It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.
不可避免，苦杏仁的气味总是让他想起爱情受阻后的命运。刚一走进还处在昏暗之中的房间，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生就察觉出这种味道。他来这里是为了处理一桩紧急事件，但从很多年前开始，这类事件在他看来就算不上紧急了。来自安的列斯群岛的流亡者赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔，曾在战争中致残，是儿童摄影师，也是医生交情最深的象棋对手，此刻已靠氰化金的烟雾从回忆的痛苦中解脱了。
He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next to him were the crutches. At one window the splendor of dawn was just beginning to illuminate the stifling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light for him to recognize at once the authority of death. The other windows, as well as every other chink in the room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, which increased the oppressive heaviness. A counter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumbling pewter trays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the fixative solution, was next to the body. There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, piles of negatives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept free of dust by a diligent hand. Although the air coming through the window had purified the atmosphere, there still remained for the one who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love in the bitter almonds. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had often thought, with no premonitory intention, that this would not be a propitious place for dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed an obscure determination of Divine Providence.
医生看到死者身上盖着一条毯子，躺在他生前一直睡的那张行军床上。旁边的凳子上放着用来蒸发毒药的小桶。地上躺着一条胸脯雪白的黑色大丹犬，被拴在行军床的床脚。狗的尸体边是一副拐杖。闷热而杂乱的房间，既是卧室也是工作室，此刻，随着晨曦从打开的窗子照进来，才开始有了一丝光亮。但只这一丝，已足以让人即刻感觉到死亡的震慑力。另外几扇窗子和房间的所有缝隙，不是被破布遮得严严实实，就是被黑色的纸板封了起来，这更加重了压抑的气氛。一张大桌上，堆满了没有标签的瓶瓶罐罐。两只已经掉皮的白镴小桶，笼在一盏红纸罩的普通聚光灯下。尸体旁边的那第三只桶则是用来装定影液的。到处都是旧杂志和报纸，还有一摞摞夹在两块玻璃片之间的底片，家具也破败不堪，但所有这些都被一双勤劳的手收拾得一尘不染。尽管窗外吹来的凉风使空气变得清新了一些，但熟悉的人仍旧能够闻到苦杏仁的气息中那种不幸爱情的温热余味。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生曾不止一次地在无意中想过，这里并不是蒙上帝恩召而死去的合适场所。但随着时间的推移，他最终揣摩到，或许这里的混乱无章，也正是遵从了全能上帝的秘密旨意。
A police inspector had come forward with a very young medical student who was completing his forensic training at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with a solemnity that on this occasion had more of condolence than veneration, for no one was unaware of the degree of his friendship with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. The eminent teacher shook hands with each of them, as he always did with every one of his pupils before beginning the daily class in general clinical medicine, and then, as if it were a flower, he grasped the hem of the blanket with the tips of his index finger and his thumb, and slowly uncovered the body with sacramental circumspection. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was completely naked, stiff and twisted, eyes open, body blue, looking fifty years older than he had the night before. He had luminous pupils, yellowish beard and hair, and an old scar sewn with baling knots across his stomach. The use of crutches had made his torso and arms as broad as a galley slave’s, but his defenseless legs looked like an orphan’s. Dr. Juvenal Urbino studied him for a moment, his heart aching as it rarely had in the long years of his futile struggle against death.
一名警官带着一个正在市诊所进行法医实习的年轻学生，已先行赶到这里。正是他们，在乌尔比诺医生到来之前，打开窗子通风，并把尸体遮盖起来。两人庄严地向医生致意。这一次，这庄严中的哀悼之意多过崇敬之情，因为无人不知医生和赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔之间的深厚友谊。德高望重的医生和两人握了握手，就像一直以来，他在每天的普通临床课前都会和每一位学生握手一样。接着，他用食指和拇指肚像拈起一枝鲜花似的掀开毯子的边缘，以一种神圣的稳重，一寸一寸地让尸体显露出来。赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔浑身赤裸，躯体僵硬而扭曲，两只眼睁着，肤色发蓝，仿佛比前一晚老了五十岁。他瞳孔透明，须发泛黄，肚皮上横着一道旧伤痕，还留有很多缝合时打的结。由于拄着双拐行动十分吃力，他的躯干和手臂就像划船的苦役犯一样粗壮有力，而他那无力的双腿却像孤儿的两条细腿似的。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生注视了尸体片刻，内心感到一阵刺痛，在与死神做着徒劳抗争的漫长岁月中，他还极少有这样的感触。
“Damn fool,” he said. “The worst was over.”
“可怜的傻瓜，”他对死者说，“最糟的事总算结束了。”
He covered him again with the blanket and regained his academic dignity. His eightieth birthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once again resisted the temptation to retire. He had said: “I’ll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans.” Although he heard less and less with his right ear, and leaned on a silver-handled cane to conceal his faltering steps, he continued to wear a linen suit, with a gold watch chain across his vest, as smartly as he had in his younger years. His Pasteur beard, the color of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, the same color, carefully combed back and with a neat part in the middle, were faithful expressions of his character. He compensated as much as he could for an increasingly disturbing erosion of memory by scribbling hurried notes on scraps of paper that ended in confusion in each of his pockets, as did the instruments, the bottles of medicine, and all the other things jumbled together in his crowded medical bag. He was not only the city’s oldest and most illustrious physician, he was also its most fastidious man. Still, his too obvious display of learning and the dis ingenuous manner in which he used the power of his name had won him less affection than he deserved.
他盖上毯子，又恢复了学院派的高傲神情。去年，他刚刚为自己的八十大寿举行了三天的正式庆典。在答谢辞中，他再次抵制了退休的诱惑。他说：“等我死了，有的是时间休息，但这种不虞之变还没有列入我的计划当中。”尽管右耳越来越不中用，也尽管他得靠一根银柄手杖来掩饰自己蹒跚的步履，但他的穿着依旧像年轻时一样考究：亚麻套装，怀表的金链挂在背心上。他的巴斯德式胡子是珍珠母色的，头发也是，梳理得服服帖帖，分出一道清晰的中缝，这两样是他性格最忠实的体现。对于越来越令他不安的记忆力衰退，他通过随时随地在零散的小纸片上快速记录来做弥补，可最后，各个口袋都装满了混在一起的纸片，难以分辨，就像那些工具、小药瓶以及别的东西在他那塞得满满的手提箱里乱作一团一样。他不仅是城中最年长、声望最高的医生，也是全城最讲究风度的人。然而，他那锋芒毕露的智慧以及过于世故地动用自己大名的方式，却让他没能得到应有的爱戴。
His instructions to the inspector and the intern were precise and rapid. There was no need for an autopsy; the odor in the house was sufficient proof that the cause of death had been the cyanide vapors activated in the tray by some photographic acid, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour knew too much about those matters for it to have been an accident. When the inspector showed some hesitation, he cut him off with the kind of remark that was typical of his manner: “Don’t forget that I am the one who signs the death certificate.” The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had the opportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man’s easy blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: “There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days.” And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.
他给警官和实习生下的指示明确而迅速。不必解剖验尸。房里的气味足以确定，死因是小桶中某种照相用酸液引起的氰化物挥发，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔对这些事十分清楚，所以绝不可能是意外事故。面对警官的犹疑，他用自己典型的方式斩钉截铁地打断了他：“您别忘了，在死亡证明上签字的是我。”年轻的医生非常失望：他还从来没有机会在尸体上研究氰化金的作用。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生惊讶于自己竟从未在医学院见过这个学生，但那动不动就脸红的样子和安第斯口音立刻便使他明白了：也许这年轻人才刚刚来到这座城市。他说：“要不了几天，这里的某个爱情疯子就会给您提供这样的机会。”话一出口，他这才意识到在自己所记得的数不清的自杀事件中，这还是第一起不是因爱情的不幸而使用氰化物的。于是，他一贯的口吻有了一丝改变。
“And when you do find one, observe with care,” he said to the intern: “they almost always have crystals in their heart.”
“到时候好好留意，”他对实习生说道，“死者的心脏里通常会有金属颗粒。”
Then he spoke to the inspector as he would have to a subordinate. He ordered him to circumvent all the legal procedures so that the burial could take place that same afternoon and with the greatest discretion. He said: “I will speak to the Mayor later.” He knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour lived in primitive austerity and that he earned much more with his art than he needed, so that in one of the drawers in the house there was bound to be more than enough money for the funeral expenses.
接着，他就像对下属说话似的同警官交谈起来。他命令警官绕过一切程序，以便葬礼能在当天下午举行，而且要尽可能秘密地举行。他说：“稍后我会去和市长说。”他知道，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔是个极端俭省的人，生活近乎原始化，他靠手艺挣来的钱远远超过他的生活所需，因此，在房间的某个抽屉，想必会有绰绰有余的存款来支付安葬的费用。
“But if you do not find it, it does not matter,” he said. “I will take care of everything.”
“没找到也没关系。”他说，“全部费用由我承担。”
He ordered him to tell the press that the photographer had died of natural causes, although he thought the news would in no way interest them. He said: “If it is necessary, I will speak to the Governor.” The inspector, a serious and humble civil servant, knew that the Doctor’s sense of civic duty exasperated even his closest friends, and he was surprised at the ease with which he skipped over legal formalities in order to expedite the burial. The only thing he was not willing to do was speak to the Archbishop so that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could be buried in holy ground. The inspector, astonished at his own impertinence, attempted to make excuses for him.
他让警官告诉报界，摄影师是自然死亡，尽管他相信这消息根本不会引起记者们的丝毫兴趣。他说：“如果有必要，我会去和省长说。”警官是个严肃而谦卑的公务人员，知道医生对公事向来一丝不苟，有时甚至因此激怒最亲近的朋友，所以很惊讶他竟会如此轻率地为了加快安葬进程而跳过法律手续。他唯一不愿做的，便是去和大主教商量，让赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔葬在圣地。警官对自己的失礼有些后悔，试图做出解释。
“I understood this man was a saint,” he said.
“我知道，他是一位圣人。”
“Something even rarer,” said Dr. Urbino. “An atheistic saint. But those are matters for God to decide.”
“更为罕见的是，”乌尔比诺医生说，“他是一位无神论的圣人。但这些就是上帝的事了。”
In the distance, on the other side of the colonial city, the bells of the Cathedral were ringing for High Mass. Dr. Urbino put on his half-moon glasses with the gold rims and consulted the watch on its chain, slim, elegant, with the cover that opened at a touch: he was about to miss Pentecost Mass.
远处，在这座曾经的殖民城市的另一端，教堂里响起了召集人们去望大弥撒的钟声。乌尔比诺医生戴上半月形的金丝眼镜，看了看挂在金链上的怀表——方形的怀表做工精致，盖子是靠弹簧打开的——再不走就要错过圣神降临节的弥撒了。
In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.
客厅里有一架底座带轮子的巨型照相机，就像公园里用的那种。幕布上用手工作坊的颜料画着黄昏海景。墙上挂满了孩子的照片，拍的是各种值得纪念的时刻：第一次领圣体，戴兔子面具，幸福的生日。年复一年，乌尔比诺医生就在这里，在下午全神贯注的棋局中，看着墙壁逐渐被照片覆盖。有很多次他都心痛地想，在这个由一张张不经意间拍下的照片组成的画廊里，就孕育着这座城市的未来：它将由那些性格不定的孩子们统治，并最终被他们毁灭，连一丝昔日荣耀的灰烬也不复存在。
On the desk, next to a jar that held several old sea dog’s pipes, was the chessboard with an unfinished game. Despite his haste and his somber mood, Dr. Urbino could not resist the temptation to study it. He knew it was the previous night’s game, for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour played at dusk every day of the week with at least three different opponents, but he always finished every game and then placed the board and chessmen in their box and stored the box in a desk drawer. The Doctor knew he played with the white pieces and that this time it was evident he was going to be defeated without mercy in four moves. “If there had been a crime, this would be a good clue,” Urbino said to himself. “I know only one man capable of devising this masterful trap.” If his life depended on it, he had to find out later why that indomitable soldier, accustomed to fighting to the last drop of blood, had left the final battle of his life unfinished.
写字台上，一个装了几支水手烟斗的罐子旁边，是一盘还没下完的棋。尽管乌尔比诺医生急于离开，而且心情阴郁，但还是抵不住对这盘残局研究一番的诱惑。他知道这一定是前一晚留下来的，因为赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔每天黄昏都下棋，而且每星期至少跟三个不同的人对弈，但他一向都会把棋下完，然后把棋盘和棋子收进盒子，放进写字台的一个抽屉。医生知道他惯执白子，而这一局，白棋在四步以内必输无疑。“如果真是谋杀，这里面一定有不错的线索。”他自言自语道，“我认识的人中只有一个能布下如此精妙的埋伏。”为何这位向来战斗到最后一滴血、从不屈服的战士，竟没有完成生命中的最后一次战斗？若不调查清楚，他简直会活不下去。
At six that morning, as he was making his last rounds, the night watchman had seen the note nailed to the street door: Come in without knocking and inform the police. A short while later the inspector arrived with the intern, and the two of them had searched the house for some evidence that might contradict the unmistakable breath of bitter almonds. But in the brief minutes the Doctor needed to study the unfinished game, the inspector discovered an envelope among the papers on the desk, addressed to Dr. Juvenal Urbino and sealed with so much sealing wax that it had to be ripped to pieces to get the letter out. The Doctor opened the black curtain over the window to have more light, gave a quick glance at the eleven sheets covered on both sides by a diligent handwriting, and when he had read the first paragraph he knew that he would miss Pentecost Communion. He read with agitated breath, turning back on several pages to find the thread he had lost, and when he finished he seemed to return from very far away and very long ago. His despondency was obvious despite his effort to control it: his lips were as blue as the corpse and he could not stop the trembling of his fingers as he refolded the letter and placed it in his vest pocket. Then he remembered the inspector and the young doctor, and he smiled at them through the mists of grief.
早晨六点，巡夜人在做最后一圈巡逻时，看见钉在临街大门上的一块牌子上写着：请进，无需敲门，并请通知警察。很快，警官和实习生就赶来了。两人把房子搜查了一遍，试图在无可置疑的苦杏仁味之外寻找由其他原因致死的证据。就在医生驻足分析那盘未下完的棋局的短短几分钟里，警官在写字台上的纸堆中发现了一封写给胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生的信。信封被厚厚的火漆封得严严实实，为取出信，不得不撕烂信封。为了让屋里的光线亮一点儿，医生拉开黑色的窗帘，先飞快地扫了一眼这沓工工整整写满了正反两面的十一页纸。而当他开始读第一段时，就明白自己肯定赶不上圣神降临弥撒的圣餐了。他读着信，激动得气喘吁吁，时而为找回中断的头绪往回翻上几页。等读完后，他看上去就好像刚刚从很远的地方、花了很长的时间回来似的。尽管努力克制，但他的沮丧显而易见：嘴唇发蓝，一如尸体的颜色；而把信折起来放进背心口袋时，他也无法控制手指的颤抖。这时，他才又想起身边的警官和年轻的医生来，透过一片沉痛的迷雾，他冲他们笑了笑。
“Nothing in particular,” he said. “His final instructions.”
“没什么特别的。”他说，“不过是他最后的一些嘱托。”
It was a half-truth, but they thought it complete because he ordered them to lift a loose tile from the floor, where they found a worn account book that contained the combination to the strongbox. There was not as much money as they expected, but it was more than enough for the funeral expenses and to meet other minor obligations. Then Dr. Urbino realized that he could not get to the Cathedral before the Gospel reading.
这只是一半的真相，但他们却把它当作事实的全部接受了，因为他们按医生的指令揭开一块地砖，果然在那里找到了一本陈年账簿，上面记着保险箱的密码。死者的钱虽没有他们想象的多，但也足够应付葬礼并结清一些小额账目。这时，乌尔比诺医生意识到，在神甫宣讲福音之前，自己也无法赶到教堂了。
“It’s the third time I’ve missed Sunday Mass since I’ve had the use of my reason,” he said. “But God understands.”
“自我懂事以来，这还是第三次错过星期日弥撒。”他说，“但上帝会原谅我的。”
So he chose to spend a few minutes more and attend to all the details, although he could hardly bear his intense longing to share the secrets of the letter with his wife. He promised to notify the numerous Caribbean refugees who lived in the city in case they wanted to pay their last respects to the man who had conducted himself as if he were the most respectable of them all, the most active and the most radical, even after it had become all too clear that he had been overwhelmed by the burden of disillusion. He would also inform his chess partners, who ranged from distinguished professional men to nameless laborers, as well as other, less intimate acquaintances who might perhaps wish to attend the funeral. Before he read the posthumous letter he had resolved to be first among them, but afterward he was not certain of anything. In any case, he was going to send a wreath of gardenias in the event that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had repented at the last moment. The burial would be at five, which was the most suitable hour during the hottest months. If they needed him, from noon on he would be at the country house of Dr. Lácides Olivella, his beloved disciple, who was celebrating his silver anniversary in the profession with a formal luncheon that day.
尽管他几乎按捺不住想与妻子分享信中秘密的急迫心情，但还是宁愿再耽搁几分钟，把细枝末节安排妥当。他答应去通知城里为数众多的加勒比流亡者，因为或许他们会想向这样一位最受人尊敬、最活跃、也最激进的人表达最后的敬意，尽管很显然，他最终还是向令人绝望的坎坷屈服了。他还会去通知死者的棋友，无论是杰出的专业棋手还是无名小卒，另外，也会通知其他一些和死者交往不那么频繁但也可能想参加葬礼的朋友。在看那封遗书之前，他本决定要做主事的第一人，但读过信后，他什么也不敢确定了。不过不管怎样，他还是要送一个栀子花的花圈，因为也许赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔在最后一刻表达了悔意。葬礼安排在下午五点，在炎热的季节，这是一个合适的时间。如果有事找他，他从中午十二点起就会一直待在拉希德斯·奥利维利亚医生的乡间别墅，他这位爱徒那天将举办豪华午宴以庆祝自己从医二十五周年。
Once the stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a set routine and achieved a respectability and prestige that had no equal in the province. He arose at the crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medicines: potassium bromide to raise his spirits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonna for sound sleep. He took something every hour, always in secret, because in his long life as a doctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for him to bear other people’s pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphor that he inhaled deeply when no one was watching to calm his fear of so many medicines mixed together.
自从度过最初艰苦奋斗的岁月，赢得了全省无人能及的尊敬和名望，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生便过起了规律的生活，每日的行踪都有律可循。他每早鸡鸣即起，并从那一刻开始服用一些秘方：溴化钾以提神醒脑，水杨酸盐以缓解阴雨天的骨痛，几滴黑麦角汁以克制眩晕，颠茄以保证良好睡眠。他在不同时刻服用不同药物，而且总是背着人偷偷服下，因为在漫长的医生和教师生涯中，他向来反对为人开具延缓衰老的药方：对他来说，忍受别人的病痛要比忍受自己的容易得多。他的兜里总是带着一小包樟脑，没人看见时便取出来深吸上一口，以消除那么多药物混在一起带来的恐惧。
He would spend an hour in his study preparing for the class in general clinical medicine that he taught at the Medical School every morning, Monday through Saturday, at eight o’clock, until the day before his death. He was also an avid reader of the latest books that his bookseller in Paris mailed to him, or the ones from Barcelona that his local bookseller ordered for him, although he did not follow Spanish literature as closely as French. In any case, he never read them in the morning, but only for an hour after his siesta and at night before he went to sleep. When he was finished in the study he did fifteen minutes of respiratory exercises in front of the open window in the bathroom, always breathing toward the side where the roosters were crowing, which was where the air was new. Then he bathed, arranged his beard and waxed his mustache in an atmosphere saturated with genuine cologne from Farina Gegenüber, and dressed in white linen, with a vest and a soft hat and cordovan boots. At eighty-one years of age he preserved the same easygoing manner and festive spirit that he had on his return from Paris soon after the great cholera epidemic, and except for the metallic color, his carefully combed hair with the center part was the same as it had been in his youth. He breakfasted en famille but followed his own personal regimen of an infusion of wormwood blossoms for his stomach and a head of garlic that he peeled and ate a clove at a time, chewing each one carefully with bread, to prevent heart failure. After class it was rare for him not to have an appointment related to his civic initiatives, or his Catholic service, or his artistic and social innovations.
他会先在书房里待上一个小时，为星期一至星期六每早八点在医学院讲授的普通临床课备课，这门课他一直教到了去世前一天。他也是文学新作的忠实读者，他在巴黎的书商会把书邮寄给他，本地书商也会为他从巴塞罗那订购，尽管他并没有像关注法语文学那样关注西班牙语文学。但不管怎样，他从不在早晨阅读文学，而是在午睡后读上一小时，晚上睡觉前再读一会儿。备完课，他在浴室里对着敞开的窗子，做十五分钟呼吸运动，冲着鸡鸣的方向吸进呼出，因为那边空气清新。然后，他洗澡，整理胡子，在正宗法里纳·赫赫努贝古龙水的香味中为胡子上胶，接着，穿上白色亚麻套装，搭配背心和软帽，以及一双鞣制的软山羊皮靴。八十一岁的他仍旧保持着温文尔雅的风度和振奋的精神，一如当年大霍乱后不久他刚从巴黎回来时的样子。他的头发从中间分开，梳得十分整齐，就和年轻时一样，只不过颜色变成了金属色。他在家中用早餐，但食谱是单独的：一杯用以养胃的大苦艾花茶，外加一头大蒜，一瓣一瓣地掰下来，就着面包有意识地细细咀嚼，以预防心脏衰竭。上完课，他很少没有活动，要么去践行市民的参与精神，要么去尽教会中的义务，再不就是与他的艺术和社会革新事业有关。
He almost always ate lunch at home and had a ten-minute siesta on the terrace in the patio, hearing in his sleep the songs of the servant girls under the leaves of the mango trees, the cries of vendors on the street, the uproar of oil and motors from the bay whose exhaust fumes fluttered through the house on hot afternoons like an angel condemned to putrefaction. Then he read his new books for an hour, above all novels and works of history, and gave lessons in French and singing to the tame parrot who had been a local attraction for years. At four o’clock, after drinking a large glass of lemonade with ice, he left to call on his patients. In spite of his age he would not see patients in his office and continued to care for them in their homes as he always had, since the city was so domesticated that one could go anywhere in safety.
他几乎总是在家中吃午餐，然后坐在院子的露台上午睡十分钟。睡梦中，他听见女仆们在枝繁叶茂的芒果树下唱歌，听着街上的叫卖声，以及海湾里燃油机和马达发出的轰鸣声——炎热的下午，它们排出的废气在整座房中弥漫，就像一个被判腐烂而死的天使在扑腾翅膀。之后，他会花一个小时阅读新书，特别是小说和历史书籍。然后，他给家里养的鹦鹉上法语和声乐课，这只鹦鹉从很多年前起就是当地的一道风景。四点钟，他喝下一大杯加冰柠檬水后，就出门去看望病人。虽然上了年纪，他还是坚持不在诊所接诊，而是继续到病人家里出诊。自从城市建设得越来越方便，人们可以步行到达城中的任何地方以来，他就一直这样做。
After he returned from Europe the first time, he used the family landau, drawn by two golden chestnuts, but when this was no longer practical he changed it for a Victoria and a single horse, and he continued to use it, with a certain disdain for fashion, when carriages had already begun to disappear from the world and the only ones left in the city were for giving rides to tourists and carrying wreaths at funerals. Although he refused to retire, he was aware that he was called in only for hopeless cases, but he considered this a form of specialization too. He could tell what was wrong with a patient just by looking at him, he grew more and more distrustful of patent medicines, and he viewed with alarm the vulgarization of surgery. He would say: “The scalpel is the greatest proof of the failure of medicine.” He thought that, in a strict sense, all medication was poison and that seventy percent of common foods hastened death. “In any case,” he would say in class, “the little medicine we know is known only by a few doctors.” From youthful enthusiasm he had moved to a position that he himself defined as fatalistic humanism: “Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.” But despite these extreme ideas, which were already part of local medical folklore, his former pupils continued to consult him even after they were established in the profession, for they recognized in him what was called in those days a clinical eye. In any event, he was always an expensive and exclusive doctor, and his patients were concentrated in the ancestral homes in the District of the Viceroys.
