On the occasion of the celebration of the new century, there was an innovative program of public ceremonies, the most memorable of which was the first journey in a balloon, the fruit of the boundless initiative of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Half the city gathered on the Arsenal Beach to express their wonderment at the ascent of the enormous balloon made of taffeta in the colors of the flag, which carried the first airmail to San Juan de la Ciénaga, some thirty leagues to the northeast as the crow flies. Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife, who had experienced the excitement of flight at the World’s Fair in Paris, were the first to climb into the wicker basket, followed by the pilot and six distinguished guests. They were carrying a letter from the Governor of the Province to the municipal officials of San Juan de la Ciénaga, in which it was documented for all time that this was the first mail transported through the air. A journalist from the Commercial Daily asked Dr. Juvenal Urbino for his final words in the event he perished during the adventure, and he did not even take the time to think about the answer that would earn him so much abuse.
为了欢庆新世纪的到来，大家举办了一系列新颖的公众活动。其中最让人难忘的，便是第一次气球旅行。这也是胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生那无穷无尽的首创精神结出的果实。半城人聚集在阿尔塞纳尔海滩，观看刷有国旗颜色的巨大塔夫绸气球升空，它将把第一批邮件送往东北方向直线距离三十里的圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加。曾见识过巴黎世博会上热气球腾空的激动场面的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生，和妻子率先登上了藤制悬篮，同行的还有一名飞行机械师和六位贵宾。他们带了一封省长致圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加市政府的信函，信中极具历史意义地将这次飞行称为第一次空中通邮。《商业日报》的一名记者问胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生，如果他在此次探险中不幸罹难，最后的遗言会是什么。乌尔比诺医生没有丝毫迟疑，做出了一个定会为他招致无数骂名的回答。
Lost in the guileless crowd that sang the national anthem as the balloon gained altitude, Florentino Ariza felt himself in agreement with the person whose comments he heard over the din, to the effect that this was not a suitable exploit for a woman, least of all one as old as Fermina Daza. But it was not so dangerous after all. Or at least not so much dangerous as depressing. The balloon reached its destination without incident after a peaceful trip through an incredible blue sky. They flew well and very lo w, with a calm, favorable wind, first along the spurs of the snow-covered mountains and then over the vastness of the Great Swamp.
气球徐徐上升，人们慷慨激昂地唱起国歌。被淹没在沸腾人群中的弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨觉得自己十分赞同人群中某个人的话，即这种冒险对女人不合适，尤其是已经这把年纪的费尔明娜·达萨。但说到底，这件事也没那么危险。或者说，至少沉闷多过危险。气球在蓝得有些不真实的天空经过一段平静的旅行之后，毫无波澜地到达了目的地。在风向有利的和风中，他们飞得很稳，很低，先是沿着白雪皑皑的山峦，然后又从无边无际的大沼泽上飞过。
“In my opinion,” he said, “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us.”
“我认为，”他说，“十九世纪对全世界来说都已经时过境迁了，唯独在我们这里没有。”
From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the cholera panic after three centuries of resistance to the sieges of the English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the Viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.
他们就像上帝一样，从天上俯瞰卡塔赫纳这座英雄古城的废墟，这是世界上最美的城市。三百年来，它的居民抵御了英军的各种包围和海盗的不懈侵扰，如今却因对霍乱的恐惧将它遗弃。他们看到了完好的城墙、杂草丛生的街道、被三色堇吞没的古堡、大理石的宫殿，以及供奉着那些因瘟疫而在盔甲里腐烂的历任总督的金色祭坛。
They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrine gardens. Excited by everyone’s shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill, and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.
他们从特洛哈斯·德卡塔卡的水上村庄上空飞过，那里的房子涂得五颜六色，到处是饲养食用鬣蜥的小棚，湖边花园里长着成串的凤仙和一簇簇的百合。听到人们的呼喊，几百个光着身子的小孩乱哄哄地跳入水中，有的是从窗子跳下来，有的是从房顶上，还有的是从他们以惊人的本领驾驶的独木舟上，他们如鲱鱼般潜入水中，打捞起一包包衣物，一瓶瓶大蜡烛木制成的咳嗽药水，还有救济食品，这些都是那位戴羽毛帽子的美丽夫人从气球的悬篮里抛给他们的。
They flew over the dark ocean of the banana plantations, whose silence reached them like a lethal vapor, and Fermina Daza remembered herself at the age of three, perhaps four, walking through the shadowy forest holding the hand of her mother, who was almost a girl herself, surrounded by other women dressed in muslin, just like her mother, with white parasols and hats made of gauze. The pilot, who was observing the world through a spyglass, said: “They seem dead.” He passed the spyglass to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who saw the oxcarts in the cultivated fields, the boundary lines of the railroad tracks, the blighted irrigation ditches, and wherever he looked he saw human bodies. Someone said that the cholera was ravaging the villages of the Great Swamp. Dr. Urbino, as he spoke, continued to look through the spyglass.
他们从海洋般阴暗深邃的香蕉种植园上空飞过，园中的宁静像死亡的蒸汽一样上升到他们中间，费尔明娜·达萨想起自己三岁，又或许四岁时，拉着母亲的手在幽暗的树林里漫步的情景。那时的母亲，在一群和她一样穿着麦斯林纱衣、打着白色阳伞、戴着薄纱帽子的女人中间，也仿佛是个小姑娘。飞行机械师一直在透过望远镜观察地面，他对他们说：“这里好像没有生命。”接着便把望远镜递给胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生。医生看到耕地上的牛车、从田野里穿过的铁轨和干涸的水渠，而目之所及，到处都有人的尸体。有人说，霍乱正在大沼泽的各个村庄里肆虐。医生一边应答，一边继续用望远镜四处眺望。
“Well, it must be a very special form of cholera,” he said, “because every single corpse has received the coup de grace through the back of the neck.”
“那可得是一种非常特殊的霍乱，”他说，“因为每个死者的后脑勺上都挨了仁慈的一枪。”
A short while later they flew over a foaming sea, and they landed without incident on a broad, hot beach whose surface, cracked with niter burned like fire. The officials were there with no more protection against the sun than ordinary umbrellas, the elementary schools were there waving little flags in time to the music, and the beauty queens with scorched flowers and crowns made of gold cardboard, and the brass band of the prosperous town of Gayra, which in those days was the best along the Caribbean coast. All that Fermina Daza wanted was to see her birthplace again, to confront it with her earliest memories, but no one was allowed to go there because of the dangers of the plague. Dr. Juvenal Urbino delivered the historic letter, which was then mislaid among other papers and never seen again, and the entire delegation almost suffocated in the tedium of the speeches. The pilot could not make the balloon ascend again, and at last they were led on muleback to the dock at Pueblo Viejo, where the swamp met the sea. Fermina Daza was sure she had passed through there with her mother when she was very young, in a cart drawn by a team of oxen. When she was older, she had repeated the story several times to her father, who died insisting that she could not possibly recall that.
不一会儿，他们飞过一片泛着泡沫的海水，安全地降落在一片灼热的沙滩上，含硝的土地干裂开来，烫得如烈火一般。政府官员们正在那里恭候，除了普通的雨伞，没有其他任何措施抵挡骄阳。一些小学生随着进行曲的节奏挥舞着小旗；历年的选美皇后头戴金光闪闪的纸王冠，手捧着已被晒焦的鲜花；还有从加勒比沿岸最好的镇子——繁荣的盖拉镇请来的吹奏乐队。费尔明娜·达萨唯一的希望就是回自己的故乡看看，和她脑海中最久远的回忆对照一下，但因为霍乱的危险，谁也没有得到去那里的许可。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生呈上了那封具有历史意义的信函，但它后来被错放到其他文书之中，最终下落不明。接下来，一行人差点在令人瞌睡的演讲中窒息。由于飞行机械师没能再次让气球升空，人们最后只好用骡子把他们送到老村城的渡口，那里是沼泽和大海的会合处。费尔明娜·达萨十分肯定自己很小的时候曾和母亲乘着一辆两头牛拉的木轮大车来过这里。长大后，她好几次向父亲提起，但父亲到死都固执地认为她不可能记得此事。
“I remember the trip very well, and what you say is accurate,” he told her, “but it happened at least five years before you were born.”
“那次旅行我记得清清楚楚，你说的细节也都对，”父亲对她说，“但那至少是你出生前五年的事。”
Three days later the members of the balloon expedition, devastated by a bad night of storms, returned to their port of origin, where they received a heroes” welcome. Lost in the crowd, of course, was Florentino Ariza, who recognized the traces of terror on Fermina Daza’s face. Nevertheless he saw her again that same afternoon in a cycling exhibition that was also sponsored by her husband, and she showed no sign of fatigue. She rode an uncommon velocipede that resembled something from a circus, with a very high front wheel, over which she was seated, and a very small back wheel that gave almost no support. She wore a pair of loose trousers trimmed in red, which scandalized the older ladies and disconcerted the gentlemen, but no one was indifferent to her skill.
三天后，气球探险队回到了出发的港口。被整整一夜暴风雨摧残得狼狈不堪的他们像英雄一般受到欢迎。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨自然也淹没在人群中，他从费尔明娜·达萨脸上辨出了惊恐的痕迹。但当天下午，他又在同样由她丈夫赞助的自行车展览上见到了她，此时的她已没有一丝倦容。她骑着一辆与众不同的脚踏车，但那更像是一件马戏团道具，前轮很高，后轮却小得出奇，看上去几乎难以支撑，而她就坐在前轮上，穿一条镶红花边的灯笼短裤，这让很多上了年纪的太太们议论纷纷，也让绅士们有些不知所措，但对她的车技，人人都由衷叹服。
That, along with so many other ephemeral images in the course of so many years, would suddenly appear to Florentino Ariza at the whim of fate, and disappear again in the same way, leaving behind a throb of longing in his heart. Taken together, they marked the passage of his life, for he experienced the cruelty of time not so much in his own flesh as in the imperceptible changes he discerned in Fermina Daza each time he saw her.
这一幕，和这许多年来的许多幕一样，总会在弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨面对命运的紧要关头时突然出现在他眼前，然后又突然消失，在他心里留下焦急渴望的种子。它们标记着他人生的轨迹，因为他甚少从自己身上体会到时间的残酷，却能在每一次见到费尔明娜·达萨时，从她身上难以察觉的细微变化中感受到这一点。
Holding his breath, Florentino Ariza observed her at his pleasure: he saw her eat, he saw her hardly touch her wine, he saw her joke with the fourth in the line of Don Sanchos; from his solitary table he shared a moment of her life, and for more than an hour he lingered, unseen, in the forbidden precincts of her intimacy. Then he drank four more cups of coffee to pass the time until he saw her leave with the rest of the group. They passed so close to him that he could distinguish her scent among the clouds of other perfumes worn by her companions.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨屏息凝神，尽情地观察她，看她吃东西，看她抿了一小口酒，看她同第四代堂桑丘打趣。他坐在自己孤独的桌子前，和她共度她人生的片刻。在这一个多小时里，他悄悄地在她贴身的禁区周围走来走去，之后他又喝了四杯咖啡消磨时光，直到看见她与那群人一起步出餐厅。他们走过时，离他是那样的近，他甚至能从众女眷身上散发的香气中识别出她的味道。
One night he went to Don Sancho’s Inn, an elegant colonial restaurant, and sat in the most remote corner, as was his custom when he ate his frugal meals alone. All at once, in the large mirror on the back wall, he caught a glimpse of Fermina Daza sitting at a table with her husband and two other couples, at an angle that allowed him to see her reflected in all her splendor. She was unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks, and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice had gone through the looking glass.
一天晚上，他走进堂桑丘这家殖民时期的高级餐厅，像往常一样找了个偏僻角落坐下来。他每次来这里都只是独自坐上一会儿，简单吃些茶点。突然，他在餐厅尽头的大镜子中看到了费尔明娜·达萨。她和丈夫以及另外两对夫妇坐在一张餐桌边，从他这个角度正好能在镜中欣赏她那迷人的风姿。她举止自如，优雅地与众人交谈，笑声就像烟火一样，在晶莹的大吊灯下，她的美更加光彩夺目：爱丽丝再次走入了镜中。
From that night on, and for almost a year afterward, he laid unrelenting siege to the owner of the inn, offering him whatever he wanted, money or favors or whatever he desired most in life, if he would sell him the mirror. It was not easy, because old Don Sancho believed the legend that the beautiful frame, carved by Viennese cabinetmakers, was the twin of another, which had belonged to Marie Antoinette and had disappeared without a trace: a pair of unique jewels. When at last he surrendered, Florentino Ariza hung the mirror in his house, not for the exquisite frame but because of the place inside that for two hours had been occupied by her beloved reflection.
从那晚起，将近一年的时间，他一直缠着那家餐厅的主人，愿意付出任何代价——金钱或者人情，又或者这位店主一生最想得到的东西——只求他把那面镜子卖给自己。可这并非易事，因为老堂桑丘相信传说中的故事——这个出自威尼斯工匠之手的精美雕花镜框原是一对，另外那件曾属于玛利亚·安托瓦内特，现已没了踪迹：它们是一对举世无双的珍宝。但最终，他还是让步了，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨把镜子挂到了自己家中，却并不是因为那镜框的精雕细琢，而是因为镜子里的那片天地，他爱恋的形象曾在那里占据了两个小时之久。
When he saw Fermina Daza she was almost always on her husband’s arm, the two of them in perfect harmony, moving through their own space with the astonishing fluidity of Siamese cats, which was broken only when they stopped to greet him. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, in fact, shook his hand with warm cordiality, and on occasion even permitted himself a pat on the shoulder. She, on the other hand, kept him relegated to an impersonal regime of formalities and never made the slightest gesture that might allow him to suspect that she remembered him from her unmarried days. They lived in two different worlds, but while he made every effort to reduce the distance between them, every step she took was in the opposite direction. It was a long time before he dared to think that her indifference was no more than a shield for her timidity. This occurred to him suddenly, at the christening of the first freshwater vessel built in the local shipyards, which was also the first official occasion at which Florentino Ariza, as First Vice President of the R. C. C., represented Uncle Leo XII. This coincidence imbued the ceremony with special solemnity, and everyone of any significance in the life of the city was present.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨每次见到费尔明娜·达萨时，她几乎总挽着丈夫的手臂，两人完美和谐地徜徉在只属于他们自己的天地之间，像暹罗猫那样惊人地灵活自如。唯有在同他打招呼时，夫妻俩才表现出分歧。的确，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生同他握手时亲切热情，有时甚至会拍拍他的肩膀。而她则相反，对他仅限于彬彬有礼，不带丝毫个人情感，从未流露出任何细微的表情能让他隐约感到她尚记得自己年轻时曾与他相识。他们生活在两个背道而驰的世界里。每当他竭力想要缩短他们之间的距离时，她绝不会向前迈进一步，而是步步都朝着相反的方向。直到很长时间以后，他才斗胆设想，那种冷漠也许不过是抵抗恐惧的保护壳。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨是在当地船厂所造的第一艘内河船的命名仪式上突然想到这一点的，那也是他第一次作为CFC的首席副董事长，代表莱昂十二叔叔出席正式场合。这一巧合赋予了这次活动某种特殊的庄严意义。凡本城中稍有头脸的人物都来了。
Florentino Ariza waited for them on the bridge with the provincial officials, surrounded by the crash of the music and the fireworks and the three heavy screams from the ship, which enveloped the dock in steam. Juvenal Urbino greeted the members of the reception line with that naturalness so typical of him, which made everyone think the Doctor bore him a special fondness: first the ship’s captain in his dress uniform, then the Archbishop, then the Governor with his and the Mayor with his, and then the military commander, who was a newcomer from the Andes. Beyond the officials stood Florentino Ariza, dressed in dark clothing and almost invisible among so many eminent people. After greeting the military commander, Fermina seemed to hesitate before Florentino Ariza’s outstretched hand. The military man, prepared to introduce them, asked her if they did not know each other. She did not say yes and she did not say no, but she held out her hand to Florentino Ariza with a salon smile. The same thing had occurred twice in the past, and would occur again, and Florentino Ariza always accepted these occasions with a strength of character worthy of Fermina Daza. But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨和省府要员一起在舰桥上迎候他们，周围响着震耳欲聋的音乐声和鞭炮声，轮船鸣了三声浑厚的汽笛，将码头笼罩在蒸汽之中。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生以其特有的潇洒风度，向列队接待的人一一致意，令每个人都觉得他对自己亲切有加：首先是身着华丽制服的船长，接着是大主教，省长夫妇，市长夫妇，然后是一位刚到任的来自安第斯地区的要塞长官。在政府要员之后就是身着黑色呢子礼服的弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨，置身于如此众多的显赫人士当中，他几乎微不足道。费尔明娜向要塞长官问好后，面对弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨伸过来的手似乎迟疑了一下。长官预备为他们引见，就问她是否与他相识。她既没有说“不”，也没有说“是”，只是带着一个浅浅的微笑把手伸给弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨。这种情景过去出现过两次，今后也一定会再次出现，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨一向将其视为费尔明娜·达萨个性的表现。但就在那天下午，他发挥了无边的想象力，问自己这种残酷的冷漠会不会是一种掩饰，底下隐藏的其实是一场爱情的风暴？
Florentino Ariza was looking after his guests in the main salon of the ship, still redolent of fresh paint and tar, when there was a burst of applause on the docks, and the band struck up a triumphal march. He had to repress the trembling that was almost as old as he was when he saw the beautiful woman of his dreams on her husband’s arm, splendid in her maturity, striding like a queen from another time past the honor guard in parade uniform, under the shower of paper streamers and flower petals tossed at them from the windows. Both responded to the ovation with a wave of the hand, but she was so dazzling, dressed in imperial gold from her high-heeled slippers and the foxtails at her throat to her bell-shaped hat, that she seemed to be alone in the midst of the crowd.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨在轮船的主厅忙着接待来宾，那里还散发着一股新刷的油漆和熔化的沥青味。这时，码头上突然爆发一阵雷鸣般的掌声，乐队奏起了凯旋曲。他不得不控制住几乎与他的年纪一样老迈的颤抖，因为他看见自己朝思暮想的美人挽着丈夫的手臂，从身穿制服的仪仗队中间徐徐走来，浑身散发着成熟的风采，如旧时的王后一般。人们从窗口撒下暴风雨般的彩带和花瓣，两人则挥手回应人们的欢呼。她是如此炫目，从脚上精致的高跟鞋，到颈上的狐尾围脖，再到头上的钟形帽，全身上下都闪耀着属于皇室的金色，在人群中显得格外出挑。
The mere idea excited his youthful desires. Once again he haunted Fermina Daza’s villa, filled with the same longings he had felt when he was on duty in the little Park of the Evangels, but his calculated intention was not that she see him, but rather that he see her and know that she was still in the world. Now, however, it was difficult for him to escape notice. The District of La Manga was on a semi-deserted island, separated from the historic city by a canal of green water and covered by thickets of icaco plum, which had sheltered Sunday lovers in colonial times. In recent years, the old stone bridge built by the Spaniards had been torn down, and in its stead was one made of brick and lined with streetlamps for the new mule-drawn trolleys. At first the residents of La Manga had to endure a torture that had not been anticipated during construction, which was sleeping so close to the city’s first electrical plant whose vibration was a constant earthquake. Not even Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with all his prestige, could persuade them to move it where it would not disturb anyone, until his proven complicity with Divine Providence interceded on his behalf. One night the boiler in the plant blew up in a fearful explosion, flew over the new houses, sailed across half the city, and destroyed the largest gallery in the former convent of St. Julian the Hospitaler. The old ruined building had been abandoned at the beginning of the year, but the boiler caused the deaths of four prisoners who had escaped from the local jail earlier that night and were hiding in the chapel.
仅仅是这样一个设想便使他旧梦复苏。他又开始在费尔明娜·达萨的别墅周围徘徊，怀着多年以前盘桓在福音花园时同样的渴望。但他心里盘算的并非是让她看见自己，而只是想看看她，知道她还活在这个世界上。可如今他要让自己不被人察觉是很困难的。拉曼加区坐落在一个半荒凉的小岛上，一条绿色的运河把它同老城隔开。那里到处都是椰李丛，是殖民时期恋人们星期日的藏身之所。近几年，西班牙人建的老石桥已被拆除，新建了一座混合材料的水泥桥，上面还装了球形电灯，以便骡子轨道车通过。起初，拉曼加区的居民不得不忍受设计不周带来的折磨，睡在本市的第一座发电站旁边，那隆隆的震动声就好像地震在持续不断地爆发。就连调动了所有关系的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生也无法让它搬到不扰人的地方去。直到他那已被证明的和全能上帝之间的同谋关系出面调停，才让事情转向他的一边。一天晚上，电站的锅炉爆炸，威力惊人，竟从一座座新建的房屋上空飞了过去，在空中穿过半座城市，最终摧毁了古老的乐善好施者圣胡利安修道院的回廊。尽管那座破旧的建筑在本年初已被废弃，但锅炉还是造成了四人死亡，他们是那天晚上从当地监狱里逃出来的犯人，当时正躲在修道院的小教堂里。
The peaceful suburb with its beautiful tradition of love was, however, not the most propitious for unrequited love when it became a luxury neighborhood. The streets were dusty in summer, swamp-like in winter, and desolate all year round, and the scattered houses were hidden behind leafy gardens and had mosaic tile terraces instead of old-fashioned projecting balconies, as if they had been built for the purpose of discouraging furtive lovers. It was just as well that at this time it became fashionable to drive out in the afternoon in hired old Victorias that had been converted to one-horse carriages, and that the excursion ended on a hill where one could appreciate the heartbreaking twilights of October better than from the lighthouse, and observe the watchful sharks lurking at the seminarians” beach, and see the Thursday ocean liner, huge and white, that could almost be touched with one’s hands as it passed through the harbor channel. Florentino Ariza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office, but instead of folding down the top, as was customary during the hot months, he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible in the darkness, always alone, and requesting unexpected routes so as not to arouse the evil thoughts of the driver. In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive was the pink marble Parthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees, a luckless replica of the idyllic mansions on Louisiana cotton plantations. Fermina Daza’s children returned home a little before five. Florentino Ariza would see them arrive in the family carriage, and then he would see Dr. Juvenal Urbino leave for his routine house calls, but in almost a year of vigilance he never even caught the glimpse he so desired.
