善解人意，让她顺利度过了前三个晚上，没有丝毫痛苦。真是老天保佑。由于加勒比海天气恶劣，大西洋轮船总局那艘船的航线被打乱，提前三天才通知要提早二十四小时出发，也就是说，船不会像六个月以来一直预计的那样，于婚礼次日前往拉罗切利，而是当晚就要起航。人人都以为，这个变化是婚礼预先为大家准备的众多华丽而高雅的惊喜之一：庆祝活动改在一艘灯火辉煌的远洋轮船上举行，直到午夜过后才结束，一支维也纳管弦乐队在席中首次演奏了约翰·施特劳斯最新创作的圆舞曲。最后，几个被香槟灌得醉醺醺的伴郎是被他们那受不了的妻子拖上岸的，当时他们正到处问侍者船上是否有空舱室好让他们把狂欢一直延续到巴黎去。最后下船的人在港口的酒馆前看见了洛伦索·达萨。他坐在大街上，礼服已经被扯烂，就像阿拉伯人为自己死去的亲人哭丧一样号啕不止。那摊他正坐在其中的几乎汇流成渠的臭水，很可能就是他的一汪眼泪。
Not on the first night on rough seas, or on the following nights of smooth sailing, or ever in her very long married life did the barbarous acts occur that Fermina Daza had feared. Despite the size of the ship and the luxuries of their stateroom, the first night was a horrible repetition of the schooner trip from Riohacha, and her husband, a diligent physician, did not sleep at all so he could comfort her, which was all that an overly distinguished physician knew how to do for seasickness. But the storm abated on the third day, after the port of Guayra, and by that time they had spent so much time together and had talked so much that they felt like old friends. On the fourth night, when both resumed their ordinary habits, Dr. Juvenal Urbino was surprised that his young wife did not pray before going to sleep. She was frank with him: the duplicity of the nuns had provoked in her a certain resistance to rituals, but her faith was intact, and she had learned to maintain it in silence. She said: “I prefer direct communication with God.” He understood her reasoning, and from then on they each practiced the same religion in their own way. They had had a brief engagement, but a rather informal one for that time: Dr. Urbino had visited her in her house, without a chaperone, every day at sunset. She would not have permitted him to touch even her fingertips before the episcopal blessing, but he had not attempted to. It was on the first calm night, when they were in bed but still dressed, that he began his first caresses with so much care that his suggestion that she put on her nightdress seemed natural to her. She went into the bathroom to change, but first she turned out the lights in the stateroom, and when she came out in her chemise she covered the cracks around the door with articles of clothing so she could return to bed in absolute darkness. As she did so, she said with good humor:
无论是海上狂风巨浪的第一夜，还是接下来平缓航行的几天，抑或是在他们漫长的婚姻生活中，费尔明娜·达萨担心的那种野蛮举动都从没有发生过。尽管船很大，舱室豪华，但第一夜仍旧可怕地重复了里奥阿查那艘轻便船上的经历。她的丈夫充当了殷勤医生的角色，片刻未睡地安慰她，因为这是一位过于杰出的医生所知道的对付晕船唯一可做的事。第三天，过了瓜伊拉港后，风暴平息了，他们已经在一起度过了很长时间，交谈过很多，彼此感觉像老朋友一样了。第四天晚上，两人恢复了各自的日常习惯。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生惊讶于自己年轻的妻子睡觉前竟然不祷告。她坦诚相告：修女们的两面派作风造成了她对宗教仪式的抵触，但她的信仰是完整的，她学会了默默地保持它。她说：“我更愿意直接与上帝沟通。”他表示理解，从那时起，他们就以各自的形式信奉着同一种宗教。两人曾有一段短暂的订婚期，但对那个时代而言是相当不正式的：不过就是医生每日黄昏都到她家去看她，而没有人在一旁监视。在主教祝福之前，她是连手指头也不会允许他碰一下的，而他也没有做过这样的尝试。在海面平静下来之后的第一夜，两人和衣躺在床上，他开始了最初的爱抚，十分小心翼翼，所以当他建议她换上睡衣时，她觉得很自然。她走到盥洗室去换衣服，但先把舱室里的灯熄了，等穿好睡衣出来，她又用几块布塞住门缝，然后才在完完全全的黑暗中回到床上。她一边这样做，一边心情不错地说：
“What do you expect, Doctor? This is the first time I have slept with a stranger.”