他第一次从欧洲回来时，是用家中那辆由两匹泛着金光的枣红马拉的四轮马车代步。后来车坏了，他便改用一辆单匹马拉的敞篷车。后来，马车开始从世界上消失，城中也仅剩下几辆以供游客观光或在葬礼上运送花圈，他却仍旧带着某种对时尚的轻蔑，继续使用这辆马车。尽管拒绝退休，但他心里很清楚，现在人们只在基本上已无力回天的情况下才请他前往，不过他认为这也是一种专业的体现。只需看一眼病人的气色，他便知道病情如何。他越来越不相信特效药，而眼瞅着外科手术得到推广，他感到非常不安。他常说：“手术刀是药物无效的最有力证明。”他认为，从严格意义上说，所有药物都具有毒性，而百分之七十的日常食物也会加速死亡。“事实上，”他常在课堂上说，“只有少数医生真正了解为数不多的几种药物。”他从年轻时的热血青年变成了他自己所谓的宿命论的人道主义者：“每个人都是自己死亡的主宰者，时间一到，我们唯一能做的就是帮助他们没有恐惧和痛苦地死去。”尽管拥有这些极端思想（它们甚至都已成为当地民间医学传说的一部分了），但他昔日的学生即便已经开了自己的诊所，也还是会来向他请教，因为他们视他为当时人们所谓的那种具有“诊断慧眼”的人。总而言之，他一直是位收费昂贵、出类拔萃的医生，病人都集中在总督区的名门望族。
His daily schedule was so methodical that his wife knew where to send him a message if an emergency arose in the course of the afternoon. When he was a young man he would stop in the Parish Café before coming home, and this was where he perfected his chess game with his father-in-law’s cronies and some Caribbean refugees. But he had not returned to the Parish Café since the dawn of the new century, and he had attempted to organize national tournaments under the sponsorship of the Social Club. It was at this time that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour arrived, his knees already dead, not yet a photographer of children, yet in less than three months everyone who knew how to move a bishop across a chessboard knew who he was, because no one had been able to defeat him in a game. For Dr. Juvenal Urbino it was a miraculous meeting, at the very moment when chess had become an unconquerable passion for him and he no longer had many opponents who could satisfy it.
他每天的工作井井有条，所以在下午出诊期间，如果出现什么紧急事件，他的妻子向来知道该往哪儿给他捎口信。年轻时，他回家前总会在教区咖啡馆逗留一会儿，他的象棋技艺就是在那里同岳父的狐朋狗友以及几个加勒比流亡者一起精进的。但从新世纪伊始，他便不再去教区咖啡馆了，而是试图组织由社交俱乐部赞助的全国性比赛。而正是在这个时期，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔来了，那时他双膝已经坏死，还不是儿童摄影师，但不到三个月时间，所有只要会在棋盘上摆弄个一兵半卒的人全都认识了他，因为根本没人能下赢他一盘棋。对胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生来说，这是一次奇迹般的相识，因为那时的他已无法自拔地迷上了象棋，而能使他满意的对手却没有几个了。
Thanks to him, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could become what he was among us. Dr. Urbino made himself his unconditional protector, his guarantor in everything, without even taking the trouble to learn who he was or what he did or what inglorious Avars he had come from in his crippled, broken state. He eventually lent him the money to set up his photography studio, and from the time he took his first picture of a child startled by the magnesium flash, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour paid back every last penny with religious regularity.
多亏了医生，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔才成为这里的一员。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生成了他无条件的保护人和一切事务的担保者，甚至都没去调查一下他是个怎样的人，以前是做什么的，究竟在怎样一场不名誉的战争中流落成这副残废而茫然的模样。最后，医生借钱给他开了一家照相馆，而赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔自从为第一个被镁光灯的闪光吓了一跳的孩子拍照以来，像编制绳索般严谨地还清了最后一分钱。
It was all for chess. At first they played after supper at seven o’clock, with a reasonable handicap for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour because of his notable superiority, but the handicap was reduced until at last they played as equals. Later, when Don Galileo Daconte opened the first outdoor cinema, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was one of his most dependable customers, and the games of chess were limited to the nights when a new film was not being shown. By then he and the Doctor had become such good friends that they would go to see the films together, but never with the Doctor’s wife, in part because she did not have the patience to follow the complicated plot lines, and in part because it always seemed to her, through sheer intuition, that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was not a good companion for anyone.
这一切都是因为象棋。起初，他们从晚餐后的七点钟开始下，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的棋艺明显更胜一筹，所以他合理地让给医生几步。但让得越来越少，直到最后一步不让。后来，加利略·达孔特开了第一家电影院，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔成了那里最准时的观众之一，二人的对弈便被挤到没有电影首映的夜晚。那时，他已成为医生的挚友，医生甚至心甘情愿地陪他去看电影。但医生从不带妻子，一方面是因为妻子没有耐心跟随复杂的情节线索，另一方面也因为他仅凭敏锐的嗅觉，便能感觉到对于其他任何人来说，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔都绝非一个好伙伴。
His Sundays were different. He would attend High Mass at the Cathedral and then return home to rest and read on the terrace in the patio. He seldom visited a patient on a holy day of obligation unless it was of extreme urgency, and for many years he had not accepted a social engagement that was not obligatory. On this Pentecost, in a rare coincidence, two extraordinary events had occurred: the death of a friend and the silver anniversary of an eminent pupil. Yet instead of going straight home as he had intended after certifying the death of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he allowed himself to be carried along by curiosity.
唯一与平时安排不同的是星期日。他会到教堂去望大弥撒，然后回家，一整天都在院子的露台上休息、读书。若非极端紧急的情况，安息日他很少出诊，而且从很多年前起，除非迫不得已，他也不再在安息日参加社交活动。但在这个圣神降临节，出于意外巧合，两件罕有的事赶在了一起：朋友之死和得意门生从医二十五周年纪念。然而，他并没有像自己预计的那样，签署完赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的死亡证明后就直接回家，而是听任了好奇心的驱使。
As soon as he was in his carriage, he again consulted the posthumous letter and told the coachman to take him to an obscure location in the old slave quarter. That decision was so foreign to his usual habits that the coachman wanted to make certain there was no mistake. No, no mistake: the address was clear and the man who had written it had more than enough reason to know it very well. Then Dr. Urbino returned to the first page of the letter and plunged once again into the flood of unsavory revelations that might have changed his life, even at his age, if he could have convinced himself that they were not the ravings of a dying man.
一上马车，他便迫不及待地又看了一遍那封遗书。接着，他命令车夫带他前往奴隶老区的一个偏僻地址。这个决定与他平日里的习惯迥然不同，以至于车夫不得不确认自己是否听错了。确实没错：地址很清楚，而且，写下这个地址的人有充足的理由对它再熟悉不过了。乌尔比诺医生又翻回到遗书的第一页，再次沉浸在信中披露的那段不堪回首的秘密往事之中。倘若他能让自己相信，这些并非一个将死之人的胡言乱语，那么，尽管到了这把年纪，生活也还是有可能因此改变。
The sky had begun to threaten very early in the day and the weather was cloudy and cool, but there was no chance of rain before noon. In his effort to find a shorter route, the coachman braved the rough cobblestones of the colonial city and had to stop often to keep the horse from being frightened by the rowdiness of the religious societies and fraternities coming back from the Pentecost liturgy. The streets were full of paper garlands, music, flowers, and girls with colored parasols and muslin ruffles who watched the celebration from their balconies. In the Plaza of the Cathedral, where the statue of The Liberator was almost hidden among the African palm trees and the globes of the new streetlights, traffic was congested because Mass had ended, and not a seat was empty in the venerable and noisy Parish Café. Dr. Urbino’s was the only horse-drawn carriage; it was distinguishable from the handful left in the city because the patent-leather roof was always kept polished, and it had fittings of bronze that would not be corroded by salt, and wheels and poles painted red with gilt trimming like gala nights at the Vienna Opera. Furthermore, while the most demanding families were satisfied if their drivers had a clean shirt, he still required his coachman to wear livery of faded velvet and a top hat like a circus ringmaster’s, which, more than an anachronism, was thought to show a lack of compassion in the dog days of the Caribbean summer.
从一大早开始，天空就没有好心情，阴云密布，透出阵阵凉意，但好在中午之前还没有下雨的危险。车夫试着抄近道，拐进了这座殖民城市崎岖的石子路。有好几次，为了不让马儿受惊，他们不得不停下车，因为从圣神降临节的庆祝活动中归来的学生和宗教团体造成了一片混乱。街道被纸花环、音乐和鲜花填满了，还有撑着各色阳伞、身穿荷叶边薄纱裙、站在阳台上观礼的姑娘们。在大教堂广场上，解放者的雕像被淹没在非洲棕榈树和崭新的球形路灯之中，几乎已经辨认不出。教堂的出口处堵满了汽车，庄严而又喧闹的教区咖啡馆里连一个空位也没剩下。那里唯一的一辆马车便是胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生的，和城中屈指可数的那几辆剩余的马车区别明显：它的漆皮顶棚总是闪闪发亮，把手等装饰物也都是铜制的，以防被硝腐蚀，轮子和车辕则都漆成了红色，还镶着金边，仿佛在参加维也纳歌剧院的盛装演出一般。此外，那个时候就连那些最喜欢装模作样的家庭都已经允许司机穿上干净的衬衫，可他却仍旧要求自己的车夫身穿软塌塌的丝绒制服，头戴马戏团驯兽师那般的礼帽，这种做法不仅让人觉得不合潮流，而且在加勒比地区的酷暑季节，显得尤为缺乏怜悯之心。
Despite his almost maniacal love for the city and a knowledge of it superior to anyone’s, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had not often had reason as he did that Sunday to venture boldly into the tumult of the old slave quarter. The coachman had to make many turns and stop to ask directions several times in order to find the house. As they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbino recognized their oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. But that pestilence so frequently idealized by nostalgia became an unbearable reality when the carriage began to lurch through the quagmire of the streets where buzzards fought over the slaughterhouse offal as it was swept along by the receding tide. Unlike the city of the Viceroys where the houses were made of masonry, here they were built of weathered boards and zinc roofs, and most of them rested on pilings to protect them from the flooding of the open sewers that had been inherited from the Spaniards. Everything looked wretched and desolate, but out of the sordid taverns came the thunder of riotous music, the godless drunken celebration of Pentecost by the poor. By the time they found the house, gangs of ragged children were chasing the carriage and ridiculing the theatrical finery of the coachman, who had to drive them away with his whip. Dr. Urbino, prepared for a confidential visit, realized too late that there was no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.
尽管胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生对这座城市的热爱近乎疯狂，也尽管他比其他任何人都更加了解它，但他很少有机会像那个星期日那样毫无顾忌地来到这片喧嚷的奴隶老区探险。车夫绕了很多圈，打听了一次又一次才找到地址。乌尔比诺医生也终于切近地体会到泥沼的阴郁可怕，它那不祥的寂静，以及那令人窒息的恶臭，这种气味曾在无数个不眠的清晨，混着院中的茉莉花香飘进他的卧室，而他却总觉得它就像昨日的一阵风一样转瞬即逝，和他的生活没有半点关联。然而，当马车在街道的泥泞中颠簸，几只兀鹫争夺着被海水裹挟的屠宰场残渣时，那种曾无数次被他的思乡情怀美化了的恶臭变成了令人无法忍受的现实。与总督区的石砌房屋不同，这里的房子都是由褪色的朽木和锌皮屋顶盖成，而且大部分建在木桩上，以免西班牙人遗留下来的那些露天污水沟里的臭水漫到屋里来。一切都显得凄凉无助，可那一间间肮脏的小酒馆里却传来震耳欲聋的鼓乐声，那是穷人的狂欢，既无涉上帝，也无涉圣神降临节的诫命[1]。等他们终于找到地方，马车后面已经跟了一群光着身子的小孩，他们哄笑着车夫戏剧式的装扮，迫使他不得不用鞭子吓跑他们。本打算做一次私密拜访的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生，此刻为时过晚地领悟到，没有哪一种天真比他这个年龄的天真更危险了。（注：[1] 圣神降临节是纪念耶稣复活后第五十日圣神降临的日子，也是纪念上帝在西奈山向摩西颁布十诫的日子。）
The exterior of the unnumbered house was in no way distinguishable from its less fortunate neighbors, except for the window with lace curtains and an imposing front door taken from some old church. The coachman pounded the door knocker, and only when he had made certain that it was the right house did he help the Doctor out of the carriage. The door opened without a sound, and in the shadowy interior stood a mature woman dressed in black, with a red rose behind her ear. Despite her age, which was no less than forty, she was still a haughty mulatta with cruel golden eyes and hair tight to her skull like a helmet of steel wool. Dr. Urbino did not recognize her, although he had seen her several times in the gloom of the chess games in the photographer’s studio, and he had once written her a prescription for tertian fever. He held out his hand and she took it between hers, less in greeting than to help him into the house. The parlor had the climate and invisible murmur of a forest glade and was crammed with furniture and exquisite objects, each in its natural place. Dr. Urbino recalled without bitterness an antiquarian’s shop, No. 26 rue Montmartre in Paris, on an autumn Monday in the last century. The woman sat down across from him and spoke in accented Spanish.
这是一座没有门牌号的房子，从外表看，除了镶花边的窗帘和一扇从某座古老教堂里卸下来的大门，其余并没有什么能把它和其他更为破败的房子区别开来。车夫叩了叩门环，确认地址正确后才扶医生下车。大门悄无声息地打开了，门里的昏暗处站着一个妇人，全身上下穿着丧服，耳边别着一枝玫瑰。这是个黑白混血女人，年纪不下四十，但身材依旧高挑，金色的眼睛有些冷酷，头发紧紧地贴在头上，仿佛戴着一个棉制头盔。乌尔比诺医生没能认出她来，尽管在摄影师的工作室里，他曾在那些云山雾罩的棋局间见过她几次，有一次甚至还给她开过几服医治间日热的奎宁药方。他向她伸出手，而她用双手握住，但与其说是为了向他表示问候，倒不如说是为了扶他走进屋子。客厅里的氛围让人仿佛置身于一片看不见的树林，到处是鸟语花香，摆满了精致的家具和器物，每一件东西都在它应在的位置。乌尔比诺医生由此毫无感伤地想起了上世纪一个秋日的星期一，他所经过的那爿坐落在巴黎蒙马特大街二十六号的古董商小店。女人在他的对面坐下来，开始用不流利的卡斯蒂利亚语[2]和他交谈。（注：[2] 卡斯蒂利亚语，即通常意义上的西班牙语，同时也是大部分拉丁美洲国家的官方语言，其中包括哥伦比亚。）
“This is your house, Doctor,” she said. “I did not expect you so soon.”
“医生，您把这儿当成家里就行。”她说，“我没想到您这么快就来了。”
Dr. Urbino felt betrayed. He stared at her openly, at her intense mourning, at the dignity of her grief, and then he understood that this was a useless visit because she knew more than he did about everything stated and explained in Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s posthumous letter. This was true. She had been with him until a very few hours before his death, as she had been with him for half his life, with a devotion and submissive tenderness that bore too close a resemblance to love, and without anyone knowing anything about it in this sleepy provincial capital where even state secrets were common knowledge. They had met in a convalescent home in Port-au-Prince, where she had been born and where he had spent his early years as a fugitive, and she had followed him here a year later for a brief visit, although both of them knew without agreeing to anything that she had come to stay forever. She cleaned and straightened the laboratory once a week, but not even the most evil-minded neighbors confused appearance with reality because they, like everyone else, supposed that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s disability affected more than his capacity to walk. Dr. Urbino himself supposed as much for solid medical reasons, and never would have believed his friend had a woman if he himself had not revealed it in the letter. In any event, it was difficult for him to comprehend that two free adults without a past and living on the fringes of a closed society’s prejudices had chosen the hazards of illicit love. She explained: “It was his wish.” Moreover, a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. On the contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary.
乌尔比诺医生瞬间感到自己的意图暴露无遗。他用心打量了女人一番，注意到她一身素孝，以及她悲痛中的不卑不亢。于是，他明白了，这次拜访早已注定是徒劳的，因为对于赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔在遗书中所提到和指明的一切，她比他知道得更多。的确如此。她一直陪伴着他，直到他死前几个小时，一如她半生都怀着仰慕和谦卑的温柔陪伴着他一样。这种情感几乎与爱情无异，但在这座连国家机密都处于众人掌控之中的昏睡省城，竟然无人知晓。他们是在太子港的一家慈善医院认识的，她在那里出生，而他在那里度过了最初的流亡岁月。她比他晚一年来到这座城市，声称是短期拜访，但二人心照不宣，都明白她是要永远地留下。她每星期打扫整理一次他的工作室，可就连那些最爱捕风捉影的邻居都混淆了表象与真实，因为他们和所有人一样，都以为赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的残疾不仅仅是无法走路。甚至连乌尔比诺医生也从医学的角度合理地做出了这样的推测。要不是赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔自己在信中吐露了实情，医生永远也不会相信他竟会有一个女人。但无论如何，他还是很难理解，两个没有过往包袱的自由的成年人，并且处在这个封闭社会的偏见之外，却像那些禁忌之爱一样选择了这样一种飘忽不定的方式。对此她解释说：“他就喜欢这样。”况且，同这个始终也不曾完全属于她的男人分享这份秘密恋情，加之两人都不止一次地从中享受到那种瞬间爆发的喜悦，这在她看来并不是一种难以接受的方式，恰恰相反：生活已然向她证明，这或许倒是一种典范。
On the previous night they had gone to the cinema, each one separately, and had sat apart as they had done at least twice a month since the Italian immigrant, Don Galileo Daconte, had installed his open-air theater in the ruins of a seventeenth-century convent. They saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a film based on a book that had been popular the year before and that Dr. Urbino had read, his heart devastated by the barbarism of war. They met afterward in the laboratory, she found him brooding and nostalgic, and thought it was because of the brutal scenes of wounded men dying in the mud. In an attempt to distract him, she invited him to play chess and he accepted to please her, but he played inattentively, with the white pieces, of course, until he discovered before she did that he was going to be defeated in four moves and surrendered without honor. Then the Doctor realized that she had been his opponent in the final game, and not General Jerónimo Argote, as he had supposed. He murmured in astonishment:
前一晚他们还去了电影院，各付各的账，座位也是分开的。自从那个意大利移民加利略·达孔特在一座十七世纪的修道院废墟上建起了露天电影院，他们每个月都至少像这样去两次。那晚，他们看的是《西线无战事》，一部由上一年流行的小说改编的电影，那本小说乌尔比诺医生也读过，并为书中战争的野蛮悲痛不已。之后，他们在工作室会合，她发现他心事重重，怅然若失，以为是电影中受伤的士兵在淤泥中垂死挣扎的残酷场面所致。她邀他下棋，借以分散他的注意力。而为了让她开心，他答应了，但下得心不在焉，当然，他还是用白子。最终，他比她先看出，再有四步自己就要输了，于是毫无颜面地投了降。这时，医生才明白，那最后一盘棋局的对手是她，而不是他之前猜想的赫罗尼莫·阿尔戈特将军。他惊奇地嘟囔了一句：
“It was masterful!”
“那盘棋下得真是精妙！”
She insisted that she deserved no praise, but rather that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, already lost in the mists of death, had moved his pieces without love. When he stopped the game at about a quarter past eleven, for the music from the public dances had ended, he asked her to leave him. He wanted to write a letter to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whom he considered the most honorable man he had ever known, and his soul’s friend, as he liked to say, despite the fact that the only affinity between the two was their addiction to chess understood as a dialogue of reason and not as a science. And then she knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had come to the end of his suffering and that he had only enough life left to write the letter. The Doctor could not believe it.
她坚持说，那并不是她的本事，而是赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔被死亡的迷雾弄得晕头转向，移动棋子的时候心中已没有了爱。对弈中断时大约十一点一刻，因为公共舞会的音乐已经停止。他请求她让他单独静一静。他想给胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生写封信。他一直把医生视作他所认识的最值得尊敬的人，而且，就像他常说的，尽管能将两人联系起来的不过是象棋这个嗜好，但医生是他真正能够交心的朋友。在他和医生看来，下棋与其说是一门学问，不如说是一种理性的对话。于是，她知道赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔已经走到了解脱的边缘，他的生命所剩下的不过是写一封信的时间。医生对此简直无法相信。
“So then you knew!” he exclaimed.
“这么说，您早就知道！”他惊呼道。
She not only knew, she agreed, but she had helped him to endure the suffering as lovingly as she had helped him to discover happiness. Because that was what his last eleven months had been: cruel suffering.
她证实说，她不仅早就知道，而且还曾怀着爱意帮他分担过这种垂死的痛苦，就像她也曾怀着同样的爱帮他发现幸福。因为他生命中最后十一个月的情况就是这样：一种残酷的垂死挣扎。
“Your duty was to report him,” said the Doctor.
“您的责任应该是把这件事通报给大家。”医生说。
“I could not do that,” she said, shocked. “I loved him too much.”
“我不能这样做，”她有些震惊，“我太爱他了。”
Dr. Urbino, who thought he had heard everything, had never heard anything like that, and said with such simplicity. He looked straight at her and tried with all his senses to fix her in his memory as she was at that moment: she seemed like a river idol, undaunted in her black dress, with her serpent’s eyes and the rose behind her ear. A long time ago, on a deserted beach in Haiti where the two of them lay naked after love, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had sighed: “I will never be old.” She interpreted this as a heroic determination to struggle without quarter against the ravages of time, but he was more specific: he had made the irrevocable decision to take his own life when he was seventy years old.
自认为什么话都听过的乌尔比诺医生，却从未听谁说过这样的话，而且还说得如此坦荡。他全神贯注地直视着她，想把这一刻铭记心中：她就像一尊河神的雕像，眼睛如蛇眼一般，无所畏惧地裹在一袭黑衣之中，耳边别着玫瑰花。很久以前，在海地一片荒凉的沙滩上，两人做爱后赤裸地躺在那里，赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔突然感叹道：“我永远也不会变老。”她把这句话理解为他要与时间的劫掠进行殊死搏斗的英勇决心，但接下来他说得更为清楚直白：他决定，要在六十岁结束自己的生命。
He had turned seventy, in fact, on the twenty-third of January of that year, and then he had set the date as the night before Pentecost, the most important holiday in a city consecrated to the cult of the Holy Spirit. There was not a single detail of the previous night that she had not known about ahead of time, and they spoke of it often, suffering together the irreparable rush of days that neither of them could stop now. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour loved life with a senseless passion, he loved the sea and love, he loved his dog and her, and as the date approached he had gradually succumbed to despair as if his death had been not his own decision but an inexorable destiny.
事实上，他在这一年的一月二十三日刚刚年满六十。于是，他把圣神降临节的前一晚定为最后的期限，对于这座将自己奉献给圣神的城市来说，这是最大的节日。昨晚发生的事，没有一个细节是她事先不知道的。他们经常谈起它，一同承受着时间流逝的痛苦，可无论他，还是她，都无法阻止这不可逆转的岁月洪流。赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔以一种毫无意义的热情热爱着生活，他爱大海，爱爱情，爱他的狗，也爱她。随着死期临近，他越来越向绝望屈服，就仿佛他的死并不是当初由他自己决定的，而是无情的命运使然。
“Last night, when I left him, he was no longer of this world,” she said.