那片宁静的郊区曾有着美妙的爱情传统，但自从它变成奢华的住宅区，对受阻的爱情就不那么适宜了。大街上，夏天尘土飞扬，冬天到处泥泞，整年都冷冷清清。稀稀落落的房子淹没在树木繁茂的花园之后，过去那种伸出屋外的旧式阳台变成了镶嵌工艺的露台，仿佛故意要跟偷情的恋人过不去似的。所幸那个时期流行起午后租马车出游，用的是改装的单匹马拉的老式敞蓬车，游览终点往往是一块高地，从那里可以欣赏十月绚丽的晚霞，比从灯塔上观看还要惬意，还可以看到悄悄游过来窥探神学院海滩的鲨鱼，而每星期四，白色的远洋巨轮从海港运河通过，几乎触手可及。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨在办公室忙碌一天后，总会租上一辆马车，但从不像人们在炎热的季节所做的那样折起车篷，而是始终独自躲在座位深处，藏在别人看不到的阴影里，而且为了不让车夫胡乱猜测，总是命令他驶向意想不到的地方。事实上，他在途中唯一感兴趣的，只有那幢掩映在枝繁叶茂的香蕉树和芒果树之间的粉红色大理石帕特农神庙，它仿佛是路易斯安那州棉花种植园的田园别墅走了样的复制品。费尔明娜·达萨的孩子们每天快到五点时回家。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨看着他们乘着自家马车归来，之后又看着胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生例行出诊。然而，他在那里转悠了将近一年，却没能看见半点自己渴望的征兆。
Bewildered by his urgency, the driver tried to raise the horse without unharnessing him, and the axle of the carriage broke. Florentino Ariza managed to climb out of the coach in the driving rain and endure his embarrassment until passersby in other carriages offered to take him home. While he was waiting, a servant of the Urbino family “ad seen him, his clothes soaked through, standing in mud up to his Knees, and she brought him an umbrella so that he could take refuge on the terrace. In the wildest of his deliriums Florentino Ariza had never dreamed of such good fortune, but on that afternoon he would have died rather than allow Fermina Daza to see him in that condition.
车夫被他催得莫名其妙，试图不卸车辕而把马扶起来，结果车轴断了。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨急忙下车，忍受着羞愧，站在残忍的大雨中，直到乘别的车路过的人伸出援手，把他带回了家。他等在那里时，乌尔比诺家的一名女仆见他浑身湿透，蹚着及膝的泥水跑来跑去，于是给他送来一把雨伞，还请他到露台上去避一避。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨即使在最狂妄的遐想中也从未料到自己能交上这等好运，但那个下午，他宁死也不愿让费尔明娜·达萨看见他那副狼狈的样子。
One afternoon when he insisted on his solitary drive despite the first devastating rains of June, the horse slipped and fell in the mud. Florentino Ariza realized with horror that they were just in front of Fermina Daza’s villa, and he pleaded with the driver, not thinking that his consternation might betray him.
一天下午，尽管六月的第一场破坏性大雨倾盆而下，但他仍然坚持这种独自出行的习惯。马在泥泞中滑了一下，跌倒在地。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨惊恐地发现自己正好处在费尔明娜·达萨家别墅的门前，他顾不上这种惊慌失措可能暴露自己，竟然恳求起车夫来。
“Not here, please,” he shouted. “Anywhere but here.”
“这儿不能停，求您了！”他对他喊道，“别的什么地方都行，就这儿不行！”
When they lived in the old city, Juvenal Urbino and his family would walk on Sundays from their house to the Cathedral for eight o’clock Mass, which for them was more a secular ceremony than a religious one. Then, when they moved, they continued to drive there for several years, and at times they visited with friends under the palm trees in the park. But when the temple of the theological seminary was built in La Manga, with a private beach and its own cemetery, they no longer went to the Cathedral except on very solemn occasions. Ignorant of these changes, Florentino Ariza waited Sunday after Sunday on the terrace of the Parish Café, watching the people coming out of all three Masses. Then he realized his mistake and went to the new church, which was fashionable until just a few years ago, and there, at eight o’clock sharp on four Sundays in August, he saw Dr. Juvenal Urbino with his children, but Fermina Daza was not with them. On one of those Sundays he visited the new cemetery adjacent to the church, where the residents of La Manga were building their sumptuous pantheons, and his heart skipped a beat when he discovered the most sumptuous of all in the shade of the great ceiba trees. It was already complete, with Gothic stained-glass windows and marble angels and gravestones with gold lettering for the entire family. Among them, of course, was that of Doña Fermina Daza de Urbino de la Calle, and next to it her husband’s, with a common epitaph: Together still in the peace of the Lord.
住在老城时，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺一家每星期日总要步行到大教堂去望八点钟的弥撒，这对他们来说与其说是宗教习惯，不如说是社交习惯。搬家以后的好几年里，他们仍旧乘马车去大教堂望弥撒，有时还会在公园的棕榈树下和友人聚上一聚。但自从拉曼加区建起了教会事务神学院的礼拜堂，并拥有自己的海滩和墓地后，他们便除了一些极为隆重的场合，不再到大教堂去了。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨对这个变化毫不知情，在教区咖啡馆的露台上白等了好几个星期日，目送着三台弥撒的人走得一个不剩。后来，他发现了自己的错误，才改到新教堂去。在最近几年之前，新教堂一直都很流行。他在那里见到了带着孩子的胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生，八月的四个星期日他们都准时前来，但费尔明娜·达萨没有和他们一起。就在其中的一个星期日，他去参观教堂附近新落成的墓地，拉曼加区的居民在那里为自己建造了奢华的坟墓。当他在高大的木棉树下发现那座最讲究的坟墓时，他的心抽搐了一下。墓已经建成，镶有哥特式的彩色玻璃，竖立着大理石天使雕像，全家人的墓碑都以金字镌刻而成。自然，其中就有费尔明娜·达萨·德乌尔比诺·德拉卡列夫人的，紧邻她丈夫的墓碑，上面刻着同一句墓志铭：共眠于上帝的平安中。
“A lady so distinguished could suffer only from consumption.”
“像她这样高贵的夫人，得的不可能是别的病，只能是肺结核。”
For the rest of the year, Fermina Daza did not attend any civic or social ceremonies, not even the Christmas celebrations, in which she and her husband had always been illustrious protagonists. But her absence was most notable on the opening night of the opera season. During intermission, Florentino Ariza happened on a group that, beyond any doubt, was discussing her without mentioning her name. They said that one midnight the previous June someone had seen her boarding the Cunard ocean liner en route to Panama, and that she wore a dark veil to hide the ravages of the shameful disease that was consuming her. Someone asked what terrible illness would dare to attack a woman with so much power, and the answer he received was saturated with black bile:
那一年的其他时间，费尔明娜·达萨没有出席任何一次市民活动和社交场合，连圣诞节的活动也没有参加，而往年的圣诞节，她和丈夫都是耀眼的主角。最引人注意的，莫过于她在一年一度的歌剧节开幕式上也缺席了。幕间休息时，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨意外发现有几个人在不指名地议论她。他们说，有人在去年六月的一天夜里看见她登上了库纳德公司开往巴拿马的远洋轮船，脸上蒙着黑纱，以免让人看出可耻的疾病正慢慢地吞噬她的生命。有人问，究竟是什么病如此可怕，竟敢侵染这样一位权力显赫的夫人，得到的回答则颇为恶毒：
Florentino Ariza knew that the wealthy of his country did not contract short-term diseases. Either they died without warning, almost always on the eve of a major holiday that could not be celebrated because of the period of mourning, or they faded away in long, abominable illnesses whose most intimate details eventually became public knowledge. Seclusion in Panama was almost an obligatory penance in the life of the rich.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨知道，他家乡的有钱人从不会生小病，一得就是大病。要么是暴亡，而且几乎总是在盛大节日的前夕，往往使得节日的欢欣被葬礼冲掉；要么就是在令人生厌的慢性病中油尽灯枯，而个中内情到头来还是传得人尽皆知。到巴拿马去隐居，几乎是富人生活中迫不得已的悔罪之举。
They submitted to God’s will in the Adventist Hospital, an immense white warehouse lost in the prehistoric downpours of Darién, where the sick lost track of the little life that was left to them, and in whose solitary rooms with their burlap windows no one could tell with certainty if the smell of carbolic acid was the odor of health or of death. Those who recovered came back bearing splendid gifts that they would distribute with a free hand and a kind of agonized longing to be pardoned for their indiscretion in still being alive. Some returned with their abdomens crisscrossed by barbarous stitches that seemed to have been sewn with cobbler’s hemp; they would raise their shirts to display them when people came to visit, they compared them with those of others who had suffocated from excesses of joy, and for the rest of their days they would describe and describe again the angelic visions they had seen under the influence of chloroform. On the other hand, no one ever learned about the visions of those who did not return, including the saddest of them all: those who had died as exiles in the tuberculosis pavilion, more from the sadness of the rain than because of the complications of their disease.
他们在基督复临派的医院中将自己交给上帝的意愿。那所医院是个巨大的白色棚屋，常年淹没在达连湾史前般的倾盆大雨之中。在那里，病人们忘记了自己已时日无多，日复一日地生活在粗麻布窗子的孤独病室里，任谁也说不清那石炭酸的气味代表的是健康还是死亡。康复的人带着令人眼花缭乱的礼物回到家乡，慷慨地分发给众人，急切地为自己的苟延残喘祈求原谅。有人回来时肚子上留下了粗糙的缝合疤痕，就像是用鞋匠的麻绳缝的。他们在前来探望的亲朋面前掀起衬衫，将自己的伤口同那些被过度的幸福窒息而死的人的伤疤进行比较。余生里，他们将反反复复地讲述在三氯甲烷的作用下，他们是如何看见天使降临的。然而，从没有人知道那些没能回来的人都看见了什么，其中最悲惨的又莫过于被遗弃在肺结核区死去的人。他们的死更多是因为雨水的折磨，而非疾病的苦楚。
If he had been forced to choose, Florentino Ariza did not know which fate he would have wanted for Fermina Daza. More than anything else he wanted the truth, but no matter how unbearable, and regardless of how he searched, he could not find it. It was inconceivable to him that no one could even give him a hint that would confirm the story he had heard. In the world of riverboats, which was his world, no mystery could be maintained, no secret could be kept. And yet no one had heard anything about the woman in the black veil. No one knew anything in a city where everything was known, and where many things were known even before they happened, above all if they concerned the rich. But no one had any explanation for the disappearance of Fermina Daza. Florentino Ariza continued to patrol La Manga, continued to hear Mass without devotion in the basilica of the seminary, continued to attend civic ceremonies that never would have interested him in another state of mind, but the passage of time only increased the credibility of the story he had heard. Everything seemed normal in the Urbino household, except for the mother’s absence.
如果要他选择，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨不知道自己更愿意费尔明娜·达萨生还是死。但首先，他最想知道的是实情，哪怕是令人无法忍受的实情。他千方百计地寻找真相，可还是没有找到。他感到不可思议，居然没有一个人能告诉他哪怕一条线索，好让他判断传言的真伪。内河航运是他管辖的领域，对他来说那里不存在任何秘密，甚至连隐私都没有。然而，谁也没听说过戴黑面纱女人的事情。在这座城市里，一切都保不了密，甚至有很多事在发生之前就尽人皆知，特别是有关富人的事。唯独这件事无人知晓。也没有人对费尔明娜·达萨的失踪做出过任何解释。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨继续在拉曼加区徘徊，毫无虔诚地到神学院的礼拜堂去望弥撒，参加一些以往根本不会理会的市民活动。可是，随着时间的流逝，传言变得越来越可信了。乌尔比诺家一切正常，唯独缺少了母亲。
As he carried on his investigation, he learned about other events he had not known of or into which he had made no inquiries, including the death of Lorenzo Daza in the Cantabrian village where he had been born. He remembered seeing him for many years in the rowdy chess wars at the Parish Café, hoarse with so much talking, and growing fatter and rougher as he sank into the quicksand of an unfortunate old age. They had never exchanged another word since their disagreeable breakfast of anise in the previous century, and Florentino Ariza was certain that even after he had obtained for his daughter the successful marriage that had become his only reason for living, Lorenzo Daza remembered him with as much rancor as he felt toward Lorenzo Daza. But he was so determined to find out the unequivocal facts regarding Fermina Daza’s health that he returned to the Parish Café to learn them from her father, just at the time of the historic tournament in which Jeremiah de Saint-Amour alone confronted forty-two opponents. This was how he discovered that Lorenzo Daza had died, and he rejoiced with all his heart, although the price of his joy might be having to live without the truth. At last he accepted as true the story of the hospital for the terminally ill, and his only consolation was the old saying: Sick women live forever. On the days when he felt disheartened, he resigned himself to the notion that the news of Fermina Daza’s death, if it should occur, would find him without his having to look for it.
在四处打听中，他发现了一些以前不知道、或者没有留意打探的消息，其中就包括洛伦索·达萨已死在他的出生地——坎塔布连的一个小村庄。他想起自己曾有很多年都在教区咖啡馆那如火如荼的象棋比赛中见过他，他的嗓子因说话太多而变得沙哑，而且随着陷入衰老的不幸流沙，他的身形更胖，脾气也更粗暴了。自上世纪那次令人不快的茴香酒早餐之后，他们之间再也没有说过话。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨断定，就像他仍对洛伦索·达萨心存怨恨一样，洛伦索·达萨对他也一定还怀恨在心，尽管他已给女儿找到一门富贵的婚姻——那曾是支撑他活下去的唯一理由。但弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨下定决心要得到有关费尔明娜·达萨健康状况的准确消息，于是又来到教区咖啡馆，想从这位父亲那里问出个名堂。那时，咖啡馆里正在进行历史性的对决：赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔独自一人对战四十二名棋手。就这样，他得知洛伦索·达萨已经去世，他由衷地感到高兴，尽管他知道，这份高兴是以仍旧找不到真相为代价的。最后，他把费尔明娜·达萨去了绝症患者医院的传言当作事实接受了，而他唯一能找到的安慰只是一句谚语：女人生病，长生不死。在那段沮丧的日子里，他只能想，如果费尔明娜·达萨真的死了，那根本不需要打探，消息是无论如何都会传到他这里来的。
It never did, for Fermina Daza was alive and well on the ranch, half a league from the village of Flores de María, where her Cousin Hildebranda Sánchez was living, forgotten by the world. She had left with no scandal, by mutual agreement with her husband, both of them as entangled as adolescents in the only serious crisis they had suffered during so many years of stable matrimony. It had taken them by surprise in the repose of their maturity, when they felt themselves safe from misfortune’s sneak attacks, their children grown and well-behaved, and the future ready for them to learn how to be old without bitterness. It had been something so unexpected for them both that they wanted to resolve it not with shouts, tears, and intermediaries, as was the custom in the Caribbean, but with the wisdom of the nations of Europe, and there was so much vacillation as to whether their loyalties lay here or over there that they ended up mired in a puerile situation that did not belong anywhere. At last she decided to leave, not even knowing why or to what purpose, out of sheer fury, and he, inhibited by his sense of guilt, had not been able to dissuade her.
但他永远也不可能收到费尔明娜·达萨的死讯。因为她还活着，而且是健康地生活在表姐伊尔德布兰达·桑切斯世外桃源般的庄园里，距离马利亚之花镇半里地。她是在和丈夫达成协议后悄然离开的。结婚这么多年来，他们一直关系稳定，这唯一的一次严重危机竟让两个人都像青春期的孩子一样乱了方寸。这件事出其不意地发生在他们最为成熟平静的时期，两人自诩已能豁免于命运中任何潜伏的坎坷，孩子们都已长大，而且受到了良好教育，摆在夫妻俩面前的本是一片坦途，可以毫无苦涩地学着慢慢变老。对两个人来说，事情都发生得太过突然，他们不愿像加勒比人常做的那样，靠吵闹、眼泪和调解人来解决问题，而是希望能靠欧洲人的智慧来解决。但争来争去，既没有采用这里的办法，又没有采用那里的办法，结果陷入了愚蠢的局面，哪儿的法子也不是。费尔明娜·达萨决定离开家，甚至不知道为什么要离开，也不知道离开后要怎么办，她只是被气疯了，而他为良心的谴责所困，也无力去说服她。
Fermina Daza, in fact, had sailed at midnight in the greatest secrecy and with her face covered by a black mantilla, not on a Cunard liner bound for Panama, however, but on the regular boat to San Juan de la Ciénaga, the city where she had been born and had lived until her adolescence, and for which she felt a growing homesickness that became more and more difficult to bear as the years went by. In defiance of her husband’s will, and of the customs of the day, her only companion was a fifteen-year-old goddaughter who had been raised as a family servant, but the ship captains and the officials at each port had been notified of her journey. When she made her rash decision, she told her children that she was going to have a change of scene for three months or so with Aunt Hildebranda, but her determination was not to return. Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew the strength of her character very well, and he was so troubled that he accepted her decision with humility as God’s punishment for the gravity of his sins. But the lights on the boat had not yet been lost to view when they both repented of their weakness.
费尔明娜·达萨的确是在半夜上船的，而且十分秘密，头上蒙着守孝的黑纱。但她登上的不是库纳德公司开往巴拿马的远洋轮船，而是开往圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加的普通小船。那座城市是她的出生地，她在那里一直住到青春期。随着岁月流逝，她的思乡之情与日俱增。她不顾丈夫的意见和当时的风俗，只带了一个在仆人中长大的十五岁教女同行。不过，她把自己的行程通知了她将搭乘的各船的船长和每个港口的官员。做出这个轻率的决定时，她对儿女们说自己要到伊尔德布兰达姨妈那儿调养三个月，可心里已决意要一直留在那里了。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生十分了解她倔强的脾气，他痛苦万分，但还是低声下气地接受了，将它视为上帝对他严重过错的惩罚。然而，船上的灯光还没有在他眼前消失，两人就都已在为他们的软弱后悔了。
Although they maintained a formal correspondence concerning their children and other household matters, almost two years went by before either one could find a way back that was not mined with pride. During the second year, the children went to spend their school vacatio n in Flores de María, and Fermina Daza did the impossible and appeared content with her new life. That at least was the conclusion drawn by Juvenal Urbino from his son’s letters. Moreover, at that time the Bishop of Riohacha went there on a pastoral visit, riding under the pallium on his celebrated white mule with the trappings embroidered in gold. Behind him came pilgrims from remote regions, musicians playing accordions, peddlers selling food and amulets; and for three days the ranch was overflowing with the crippled and the hopeless, who in reality did not come for the learned sermons and the plenary indulgences but for the favors of the mule who, it was said, performed miracles behind his master’s back. The Bishop had frequented the home of the Urbino de la Calle family ever since his days as an ordinary priest, and one afternoon he escaped from the public festivities to have lunch at Hildebranda’s ranch. After the meal, during which they spoke only of earthly matters, he took Fermina Daza aside and asked to hear her confession. She refused in an amiable but firm manner, with the explicit argument that she had nothing to repent of. Although it was not her purpose, at least not her conscious purpose, she was certain that her answer would reach the appropriate ears.
虽然他们保持着形式上的通信，谈论孩子们的情况和家里的其他事项，可几乎两年过去了，无论他，还是她，都没有找到一条回头之路，因为每条路都被他们的骄傲暗中捣毁。第二年学校放假期间，孩子们到马利亚之花去度假，费尔明娜·达萨尽一切可能及不可能，竭力表现出对新生活的适应。至少，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生从孩子们的信中得出的是这样的结论。那段日子里，里奥阿查的主教骑着他那头著名的配有金线镶边鞍具的白色骡子，走在华盖之下到那里传教寻访。跟在他后面的，是从其他村子远道而来的朝圣者、拉手风琴的乐师，以及四处贩卖食品和护身符的小贩。整整三天，各种身患残疾和不治之症的人云集庄园。事实上，他们并不是来听主教博学的布道或请求全赦的，而是来乞求骡子赐福，据说，这头骡子背着主人创造了种种奇迹。当年主教还是个地位卑微的神甫时，和乌尔比诺·德拉卡列家十分熟识。这天中午，他从布道的地方溜出来，到伊尔德布兰达的庄园吃午饭。其间他们只谈了些世俗的事。而午饭过后，他把费尔明娜·达萨叫到一边，想听听她的忏悔。她委婉而又坚定地拒绝了，理由十分明确：她没有什么可后悔的。尽管并非有意，但她也意识到了，自己这个回答将会传到它应该传到的地方去。
Dr. Juvenal Urbino used to say, not without a certain cynicism, that it was not he who was to blame for those two bitter years of his life but his wife’s bad habit of smelling the clothes her family took off, and the clothes that she herself took off, so that she could tell by the odor if they needed to be laundered even though they might appear to be clean. She had done this ever since she was a girl, and she never thought it worthy of comment until her husband realized what she was doing on their wedding night. He also knew that she locked herself in the bathroom at least three times a day to smoke, but this did not attract his attention because the women of his class were in the habit of locking themselves away in groups to talk about men and smoke, and even to drink as much as two liters of aguardiente until they had passed out on the floor in a brickmason’s drunken stupor. But her habit of sniffing at all the clothing she happened across seemed to him not only inappropriate but unhealthy as well. She took it as a joke, which is what she did with everything she did not care to discuss, and she said that God had not put that diligent oriole’s beak on her face just for decoration. One morning, while she was at the market, the servants aroused the entire neighborhood in their search for her three-year-old son, who was not to be found anywhere in the house. She arrived in the middle of the panic, turned around two or three times like a tracking mastiff, and found the boy asleep in an armoire where no one thought he could possibly be hiding. When her astonished husband asked her how she had found him, she replied:
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生常常不无讥讽地说，那两年的痛苦生活并非源于他的过错，而是因为妻子的一种恶习——她喜欢闻家人和自己脱下来的衣服，从气味上判断该不该送去清洗，尽管有时候衣服看起来还很干净。这是她从小养成的习惯，她从来不认为有什么特别，直到丈夫在新婚之夜注意到这一点。丈夫还发现她每天至少三次把自己关在浴室里抽烟，但对此倒没有在意，因为她那个阶层的女人本来就常常凑在一起关起门来谈论男人、抽烟，甚至喝两瓜尔蒂略一瓶的廉价烧酒，直喝到像泥瓦匠那样烂醉如泥地倒在地上。但是，对于她碰到衣服就闻的习惯，他认为不仅不恰当，而且有害健康。但她只把丈夫的意见当作玩笑。对所有不愿争论的事，她都是这样的态度。而且她说，上帝把这么一个黄鹂一样勤快的鼻子安到她脸上，不单只为了装饰。一天早上，她出去买东西时，家中仆人们的吵闹惊动了四邻：他们在找她三岁的儿子，寻遍房子的各个角落都没找到。正当所有人惊恐万状时，她回来了。她像能追寻踪迹的獒犬似的转了两三圈，就在一个衣橱里找到了熟睡的儿子，谁也没想到他会藏在那里。丈夫惊呆了，问她是怎么做到的，她回答说：
“By the smell of caca.”