“你想怎么样呢，医生？这是我第一次和陌生男人一起睡觉。”
Dr. Urbino felt her slide in next to him like a startled little animal, trying to keep as far away as possible in a bunk where it was difficult for two people to be together without touching. He took her hand, cold and twitching with terror, he entwined his fingers with hers, and almost in a whisper he began to recount his recollections of other ocean voyages. She was tense again because when she came back to bed she realized that he had taken off all his clothes while she was in the bathroom, which revived her terror of what was to come. But what was to come took several hours, for Dr. Urbino continued talking very slowly as he won her body’s confidence millimeter by millimeter. He spoke to her of Paris, of love in Paris, of the lovers in Paris who kissed on the street, on the omnibus, on the flowering terraces of the cafés opened to the burning winds and languid accordions of summer, who made love standing up on the quays of the Seine without anyone disturbing them. As he spoke in the darkness he caressed the curve of her neck with his fingertips, he caressed the fine silky hair on her arms, her evasive belly, and when he felt that her tension had given way he made his first attempt to raise her nightgown, but she stopped him with an impulse typical of her character. She said: “I know how to do it myself.” She took it off, in fact, and then she was so still that Dr. Urbino might have thought she was no longer there if it had not been for the glint of her body in the darkness.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生感觉到她像一只惊慌失措的小动物一样滑到他身边，尽可能地离他远些，但在这样一张简易床上，很难做到谁也不碰谁。他抓住她冰凉、因害怕而有些发抖的手，把两人的手指交叉在一起，然后几乎耳语般讲起了自己另外几次海上旅行的经历。她再度紧张起来，因为回到床上后，她发现就在自己去盥洗室的时候，他已脱光了所有的衣服，这让她重新萌生了对下一步的恐惧。但这下一步却推迟了好几个小时，乌尔比诺医生只是继续缓慢地述说，一边说，一边一毫米一毫米地争取她身体的信任。他说起了巴黎，说起了巴黎的爱情，说起巴黎的情侣们在大街上，在公共汽车上，在向夏日火热的空气和慵懒的手风琴声敞开大门的咖啡馆那开满鲜花的露台上亲吻，在塞纳河的码头上站着做爱，而不会被任何人打扰。他一边在黑暗中呢喃，一边用指肚抚摸她脖颈的曲线，她手臂上如丝般柔软的茸毛，以及她那躲躲闪闪的腹部。当他觉得她的紧张感已经消除时，第一次做出了掀开她睡袍的尝试，但她以性格中特有的冲动制止了他。她说：“我自己知道怎么做。”果然，她脱掉了睡袍，然后就一动不动地躺着，要不是她的身体在黑暗中发出微光，乌尔比诺医生甚至以为她已经不在那里了。
After a while he took her hand again, and this time it was warm and relaxed but still moist with a tender dew. They were silent and unmoving for a while longer, he looking for the opportunity to take the next step and she waiting for it without knowing where it would come from, while the darkness expanded as their breathing grew more and more intense. Without warning he let go of her hand and made his leap into the void: he wet the tip of his forefinger with his tongue and grazed her nipple when it was caught off guard, and she felt a mortal explosion as if he had touched a raw nerve. She was glad of the darkness so he could not see the searing blush that shook her all the way to the base of her skull. “Don’t worry,” he said with great calm. “Don’t forget that I’ve met them already.” He felt her smile, and her voice was sweet and new in the darkness.