“昨晚，我把他一个人留在那里的时候，他就不属于这个世界了。”
She had wanted to take the dog with her, but he looked at the animal dozing beside the crutches and caressed him with the tips of his fingers. He said: “I’m sorry, but Mister Woodrow Wilson is coming with me.” He asked her to tie him to the leg of the cot while he wrote, and she used a false knot so that he could free himself. That had been her only act of disloyalty, and it was justified by her desire to remember the master in the wintry eyes of his dog. But Dr. Urbino interrupted her to say that the dog had not freed himself. She said: “Then it was because he did not want to.” And she was glad, because she preferred to evoke her dead lover as he had asked her to the night before, when he stopped writing the letter he had already begun and looked at her for the last time.
她曾想过把狗带走，但他看了看它在拐杖边瞌睡的样子，用指尖轻抚了它几下，说：“对不起，伍德罗·威尔逊先生得跟我在一起。”他写信时，让她把狗拴在行军床的床脚上，可她却系了个活扣，好让狗能够自己松脱。这是她对他唯一的一次不忠，但情有可原，因为她希望今后还能从狗那双冰冷的眼睛里忆起它的主人。乌尔比诺医生打断了她，告诉她狗最终没有挣脱。她说：“那就是它自己不想了。”随后，她又高兴起来，因为她宁愿如他请求的那样去纪念这位死去的恋人，昨晚，他写信时突然停下笔，最后看了她一眼，说：
“Remember me with a rose,” he said to her.
“请用一枝玫瑰纪念我。”
She had returned home a little after midnight. She lay down fully dressed on her bed, to smoke one cigarette after another and give him time to finish what she knew was a long and difficult letter, and a little before three o’clock, when the dogs began to howl, she put the water for coffee on the stove, dressed in full mourning, and cut the first rose of dawn in the patio. Dr. Urbino already realized how completely he would repudiate the memory of that irredeemable woman, and he thought he knew why: only a person without principles could be so complaisant toward grief.
她到家时，刚过半夜。她和衣躺在床上抽烟，不断用烟蒂点燃另一支香烟，以给他足够的时间写信，她知道，那一定是封又长又难写的信。快到三点时，街上的狗开始狂吠，她把用来冲咖啡的水放到火炉上，从上到下换上丧服，并在院中剪下清晨绽放的第一枝玫瑰。乌尔比诺医生早就意识到自己有多么厌恶这个无可救药的女人的回忆，他认为他自有他的理由：只有没有原则的人，才会从痛苦中得到满足。
And for the remainder of the visit she gave him even more justification. She would not go to the funeral, for that is what she had promised her lover, although Dr. Urbino thought he had read just the opposite in one of the paragraphs of the letter. She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory, she would not bury herself alive inside these four walls to sew her shroud, as native widows were expected to do. She intended to sell Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s house and all its contents, which, according to the letter, now belonged to her, and she would go on living as she always had, without complaining, in this death trap of the poor where she had been happy.
拜访结束前，她又对医生讲了很多事。她不会去参加葬礼，因为她答应了自己的情人，尽管乌尔比诺医生认为，信中有一段话的意思正好相反。她不会流一滴眼泪，不会浪费自己的余生，在慢火煮炖的回忆的蛆肉汤中煎熬，不会把自己活活埋葬在四面墙壁之间，成日为自己缝制寿衣，尽管这是当地人乐见寡妇做的事情。她打算卖掉赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的房子：根据遗书上的安排，这座房子连同里面的一切从现在起都属于她了。之后，她会像以前一样继续住在这座穷人等死的墓穴中，无怨无悔，因为在这里，她曾体验到幸福。
The words pursued Dr. Juvenal Urbino on the drive home: “this death trap of the poor.” It was not a gratuitous description. For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air. On Satur days the poor mulattoes, along with all their domestic animals and kitchen utensils, tumultuously abandoned their hovels of cardboard and tin on the edges of the swamps and in jubilant assault took over the rocky beaches of the colonial district. Until a few years ago, some of the older ones still bore the royal slave brand that had been burned onto their chests with flaming irons. During the weekend they danced without mercy, drank themselves blind on home-brewed alcohol, made wild love among the icaco plants, and on Sunday at midnight they broke up their own party with bloody free-for-alls. During the rest of the week the same impetuous mob swarmed into the plazas and alleys of the old neighborhoods with their stores of everything that could be bought and sold, and they infused the dead city with the frenzy of a human fair reeking of fried fish: a new life.
回家路上，这句话一直在胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生的耳边回响：“穷人等死的墓穴。”这个评价绝非信口胡言。因为这座城市，他的城市，至今仍处在时代的边缘：它依旧是当初那座炎热干燥的城市，夜晚也仍旧充斥着那些让他觉得恐怖不已的事，但同时，也仍能让人感受到青春期那种孤独的快乐。在这里，鲜花会生锈，盐巴会腐烂。四个世纪以来，除了在凋谢的月桂树和腐臭的沼泽间慢慢衰老，这里什么都没有发生。冬天，瞬间而至、席卷一切的暴雨使厕所里的污水漫溢，把街道变成令人作呕的泥塘。夏天，有一种看不见的灰尘，粗糙得就像烧红的白垩粉，被狂风一吹，便会从各个缝隙钻进屋里，堵得再严实也无济于事。此外，狂风还会掀开屋顶，把小孩抛向空中。星期六，那些黑白混血的穷人们会乱哄哄地离开用纸板和锌铜合金板搭建在沼泽边的棚屋，带着牲畜和吃饭饮水的家什，一窝蜂兴高采烈地去占领殖民区那布满岩石的海滩。直到前几年，一些上了年纪的人身上还带着真真正正的奴隶印记，那是用烧红的烙铁印在胸口的。整个周末，这些人都毫无节制地纵情跳舞，拼命用自家蒸馏酿制的烧酒把自己灌得烂醉，在梅子丛中交欢。而到了星期日的半夜，他们会以一场血腥的群体争斗来结束自己的方丹戈舞。一周的其他几天，这群风风火火的人则混迹于老城区的广场和大街小巷，摆起小摊，做起各式各样的生意，为这座死气沉沉的城市注入一种散发着炸鱼味的集市的躁动：一种新的生活。
Independence from Spain and then the abolition of slavery precipitated the conditions of honorable decadence in which Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been born and raised. The great old families sank into their ruined palaces in silence. Along the rough cobbled streets that had served so well in surprise attacks and buccaneer landings, weeds hung from the balconies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of life at two o’clock in the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta. Indoors, in the cool bedrooms saturated with incense, women protected themselves from the sun as if it were a shameful infection, and even at early Mass they hid their faces in their mantillas. Their love affairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemed interminable. At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.
先是从西班牙的统治中取得独立，而后又废除了奴隶制，这些都加速了贵族的衰落，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生便是在这种环境中出生和成长的。昔日的显赫家族在他们撤消了守卫的城堡里渐渐归于沉寂。一条条铺着石砖的崎岖街道曾经那么有效地抵御了突然来袭的战争和登陆的海盗，而如今，杂草从阳台上沿街垂落，石灰和石块砌成的城墙裂开一道道缝隙，即便是最好的府邸也难逃衰败的厄运。下午两点，唯一有点儿生气的迹象，就是在午休的昏暗中传来的阵阵无精打采的钢琴练习声。府邸里，凉爽的卧室中弥漫着熏香的味道，女人们躲避着阳光，就像躲避某种令人不齿的传染病，就连在清晨的弥撒中，她们也用纱巾遮着脸。她们的爱情迟缓而艰难，常常被不祥的预兆干扰，生命对她们来说简直没完没了。傍晚，街上车水马龙，一大群嗜血的蚊子从沼泽中飞起，带着一股柔柔的人粪气味，温热而感伤，扰得灵魂深处泛起对死亡的坚信。
And so the very life of the colonial city, which the young Juvenal Urbino tended to idealize in his Parisian melancholy, was an illusion of memory. In the eighteenth century, the commerce of the city had been the most prosperous in the Caribbean, owing in the main to the thankless privilege of its being the largest African slave market in the Americas. It was also the permanent residence of the Viceroys of the New Kingdom of Granada, who preferred to govern here on the shores of the world’s ocean rather than in the distant freezing capital under a centuries-old drizzle that disturbed their sense of reality. Several times a year, fleets of galleons carrying the treasures of Potosí, Quito, and Veracruz gathered in the bay, and the city lived its years of glory. On Friday, June 8, 1708, at four o’clock in the afternoon, the galleon San José set sail for Cádiz with a cargo of precious stones and metals valued at five hundred billion pesos in the currency of the day; it was sunk by an English squadron at the entrance to the port, and two long centuries later it had not yet been salvaged. That treasure lying in its bed of coral, and the corpse of the commander floating sideways on the bridge, were evoked by historians as an emblem of the city drowned in memories.
因此，这座殖民城市的所谓独特生活不过是记忆中的一种幻觉，年轻的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生每每在巴黎心生伤感之时，总是把它美化了。十八世纪，这座城市的商业在加勒比地区最为繁荣，尤其是靠着那项令人厌恶却又得天独厚的优势，即它是美洲最大的非洲奴隶市场。此外，它还是新格拉纳达王国总督的常驻地。总督们喜欢待在这里，面对大洋施行统治，而不是在遥远且天寒地冻的首都，那里的连绵阴雨会扰乱他们对现实的感知。在这座城市的辉煌时期，每年，满载着波多西、基多和维拉克鲁斯各地财富的大帆船船队都会在这里的海湾聚集多次。一七〇八年六月八日，星期五，下午四点，圣何塞号大帆船载着当时价值五千亿比索的宝石和贵金属，刚刚起锚开往加的斯，就被英国舰队击沉在港口的入海处，漫长的两世纪后依旧没被打捞上来。这批躺在珊瑚丛中的珍宝，连同侧着身子漂浮在驾驶舱的船长尸体，常常被历史学家们提起，作为这座淹没在记忆之中的城市的象征。
Across the bay, in the residential district of La Manga, Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s house stood in another time. One-story, spacious and cool, it had a portico with Doric columns on the outside terrace, which commanded a view of the still, miasmic water and the debris from sunken ships in the bay. From the entrance door to the kitchen, the floor was covered with black and white checkerboard tiles, a fact often attrib uted to Dr. Urbino’s ruling passion without taking into account that this was a weakness common to the Catalonian craftsmen who built this district for the nouveaux riches at the beginning of the century. The large drawing room had the very high ceilings found throughout the rest of the house, and six full-length windows facing the street, and it was separated from the dining room by an enormous, elaborate glass door covered with branching vines and bunches of grapes and maidens seduced by the pipes of fauns in a bronze grove. The furnishings in the reception rooms, including the pendulum clock that stood like a living sentinel in the drawing room, were all original English pieces from the late nineteenth century, and the lamps that hung from the walls were all teardrop crystal, and there were Sèvres vases and bowls everywhere and little alabaster statues of pagan idylls. But that European coherence vanished in the rest of the house, where wicker armchairs were jumbled together with Viennese rockers and leather footstools made by local craftsmen. Splendid hammocks from San Jacinto, with multicolored fringe along the sides and the owner’s name embroidered in Gothic letters with silk thread, hung in the bedrooms along with the beds. Next to the dining room, the space that had originally been designed for gala suppers was used as a small music room for intimate concerts when famous performers came to the city. In order to enhance the silence, the tiles had been covered with the Turkish rugs purchased at the World’s Fair in Paris; a recent model of a victrola stood next to a stand that held records arranged with care, and in a corner, draped with a Manila shawl, was the piano that Dr. Urbino had not played for many years. Throughout the house one could detect the good sense and care of a woman whose feet were planted firmly on the ground.
在港湾另一边的拉曼加住宅区，坐落着胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生的家，这里的一切仿佛属于另一个时代。房子又大又凉爽，只有一层，室外的露台上有着多利克式的柱廊，站在那儿可以将海湾里弥漫瘴气的水域和沉船残骸尽收眼底。从门口到厨房，铺的是象棋棋盘式的黑白相间的地砖——人们不止一次地将之归因于乌尔比诺医生的个人嗜好，却忘了这也是加泰罗尼亚建筑大师们的通病，而在本世纪初，这个地区暴发户的房子都是由他们建造的。大厅很宽敞，天花板像所有其他房间一样很高，还有六扇面向大街的落地窗。大厅和厨房之间，由一扇装饰繁复的巨大玻璃门隔开，上面雕着葡萄藤枝蔓和一串串的葡萄，铜制树林里，几个少女正陶醉在农牧神的笛声之中。主客厅中的所有家具，连同大厅里那座像个活岗哨的摆钟，全都是十九世纪末的正宗英国货。吊灯上装饰着水晶坠子，塞弗勒的瓷瓶、花瓶以及以情爱为主题的雪花石膏异教小雕塑也随处可见。不过，这种欧式风格在房子的其余地方就见不到了，那些空间混杂着藤制扶手椅、维也纳摇椅和当地手工制作的皮凳子。卧室里除了床，还有张精致的圣哈辛托吊床，上面用丝线绣着主人的名字，哥特式字体，两边还垂着彩色的流苏。饭厅一侧原本是设计用来举办豪华晚宴的，后来变成了一个小音乐厅，每逢有著名的演奏家来到此地，都会受邀来这里举行私人音乐会。地砖上铺着从巴黎世博会上买回来的土耳其地毯，为的是让环境显得更加幽静。摆放整齐的唱片架旁是一台最新款的电唱机。角落里放着一架钢琴，上面盖着一块马尼拉披肩，乌尔比诺医生已经有很多年没弹琴了。整座房子里，随处可以看出一个脚踏实地的女人的精明与细心。
But no other room displayed the meticulous solemnity of the library, the sanctuary of Dr. Urbino until old age carried him off. There, all around his father’s walnut desk and the tufted leather easy chairs, he had lined the walls and even the windows with shelves behind glass doors, and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound in identical calfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Unlike the other rooms, which were at the mercy of noise and foul winds from the port, the library always enjoyed the tranquillity and fragrance of an abbey. Born and raised in the Caribbean superstition that one opened doors and windows to summon a coolness that in fact did not exist, Dr. Urbino and his wife at first felt their hearts oppressed by enclosure. But in the end they were convinced of the merits of the Roman strategy against heat, which consists of closing houses during the lethargy of August in order to keep out the burning air from the street, and then opening them up completely to the night breezes. And from that time on theirs was the coolest house under the furious La Manga sun, and it was a delight to take a siesta in the darkened bedrooms and to sit on the portico in the afternoon to watch the heavy, ash-gray freighters from New Orleans pass by, and at dusk to see the wooden paddles of the riverboats with their shining lights, purifying the stagnant garbage heap of the bay with the wake of their music. It was also the best protected from December through March, when the northern winds tore away roofs and spent the night circling like hungry wolves looking for a crack where they could slip in. No one ever thought that a marriage rooted in such foundations could have any reason not to be happy.
然而，没有一个地方能像书房那样尽显庄严与肃穆。在衰老将乌尔比诺医生掳获之前，那里曾是他的圣地。在父亲的胡桃木写字台和带皮制软垫的安乐椅四周，他让人用上釉的隔板架把墙壁连同窗子都挡得严严实实，然后以一种近乎癫狂的秩序，往上面整整齐齐地码放了三千册书，每一册都装裱着小牛皮，书脊上用烫金字印着书名的首字母缩写。其他房间都不得不忍受着港口的嘈杂和各种难闻的气味，书房却截然相反，永远弥漫着修道院的幽静气息。加勒比地区的人有一种迷信，以为打开门窗可以将实际上并不存在的凉爽引至屋内。在这里出生并长大的乌尔比诺医生和他的妻子，起初也曾因门窗紧闭而感到压抑，但最终，他们还是采纳了罗马人抵御炎热的绝妙法子，即在令人昏昏欲睡的八月紧闭门窗，不让街上炽热的空气钻进来，等到了晚上再全部敞开，让凉风入户。从那时起，他们家便成了拉曼加区炎炎烈日下最为凉爽的处所。先在卧室的昏暗中睡个午觉，然后下午坐在门廊上，望着来自新奥尔良的沉甸甸的灰色货船和带木制桨轮的内河船来来往往，简直是一种享受。一到黄昏，那些内河船便灯火通明，伴随着隆隆的轰鸣声，将游积在海湾里的垃圾卷走。每年的十二月到次年三月，北方的信风会肆意地掀开屋顶，夜里像饥饿的狼群一样在房子周围呼啸盘旋，寻找可以钻进来的缝隙。在这种时候，医生的家也是保护得最好的。从来没有人想过，安居在这样一座坚实牢固的房子里的夫妻，会有什么理由不幸福。
In any case, Dr. Urbino was not when he returned home that morning before ten o’clock, shaken by the two visits that not only had obliged him to miss Pentecost Mass but also threatened to change him at an age when everything had seemed complete. He wanted a short siesta until it was time for Dr. Lácides Olivella’s gala luncheon, but he found the servants in an uproar as they attempted to catch the parrot, who had flown to the highest branches of the mango tree when they took him from his cage to clip his wings. He was a deplumed, maniacal parrot who did not speak when asked to but only when it was least expected, but then he did so with a clarity and rationality that were uncommon among human beings. He had been tutored by Dr. Urbino himself, which afforded him privileges that no one else in the family ever had, not even the children when they were young.
但不管怎样，那天早上乌尔比诺医生在十点之前回到家时，并没有感到幸福。两次拜访搅得他心烦意乱，还不仅仅是因为让他错过了圣神降临弥撒，而是在这样一个一切似乎都应该尘埃落定的年纪，它们险些把他变成另一个人。他本想在拉希德斯·奥利维利亚医生的豪华午宴前凑合睡上一会儿，却赶上仆人们乱哄哄地在捉鹦鹉。那只鹦鹉趁着人们把它从鸟笼里抓出来修剪翅膀上的羽毛时，飞到了芒果树最高的枝杈上。这是一只毛羽稀疏且性情怪僻的鹦鹉，别人求它开口，它偏不说，而就在人们最意想不到的时候，它却说个没完，而且表达得十分清楚明白，那种条理甚至在人类身上都难得一见。它是由乌尔比诺医生亲自训练的，这让它拥有了家中谁都没有的特权，就连医生的孩子们小时候都没有享受过。
He had lived in the house for over twenty years, and no one knew how many years he had been alive before then. Every afternoon after his siesta, Dr. Urbino sat with him on the terrace in the patio, the coolest spot in the house, and he had summoned the most diligent reserves of his passion for pedagogy until the parrot learned to speak French like an academician. Then, just for love of the labor, he taught him the Latin accompaniment to the Mass and selected passages from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and he tried without success to inculcate in him a working notion of the four arithmetic functions. On one of his last trips to Europe he brought back the first phonograph with a trumpet speaker, along with many of the latest popular records as well as those by his favorite classical composers. Day after day, over and over again for several months, he played the songs of Yvette Guilbert and Aristide Bruant, who had charmed France during the last century, until the parrot learned them by heart. He sang them in a woman’s voice if they were hers, in a tenor’s voice if they were his, and ended with impudent laughter that was a masterful imitation of the servant girls when they heard him singing in French. The fame of his accomplishments was so widespread that on occasion distinguished visitors who had traveled from the interior on the riverboats would ask permission to see him, and once some of the many English tourists, who in those days sailed the banana boats from New Orleans, would have bought him at any price. But the day of his greatest glory was when the President of the Republic, Don Marco Fidel Suárez, with his entourage of cabinet ministers, visited the house in order to confirm the truth of his reputation. They arrived at about three o’clock in the afternoon, suffocating in the top hats and frock coats they had worn during three days of official visits under the burning August sky, and they had to leave as curious as when they arrived, because for two desperate hours the parrot refused to say a single syllable, ignoring the pleas and threats and public humiliation of Dr. Urbino, who had insisted on that foolhardy invitation despite the sage warnings of his wife.
它在这个家已待了二十多年，但谁也不知道这之前它还活过多少年。每天下午午觉醒来，乌尔比诺医生都与它为伴，坐在整个家中最凉爽的地方，院子的露台上。医生怀着教育家的热情，借助了最为艰辛的手段，一直训练到鹦鹉能把法语讲得像个学者一样好。之后，纯粹是出于对美德的癖好，他又教鹦鹉学会了拉丁弥撒中的伴唱和从《玛窦福音》[3]中挑出来的几段经文，甚至试图机械地向它灌输四则运算法则，可惜最终没有成功。他最后几回到欧洲旅行时，有一次带回了城中第一台带喇叭的留声机，还有许多流行唱片和他最喜欢的古典作曲家的唱片。接下来的几个月，他日复一日，一次又一次地让鹦鹉聆听上个世纪风靡一时的依维特·吉尔贝和阿里斯蒂德·布里昂的歌曲，直到鹦鹉最终把这些歌都背了下来。唱那位女歌手的歌，它用女人的嗓音，唱那位男歌手的歌，它则用男高音，最后，还用一阵放荡的笑声来收场，和女仆们听完它用法语演唱的歌曲后爆发出的哄笑声一模一样，惟妙惟肖。这只鹦鹉美名远扬，常有一些乘内河船从内陆远道而来的尊贵客人要求一睹它的风采。那时期，有很多英国旅游者乘坐来自新奥尔良的运输香蕉的船只途经此地。有一次，几个英国佬甚至不惜任何代价想要把它买走。然而，鹦鹉最为荣耀的时刻还得数共和国总统马尔科·菲德尔·苏亚雷斯带着他的全体内阁部长来到这座府邸，想亲眼证实它声誉的那天。他们大约下午三点钟到达，个个头戴礼帽，身穿呢子长礼服，热得喘不过气来。三天以来，他们一直在进行正式会晤，在八月炽热的天空下始终不曾脱去这身装束。可最终，他们却不得不怎么带着好奇心来，还怎么带着好奇心回去，因为在两小时的绝望等待中，不管乌尔比诺医生如何恳求或威胁，鹦鹉始终一言不发，仿佛在说“嘴长在我自己身上”，可就连这句话也绝不宣之于口。医生当众出了丑，怪只怪他当初不听妻子明智的提醒，执意发出了这个莽撞的邀请。（注：[3] 《玛窦福音》即《马太福音》，是天主教的通常译法。）
The fact that the parrot could maintain his privileges after that historic act of defiance was the ultimate proof of his sacred rights. No other animal was permitted in the house, with the exception of the land turtle who had reappeared in the kitchen after three or four years, when everyone thought he was lost forever. He, however, was not considered a living being but rather a mineral good luck charm whose location one could never be certain of. Dr. Urbino was reluctant to confess his hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds of scientific inventions and philosophical pretexts that convinced many, but not his wife. He said that people who loved them to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.
在那次历史性的无礼举动之后，鹦鹉仍旧保持了在家中的特权，这充分证明了它的神圣地位。在这个家，除了它和一只陆龟，不许饲养其他任何动物。那只陆龟曾消失过三四年时间，大家都以为永远地失去它了，可它竟又在厨房里出现。不过，它并不被视作一件活物，而更像是一种矿物质，一个能带来好运的护身符，且向来没人能说清它究竟待在什么地方。乌尔比诺医生拒不承认自己厌恶动物，相反，他用各种杜撰的科学或哲学借口来掩饰这一点。这些理由总是能说服很多人，只除了他的妻子。他常说，过分爱动物的人可能会对人类自身做出至为残忍的事来。还说狗并非忠诚，而是卑躬屈膝；猫则是机会主义者和叛徒；孔雀是死神的传令官；金刚鹦鹉不过是惹人厌的装饰物；兔子助长贪婪；长尾猴会传染欲火；公鸡则该遭天谴，因为正是它造成了基督三次被人否认[4]。（注：[4] 据《新约》记载，耶稣在受难前夕，曾预言他的门徒中最忠诚的伯多禄（即圣彼得）会在天亮鸡叫前三次背叛他。结果预言应验，耶稣被抓走后，伯多禄被人问起时，三次否认自己认识耶稣。）
On the other hand, Fermina Daza, his wife, who at that time was seventy-two years old and had already lost the doe’s gait of her younger days, was an irrational idolater of tropical flowers and domestic animals, and early in her marriage she had taken advantage of the novelty of love to keep many more of them in the house than good sense would allow. The first were three Dalmatians named after Roman emperors, who fought for the favors of a female who did honor to her name of Messalina, for it took her longer to give birth to nine pups than to conceive another ten. Then there were Abyssinian cats with the profiles of eagles and the manners of pharaohs, cross-eyed Siamese and palace Persians with orange eyes, who walked through the rooms like shadowy phantoms and shattered the night with the howling of their witches” sabbaths of love. For several years an Amazonian monkey, chained by his waist to the mango tree in the patio, elicited a certain compassion because he had the sorrowful face of Archbishop Obdulio y Rey, the same candid eyes, the same eloquent hands; that, however, was not the reason Fermina got rid of him, but because he had the bad habit of pleasuring himself in honor of the ladies.