“因为有股屎味。”
The truth is that her sense of smell not only served her in regard to washing clothes or finding lost children: it was the sense that oriented her in all areas of life, above all in her social life. Juvenal Urbino had observed this throughout his marriage, in particular at the beginning, when she was the parvenu in a milieu that had been prejudiced against her for three hundred years, and yet she had made her way through coral reefs as sharp as knives, not colliding with anyone, with a power over the world that could only be a supernatural instinct. That frightening faculty, which could just as well have had its origin in a millenarian wisdom as in a heart of stone, met its moment of misfortune one ill-fated Sunday before Mass when, out of simple habit, Fermina Daza sniffed the clothing her husband had worn the evening before and experienced the disturbing sensation that she had been in bed with another man.
事实上，她不仅仅能靠嗅觉判断衣服该不该洗，或是孩子丢在了哪里：嗅觉能在生活的每个方面指引她，尤其是在社交生活中。两人结婚后，特别是在刚刚结婚时，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生把这一切都看在眼里：她是个初来乍到的外来者，闯入这个三百年来都时刻准备要和她对着干的环境中，然而，她却能在尖刀密布的珊瑚丛中穿梭自如，不与任何人发生磕碰，这般掌控世界的能力只可能来自超自然的本能。这可怕的本事或许源于千百年累积的智慧，又或许出自一副铁石心肠，而在一个倒霉的星期日，它终于招致不幸降临。去望弥撒前，费尔明娜·达萨纯粹出于习惯，闻了闻丈夫前一天下午穿过的衣服，立时感到一阵错乱，就仿佛和自己同床共枕的医生变成了另外一个男人。
First she smelled the jacket and the vest while she took the watch chain out of the buttonhole and removed the pencil holder and the billfold and the loose change from the pockets and placed everything on the dresser, and then she smelled the hemmed shirt as she removed the tiepin and the topaz cuff links and the gold collar button, and then she smelled the trousers as she removed the keyholder with its eleven keys and the penknife with its mother-of-pearl handle, and finally she smelled the underwear and the socks and the linen handkerchief with the embroidered monogram. Beyond any shadow of a doubt there was an odor in each of the articles that had not been there in all their years of life together, an odor impossible to define because it was not the scent of flowers or of artificial essences but of something peculiar to human nature. She said nothing, and she did not notice the odor every day, but she now sniffed at her husband’s clothing not to decide if it was ready to launder but with an unbearable anxiety that gnawed at her innermost being.
她先是闻了闻外套和背心，然后从扣眼上摘下怀表链，从兜里取出铅笔、钱包和为数不多的几枚硬币，把它们逐一放在梳妆台上。然后，她闻了闻褶边衬衫，同时取下领带夹、袖口上的黄晶袖扣和假领上的金扣。接着，她又一边闻裤子，一边取出串着十一把钥匙的钥匙环和带珍珠母手柄的铅笔刀。最后，她闻了闻内裤、袜子和绣着他姓名首字母花押字的手绢。毫无疑问：每件衣物上都带有一种他们共同生活这么多年以来从未有过的气味，一股形容不出的味道，既不是花香，也不是香水味，而是人身上的味道。她什么也没说，之后也并不是每天都能闻到这股味道。但从此，她闻丈夫的衣服，已不是为了判断该不该洗，而是出于一种侵蚀着她五脏六腑的无法忍受的焦虑。
Fermina Daza did not know where to locate the odor of his clothing in her husband’s routine. It could not be placed between his morning class and lunch, for she supposed that no woman in her right mind would make hurried love at that time of day, least of all with a visitor, when the house still had to be cleaned, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunch prepared, and perhaps with the added worry that one of the children would be sent home early from school because somebody threw a stone at him and hurt his head and he would find her at eleven o’clock in the morning, naked in the unmade bed and, to make matters worse, with a doctor on top of her. She also knew that Dr. Juvenal Urbino made love only at night, better yet in absolute darkness, and as a last resort before breakfast when the first birds began to chirp. After that time, as he would say, it was more work than the pleasure of daytime love was worth to take off one’s clothes and put them back on again. So that the contamination of his clothing could occur only during one of his house calls or during some moment stolen from his nights of chess and films. This last possibility was difficult to prove, because unlike so many of her friends, Fermina Daza was too proud to spy on her husband or to ask someone else to do it for her. His schedule of house calls, which seemed best suited to infidelity, was also the easiest to keep an eye on, because Dr. Juvenal Urbino kept a detailed record of each of his patients, including the payment of his fees, from the first time he visited them until he ushered them out of this world with a final sign of the cross and some words for the salvation of their souls.
费尔明娜·达萨不知该把这种味道还原到丈夫规律生活中的哪个环节。不可能是上午上完课到午饭之间的这段时间，因为她猜想任何一个理智健全的女人都不会在这种时候匆忙做爱，更不会是和来访的客人，她们得打扫屋子，整理床铺，上市场买东西，准备午饭，何况还有可能会赶上这样的倒霉事：某个孩子由于被石头打破了脑袋，提前从学校回家，竟一头撞上母亲十一点钟赤身裸体地躺在一片狼藉的房间里，更糟糕的是还有一位医生趴在她身上。再者，她知道，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生只在晚上做爱，最好是在绝对的黑暗之中，最迟也得是在早餐之前，伴随着第一群鸟儿咕咕的叫声。据他自己说，过了这个时间，脱衣服和穿衣服所费的工夫可比享受到的片刻欢愉还要长。所以，衣服沾染上气味只可能发生在某次出诊时，或晚上借口下棋、看电影溜出去的某个时刻。后面这种情况很难搞清，因为费尔明娜·达萨和她那众多女伴截然不同，她太骄傲，不屑于监视丈夫，或请求别人替她这样做。至于出诊，看似是不忠行为的最佳时机，但同时也是最容易被发现的，因为胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生对每位病人都有一份包括酬金在内的详细记录，从第一次出诊，直到用一个十字和一句愿灵魂安息的话语把他从这个世界送走为止，全部有案可查。
In the three weeks that followed, Fermina Daza did not find the odor in his clothing for a few days, she found it again when she least expected it, and then she found it, stronger than ever, for several days in a row, although one of those days was a Sunday when there had been a family gathering and the two of them had not been apart for even a moment. Contrary to her normal custom and even her own desires, she found herself in her husband’s office one afternoon as if she were someone else, doing something that she would never do, deciphering with an exquisite Bengalese magnifying glass his intricate notes on the house calls he had made during the last few months. It was the first time she had gone alone into that office, saturated with showers of creosote and crammed with books bound in the hides of unknown animals, blurred school pictures, honorary degrees, astrolabes, and elaborately worked daggers collected over the years: a secret sanctuary that she always considered the only part of her husband’s private life to which she had no access because it was not part of love, so that the few times she had been there she had gone with him, and the visits had always been very brief. She did not feel she had the right to go in alone, much less to engage in what seemed to be indecent prying. But there she was. She wanted to find the truth, and she searched for it with an anguish almost as great as her terrible fear of finding it, and she was driven by an irresistible wind even stronger than her innate haughtiness, even stronger than her dignity: an agony that bewitched her.
接下来的三个星期，费尔明娜·达萨先是好几天都没有从丈夫的衣服上闻到那种气味，然后突然又在最意想不到的时候再次发现了它。之后一连几天，那种味道都前所未有地强烈。其中有一天还是星期日，他们举行家庭聚会，他和她片刻也没有分开过。终于，一天下午，她违背自己的习惯与意愿，走进丈夫的书房，仿佛不是自己而是另一个女人在做一件她永远也不会做的事情：用一个精致的孟加拉放大镜，试图限免他最近几个月错综复杂的出诊记录。这是她第一次单独走进这间书房，空气中充斥着杂酚油的气息，到处塞满了用不知名的动物皮装裱的书籍、模糊不清的校园合影、荣誉证书，以及多年收集的等高仪和千奇百怪的匕首。这是一块秘密的圣地，一直被她视为丈夫唯一的私人领地，她从不涉足，因为这里与爱无关，少有的几次进入都是和丈夫一起，而且每次都是为了处理短暂的事务。她觉得自己没有权利单独进去，更不用说是为了进行在她看来有失体面的搜查。但她还是进来了。她想找到真相，心里既焦灼又恐惧，两种感觉几乎不相上下。她被一股无法控制的劲风所驱使，这风比她与生俱来的高傲，甚至比她的尊严都更强烈：一种教人心碎的折磨。
Urged on by her imagination, she began to discover changes in her husband. She found him evasive, without appetite at the table or in bed, prone to exasperation and ironic answers, and when he was at home he was no longer the tranquil man he had once been but a caged lion. For the first time since their marriage, she began to monitor the times he was late, to keep track of them to the minute, to tell him lies in order to learn the truth, but then she felt wounded to the quick by the contradictions. One night she awoke with a start, terrified by a vision of her husband staring at her in the darkness with eyes that seemed full of hatred. She had suffered a similar fright in her youth, when she had seen Florentino Ariza at the foot of her bed, but that apparition had been full of love, not hate. Besides, this time it was not fantasy: her husband was awake at two in the morning, sitting up in bed to watch her while she slept, but when she asked him why, he denied it. He lay back on the pillow and said:
在幻想的驱使下，她开始发现丈夫的变化。她发现他说话闪烁其词，在餐桌和床上都欲望不振，容易发火，而且言辞刻薄，在家的时候也不如原来那样平和，而是像一头被关在笼里的狮子。结婚以来她头一遭开始留意他晚回家多长时间，甚至精确到分钟。她对他说各种谎话，想骗他道出实情，过后又因为矛盾挣扎而痛苦万分。一天晚上，她被幻觉惊醒，看到丈夫正在黑暗中用仇恨的目光盯着自己。她不寒而栗，就像年少时曾看见弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨站在她的床脚一样，只不过后者的出现并非出于仇恨，而是出于爱。更何况，这次根本不是幻觉，事实是，她的丈夫凌晨两点还醒着，从床上坐起身来，注视着熟睡的她。可当她问丈夫怎么回事时，他却矢口否认，重新把脑袋放在枕头上说：
She was able to draw no conclusions, because her husband’s patients, except for mutual friends, were part of his private domain; they were people without identity, known not by their faces but by their pains, not by the color of their eyes or the evasions of their hearts but by the size of their livers, the coating on their tongues, the blood in their urine, the hallucinations of their feverish nights. They were people who believed in her husband, who believed they lived because of him when in reality they lived for him, and who in the end were reduced to a phrase written in his own hand at the bottom of the medical file: Be calm. God awaits you at the door. Fermina Daza left his study after two fruitless hours, with the feeling that she had allowed herself to be seduced by indecency.
她什么也没有查清楚，因为除了两人共同的朋友，丈夫的其他病人也是他与世隔绝的王国的一部分。那些人没有注明身份，辨认他们不是通过面孔，而是通过病痛，不是通过眼睛的颜色或者心声，而是通过肝脏的大小、舌苔的情况、尿液中的凝结物，以及他们夜间发烧时的幻觉。这些人相信她的丈夫，相信他们是因他而活，而事实上，他们是为他而活，最终，他们被归结为他亲笔在诊断证明书上写下的一句话：安息吧，上帝在门口等着你。经过两小时徒劳无功的搜查，费尔明娜·达萨离开了书房，觉得自己一时鬼迷心窍做出了不光彩的事。
After that night, and after similar episodes that occurred during that time, when Fermina Daza could not tell for certain where reality ended and where illusion began, she had the overwhelming revelation that she was losing her mind. At last she realized that her husband had not taken Communion on the Thursday of Corpus Christi or on any Sunday in recent weeks, and he had not found time for that year’s retreats. When she asked him the reason for those unusual changes in his spiritual health, she received an evasive answer. This was the decisive clue, because he had not failed to take Communion on an important feast day since he had made his first Communion, at the age of eight. In this way she realized not only that her husband was in a state of mortal sin but that he had resolved to persist in it, since he did not go to his confessor for help. She had never imagined that she could suffer so much for something that seemed to be the absolute opposite of love, but she was suffering, and she resolved that the only way she could keep from dying was to burn out the nest of vipers that was poisoning her soul. And that is what she did. One afternoon she began to darn socks on the terrace while her husband was reading, as he did every day after his siesta. Suddenly she interrupted her work, pushed her eyeglasses up onto her forehead, and without any trace of harshness, she asked for an explanation:
这晚之后，又发生了一些类似的事，费尔明娜·达萨已经分不清现实在何处结束，梦幻又在何处开始。恍惚间，她觉得自己就要疯了。最后，她突然发现在基督圣体节那天，丈夫居然没有领圣体，最近几周的星期日也都没有领，更没有腾出任何时间来进行灵修，反省这一年的生活。当她问他这些信仰生活中不同寻常的变化究竟是何原因时，得到的是一个模糊不清的回答。这就是问题的关键所在，因为自从八岁第一次领圣餐起，他从没有在如此重要的日子里不去领圣体。于是，她意识到丈夫不仅犯下了致命的罪过，而且下定决心执迷不悟，因为他甚至都没有去找过忏悔神甫寻求帮助。她从未想过自己竟会为某种与爱情完全相悖的东西备受煎熬，可目前状况的确如此。她下了决心，唯一能让自己免于痛苦而死的办法就是在正侵蚀着她五脏六腑的毒蛇窝里放一把火。她真的这样做了。一天下午，就在丈夫快要结束午睡后的例行阅读时，她坐到露台上去补袜子。突然，她放下手中的活儿，把眼镜推到额头上，不带丝毫强硬迹象地对丈夫说：
“You must have been dreaming.”
“一定是你在做梦。”
“What is going on?” he asked.
“出什么事啦？”他问。
He was immersed in L’Ile des pingouins, the novel that everyone was reading in those days, and he answered without surfacing: “Oui.” She insisted: “Look at me.”
他正沉浸于那个时期人人都在读的小说《企鹅岛》中，没有回过神来，只应了一声：“嗯。”[1]她没有放弃，继续道：“你看着我的脸。”（注：[1] 原文为法语。）
That was all she said. She lowered her glasses and continued darning socks. Dr. Juvenal Urbino knew then that the long hours of anguish were over. The moment had not been as he had foreseen it; rather than a seismic tremor in his heart, it was a calming blow, and a great relief that what was bound to happen sooner or later had happened sooner rather than later: the ghost of Miss Barbara Lynch had entered his house at last.
她什么也没有再说，把眼镜从额头上放下来，继续补袜子。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生明白，长久以来的焦虑就此结束了。与他预想的形式相反，这并不是一次心灵的地震，而只是平和的一击。他感到如释重负：既然迟早都要发生，那么晚来不如早到，反正芭芭拉·林奇小姐的幽灵早已进入这个家了。
“Doctor.”
“医生。”
He did so, looking without seeing her through the fog of his reading glasses, but he did not have to take them off to feel burned by the raging fire in her eyes.
他照她说的做了，透过老花镜的一片迷雾看着她。虽看不清楚，但他无需摘下眼镜，便能感受到她炙热的目光灼烧着他。
“You know better than I,” she said.
“你应该比我清楚！”她回答。
Dr. Juvenal Urbino had met her four months earlier as she waited her turn in the clinic of Misericordia Hospital, and he knew immediately that something irreparable had just occurred in his destiny. She was a tall, elegant, large-boned mulatta, with skin the color and softness of molasses, and that morning she wore a red dress with white polka dots and a broad-brimmed hat of the same fabric, which shaded her face down to her eyelids. Her sex seemed more pronounced than that of other human beings. Dr. Juvenal Urbino did not attend patients in the clinic, but whenever he passed by and had time to spare, he would go in to remind his more advanced students that there is no medicine better than a good diagnosis. So that he arranged to be present at the examination of the unforeseen mulatta, making certain that his pupils would not notice any gesture of his that did not appear to becasua l and barely looking at her, but fixing her name and address with care in his memory. That afternoon, after his last house call, he had his carriage pass by the address that she had given in the consulting room, and in fact there she was, enjoying the coolness on her terrace.
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生是在四个月前认识她的，当时她正在仁爱医院的门诊候诊。见到她的那一刻，他便知道一件无可挽回的事终于在自己的命运中发生了。她是个黑白混血姑娘，个子很高，仪态优雅，骨骼宽大，皮肤的颜色像蜜一样，质地也像蜜一样柔软。那天早上，她穿着一身红底白点的衣服，帽子也是同样颜色，帽檐很宽，阴影一直遮到眼睛，看上去比任何人都更具性的蛊惑力。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生平时是不接门诊的，不过有空时常会进去提醒那些高年级的学生说，任何药物都比不上一次正确的诊断。于是，他设法让自己在这个不期而遇的混血女人接受检查时在场，同时小心翼翼地不让学生们觉得他的任何一个表情有什么异常。他几乎没有看她，却把有关她的信息一一记在心里。那天下午，看完最后一个病人，他让车夫从她问诊时提供的地址前经过。她果然在那里，正在露台上乘凉。
It was a typical Antillean house, painted yellow even to the tin roof, with burlap windows and pots of carnations and ferns hanging in the doorway. It rested on wooden pilings in the salt marshes of Mala Crianza. A troupial sang in the cage that hung from the eaves. Across the street was a primary school, and the children rushing out obliged the coachman to keep a tight hold on the reins so that the horse would not shy. It was a stroke of luck, for Miss Barbara Lynch had time to recognize the Doctor. She waved to him as if they were old friends, she invited him to have coffee while the confusion abated, and he was delighted to accept (although it was not his custom to drink coffee) and to listen to her talk about herself, which was the only thing that had interested him since the morning and the only thing that was going to interest him, without a moment’s respite, during the months to follow. Once, soon after he had married, a friend told him, with his wife present, that sooner or later he would have to confront a mad passion that could endanger the stability of his marriage. He, who thought he knew himself, knew the strength of his moral roots, had laughed at the prediction. And now it had come true.
那是一座典型的安的列斯式的房子，整体都漆成了黄色，连锌皮屋顶也是黄色的，窗子是粗麻布的，门廊里吊着一盆盆康乃馨和蕨类植物。房子坐落在滨海的马拉·克利安萨沼泽区，建在木桩之上。屋檐下挂着个笼子，一只黄鸟在里面歌唱。对面人行道边有所小学校，一拥而出的孩子们迫使车夫收紧了缰绳，以免让马受惊。很幸运，芭芭拉·林奇小姐刚好在这个时候认出了医生。她用老友的手势向他打招呼，邀他进去喝一杯咖啡，等纷乱的人群过去之后再走。他一反平日不喝咖啡的习惯，高兴地一边喝一边听她介绍自己。那是自那天早上以来他唯一感兴趣的事，也是之后几个月里占据他全部注意力、扰得他片刻不得安宁的事。刚结婚时，曾有个朋友当着他妻子的面对他说，他迟早会遭遇一段疯狂的激情，使他们婚姻的稳固受到威胁。而当时他自认为十分了解自己，对内心坚实的道德根基也把握十足，对此预言只付之一笑。现在倒好：他果真处在了这样的境地。
Miss Barbara Lynch, Doctor of Theology, was the only child of the Reverend Jonathan B. Lynch, a lean black Protestant minister who rode on a mule through the poverty-stricken settlements in the salt marshes, preaching the word of one of the many gods that Dr. Juvenal Urbino wrote with a small g to distinguish them from his. She spoke good Spanish, with a certain roughness in the syntax, and her frequent slips heightened her charm. She would be twenty-eight years old in December, not long ago she had divorced another minister, who was a student of her father’s and to whom she had been unhappily married for two years, and she had no desire to repeat the offense. She said: “I have no more love than my troupial.” But Dr. Urbino was too serious to think that she said it with hidden intentions. On the contrary: he asked himself in bewilderment if so many opportunities coming together might not be one of God’s pitfalls, which he would then have to pay for dearly, but he dis missed the thought without delay as a piece of theological nonsense resulting from his state of confusion.
芭芭拉·林奇小姐是一位神学博士，是受人尊敬的新教牧师约拿坦·B·林奇的独生女。这位牧师又黑又瘦，经常骑着一头骡子到海滨沼泽区的贫穷村落去宣讲众多上帝中的某一位的福音，而在胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生看来，与他的上帝相比，其他这许多位上帝在书写时只能用小写。芭芭拉·林奇讲得一口流利的卡斯蒂利亚语，句法偶尔不通，但这种小小的磕绊反而令她别具韵味。到十二月，她就年满二十八岁了，不久前，她刚同另一位牧师——他父亲的学生——离了婚。她和他一起度过了两年糟糕的婚姻生活，因此再没有一点儿想重蹈覆辙的愿望。她说：“我只爱我的小黄鸟。”但胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生太过严肃，竟没有听出她的弦外之音。相反，他迷茫地问自己是否这所有的便利条件都是上帝的一个圈套，为的是以后连本带利地向他讨还，但随即他又把这个想法从头脑里清除出去，认为这纯粹是自己在困惑之中的胡思乱想。
As he was about to leave, he made a casual remark about that morning’s medical consultation, knowing that nothing pleases patients more than talking about their ailments, and she was so splendid talking about hers that he promised he would return the next day, at four o’clock sharp, to examine her with greater care. She was dismayed: she knew that a doctor of his qualifications was far above her ability to pay, but he reassured her: “In this profession we try to have the rich pay for the poor.” Then he marked in his notebook: Miss Barbara Lynch, Mala Crianza Salt Marsh, Saturday, 4 p. m. Months later, Fermina Daza was to read that notation, augmented by details of the diagnosis, treatment, and evolution of the disease. The name attracted her attention, and it suddenly occurred to her that she was one of those dissolute artists from the New Orleans fruit boats, but the address made her think that she must come from Jamaica, a black woman, of course, and she eliminated her without a second thought as not being to her husband’s taste.