片刻之后，他又抓住她的手，这次，她的手变得温暖而放松，但仍旧湿湿的，沁着柔软的汗珠。他们沉默地、一动不动地待了一会儿。他在伺机进行下一步，而她在等待着，不知他会从何处开始。随着她的呼吸越来越急促，房间里变得越来越黑。突然，他松开她的手，一跃而起：用舌头舔湿了中指的指肚，轻轻碰了一下她那毫无防备的乳头，而她感觉到致命一击，仿佛他触到了她的一根活神经。她庆幸自己处于黑暗之中，不会让他看见她那使得全身震颤直至发根的滚烫羞红。“别紧张。”他对她说，语气极为温和，“别忘了，我是见过它们的。”他感觉到她笑了，黑暗中，她的声音甜美而鲜嫩。
Then he knew that they had rounded the cape of good hope, and he took her large, soft hand again and covered it with forlorn little kisses, first the hard metacarpus, the long, discerning fingers, the diaphanous nails, and then the hieroglyphics of her destiny on her perspiring palm. She never knew how her hand came to his chest and felt something it could not decipher. He said: “It is a scapular.” She caressed the hairs on his chest one by one and then seized all the hair in her fist to pull it out by the roots. “Harder,” he said. She tried, until she knew she was not hurting him, and then it was her hand that sought his, lost in the darkness. But he did not allow their fingers to intertwine; instead he grasped her by the wrist and moved her hand along his body with an invisible but well-directed strength until she felt the ardent breath of a naked animal without bodily form, but eager and erect. Contrary to what he had imagined, even contrary to what she herself had imagined, she did not withdraw her hand or let it lie inert where he placed it, but instead she commended herself body and soul to the Blessed Virgin, clenched her teeth for fear she would laugh out loud at her own madness, and began to identify her rearing adversary by touch, discovering its size, the strength of its shaft, the extension of its wings, amazed by its determination but pitying its solitude, making it her own with a detailed curiosity that someone less experienced than her husband might have confused with caresses. He summoned all his reserves of strength to overcome the vertigo of her implacable scrutiny, until she released it with childish unconcern as if she were tossing it into the trash.
这时，他知道自己已经绕过了美好希望的海角[15]。他再次拿起她修长而绵软的手，用一个个孤零零的轻吻覆盖了它，从棱角分明的手背，到纤长灵敏的手指、透明的指甲，再到那沁着香汗的手掌上象征命运的掌纹。她不知道自己的手如何到了他的胸膛，碰到了一片不知道是什么的东西。他说：“这是圣衣。”她抚摸着他胸口的软毛，又用五根手指抓住这片草丛，仿佛要把它们连根拔起。“再使点儿劲。”他说。她试着加了些力气，直到她确信不至于把他弄疼的程度。之后，竟然是她的手在寻找他那消失在黑暗中的手。但他没有与她十指相扣，而是一把抓住她的手腕，用一种无形、却又恰到好处的力量，引领她的手沿着他的身体游走，直到她感觉到一头赤身猛兽的炽热气息，没有固定的形状，却热切而高昂。与他的想象相反，甚至也与她自己的想象相反，她的手并没有撤回去，也没有停在他把它放下的地方。她将自己全身心地托付给了至圣童贞马利亚。她咬着牙，生怕会因这疯狂的举动而笑出声来：她开始通过触摸来认识那个昂首挺立的对手，认识它的体积，它那长茎的力量，它两翼的延伸，既对它的坚决感到害怕，又对它的孤独感到同情。她带着细致入微的好奇，一点一点地将它据为己有，若非丈夫是个富有经验的人，准会把她的举动错会成挑逗。他求助于自己的最后一点力气，抵抗着这番致命探究带来的眩晕，直到她以孩子般的随性放开了它，就像把它丢进垃圾堆似的。（注：[15] 即“好望角”的典故，绕过此海角就意味着好运来临。）
“I remember it very well,” she said, “and I’m still angry.”
“我记得很清楚，”她说，“而且我的气现在还没消呢。”
Then, with authoritative methodology, he explained it to her in all seriousness while he moved her hand to the places he mentioned and she allowed it to be moved with the obedience of an exemplary pupil. At a propitious moment he suggested that all of this was easier in the light. He was going to turn it on, but she held his arm, saying: “I see better with my hands.” In reality she wanted to turn on the light as well, but she wanted to be the one to do it, without anyone’s ordering her to, and she had her way. Then he saw her in the sudden brightness, huddled in the fetal position beneath the sheet. But he watched as she grasped the animal under study without hesitation, turned it this way and that, observed it with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific, and said when she was finished: “How ugly it is, even uglier than a woman’s thing.” He agreed, and pointed out other disadvantages more serious than ugliness. He said: “It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacrificing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases.” She continued to examine it, asking what this was for and what that was for, and when she felt satisfied with her information she hefted it in both hands to confirm that it did not weigh enough to bother with, and let it drop with a gesture of disdain.