与此相反，他的妻子费尔明娜·达萨却是个热带花卉和家养动物的盲目热爱者。她如今七十二岁了，早已失去年轻时小母鹿一样的身姿。刚结婚时，她利用两人间爱情的新鲜劲儿，在家里养了许多动物，远远超出了理性范畴。最先养的是三只达尔马提亚斑点狗，分别给取了三个罗马皇帝的名字。它们为了在一只母狗面前争宠，撕咬得你死我活。而那只名叫麦瑟琳娜[5]的母狗也真无愧于它的名字，刚刚产下九只狗崽，就又迅速怀上了十只。之后，费尔明娜·达萨又养了几只集老鹰轮廓和法老风范于一身的阿比西尼亚猫、几只斜眼的暹罗猫和橘黄色眼睛的宫廷波斯猫。它们像幽灵的影子一般在各个卧室里窜来窜去。到了发情期，从它们的妖魔聚会上传来的号叫声搅扰着夜晚的平静。有几年，在院子里的芒果树上，竟还有一只用铁链拴着腰的亚马逊长尾猴，由于其痛苦的面容、天真的眼神和极其丰富的肢体语言都酷似大主教奥布杜利奥—雷依，常常引来人们的某种同情。但费尔明娜·达萨最后之所以抛弃它，还并不是因为这些，而是因为它有向女人们献殷勤并自鸣得意的坏毛病。（注：[5] 麦瑟琳娜，古罗马皇帝克劳狄一世的第三任妻子，以狠毒和放荡著称。）
There were all kinds of Guatemalan birds in cages along the passageways, and premonitory curlews, and swamp herons with long yellow legs, and a young stag who came in through the windows to eat the anthurium in the flowerpots. Shortly before the last civil war, when there was talk for the first time of a possible visit by the Pope, they had brought a bird of paradise from Guatemala, but it took longer to arrive than to return to its homeland when it was learned that the announcement of the pontifical visit had been a lie spread by the government to alarm the conspiratorial Liberals. Another time, on the smugglers” ships from Curaçao, they bought a wicker cage with six perfumed crows identical to the ones that Fermina Daza had kept as a girl in her father’s house and that she still wanted to have as a married woman. But no one could bear the continual flapping of their wings that filled the house with the reek of funeral wreaths. They also brought in an anaconda, four meters long, whose insomniac hunter’s sighs disturbed the darkness in the bedrooms although it accomplished what they had wanted, which was to frighten with its mortal breath the bats and salamanders and countless species of harmful insects that invaded the house during the rainy months. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, so occupied at that time with his professional obligations and so absorbed in his civic and cultural enterprises, was content to assume that in the midst of so many abominable creatures his wife was not only the most beautiful woman in the Caribbean but also the happiest. But one rainy afternoon, at the end of an exhausting day, he encountered a disaster in the house that brought him to his senses. Out of the drawing room, and for as far as the eye could see, a stream of dead animals floated in a marsh of blood. The servant girls had climbed on the chairs, not knowing what to do, and they had not yet recovered from the panic of the slaughter.
走廊的鸟笼里养了各种各样的危地马拉鸟，此外，家中还有几只未卜先知的石鸻、几只黄腿修长的沼泽草鹭和一只常常从窗外探进头来啃咬花瓶中的火鹤的小鹿。在最后一次内战爆发前不久，当第一次有传言教皇可能会来到此地时，他们从危地马拉弄来了一只天堂鸟。可当得知教皇来访的传闻不过是政府为了恐吓图谋不轨的自由党人而散布的谣言时，这只鸟又被送回了故土，去得比来得还快。还有一次，他们从库拉索岛走私者的帆船上买回六只关在一个金丝鸟笼里的香乌鸦，和费尔明娜·达萨小时候起就在父亲家养的香乌鸦一模一样，她希望嫁人以后还能继续养这种鸟。可它们总是不停地扇动翅膀，弄得家里充满了它们身上那种殡葬花圈似的气味，谁都无法忍受。他们还曾带回来一条四米长的蟒蛇，为的是用它那死亡的气息吓跑蝙蝠、蝾螈，以及雨季里侵入家中的多种害虫。尽管也达到了目的，可这位不眠猎手嗤嗤的呼吸声扰乱了卧室黑暗里的宁静。当时正怀着职业道德忙得不可开交，并且醉心于社交和文化事业的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生，虽然身处这样一大堆令人厌恶的活物之中，但只要想想他的妻子不仅是加勒比地区最美，而且也是最幸福的女人，他也就知足了。然而，一个雨天的下午，他筋疲力竭地结束了一天的工作，回到家竟撞进一场将他推回现实的灾难。从客厅一直到他目所能及的地方，动物的尸体连成了串，漂浮在血泊之中。女仆们都爬到了椅子上，满脸的不知所措，显然，是对这场大屠杀惊魂未定。
One of the German mastiffs, maddened by a sudden attack of rabies, had torn to pieces every animal of any kind that crossed its path, until the gardener from the house next door found the courage to face him and hack him to pieces with his machete. No one knew how many creatures he had bitten or contaminated with his green slaverings, and so Dr. Urbino ordered the survivors killed and their bodies burned in an isolated field, and he requested the services of Misericordia Hospital for a thorough disinfecting of the house. The only animal to escape, because nobody remembered him, was the giant lucky charm tortoise.
事情是这样的：几只德国獒中的一只突然得了狂犬病，发起疯来，不管见到什么动物都扑上去咬，最后还是邻居家的园丁挺身而出，挥刀把它砍成了碎片。谁也不知道它究竟咬过哪些动物，又或者它嘴里吐出的那些绿色泡沫沾染过哪些，于是，乌尔比诺医生下令杀掉所有幸存的动物，并把尸体带到偏远的旷野焚烧，还请仁爱医院的工作人员到家里进行了一次彻底消毒。唯一幸免于难的就是那只象征好运的雄性美洲陆龟，因为根本没人想起它来。
Fermina Daza admitted for the first time that her husband was right in a domestic matter, and for a long while afterward she was careful to say no more about animals. She consoled herself with color illustrations from Linnaeus’s Natural History, which she framed and hung on the drawing room walls, and perhaps she would eventually have lost all hope of ever seeing an animal in the house again if it had not been for the thieves who, early one morning, forced a bathroom window and made off with the silver service that had been in the family for five generations. Dr. Urbino put double padlocks on the window frames, secured the doors on the inside with iron crossbars, placed his most valuable possessions in the strongbox, and belatedly acquired the wartime habit of sleeping with a revolver under his pillow. But he opposed the purchase of a fierce dog, vaccinated or unvaccinated, running loose or chained up, even if thieves were to steal everything he owned.
费尔明娜·达萨头一次在家庭事务上完全赞同丈夫，并且很长一段时间里都小心翼翼地没再提过动物的事。她用林奈《自然史》中的彩色插图聊以自慰，还叫人把这些图镶上画框，挂在大厅墙上。若不是有天清晨几个小偷打破浴室窗子，偷走了一套五代家传的银制餐具，或许她早已断了念头，以为再也没有希望在家中看到动物了。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生在窗子的铁环上装了双锁，各道门也都用铁闩加固，并把最贵重的物品放进保险箱，还养成了某种迟来的战时习惯：睡觉时把左轮手枪放在枕头底下。但他反对再买一条烈狗，无论是否注射过疫苗，也无论是散养还是拴着：就算让贼把家里偷个精光，他也绝不同意。
“Nothing that does not speak will come into this house,” he said.
“凡是不会说话的，一律不许进这个家。”
He said it to put an end to the specious arguments of his wife, who was once again determined to buy a dog, and he never imagined that his hasty generalization was to cost him his life. Fermina Daza, whose straightforward character had become more subtle with the years, seized on her husband’s casual words, and months after the robbery she returned to the ships from Curaçao and bought a royal Paramaribo parrot, who knew only the blasphemies of sailors but said them in a voice so human that he was well worth the extravagant price of twelve centavos.
这么说是为了让妻子不再为此事纠缠，因为她又固执地想买一条狗回来，可他万万没有想到，这句自己匆忙说出并且意义过于宽泛的话竟会有朝一日要了他的命。费尔明娜·达萨那桀骜不驯的性格随着年龄的增长有了微妙的变化，她立刻抓住丈夫用词轻率的疏漏：失窃案发生几个月后，她又去了一艘来自库拉索岛的帆船，买下一只帕拉马里博皇家鹦鹉。虽然它只会说些水手的粗话，但说得竟和真人一模一样，也算值了十二生太伏的高价。
He was a fine parrot, lighter than he seemed, with a yellow head and a black tongue, the only way to distinguish him from mangrove parrots who did not learn to speak even with turpentine suppositories. Dr. Urbino, a good loser, bowed to the ingenuity of his wife and was even surprised at how amused he was by the advances the parrot made when he was excited by the servant girls. On rainy afternoons, his tongue loosened by the pleasure of having his feathers drenched, he uttered phrases from another time, which he could not have learned in the house and which led one to think that he was much older than he appeared. The Doctor’s final doubts collapsed one night when the thieves tried to get in again through a skylight in the attic, and the parrot frightened them with a mastiff’s barking that could not have been more realistic if it had been real, and with shouts of stop thief stop thief stop thief, two saving graces he had not learned in the house. It was then that Dr. Urbino took charge of him and ordered the construction of a perch under the mango tree with a container for water, another for ripe bananas, and a trapeze for acrobatics. From December through March, when the nights were cold and the north winds made living outdoors unbearable, he was taken inside to sleep in the bedrooms in a cage covered by a blanket, although Dr. Urbino suspected that his chronic swollen glands might be a threat to the healthy respiration of humans. For many years they clipped his wing feathers and let him wander wherever he chose to walk with his hulking old horseman’s gait. But one day he began to do acrobatic tricks on the beams in the kitchen and fell into the pot of stew with a sailor’s shout of every man for himself, and with such good luck that the cook managed to scoop him out with the ladle, scalded and deplumed but still alive. From then on he was kept in the cage even during the daytime, in defiance of the vulgar belief that caged parrots forget everything they have learned, and let out only in the four o’clock coolness for his classes with Dr. Urbino on the terrace in the patio. No one realized in time that his wings were too long, and they were about to clip them that morning when he escaped to the top of the mango tree.
这只鹦鹉的确品种优良，而且比看上去还要灵巧，长相上唯一区别于热带丛林鹦鹉的地方就是它头黄舌黑，可即使用松节油栓剂也无法让丛林鹦鹉学会说话。乌尔比诺医生向来是个输得起的人，他在妻子的才智面前低了头，并惊讶地发现，自己也觉得鹦鹉在女仆们的嬉笑中取得的进步十分逗趣。雨天的下午，这只羽毛被淋透的鹦鹉尤其欢快，放开了舌头，滔滔不绝地说出很多它不可能在这个家里学到的老话儿，让人觉得它恐怕比看上去要老得多。乌尔比诺医生的最后一丝保留终于在某天晚上被彻底瓦解。那天夜里，几个盗贼再次试图从屋顶平台的天窗钻进屋里，而鹦鹉用几声德国獒的狂吠把他们吓得落荒而逃，即使是真狗也无法叫得更逼真了，而它一边叫，还一边喊着“有贼”、“有贼”，这两种有趣的救命本事可都不是在这个家学的。自那以后，乌尔比诺医生就亲自接管了它。他命人在芒果树下搭起栖木，上面放两个容器，一个盛水，一个盛熟香蕉，此外，还挂了根吊杆供鹦鹉练习杂耍。尽管乌尔比诺医生怀疑，它的慢性鼻疽病对人的正常呼吸有害，但从十二月到翌年三月，夜晚转凉，当北风使得鹦鹉无法再在室外待下去时，它便会被放进一只罩有毯子的笼子里，接进卧室睡觉。多年来，他们总是为它剪短翅膀的羽毛，放它自在地迈着那老骑士般的步伐，曲着腿走来走去。但有一天，它正在厨房的横梁上兴致勃勃地耍着杂技，却一下子掉进了炖杂烩的锅里，嘴里还念叨着它那一串叽里呱啦的水手呼救语。幸而它的运气足够好，厨娘用做饭的大勺把它捞了起来。它被烫得全身通红，羽毛也掉光了，但还活着。从那以后，就连大白天它也被关在笼子里，顾不上民间流传的关于笼中的鹦鹉会忘记所学东西的说法了，只有在凉爽的四点钟，乌尔比诺医生在院子的露台给它上课时，它才会被放出来。谁也没有及时发现它翅膀上的羽毛已经过长，而就在那天早晨，大家正准备给它修剪羽毛，它逃到了芒果树的树冠上。
And for three hours they had not been able to catch him. The servant girls, with the help of other maids in the neighborhood, had used all kinds of tricks to lure him down, but he insisted on staying where he was, laughing madly as he shouted long live the Liberal Party, long live the Liberal Party damn it, a reckless cry that had cost many a carefree drunk his life. Dr. Urbino could barely see him amid the leaves, and he tried to cajole him in Spanish and French and even in Latin, and the parrot responded in the same languages and with the same emphasis and timbre in his voice, but he did not move from his treetop. Convinced that no one was going to make him move voluntarily, Dr. Urbino had them send for the fire department, his most recent civic pastime.
他们花了三个小时还没有捉住它。女仆们在邻居家女仆的帮助下，用尽各种办法想把它哄下来，可它依旧固执地待在原地，一边放声大笑，一边高喊着：“自由党万岁！他妈的自由党万岁！”近来，因这种莽撞的呼号而丢了性命的快活酒鬼已不下四个。乌尔比诺医生几乎看不清繁叶中的鹦鹉，他试图用西班牙语、法语，甚至拉丁语来说服它，而它则用同样的语言、同样的重音和同样的音色回答他，却始终寸步不离树梢。乌尔比诺医生见谁也无法让鹦鹉心甘情愿地下来，便下令找消防队员来帮忙，这是他作为一名爱国市民，最新搞出来的一项玩意儿。
Until just a short time before, in fact, fires had been put out by volunteers using brickmasons’ ladders and buckets of water carried in from wherever it could be found, and methods so disorderly that they sometimes caused more damage than the fires. But for the past year, thanks to a fund-organized by the Society for Public Improvement, of which Juvenal Urbino was honorary president, there was a corps of professional firemen and a water truck with a siren and a bell and two high-pressure hoses. They were so popular that classes were suspended when the church bells were heard sounding the alarm, so that children could watch them fight the fire. At first that was all they did. But Dr. Urbino told the municipal authorities that in Hamburg he had seen firemen revive a boy found frozen in a basement after a three-day snowstorm. He had also seen them in a Neapolitan alley lowering a corpse in his coffin from a tenth-floor balcony because the stairway in the building had so many twists and turns that the family could not get him down to the street. That was how the local firemen learned to render other emergency services, such as forcing locks or killing poisonous snakes, and the Medical School offered them a special course in first aid for minor accidents. So it was in no way peculiar to ask them to please get a distinguished parrot, with all the qualities of a gentleman, out of a tree. Dr. Urbino said: “Tell them it’s for me.” And he went to his bedroom to dress for the gala luncheon. The truth was that at that moment, devastated by the letter from Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, he did not really care about the fate of the parrot.
事实上，直到不久前，火灾还是由自发的人们用泥瓦匠的梯子和一桶桶随便从什么地方运来的水扑灭的。那种混乱无序的法子有时甚至会造成比火灾本身更大的危害。而从去年起，多亏了胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生担任荣誉主席的公共改善协会发起的一项募捐，这里开始有了一支专业的消防队，外加一辆带有汽笛、警铃和两条高压水管的蓄水卡车。这些东西红极一时，甚至每逢听到教堂敲响警报的钟声，学校都会停止上课，好让学生们前去观看消防员如何救火。起初，他们唯一的任务便是灭火。但乌尔比诺医生告诉市政当局，他曾在汉堡看到消防员们救活了一个于三天的大雪后在地窖中冻僵的孩子，还在那不勒斯的小巷里看见过他们从十层楼的阳台上抬下一口装着死人的棺材，只因那座楼的楼梯太过曲折，死者的家人无法将棺木抬到街上。就这样，本地的消防员们开始学习提供其他紧急服务，比如撬开门锁、杀死毒蛇等等，医学院还专门为他们开设了一期小事故急救课程。因此，请他们帮忙从树上捉下一只像绅士一样品格高贵的鹦鹉并不能算过分之举。乌尔比诺医生说：“告诉他们，是我请他们来的。”说完便径直走到卧室去换衣服，准备参加午宴。事实上，此时此刻，他正被赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的那封信弄得晕头转向，根本无心顾及鹦鹉的命运。
Fermina Daza had put on a loose-fitting silk dress belted at the hip, a necklace of real pearls with six long, uneven loops, and high-heeled satin shoes that she wore only on very solemn occasions, for by now she was too old for such abuses. Her stylish attire did not seem appropriate for a venerable grandmother, but it suited her figure — long-boned and still slender and erect, her resilient hands without a single age spot, her steel-blue hair bobbed on a slant at her cheek. Her clear almond eyes and her inborn haughtiness were all that were left to her from her wedding portrait, but what she had been deprived of by age she more than made up for in character and diligence. She felt very well: the time of iron corsets, bound waists, and bustles that exaggerated buttocks was receding into the past. Liberated bodies, breathing freely, showed themselves for what they were. Even at the age of seventy-two.
费尔明娜·达萨穿了件宽松的丝绸衬衣，下摆长至臀部，并戴了一条货真价实的长珍珠项链，在脖子上绕了大大小小六个圈，脚下一双缎面高跟鞋，是在极为庄重的场合才穿的，因为年龄已经不允许她经常如此大费周章地打扮了。这身时髦装束似乎并不适合一个备受敬重的老妇人，但在她身上却十分得体。她骨架修长，身材依旧苗条挺拔，富有弹性的手上连一块老人斑都没有，一头紧贴脸颊的短发泛着钢铁般的蓝色光芒。和新婚时的照片相比，她此刻还能保持不变的就只剩下那一双清澈的杏核眼和她那民族特有的高傲了，但她因年龄而减损的，又因性格而弥补回来，更因勤劳赢得了更多。她觉得现在这样很好：那穿铁丝紧身胸衣、束起腰身、用布片将臀部垫高的岁月已经一去不复返了。身体得到解放，呼吸也变得顺畅，原本什么样就表现出什么样。尽管她已经七十二岁了。
Dr. Urbino found her sitting at her dressing table under the slow blades of the electric fan, putting on her bell-shaped hat decorated with felt violets. The bedroom was large and bright, with an English bed protected by mosquito netting embroidered in pink, and two windows open to the trees in the patio, where one could hear the clamor of cicadas, giddy with premonitions of rain. Ever since their return from their honeymoon, Fermina Daza had chosen her husband’s clothes according to the weather and the occasion, and laid them out for him on a chair the night before so they would be ready for him when he came out of the bathroom. She could not remember when she had also begun to help him dress, and finally to dress him, and she was aware that at first she had done it for love, but for the past five years or so she had been obliged to do it regardless of the reason because he could not dress himself. They had just celebrated their golden wedding anniversary, and they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased. Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer. Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband’s step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood. That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deception was providential for the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity.
乌尔比诺医生看见她坐在梳妆台前，在缓缓转动的电风扇扇叶下，正把一顶饰有紫罗兰毡花的钟形帽往头上戴。卧室宽敞而明亮，英式大床上挂着玫瑰色的针织蚊帐，两扇敞开的窗正对着院里的几棵树。知了们被即将下雨的征兆扰得惊慌失措，刺耳的鸣声阵阵传进屋来。自从新婚旅行回来后，费尔明娜·达萨便一直根据天气和场合为丈夫挑选合适的衣服，并在前一晚把它们按顺序整齐地放在椅子上，好让丈夫从浴室出来时能方便地穿上。她也不记得自己是从什么时候起开始帮他穿衣服，而后又变成完全替他穿。她心里很清楚，起初她这样做只是因为爱，而自五年前起，却是无论如何不得不这样做了，因为他已经不能自己穿衣。两人才刚刚庆祝完金婚，谁离开谁都无法生存片刻，甚至每一刻都不能不想着对方，而且随着年纪越来越老，就越来越是如此。可无论他，还是她，都无法说清这种相互依赖究竟是建立在爱情的基础上，还是习惯使然。他们从不曾为此问过自己，因为两人都宁愿不知道答案。她早就发觉了丈夫脚步的日益蹒跚，脾气的反复无常，记忆中出现的裂痕，以及新近养成的在睡梦中抽泣的习惯，但她并没有把这些当作他最终衰老的确凿标志，而是视之为一次幸福的返老还童。她把他当作一个老小孩，而非一个难以伺候的老人。这种自欺欺人对两人来说或许都是一种上天的恩赐，因为这让他们避免了互相同情。
Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. For years Fermina Daza had endured her husband’s jubilant dawns with a bitter heart. She clung to the last threads of sleep in order to avoid facing the fatality of another morning full of sinister premonitions, while he awoke with the innocence of a newborn: each new day was one more day he had won. She heard him awake with the roosters, and his first sign of life was a cough without rhyme or reason that seemed intended to awaken her too. She heard him grumble, just to annoy her, while he felt around for the slippers that were supposed to be next to the bed. She heard him make his way to the bathroom, groping in the dark. After an hour in his study, when she had fallen asleep again, he would come back to dress, still without turning on the light. Once, during a party game, he had been asked how he defined himself, and he had said: “I am a man who dresses in the dark.” She heard him, knowing full well that not one of those noises was indispensable, and that he made them on purpose although he pretended not to, just as she was awake and pretended not to be. His motives were clear: he never needed her awake and lucid as much as he did during those fumbling moments.
如果两人能及时明白，比起婚姻中的巨大灾难，日常的琐碎烦恼更加难以躲避，或许他们的生活完全会是另一副样子。而如果说，他们在共同的生活中也多少学到了点什么，那就是智慧往往在已无用武之地时才来到我们身边。多年来，费尔明娜·达萨一直痛苦地忍受着丈夫每天清晨起床时的快乐。她竭力抓住自己的最后一丝困意，以免去面对一个新的充满了不祥之兆的早晨所预示的宿命，而他却带着一个新生儿的天真醒来了：新的清晨，意味着他又赢得了一天的时间。她听着他伴随着鸡鸣醒来，活着的第一个标志就是一声无缘无故的咳嗽，好像故意要把她吵醒似的。她听着他一边摸索应该就在床边的拖鞋，一边嘟嘟囔囔地发着牢骚，唯一的目的就是要扰得她不得安宁。她听着他在黑暗中一路跌跌撞撞地摸向浴室，然后，他会在书房待上一个小时，可她才刚刚重新入睡，就又听见他回来穿衣服，仍旧没有开灯。（有一次，在玩沙龙游戏时，人们问他如何定义自己，他说：“我是一个在黑暗中穿衣服的男人。”）她就这样听着他，心里清楚，这些声响中没有一个是必要的。他假装无意，但其实是有意弄出这许多动静，就像她明明醒着，却假装没有醒。他的理由十分明确：他从未像这些不安的时刻里那样迫切地需要她，需要她活着，并且头脑清醒。
There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was. Dr. Urbino knew she was waiting for his slightest sound, that she even would be grateful for it, just so she could blame someone for waking her at five o’clock in the morning, so that on the few occasions when he had to feel around in the dark because he could not find his slippers in their customary place, she would suddenly say in a sleepy voice: “You left them in the bathroom last night.” Then right after that, her voice fully awake with rage, she would curse: “The worst misfortune in this house is that nobody lets you sleep.”