就要告别时，他偶然提起了上午的检查，他知道，对于病人来说，没有什么比谈论病情更让他们感兴趣的了。说起自己的病，她滔滔不绝，于是，他答应第二天下午四点再到这里来，给她做一次更为详细的检查。她吓了一跳，因为她知道像他这个级别的医生远远超过她的支付能力。但他请她放心：“干我们这个行当的，向来都是设法让富人为穷人付账的。”说完，他在自己的袖珍记事本上记下：芭芭拉·林奇小姐，马拉·克利安萨沼泽区，星期六，下午四时。几个月后，费尔明娜·达萨将会读到这页记录，其中还有再详细不过的诊断细节和处方，以及病情的发展。这个名字引起了她的注意。她突然觉得，这可能是新奥尔良水果船上那些行为放荡的女艺术家中的一个，可地址又让她想到应该是个牙买加人，那么，就是个黑女人了，于是她毫不犹豫地排除了她的嫌疑，认为她不可能是丈夫喜欢的类型。
Dr. Juvenal Urbino came ten minutes early for the Saturday appointment, and Miss Lynch had not finished dressing to receive him. He had not felt so much tension since his days in Paris when he had to present himself for an oral examination. As she lay on her canvas bed, wearing a thin silk slip, Miss Lynch’s beauty was endless. Everything about her was large and intense: her siren’s thighs, her slow-burning skin, her astonished breasts, her diaphanous gums with their perfect teeth, her whole body radiating a vapor of good health that was the human odor Fermina Daza had discovered in her husband’s clothing. She had gone to the clinic because she suffered from something that she, with much charm, called “twisted colons,” and Dr. Urbino thought that it was a symptom that should not be ignored. So he palpated her internal organs with more intention than attention, and as he did so he discovered in amazement that this marvelous creature was as beautiful inside as out, and then he gave himself over to the delights of touch, no longer the best-qualified physician along the Caribbean coastline but a poor soul tormented by his tumultuous instincts. Only once before in his austere professional life had something similar happened to him, and that had been the day of his greatest shame, because the indignant patient had moved his hand away, sat up in bed, and said to him: “What you want may happen, but it will not be like this.” Miss Lynch, on the other hand, abandoned herself to his hands, and when she was certain that the Doctor was no longer thinking about his science, she said:
星期六，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生提前十分钟前来赴约，林奇小姐尚未穿好衣服准备迎接他。自从在巴黎参加某场口试以来，他再没有如此紧张过。林奇小姐躺在麻布床上，穿着一件柔软的丝绸衬衣，美到了极致。她浑身上下都丰满而结实：美人鱼般的大腿，仿佛经文火炙烤的皮肤，惊艳的乳房，以及一口洁白完美的牙齿，整个身体都散发出健康的气息，也就是费尔明娜·达萨在丈夫衣服上嗅到的那种气味。林奇小姐去看门诊是因为一点小毛病，她诙谐地称之为“弯弯曲曲的腹痛”，可乌尔比诺医生认为这是非同小可的症状，因而，他触摸了她各个内脏器官所在的位置，与其说是认真仔细，不如说是别有用心。这样做时，他竟然渐渐忘了自己的医术，惊讶地发现这个天生尤物的内脏与她的外表一样美丽。他完全沉浸在愉悦的抚摸中，已不再是加勒比沿岸最优秀的医生，而成了上帝创造的一个被本能折磨得神志混乱的可怜男人。在他严肃的职业生涯中，仅仅发生过一次类似的事情，而那一天他蒙受了奇耻大辱，因为愤怒的女病人一把推开他的手，在床上坐了起来，对他说：“您想要的事情可以发生，但绝不能通过这种方式。”林奇小姐则恰恰相反，她完全听任他的摆布。当她毫不怀疑医生心里所想已不再是科学时，便说道：
“I thought this not permitted by your ethics.”
“我原以为这是伦理道德所不允许的。”
“Our code of ethics supposes,” he said, “that we doctors are made of wood.”
“伦理道德，”他说，“它把我们医生都想象成了木头。”
She extended a hand to him gratefully.
她感激地向他伸过一只手。
He was as drenched by perspiration as if he had just stepped out of a pool wearing all his clothes, and he dried his hands and face with a towel.
他大汗淋漓，就像穿着衣服从池塘里爬出来似的。他用毛巾擦了擦手和脸。
“I have not stopped thinking about you for an instant,” he said.
“我一刻也无法停止想您。”他说。
It was so tremulous a confession that it might have inspired pity. But she saved him from all harm with a laugh that lit up the bedroom.
他坦白时，声音颤抖得实在让人怜悯。但她用一阵照亮了整个屋子的笑声，让他从一切罪责中得以赦免。
It was far from easy. Miss Lynch wanted her honor protected, she wanted security and love, in that order, and she believed that she deserved them. She gave Dr. Urbino the opportunity to seduce he r but not to penetrate her inner sanctum, even when she was alone in the house. She would go no further than allowing him to repeat the ceremony of palpation and auscultation with all the ethical violations he could desire, but without taking off her clothes. For his part, he could not let go of the bait once he had bitten, and he continued his almost daily incursions. For reasons of a practical nature, it was close to impossible for him to maintain a continuing relationship with Miss Lynch, but he was too weak to stop, as he would later be too weak to go any further. This was his limit.
一切进展得并不容易。林奇小姐注重自己的清誉，她首先要安全，然后要爱情，必须按照这个顺序来，而且她认为自己完全配得上这些。她给乌尔比诺医生引诱她的机会，但不让他踏足自己的卧室，即便家中只有她一个人也不行。她至多允许他重复抚摸和听诊的仪式，以此对伦理道德进行肆意地践踏，但不能脱掉她的衣服。而他呢，一旦上钩便无法松开肉欲的诱饵，几乎每天都去纠缠。由于种种现实原因，他要维持和林奇小姐的这种关系几乎是不可能的，可他太软弱，无法及时自拔，以致不得不继续走下去。这是他的弱点。
“I know since I saw you in hospital, Doctor,” she said. “Black I am but not a fool.”
“我在医院见到您时就看出来了，大夫。”她说，“我是黑人，但不是愚人。”
“The fact I thought so does not mean you cannot do,” she said. “Just think what it mean for poor black woman like me to have such a famous man notice her.”
“我只是这样以为，但并不意味着您不能这样做。”她说，“您想象一下这有多不可思议，我这样一个可怜的女人，竟得到一位如此声名显赫的男人的垂青。”
They had to choose a time when the children were not there, and there were only two possibilities: the afternoon recess for lunch, between twelve and two, which was also when the Doctor had his lunch, or late in the afternoon, after the children had gone home. This was always the best time, although by then the Doctor had made his rounds and had only a few minutes to spare before it was time for him to eat with his family. The third problem, and the most serious for him, was his own situation. It was not possible for him to go there without his carriage, which was very well known and always had to wait outside her door. He could have made an accomplice of his coachman, as did most of his friends at the Social Club, but that was not in his nature. In fact, when his visits to Miss Lynch became too obvious, the liveried family coachman himself dared to ask if it would not be better for him to come back later so that the carriage would not spend so much time at her door. Dr. Urbino, in a sharp response that was not typical of him, cut him off.
他们必须选一个孩子们不在的时间，只有两种可能：其一是十二点到两点午餐休息的时候，可这也是医生午餐的时间；其二是傍晚孩子们回家之后。后面这个时间点一向再好不过，可这时医生刚好结束了出诊，距离赶回家去吃晚饭只有几分钟了。第三个形成阻碍的问题，也是对他来说最为严重的问题，就是他的社会地位。他不可能不坐车去，可他的车子尽人皆知，而且还必须停在门口。他本可以和车夫串通，他在社交俱乐部的朋友们几乎都是这样干的，可这又违背了他的行事风格。他如此频繁地拜访林奇小姐，意图已经十分明显，以至于穿着仆人制服的车夫竟斗胆问他自己是否应该先回去，过后再来接他，以免让车子在门前停得太久。乌尔比诺医生一改往日的温和，斩钉截铁地打断了他的话：
The Reverend Lynch did not lead a regular life, for he would ride away on his mule on the spur of the moment, carrying Bibles and evangelical pamphlets on one side and provisions on the other, and he would return when least expected. Another difficulty was the school across the street, for the children would recite their lessons as they looked out the windows, and what they saw with greatest clarity was the house across the way, with its doors and windows open wide from six o’clock in the morning, they saw Miss Lynch hanging the birdcage from the eaves so that the troupial could learn the recited lessons, they saw her wearing a bright-colored turban and going about her household tasks as she recited along with them in her brilliant Caribbean voice, and later they saw her sitting on the porch, reciting the afternoon psalms by herself in English.
受人尊敬的林奇先生生活没有规律，随时都会骑上骡子出门去，也会在最意想不到的时刻回家来。骡子的背上一边驮着各种版本的圣经和宣传福音的小册子，另一边驮着食物。另外一处不便是对面的学校，因为孩子们朗诵课文时，眼睛总是看向窗外的街道，而看得最清楚的就是街对面的这所房子。从早上六点起，房子的各扇门窗便纷纷敞开，他们看见林奇小姐把鸟笼挂在屋檐下，让小黄鸟学习他们朗诵课文；看见她包着花头巾，一边做家务，一边用她那加勒比的清脆嗓音也跟着朗诵起来；之后，他们又看见她坐在门廊上，独自用英语唱着下午的赞美诗。
There was no solution. In a city like this, it was impossible to hide an illness when the Doctor’s carriage stood at the door. At times the Doctor himself took the initiative and went on foot, if distance permitted, or in a hired carriage, to avoid malicious or premature assumptions. Such deceptions, however, were to little avail. Since the prescriptions ordered in pharmacies revealed the truth, Dr. Urbino would always prescribe counterfeit medicines along with the correct ones in order to preserve the sacred right of the sick to die in peace along with the secret of their illness. Similarly, he was able in various truthful ways to account for the presence of his carriage outside the house of Miss Lynch, but he could not allow it to stay there too long, least of all for the amount of time he would have desired, which was the rest of his life.
没有办法。在这样一个城市里，只要医生的车子停在门前，就休想隐瞒病情。有时如果距离允许，医生情愿自己走路去，或者租一辆马车前往，以免招来恶意的揣测和妄下的结论。然而，这种办法没多少用，因为拿去药店取药的处方会使真相大白。于是，乌尔比诺医生只得在开方时把真真假假的药写在一起，以保证病人神圣的权利，让他们能带着自己病痛的秘密平静地死去。同样，他也可以找出种种体面的理由为自己的车子出现在林奇小姐家门口做出解释，但那并不可能维持很久，更不会像他所希望的那样：维持一辈子。
“This is the first time since I know you that I have heard you say something you should not have,” he said. “Well, then: I will assume it was never said.”
“自从认识你以来，这还是我第一次听到你说出不该说的话。”他说，“好吧，我就当你没说过。”
The world became a hell for him. For once the initial madness was sated, they both became aware of the risks involved, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino never had the resolve to face a scandal. In the deliriums of passion he promised everything, but when it was over, everything was left for later. On the other hand, as his desire to be with her grew, so did his fear of losing her, so that their meetings became more and more hurried and problematic. He thought about nothing else. He waited for the afternoons with unbearable longing, he forgot his other commitments, he forgot everything but her, but as his carriage approached the Mala Crianza salt marsh he prayed to God that an unforeseen obstacle would force it to drive past. He went to her in a state of such anguish that at times as he turned the corner he was glad to catch a glimpse of the woolly head of the Reverend Lynch, who read on the terrace while his daughter catechized neighborhood children in the living room with recited passages of scripture. Then he would go home relieved that he was not defying fate again, but later he would feel himself going mad with the desire for it to be five o’clock in the afternoon all day, every day.
世界对他来说变成了一座地狱，因为最初的疯狂刚一得到满足，两人就都意识到了危险，乌尔比诺医生永远也无法下定决心去面对丑闻。在狂热的胡言乱语中，他什么都可以许诺，但过后，所有的事情又都搁置再说了。另一方面，随着想跟她在一起的渴望越来越强烈，害怕失去她的恐惧也越来越强烈，因此他们的会面一次比一次仓促，一次比一次艰难。他无法去思考别的事情，每天都迫不及待地等着下午来临，忘记了其他责任，忘记了除她以外的一切。可是，每当车子距离马拉·克利安萨沼泽区越来越近，他又祈求上帝在最后一刻出点什么岔子，好迫使他过门而不入。他始终怀着这种痛苦的心情赴约，有几次，他从街角就看见头发像棉花一般厚软的受人尊敬的林奇先生正在露台上看书，而他的女儿正在客厅里用歌声向邻家的孩子宣讲福音，他甚至庆幸起来。那时，他便会幸福地往家走，不必继续挑战命运，但过后他又会发狂，渴望每一天的每时每刻都能变成下午五点钟。
So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too conspicuous, and after three months it became nothing less than ridiculous. Without time to say anything, Miss Lynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She took the precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaica with red flowered ruffles, but with no underwear, nothing, in the belief that this convenience was going to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered everything she did to make him happy. Panting and drenched with perspiration, he rushed after her into the bedroom, throwing everything on the floor, his walking stick, his medical bag, his Panama hat, and he made panic-stricken love with his trousers down around his knees, with his jacket buttoned so that it would not get in his way, with his gold watch chain across his vest, with his shoes on, with everything on, and more concerned with leaving as soon as possible than with achieving pleasure. She was left dangling, barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, as exhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when in reality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love. But he had finished in time: the exact time needed to give an injection during a routine visit. Then he returned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack of courage that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on the brazier.
所以，当车子停在门口变得过于惹人注目时，他们的爱就难以为继了，到第三个月的末尾，整件事甚至只能用荒唐来形容了。每次，两人都来不及寒暄，林奇小姐一看见自己的情人慌忙赶来，便迅速钻进卧室。在等他的日子里，她会事先做好准备，穿一条宽大的裙子——一条带荷叶边的精美牙买加裙，荷叶边上还印着红色的花朵——里面不穿内衣，什么都不穿，因为她相信行事便捷能帮助他克服恐惧心理。可她为使他幸福所做的一切却被他白白浪费了。他气喘吁吁地跟着她走向卧室，大汗淋漓，一进屋就惊天动地地把所有东西一股脑儿丢到地上，手杖、医药箱，以及巴拿马草帽，然后便惊慌失措地做起爱来，裤子只褪到膝盖处，而为了避免麻烦，连外衣的扣子都没有解，怀表链放到了背心里，鞋也还穿着，什么都穿着，心里时刻惦记的不是如何尽兴，而是尽早离开。她才刚刚进入孤独的隧道，便落得个被迫节食禁欲的境地，因为他已经开始重新系上扣子，一副精疲力竭的样子，就好像刚刚在生死线上做了一场绝世之爱，而其实他不过是完成了爱情中生理的那部分仪式罢了。但他很会把握节奏：刚好是一次常规治疗中静脉注射的时间。然后，他便回家去，为自己的软弱羞愧万分，恨不得死去，他诅咒自己缺乏勇气，不敢请求费尔明娜·达萨脱下他的裤子，把他的屁股放到炭火上去灼烧。
In the past few years he had become conscious of the burden of his own body. He recognized the symptoms. He had read about them in textbooks, he had seen them confirmed in real life, in older patients with no history of serious ailments who suddenly began to describe perfect syndromes that seemed to come straight from medical texts and yet turned out to be imaginary. His professor of children’s clinical medicine at La Salpêtrière had recommended pediatrics as the most honest specialization, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick, and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concrete symptoms of real diseases. After a certain age, however, adults either had the symptoms without the diseases or, what was worse, serious diseases with the symptoms of minor ones. He distracted them with palliatives, giving time enough time to teach them not to feel their ailments, so that they could live with them in the rubbish heap of old age. Dr. Juvenal Urbino never thought that a physician his age, who believed he had seen everything, would not be able to overcome the uneasy feeling that he was ill when he was not. Or what was worse, not believe he was, out of pure scientific prejudice, when perhaps he really was. At the age of forty, half in earnest and half in jest, he had said in class: “All I need in life is someone who understands me.” But when he found himself lost in the labyrinth of Miss Lynch, he no longer was jesting.
早在几年前，他就已经感觉到自己的身体在走下坡路。他了解这些症状。他在书上读到过，也在现实中从上了年纪的患者口中听说过，那些人先前都没有什么严重疾病，但突然就觉得出现了种种不适，描述的竟然和医书上写的如出一辙，而最终却发现，那不过是他们的幻觉罢了。在萨伯特医院教授儿童临床医学的老师曾建议他专攻儿科，因为这是最诚实的专业：小孩子们只有在真生病时才生病，和医生交流时也不会说套话，只讲具体的症状，没有半点虚假。成人则正好相反，到了一定年龄，要么是只有症状而没有真生病，要么更糟：病得很重，症状却像其他一些无关痛痒的小病。他通常都用缓和性的药剂来分散他们的注意力，把问题交给时间，让他们在暮年的一团乱麻中与自己的小毛病长期共处，最终学会熟视无睹。但胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生没有想到，像他这个年纪的医生，自认为什么都见过了，竟然不能克服明明没病却觉得有病的焦虑。或者更糟：也许是真的有病，却仅仅凭着科学的偏见，不相信自己有病。四十岁时，他曾在课堂上半严肃半开玩笑地说：“我生活中唯一需要的就是一个懂我的人。”然而，当他发现自己已迷失在林奇小姐的迷宫中时，便不能再把这话当作一句玩笑了。
He did not eat, he said his prayers without conviction, in bed he pretended to continue his siesta reading while his wife walked round and round the house putting the world in order before going to bed. As he nodded over his book, he began to sink down into the inevitable mangrove swamp of Miss Lynch, into her air of a recumbent forest glade, his deathbed, and then he could think of nothing except tomorrow’s five minutes to five o’clock in the afternoon and her waiting for him in bed with nothing but the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman’s skirt from Jamaica: the hellish circle.
他没吃晚饭，念祈祷也心不在焉，上床后，装作继续在读午休时读的书，而此时，他的妻子仍在房子里忙来忙去，要在睡觉前把一切料理妥当。他看着书，渐渐瞌睡起来，然后就一点点陷入林奇小姐那无法回避的湿热丛林，沉溺于她躺卧的那片林中空地的蒸汽，堕入他的死亡之床。此时，他什么也无法想，只想着明天下午五点差五分时，她将在床上等他，那条疯狂的牙买加裙下面一丝不挂，只露出她深色树丛中的那片高地：地狱之圈。
For this occurred after she interrupted his afternoon reading to ask him to look at her, and he had the first indication that his hellish circle had been discovered. But he did not know how, because it would have been impossible for him to conceive of Fermina Daza’s learning the truth by smell alone. In any case, for a long time this had not been a good city for keeping secrets. Soon after the first home telephones were installed, several marriages that seemed stable were destroyed by anonymous tale-bearing calls, and a number of frightened families either canceled their service or refused to have a telephone for many years. Dr. Urbino knew that his wife had too much self-respect to allow so much as an attempt at anonymous betrayal by telephone, and he could not imagine anyone daring to try it under his own name. But he feared the old method: a note slipped under the door by an unknown hand could be effective, not only because it guaranteed the double anonymity of sender and receiver, but because its time-honored ancestry permitted one to attribute to it some kind of metaphysical connection to the designs of Divine Providence.
这件事发生在她打断他下午的阅读，要求他看着她的脸之后。他的第一反应便是他的地狱之圈已经败露。可他不明白她是怎么发现的，因为他无论如何也想象不到费尔明娜·达萨仅凭嗅觉就发现了真相。但不管怎样，从很久以前开始，这里就不是一座善于保守秘密的城市。第一批家用电话刚装上不久，几对看上去关系稳定的夫妻就因为匿名电话里的流言蜚语离了婚。很多因此而害怕的家庭暂停了电话服务，或者好几年都一直拒绝安装。乌尔比诺医生知道他的妻子自尊心很强，绝不会允许一通匿名电话就破坏掉自己的信心，这种事连想都别想，而他也无法想象有谁会大胆到用真名向她通报实情。然而，他害怕那种旧式的诡计：一张从门下塞进来、不知出自谁手的纸条，效果反倒可能立竿见影，不仅因为这么做让发信人和收信人都隐匿了姓名，而且因为这一伎俩古老而神秘，难免使人把它同全能上帝的安排联系在一起。
All the real or imaginary symptoms of his older patients made their appearance in his body. He felt the shape of his liver with such clarity that he could tell its size without touching it. He felt the dozing cat’s purr of his kidneys, he felt the iridescent brilliance of his vesicles, he felt the humming blood in his arteries. At times he awoke at dawn gasping for air, like a fish out of water. He had fluid in his heart. He felt it lose the beat for a moment, he felt it syncopate like a school marching band, once, twice, and then, because God is good, he felt it recover at last. But instead of having recourse to the same distracting remedies he gave to his patients, he went mad with terror. It was true: all he needed in life, even at the age of fifty-eight, was someone who understood him. So he turned to Fermina Daza, the person who loved him best and whom he loved best in the world, and with whom he had just eased his conscience.
他那些上了年纪的病人所有真实或假想的病症，全都集中到了他身上。他能清楚地感觉到自己肝脏的形状，无须触摸就能说出它的大小。他感到自己的肾脏发出像熟睡的猫一样的哼叫；感到胆囊在闪闪发光；感到血液在动脉里嗡嗡作响。有时，他像一条喘不上来气的鱼一样醒来，觉得心脏里积满了水。他觉得心脏瞬间乱了步伐，觉得它的脉动延迟了一下，就像当初在学校里参加军训时那样，继而一次又一次地延迟。最后，他又觉得它恢复了正常，因为上帝是伟大的。但他没有求助于曾开给病人的那些分散注意力的药物，而是被恐惧折磨得晕头转向。的确，五十八岁时，他生活中唯一需要的，依然是一个懂他的人。为此，他求助于费尔明娜·达萨，这个世界上最爱他、也是他最爱的人，在她这里，他刚刚让自己的良心得到了平静。
Jealousy was unknown in his house: during more than thirty years of conjugal peace, Dr. Urbino had often boasted in public — and until now it had been true — that he was like those Swedish matches that light only with their own box. But he did not know how a woman with as much pride, dignity, and strength of character as his wife would react in the face of proven infidelity. So that after looking at her as she had asked, nothing occurred to him but to lower his eyes again in order to hide his embarrassment and continue the pretense of being lost among the sweet, meandering rivers of Alca Island until he could think of something else. Fermina Daza, for her part, said nothing more either. When she finished darning the socks, she tossed everything into the sewing basket in no particular order, gave instructions in the kitchen for supper, and went to the bedroom.