于是，他如同上课一般认真地向她解释起来，一边讲一边带着她的手移过他所提到的各个部位，而她则像个模范学生一样，顺从地跟随着他。在一个恰当的时刻，他建议把灯点亮，让一切更清楚些。他正要去点，她却拦住了他的手臂，说：“我用手看得更清楚。”事实上，她也想把灯点亮，但她想自己点，而不是被别人命令。最后，她得偿所愿。他在突然出现的光亮中看见了她，胎儿似的蜷缩着，包裹在被单里。但他发现她丝毫没有忸怩作态，而是再一次抓住那只让她充满好奇的野兽，把它扭向右又扭向左，带着一种似乎已经超越了科学范畴的兴趣观察它，最后得出结论：“它多丑啊，比女人的更难看。”他表示赞同，并指出它的几种比丑陋更严重的弊端。他说：“它就像人的长子，你工作一辈子都是为了它，为它牺牲了一切，可到头来，它还是只做它想做的事。”她继续探索着，不时地问这是干什么用的，那又是干什么用的。当她认为已经了解得足够清楚了，就用双手掂了掂它，最终证实，即便是从分量上看，也颇不值得为它费心。她带着轻蔑的表情放开手，让它滑了下去。
“I have never been able to understand how that thing works,” she said.
“我从来就搞不明白这东西是怎么一回事。”
He was astounded. The original thesis of his dissertation had been just that: the advantage of simplifying the human organism. It seemed antiquated to him, with many useless or duplicated functions that had been essential in other stages of the human race but were not in ours. Yes: it could be more simple and by the same token less vulnerable. He concluded: “It is something that only God can do, of course, but in any event it would be good to have it established in theoretical terms.” She laughed with amusement and so much naturalness that he took advantage of the opportunity to embrace her and kiss her for the first time on the mouth. She responded, and he continued giving her very soft kisses on her cheeks, her nose, her eyelids, while he slipped his hand under the sheet and caressed her flat, straight pubic hair: the pubic hair of a Japanese. She did not move his hand away, but she kept hers on the alert in the event that he took one step further.
他大吃一惊。他毕业论文最初的想法正是这个：简化人类器官的好处。他认为人类的器官体系已经过时，很多功能是无用或者重复的，对于曾经的时代来说必不可少，但对我们的时代却并非如此。的确，可以更简单些，从而也就少一些脆弱。他总结道：“当然，这是上帝才能做的事，但不管怎样，在理论上明确下来也是好的。”她被逗笑了，笑得那么自然，他趁机抱住她，第一次吻在了她的唇上。她回应了他，他一边继续轻吻她的脸颊、鼻子、眼皮，一边把手滑到被单下面，抚摸起她那毛发平直的圆润阴阜来：一个日本女人那样的阴阜。她没有把他的手推开，但她自己的手也处在警惕之中，以防他再前进一步。
“Besides, I think it has too many things on it,” she said.
“而且，我觉得它有很多东西是多余的。”
“Let’s not go on with the medical lesson,” she said.
“我们不要再上医学课啦。”她说。
Then he pulled down the sheet and she not only did not object but kicked it away from the bunk with a rapid movement of her feet because she could no longer bear the heat. Her body was undulant and elastic, much more serious than it appeared when dressed, with its own scent of a forest animal, which distinguished her from all the other women in the world. Defenseless in the light, she felt a rush of blood surge up to her face, and the only way she could think of to hide it was to throw her arms around her husband’s neck and give him a hard, thorough kiss that lasted until they were both gasping for breath.