没有人比她的睡姿更优雅，一只手搭在前额上，像一幅舞蹈的素描。但是，若有人打扰了她将醒未醒时浅浅的睡意，她又会比任何人都凶悍。乌尔比诺医生知道，她正侧耳等着他发出哪怕最微小的一丝响动，甚至还会为此感谢他，因为这样，她就可以把清晨五点被吵醒的责任全部推到他身上了。而事实也的确如此，有几次，他由于没有在老地方找到拖鞋，正在黑暗中摸索，她突然用半梦半醒的声音说：“你昨晚把它们放在浴室里了。”接着，她又用愤怒而清醒的声音骂道：“这个家里最倒霉的事，就是从来不让人好好睡觉。”
Then she would roll over in bed and turn on the light without the least mercy for herself, content with her first victory of the day. The truth was they both played a game, mythical and perverse, but for all that comforting: it was one of the many dangerous pleasures of domestic love. But one of those trivial games almost ended the first thirty years of their life together, because one day there was no soap in the bathroom.
于是，她在床上翻来覆去，对自己不抱一丝怜悯地打开灯，为这一天的头一个胜利而扬扬得意。事实上，这是两人间的一种游戏，神秘而邪恶，但也正因为如此，他们才能重新振奋起来：这是居家爱情的众多危险性快乐的一种。然而，也正是一次类似这样的日常消遣，差点让他们头三十年的共同生活走到尽头。事情的起因是有一天，他们的浴室里没香皂了。
It began with routine simplicity. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had returned to the bedroom, in the days when he still bathed without help, and begun to dress without turning on the light. As usual she was in her warm fetal state, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow, that arm from a sacred dance above her head. But she was only half asleep, as usual, and he knew it. After a prolonged sound of starched linen in the darkness, Dr. Urbino said to himself:
一切本和平常没有两样。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生从浴室回到卧房，那时，他还能自己洗澡而无需别人帮助。他开始穿衣服，没有开灯。她则跟往常这个时候一样，像胎儿似的躺在温暖的被窝里，闭着眼睛，呼吸很轻，那只跳着神圣舞蹈的手臂放在头顶。她正处于半梦半醒之间，他心里十分清楚这一点。黑暗中，浆过的亚麻衣服窸窣了好一阵子后，乌尔比诺医生自言自语道：
“I’ve been bathing for almost a week without any soap.”
“差不多有一个星期了，我洗澡的时候都没有香皂。”
Then, fully awake, she remembered, and tossed and turned in fury with the world because in fact she had forgotten to replace the soap in the bathroom. She had noticed its absence three days earlier when she was already under the shower, and she had planned to replace it afterward, but then she forgot until the next day, and on the third day the same thing happened again. The truth was that a week had not gone by, as he said to make her feel more guilty, but three unpardonable days, and her anger at being found out in a mistake maddened her. As always, she defended herself by attacking.
于是她想起这件事，醒了，然后对全世界都没好气地翻了个身，因为她的确忘记往浴室里放上新的香皂了。她是在三天前发现这件事的，那时她已经站在了淋浴喷头下，于是想之后再放上，但过后却忘了，直到第二天淋浴时才又想起。而第三天又发生了同样的事。事实上并不到一个星期，他这样说是为了夸大她的错误，但三天确实是有的，而且不可原谅。那种被人当场抓住错误的感觉让她老羞成怒。像往常一样，她以攻为守。
“Well I’ve bathed every day,” she shouted, beside herself with rage, “and there’s always been soap.”
“这几天我每天都洗澡，”她失态地叫嚷道，“一直都有香皂。”
Although he knew her battle tactics by heart, this time he could not abide them. On some professional pretext or other he went to live in the interns” quarters at Misericordia Hospital, returning home only to change his clothes before making his evening house calls. She headed for the kitchen when she heard him come in, pretending that she had something to do, and stayed there until she heard his carriage in the street. For the ne xt three months, each time they tried to resolve the conflict they only inflamed their feelings even more. He was not ready to come back as long as she refused to admit there had been no soap in the bathroom, and she was not prepared to have him back until he recognized that he had consciously lied to torment her.
尽管他太了解她的战术，但这一次却无法再忍了。他编了个冠冕堂皇的理由，搬到了仁爱医院的实习医生宿舍里去住，只在黄昏出诊前回家换衣服。而她每一听到他回来的声音，就立刻跑到厨房里去，假装在忙着什么，直到街上再次响起马车的铁蹄声。接下来的三个月里，每次他们试图解决分歧，结果都是把怒火越拨越旺。只要她不承认浴室中没有香皂，他就不打算回来；而她呢，只要他不承认自己为折磨她而故意说了谎，她就不准备接受他回来。
The incident, of course, gave them the opportunity to evoke many other trivial quarrels from many other dim and turbulent dawns. Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened old scars, turned them into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in so many years of conjugal battling they had done little more than nurture their rancor. At last he proposed that they both submit to an open confession, with the Archbishop himself if necessary, so that God could decide once and for all whether or not there had been soap in the soap dish in the bathroom. Then, despite all her self-control, she lost her temper with a historic cry:
当然，这次事件也让他们有机会联想起其他无数个朦胧清晨发生的无数次口角。一阵反感掀起另一阵反感，旧伤疤被揭开，变成了新伤口。两人都十分惊愕，因为他们痛苦地证实了，在这么多年的夫妻争斗中，他们所做的一切都不过是培养了仇恨。他甚至提出，如果有必要，他们可以去大主教先生那里做一次公开忏悔，让上帝裁决浴室的香皂盒里到底有没有香皂。这一下，本来还很好地保持了理智的她，终于爆发出一声历史性的叫喊：
“To hell with the Archbishop!”
“让大主教先生见鬼去吧！”
The impropriety shook the very foundations of the city, gave rise to slanders that were not easy to disprove, and was preserved in popular tradition as if it were a line from an operetta: “To hell with the Archbishop!” Realizing she had gone too far, she anticipated her husband’s predictable response and threatened to move back to her father’s old house, which still belonged to her although it had been rented out for public offices, and live there by herself. And it was not an idle threat: she really did want to leave and did not care about the scandal, and her husband realized this in time. He did not have the courage to defy his own prejudices, and he capitulated. Not in the sense that he admitted there had been soap in the bathroom, but insofar as he continued to live in the same house with her, although they slept in separate rooms, and he did not say a word to her. They ate in silence, sparring with so much skill that they sent each other messages across the table through the children, and the children never realized that they were not speaking to each other.
这声辱骂震动了城市的地基，引起各种各样难以澄清的流言蜚语，而且像说唱剧中的顺口溜一样变成了民间俚语：“让大主教先生见鬼去吧！”她意识到自己越了界，于是先发制人，抢在她预料丈夫会有的反应之前，威胁他说，自己要一个人搬到父亲的老房子里去住，虽然那里现在租出去成了公家的办公室，但仍旧是属于她的。这并非虚张声势：她真的想走，根本不会顾及什么社会舆论。而她丈夫及时发现了这一点。他没有勇气去挑战这一有失偏颇的判断，于是让步了。当然，他并没有承认浴室中确有香皂，因为那是对真理的侮辱，而只是接受两个人继续生活在同一幢房子里，但分房住，而且互不说话。于是吃饭时，为避免尴尬，他们巧妙地通过孩子们从桌子一头传话到另一头，而孩子们竟然也从未发现，他们彼此间从不搭腔。
Since the study had no bathroom, the arrangement solved the problem of noise in the morning, because he came in to bathe after preparing his class and made a sincere effort not to awaken his wife. They would often arrive at the bathroom at the same time, and then they took turns brushing their teeth before going to sleep. After four months had gone by, he lay down on their double bed one night to read until she came out of the bathroom, as he often did, and he fell asleep. She lay down beside him in a rather careless way so that he would wake up and leave. And in fact he did stir, but instead of getting up he turned out the light and settled himself on the pillow. She shook him by the shoulder to remind him that he was supposed to go to the study, but it felt so comfortable to be back in his great-grandparents’ featherbed that he preferred to capitulate.
书房里没有浴室，这反倒避免了因早晨的声响而引起摩擦，因为乌尔比诺医生改为备课后再进屋洗澡，并且小心翼翼，唯恐吵醒妻子。有好几次，他们睡前撞到了一起，于是便轮流刷牙。四个月后的一天，她从浴室中出来，发现他在他们那张大床上看书（这是常有的事）竟看睡着了。她在他身边躺下，动作很大，希望能吵醒他，让他离开。而他也的确迷迷糊糊地醒了，但并没有起身，而是关掉床头灯，然后又舒服地倒在了他的枕头上。她晃了晃他的肩膀，提醒他该去书房了，但此时此刻，他再次回到了祖传的羽毛床上，感觉是那么的舒服，宁愿缴械投降。
“Let me stay here,” he said. “There was soap.”
“让我留在这儿吧。”他说，“的确有香皂。”
When they recalled this episode, now they had rounded the corner of old age, neither could believe the astonishing truth that this had been the most serious argument in fifty years of living together, and the only one that had made them both want to abandon their responsibilities and begin a new life. Even when they were old and placid they were careful about bringing it up, for the barely healed wounds could begin to bleed again as if they had been inflicted only yesterday.
当他们步入老年，回忆起这段往事时，无论他还是她，都无法相信这样一个惊人的事实，即那次吵架竟是他们半个世纪的共同生活中最为严重的一次，也是他们唯一一次萌生了放弃的念头，希望开始过另一种人生。尽管现在他们老了，已经心平气和，但还是注意不去提它，因为那刚刚愈合的伤口会再次流血，仿如就发生在昨日。
He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion’s stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come. That memory often returned to her as the years weakened the stream, for she never could resign herself to his wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it. Dr. Urbino tried to convince her, with arguments readily understandable to anyone who wished to understand them, that the mishap was not repeated every day through carelessness on his part, as she insisted, but because of organic reasons: as a young man his stream was so defined and so direct that when he was at school he won contests for marksmanship in filling bottles, but with the ravages of age it was not only decreasing, it was also becoming oblique and scattered, and had at last turned into a. fantastic fountain, impossible to control despite his many efforts to direct it. He would say: “The toilet must have been invented by someone who knew nothing about men.” He contributed to domestic peace with a quotidian act that was more humiliating than humble: he wiped the rim of the bowl with toilet paper each time he used it. She knew, but never said anything as long as the ammoniac fumes were not too strong in the bathroom, and then she proclaimed, as if she had uncovered a crime: “This stinks like a rabbit hutch.” On the eve of old age this physical difficulty inspired Dr. Urbino with the ultimate solution: he urinated sitting down, as she did, which kept the bowl clean and him in a state of grace.
他是让费尔明娜·达萨听到小便声的第一个男人。那是新婚之夜，在那艘载着他们前往法国的轮船的舱室中。当时，她正因晕船萎靡不振，而他那公马一般的小便声是那么的强劲威严，这更增加了她对那场一直令她提心吊胆的灾难的恐惧。随着年龄的增长，他那股泉水声越来越弱，可那段记忆却频繁地浮现在她的脑海中，因为她从来都无法忍受他在用马桶时把池子的边缘弄湿。乌尔比诺医生试图用一个任何有意听懂的人都能明白的浅显道理说服她，告诉她这种事故并非如她坚持认为的那样，是他每天不小心才造成的，而是身体机能的原因：年轻时，他尿得又准又直，在学校里，他曾是瞄准瓶子撒尿的冠军，但随着岁月的消磨，不仅小便的势头减弱，而且还歪歪斜斜，分成许多支流，最后变成了一股无法驾驭的虚幻之泉，尽管他每次都做出极大努力想让它走直线。他说：“抽水马桶一定是某个一点儿也不了解男人的人发明的。”他只好用日常行动来为家庭和平做出贡献，但这更多的是出于屈辱，而非谦恭：每次小便后，他都会拿卫生纸去擦干马桶池的边缘。她对此心知肚明，但只要卫生间里的氨气味不过于明显，她便从来都不说什么，而一旦出现那种情况，她就会像发现一桩罪行似的宣告：“这儿的味道呛得就像个兔子窝。”在步入老龄的前夕，乌尔比诺医生终于找出了对抗这项身体障碍的终极解决办法：像她一样坐着撒尿，如此一来，不仅保持了马桶池的清洁，他自己的姿势也惬意了许多。
By this time he could do very little for himself, and the possibility of a fatal slip in the tub put him on his guard against the shower. The house was modern and did not have the pewter tub with lion’s paw feet common in the mansions of the old city. He had had it removed for hygienic reasons: the bathtub was another piece of abominable junk invented by Europeans who bathed only on the last Friday of the month, and the n in the same water made filthy by the very dirt they tried to remove from their bodies. So he had ordered an outsized washtub made of solid lignum vitae, in which Fermina Daza bathed her husband just as if he were a newborn child. Waters boiled with mallow leaves and orange skins were mixed into the bath that lasted over an hour, and the effect on him was so sedative that he sometimes fell asleep in the perfumed infusion. After bathing him, Fermina Daza helped him to dress: she sprinkled talcum powder between his legs, she smoothed cocoa butter on his rashes, she helped him put on his undershorts with as much love as if they had been a diaper, and continued dressing him, item by item, from his socks to the knot in his tie with the topaz pin. Their conjugal dawns grew calm because he had returned to the childhood his children had taken away from him. And she, in turn, at last accepted the domestic schedule because the years were passing for her too; she slept less and less, and by the time she was seventy she was awake before her husband.
那个时候，他的自理能力已经很差了，在浴室中滑上一跤都可能是致命的，所以他警惕地反对淋浴。他们家是现代化的，没有在老城区的宅子里普遍使用的带狮子腿的白镴浴缸。当初，他出于卫生的理由拒绝了它：他认为浴缸是欧洲人最肮脏的发明之一，他们只在每个月的最后一个星期五洗澡，却还把自己浸泡在一缸污水里，里面尽是些他们费力从身上褪下来的脏东西。因此，他让人用实心愈疮木做了一只特大号的木桶。而费尔明娜·达萨就用这只桶，依照给新生儿洗澡的程序给丈夫洗澡。每次沐浴都长达一个多小时，水中掺入用锦葵和橙皮煮沸的汤水，这对他有很好的镇静效果，有时，他甚至会在香气四溢的汤水中睡着。洗完澡，费尔明娜·达萨帮他穿衣：先在两腿间撒上滑石粉，在灼伤的红疹上涂上可可油，然后温柔地给他穿上衬裤，就仿佛那是一块尿布，接着，再从袜子一直穿到别着黄玉别针的领带。终于，夫妻俩的清晨恢复了平静，因为他又回到被儿女夺走的童年，而她呢，最终也和家庭日程协调起来，只因岁月同样也在她身上流逝：她睡得越来越少，还没满七十岁，她就醒得比丈夫早了。
On Pentecost Sunday, when he lifted the blanket to look at Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s body, Dr. Urbino experienced the revelation of something that had been denied him until then in his most lucid peregrinations as a physician and a believer. After so many years of familiarity with death, after battling it for so long, after so much turning it inside out and upside down, it was as if he had dared to look death in the face for the first time, and it had looked back at him. It was not the fear of death. No: that fear had been inside him for many years, it had lived with him, it had been another shadow cast over his own shadow ever since the night he awoke, shaken by a bad dream, and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality. What he had seen that day, however, was the physical presence of something that until that moment had been only an imagined certainty. He was very glad that the instrument used by Divine Providence for that overwhelming revelation had been Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, whom he had always considered a saint unaware of his own state of grace. But when the letter revealed his true identity, his sinister past, his inconceivable powers of deception, he felt that something definitive and irrevocable had occurred in his life.
圣神降临节的那个星期日，当掀开毯子看到赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的尸体时，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生发现了某种自己在光辉的医生生涯和信徒生活中一直都否认的东西：即在和死神熟识了那么多年，在同它战斗，翻来覆去与它接触了那么久之后，那还是他第一次敢于直视它，而与此同时，它也在注视着他。这并不是对死亡的恐惧。不，不是：自从很多年前的一天晚上，他从噩梦中惊醒，意识到死亡并非仅仅如他所感觉的那样，是一种始终存在的可能，而是一个切近的现实时，这种恐惧就已经在他心里、与他共存了，就像他影子之上的另一个影子。事实上，那天他所看到的是一个真切的存在，而在那之前，死亡不过是他想象中的某种确定的东西。他很欣慰，全能的上帝出其不意地向他揭示这个奥秘所用的工具竟然是赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔，他一直认为赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔是个圣人，只不过他从不自知所蒙受的恩宠罢了。然而，那封信却又向他揭示了他的真实身份、他黑暗的过去和他那令人难以置信的伪装能力，这让医生突然觉得，自己的生活中发生了某种决定性的、无可挽回的事情。
Nevertheless Fermina Daza did not allow him to infect her with his somber mood. He tried, of course, while she helped him put his legs into his trousers and worked the long row of buttons on his shirt. But he failed because Fermina Daza was not easy to impress, least of all by the death of a man she did not care for. All she knew about him was that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was a cripple on crutches whom she had never seen, that he had escaped the firing squad during one of many insurrections on one of many islands in the Antilles, that he had become a photographer of children out of necessity and had become the most successful one in the province, and that he had won a game of chess from someone she remembered as Torremolinos but in reality was named Capablanca.
不过，费尔明娜·达萨并没有感染他的忧郁。当然，他也试过要感染她，就在她帮他把两条腿塞进裤筒，又为他扣上衬衫那排长长的纽扣时。但他没有成功，因为费尔明娜·达萨不是那么容易被打动的，更何况这只是一个她并不喜欢的男人的死。她从没见过赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔，仅仅知道他是一个拄拐的残疾人，是在安的列斯群岛众多岛屿中的一座，众多起义里的一次，从行刑队的枪口下逃出来的，因生活的需要当上了儿童摄影师，并最终成为全省最受欢迎的一位；她还知道，他曾经赢过一个她记得好像叫托雷莫里诺的人一盘象棋，尽管那个人实际上叫卡帕布兰卡。
“But he was nothing more than a fugitive from Cayenne, condemned to life imprisonment for an atrocious crime,” said Dr. Urbino. “Imagine, he had even eaten human flesh.”
“他其实是卡宴的一名逃犯，因犯了重罪而被判终身监禁。”乌尔比诺医生说，“你能想象吗，他居然还吃过人肉呢。”
He handed her the letter whose secrets he wanted to carry with him to the grave, but she put the folded sheets in her dressing table without reading them and locked the drawer with a key. She was accustomed to her husband’s unfathomable capacity for astonishment, his exaggerated opinions that became more incomprehensible as the years went by, his narrowness of mind that was out of tune with his public image. But this time he had outdone himself. She had supposed that her husband held Jeremiah de Saint-Amour in esteem not for what he had once been but for what he began to be after he arrived here with only his exile’s rucksack, and she could not understand why he was so distressed by the disclosure of his true identity at this late date. She did not comprehend why he thought it an abomination that he had had a woman in secret, since that was an atavistic custom of a certain kind of man, himself included, yes even he in a moment of ingratitude, and besides, it seemed to her a heartbreaking proof of love that she had helped him carry out his decision to die. She said: “If you also decided to do that for reasons as serious as his, my duty would be to do what she did.” Once again Dr. Urbino found himself face to face with the simple incomprehension that had exasperated him for a half a century.
他把那封信交给她，信中的秘密他打算一直带到坟墓里去。可她并没有看，而是把折得整整齐齐的信纸收进梳妆台的抽屉，用钥匙锁了起来。她已经习惯了丈夫那深不可测的大惊小怪的能力，习惯了他那随着年龄的增长而越来越错综复杂的小题大做，以及他那种与他的公众形象大相径庭的狭隘见解。而这一次，他甚至比以往表现得更糟。她本来以为，丈夫敬重赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔，并非因为他之前是个怎样的人，而是因为他除了一个流亡者的背包以外身无别物地来到这里之后的所作所为，于是她不明白，为何这个人迟迟曝光的身份会让丈夫如此沮丧。她也不理解，丈夫为何会对他私下里有一个女人这件事如此厌恶。这可以说是赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔那类人世代相传的一个习惯；更何况，丈夫自己也曾在某个忘恩负义的时候这样干过，再者，她觉得那个女人能够帮助他践行死亡的决定，这本身便是令人心碎的爱的明证。她说：“如果你也像他那样，因为如此严肃的理由而决定去死，那我的责任便是做和她同样的事。”乌尔比诺医生又一次处在茫然的十字路口，妻子这种武断的不理解已经让他恼火了整整半个世纪。
“You don’t understand anything,” he said. “What infuriates me is not what he was or what he did, but the deception he practiced on all of us for so many years.”
“你什么都不懂。”他说，“我生气的并不是他以前是谁，曾经做过什么，而是他竟然骗了我们所有人这么多年。”
His eyes began to fill with easy tears, but she pretended not to see.
他的眼睛里开始噙满瞬间而来的泪水，但她装作没有看见。
“He did the right thing,” she replied. “If he had told the truth, not you or that poor woman or anybody in this town would have loved him as much as they did.”
“他做得对。”她反驳说，“如果他说了实话，那么无论是你还是那个女人，以及这里所有的人，都不会像曾经那样爱他了。”
She threaded his watch chain through the buttonhole in his vest. She put the finishing touches to the knot in his tie and pinned on his topaz tiepin. Then she dried his eyes and wiped his teary beard with the handkerchief sprinkled with florida water and put that in his breast pocket, its corners spread open like a magnolia. The eleven strokes of the pendulum clock sounded in the depths of the house.
她帮他把怀表链挂在背心的扣眼上，又为他最后调整了一下领带结，扣上黄玉别针。接着，她用喷了香水的手绢为他擦干眼泪，又弄干净胡子上沾着的泪珠，然后把手绢的四角打开，折成一朵洋玉兰的形状，放进他的上衣口袋。这时，摆钟敲响的十一下钟声在整座房子里回荡。
“Hurry,” she said, taking him by the arm. “We’ll be late.”
“快点。”她边说边挽起了他的手臂，“我们要迟到了。”
Aminta Dechamps, Dr. Lácides Olivella’s wife, and her seven equally diligent daughters, had arranged every detail so that the silver anniversary luncheon would be the social event of the year. The family home, in the very center of the historic district, was the old mint, denatured by a Florentine architect who came through here like an ill wind blowing renovation and converted many seventeenth-century relics into Venetian basilicas. It had six bedrooms and two large, well-ventilated dining and reception rooms, but that was not enough space for the guests from the city, not to mention the very select few from out of town. The patio was like an abbey cloister, with a stone fountain murmuring in the center and pots of heliotrope that perfumed the house at dusk, but the space among the arcades was inadequate for so many grand family names. So it was decided to hold the luncheon in their country house that was ten minutes away by automobile along the King’s Highway and, had over an acre of patio, and enormous Indian laurels, and local water lilies in a gently flowing river. The men from Don Sancho’s Inn, under the supervision of Señora de Olivella, hung colored canvas awnings in the sunny areas and raised a platform under the laurels with tables for one hundred twenty-two guests, with a linen tableclo th on each of them and bouquets of the day’s fresh roses for the table of honor. They also built a wooden dais for a woodwind band whose program was limited to contradances and national waltzes, and for a string quartet from the School of Fine Arts, which was Señora de Olivella’s surprise for her husband’s venerable teacher, who would preside over the luncheon. Although the date did not correspond exactly to the anniversary of his graduation, they chose Pentecost Sunday in order to magnify the significance of the celebration.