忌妒从不认识他的家门：三十多年平静的夫妻生活中，乌尔比诺医生曾多次在公众面前夸耀，他就像瑞典火柴，只能在自己的盒子上擦燃。这话原本也的确是真的。然而，他从没想过，一个像妻子这样高傲、这样自尊、这样倔强的女人，面对丈夫已被证实的不忠，会做出怎样的反应。因此，他在如她所要求的那样看着她的脸之后，除了再一次低下头以掩饰自己的慌乱，想不出还能做什么。他继续假装陶醉于阿尔卡岛那一条条恬美蜿蜒的小河之间，暗自思考着对策。而费尔明娜·达萨也没有再说什么。她补完袜子，把东西乱七八糟地丢进针线盒，到厨房吩咐开晚饭，之后便回卧室去了。
Then he reached the admirable decision not to go to Miss Lynch’s house at five o’clock in the afternoon. The vows of eternal love, the dream of a discreet house for her alone where he could visit her with no unexpected interruptions, their unhurried happiness for as long as they lived — everything he had promised in the blazing heat of love was canceled forever after. The last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from the pharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it to her with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. At five o’clock, instead of going to see her, he made a profound act of contrition before his confessor, and on the following Sunday he took Communion, his heart broken but his soul at peace.
于是胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生下定决心，下午五点不再去林奇小姐家。那些至死不渝的爱情誓言，那单独为她找所幽静房子，使他不必担惊受怕地与她相会的梦想，以及两人一起从容地享受幸福直到死亡的向往——所有这些他在爱的火焰中许下的诺言都永远地付之东流。林奇小姐从他那里得到的最后一件东西是一个绿宝石发卡，车夫交给她时什么也没有说，没有捎任何口信，也没有字条。东西放在一个小盒子里，外面包着一张药房的纸，就连车夫也以为那是应急药物。他后半生再没有见过她，甚至都没有偶遇过。只有上帝知道，这个英勇的决定给他带去了多少痛苦，而为了能在这场内心的灾难后继续活下去，他又把自己关在厕所里流下了多少苦涩的泪水。五点钟时，他没有和她在一起，而是在神甫面前深深地忏悔了自己的罪过。第二个星期日，他怀着破碎的内心领受了圣体，但灵魂终于得到了平静。
That night, following his renunciation, as he was undressing for bed, he recited for Fermina Daza the bitter litany of his early morning insomnia, his sudden stabbing pains, his desire to weep in the afternoon, the encoded symptoms of secret love, which he recounted as if they were the miseries of old age. He had to tell someone or die, or else tell the truth, and so the relief he obtained was sanctified within the domestic rituals of love. She listened to him with close attention, but without looking at him, without saying anything as she picked up every article of clothing he removed, sniffed it with no gesture or change of expression that might betray her wrath, then crumpled it and tossed it into the wicker basket for dirty clothes. She did not find the odor, but it was all the same: tomorrow was another day. Before he knelt down to pray before the altar in the bedroom, he ended the recital of his misery with a sigh as mournful as it was sincere: “I think I am going to die.” She did not even blink when she replied.
做出了断的当晚，他一面脱衣准备就寝，一面对费尔明娜·达萨反复唠叨着他清晨失眠的痛苦，一阵阵突然来袭的针扎似的疼痛，以及黄昏时想痛哭一场的渴望，至于秘密爱情带来的种种苦楚，他也把它们当作衰老的症状讲了出来。为了不至于死掉，并且为了不说出真相，他必须这样向人倾诉一番。终于，他在象征着爱的家庭仪式中祭献了这一股脑儿的苦水。她认真听着，没有看他，又是一言不发，一件一件地接过他脱下来的衣服。她闻着每件衣服，脸上没有流露出丝毫愤怒，然后随意揉成一团，扔进装脏衣服的藤条筐里。她没有发现那种味道，但这代表不了什么：明天又是新的考验。跪到卧室的小祭台前准备祈祷时，他伤心而又真诚地叹了一口气，结束了对种种苦痛的怨艾：“我觉得我快要死了。”她眼睛都不眨地回答了他。
“That would be best,” she said. “Then we could both have some peace.”
“那样最好，”她说，“那样我们就都平静了。”
That night, on the other hand, she wished him dead with all her heart, and this certainty alarmed him. Then he heard her slow sobbing in the darkness as she bit the pillow so he would not hear. He was puzzled, because he knew that she did not cry easily for any affliction of body or soul. She cried only in rage, above all if it had its origins in her terror of culpability, and then the more she cried the more enraged she became, because she could never forgive her weakness in crying. He did not dare to console her, knowing that it would have been like consoling a tiger run through by a spear, and he did not have the courage to tell her that the reason for her weeping had disappeared that afternoon, had been pulled out by the roots, forever, even from his memory.
这天晚上却相反，她全心全意地希望他死去，这种坚决让乌尔比诺医生吓了一跳。之后，他听到她在黑暗中缓缓抽泣，而且咬着枕头不让他听见。这让他不知所措，他知道，她不会由于身体或内心的任何痛苦而哭泣，只有在愤怒时才会这样，而如果这种愤怒在某种程度上源于她对自己过失的惧怕，就会哭得更凶，并且越哭越气，因为她无法原谅自己竟然会软弱得哭出来。他不敢安慰她，因为他明白这无异于安慰一只被长矛刺穿的母老虎，他甚至没有勇气告诉她，引起她哭泣的理由已经在那个下午消失了，已被彻底、永远地从他的记忆中根除了。
Years before, during the crisis of a dangerous illness, he had spoken of the possibility of dying, and she had made the same brutal reply. Dr. Urbino attributed it to the natural hardheartedness of women, which allows the earth to continue revolving around the sun, because at that time he did not know that she always erected a barrier of wrath to hide her fear. And in this case it was the most terrible one of all, the fear of losing him.
几年前，在一次病重的危急时刻，他也曾讲过自己可能会死的话，而她当时给出的也是同样残忍的回答。乌尔比诺医生将之归咎于女人天性中的冷酷无情，正因为如此，地球才依旧围绕着太阳转。当时他并不知道，为了不让别人看出她的恐惧，她总是会抢先竖起一道愤怒的屏障。而那个时候，她所面临的正是她最恐惧的事情——永远地失去他。
“I have a right to know who she is,” she said.
“我有权知道她是谁。”她说。
Fatigue overcame him for a few minutes. When he awoke, she had lit her dim bedside lamp and lay there with her eyes open, but without crying. Something definitive had happened to her while he slept: the sediment that had accumulated at the bottom of her life over the course of so many years had been stirred up by the torment of her jealousy and had floated to the surface, and it had aged her all at once. Shocked by her sudden wrinkles, her faded lips, the ashes in her hair, he risked telling her that she should try to sleep: it was after two o’clock. She spoke, not looking at him but with no trace of rage in her voice, almost with gentleness.
有几分钟，困意俘虏了他。当他醒来时，她已点亮她那盏微弱的床头灯，仍旧睁着眼，但没有哭。在他睡着的时候，她身上发生了一个决定性的改变：多年来积聚在年岁深处的沉渣，此刻因忌妒的搅动浮现出来，她刹那间苍老了。看着她那瞬间出现的皱纹、枯萎的双唇、灰白的头发，他不禁伤怀，冒着风险劝她睡觉：已经两点多了。她没有看他，但声音里也没有愤怒的痕迹，语气几乎是温和的。
And then he told her everything, feeling as if he were lifting the weight of the world from his shoulders, because he was convinced that she already knew and only needed to confirm the details. But she did not, of course, so that as he spoke she began to cry again, not with her earlier timid sobs but with abundant salty tears that ran down her cheeks and burned her nightdress and inflamed her life, because he had not done what she, with her heart in her mouth, had hoped he would do, which was to be a man: deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusation, and shout curses at this ill-begotten society that did not hesitate to trample on one’s honor, and remain imperturbable even when faced with crushing proofs of his disloyalty. Then, when he told her that he had been with his confessor that afternoon, she feared she would go blind with rage. Ever since her days at the Academy she had been convinced that the men and women of the Church lacked any virtue inspired by God. This was a discordant note in the harmony of the house, which they had managed to overlook without mishap. But her husband’s allowing his confessor to be privy to an intimacy that was not only his but hers as well was more than she could bear.
于是，他把一切都告诉了她，感觉仿佛从身上卸下了全世界的重量，因为他相信她已经知道真相，不过是想确认一些细节。但事实当然并非如此，所以他讲的时候，她又哭了起来，不是像起初那样低声抽泣，而是泪如泉涌，咸咸的泪水从脸颊滑落，在她的睡袍里翻滚沸腾，灼烧着她的生命：他竟没有像她提心吊胆地所期待的那样，做出个男人的样子，抵死否认，为自己所受的诽谤大发雷霆，咒骂这个婊子养的社会肆无忌惮地践踏别人的名誉，即使面对自己不忠的毁灭性证据，仍能临危不乱。之后，当他告诉她已在下午见过忏悔神甫时，她简直怕自己会气瞎了双眼。从上学时起，她就认定教会里的人不具备上帝所启示的任何一种美德。这是他们和谐家庭中的一个本质分歧，两人一直都小心回避这一点，没有发生过什么碰撞。但丈夫竟然允许忏悔神甫掺和到这样一件不仅关乎他个人、也关系到她的隐私中来，实在是出了格。
For her it was the end of everything. She was sure that her honor was the subject of gossip even before her husband had finished his penance, and the feeling of humiliation that this produced in her was much less tolerable than the shame and anger and injustice caused by his infidelity. And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman. He corrected her: “With a mulatta.” But by then it was too late for accuracy: she had finished.
在她看来，一切全完了。她敢肯定，还没等丈夫做完忏悔，她的荣誉就已成为大街小巷的话题。这给她造成的屈辱感要比丈夫的不忠带来的羞愧、愤怒和不平更加难以忍受。而最糟的是，见鬼，竟然是跟一个黑女人。他纠正说：“是黑白混血的女人。”但此时，再精确的解释也是多余了：她已有了定论。
“You might as well have told a snake charmer in the market,” she said.
“你还不如告诉一个在门廊里耍蛇的。”她说。
“Just as bad,” she said, “and only now I understand: it was the smell of a black woman.”
“一样是贱货！”她说，“现在我才明白，原来是黑女人的气味。”
This happened on a Monday. On Friday at seven o’clock in the evening, Fermina Daza sailed away on the regular boat to San Juan de la Ciénaga with only one trunk, in the company of her goddaughter, her face covered by a mantilla to avoid questions for herself and her husband. Dr. Juvenal Urbino was not at the dock, by mutual agreement, following an exhausting three-day discussion in which they decided that she should go to Cousin Hildebranda Sanchez’s ranch in Flores de María for as long a time as she needed to think before coming to a final decision. Without knowing her reasons, the children understood it as a trip she had often put off and that they themselves had wanted her to make for a long time. Dr. Urbino arranged matters so that no one in his perfidious circle could engage in malicious speculation, and he did it so well that if Florentino Ariza could find no clue to Fermina Daza’s disappearance it was because in fact there was none, not because he lacked the means to investigate. Her husband had no doubts that she would come home as soon as she got over her rage. But she left certain that her rage would never end.
这件事发生在一个星期一。而星期五晚上七点钟，费尔明娜·达萨就登上了开往圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加的常规小船，随身只带了一只箱子，由教女陪伴。为避免旁人发问，也避免有人将来向丈夫问起她来，她在脸上蒙了黑纱。按照两人的约定，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生没有出现在港口。此前，他们进行了一场历时三天、精疲力竭的谈话，最终决定让她到位于马利亚之花镇的伊尔德布兰达表姐的庄园去，以便在做出最后的决定前有足够的时间思考。不明就里的孩子们把这理解为一次推迟了多次的旅行，很久以来，他们也一直盼望能到那里去。乌尔比诺医生把一切都安排得妥妥当当，为的是让他那个不可信赖的小世界里没有人能做出居心叵测的推测。这一点他做得天衣无缝，所以，如果说弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨没能找到费尔明娜·达萨消失后的一丁点儿踪迹，那是因为事实上根本就无迹可寻，而不是因为他缺乏调查的手段。丈夫毫不怀疑妻子一旦平息愤怒就会马上回家。但她走时却坚信自己的愤怒永远也不会平息。
However, she was going to learn very soon that her drastic decision was not so much the fruit of resentment as of nostalgia. After their honeymoon she had returned several times to Europe, despite the ten days at sea, and she had always made the trip with more than enough time to enjoy it. She knew the world, she had learned to live and think in new ways, but she had never gone back to San Juan de la Ciénaga after the aborted flight in the balloon. To her mind there was an element of redemption in the return to Cousin Hildebranda’s province, no matter how belated. This was not her response to her marital catastrophe: the idea was much older than that. So the mere thought of revisiting her adolescent haunts consoled her in her unhappiness.
然而，她很快就会明白，这个过火的决定与其说是怨恨的果实，不如说是思乡的结果。蜜月旅行之后，她曾多次返回欧洲，虽然每次都要在海上漂泊十天，却总有足够的时间去感受幸福。她见过世面，已经学会以另一种方式生活和思考，可自从那次糟糕的气球之旅后，她就再也没有回过圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加。回到伊尔德布兰达表姐居住的省份，对她来说即使太迟，也是一种补救。这个想法由来已久，倒并非因为婚姻的灾难。单是想到去重温少女情怀，也足以让她慰藉自己的不幸。
When she disembarked with her goddaughter in San Juan de la Ciénaga, she called on the great reserves of her character and recognized the town despite all the evidence to the contrary. The Civil and Military Commander of the city, who had been advised of her arrival, invited her for a drive in the official Victoria while the train was preparing to leave for San Pedro Alejandrino, which she wanted to visit in order to see for herself if what they said was true, that the bed in which The Liberator had died was as small as a child’s. Then Fermina Daza saw her town again in the somnolence of two o’clock in the afternoon. She saw the streets that seemed more like beaches with scum-covered pools, and she saw the mansions of the Portuguese, with their coats of arms carved over the entrance and bronze jalousies at the windows, where the same hesitant, sad piano exercises that her recently married mother had taught to the daughters of the wealthy houses were repeated without mercy in the gloom of the salons. She saw the deserted plaza, with no trees growing in the burning lumps of sodium nitrate, the line of carriages with their funereal tops and their horses asleep where they stood, the yellow train to San Pedro Alejandrino, and on the corner next to the largest church she saw the biggest and most beautiful of the houses, with an arcaded passageway of greenish stone, and its great monastery door, and the window of the bedroom where Álvaro would be born many years later when she no longer had the memory to remember it. She thought of Aunt Escolástica, for whom she continued her hopeless search in heaven and on earth, and thinking of her, she found herself thinking of Florentino Ariza with his literary clothes and his book of poems under the almond trees in the little park, as she did on rare occasions when she recalled her unpleasant days at the Academy. She drove around and around, but she could not recognize the old family house, for where she supposed it to be she found only a pigsty, and around the corner was a street lined with brothels where whores from all over the world took their siestas in the doorways in case there was something for them in the mail. It was not the same town.
她和教女在圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加下了船，凭着那份保留至今的刚强性格，她不顾别人的种种警告，重游了那座城市。收到消息前来接待她的要塞行政和军事长官请她登上了官家的马车，将护送她直到登上前往圣佩德罗·阿莱杭德里诺的火车，她想到那里去，是为了证实解放者临终时睡的那张床是否真如人们所说，小得就像一张孩子的床。于是，费尔明娜·达萨在午后两点的疲倦中再次看到了自己广阔的故乡。她看到了故乡的街道，但它们看上去更像一片海滩，到处是覆盖着青苔的水洼；又看到了葡萄牙人的豪华住宅，大门上镌刻着家族徽章，窗前垂着铜制的百叶窗，阴暗的大厅里单调地重复着几首钢琴练习曲，颤颤巍巍，惨惨凄凄。她母亲当年刚结婚时，也曾拿这几首曲子教过富人家的姑娘。她看到广场上空无一人，炙热的石子地上连一棵树都没有；送葬似的带篷马车一字排开，马儿站在那里都睡着了；还有那辆开往圣佩德罗·阿莱杭德里诺的黄色火车。在城中最大教堂的拐角处，她看到了那所最雄伟、最漂亮的房子，它那青色石头的连拱廊、修道院式的大门，以及卧室的窗子，多年以后，当她已无法记清此段回忆时，阿尔瓦罗将在这间卧室出生。她想起了她无望地寻遍了天上地下的埃斯科拉斯蒂卡姑妈，而想到姑妈，便又想起了弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨，想起他那身文人的衣服，他在小花园的杏树下读的那本诗集。她偶尔几次回忆起学校里不愉快的岁月时，也会触动有关他的思绪。可她转了好几圈都没能认出自家的老房子。她认为它应该在的那个地方，除了一个猪舍以外什么都没有。拐角过去是一条妓院街，全世界来的妓女都在门廊上睡午觉，等待邮车或许会带来什么寄给她们的东西。这里已不是她的故乡了。
When they began their drive, Fermina Daza had covered the lower half of her face with her mantilla, not for fear of being recognized in a place where no one could know her but because of the dead bodies she saw everywhere, from the railroad station to the cemetery, bloating in the sun. The Civil and Military Commander of the city told her: “It’s cholera.” She knew it was, because she had seen the white lumps in the mouths of the sweltering corpses, but she noted that none of them had the coup de grace in the back of the neck as they had at the time of the balloon.
刚一上马车，费尔明娜·达萨就用面纱遮住了半张脸，不是害怕被人认出来，毕竟，这里谁也不可能认识她，而是因为从火车站一直到墓地的路上，日光暴晒下的肿胀尸体随处可见。要塞长官对她说：“是霍乱。”她早已看出来了，因为那些晒焦的尸体嘴里都泛着白沫，但她同时也注意到，没有一具尸体像她乘坐气球时看见的那些那样，脑后挨了仁慈的一枪。
The distance from San Juan de la Ciénaga to the old plantation of San Pedro Alejandrino was only nine leagues, but the yellow train took the entire day to make the trip because the engineer was a friend of the regular passengers, who were always asking him to please stop so they could stretch their legs by strolling across the golf courses of the banana company, and the men bathed naked in the clear cold rivers that rushed down from the mountains, and when they were hungry they got off the train to milk the cows wandering in the pastures. Fermina Daza was terrified when they reached their destination, and she just had time to marvel at the Homeric tamarinds where The Liberator had hung his dying man’s hammock and to confirm that the bed where he had died, just as they had said, was small not only for so glorious a man but even for a seven-month-old infant. Another visitor, however, who seemed very well informed, said that the bed was a false relic, for the truth was that the father of his country had been left to die on the floor. Fermina Daza was so depressed by what she had seen and heard since she left her house that for the rest of the trip she took no pleasure in the memory of her earlier trip, as she had longed to do, but instead she avoided passing through the villages of her nostalgia. In this way she could still keep them, and keep herself from disillusionment. She heard the accordions in her detours around disenchantment, she heard the shouts from the cockfighting pits, the bursts of gunfire that could just as well signal war as revelry, and when she had no other recourse and had to pass through a village, she covered her face with her mantilla so that she could remember it as it once had been.
从圣胡安·德拉希耶纳加到圣佩德罗·阿莱杭德里诺的古老甘蔗园只有九里路，可那列黄色的火车却走了一整天，因为火车司机跟常坐这列车的乘客们是朋友，他们时不时就央求他停下来，以便到香蕉公司高尔夫球场的草坪上去走走，舒展一下腿脚。男人们还光着身子到河里去洗澡，河水从山上倾泻而下，清澈冰凉。他们觉得饿时，就下车去，从牧场放养的奶牛身上挤些奶来喝。被这些情景吓坏了的费尔明娜·达萨终于到站，差点没时间去观赏解放者临死前悬挂吊床的那几棵史诗般的罗望子树，并且证实他当时所睡的床果真如人们所说，不仅对他这样一位荣耀的男人，即使对一个七个月的婴儿来说也极其狭小。不过，另一位看上去无所不知的参观者称，那张床是件假文物，事实上，国父是被人扔在地上死去的。费尔明娜·达萨对离家以来这一路的所见所闻感到万分压抑，以至于在之后的旅途中，再没有心情去回味前半段旅程。于是，尽管曾万般怀念，如今她却避免走过那些她思念的村庄。这样她才能在记忆中留住它们，让自己免受幻灭之苦。当她试图抄捷径以逃离烦恼时，她听到了手风琴声，听到了斗鸡场的叫喊声，也听到了或许是战争抑或是庆典的铅炮声。当她别无他法不得不穿过某个村庄时，便用面纱遮住脸，以继续把它幻想成以前的样子。
“That is true,” said the officer. “Even God improves His methods.”
“的确如此。”长官说，“上帝也在改善自己的方法。”
One night, after so much avoidance of the past, she arrived at Cousin Hildebranda’s ranch, and when she saw her waiting at the door she almost fainted: it was as if she were seeing herself in the mirror of truth. She was fat and old, burdened with unruly children whose father was not the man she still loved without hope but a soldier living on his pension whom she had married out of spite and who loved her to distraction. But she was still the same person inside her ruined body. Fermina Daza recovered from her shock after just a few days of country living and pleasant memories, but she did not leave the ranch except to go to Mass on Sundays with the grand children of her wayward conspirators of long ago, cowboys on magnificent horses and beautiful, well-dressed girls who were just like their mothers at their age and who rode standing in oxcarts and singing in chorus until they reached the mission church at the end of the valley. She only passed through the village of Flores de María, where she had not gone on her earlier trip because she had not thought she would like it, but when she saw it she was fascinated. Her misfortune, or the village’s, was that she could never remember it afterward as it was in reality, but only as she had imagined it before she had been there.