他掀掉她身上的被单，而她不仅没有反对，还快速而使劲地用双脚把它踢得离床远远的。她的身体凹凸有致，富有弹性，比穿着衣服时要真实得多，并且散发出一种特有的山间野兽似的味道，让她能在全世界的女人中被分辨出来。她全然暴露在灯光之下，无处藏身，一股热血涌上她的脸颊。她唯一能想到的掩饰羞怯的办法，就是搂住丈夫的脖子，深深地、用力地吻他，直到两人把所有可供呼吸的空气都耗尽在亲吻之中。
“No,” he said. “This is going to be a lesson in love.”
“不，”他说，“这将是爱之课。”
He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake.
他心里明白，自己并不爱她。同她结婚是因为喜欢她的高傲，她的严肃，她的力量，也因为自己的一点儿虚荣心，但当她第一次吻他时，他确定，没有什么障碍能阻止他们建立一份完美的爱情。在那第一个晚上，他们什么都聊了，一直聊到天亮，就是没有谈到爱情，以后也永远不会谈到它。但从最后的结果来看，两个人谁都没有做错。
At dawn, when they fell asleep, she was still a virgin, but she would not be one much longer. The following night, in fact, after he taught her how to dance Viennese waltzes under the starry Caribbean sky, he went to the bathroom after she did, and when he returned to the stateroom he found her waiting for him naked in the bed. Then it was she who took the initiative, and gave herself without fear, without regret, with the joy of an adventure on the high seas, and with no traces of bloody ceremony except for the rose of honor on the sheet. They both made love well, almost as if by miracle, and they continued to make love well, night and day and better each time for the rest of the voyage, and when they reached La Rochelle they got along as if they were old lovers.
天亮时，他们睡着了，她还是个处女，但很快就会不是了。果然，接下来的那个晚上，在加勒比海的满天繁星下，他教她跳了维也纳华尔兹，并在她之后去了盥洗室，等他回到舱室时，发现她正光着身子在床上等他。这次是她采取了主动，毫不畏惧，毫无痛苦，怀着在公海中冒险的喜悦把自己交给了他，除了床单上那朵贞洁的玫瑰，没有其他任何血腥仪式的痕迹。两个人都做得很好，几乎称得上是一个奇迹。在余下的旅途中，他们不分白天黑夜地继续这样做着，而且一次比一次好。到拉罗切利时，两人已经默契得像相识已久的恋人了。
They stayed in Europe, with Paris as their base, and made short trips to neighboring countries. During that time they made love every day, more than once on winter Sundays when they frolicked in bed until it was time for lunch. He was a man of strong impulses, and well disciplined besides, and she was not one to let anyone take advantage of her, so they had to be content with sharing power in bed. After three months of feverish lovemaking he concluded that one of the m was sterile, and they both submitted to rigorous examinations at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, where he had been an intern. It was an arduous but fruitless effort. However, when they least expected it, and with no scientific intervention, the miracle occurred. When they returned home, Fermina was in the sixth month of her pregnancy and thought herself the happiest woman on earth. The child they had both longed for was born without incident under the sign of Aquarius and baptized in honor of the grandfather who had died of cholera.
他们在欧洲待了很久，以巴黎为大本营，不时到邻近的国家去短期旅行。这段时间，他们每天都做爱，冬季的每个星期日甚至还不止做一次，在床上一直嬉闹到午饭时间。他是一个精力充沛的男人，而且训练有素，她则天生不容许别人占据优势，因此两人在床上不得不平分主导权。三个月火热的恩爱生活过后，他意识到两人中有一个无法生育，于是，他们在他实习过的萨伯特医院接受了严格的检查。那是一次艰苦却徒劳无功的努力。然而，就在他们最意想不到的时候，没有借助任何科学手段，奇迹发生了。回家时，费尔明娜·达萨已经怀孕六个月，她相信自己是世界上最幸福的女人。两人期待已久的儿子在水瓶座的月份顺利降生，取了死于霍乱的祖父的名字，以示纪念。
It was impossible to know if it was Europe or love that changed them, for both occurred at the same time. They were, in essence, not only between themselves but with everyone else, just as Florentino Ariza perceived them when he saw them leaving Mass two weeks after their return on that Sunday of his misfortune. They came back with a new conception of life, bringing with them the latest trends in the world and ready to lead, he with the most recent developments in literature, music, and above all in his science. He had a subscription to Le Figaro, so he would not lose touch with reality, and another to the Revue des Deux Mondes, so that he would not lose touch with poetry. He had also arranged with his bookseller in Paris to receive works by the most widely read authors, among them Anatole France and Pierre Loti, and by those he liked best, including Rémy de Gourmont and Paul Bourget, but under no circumstances anything by Emile Zola, whom he found intolerable despite his valiant intervention in the Dreyfus affair. The same bookseller agreed to mail him the most attractive scores from the Ricordi catalogue, chamber music above all, so that he could maintain the well-deserved title earned by his father as the greatest friend of concerts in the city.