拉希德斯·奥利维利亚医生的妻子阿敏塔·德昌普斯和他们那七个一个赛一个机敏的女儿已经筹划好一切，志在让这次二十五周年纪念午宴成为当年的社交大事。他家的房子坐落在历史悠久的老城区正中心，是过去的造币厂所在，经一位佛罗伦萨建筑师的捣鼓而改头换面。这位建筑师像一股革新的邪风途经此处，把不下四处十七世纪的遗址变成了威尼斯式的大教堂。医生家有六间卧室和两个用来会客兼用餐的大厅，十分宽敞，而且通风效果极佳，但还是接待不了人数众多的城内来宾，更何况还有一批着意挑选的外埠宾客。至于他家的院子，则如同修道院里带回廊的院落一般，中央有一座石砌的喷泉在低声吟唱。黄昏时，花坛中香水草的芬芳在整幢房子里弥漫。但拱廊下的这片天地仍不足以容纳那些姓氏显赫的贵宾。因此，他们最终决定把午宴设在乡间别墅，开车走皇家公路需要十分钟。那里有一个几千平方米的大院子，种着高大的印度月桂树，缓缓流淌的小河中漂浮着土生土长的睡莲。堂桑丘餐厅的伙计们在奥利维利亚夫人的带领下，在没有树荫的地方支起彩色的帆布篷，而在月桂树下则用许多张桌子拼起了长长的餐台，全部铺上亚麻桌布，摆了一百二十二套餐具，主宾席上还摆放着一簇当天采下的玫瑰花。他们为乐队搭了一个台子，其中，管乐队只负责演奏对舞舞曲和民族华尔兹，还有一支从艺术学校请来的四人弦乐队，是奥利维利亚夫人专门为丈夫德高望重的老师准备的惊喜——午宴将由老师主持。尽管这天并非医生实际的毕业纪念日，但他们还是选择了这个圣神降临节的星期日，为的是突出喜庆的气氛。
The preparations had begun three months earlier, for fear that something indispensable would be left undone for lack of time. They brought in live chickens from Ciénaga de Oro, famous all along the coast not only for their size and flavor but because in colonial times they had scratched for food in alluvial deposits and little nuggets of pure gold were found in their gizzards. Señora de Olivella herself, accompanied by some of her daughters and her domestic staff, boarded the luxury ocean liners and selected the best from everywhere to honor her husband’s achievements. She had anticipated everything except that the celebration would take place on a Sunday in June in a year when the rains were late. She realized the danger that very morning when she went to High Mass and was horrified by the humidity and saw that the sky was heavy and low and that one could not see to the ocean’s horizon. Despite these ominous signs, the Director of the Astronomical Observatory, whom she met at Mass, reminded her that in all the troubled history of the city, even during the crudest winters, it had never rained on Pentecost. Still, when the clocks struck twelve and many of the guests were already having an aperitif outdoors, a single crash of thunder made the earth tremble, and a turbulent wind from the sea knocked over the tables and blew down the canopies, and the sky collapsed in a catastrophic downpour.
准备工作早在三个月前就开始了，生怕有什么必要的事因为时间不够而不能完成。他们派人从希耶纳加·德奥罗带来了活母鸡。这些鸡在整个沿海地区都很有名，不仅仅因为个大味美，更因为殖民时期，它们在冲积土区域觅食，从它们的砂囊中可以找出纯金的沙粒。奥利维利亚夫人还在几个女儿和仆人的陪伴下，亲自登上豪华的远洋轮船，挑选来自世界各地的最好的东西，以颂扬丈夫的成就。一切都在她的预料之中，只除了一点，那就是庆典设在六月的一个星期日，而这一年的雨季姗姗来迟。当天早晨，她出门去望大弥撒时便感到危机四伏。空气中的潮湿让她惶恐，接着又发现天空阴沉，气压很低，甚至连海平线都看不见了。尽管出现这些不祥的征兆，她在望弥撒时碰见的天象观测台台长却提醒她，在本城多灾多难的历史当中，即便在最严酷的冬天，圣神降临节这天也从来没下过雨。然而，十二点的钟声刚刚敲响，正当很多客人在露天开始品尝开胃酒时，一声孤独的霹雳震颤了大地，一阵从海上席卷而来的恶风掀翻了桌子，把篷布吹到了天上，灾难性的暴雨倾泻而下，天仿佛塌了下来。
In the chaos of the storm Dr. Juvenal Urbino, along with the other late guests whom he had met on the road, had great difficulty reaching the house, and like them he wanted to move from the carriage to the house by jumping from stone to stone across the muddy patio, but at last he had to accept the humiliation of being carried by Don Sancho’s men under a yellow canvas canopy. They did the best they could to set up the separate tables again inside the house — even in the bedrooms — and the guests made no effort to disguise their surly, shipwrecked mood. It was as hot as a ship’s boiler room, for the windows had to be closed to keep out the wind-driven rain. In the patio each place at the tables had been marked with a card bearing the name of the guest, one side reserved for men and the other for women, according to custom. But inside the house the name cards were in confusion and people sat where they could in an obligatory promiscuity that defied our social superstitions on at least this one occasion. In the midst of the cataclysm Aminta de Olivella seemed to be everywhere at once, her hair soaking wet and her splendid dress spattered with mud, but bearing up under the misfortune with the invincible smile, learned from her husband, that would give no quarter to adversity. With the help of her daughters, who were cut from the same cloth, she did everything possible to keep the places at the table of honor in order, with Dr. Juvenal Urbino in the center and Archbishop Obdulio y Rey on his right. Fermina Daza sat next to her husband, as she always did, for fear he would fall asleep during the meal or spill soup on his lapel. Across from him sat Dr. Lácides Olivella, a well-preserved man of about fifty with an effeminate air, whose festive spirit seemed in no way related to his accurate diagnoses. The rest of the table was occupied by provincial and municipal officials and last year’s beauty queen, whom the Governor escorted to the seat next to him. Although it was not customary for invitations to request special attire, least of all for a luncheon in the country, the women wore evening gowns and precious jewels and most of the men were dressed in dinner jackets with black ties, and some even wore frock coats. Only the most sophisticated, Dr. Urbino among them, wore their ordinary clothes. At each place was a menu printed in French, with golden vignettes.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生和他在路上碰见的最后一拨客人一起，终于在暴风雨的混乱中艰难到达。他本想和那些客人一样，下车后踩着一块块石头，跳着跃过一片汪洋的院子冲进屋去，但最终还是难堪地被堂桑丘的伙计们遮在一顶黄色帆布的华盖下，用胳膊抱了进去。七零八落的桌子已经被尽可能完善地重新安置在室内，就连卧室也摆满了，而客人们没有做出丝毫努力来掩饰他们那副落难的模样。屋里热得像船上的锅炉房一样，因为所有的窗子都关上了，以免雨水被风斜吹进来。在院子里时，桌上每一个位置都摆放着写有宾客姓名的卡片，并且按照习惯，一侧是男士，另一侧是女士。但到了屋里，名签被混在一处，众人只得随便找个地方坐下，这场人力不可抗拒的天灾造成了男女混坐的局面，破天荒头一遭地打破了我们的社交迷信。在这场灾变中，阿敏塔·德奥利维利亚[6]仿佛时时刻刻都无处不在似的。尽管头发被淋得透湿，华美的衣服上也溅满了泥点，但她从容地承受着这场不幸，脸上始终挂着从丈夫那里学来的不可战胜的微笑，不让厄运有片刻得意的机会。她靠着和她在同一个熔炉里锻造出来的女儿们的帮助，尽可能地重新安置了主宾席，让胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生坐到正中间，大主教奥布杜利奥—雷依坐在他的右首。费尔明娜·达萨则像往常一样紧挨着丈夫落座，因为她担心他会在午宴上睡着或是把汤洒在翻领上。对面的位子坐着拉希德斯·奥利维利亚医生。他已年过半百，略带女人气，保养得非常好，那股子爱热闹的劲头与他精湛的医术毫不相称。主桌的其余位置都被省市要员占满了，还有一位前一年的选美皇后，省长挽着她的手臂，把她安排在自己身边。尽管当地并没有习惯要求来宾的穿着，更何况这还是一次乡间宴会，但女人们个个都身着晚礼服，佩戴着全套的珠宝首饰，而男人们大部分身穿深色礼服，打着黑色领带，有的还穿上了呢子长礼服。只有那些见过世面的人才会穿日常的服装，这其中就包括胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生。在每一个座位上，都有一份烫着金边的法文菜单。（注：[6] 即前文的阿敏塔·德昌普斯，这是冠夫姓后的名字。）
Señora de Olivella, horror-struck by the devastating heat, went through the house pleading with the men to take off their jackets during the luncheon, but no one dared to be the first. The Archbishop commented to Dr. Urbino that in a sense this was a historic luncheon: there, together for the first time at the same table, their wounds healed and their anger dissipated, sat the two opposing sides in the civil wars that had bloodied the country ever since Independence. This thought accorded with the enthusiasm of the Liberals, especially the younger ones, who had succeeded in electing a president from their party after forty-five years of Conservative he gemony. Dr. Urbino did not agree: in his opinion a Liberal president was exactly the same as a Conservative president, but not as well dressed. But he did not want to contradict the Archbishop, although he would have liked to point out to him that guests were at that luncheon not because of what they thought but because of the merits of their lineage, which was something that had always stood over and above the hazards of politics and the horrors of war. From this point of view, in fact, not a single person was missing.
奥利维利亚夫人担心闷热难耐，走遍整个屋子恳求客人们在用餐时脱掉外套，但没有谁敢率先轻举妄动。大主教提醒胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生，在某种程度上这是一次具有历史意义的午宴：在这里，自独立以来一直把国家弄得血雨腥风的内战双方，头一次抚平创伤，摈弃仇恨，坐到了同一张桌子上。这种想法颇合那些激情澎湃的自由党人，尤其是年轻党员的意，在保守党独揽大权四十五年之后，他们终于选出了一位自己党派的总统。乌尔比诺医生却不以为然：他完全不觉得一位自由党总统和一位保守党总统有何不同，最多是前者的衣着稍差一点。但他不想反驳大主教，尽管他本想向他指出，午宴中的所有人之所以来到这里，并非由于他们的思想，而是因为他们的家世，而后者向来都是凌驾于政治的动荡和战争的恐怖之上的。事实上，也正是因为如此，这里才会座无虚席。
The downpour ended as suddenly as it had begun, and the sun began to shine in a cloudless sky, but the storm had been so violent that several trees were uprooted and the overflowing stream had turned the patio into a swamp. The greatest disaster had occurred in the kitchen. Wood fires had been built outdoors on bricks behind the house, and the cooks barely had time to rescue their pots from the rain. They lost precious time reorganizing the flooded kitchen and improvising new fires in the back gallery. But by one o’clock the crisis had been resolved and only the dessert was missing: the Sisters of St. Clare were in charge of that, and they had promised to send it before eleven. It was feared that the ditch along the King’s Highway had flooded, as it did even in less severe winters, and in that case it would be at least two hours before the dessert arrived. As soon as the weather cleared they opened the windows, and the house was cooled by air that had been purified by the sulfurous storm. Then the band was told to play its program of waltzes on the terrace of the portico, and that only heightened the confusion because everyone had to shout to be heard over the banging of copper pots inside the house. Tired of waiting, smiling even on the verge of tears, Aminta de Olivella ordered luncheon to be served.
暴雨骤然停息，就像它突然开始那样。太阳立刻炽热地燃烧起来，万里无云。只是刚才的暴风雨太过猛烈，有几棵大树被连根拔起，泛滥的积水把院子变成了沼泽。最大的灾难发生在厨房。有几个烧柴火的炉灶是用砖在后院里露天搭建的，厨师们没来得及把上面的锅从大雨中抢救出来。他们紧张地忙乱了好一阵儿，才把被大水淹了的厨房清理干净，并在后廊上临时架起了几个新炉灶。不过等到下午一点，紧急情况已经解决，只差由圣克拉拉修道院的嬷嬷们负责的饭后甜点了，她们原本承诺会在十一点之前送达。大家担心皇家公路旁的溪水又漫上来，就像在不太冷的冬天那样，果真如此，那甜点便不可能在两小时内送来了。雨刚一停，窗子就马上打开，被暴雨中的硫磺清洁过的空气吹进来，屋里一下子变得清爽了。随后，乐队奉命在门廊的露台上演奏节目单上的华尔兹舞曲，但他们唯一起到的作用却是加剧了人们的躁动，因为铜管乐器发出的声响回荡在整座房子里，人们不得不大声叫嚷才能交谈。阿敏塔·德奥利维利亚已经厌倦了等待，微笑得快要落泪，于是下令立即上菜。
The group from the School of Fine Arts began their concert in the formal silence achieved for the opening bars of Mozart’s “La Chasse.” Despite the voices that grew louder and more confused and the intrusions of Don Sancho’s black servants, who could barely squeeze past the tables with their steaming serving dishes, Dr. Urbino managed to keep a channel open to the music until the program was over. His powers of concentration had decreased so much with the passing years that he had to write down each chess move in order to remember what he had planned. Yet he could still engage in serious conversation and follow a concert at the same time, although he never reached the masterful extremes of a German orchestra conductor, a great friend of his during his time in Austria, who read the score of Don Giovanni while listening to Tannhäuser.
接下来轮到艺术学校的乐队演奏。在为最初的旋律争取来的一阵表面的肃静中，一曲莫扎特的《狩猎》缓缓响起。尽管人们的说话声越来越高、越来越嘈杂，也尽管堂桑丘的黑人仆役们端着一盘盘热气腾腾的菜肴在餐桌间挤来挤去、磕磕碰碰，乌尔比诺医生却始终能保持一条畅通的渠道，把所有曲目听完。他集中精力的能力一年不如一年，甚至下棋时都必须把每一步记录在纸上，才能知道自己走到哪儿了。然而，他竟仍然能够在进行一场严肃交谈的同时，不错失音乐的旋律，尽管还没有达到他的一位挚友那种炉火纯青的地步——他在奥地利结交了一名德国管弦乐队的指挥，能够一边听着《唐豪瑟》，一边看《唐璜》的乐谱。
He thought that the second piece on the program, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” was played with facile theatricality. While he strained to listen through the clatter of covered dishes, he stared at a blushing boy who nodded to him in greeting. He had seen him somewhere, no doubt about that, but he could not remember where. This often happened to him, above all with people’s names, even those he knew well, or with a melody from other times, and it caused him such dreadful anguish that one night he would have preferred to die rather than endure it until dawn. He was on the verge of reaching that state now when a charitable flash illuminated his memory: the boy had been one of his students last year. He was surprised to see him there, in the kingdom of the elect, but Dr. Olivella reminded him that he was the son of the Minister of Health and was preparing a thesis in forensic medicine. Dr. Juvenal Urbino greeted him with a joyful wave of his hand and the young doctor stood up and responded with a bow. But not then, not ever, did he realize that this was the intern who had been with him that morning in the house of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour.
第二首曲子是舒伯特的《死亡与少女》，乌尔比诺医生觉得他们把戏剧性表现得过于肤浅了。他一边透过餐具和盘子发出的新一轮噪音，艰难地听着演奏，一边把目光落到一位正向他微微点头致意的面色微红的年轻人身上。无疑，他在什么地方见过他，但又想不起究竟在哪里。这种事情经常发生，特别是对人名，即便是那些他最熟悉的人，而对过去听过的某段旋律也常常如此。这给他带去了极大痛苦，某天夜里，他甚至宁愿死掉，也不愿忍受失忆的煎熬直到天亮。正当他又差点落到如此不堪的地步时，一道仁慈之光照亮了他的记忆：这个年轻人去年曾做过他的学生。他很惊讶在这里见到他，在这个被拣选者的王国里。可奥利维利亚提醒他，那是卫生部长的儿子，来这里准备法医论文的。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生高兴地向他挥手致意，年轻的医生站起身，鞠躬回礼。但无论那时还是以后，乌尔比诺医生从未意识到这个年轻人就是那天早上和他一起在赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔家的实习医生。
Comforted by yet another victory over old age, he surrendered to the diaphanous and fluid lyricism of the final piece on the program, which he could not identify. Later the young cellist, who had just returned from France, told him it was a quartet for strings by Gabriel Fauré, whom Dr. Urbino had not even heard of, although he was always very alert to the latest trends in Europe. Fermina Daza, who was keeping an eye on him as she always did, but most of all when she saw him becoming introspective in public, stopped eating and put her earthly hand on his. She said: “Don’t think about it anymore.” Dr. Urbino smiled at her from the far shore of ecstasy, and it was then that he began to think again about what she had feared. He remembered Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, on view at that hour in his coffin, in his bogus military uniform with his fake decorations, under the accusing eyes of the children in the portraits. He turned to the Archbishop to tell him about the suicide, but he had already heard the news. There had been a good deal of talk after High Mass, and he had even received a request from General Jerónimo Argote, on behalf of the Caribbean refugees, that he be buried in holy ground. He said: “The request itself, it seemed to me, showed a lack of respect.” Then, in a more humane tone, he asked if anyone knew the reason for the suicide. Dr. Urbino answered: “Gerontophobia,” the proper word although he thought he had just invented it. Dr. Olivella, attentive to the guests who were sitting closest to him, stopped listening to them for a moment to take part in his teacher’s conversation. He said: “It is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love.” Dr. Urbino was not surprised to recognize his own thoughts in those of his favorite disciple.
由于再一次战胜了衰老，他感到轻松了许多，陶醉在最后一支曲子那清澈而流畅的抒情旋律中，虽然他并没有听出是什么曲子。后来，乐队中年轻的大提琴手告诉他，那是一首加布里埃尔·福雷的弦乐四重奏。乌尔比诺医生一直十分关注欧洲的新鲜事物，但这位作曲家的名字他甚至听都没听人说起过。费尔明娜·达萨像往常一样时刻留意着他，特别是看到他当众陷入沉思时。她停止用餐，把自己的手放在他的手上，将他拉回现实，对他说：“别再想那件事了。”乌尔比诺医生茫然失神地冲她笑了笑，在这时，他才再次想起那件她所担心的事。他想起了赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔，仿佛看见他此刻正穿着那身假军装，戴着那些道具勋章，躺在棺材里，暴露在墙上照片里孩子们指责的目光下。他转过身，把自杀事件告诉大主教，可大主教早已经知道了。大弥撒一结束人们就议论纷纷，大主教甚至接到了赫罗尼莫·阿尔戈特将军的申请，代表所有加勒比流亡者请求把赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔安葬在圣地。大主教说：“我认为这申请本身就是缺乏敬意的表现。”接着，他又用更具一点儿人情味的口吻问医生，是否有人知道自杀的原因。乌尔比诺医生则用一个自认为瞬间发明但准确无误的词回答了他：衰老恐惧症。一直把注意力放在身边几位客人身上的奥利维利亚医生，此刻稍稍怠慢了他们，加入到老师的谈话中来。他说：“现在还能碰见不是因爱情而自杀的人，真是遗憾。”乌尔比诺医生见爱徒的想法竟和自己如出一辙，并没有感到惊奇。
“And worse yet,” he said, “with gold cyanide.”
“而且，最糟的是，”他说，“他用的是氰化金。”
When he said that, he once again felt compassion prevailing over the bitterness caused by the letter, for which he thanked not his wife but rather a miracle of the music. Then he spoke to the Archbishop of the lay saint he had known in their long twilights of chess, he spoke of the dedication of his art to the happiness of children, his rare erudition in all things of this world, his Spartan habits, and he himself was surprised by the purity of soul with which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had separated himself once and for all from his past. Then he spoke to the Mayor about the advantages of purchasing his files of photographic plates in order to preserve the images of a generation who might never again be happy outside their portraits and in whose hands lay the future of the city. The Archbishop was scandalized that a militant and educated Catholic would dare to think that a suicide was saintly, but he agreed with the plan to create an archive of the negatives. The Mayor wanted to know from whom they were to be purchased. Dr. Urbino’s tongue burned with the live coal of the secret. “I will take care of it.” And he felt redeemed by his own loyalty to the woman he had repudiated five hours earlier. Fermina Daza noticed it and in a low voice made him promise that he would attend the funeral. Relieved, he said that of course he would, that went without saying.
说这话时，他感到对死者的同情再次战胜了那封信带来的痛苦，对此他并不感谢妻子，而是感谢音乐的奇迹。于是，他向大主教说起这位他在对弈的漫长下午认识的世俗圣人，说起他用自己的艺术为儿童的幸福所做的奉献，说起他对一切世事罕见的博学，以及他那简朴的生活习惯。说着说着，医生自己突然也对赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔那纯洁的灵魂惊讶不已，这种纯洁早已彻底地将他同他的过去割裂开来。随后，医生又向市长提议，应当买下摄影师所有照片的底片，以把一代人的形象保存下来——或许这代人在照片以外再也无法获得幸福，但这座城市的未来掌握在他们手中。大主教对一位有教养的天主教战士竟会将一个自杀者称为圣徒感到十分恼火，但他赞同留存底片的提议。市长想知道该向谁去购买底片。乌尔比诺医生的舌头被秘密之火灼烧着，但他咬紧牙关，没有把底片的秘密继承人说出来。他说：“我来负责此事。”并为自己对那位女士保持了忠诚而感到释然，因为就在五小时前，他还鄙视过她。费尔明娜·达萨看出了这点，她低声让他保证会去参加葬礼。当然会去，他轻松地说，责无旁贷。
The speeches were brief and simple. The woodwind band began a popular tune that had not been announced on the program, and the guests strolled along the terraces, waiting for the men from Don Sancho’s Inn to finish drying the patio in case anyone felt inclined to dance. The only guests who stayed in the drawing room were those at the table of honor, who were celebrating the fact that Dr. Urbino had drunk half a glass of brandy in one swallow in a final toast. No one recalled that he had already done the same thing with a glass of grand cru wine as accompaniment to a very special dish, but his heart had demanded it of him that afternoon, and his self-indulgence was well repaid: once again, after so many long years, he felt like singing. And he would have, no doubt, on the urging of the young cellist who offered to accompany him, if one of those new automobiles had not suddenly driven across the mudhole of the patio, splashing the musicians and rousing the ducks in the barnyards with the quacking of its horn. It stopped in front of the portico and Dr. Marco Aurelio Urbino Daza and his wife emerged, laughing for all they were worth and carrying a tray covered with lace cloths in each hand. Other trays just like them were on the jump seats and even on the floor next to the chauffeur. It was the belated dessert. When the applause and the shouted cordial jokes had ended, Dr. Urbino Daza explained in all seriousness that before the storm broke, the Sisters of St. Clare had asked him to please bring the dessert, but he had left the King’s Highway because someone said that his parents” house was on fire. Dr. Juvenal Urbino became upset before his son could finish the story, but his wife reminded him in time that he himself had called for the firemen to rescue the parrot. Aminta de Olivella was radiant as she decided to serve the dessert on the terraces even though they had already had their coffee. But Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife left without tasting it, for there was barely enough time for him to have his sacred siesta before the funeral.