逃避了许许多多往事之后，她终于在一天晚上来到伊尔德布兰达表姐的庄园。而当她看到在门口等她的表姐时，差点昏厥过去：她就仿佛在一面真实之镜中照见了自己。表姐身材发福，年老体衰，身边带着几个不听管教的儿女，孩子们的父亲并不是那个她仍旧无望地爱着的男人，而是一位靠丰厚的津贴生活的退役军人，当年，她在绝望之下嫁给了他，而他则疯狂地爱恋着她。尽管如此，在那被摧残的身躯里，她依旧是原来那个她。费尔明娜·达萨在乡下住了些日子，回忆起美好往事，渐渐从一开始的震惊中恢复过来。但她除了星期日去望弥撒，从来不出庄园。和她同去望弥撒的，是她昔日那些桀骜不驯的闺中密友的孙儿辈，此外还有骑着高头大马的商人，以及打扮得花枝招展的漂亮姑娘。她们一路站在牛车上，一如她们的母亲在她们这个年龄时的样子，齐声高唱着歌，直至来到山谷深处的教会教堂。费尔明娜·达萨原本只是路过马利亚之花镇，在昔日的那次旅行中，她自认为不会喜欢这里而没有来，可这次，她一眼就被它完全迷住了。但她的悲哀，抑或是这个镇子的悲哀在于，后来的她永远也想不起它真实的模样，只记得见到它之前她脑海中想象的样子。
“It is better to arrive in time than to be invited.”
“要赶好时辰，就得不请自来。”
She thought she would die of joy. Without time to think about it, she washed her hands as well as she could while she murmured: “Thank you, God, thank you, how good you are,” thinking that she had not yet bathed because of the damned eggplant that Hildebranda had asked her to prepare without telling her who was coming to lunch, thinking that she looked so old and ugly and that her face was so raw from the sun that he would regret having come when he saw her like this, damn it. But she dried her hands the best she could on her apron, arranged her appearance the best she could, called on all the haughtiness she had been born with to calm her maddened heart, and went to meet the man with her sweet doe’s gait, her head high, her eyes shining, her nose ready for battle, and grateful to her fate for the immense relief of going home, but not as pliant as he thought, of course, because she would be happy to leave with him, of course, but she was also determined to make him pay with her silence for the bitter suffering that had ended her life.
她开心得要死，来不及多想，只胡乱地洗了洗手，喃喃道：“谢谢，我的上帝，谢谢，你真是太好了！”她想到因为这该死的茄子馅饼，自己还没有洗澡，伊尔德布兰达让她做馅饼，却没有告诉她谁要来吃午餐；她想到自己现在又老又丑，脸还被太阳晒脱了皮，如果他看见她这副模样，一定会为赶来接她而后悔，真见鬼。可她还是匆忙地在围裙上擦干了手，尽可能地整理了一下仪容，带着母亲生她时给予她的全部高傲，理了理纷乱的心绪，前去迎接那个男人。她迈着她那母鹿般优美的步伐，昂着头，目光熠熠，翘起迎接挑战的鼻子，心中充满了对命运的感激，为能回家而感到无限轻松。当然，事情也并不像他想象的那般容易，她确实高高兴兴地跟他回去了，但同时也下定决心，要在余生默默地向他讨还自己所受的痛苦折磨。
Dr. Juvenal Urbino made the decision to come for her after receiving a report from the Bishop of Riohacha, who had concluded that his wife’s long stay was caused not by her unwillingness to return but by her inability to find a way around her pride. So he went without notifying her after an exchange of letters with Hildebranda, in which it was made clear that his wife was filled with nostalgia: now she thought only of home. At eleven o’clock in the morning, Fermina Daza was in the kitchen preparing stuffed eggplant when she heard the shouts of the peons, the neighing of the horses, the shooting of guns into the air, then the resolute steps in the courtyard and the man’s voice:
胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生接到了里奥阿查主教的消息后，决定亲自去接她。他的结论是，妻子迟迟不归，并非因为不想回家，而是想为她的傲慢找个台阶下。于是，在和伊尔德布兰达通过几封信后，他没有通知妻子便动身了。从信中他清楚地看出，妻子的思乡之情已经颠倒过来：现在她想的只有自己的家。上午十一点，费尔明娜·达萨正在厨房里做茄子馅饼，忽然听到雇工们的叫喊、马的嘶鸣和朝天放枪的声音，接着，门厅里响起了坚定的脚步声和那个男人的说话声。
Almost two years after the disappearance of Fermina Daza, an impossible coincidence occurred, the sort that Tránsito Ariza would have characterized as one of God’s jokes. Florentino Ariza had not been impressed in any special way by the invention of moving pictures, but Leona Cassiani took him, unresisting, to the spectacular opening of Cabiria, whose reputation was based on the dialogues written by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. The great open-air patio of Don Galileo Daconte, where on some nights one enjoyed the splendor of the stars more than the silent lovemaking on the screen, was filled to overflowing with a select public. Leona Cassiani followed the wandering plot with her heart in her mouth. Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, was nodding his head in sleep because of the overwhelming tedium of the drama. At his back, a woman’s voice seemed to read his thoughts:
于是，差不多就在费尔明娜·达萨失踪两年后，发生了一件不可思议的事，特兰西多·阿里萨定会将其视作上帝对人生的嘲弄。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨对电影的发明并没有什么特殊的兴趣，但莱昂娜·卡西亚尼还是毫不费劲地把他带到了《卡比莉亚》隆重的首映式上，广告中大肆宣传，影片对白是诗人加布里埃尔·邓南遮写的。堂加利略·达孔特的露天大院子里照例坐满了贵宾，但在有些夜晚，人们欣赏的更多的是璀璨的星空，而非银幕中的无声爱情。莱昂娜·卡西亚尼的一颗心始终悬着，跟随着跌宕的故事起伏。而弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨则恰恰相反，剧情的死气沉沉让他困得打瞌睡。在他背后，传来一个女人的声音，仿佛猜中了他的心思：
That was all she said, inhibited perhaps by the resonance of her voice in the darkness, for the custom of embellishing silent films with piano accompaniment had not yet been established here, and in the darkened enclosure all that one could hear was the projector murmuring like rain. Florentino Ariza did not think of God except in the most extreme circumstances, but now he thanked Him with all his heart. For even twenty fathoms underground he would instantly have recognized the husky voice he had carried in his soul ever since the afternoon when he heard her say in a swirl of yellow leaves in a solitary park: “Now go, and don’t come back until I tell you to.” He knew that she was sitting in the seat behind his, next to her inevitable husband, and he could detect her warm, even breathing, and he inhaled with love the air purified by the health of her breath. Instead of imagining her under attack by the devouring worms of death, as he had in his despondency of recent months, he recalled her at a radiant and joyful age, her belly rounded under the Minervan tunic with the seed of her first child. In utter detachment from the historical disasters that were crowding the screen, he did not need to turn around to see her in his imagination. He delighted in the scent of almonds that came wafting back to him from his innermost being, and he longed to know how she thought women in films should fall in love so that their loves would cause less pain than they did in life. Just before the film ended, he realized in a flash of exultation that he had never been so close, so long, to the one he loved so much.
这是她说的唯一一句话，可能是发现自己的声音在黑暗中回荡，不由得克制住了。当时，这里尚没有用钢琴给无声电影伴奏的习惯，黑暗中的观众只能听着放映机那下雨似的沙沙声。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨只有在极端困难的情况下才会想起上帝，但这一次，他却对上帝充满感激。因为，即使深埋地下二十西班牙寻，他也能立刻认出那个深沉的金属般的声音，自从那天下午，在那个幽静小花园的漫天黄叶中，听见她说出那句“现在，您走吧，没有我的通知，请您不要再来了”，这个声音便留在他的灵魂里。他知道，她就坐在他身后的座位上，当然，是在她丈夫旁边。他感觉到她那温热而均匀的呼吸，满怀爱意地吸纳着经她健康的气息净化过的空气。他感受到，她并没有像自己在最近几个月的沮丧中时常想象的那样，已被死亡的幼虫所侵蚀，而是让人再次回想起她最光彩照人、最幸福的时刻：穿着智慧女神的长衫，隆起的腹中孕育着她的第一个孩子。他没有回头去看，但她却如在眼前，而银幕上演出的那一连串历史性灾难他全然没有放在心上。他陶醉于从他的灵魂深处传来的杏果的芬芳，急切地想知道她如何看待电影中那些陷入爱情的女人，是否她们的爱比现实中的爱少一些痛苦。电影快结束时，他感到一瞬间的狂喜，因为他还从未和这个他深爱的女人如此贴近地待在一起这么久。
“My God, this is longer than sorrow!”
“我的上帝，这比疼痛还要长！”
She was another person. There was no sign in her face of the terrible disease that was in fashion, or of any other illness, and her body had kept the proportion and slenderness of her better days, but it was evident that the last two years had been as hard on her as ten difficult ones. Her short hair was becoming, with a curved wing on each cheek, but it was the color of aluminum, not honey, and behind her grandmother’s spectacles her beautiful lanceolate eyes had lost half a lifetime of light. Florentino Ariza saw her move away from her husband’s arm in the crowd that was leaving the theater, and he was surprised that she was in a public place wearing a poor woman’s mantilla and house slippers. But what moved him most was that her husband had to take her arm to help her at the exit, and even then she miscalculated the height of the step and almost tripped on the stairs at the door.
她变成了另外一个人。她的脸上没有一丝可怕的流行病、或者其他疾病留下的痕迹。她还保持着豆蔻年华的体重和身段，但很显然，最近两年她经历了仿佛十年的艰辛与严酷。短发很适合她，两侧的鬓角像翅膀似的翘着，但已经不是蜜的颜色，而是铝的银白色。老花镜后，那双美丽的柳叶眼已失去了半生的光芒。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨看着她挽着丈夫的手臂在散场的人群中远去，惊讶地发现她竟在公共场合披着穷人的头纱，穿着家用的便鞋。但最让他感伤的，是她的丈夫不得不抓住她的手臂，指引她该从哪里出去，而即便这样，她还是估计错了高度，差点在门口的台阶上跌倒。
When the lights went on, he waited for the others to stand up. Then he stood, unhurried, and turned around in a distracted way as he buttoned his vest that he always opened during a performance, and the four of them found themselves so close to one another that they would have been obliged to exchange greetings even if one of them had not wanted to. First Juvenal Urbino greeted Leona Cassiani, whom he knew well, and then he shook Florentino Ariza’s hand with his customary gallantry. Fermina Daza smiled at both of them with courtesy, only courtesy, but in any event with the smile of someone who had seen them often, who knew who they were, and who therefore did not need an introduction. Leona Cassiani responded with her mulatta grace. But Florentino Ariza did not know what to do, because he was flabbergasted at the sight of her.
灯亮时，他等着其他人先站起来，然后才不慌不忙地起身。他漫不经心地转过身，把看电影时总是敞开的背心扣子扣起来，这时，四人站得如此之近，就算有人不情愿，也无论如何必须打招呼了。胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生首先问候了莱昂娜·卡西亚尼，他对她很熟悉，之后，又以其一贯的彬彬有礼同弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨握了手。费尔明娜·达萨向他们致以礼节性的微笑，只是礼节性的，意思是这个微笑的主人已经见过他们很多次，也知道他们是谁，因而无需再向她做自我介绍。莱昂娜·卡西亚尼以她那混血女人特有的优雅回应了她。可弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨却不知该如何是好，因为刚一见到她，他就惊呆了。
Florentino Ariza was very sensitive to the faltering steps of age. Even as a young man he would interrupt his reading of poetry in the park to observe elderly couples who helped each other across the street, and they were lessons in life that had aided him in detecting the laws of his own aging. At Dr. Juvenal Urbino’s time of life, that night at the film, men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows. A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men on charity, whispering in their ear, in order not to wound their masculine pride, that they should be careful, that there were three steps, not two, that there was a puddle in the middle of the street, that the shape lying across the sidewalk was a dead beggar, and with great difficulty helped them to cross the street as if it were the only ford across the last of life’s rivers. Florentino Ariza had seen himself reflected so often in that mirror that he was never as afraid of death as he was of reaching that humiliating age when he would have to be led on a woman’s arm. On that day, and only on that day, he knew he would have to renounce his hope of Fermina Daza.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨对年龄所致的步履蹒跚十分敏感。早在年轻时，在花园里，他就常常放下正在阅读的诗集，观察一对对老人互相搀扶着穿过街道的情景。那是生活给他上的课，让他得以隐约窥见自己年老时的境况。在胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生看电影那晚的那个年纪，男人仿佛焕发了第二次青春，最初的几根白发使他们看上去更为庄重，充满智慧和魅力，尤其是在年轻女子的眼中，而与此同时，他们枯萎憔悴的妻子不得不拽着他们的手臂，才不至于被自己的影子绊倒。然而几年之后，丈夫的健康便突然一落千丈，身体和灵魂都迅速耻辱地衰老，而那时，妻子们又焕发了第二春，像拉着乞讨的瞎子一样拉着他们的手臂，为了不伤害男性的骄傲，轻声在耳边提醒他们注意脚下的台阶是三级而不是两级、街中间有一个水坑、横躺在人行道上的那团模糊的东西是个死了的乞丐，然后，艰难地帮助他们穿过马路，仿佛那是他们生命中最后一条河的唯一渡口。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨曾无数次在那面生活之镜中照见自己，他对死亡的恐惧从来不及对那个可耻年龄的恐惧，到那时，他将不得不被一个女人搀扶着。他知道，到了那一天，也只有到了那一天，他终将放弃对费尔明娜·达萨的渴望。
The meeting frightened away sleep. Instead of driving Leona Cassiani in the carriage, he walked with her through the old city, where their footsteps echoed like horses” hooves on the cobblestones. From time to time, fragments of fugitive voices escaped through the open balconies, bedroom confidences, sobs of love magnified by phantasmal acoustics and the hot fragrance of jasmine in the narrow, sleeping streets. Once again Florentino Ariza had to summon all his strength not to reveal to Leona Cassiani his repressed love for Fermina Daza. They walked together with measured steps, loving each other like unhurried old sweethearts, she thinking about the charms of Cabiria and he thinking about his own misfortune. A man was singing on a balcony in the Plaza of the Customhouse, and his song was repeated throughout the area in a chain of echoes: When I was sailing across the immense waves of the sea. On Saints of Stone Street, just when he should have said good night at her door, Florentino Ariza asked Leona Cassiani to invite him in for a brandy. It was the second time he had made such a request to her under comparable circumstances. The first time, ten years before, she had said to him: “If you come in at this hour you will have to stay forever.” He did not go in. But he would do so now, even if he had to break his word afterward. Nevertheless, Leona Cassiani invited him in and asked for no promises.
这次相遇驱走了他的困意。他没有用车送莱昂娜·卡西亚尼，而是陪她步行穿过老城区。他们的脚步踏在砖地上，像马蹄声一样回荡。敞开的阳台上时而飘来零星的说话声，有卧房中的喁喁私语，也有被虚无缥渺的声响和熟睡小巷中茉莉花的热烈芬芳升华了的爱的呜咽。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨不得不又一次竭力克制自己，避免把压抑在心中的对费尔明娜·达萨的爱吐露给莱昂娜·卡西亚尼。他们迈着缓慢的步伐一起走着，像一对不慌不忙的老情人一样亲昵无间，她想着卡比莉亚的种种美好，而他却想着自己的种种不幸。一个男人在海关广场的阳台上唱歌，歌声在四周回荡，连绵不绝：当我穿过大海无尽的浪涛。在石头圣人大街，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨本该在莱昂娜·卡西亚尼的家门前向她道别，而他却请求她邀请自己到她家里去喝一杯白兰地。这是他第二次在类似情况下提出这样的要求。第一次是在十年前，当时她回答说：“如果你现在上去，那就必须永远留下来。”结果他没有去。如果换作现在，他无论如何都会上去的，即便日后可能不得不食言。然而，这一次莱昂娜·卡西亚尼邀他上去，无需任何承诺。
That was how he found himself, when he least expected it, in the sanctuary of a love that had been extinguished before it was born. Her parents had died, her only brother had made his fortune in Curaçao, and she was living alone in the old family house. Years before, when he had still not renounced the hope of making her his lover, with the consent of her parents Florentino Ariza would visit her on Sundays, and sometimes until very late at night, and he had contributed so much to the household that he came to consider it his own. But that night after the film he had the feeling that his memory had been erased from the drawing room. The furniture had been moved, there were new prints hanging on the walls, and he thought that so many heartless changes had been made in order to perpetuate the certainty that he had never lived. The cat did not recognize him. Dismayed by the cruelty of oblivion, he said: “He does not remember me anymore.” But she replied over her shoulder, as she was fixing the brandies, that if he was bothered by that he could rest easy, because cats do not remember anyone.
就这样，他在最意想不到的时候来到一座爱情圣殿，而这份爱尚未诞生就已被扑灭。莱昂娜·卡西亚尼的父母已经去世，唯一的兄弟在库拉索岛发了财，如今她一个人住在家里的老宅中。若干年前，当弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨还没有放弃让她成为自己情人的希望时，常常征得她父母的同意在星期日来拜访她，有时晚上还待到很晚。他对这所房子的修缮做出了很大贡献，以至于都把它当作自己的家了。然而，在看完电影的这天晚上，他似乎觉得客厅里有关他的记忆都被清除了。家具变换了位置，墙上挂了新的彩画。他想，这些显而易见的变化是刻意的，为的是证明他从未在此地存在过。而就连那只猫也没有认出他来。他被这种残忍的遗忘吓了一跳，说：“它不记得我了。”可她一边倒白兰地，一边背对着他说，如果他是为此而忧心，那么大可不必，因为猫是从来也不会记着谁的。
Leaning back as they sat close together on the sofa, they spoke about themselves, about what they had been before they met one afternoon who knows how long ago on the mule-drawn trolley. Their lives were spent in adjacent offices, and until now they had never spoken of anything except their daily work. As they talked, Florentino Ariza put his hand on her thigh, he began to caress her with the gentle touch of an experienced seducer, and she did not stop him, but she did not respond either, not even with a shudder for courtesy’s sake. Only when he tried to go further did she grasp his exploratory hand and kiss him on the palm.
两人倚在沙发上，靠得很近，聊着他们自己，说起他们相识前各自是什么样子，也就是在那个谁也不记得是什么时候的下午，在那辆骡子轨道车上相遇之前。一直以来，他们都在两间相邻的办公室里工作，而在此刻之前，他们从未谈过日常工作以外的事情。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨一边聊着一边把手放到她的大腿上，像情场老手一样轻轻抚摸起来。她任由他这样做，但就连礼貌性的颤抖都没有回应给他。当他试图更进一步时，她拉起他那只探险的手，在掌心上吻了一下。
“Behave yourself,” she said. “I realized a long time ago that you are not the man I am looking for.”
“注意你的举止，”她对他说，“很久以前，我就发现你不是我要找的男人了。”
While she was still very young, a strong, able man whose face she never saw took her by surprise, threw her down on the jetty, ripped her clothes off, and made instantaneous and frenetic love to her. Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms. She had not seen his face, she had not heard his voice, but she was sure she would have known him in a crowd of a thousand men because of his shape and size and his way of making love. From that time on, she would say to anyone who would listen to her: “If you ever hear of a big, strong fellow who raped a poor black girl from the street on Drowned Men’s Jetty, one October fifteenth at about half-past eleven at night, tell him where he can find me.” She said it out of habit, and she had said it to so many people that she no longer had any hope. Florentino Ariza had heard the story as many times as he had heard a boat sailing away in the night. By two o’clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was waiting for, and he was glad to know it.
在她很年轻的时候，一个强壮、敏捷、但她从未看清长相的男人，在防波堤上突然将她按倒，撕扯剥光了她的衣服，短暂而疯狂地跟她做了一次爱。她躺在石头上，浑身满是伤痕，却真心希望那个男人能永远留下来，直到她在他的怀中带着爱死去。她没有看见他的脸，也没有听到他的声音，但她相信自己能根据他的体型、身材和做爱的方式，从千万个人中把他认出来。从那时起，她便对所有愿意听她讲的人说：“如果你碰巧听说一个高大健壮的男人在十月十五那天晚上大约十一点半钟时，在殉情者的防波堤上强奸了一个可怜的过路的黑女人，那么请你告诉他在哪里能找到我。”这句话变成了她的一种习惯，她讲给过无数人听，最后彻底绝望了。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨也多次听她说起过这个故事，就像听到夜晚起航的轮船的告别声一般频繁。凌晨两点的钟敲响时，他们每人已经喝了三杯白兰地。他明确地知道了自己不是她所等的男人，他很高兴能明白这一点。
“Bravo, lionlady,” he said when he left. “We have killed the tiger.”
“干得不错，母狮！”他临走时对她说道，“我们总算把猛虎扼杀了。”
It was not the only thing that came to an end that night. The evil lie about the pavilion of consumptives had ruined his sleep, for it had instilled in him the inconceivable idea that Fermina Daza was mortal and as a consequence might die before her husband. But when he saw her stumble at the door of the movie theater, by his own volition he took another step toward the abyss with the sudden realization that he, and not she, might be the one to die first. It was the most fearful kind of presentiment, because it was based on reality. The years of immobilized waiting, of hoping for good luck, were behind him, but on the horizon he could see nothing more than the unfathomable sea of imaginary illnesses, the drop-by-drop urinations of sleepless nights, the daily death at twilight. He thought that all the moments in the day, which had once been his allies and sworn accomplices, were beginning to conspire against him. A few years before he had gone to a dangerous assignation, his heart heavy with terror of what might happen, and he had found the door unlocked and the hinges recently oiled so that he could come in without a sound, but he repented at the last moment for fear of causing a decent married woman irreparable harm by dying in her bed. So that it was reasonable to think that the woman he loved most on earth, the one he had waited for from one century to the next without a sigh of disenchantment, might not have the opportunity to lead him by the arm across a street full of lunar grave mounds and beds of wind blown poppies in order to help him reach the other side of death in safety.