说不清究竟是欧洲之行改变了他们，还是爱情改变了他们，因为这两者是同时发生的。它们都起了作用，更深一层说，改变的不仅是他们两人，也是所有人，就像弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨在那个不幸的星期日，他们回来两周后，看见他们望完弥撒从教堂中走出来时所察觉到的那样。他们带着一种新的生活观念回来了，满载着世界的新鲜事物，准备以此引领大众。他带回了文学、音乐，尤其是他所学专业的最新发展。为了不和现实脱节，他从巴黎订了一份《费加罗报》，为了不和诗歌脱节，他又订了一份《两世界杂志》。此外，他还和自己在法国的书商约定好，把读者最多的那些作家的作品寄给他，比如阿纳托尔·法朗士和彼埃尔·洛蒂，再把他最喜欢的作家的作品也寄给他，比如雷米·德古尔蒙和保罗·布尔热，但绝不要寄埃米尔·左拉的作品，因为他觉得尽管左拉在德雷福斯事件中勇敢地伸张正义，但他的作品让人无法忍受。那位书商还承诺把黎科迪出版社目录中最吸引人的乐谱篇章一并寄来，特别是室内音乐，如此，他便能保持父亲所赢得的本城音乐会第一倡导者的好名声了。
Fermina Daza, always resistant to the demands of fashion, brought back six trunks of clothing from different periods, for the great labels did not convince her. She had been in the Tuileries in the middle of winter for the launching of the collection by Worth, the indisputable tyrant of haute couture, and the only thing she got was a case of bronchitis that kept her in bed for five days. Laferrière seemed less pretentious and voracious to her, but her wise decision was to buy her fill of what she liked best in the secondhand shops, although her husband swore in dismay that it was corpses” clothing. In the same way she brought back quantities of Italian shoes without brand names, which she preferred to the renowned and famous shoes by Ferry, and she brought back a parasol from Dupuy, as red as the fires of hell, which gave our alarmed social chroniclers much to write about. She bought only one hat from Madame Reboux, but on the other hand she filled a trunk with sprigs of artificial cherrie s, stalks of all the felt flowers she could find, branches of ostrich plumes, crests of peacocks, tailfeathers of Asiatic roosters, entire pheasants, hummingbirds, and a countless variety of exotic birds preserved in midflight, midcall, midagony: everything that had been used in the past twenty years to change the appearance of hats. She brought back a collection of fans from countries all over the world, each one appropriate to a different occasion. She brought back a disturbing fragrance chosen from many at the perfume shop in the Bazar de la Charité, before the spring winds leveled everything with ashes, but she used it only once because she did not recognize herself in the new scent. She also brought back a cosmetic case that was the latest thing in seductiveness, and she took it to parties at a time when the simple act of checking one’s makeup in public was considered indecent.