宴会上的讲话简短而浅白。管乐队开始转为通俗风格，演奏起节目单上没有的曲子来。宾客们在露台上散着步，等待着堂桑丘餐厅的伙计们把院子里的积水排干，然后看谁有兴致跳上一曲。唯有主宾席的客人们还留在大厅里，正为在最后祝酒时把小半杯白兰地一饮而尽的乌尔比诺医生喝彩。谁也不记得他曾有过这样的举动，平常，只有为了搭配极为特殊的菜肴，他才会偶尔喝上一杯上好的葡萄酒。但那天下午，心情使然，他的懦弱被很好地弥补了：过了那么多、那么多年之后，他终于再一次有了唱歌的兴致。若不是因为一辆崭新的汽车突然到来，他无疑会应自告奋勇为他伴奏的年轻大提琴手的邀请高歌一曲。汽车穿过泥泞的院子，溅了乐师们一身泥浆，并用它那鸭子叫似的喇叭声，把围栏里的鸭子惊得一阵乱叫，最终停在了门廊前。马可·奥雷里奥·乌尔比诺·达萨医生和妻子一边笑得前仰后合，一边从车上走下来，四只手各端着一个用镂空花边布盖着的托盘。还有很多同样的托盘放在车里副驾驶的位置上，一直摆到了司机脚边。原来，这些就是迟来的餐后甜点。在众人的掌声和亲切的哄笑声停息后，乌尔比诺·达萨医生一本正经地解释道，圣克拉拉修道院的修女们在下雨之前就请他帮忙把甜点带过来，但他开上皇家公路后又折了回去，因为有人告诉他，他父母家中失火了。还没等儿子把话讲完，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生便大惊失色。但妻子及时提醒他，是他自己把消防员叫去抓鹦鹉的。尽管大家都已经喝过了咖啡，但阿敏塔·德奥利维利亚容光焕发，决定让客人们再去露台上享用餐后甜点。不过，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生和妻子没有去，因为几乎已经不剩什么时间能让他在葬礼前睡上他那神圣的午觉了。
And he did have it, although his sleep was brief and restless because he discovered when he returned home that the firemen had caused almost as much damage as a fire. In their efforts to frighten the parrot they had stripped a tree with the pressure hoses, and a misdirected jet of water through the windows of the master bedroom had caused irreparable damage to the furniture and to the portraits of unknown forebears hanging on the walls. Thinking that there really was a fire, the neighbors had hurried over when they heard the bell on the fire truck, and if the disturbance was no worse, it was because the schools were closed on Sundays. When they realized they could not reach the parrot even with their extension ladders, the firemen began to chop at the branches with machetes, and only the opportune arrival of Dr. Urbino Daza prevented them from mutilating the tree all the way to the trunk. They left, saying they would return after five o’clock if they received permission to prune, and on their way out they muddied the interior terrace and the drawing room and ripped Fermina Daza’s favorite Turkish rug. Needless disasters, all of them, because the general impression was that the parrot had taken advantage of the chaos to escape through neighboring patios. And in fact Dr. Urbino looked for him in the foliage, but there was no response in any language, not even to whistles and songs, so he gave him up for lost and went to sleep when it was almost three o’clock. But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus.
他终究还是睡了，但睡得很短，而且很糟，因为回家时，他发现消防员造成的灾害不亚于一场火灾。他们为了吓唬鹦鹉，用高压水管把一棵树冲得光秃秃的，还有一股水流瞄错方向，射进了主卧室的窗子，对家具和墙上那些对他们来说完全陌生的祖先画像造成了无可挽回的损坏。邻居们听见消防车的鸣笛，还以为发生了火灾，纷纷从家中赶来。幸好，学校星期日关门，这才没有造成更大的混乱。当消防员们发现，即使站在加长梯上也仍旧够不到鹦鹉时，便开始用砍刀砍断树枝。幸亏乌尔比诺·达萨医生及时出现制止，他们才没有连树干都一并砍倒。他们留下话说，五点钟后还会回来，看到时是否需要他们继续修剪枝叶。出门时，他们把内阳台和客厅踩得满是泥巴，还弄破了费尔明娜·达萨最爱的一块土耳其地毯。而最糟的是，这一切灾难性的破坏都是徒劳无功的，因为大家普遍认为，鹦鹉已经趁乱逃到邻居家的院子里去了。的确，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生又在树丛中找了好一会儿，却始终都没有得到鹦鹉用任何语言做出的回应，就连吹口哨和唱歌也无济于事。他认定它丢了，快到三点时才回去睡觉。上床前，他去小便，还快乐地闻到他那被温热的芦笋净化了的尿液中那种神秘花园的芬芳。
He was awakened by sadness. Not the sadness he had felt that morning when he stood before the corpse of his friend, but the invisible cloud that would saturate his soul after his siesta and which he interpreted as divine notification that he was living his final afternoons. Until the age of fifty he had not been conscious of the size and weight and condition of his organs. Little by little, as he lay with his eyes closed after his daily siesta, he had begun to feel them, one by one, inside his body, feel the shape of his insomniac heart, his mysterious liver, his hermetic pancreas, and he had slowly discovered that even the oldest people were younger than he was and that he had become the only survivor of his generation’s legendary group portraits. When he became aware of his first bouts of forgetfulness, he had recourse to a tactic he had heard about from one of his teachers at the Medical School: “The man who has no memory makes one out of paper.” But this was a short-lived illusion, for he had reached the stage where he would forget what the written reminders in his pockets meant, search the entire house for the eye glasses he was wearing, turn the key again after locking the doors, and lose the sense of what he was reading because he forgot the premise of the argument or the relationships among the characters. But what disturbed him most was his lack of confidence in his own power of reason: little by little, as in an ineluctable shipwreck, he felt himself losing his good judgment.
他被悲伤惊醒了。不是上午他站在朋友尸体前的那种悲伤，而是一种无形的伤感迷雾，在午觉后充斥着他的灵魂。他将之理解为一种神谕，预示他正在度过自己一生中最后的几个下午。五十岁前，他从未感觉过自己各个内脏器官的大小、重量和状态。但五十岁后，慢慢地，每天午觉后他闭着双眼躺在那里，开始一个接一个地感觉到它们存在于自己体内，甚至能感觉到他那不眠不休的心脏的形状，以及他那神秘的肝脏和密封的胰脏。他逐渐发现，周围就连最老的人也比他小，在他们那富有传奇色彩的一代人中，他已经成了唯一的幸存者。当他发现自己开始健忘，便求助于在医学院时从一位老师那里听来的方法：“没有记性的人，便靠纸来代替。”然而，这不过是个短暂的幻想，因为到最后，他连兜里那些纸条们究竟想说些什么都忘了。他会戴着眼镜却满屋子找眼镜，锁上门后又把钥匙转回来，看书时也会丢掉线索，因为忘了情节的前因后果或人物间的关系。而让他最不安的，是他无法再信任自己的理智：他感到自己正逐渐失去判断力，陷入不可抗拒的灾难之中。
With no scientific basis except his own experience, Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew that most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but that none was as specific as old age. He detected it in the cadavers slit open from head to toe on the dissecting table, he even recognized it in patients who hid their age with the greatest success, he smelled it in the perspiration on his own clothing and in the unguarded breathing of his sleeping wife. If he had not been what he was — in essence an old-style Christian — perhaps he would have agreed with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour that old age was an indecent state that had to be ended before it was too late. The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.
尽管没有科学根据，但胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生仅凭经验就知道，大部分致命的疾病都有一种特殊的味道，却没有一种像衰老这样独特。这种味道他在解剖台上开膛破肚的尸体中察觉得到，甚至在那些极好地掩饰了年龄的病人身上也辨认得出，在自己衣服上的汗气和妻子熟睡时毫无戒备的呼吸中，他也闻得到。若非骨子里是一个传统的老基督徒，或许他也会赞同赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的看法：衰老是一种不体面的状态，应当及时制止。唯一的一点安慰——即便是对他这样一个曾是床上好手的男人来说——就是性欲缓慢而又仁慈的消亡：性的平静。八十一岁时，他仍旧足够清醒地意识到，把自己拴在这个世界上的，仅剩下几根细细的丝线，睡梦中简单地改变一下姿势都可能让它们毫无痛苦地断开。而如果说，他还在尽可能地维持它们，那完全是出于在死亡的黑暗中找不到上帝的恐惧。
Fermina Daza had been busy straightening the bedroom that had been destroyed by the firemen, and a little before four she sent for her husband’s daily glass of lemonade with chipped ice and reminded him that he should dress for the funeral. That afternoon Dr. Urbino had two books by his hand: Man, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel and The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe; the pages of the second book were still uncut, and he asked Digna Pardo, the cook, to bring him the marble paper cutter he had left in the bedroom. But when it was brought to him he was already reading Man, the Unknown at the place he had marked with an envelope: there were only a few pages left till the end. He read slowly, making his way through the meanderings of a slight headache that he attributed to the half glass of brandy at the final toast. When he paused in his reading he sipped the lemonade or took his time chewing on a piece of ice. He was wearing his socks, and his shirt without its starched collar; his elastic suspenders with the green stripes hung down from his waist. The mere idea of having to change for the funeral irritated him. Soon he stopped reading, placed one book on top of the other, and began to rock very slowly in the wicker rocking chair, contemplating with regret the banana plants in the mire of the patio, the stripped mango, the flying ants that came after the rain, the ephemeral splendor of another afternoon that would never return. He had forgotten that he ever owned a parrot from Paramaribo whom he loved as if he were a human being, when suddenly he heard him say: “Royal parrot.” His voice sounded close by, almost next to him, and then he saw him in the lowest branch of the mango tree.
费尔明娜·达萨一直忙着收拾被消防员毁得一塌糊涂的卧室。快到四点钟时，她让人给丈夫送去一杯他每日都喝的加碎冰块的柠檬水，并提醒他该穿好衣服去参加葬礼了。这天下午，乌尔比诺医生的手边有两本书：亚历克西·卡雷尔的《人体未解之谜》和亚克塞尔·蒙特的《圣米歇尔的故事》。后一本书的书页尚未裁开。乌尔比诺医生吩咐厨娘蒂戈娜·帕尔多把他忘在卧室里的象牙裁纸刀取来。刀子取来时，他正在读《人体未解之谜》中用信封夹着的那一页：只差几页，这本书就要读完了。由于头部隐隐作痛，他读得很慢，他将这如河流一般连绵曲折的头痛归咎于最后碰杯时的那小半杯白兰地。在阅读间隙，他不时地呷上一口柠檬水，或是慢慢嚼上一块冰。他已经穿好了袜子，但衬衫还没有装上假领，绿色条纹的松紧背带也还耷拉在腰身两侧。一想到要换衣服去参加葬礼，他就心烦不已。他很快停止了阅读，把手上的书放到另一本书上，然后靠在藤条摇椅上慢慢摇晃，心情沉重地看着一片汪洋的院子，以及院子里的香蕉树丛、被砍得光秃秃的芒果树、雨后出现的飞蚁和又一个一去不返的下午所释放出的短暂而华美的光辉。他都已经忘了自己曾经拥有一只帕拉马里博鹦鹉，他曾像爱一个人一样爱它，但突然，他听见它的说话声：“皇家小鹦鹉。”声音很近，几乎就在他身边，随即，他在芒果树最低的树枝上看到了它。
“You scoundrel!” he shouted.
“不知羞耻的家伙！”他对它喊道。
The parrot answered in an identical voice: “You’re even more of a scoundrel, Doctor.”
而鹦鹉用一模一样的声音反驳道：“你更不知羞耻，医生。”
He continued to talk to him, keeping him in view while he put on his boots with great care so as not to frighten him and pulled his suspenders up over his arms and went down to the patio, which was still full of mud, testing the ground with his stick so that he would not trip on the three steps of the terrace. The parrot did not move, and perched so close to the ground that Dr. Urbino held out his walking stick for him so that he could sit on the silver handle, as was his custom, but the parrot sidestepped and jumped to the next branch, a little higher up but easier to reach since the house ladder had been leaning against it even before the arrival of the firemen. Dr. Urbino calculated the height and thought that if he climbed two rungs he would be able to catch him. He stepped onto the first, singing a disarming, friendly song to distract the attention of the churlish bird, who repeated the words without the music but sidled still farther out on the branch. He climbed to the second rung without difficulty, holding on to the ladder with both hands, and the parrot began to repeat the entire song without moving from the spot. He climbed to the third rung and then the fourth, for he had miscalculated the height of the branch, and then he grasped the ladder with his left hand and tried to seize the parrot with his right. Digna Pardo, the old servant, who was coming to remind him that he would be late for the funeral, saw the back of a man standing on the ladder, and she would not have believed that he was who he was if it had not been for the green stripes on the elastic suspenders.
他一边目不转睛地继续和它说话，一边小心翼翼地穿上短靴，以防吓跑它。他把两条背带搭在肩上，来到满是泥泞的院子里，走下露台的三级台阶时，他用手杖试探着，以免绊倒。鹦鹉没有动。它站得很低，于是他把手杖伸过去，好让它像往常一样站到银手柄上来，可它却躲开了。它跳到相邻的树枝上，虽然高了一些，但更容易够到了，因为家里的梯子在消防员来之前就支在那儿了。乌尔比诺医生估摸了一下高度，认为只需登上两级，就能够到它了。他登上第一级，嘴里唱着表示友好的歌，用来分散这只不听话的动物的注意力。鹦鹉没有跟唱，只是重复着歌词，并在树枝上往远处横挪了几步。他用两手抓牢梯子，没费劲就登上了第二级。鹦鹉开始完整地唱起整首歌来，没有挪地儿。他爬上第三级，接着又爬上第四级，因为他错误地估计了树枝的高度。接着，他左手紧紧地握住梯子，右手则试探着去抓鹦鹉。老女仆蒂戈娜·帕尔多走过来提醒他葬礼就要迟到了，却看见梯子上一个男人的背影，要不是那两条绿色条纹的松紧背带，她简直不敢相信那就是乌尔比诺医生。
“Santísimo Sacramento!” she shrieked. “You’ll kill yourself!”
“至圣的上帝啊！”她喊道，“您会摔死的！”
Dr. Urbino caught the parrot around the neck with a triumphant sigh: ça y est. But he released him immediately because the ladder slipped from under his feet and for an instant he was suspended in air and then he realized that he had died without Communion, without time to repent of anything or to say goodbye to anyone, at seven minutes after four on Pentecost Sunday.
乌尔比诺医生抓住鹦鹉的脖子，发出一声胜利的感叹：总算好了[7]。但随即又放开了它，因为梯子在他脚下滑了出去。他在空中悬留了片刻，意识到自己来不及领受圣体，来不及为任何事忏悔，来不及向任何人告别就要死掉了，死在圣神降临节的星期日下午四点零七分。（注：[7] 原文为法语。）
Fermina Daza was in the kitchen tasting the soup for supper when she heard Digna Pardo’s horrified shriek and the shouting of the servants and then of the entire neighborhood. She dropped the tasting spoon and tried her best to run despite the invincible weight of her age, screaming like a madwoman without knowing yet what had happened under the mango leaves, and her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death’s final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath:
费尔明娜·达萨正在厨房里品尝晚餐的汤，忽然听见蒂戈娜·帕尔多的一声惨叫和仆人们的骚乱，紧接着是邻居们的喧闹。她丢下尝汤的勺子，拖着她这个年龄不可战胜的沉重身躯，尽可能快地跑了出去，疯了似的叫喊着——尽管她还不知道芒果树的枝叶下到底发生了什么。当看到丈夫仰面朝天地躺在泥水之中，她的心仿佛要爆裂一般。丈夫已经奄奄一息，但还在坚持与死神这致命的一击做着最后一分钟抗争，好让她及时赶来。要这样撇下她独自离去，他感到无比痛苦，透过泪水，他在慌乱的人群中认出了她。他诀别地看了她最后一眼，在两人半个世纪的共同生活中，她从未见过他的眼神如此闪亮，如此悲痛，而又如此充满感激。他用尽最后一口气，对她说道：
“Only God knows how much I loved you.”
“只有上帝知道我有多爱你。”
It was a memorable death, and not without reason. Soon after he had completed his course of specialized studies in France, Dr. Juvenal Urbino became known in his country for the drastic new methods he used to ward off the last cholera epidemic suffered by the province. While he was still in Europe, the previous one had caused the death of a quarter of the urban population in less than three months; among the victims was his father, who was also a highly esteemed physician. With his immediate prestige and a sizable contribution from his own inheritance, he founded the Medical Society, the first and for many years the only one in the Caribbean provinces, of which he was lifetime President. He organized the construction of the first aqueduct, the first sewer system, and the covered public market that permitted filth to be cleaned out of Las Ánimas Bay. He was also President of the Academy of the Language and the Academy of History. For his service to the Church, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem made him a Knight of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, and the French Government conferred upon him the rank of Commander in the Legion of Honor. He gave active encouragement to every religious and civic society in the city and had a special interest in the Patriotic Junta, composed of politically disinterested influential citizens who urged governments and local businesses to adopt progressive ideas that were too daring for the time. The most memorable of them was the testing of an aerostatic balloon that on its inaugural flight carried a letter to San Juan de la Ciénaga, long before anyone had thought of airmail as a rational possibility. The Center for the Arts, which was also his idea, established the School of Fine Arts in the same house where it is still located, and for many years he was a patron of the Poetic Festival in April.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生的死是值得纪念的，这无可非议。刚从法国学成归来，他就运用全新的有力手段，制止了本省最后一次霍乱的流行，由此声誉传遍全国。前一次霍乱流行时他还在欧洲。那次疫情在不到三个月的时间里就造成了四分之一城市居民的死亡，其中就包括他的父亲，一位同样受人尊敬的医生。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生靠着迅速获得的声望，并从家产中捐赠出可观的数目，创建了医学协会，这是加勒比各省开办的第一家医学协会，而且在很多年内都是唯一的一家，乌尔比诺医生担任协会的终身主席。他督促建设了城里的第一条高架水渠、第一个下水道系统，还建起了有篷顶的市场，使原本垃圾成堆的灵魂湾符合了卫生标准。此外，他还是语言学院和历史学院的主席。而由于他对教会做出的贡献，耶路撒冷拉丁教长封他为圣墓骑士团骑士。法国政府则授予他指挥官级别的荣誉军团勋章。他是本城所有宗教团体和市民团体的积极支持者，特别是爱国委员会。这个委员会由具有影响力且没有政治利益的市民组成，以在当时来讲相当大胆的进步思想对政府和商界施加压力。在这些想法中，最值得纪念的莫过于一次浮空气球试验。首次气球飞行就把一封信带到了圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加，比人们最终把航空通邮视作一种理性的可能要早得多。成立艺术中心也是医生的主意。后来，艺术中心又在同一座房子里开设了艺术学校，至今还屹立在那里。另外，很多年来，他都是四月花会[8]的赞助者。（注：[8] 四月花会，为纪念花神芙洛拉而举办的庆祝活动，起源于古罗马。）
Only he achieved what had seemed impossible for at least a century: the restoration of the Dramatic Theater, which had been used as a henhouse and a breeding farm for game cocks since colonial times. It was the culmination of a spectacular civic campaign that involved every sector of the city in a multitudinous mobilization that many thought worthy of a better cause. In any event, the new Dramatic Theater was inaugurated when it still lacked seats or lights, and the audience had to bring their own chairs and their own lighting for the intermissions. The same protocol held sway as at the great performances in Europe, and the ladies used the occasion to show off their long dresses and their fur coats in the dog days of the Caribbean summer, but it was also necessary to authorize the admission of servants to carry the chairs and lamps and all the things to eat that were deemed necessary to survive the interminable programs, one of which did not end until it was time for early Mass. The season opened with a French opera company whose novelty was a harp in the orchestra and whose unforgettable glory was the impeccable voice and dramatic talent of a Turkish soprano who sang barefoot and wore rings set with precious stones on her toes. After the first act the stage could barely be seen and the singers lost their voices because of the smoke from so many palm oil lamps, but the chroniclers of the city were very careful to delete these minor inconveniences and to magnify the memorable events. Without a doubt it was Dr. Urbino’s most contagious initiative, for opera fever infected the most surprising elements in the city and gave rise to a whole generation of Isoldes and Otellos and Aïdas and Siegfrieds. But it never reached the extremes Dr. Urbino had hoped for, which was to see Italianizers and Wagnerians confronting each other with sticks and canes during the intermissions.
看似不可能在一个世纪里办到的事，只有他办到了，即重建从殖民时期起就变成了斗鸡场和公鸡饲养场的喜剧剧院。那是一次壮观的市民运动高峰，本城各界人士无一例外地参与了这次全民总动员，很多人认为它堪称伟业。最终，焕然一新的喜剧剧院举行了落成典礼，尽管当时剧院里还没有座椅和灯光，来看演出的人不得不自带座椅和供场间休息时照明用的灯具。剧院照搬了欧洲人那套盛大的首演礼仪，贵妇们利用这个机会在加勒比的伏天里炫耀她们长长的礼服和皮大衣。但同时，剧院也不得不允许仆人进入，以便让他们搬座椅和灯具，并带上他们认为必要的吃食，以应付无休无止的演出：要知道，有的节目甚至会演到次日首台弥撒的时候。首季度的演出由一个法国歌剧团拉开序幕。剧团管弦乐队中的一把竖琴让人大开眼界，而令人无法忘怀的荣耀，则属于剧团中一位土耳其女高音，她拥有完美无瑕的嗓音和戏剧天赋，赤着脚演唱，脚趾上还戴着贵重的宝石戒指。一盏盏椰油灯散发出浓浓的烟雾，从第一幕起，人们就几乎看不清舞台，歌手们也因此走了音，但城中的记者巧妙地忽略了这些微不足道的瑕疵，赞颂了值得纪念的东西。无疑，这堪称乌尔比诺医生最富感染力的一次倡议，戏剧热甚至感染到本城那些最意想不到的阶层，由此产生了一代形形色色的特里斯坦们和奥赛罗们、阿依达们和齐格弗里德们。不过，热潮也从未达到过乌尔比诺医生所期待的那种极端程度，即见到意大利派和瓦格纳派在幕间休息时棍棒相见，大打出手。
Dr. Juvenal Urbino never accepted the public positions that were offered to him with frequency and without conditions, and he was a pitiless critic of those physicians who used their professional prestige to attain political office. Although he was always considered a Liberal and was in the habit of voting for that party’s candidates, it was more a question of tradition than conviction, and he was perhaps the last member of the great families who still knelt in the street when the Archbishop’s carriage drove by. He defined himself as a natural pacifist, a partisan of definitive reconciliation between Liberals and Conservatives for the good of the nation. But his public conduct was so autonomous that no group claimed him for its own: the Liberals considered him a Gothic troglodyte, the Conservatives said he was almost a Mason, and the Masons repudiated him as a secret cleric in the service of the Holy See. His less savage critics thought he was just an aristocrat enraptured by the delights of the Poetic Festival while the nation bled to death in an endless civil war.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生从不接受任何官方职位，虽然有人经常无条件地提供给他这样的机会。他向来无情地批评那些依靠职业威信爬上政治高位的医生。尽管他一直被视作自由派，选举中也通常会把票投给自由党人，但他这样做更多的是出于传统而非信念。在那些显赫家族中，他或许是唯一一个遇到大主教华丽的四轮马车经过时会在街上跪下来的人。他把自己定义为一个天生的和平主义者，主张为了国家的利益，自由党和保守党之间应该彻底妥协。然而，他在公众面前表现出的特立独行却让任何一方都不把他当自己人：自由党视他为山洞里的哥特人，保守党则认为他基本上算是共济会成员，而共济会的人不接受他，认为他是为罗马天主教廷服务的秘密教士。那些不那么刻薄的批评者则认为，他不过是一个当民族在无休止的战争中倾流鲜血之际，却依旧醉心于四月花会的贵族而已。
Only two of his actions did not seem to conform to this image. The first was his leaving the former palace of the Marquis de Casalduero, which had been the family mansion for over a century, and moving to a new house in a neighborhood of nouveaux riches. The other was his marriage to a beauty from the lower classes, without name or fortune, whom the ladies with long last name s ridiculed in secret until they were forced to admit that she outshone them all in distinction and character. Dr. Urbino was always acutely aware of these and many other cracks in his public image, and no one was as conscious as he of being the last to bear a family name on its way to extinction. His children were two undistinguished ends of a line. After fifty years, his son, Marco Aurelio, a doctor like himself and like all the family’s firstborn sons in every generation, had done nothing worthy of note — he had not even produced a child. Dr. Urbino’s only daughter, Ofelia, was married to a solid bank employee from New Orleans, and had reached the climacteric with three daughters and no son. But although stemming the flow of his blood into the tide of history caused him pain, what worried Dr. Urbino most about dying was the solitary life Fermina Daza would lead without him.