那晚终结的事还不止这一件。关于结核病医院的恶意传言曾打碎了他的梦想，因为那让他产生了一个过去从未有过的疑虑，即费尔明娜·达萨也是会死的，既如此，那她也就有可能死在丈夫的前头。而当他看见她在电影院的出口险些绊倒时，他又进一步滑向深渊，忽然间意识到先死的人可能是他自己，而不是她。这是一个预兆，是所有预兆中最可怕的一种，因为它是有事实根据的。那些耐心等待、幸福憧憬的岁月已成为过去，如今，在地平线上隐约望见的，不过是充满了各种可以想见的病毒的茫茫大海，失眠的清晨一滴一滴排出的尿液，以及每日下午随时可能降临的死亡。曾经，每天的每分每秒都胜似他的盟友，如今却开始算计他。几年前他去赴某个约会时就已经开始提心吊胆，害怕发生意外。他发现门没有上闩，合页刚刚上过油，显然是为了让他进来时不会发出声响，但在最后一刻，他后悔了，担心自己死在她的床上，给一个无辜的热情女人造成无法消除的阴影。因此，有理由认为，那个世界上他最爱的女人，那个他毫无怨言地从一个世纪等到另一个世纪的女人，很可能会来不及挽着他的手臂穿过到处是圆形坟冢和在风中摇曳的罂粟花的漫漫长街，帮助他平安到达死亡的彼岸。
The truth is that by the standards of his time, Florentino Ariza had crossed the line into old age. He was fifty-six well-preserved years old, and he thought them well lived because they were years of love. But no man of the time would have braved the ridicule of looking young at his age, even if he did or thought he did, and none would have dared to confess without shame that he still wept in secret over a rebuff received in the previous century. It was a bad time for being young: there was a style of dress for each age, but the style of old age began soon after adolescence, and lasted until the grave. More than age, it was a matter of social dignity. The young men dressed like their grandfathers, they made themselves more respectable with premature spectacles, and a walking stick was looked upon with favor after the age of thirty. For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for being eternal spinsters: the ones left behind. The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but in relation to the time left to them before they died.
事实上，按照那个时代的标准，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨已经步入老年人的行列。他已满五十六岁，认为自己没有虚度光阴，因为那都是充满爱的岁月。不过，在那个时代，没有哪个男人会像他一样勇于面对因看上去年轻而招来的耻笑，即使他们确实不老，或者心里也自认年轻；也不是所有人都敢于毫无羞愧地承认自己仍在因上世纪的挫折而偷偷哭泣。那个时代对年轻存在偏见：尽管每个年龄段都有自己的穿着方式，但老年的衣着在青春期结束后不久便开始穿上身了，而且一直持续到进入坟墓。这种穿戴与其说标志着年龄，不如说是社会地位的象征。年轻人穿得像自己的祖父，再早早地戴上一副眼镜，便会更加受人尊重；而从三十岁起，手杖就是让人刮目相看的物件。至于女人，则只有两个年龄：一是结婚的年龄，一般不超过二十二岁；一是永远独身、再也嫁不出去的年龄。而其他女人，那些已婚的、当了母亲的、成为寡妇的、做了祖母的，都属于另外一类，她们不按已经度过的年岁来计算年龄，而是按距离死亡还有多久来计算。
Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, faced the insidious snares of old age with savage temerity, even though he knew that his peculiar fate had been to look like an old man from the time he was a boy. At first it was a matter of necessity. Tránsito Ariza pulled apart and then sewed together again for him the clothes that his father decided to discard, so that he went to primary school wearing frock coats that dragged on the ground when he sat down, and ministerial hats that came down over his ears despite the cotton batting on the inside to make them smaller. Since he had also worn glasses for myopia from the age of five, and had his mother’s Indian hair, as bristly and coarse as horsehair, his appearance clarified nothing. It was fortunate that after so much governmental instability because of so many superimposed civil wars, academic standards were less selective than they had been, and there was a jumble of backgrounds and social positions in the public schools. Half-grown children would come to class from the barricades, smelling of gunpowder, wearing the insignias and uniforms of rebel officers captured at gunpoint in inconclusive battles, and carrying their regulation weapons in full view at their waists. They shot each other over disagreements in the playground, they threatened the teachers if they received low grades on examinations, and one of them, a third-year student at La Salle Academy and a retired colonel in the militia, shot and killed Brother Juan Eremita, Prefect of the Community, because he said in catechism class that God was a full-fledged member of the Conservative Party.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨则相反，他赤裸裸地大胆对抗着衰老的圈套，尽管心里清楚自己命运奇特，从小就像个老头儿。起初是情势所迫。特兰西多·阿里萨把他父亲决定扔进垃圾堆的衣服拆开后给他缝成新衣。于是，他不得不穿着礼服去上小学，一坐下，衣服便拖到地上；他头上戴的也是政府官员的那种帽子，尽管为了让它小一点，加了一圈塞满棉花的里衬，但还是连耳朵都盖上了。此外，他从五岁起就戴上了近视眼镜，而且头发和母亲一样，是印第安人的那种质地，粗硬得像马鬃，所以，从外表根本看不出他其实长什么样子。幸运的是，由于连年内战，政府混乱不堪，学校的入学标准不像从前那样严格了，在公立学校里，各种出身和社会地位的学生都有。尚未长大的孩子们走进课堂，身上却散发着街垒战的火药味，穿着不知在哪次战斗中靠枪子儿得来的叛军制服，佩戴着他们的徽章，腰带上还明目张胆地别着与他们军衔相符的武器。课间休息时，随便一点争执就会让孩子们拔枪相向。如果老师在考试中给了他们低分，他们甚至用枪来威胁。拉萨耶学校的一个三年级学生，退伍的民兵上校，就一枪打死了修会会长胡安·埃雷米塔修士，只因为他在教理问答课上说，上帝是保守党的正式成员。
On the other hand, the sons of the great ruined families were dressed like old-fashioned princes, and some very poor boys went barefoot. Among so many oddities originating in so many places, Florentino Ariza was certainly among the oddest, but not to the point of attracting undue attention. The harshest thing he heard was when someone shouted to him on the street: “When you’re ugly and poor, you can only want more.” In any event, the apparel imposed by necessity became, from that time on and for the rest of his life, the kind best suited to his enigmatic nature and solemn character. When he was promoted to his first important position in the R. C. C., he had clothes made to order in the same style as those of his father, whom he recalled as an old man who had died at Christ’s venerable age of thirty-three. So that Florentino Ariza always looked much older than he was. As a matter of fact, the loose-tongued Brígida Zuleta, a brief love who dished up unwashed truths, told him on the very first day that she liked him better without his clothes because he looked twenty years younger when he was naked. However, he never knew how to remedy that, first because his personal taste would not allow him to dress in any other way, and second because at the age of twenty no one knew how to dress like a younger man, unless he were to take his short pants and sailor hat out of the closet again. On the other hand, he himself could not escape the notion of old age current in his day, so it was to be expected that when he saw Fermina Daza stumble at the door of the movie theater he would be shaken by a thunderbolt of panic that death, the son of a bitch, would win an irreparable victory in his fierce war of love.
另一方面，那些遭遇了不幸的名门望族的孩子穿得就像古时的亲王，特别穷的孩子则光着脚。在这些来自四面八方、打扮得千奇百怪的学生之中，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨无论如何都要算在最奇怪之列，尽管如此，他却并不十分引人注意。他听到的最难听的话，是街上的人冲他喊：“穷光蛋，丑八怪，一切希望全落空。”但不管怎样，那身因生活所迫而穿上的衣服，从那时起，及至他整个一生，都是与他那神秘的气质和忧郁的性格最为相配的。当他在CFC第一次被委以重任时，他让人为他量身定做了和父亲那件同样款式的衣服。他像怀念一位老人一样怀念着死于三十三岁的父亲，那是一个令人尊敬的年龄：基督罹难时也是这个岁数。所以，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨看上去始终要比他的实际年龄大得多，以至于口无遮拦的布里希达·苏莱塔，他的一个不假思索地说出真相的露水情人，从第一天起便对他说，她更喜欢他脱掉衣服后的样子，因为光着身子的他仿佛一下子年轻了二十岁。然而，他永远也不知道如何弥补这一点：首先，他个人的喜好不允许他穿成别的样子；其次，那个时候二十岁的人谁也不知道怎样才能将自己打扮得更年轻，除非把短裤和见习水手帽再次从衣橱里翻出来；再者，他也不可能摆脱那个时代人们对老年所持的看法。因此，当他看见费尔明娜·达萨在电影院出口险些绊倒时，不禁打了个寒战，一个可怕的想法晴天霹雳般击中了他，即在这场血腥的爱情战争中，婊子养的死神很可能会不可逆转地夺去他的胜利。
Until that time his greatest battle, fought tooth and nail and lost without glory, was against baldness. From the moment he saw the first hairs tangled in his comb, he knew that he was condemned to a hell whose torments cannot be imagined by those who do not suffer them. He struggled for years. There was not a pomade or lotion he did not try, a belief he did not accept, a sacrifice he did not endure, in order to defend every inch of his head against the ravages of that devastation. He memorized the agricultural information in the Bristol Almanac because he had heard tha t there was a direct relationship between the growth of hair and the harvesting cycles. He left the totally bald barber he had used all his life for a foreign newcomer who cut hair only when the moon was in the first quarter. The new barber had begun to demonstrate that in fact he had a fertile hand, when it was discovered that he was wanted by several Antillean police forces for raping novices, and he was taken away in chains.
到那时为止，他经历过的最大战斗是同自己的秃顶进行的，他一直顽强抗争，却最终落得惨败的结局。从看见缠在梳子上的最初几根头发开始，他便意识到自己被打入了地狱，这种痛苦是任何一个无此遭遇的人无法想象的。为了保住迅速荒芜的头顶的每一寸毛发，没有什么发蜡和生发水他没有试过，也没有什么信仰他没有求助过，更没有什么代价他没有付出过。他背下了《布里斯托年鉴》中关于农业的全部条文，因为他听说头发的生长和庄稼的收获周期有着直接的联系。他还放弃了自己一直光顾的理发师，因为这人是个实打实的光头，而换了一个新来的只在新月那几天理发的外乡理发师。可这位新理发师才刚刚证明了自己手艺不错，就被发现是安的列斯群岛好几家警察局通缉的强奸幼女犯，被戴上镣铐拖走了。
By then Florentino Ariza had cut out every advertisement concerning baldness that he found in the newspapers of the Caribbean basin, the ones in which they printed two pictures of the same man, first as bald as a melon and then with more hair than a lion: before and after using the infallible cure. After six years he had tried one hundred seventy-two of them, in addition to complementary treatments that appeared on the labels of the bottles, and all that he achieved was an itching, foul-smelling eczema of the scalp called ringworm borealis by the medicine men of Martinique because it emitted a phosphorescent glow in the dark. As a last resort he had recourse to all the herbs that the Indians hawked in the public market and to all the magical specifics and Oriental potions sold in the Arcade of the Scribes, but by the time he realized that he had been swindled, he already had the tonsure of a saint. In the year 1900, while the Civil War of a Thousand Days bled the country, an Italian who made custom-fitted wigs of human hair came to the city. The wigs cost a fortune, and the manufacturer took no responsibility after three months of use, but there were few solvent bald men who did not succumb to the temptation. Florentino Ariza was one of the first. He tried on a wig that was so similar to his own hair that he was afraid it would stand on end with his changes in mood, but he could not accept the idea of wearing a dead man’s hair on his head. His only consolation was that his raging baldness meant that he would not have to watch his hair turn gray. One day, one of the genial drunks on the river docks embraced him with more enthusiasm than usual when he saw him leave the office, and then he removed Florentino Ariza’s hat, to the mocking laughter of the stevedores, and gave him a resounding kiss on the head.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨把那个时期加勒比地区所有报纸上关于医治秃顶的广告都剪了下来。那些报纸通常刊登着同一个人的两张照片，第一张上，头秃得像个甜瓜，而第二张上头发比雄狮还浓密：这便是使用某种安全可靠的药水之前和之后的区别。六年里，他试验了一百七十二种药物，并践行了药瓶商标上写的所有其他辅助方法，而唯一的收获，是其中的一种药使他患上了头部湿疹，又痒又臭，马提尼克岛的教外苦行僧们称之为北极光癣，因为它会在黑暗中发出一种磷光。抱着最后一线希望，他求助于在公共市场上售卖的所有印第安草药和在“代笔人门廊”出售的一切神奇特效药，包括东方汤药，可当他发现自己上当受骗时，头顶已经和一个削发僧人无异了。新世纪元年，千日战争把国家置于血泊中时，城里来了个意大利人，他会按照尺寸用真头发制作假发套，价格不菲，但只保质三个月，逾期概不负责。尽管如此，绝大部分有支付能力的谢顶者都愿意前往一试。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨是头一批尝试的人之一。他试戴了一个和自己原来的头发极为相似的假发套，以至于担心在自己情绪变化时那头发会竖起来。但他最终还是对这个把死人头发戴在活人头上的想法无法苟同。他唯一的安慰是如此风卷残云的谢顶让他不用眼瞅着自己的头发变白。一天，内河码头上一个欢快的醉汉看见他从办公室里走出来，上前以超乎寻常的热情拥抱了他，并在码头工人的起哄声中摘掉他的帽子，给他的脑袋来了响亮的一吻。
That night, at the age of forty-eight, he had the few downy strands left at his temples and the nape of his neck cut off, and he embraced with all his heart his destiny of total baldness. Every morning before his bath he lathered not only his chin but the areas on his scalp where stubble was beginning to reappear, and with a barber’s razor he left everything as smooth as a baby’s bottom. Until then he would not remove his hat even in the office, for his baldness produced a sensation of nakedness that seemed indecent to him. But when he accepted his baldness with all his heart, he attributed to it the masculine virtues that he had heard about and scorned as nothing but the fantasies of bald men. Later he took refuge in the new custom of combing long hairs from his part on the right all the way across his head, and this he never abandoned. But even so, he continued to wear his hat, always the same funereal style, even after the tartarita, the local name for the straw skimmer, came into fashion.
那天晚上，四十八岁的他让人把自己两鬓和后脑勺上仅剩的几根毛发全部剃掉，彻彻底底接受了全秃的命运。他甚至在每天早上洗澡之前，把下巴和脸上所有长出胡楂的地方都涂满肥皂沫，用一把剃刀把它们刮得像小孩的屁股一样光滑。以前，即使在办公室里他也从不摘掉帽子，因为秃顶给他一种赤身裸体的感觉，让他觉得有失体面。但当他彻底接受秃头后，便把它归为男性的美德之一，其实他早就听人这样说过，却一直视其为秃头们的自欺欺人而予以蔑视。再后来，他又养成了新习惯，把右侧仅有的几根头发留长，让它跨过整个头顶，从此，他一直沿用这个办法。但尽管这样，他还是戴着帽子，而且总戴那个参加葬礼似的款式，即便当地已流行起一种被称为“塔尔塔里塔帽”的窄边草帽，他也依然不改旧貌。
“Hairless wonder!” he shouted.
“神圣的秃头！”他喊道。
Uncle Leo XII sent him to Dr. Francis Adonay, a black giant in gaiters and jodhpurs who traveled the rive r boats with complete dental equipment that he carried in a steward’s saddlebag, and who seemed to be more like a traveling salesman of terror in the villages along the river. With just one glance in his mouth, he decided that Florentino Ariza had to have even his healthy teeth and molars extracted in order to protect him once and for all from further misfortunes. In contrast to baldness, this radical treatment caused him no alarm at all, except for his natural fear of a bloodbath without anesthesia. The idea of false teeth did not disturb him either, first because one of his fondest childhood memories was of a carnival magician who removed his upper and lower teeth and left them chattering by themselves on a table, and second because it would end the toothaches that had tormented him, ever since he was a boy, with almost as much cruelty as the pains of love. Unlike baldness, it did not seem to him an underhanded attack by old age, because he was convinced that despite the bitter breath of vulcanized rubber, his appearance would be cleaner with an orthopedic smile. So he submitted without resistance to the red-hot forceps of Dr. Adonay, and he endured his convalescence with the stoicism of a pack mule.
莱昂十二叔叔让他去找弗朗西斯·阿多奈医生。这是个打着绑腿、穿着马裤的高大黑人。他把一整套牙医器械都放在工头用的褡裢里，随身背着，穿梭于内河船之间，看上去倒更像一个令沿岸村镇都害怕的旅行代办人。他只朝弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨嘴里看了一眼，就认定他的牙齿全部要拔光，甚至包括那几颗好牙，这样才能一劳永逸地避免再次遭罪。与对秃顶的忧心相反，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨对这种野蛮的治疗方法没有产生任何顾虑，除了很自然地略微担心不用麻醉难免会有些血腥。装假牙的主意并没有让他感到不快，这首先是因为他童年的一段难忘回忆：一个集市上的魔术师将满口牙齿取下，让它们自己在桌子上说话。其次，这可以结束从小就折磨他的牙痛，说起来，那种滋味就和爱情的痛苦一样强烈残忍。在他看来，这和秃顶不一样，并不是衰老的一次狡猾袭击，因为他相信，虽然如此一来他的呼吸会有一股硫化橡胶的辛辣味，但矫形后的微笑会让他的外表看上去更有光彩。因此，他毫无抵抗地向阿多奈医生那把烧红的钳子屈服了，并以负重耐劳的驴子的坚韧意志经受了恢复期的考验。
The loss of his teeth, on the other hand, did not result from a natural calamity but from the shoddy work of an itinerant dentist who decided to eradicate a simple infection by drastic means. His terror of the drill had prevented Florentino Ariza from visiting a dentist, despite his constant toothaches, until the pain became unbearable. His mother was alarmed by a night of inconsolable moaning from the room next to hers, because these moans seemed to be the same as the ones from another time, which had almost disappeared in the mists of her memory, but when she made him open his mouth to see where love was hurting him, she discovered that he had fallen victim to abscesses.
然而，他失去牙齿却并非因为自然之灾，而是源于一个江湖牙医试图根治一次普通感染时的鲁莽举动。对脚踏牙钻的恐惧使得弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨一直不敢去看牙医，尽管他常常牙痛，甚至有时无法忍受。听到他在隔壁房间整夜无助地呻吟，母亲吓坏了，因为她觉得这声音跟儿子昔日某时的呻·吟声如出一辙，而那原本早已消散在她记忆的迷雾之中了。但当她让儿子张开嘴，好看看爱情究竟伤到了他哪个地方时，却发现他是因牙龈化脓而痛苦不堪。
Uncle Leo XII attended to the details of the operation as if it were being performed on his own flesh. His singular interest in false teeth had developed on one of his first trips along the Magdalena River and was the result of his maniacal love for bel canto. One night when the moon was full, at the entrance to the port of Gamarra, he made a wager with a German surveyor that he could awaken the creatures of the jungle by singing a Neapolitan romanza from the Captain’s balustrade. He almost lost the bet. In the river darkness one could hear the flapping wings of the cranes in the marshes, the thudding tails of the alligators, the terror of the shad as they tried to leap onto dry land, but on the final note, when it was feared that the singer would burst his arteries with the power of his song, his false teeth dropped out of his mouth with his last breath and fell into the water.
莱昂十二叔叔亲自过问了手术细节，就好像是要给他动手术似的。他对假牙有着特殊的兴趣，这种兴趣产生于他沿马格达莱纳河航行最初几年，也可以说是他对美声唱法[2]的痴迷所造成的苦果。一个满月的夜晚，当船驶入加马拉港时，他和一位德国土地测量员打赌说，他只要站在船长室的栏杆处唱上一首那不勒斯浪漫曲，就能把森林里的动物都惊醒。他好险才赢了这一注。在河上漆黑的夜色中，只听见草鹭在沼泽里扇动着翅膀，鳄鱼甩着尾巴，鲱鱼惊恐地跳到陆地上。然而，当他唱到最高的一个音符，大家正担心曲调之高亢会让歌手的动脉迸裂时，他的假牙随着最后吐出的一口气飞了出去，沉入水中。（注：[2] 原文为意大利语。）
The boat had to wait three days at the port of Tenerife while an emergency set was made for him. It was a perfect fit. But on the voyage home, trying to explain to the Captain how he had lost the first pair, Uncle Leo XII filled his lungs with the burning air of the jungle, sang the highest note he could, held it to his last breath as he tried to frighten the alligators that were sunning themselves and watching the passage of the boat with unblinking eyes, and the new set of false teeth sank into the current as well. From then on, he kept spare sets of teeth everywhere, in various places throughout his house, in his desk drawer, and on each of the three company boats. Moreover, when he ate out he would carry an extra pair in a cough drop box that he kept in his pocket, because he had once broken a pair trying to eat pork cracklings at a picnic. Fearing that his nephew might be the victim of similar unpleasant surprises, Uncle Leo XII told Dr. Adonay to make him two sets right from the start: one of cheap materials for daily use at the office, and the other for Sundays and holidays, with a gold chip in the first molar that would impart a touch of realism. At last, on a Palm Sunday ringing with the sound of holiday bells, Florentino Ariza returned to the street with a new identity, his perfect smile giving him the impression that someone else had taken his place in the world.