一向反对追求时尚的费尔明娜·达萨，这次带回了六箱不同时代的衣服，因为那些名牌服装没能让她动心。她曾在严冬去往杜伊勒里宫参加那位锋芒逼人的高级定制服装界霸主沃斯的服装展，唯一的收获就是让她在床上躺了五天的支气管炎。她觉得相比之下拉费里耶尔的服装倒没那么浮华和张扬，但她还是做出英明的决定，到二手商店去将自己喜欢的东西洗劫一空，尽管丈夫惊恐地发誓说那些都是死人的衣服。同样，她还带回了很多没有牌子的意大利鞋，比起名声在外而又稀奇古怪的费利牌鞋，她更喜欢自己买的这些。她还从杜布伊那里买回一把阳伞，红得像地狱之火，为我们那些总爱大惊小怪的社会新闻记者提供了很多写作素材。她只买了一顶瑞邦夫人设计的帽子，却装了满满一箱的人造樱桃枝，能找到的各式毡花束，一把把鸵鸟羽毛、孔雀毛、亚洲公鸡的尾羽，整只的雉鸡、蜂鸟，以及各式各样外国鸟的标本，有正在飞翔的，正在啼鸣的，还有奄奄一息的：所有这些在过去的二十个寒暑里都发挥了用途，让同一顶帽子变换出各种风貌。她还带回一套来自世界各国的扇子，每把都各有特色，适用于不同场合。此外还有一瓶能把人迷得神魂颠倒的香水，那是在春风席卷着灰烬将法国慈善集会夷为平地之前[16]，从集会上的众多香水中挑选出来的，但她只用过一次，因为换成这种香味后她都认不出自己了。她还带回一个化妆盒，这是诱惑品市场的最新玩意儿，她是第一个带化妆盒去参加节日聚会的女人，当时，仅仅在公众场合补妆都被视作不正经的表现。（注：[16] 1897年，法国慈善集会毁于一场大火。）
They also brought back three indelible memories: the unprecedented opening of The Tales of Hoffmann in Paris, the terrifying blaze that destroyed almost all the gondolas off St. Mark’s Square in Venice, which they witnessed with grieving hearts from the window of their hotel, and their fleeting glimpse of Oscar Wilde during the first snowfall in January. But amid these and so many other memories, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had one that he always regretted not sharing with his wife, for it came from his days as a bachelor student in Paris. It was the memory of Victor Hugo, who enjoyed an impassioned fame here that had nothing to do with his books, because someone said that he had said, although no one actually heard him say it, that our Constitution was meant for a nation not of men but of angels. From that time on, special homage was paid to him, and most of our many compatriots who traveled to France went out of their way to see him. A half-dozen students, among them Juvenal Urbino, stood guard for a time outside his residence on Avenue Eylau, and at the cafés where it was said he came without fail and never came, and at last they sent a written request for a private audience in the name of the angels of the Constitution of Rionegro. They never received a reply. One day, when Juvenal Urbino happened to be passing the Luxembourg Gardens, he saw him come out of the Senate with a young woman on his arm. He seemed very old, he walked with difficulty, his beard and hair were less brilliant than in his pictures, and he wore an overcoat that seemed to belong to a larger man. He did not want to ruin the memory with an impertinent greeting: he was satisfied with the almost unreal vision that he would keep for the rest of his life. When he returned to Paris as a married man, in a position to see him under more formal circumstances, Victor Hugo had already died.
此外，两人还带回了三段不可磨灭的记忆：《霍夫曼的故事》那盛况空前的首演；圣马可广场对面那场几乎烧毁了威尼斯所有贡多拉的触目惊心的大火，他们透过酒店的窗子痛心地亲眼目睹了那一幕；还有一月份的第一场雪时，他们匆匆邂逅奥斯卡·王尔德的情景。但在这些以及其他许多回忆之间，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生还保留着一段他一直遗憾没能与妻子共享的回忆。那是他独自在巴黎上学期间一段关于维克多·雨果的记忆。在我们这里，雨果除了他的作品之外，还享有一份感人的声誉，据说他曾经说——其实并没有人真的听他说过——哥伦比亚的宪法不是给人制定的，而是给天使制定的。从那时起，人们就对他有了一种特别的崇拜。去法国旅行的同胞很多，其中大部分都热切地盼望能够见到他。曾经有六名学生，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺就是其中之一，有段时间总是守候在埃洛大街他的住所前，以及听说他必去的几家咖啡馆里，但他从未出现过。最后，他们写信向他申请一次私人会见的机会，署名为里奥·内格罗宪法[17]的天使们，也没有收到回音。但有一天，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺偶然从卢森堡花园经过，竟看见雨果从参议院走出来，被一个年轻女人搀扶着。他看上去十分苍老，举步维艰，胡子和头发都不像画像上那样光亮，身上的衣服也好像属于一个比他高大许多的人。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺不想用一个不合时宜的问候毁掉这段回忆：就这样近乎虚幻地看上一眼，已足够令他终身难忘。等他结婚后重返巴黎，有条件更为正式地见上一面的时候，维克多·雨果却已经辞世了。（注：[17] 里奥·内格罗宪法，哥伦比亚于1863至1885年期间施行的宪法。）