只有两件事似乎与他的这一形象不符。第一件是他把家搬到了暴发户的居住区，离开家族居住了一个多世纪的古老的卡萨尔杜埃罗侯爵府。另一件则是他和一位既没有高贵姓氏也没有万贯家产的平民姑娘结了婚，这位姑娘曾被那些有着一长串姓氏的夫人们背地里嘲笑了很久，直到她们最终折服，承认她的出众和品行比她们所有人都要胜过数倍。乌尔比诺医生对于他的公众形象在这些以及其他很多方面所受的微词一直十分清楚，而且他比谁都明白，自己是这个濒临灭绝的姓氏最后的一位主角。他的两个孩子是家族的终结，而且没有任何闪光之处。儿子马可·奥雷里奥和他一样是个医生，与家族历代的长子一样毫无建树，而且现已年过五十，膝下却连一儿半女都没有。唯一的女儿奥菲利娅嫁给了一个人品不错的新奥尔良银行职员，现在已经到了更年期，有三个女儿，没有儿子。虽然家族的血统在历史的长河里就此消亡令乌尔比诺医生痛心不已，但对于死亡，他最担心的，还是费尔明娜·达萨失去他后的孤独生活。
In any event, the tragedy not only caused an uproar among his own household but spread to the common people as well. They thronged the streets in the hope of seeing something, even if it was only the brilliance of the legend. Three days of mourning were proclaimed, flags were flown at half mast in public buildings, and the bells in all the churches tolled without pause until the crypt in the family mausoleum was sealed. A group from the School of Fine Arts made a death mask that was to be used as the mold for a life-size bust, but the project was canceled because no one thought the faithful rendering of his final terror was decent. A reno wned artist who happened to be stopping here on his way to Europe painted, with pathos-laden realism, a gigantic canvas in which Dr. Urbino was depicted on the ladder at the fatal moment when he stretched out his hand to capture the parrot. The only element that contradicted the raw truth of the story was that in the painting he was wearing not the collarless shirt and the suspenders with green stripes, but rather a bowler hat and black frock coat copied from a rotogravure made during the years of the cholera epidemic. So that everyone would have the chance to see it, the painting was exhibited for a few months after the tragedy in the vast gallery of The Golden Wire, a shop that sold imported merchandise, and the entire city filed by. Then it was displayed on the walls of all the public and private institutions that felt obliged to pay tribute to the memory of their illustrious patron, and at last it was hung, after a second funeral, in the School of Fine Arts, where it was pulled down many years later by art students who burned it in the Plaza of the University as a symbol of an aesthetic and a time they despised.
总而言之，这场悲剧不仅震动了医生的家人，而且感染了平民百姓。他们纷纷来到大街，幻想一睹医生的风采，哪怕那风采只是一种传说。全城宣布哀悼三天，公共机构降半旗，所有教堂的钟声都响个不停，直到家庭墓地的墓穴被封上为止。艺术学校的一班学生为遗体做了一个面部模型，打算以此为模子塑造一尊真人大小的半身像，但最后又放弃了这个计划，因为大家都认为真实地塑造这最后一刻的惊恐有失庄重。一个前往欧洲恰好途经此地的知名画家用感人至深的现实主义手法画了一幅巨大的油画，画中乌尔比诺医生站在梯子上，定格在伸手去抓鹦鹉的那个死亡瞬间。唯一和冷酷的现实不符的是，他没有穿无领衬衫，也没有戴绿色条纹背带，而是头戴常礼帽，身着黑色呢子长礼服外套，这个形象参考自霍乱时期一份报纸上的插图。这幅油画在悲剧发生几个月后就展出在“金丝”商店宽敞的长廊里，为的是让所有人都能看到，因为“金丝”是一家卖进口物品的商店，全城人都会光顾，络绎不绝。之后，油画又出现在所有自认为有义务纪念这位杰出人士的公共和私人机构的墙上。最后，它被挂在了艺术学校，那里还为医生举行了第二次葬礼。而多年以后，同样是那里的美术系学生把油画搬出学校，作为某个令人厌恶的时代和某种美学的象征，在大学广场上一把火烧掉了。
From her first moment as a widow, it was obvious that Fermina Daza was not as helpless as her husband had feared. She was adamant in her determination not to allow the body to be used for any cause, and she remained so even after the honorific telegram from the President of the Republic ordering it to lie in state for public viewing in the Assembly Chamber of the Provincial Government. With the same serenity she opposed a vigil in the Cathedral, which the Archbishop himself had requested, and she agreed to the body’s lying there only during the funeral Mass. Even after the mediation of her son, who was dumbfounded by so many different requests, Fermina Daza was firm in her rustic notion that the dead belong only to the family, and that the vigil would be kept at home, with mountain coffee and fritters and everyone free to weep for him in any way they chose. There would be no traditional nine-night wake: the doors were closed after the funeral and did not open again except for visits from intimate friends.
从成为寡妇的第一刻起，费尔明娜·达萨便没有表现得像丈夫担心的那样无依无靠。她下了不可动摇的决心，不允许用丈夫的遗体为任何事业谋取利益，甚至对共和国总统在唁电中发出的命令也不予理会，即把遗体置于棺木中，停放在省政府的大厅里供人瞻仰。她以同样的冷静反对在教堂守灵，但由于大主教亲自提出请求，她同意在举行为亡者祈祷的葬礼弥撒时将遗体停放在教堂里。甚至当儿子被各种请求弄得不知所措，出面说项时，费尔明娜·达萨仍旧毫不动摇地坚持着她的乡土观念：死者不属于任何人，只属于他的家人；他们将在自己家里，喝着苦咖啡、吃着奶酪饼为他守灵，并且每个人都有想怎么哭就怎么哭的自由。他们将免去传统的九日守夜礼，下葬后就紧闭大门，除了接待最亲近的来访者，否则不会敞开家门。
The house was under the rule of death. Every object of value had been locked away with care for safekeeping, and on the bare walls there were only the outlines of the pictures that had been taken down. Chairs from the house, and those lent by the neighbors, were lined up against the walls from the drawing room to the bedrooms, and the empty spaces seemed immense and the voices had a ghostly resonance because the large pieces of furniture had been moved to one side, except for the concert piano which stood in its corner under a white sheet. In the middle of the library, on his father’s desk, what had once been Juvenal Urbino de la Calle was laid out with no coffin, with his final terror petrified on his face, and with the black cape and military sword of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher. At his side, in complete mourning, tremulous, hardly moving, but very much in control of herself, Fermina Daza received condolences with no great display of feeling until eleven the following morning, when she bade farewell to her husband from the portico, waving goodbye with a handkerchief.
家里笼罩在一片丧葬的气氛之中。所有贵重物品都被妥善地保管起来，墙上光秃秃的，只剩下一幅幅绘画曾挂在那里的痕迹。自家的和从邻居家借来的椅子靠墙放着，从客厅一直摆到卧室。大家具都被搬走了，只留下一架三角钢琴蒙着白布躺在角落里，空旷的房间仿佛没有边际，声音像幽灵似的回荡着。在书房中央，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺·德拉卡列的遗体躺在他父亲的写字台上，没有棺木，脸上凝固着那最后的惊恐，身穿黑色披风，佩戴着圣墓骑士团战斗的长剑。在他旁边，全身孝服，颤颤巍巍、但自制力仍然很强的费尔明娜·达萨接受着吊唁，毫无失态之举，甚至都没有移动过身子，直到次日上午十一点。那时，她站在门廊上，挥挥手帕，说一声“再见”，送别了丈夫。
It had not been easy for her to regain her self-control after she heard Digna Pardo’s shriek in the patio and found the old man of her life dying in the mud. Her first reaction was one of hope, because his eyes were open and shining with a radiant light she had never seen there before. She prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past. But she had to give in to the intransigence of death. Her grief exploded into a blind rage against the world, even against herself, and that is what filled her with the control and the courage to face her solitude alone. From that time on she had no peace, but she was careful about any gesture that might seem to betray her grief. The only moment of pathos, although it was involuntary, occurred at eleven o’clock Sunday night when they brought in the episcopal coffin, still smelling of ship’s wax, with its copper handles and tufted silk lining. Dr. Urbino Daza ordered it closed without delay since the air in the house was already rarefied with the heady fragrance of so many flowers in the sweltering heat, and he thought he had seen the first purplish shadows on his father’s neck. An absentminded voice was heard in the silence: “At that age you’re half decayed while you’re still alive.” Before they closed the coffin Fermina Daza took off her wedding ring and put it on her dead husband’s finger, and then she covered his hand with hers, as she always did when she caught him digressing in public.
自从听见蒂戈娜·帕尔多在院子里的喊叫声，看见心爱的老头儿在泥水里垂死挣扎，到如今她能恢复如此自控的状态实属不易。起初她的第一反应是仍有希望，因为丈夫还睁着眼，而且他眼中那四射的光芒是她从来没有见过的。她恳求上帝能够给她哪怕片刻的时间，好让丈夫在离去之前知道，无论两人间有过什么样的猜疑，她始终是那么爱他。她感到一种无法抗拒的强烈愿望，希望能与他从头再来，重新开始生活，好让两人把所有没说出口的话都告诉对方，把所有过去做错了的事重新做好。但面对毫不让步的死神，她只得投降。她的痛苦化作一股对世界、甚至对自己的盲目怒火，而这反而给她注入了自控的力量和独自面对孤独的勇气。从那时起，她心头没有片刻安宁，但她小心翼翼地不让自己的任何表情泄露出内心的痛苦。唯有那么一瞬间她身不由己地流露出某种凄楚，那就是星期日晚上十一点钟，人们把那口只有主教才有资格使用的棺材抬走的时候。棺木散发出轮船上那种萨波林油漆的味道，配有铜制把手，衬里是带夹层的丝绸。乌尔比诺·达萨医生下令立即盖棺，因为天气热得难以忍受，那许许多多鲜花散发出的气味使得整个家里的空气都稀薄了，而且他隐约在父亲脖子上看到了最初的紫色斑痕。沉静之中，一个漫不经心的声音说道：“活到这把年纪，人还在的时候就已经腐烂一半了。”盖棺前，费尔明娜·达萨摘下结婚戒指，把它戴在了亡夫手上，然后把自己的手盖在他手上，就像往常发现他在公共场合信口开河时一样。
“We will see each other very soon,” she said to him.
“我们很快就会再见面的。”她对他说。
Florentino Ariza, unseen in the crowd of notable personages, felt a piercing pain in his side. Fermina Daza had not recognized him in the confusion of the first condolences, although no one would be more ready to serve or more useful during the night’s urgent business. It was he who imposed order in the crowded kitchens so that there would be enough coffee. He found additional chairs when the neighbors” proved insufficient, and he ordered the extra wreaths to be put in the patio when there was no more room in the house. He made certain there was enough brandy for Dr. Lácides Olivella’s guests, who had heard the bad news at the height of the silver anniversary celebration and had rushed in to continue the party, sitting in a circle under the mango tree. He was the only one who knew how to react when the fugitive parrot appeared in the dining room at midnight with his head high and his wings spread, which caused a stupefied shudder to run through the house, for it seemed a sign of repentance. Florentino Ariza seized him by the neck before he had time to shout any of his witless stock phrases, and he carried him to the stable in a covered cage. He did everything this way, with so much discretion and such efficiency that it did not even occur to anyone that it might be an intrusion in other people’s affairs; on the contrary, it seemed a priceless service when evil times had fallen on the house.
隐身在众多社会名流中的弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨，突然感到体侧仿佛被刺了一刀。费尔明娜·达萨在第一批吊唁者的混乱中没有认出他来，尽管在那个慌乱的晚上，没有人比他出现得更及时，也没有人比他更尽力。是他把人满为患的厨房安排得秩序井然，让咖啡供应充足。当从邻居家借来的椅子不够用时，是他找来更多的椅子；当屋里的花圈堆得多一个也放不下时，又是他让人把余下的都放在院子里。他忙前忙后，留意不让拉希德斯·奥利维利亚医生家的客人缺少了白兰地。这些客人在二十五周年庆典的高潮时听闻噩耗，惊慌失措地赶来，围坐在芒果树下继续他们的欢闹。当逃跑的鹦鹉昂着脑袋，张着翅膀，大半夜出现在客厅中时，全屋人都不寒而栗，认为那是被悔恨所驱使，唯有弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨知道如何及时应对。他一把抓住鹦鹉脖子，让它来不及叫出任何一句愚蠢的口号，便被关进一个盖着布的笼子，带到了马厩。他就这样打理着一切，那般地谨慎有效，谁也没有认为他是在干涉别人的家事，恰恰相反，在这个家庭处于危难的时刻，他的所作所为被视作一种让人无以为报的帮助。
He was what he seemed: a useful and serious old man. His body was bony and erect, his skin dark and clean-shaven, his eyes avid behind round spectacles in silver frames, and he wore a romantic, old-fashioned mustache with waxed tips. He combed the last tufts of hair at his temples upward and plastered them with brilliantine to the middle of his shining skull as a solution to total baldness. His natural gallantry and languid manner were immediately charming, but they were also considered suspect virtues in a confirmed bachelor. He had spent a great deal of money, ingenuity, and willpower to disguise the seventy-six years he had completed in March, and he was convinced in the solitude of his soul that he had loved in silence for a much longer time than anyone else in this world ever had.
一如看上去的那样：他是一个乐于助人且举止稳重的老人。他身体硬朗挺拔，皮肤是褐色的，汗毛稀少，银色金属架的圆眼镜后面藏着一双充满渴望的眼睛，唇上留着浪漫的小胡须，胡子尖上涂着胶，虽然这种做法已有些过时。他把最后几绺鬓发向上梳起，用发蜡粘在光亮的脑壳中央，以此作为解决完全秃顶的最终办法。他那天生的文质彬彬和忧郁的气质能让他迅速地赢得好感，但也往往被视作一个顽固的单身汉身上的两种可疑品质。为了不让人察觉在刚刚过去的三月他已达七十六岁高龄，他花了很多金钱，也费了很多心思，并付出了坚毅的努力。作为一个仍处在孤独中的灵魂，他坚信自己比世界上任何一个人都默默爱得更深。
The night of Dr. Urbino’s death, he was dressed just as he had been when he first heard the news, which was how he always dressed, even in the infernal heat of June: a dark suit with a vest, a silk bow tie and a celluloid collar, a felt hat, and a shiny black umbrella that he also used a walking stick. But when it began to grow light he left the vigil for two hours and returned as fresh as the rising sun, carefully shaven and fragrant with lotions from his dressing table. He had changed into a black frock coat of the kind worn only for funerals and the offices of Holy Week, a wing collar with an artist’s bow instead of a tie, and a bowler hat. He also carried his umbrella, not just out of habit but because he was certain that it would rain before noon, and he informed Dr. Urbino Daza of this in case the funeral could be held earlier. They tried to do so, in fact, because Florentino Ariza belonged to a shipping family and was himself President of the River Company of the Caribbean, which allowed one to suppose that he knew something about predicting the weather. But they could not alter the arrangements in time with the civil and military authorities, the public and private corporations, the military band, the School of Fine Arts orchestra, and the schools and religious fraternities, which were prepared for eleven o’clock, so the funeral that had been anticipated as a historic event turned into a rout because of a devastating downpour. Very few people splashed through the mud to the family mausoleum, protected by a colonial ceiba tree whose branches spread over the cemetery wall. On the previous afternoon, under those same branches but in the section on the other side of the wall reserved for suicides, the Caribbean refugees had buried Jeremiah de Saint-Amour with his dog beside him, as he had requested.
尽管六月热得如同地狱，但在乌尔比诺医生去世的那天晚上，他始终都穿着自己刚刚听到消息时穿的那身衣服。他平时也总是这身打扮：配有背心的深色呢子外套，赛璐珞衣领上系着一条丝带，一顶毡帽，手里一把兼作拐杖的黑绸雨伞。但当天蒙蒙亮时，他从守灵的地方消失了两个小时。而伴随着第一缕阳光，他又神采奕奕地回来了，胡子刮得整整齐齐，身上散发着沐浴露的馨香。他换上了一件黑色呢子长礼服，这样的衣服他平时已经不穿了，只有参加葬礼和复活节圣周活动时才穿。他没有打领带，而是在翼领上打了一个艺术家式的蝴蝶结，头上戴了一顶常礼帽。他仍旧带上了雨伞，但这次并不仅仅是出于习惯，而是他确定当天十二点以前就会下起雨来。他把可能下雨的事告诉了乌尔比诺·达萨医生，看他是否可以把葬礼提前。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨来自航运世家，本人就是加勒比河运公司的董事长，可以说对预测天气十分在行，因此他们也的确尝试这么做了。但实在是没有办法在政界、军界、公共和私人团体、军乐队和艺术学校的乐队、各教会学校和宗教团体间进行及时协调，因为大家本已商定在十一点举行葬礼。于是，这场预计将成为一个历史性事件的葬礼最终被一场毁灭性的暴雨浇得七零八落，狼狈不堪。只有很少的几个人哗啦哗啦地踩着泥泞，最终到达乌尔比诺医生家的墓地。墓地被一株殖民时期的木棉守护着，它那繁茂的枝叶一直延伸到围墙之外。就在这同一片树荫下，在墙外的一小块专门用来埋葬自杀者的土地上，加勒比的流亡者们前一天下午刚刚安葬了赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔，并且按照他的遗愿，把狗葬在了他身边。
Florentino Ariza was one of the few who stayed until the funeral was over. He was soaked to the skin and returned home terrified that he would catch pneumonia after so many years of meticulous care and excessive precautions. He prepared hot lemonade with a shot of brandy, drank it in bed with two aspirin tablets, and, wrapped in a wool blanket, sweated by the bucketful until the proper equilibrium had been reestablished in his body. When he returned to the wake he felt his vitality completely restored. Fermina Daza had once again assumed command of the house, which was cleaned and ready to receive visitors, and on the altar in the library she had placed a portrait in pastels of her dead husband, with a black border around the frame. By eight o’clock there were as many people and as intense a heat as the night before, but after the rosary someone circulated the request that everyone leave early so that the widow could rest for the first time since Sunday afternoon.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨是最终到达墓地的少数几个人之一。他连内衣都被淋透了，惊恐万分地回到家，担心自己会染上肺炎，让这么多年小心翼翼、一丝不苟地保护身体的努力付之东流。他让人为自己准备了一杯加白兰地的热柠檬水，坐在床上用它冲服了两片阿司匹林，然后裹在羊毛被里出了一身大汗，直到恢复了体力。再次回到守灵处时，他感到精神饱满。费尔明娜·达萨重新执掌起家务来。家里已经打扫过，准备接待客人。书房的小祭台上摆放了一张已故男主人的画像，是用蜡笔画的，画框上系着黑丝带。晚八点时，宾客满堂，天气就像前一晚一样炎热。念过玫瑰经后，有人四下请求大家早些回去，以便让亡者的遗孀好好歇歇，因为她从星期日下午以来还不曾休息过。
Fermina Daza said goodbye to most of them at the altar, but she accompanied the last group of intimate friends to the street door so that she could lock it herself, as she had always done, as she was prepared to do with her final breath, when she saw Florentino Ariza, dressed in mourning and standing in the middle of the deserted drawing room. She was pleased, because for many years she had erased him from her life, and this was the first time she saw him clearly, purified by forgetfulness. But before she could thank him for the visit, he placed his hat over his heart, tremulous and dignified, and the abscess that had sustained his life finally burst.
对大部分客人，费尔明娜·达萨站在祭台旁向他们告了别，而对那些留到最后才走的挚友亲朋，她一直送到了街边的大门口，并准备像往常那样，亲自将大门关好。正当她打算用最后一丝力气把门合上时，看见了身穿丧服站在空荡荡的客厅中央的弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨。她高兴起来，因为在很多年前，她就已将他从自己的生活中抹掉了，而此时是第一次真切地看见他，看见他的样子从遗忘中清晰地显现出来。可费尔明娜还没有来得及对他的到访表示感谢，他便颤抖而又庄重地将帽子放到胸口的位置，让许久以来支撑他活下来的相思之苦一股脑儿迸发出来。
“Fermina,” he said, “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”
“费尔明娜，”他对她说，“这个机会我已经等了半个多世纪，就是为了能再一次向您重申我对您永恒的忠诚和不渝的爱情。”
Fermina Daza would have thought she was facing a madman if she had no t had reason to believe that at that moment Florentino Ariza was inspired by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Her first impulse was to curse him for profaning the house when the body of her husband was still warm in the grave. But the dignity of her fury held her back. “Get out of here,” she said. “And don’t show your face again for the years of life that are left to you.” She opened the street door, which she had begun to close, and concluded:
若不是有理由认为弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨那一刻是受到了圣神恩典的启示，费尔明娜准会以为站在自己面前的是一个疯子。她即刻的反应是想咒骂他在自己丈夫尸骨未寒时就来亵渎自己的家庭。但盛怒带来的威严制止了她。“你滚开！”她对他说，“在你的有生之年，都别再让我看见你。”她将正要关闭的大门再次完全敞开，斩钉截铁地说：
“And I hope there are very few of them.”
“我希望这也没有几年了。”
When she heard his steps fade away in the deserted street she closed the door very slowly with the crossbar and the locks, and faced her destiny alone. Until that moment she had never been fully conscious of the weight and size of the drama that she had provoked when she was not yet eighteen, and that would pursue her until her death. She wept for the first time since the afternoon of the disaster, without witnesses, which was the only way she wept. She wept for the death of her husband, for her solitude and rage, and when she went into the empty bedroom she wept for herself because she had rarely slept alone in that bed since the loss of her virginity. Everything that belonged to her husband made her weep again: his tasseled slippers, his pajamas under the pillow, the space of his absence in the dressing table mirror, his own odor on her skin. A vague thought made her shudder: “The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die.” She did not want anyone’s help to get ready for bed, she did not want to eat anything before she went to sleep. Crushed by grief, she prayed to God to send her death that night while she slept, and with that hope she lay down, barefoot but fully dressed, and fell asleep on the spot. She slept without realizing it, but she knew in her sleep that she was still alive, and that she had half a bed to spare, that she was lying on her left side on the left-hand side of the bed as she always did, but that she missed the weight of the other body on the other side. Thinking as she slept, she thought that she would never again be able to sleep this way, and she began to sob in her sleep, and she slept, sobbing, without changing position on her side of the bed, until long after the roosters crowed and she was awakened by the despised sun of the morning without him. Only then did she realize that she had slept a long time without dying, sobbing in her sleep, and that while she slept, sobbing, she had thought more about Florentino Ariza than about her dead husband.
她听着脚步声在寂静的街道上渐渐消失，然后慢慢地关上大门，上了门闩，别好锁头，独自面对自己的命运。在这一刻之前，她从未充分认识到自己年仅十八岁时造成的那个悲剧的分量和后果，从未意识到它竟会一路跟随自己直至死亡。从丈夫出事的那个下午以来，她第一次哭了，哭的时候没人在场，这也是唯一能让她哭出来的方式。她为丈夫的死而哭，为自己的孤独和愤怒而哭。走进空荡荡的卧室时，她又为自己而哭，因为自从她不再是处女之身以后，很少独自睡在那张床上。和丈夫有关的一切都令她触景伤怀：带穗的拖鞋，枕下的睡衣，梳妆台上没有了他身影的镜子，以及他留在她皮肤上的味道。一个莫名的念头使她浑身一颤：“当被人爱着的人死去时，真该带上他所有的东西。”她不想让别人搀扶她上床，也不想在睡前吃任何东西。痛苦压得她喘不上气来，她祈求上帝今晚就让她在睡梦中死去。带着这个幻想，她脱掉鞋，和衣躺下，顷刻间便睡着了。她在不知不觉中入睡，但她知道自己仍旧活着，她知道床空出了半边，自己像往常一样躺在左边，却没有了右边的另一个身体来保持平衡。她一边睡，一边想。当想到自己再也不能像以前那样睡觉了，她在睡梦中哭了起来。她一边睡，一边抽泣，却始终没有变过姿势，仍旧躺在床的左边。直到公鸡打鸣，直到这个没有了他的清晨那不受欢迎的阳光惊醒了她。之后，她又躺了许久。到了这时，她才发现自己睡了很久却并没有死去，而是一直在梦中哭泣；才发现自己边睡边哭，想得更多的竟是弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨，而非她那死去的丈夫。
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