As a consolation, Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza brought back the shared memory of a snowy afternoon when they were intrigued by a crowd that defied the storm outside a small bookshop on the Boulevard des Capucines because Oscar Wilde was inside. When he came out at last, elegant indeed but perhaps too conscious of being so, the group surrounded him, asking that he sign their books. Dr. Urbino had stopped just to watch him, but his impulsive wife wanted to cross the boulevard so that he could sign the only thing she thought appropriate, given the fact that she did not have a book: her beautiful gazelle-skin glove, long, smooth, soft, the same color as her newlywed’s skin. She was sure that a man as refined as he would appreciate the gesture. But her husband objected with firmness, and when she tried to go despite his arguments, he did not feel he could survive the embarrassment.
作为安慰，胡维纳尔和费尔明娜拥有这样一段共同回忆。那是一个大雪纷飞的下午，一群人冒着暴风雪站在卡布奇诺街上的一家小书店门前，引起了他们俩的好奇。原来，奥斯卡·王尔德在书店里。终于，他从里面走出来，果然气宇不凡，但也许他自己过分意识到了这一点。人群将他团团围住，请他在书上签名。乌尔比诺医生停下来只是想看看，可他冲动的妻子却要穿过大街去，由于没有带书，她想请求王尔德把名字签在她唯一觉得合适的地方：那副美丽的羚羊皮手套上，手套修长、光滑、柔软，与新婚的她的皮肤同样颜色。她确信，一个像他那样高雅的男人定会欣赏她的举动。但丈夫坚决反对，而当她无视劝阻硬是要去时，他感到羞愧得无地自容。
It was something natural in her. Before she had been married a year, she moved through the world with the same assurance that had been hers as a little girl in the wilds of San Juan de la Ciénaga, as if she had been born with it, and she had a facility for dealing with strangers that left her husband dumbfounded, and a mysterious talent for making herself understood in Spanish with anyone, anywhere. “You have to know languages when you go to sell something,” she said with mocking laughter. “But when you go to buy, everyone does what he must to understand you.” It was difficult to imagine anyone who could have assimilated the daily life of Paris with so much speed and so much joy, and who learned to love her memory of it despite the eternal rain. Nevertheless, when she returned home overwhelmed by so many experiences, tired of traveling, drowsy with her pregnancy, the first thing she was asked in the port was what she thought of the marvels of Europe, and she summed up many months of bliss with four words of Caribbean slang:
这是她本性使然。结婚不到一年，她便到处游逛，就像小时候走在圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加那片死亡之地上一样自如，仿佛这是她天生的本事。她和陌生人打起交道来得心应手，令她的丈夫困惑不已。而且，她有一种神秘的才能，可以和任何人，在任何地方，靠卡斯蒂利亚语进行交流。“语言嘛，如果你是想卖东西，当然得要懂的。”她常常略带嘲笑地说，“但如果是想买东西，那不管怎样，别人总有法儿听得明白。”很难想象有人能像她那样，那么快，那么兴高采烈地适应了巴黎的日常生活。尽管巴黎阴雨连绵，她还是学会了去爱记忆中的它。然而，当她带着那压得她喘不过气来的无数经历，带着旅途的疲惫，昏昏欲睡地回到家时，港口的人们问她的第一个问题便是对欧洲的种种神奇之处有何感受，而她用一句四个字的加勒比俚语就概括了这许多个月的幸福生活：
“If you cross that street,” he said to her, “when you get back here you will find me dead.”
“如果你穿过这条街，”他对她说，“等你回来，就会看见我已经死在这里了。”
“It’s not so much.”
“浮华而已。”
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