为了给他另配一副应急的假牙，轮船不得不在特内里费港耽搁了三天。新假牙做得完美极了。可返航时，莱昂十二叔叔又试图向船长解释他的上一副假牙是如何弄丢的。他深深地吸了一口森林中灼热的空气，放开嗓子唱出了他所能唱的最高音，并把这个音尽可能地延长，试图把那些一边晒太阳一边不眨眼地看着轮船驶过的鳄鱼吓跑。结果，新的假牙又沉入了河水。那以后，他配了很多副假牙，把它们放在家里的各个地方以及办公桌的抽屉里，公司的三条船上也各有一副。此外，他在外用餐时也会带上一副备用，就放在衣兜里一个装咳嗽药片的小盒中，因为他曾经在某天中午野餐时，为了吃煎猪皮而把假牙弄坏了。由于担心侄子也会有类似遭遇，莱昂十二叔叔让阿多奈医生一次性给他做了两副假牙：一副材质便宜，平时在办公室里用；另一副则是为星期日和节日准备的，在微笑时总会露出的那第一颗槽牙上还薄薄地涂了点儿金子，看上去更为逼真。终于，在一个圣枝主日[3]，当节日的钟声带来一片喧嚣，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨以全新的面貌重新走到了街上，那完美无瑕的微笑几乎让他觉得是另一个人取代了他在这个世界上的位置。（注：[3] 圣枝主日，天主教节日，是复活节前的星期天，标志着复活节圣周的开始。）
This was at the time that his mother died and Florentino Ariza was left alone in his house. It was a haven that suited his way of loving, because the location was discreet despite the fact that the numerous windows that gave the street its name made one think of too many eyes behind the curtains. But the house had been built to make Fermina Daza, and no one but Fermina Daza, happy, so that Florentino Ariza preferred to lose a good many opportunities during his most fruitful years rather than soil his house with other loves. To his good fortune, every step he climbed in the R. C. C. brought new privileges, above all secret privileges, and one of the most practical was the possibility of using the offices at night, or on Sundays or holidays, with the complicity of the watchmen. Once, when he was First Vice President, he was making emergency love to one of the Sunday girls, sitting on a desk chair with her astride him, when the door opened without warning. Uncle Leo XII peered in, as if he had walked into the wrong office, and stared at his terrified nephew over his eyeglasses. “I’ll be damned!” said his uncle, without the least sign of shock. “You screw just like your dad!” And before he closed the door, he said, with his eyes looking off into the distance:
这件事发生在他母亲去世，家中只剩他孤身一人的时期。他的家是一个绝佳的爱巢，尤其适合他的爱情方式，因为虽然街道名为窗户街，让人联想到一扇扇窗子的薄纱帘后藏着无数双眼睛，但其实是一条幽静的巷子。可问题是，这房子的一切都是为了让费尔明娜·达萨幸福，也只为让她幸福。因此，在弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨斩获最丰的那些年月，他宁可失掉很多机会，也不愿用其他爱情来玷污他的家。幸运的是，他在CFC每向上爬一级，就意味着获得某些新的特权，尤其是那些秘密特权。对他来说，其中最有用的一项，就是与门房串通好后，能够在晚上、星期日以及节日里使用办公室。有一次，就在他已当上公司的首席副董事长时，他正与一个星期日值班的姑娘匆忙做爱——他坐在办公桌前的椅子上，姑娘骑在他身上——门突然开了，莱昂十二叔叔伸进头来，像走错了办公室似的，从眼镜上方看着惊呆了的侄儿。“见鬼！”叔叔毫无异色地说，“跟你爸真是一路货色！”在重新把门关上之前，他把目光落在空处，说：
“And you, Señorita, feel free to carry on. I swear by my honor that I have not seen your face.”
“您，小姐，不必担心，请继续。我以我的荣誉向您起誓，我没有看见您的脸。”
The matter was not mentioned again, but the following week it was impossible to work in Florentino Ariza’s office. On Monday the electricians burst in to install a rotating fan on the ceiling. The locksmiths arrived unannounced and with as much noise as if they were going to war, installed a lock on the door so that it could be bolted from the inside. The carpenters took measurements without saying why, the upholsterers brought swatches of cretonne to see if they matched the color of the walls, and the next week an enormous double couch covered in a Dionysian flowered print was delivered through the window because it was too big for the doors. They worked at the oddest hours, with an impertinence that did not seem unintentional, and they offered the same response to all his protests: “Orders from the head office.” Florentino Ariza never knew if this sort of interference was a kindness on his uncle’s part or a very personal way of forcing him to face up to his abusive behavior. The truth never occurred to him, which was that Uncle Leo XII was encouraging his nephew, because he, too, had heard the rumors that his habits were different from those of most men, and this obstacle to naming him as his successor had caused him great distress.
没有人再提起过这件事，但接下来的那个星期，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨的办公室变得无法工作了。星期一，电工们蜂拥而至，要在天花板上装一个叶式吊扇。锁匠们也没有事先通知就到了，吵吵闹闹像打仗似的，在门上装了把锁，可以从里面把门锁上。木匠们量了尺寸，却没有说要做什么。窗帘装饰工带来印花装饰布，看看是否与墙壁的颜色匹配。再接下来一个星期，他们从窗户外塞进来一个印着酒神节花色的双人大沙发，因为从门口实在搬不进来。这些人在最令人意想不到的时候干起活来，但又并非肆意捣乱，对任何人提出的抗议，他们只有一句回答：“这是董事会的命令。”弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨直到最后也没弄明白，这些干涉行动究竟是叔叔出于对他的好意关心，还是在用特有的方式让他检讨自己的胡作非为。他始终没能看出真相，事实上，莱昂十二叔叔是在鼓励他，因为已经有一些传言传到他那里，说他侄子的兴趣有别于大部分男人，这让他烦恼无比，担心会妨碍侄子继承自己的衣钵。
When doctor’s orders forced his uncle into retirement, Florentino Ariza began, with good grace, to sacrifice some of his Sunday loves. He accompanied his uncle to his country retreat in one of the city’s first automobiles, whose crank handle had such a powerful recoil that it had dislocated the shoulder of the first driver. They talked for many hours, the old man in the hammock with his name embroidered in silk thread, removed from everything and with his back to the sea, in the old slave plantation from whose terraces, filled with crepe myrtle, one could see the snow-covered peaks of the sierra in the afternoon. It had always been difficult for Florentino Ariza and his uncle to talk about anything other than river navigation, and it still was on those slow afternoons when death was always an unseen guest. One of Uncle Leo XII’s constant preoccupations was that river navigation not pass into the hands of entrepreneurs from the interior with connections to European corporations. “This has always been a business run by people from the coast,” he would say. “If the inlanders get hold of it, they will give it back to the Germans.” His preoccupation was consistent with a political conviction that he liked to repeat even when it was not to the point.
当叔叔遵照医嘱不情愿地退休后，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨便开始甘愿牺牲他的星期日爱情，乘坐城中最早的一辆汽车，到叔叔的乡间别墅去陪他。汽车的起动摇柄反弹时力量很大，竟然打断了第一个司机的整条胳臂。他和叔叔一谈就是好几个小时。老头儿躺在用丝线绣着他名字的吊床上，远离一切，背对大海。那是一座古老的奴隶庄园，每天下午，从种满百合的露台上，可以看到白雪皑皑的山峰。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨和叔叔的谈话向来难以脱离河运的话题，在那些漫长的下午也不例外，而死神一直是一位冷眼旁观的隐形客人。长久以来，莱昂十二叔叔最担心的事之一，就是河运公司落到一些同欧洲财团有联系的内陆企业主手中。“这一向是门粗人的生意，”他说，“要是被那些纨绔子弟拿去，他们会拱手奉还给德国人。”他的担心与他一直以来的政治信条连贯一致，有时即使场合不合适，他也喜欢一遍又一遍地重复这些信条。
Unlike his brother, Leo XII Loayza had enjoyed a stable marriage of sixty years” duration, and he was always proud of not working on Sundays. He had four sons and a daughter, and he wanted to prepare all of them as heirs to his empire, but by a series of coincidences that were common in the novels of the day, but that no one believed in real life, his four sons died, one after the other, as they rose to positions of authority, and his daughter had no river vocation whatsoever and preferred to die watching the boats on the Hudson from a window fifty meters high. There were even those who accepted as true the tale that Florentino Ariza, with his sinister appearance and his vampire’s umbrella, had somehow been the cause of all those coincidences.
与哥哥不同，莱昂十二·罗阿依萨维持了六十年稳定的夫妻生活，他星期日从不工作，并以此为荣。他有四个儿子和一个女儿，他想把他们每一个都培养成自己帝国的接班人，但生活却将一系列意外摆在他面前，这些偶然在当时的小说里司空见惯，在现实生活中却令人难以置信：四个儿子随着职位步步高升，竟一个接一个地死掉了，而女儿则对河运事业毫无兴趣，宁愿从五十米高的窗子里看着哈德逊河上的船了此余生。事情到了这种地步，以至于不乏有人把传言当真，认为外表阴郁、手里拿着吸血鬼雨伞的弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨肯定是做了什么，才导致这一件件意外发生。
To his brother Masons, who attributed all evils to the failure of federalism, he would always reply: “The War of a Thousand Days was lost twenty-three years ago in the war of “76.” Florentino Ariza, whose indifference to politics hovered on the limits of the absolute, listened to these increasingly frequent and tiresome speeches as one listens to the sound of the sea. But he was a rigorous debater when it came to company policy. In opposition to his uncle’s opinion, he thought that the setbacks in river navigation, always on the edge of disaster, could be remedied only by a voluntary renunciation of the riverboat monopoly that the National Congress had granted to the River Company of the Caribbean for ninety-nine years and a day. His uncle protested: “My namesake Leona with her worthless anarchist theories has put those ideas in your head.” But that was only half true. Florentino Ariza based his thinking on the experience of the German commodore Johann B. Elbers, whose noble intelligence had been destroyed by excessive personal ambition. His uncle, however, believed that the failure of Elbers was due not to privileges but to the unrealistic commitments he had contracted for, which had almost been tantamount to his assuming responsibility for the geography of the nation: he had taken charge of maintaining the navigability of the river, the port installations, the access routes on land, the means of transportation. Besides, he would say, the virulent opposition of President Simón Bolívar was no laughing matter.
他的两位兄长都是共济会成员，将一切罪恶归因于联邦制的失败，对此，他总是反驳他们说：“千日战争在二十三年前，也就是七六年的战争中就失败了。”弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨对于政治几乎冷漠到极致，听叔叔越来越频繁的长篇大论，就像听大海的涛声。但对于公司政策，他是叔叔坚定的反对者。在他看来，河运事业一直处在灾难的边缘，要想根治它的落后，只有主动放弃对蒸汽船的垄断，虽然这项垄断权是国会授予加勒比河运公司的，为期九十九年零一天。叔叔抗议说：“这些思想肯定都是我那位满脑子无政府主义幻想的同名人莱昂娜塞到你脑瓜里的。”但他只说对了一半。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨是以德国海军准将胡安·B·埃尔勃斯为前车之鉴，此人无节制的野心毁掉了他出众的智慧。可叔叔却认为埃尔勃斯的失败并非因为他的特权，而是因为他同时做出了太多不切实际的承诺，就好像要把全国土地的责任都扛在肩上：他包揽了河流的通航、港口设施、陆地的交通枢纽和交通工具。除此之外，叔叔接着说，西蒙·玻利瓦尔总统的强烈反对也是不容小觑的障碍。
“I am almost one hundred years old, and I have seen everything change, even the position of the stars in the universe, but I have not seen anything change yet in this country,” he would say. “Here they make new constitutions, new laws, new wars every three months, but we are still in colonial times.”
“我就快满一百岁了，我看到一切都在变，就连宇宙中星辰的位置都在变，可就是没看到这个国家有什么改变。”他说，“这里每隔三个月就会有新的宪法，新的法律，新的战争，但我们仍旧处在殖民时期。”
Most of his business associates viewed those disputes as if they were matrimonial arguments, in which both parties are right. The old man’s obstinacy seemed natural to them, not because, as it was too easy to say, old age had made him less visionary than he had always been, but because renouncing the monopoly must have seemed to him like throwing away the victories of a historic battle that he and his brothers had waged unaided, back in heroic times, against powerful adversaries from all over the world. Which is why no one opposed him when he kept so tight a hold on his rights that no one could touch them before their legal expiration. But suddenly, when Florentino Ariza had already surrendered his weapons during those meditative afternoons on the plantation, Uncle Leo XII agreed to renounce the centenarian privilege, on the one honorable condition that it not take place before his death.
大部分股东把这种争论视作“公说公有理，婆说婆有理”的事。老头儿的固执在他们看来是很自然的，倒不是因为像大家随口常说的那样，衰老使他不如当初那么高瞻远瞩了，而是因为放弃垄断对他来说，无异于把他的兄弟们在一场历史性的战役中缴获来的战利品扔进垃圾堆，那可是他们在英雄时代赤手空拳跟整个世界的强大对手作战得来的。因此，他大权在握的时候，谁都没有反对过，而且他握得那么紧，谁也不可能在它们合法消亡前触动它们。然而，突然有一天，就在弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨已经预备在庄园下午的讨论中缴械投降时，莱昂十二叔叔同意放弃百年的特权，唯一一个有关荣誉的附加条件就是不要在他死前这样做。
It was his final act. He did not speak of business again, he did not even allow anyone to consult with him, he did not lose a single ringlet from his splendid imperial head or an iota of his lucidity, but he did everything possible to keep anyone from seeing him who might pity him. He passed the days in contemplation of the perpetual snows from his terrace, rocking slowly in a Viennese rocker next to a table where the servants always kept a pot of black coffee hot for him, along with a glass of water with boric acid that contained two plates of false teeth, which he no longer used except to receive visitors. He saw very few friends, and he would speak only of a past so remote that it antedated river navigation. But he still had one new topic of conversation left: his desire that Florentino Ariza marry. He expressed his wish to him several times, and always in the same way:
这是他对公司最后的指示。他从此再也不提生意上的事，甚至不允许别人向他求教。他那头具有皇家风范的漂亮鬈发没有掉下一绺，他的睿智也没有减弱分毫，但他竭尽一切努力不让任何可能同情他的人见到他。他坐在露台上那把缓缓摇动的维也纳摇椅中，看着山顶终年的积雪，打发时日。旁边的小桌上放着女仆随时为他更替的一壶热黑咖啡和一杯小苏打水，里面浸着两副假牙，他在接待客人时才戴上。他只见很少的几位朋友，而且只和他们谈内河航运开始以前很久的遥远往事。不过，他也有一个新的话题：希望弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨结婚。他对他说起过好几次，而且总是以同样的方式。
Six months later, by unanimous agreement, Florentino Ariza was named President of the Board of Directors and General Manager of the company. After the champagne toast on the day he took over the post, the old lion in retirement excused himself for speaking without getting up from the rocker, and he improvised a brief speech that seemed more like an elegy. He said that his life had begun and ended with two providential events. The first was that The Liberator had carried him in his arms in the village of Turbaco when he was making his ill-fated journey toward death. The other had been finding, despite all the obstacles that destiny had interposed, a successor worthy of the company. At last, trying to undramatize the drama, he concluded:
六个月后，经股东们一致同意，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨被任命为公司的董事长兼总经理。他就职那天，喝过香槟酒之后，引退的老雄狮请求大家原谅他坐在摇椅上说话，然后即兴发表了一段简短的讲话，但与其说那是演讲，倒不如说是一曲为自己写的挽歌。他说，他这一生由两件上天安排的事开始和结束。一是解放者在奔赴死亡的不幸旅途中，曾在图尔瓦科镇抢过他。二是他扫清了命运给他设置的所有障碍，终于找到一个配得上他公司的继承人。最后，为了使这幕剧少一点戏剧性，他总结说：
“If I were fifty years younger,” he would say, “I would marry my namesake Leona. I cannot imagine a better wife.”
“如果我年轻五十岁，”他说，“我就和我的同名人莱昂娜结婚。我想象不出还有比她更好的妻子。”
Florentino Ariza trembled at the idea of his labor of so many years being frustrated at the last moment by this unforeseen circumstance. He would have preferred to renounce everything, throw it all away, die, rather than fail Fermina Daza. Fortunately, Uncle Leo XII did not insist. When he turned ninety-two, he recognized his nephew as sole heir and retired from the company.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨一想到自己多年来的努力很可能因为这个意想不到的状况在最后关头功亏一篑，不禁浑身发抖。他宁愿放弃一切、丢开一切，宁愿死，也不愿有负于费尔明娜·达萨。幸而莱昂十二叔叔没有坚持。满九十二岁时，他指定侄子为自己唯一的继承人，进而最终退出了公司。
It goes without saying that to close the ceremony he sang the “addio alla vita” from Tosca. He sang it a capella, which was the style he preferred, in a voice that was still steady. Florentino Ariza was moved, but he showed it only in the slight tremor in his voice as he expressed his thanks. In just the same way that he had done and thought everything he had done and thought in life, he had scaled the heights only because of his fierce determination to be alive and in good health at the moment he would fulfill his destiny in the shadow of Fermina Daza.
典礼结束时，他理所当然地高歌了一曲，唱的是《托斯卡》中的咏叹调《向生命告别》。清唱，没有伴奏，就像他最喜欢的那样，而他的声音依旧坚定有力。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨十分感动，但只在他道谢时微微颤抖的声音中显露出这一点。他已经完成了生活中所有能想和能做的事，到达了人生的巅峰，而这一切都源自那个刻骨铭心的决心，那就是要活着，健康地活着，直到自己的命运得到费尔明娜·达萨庇护的那一刻。
“The only frustration I carry away from this life is that of singing at so many funerals except my own.”
“我这一生唯一的憾事，就是我在那么多葬礼上唱过歌，却不能为自己的葬礼唱一回。”
However, it was not her memory alone that accompanied him to the party Leona Cassiani gave for him that night. The memory of them all was with him: those who slept in the cemeteries, thinking of him through the roses he planted over them, as well as those who still laid their heads on the pillow where their husbands slept, their horns golden in the moonlight. Deprived of one, he wanted to be with them all at the same time, which is what he always wanted whenever he was fearful. For even during his most difficult times and at his worst moments, he had maintained some link, no matter how weak, with his countless lovers of so many years: he always kept track of their lives.
尽管如此，在莱昂娜·卡西亚尼为他举办的晚会上，陪伴他的并不只是对费尔明娜·达萨的回忆，而是对所有女人的回忆：既有那些已经在墓地里长眠的女人，她们透过他种在她们坟上的玫瑰思念着他；也有那些仍和丈夫同枕共眠的女人，她们丈夫头上的犄角[4]在月光下闪着金光。只因缺少那一个女人，他便希望同时和所有女人在一起，事实是，每当他感到恐惧惊慌，他便格外地需要她们。因此，即使在他最艰难的时期，最糟糕的时刻，他也始终和这许多年来数不清的情人们保持着哪怕最微弱的联系：他始终追随着她们的踪迹。（注：[4] 西班牙语中，称一个男人头上长犄角，暗指其妻子不忠。）
And so that night he remembered Rosalba, the very first one, who had carried off the prize of his virginity and whose memory was still as painful as it had been the first day. He had only to close his eyes to see her in her muslin dress and her hat with the long silk ribbons, rocking her child’s cage on the deck of the boat. Several times in the course of the numerous years of his life he had been ready to set out in search of her, without knowing where, or her last name, or if she was the one he was looking for, but certain of finding her somewhere among groves of orchids. Each time, because of a real difficulty at the last minute or because of an ill-timed failure of his own will, his trip was postponed just as they were about to raise the gangplank: always for a reason that had something to do with Fermina Daza.
就这样，那天晚上他想起了罗萨尔芭，他最早的情人，那个把他的童贞当作战利品带走的女人。对她的记忆依旧像当初第一天那样让他痛心。他只要一合上眼，就看见她穿着麦斯林纱裙，戴着长绸带的帽子，在甲板上摇着装孩子的鸟笼。多年来，他曾好几次收拾好一切准备去找她，尽管既不知道她在哪里，也不知道她姓什么，甚至不知道要找的人究竟是不是她，但他确信能在兰花丛中的某个地方找到她。每一次，都是在船即将撤掉踏板的最后一刻，由于某种现实原因，或是他一念间的动摇，旅行又被推迟了：永远都是某个与费尔明娜·达萨有关的理由。
He remembered the Widow Nazaret, the only one with whom he had profaned his mother’s house on the Street of Windows, although it had been Tránsito Ariza and not he who had asked her in. He was more understanding of her than of any of the others, because she was the only one who radiated enough tenderness to compensate for Fermina Daza despite her sluggishness in bed. But she had the inclinations of an alleycat, which were more indomitable than the strength of her tenderness, and this meant that both of them were condemned to infidelity. Still, they continued to be intermittent lovers for almost thirty years, thanks to their musketeers” motto: Unfaithful but not disloyal. She was also the only one for whom Florentino Ariza assumed any responsibility: when he heard that she had died and was going to a pauper’s grave, he buried her at his own expense and was the only mourner at the funeral.
他想起了拿撒勒的寡妇，唯一亵渎过他母亲在窗户街的家的女人，虽然当初并不是他，而是特兰西多·阿里萨自己敞开门让她进去的。尽管她在床第间表现不佳，但他对她的理解比对其他任何女人都多，因为她是唯一一个温柔得可与费尔明娜·达萨相比的人。但她那难以驯服的野猫秉性，更甚于她那股温柔的力量，这使得他们注定无法忠于对方。然而，他们仍在将近三十年的时间里保持了断断续续的情人关系，这还得感谢他们信守的那句火枪手的座右铭：可以不忠，但不可背信弃义。此外，她还是弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨唯一为之出头露面的女人：当他得知她已去世，需要靠施舍下葬时，他出钱安葬了她，并独自出席了葬礼。
He remembered Ángeles Alfaro, the most ephemeral and best loved of them all, who came for six months to teach string instruments at the Music School and who spent moonlit nights with him on the flat roof of her house, as naked as the day she was born, playing the most beautiful suites in all music on a cello whose voice became human between her golden thighs. From the first moonlit night, both of them broke their hearts in the fierce love of inexperience. But Ángeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner’s cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs was a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival. With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.” He wept copious tears at the grief of parting. But as soon as the ship had disappeared over the horizon, the memory of Fermina Daza once again occupied all his space.
他想起了安赫莱斯·阿尔法洛。她的出现虽然短暂，却是所有女人中最让他喜欢的。她来本市是为了在音乐学校教六个月的弦乐课。在月光皎洁的夜晚，她像初来到这世上时一样赤裸着身子，和他一起坐在她家的屋顶天台上，用大提琴拉起一组最美的旋律，琴声在她金色的大腿间变成了男人的声音。从第一个月夜开始，他们就像如狼似虎的新手一般做爱，撕心裂肺。但是，安赫莱斯·阿尔法洛终于像来时一样走了，带着她女性的温柔和那把淫荡的大提琴，乘一艘挂着遗忘之旗的远洋轮船一去不返。在月光下的天台上，她唯一留下的是一个挥着白手绢告别的姿势，那手绢仿似一只地平线上的孤凄白鸽，如花会上的诗句中描写的一样。和她在一起时，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨学会了一件他其实已在无意中多次体验过的事：可以同时爱上几个人，并带着同样的痛苦爱着她们所有人，不背叛其中任何一个。他孤身一人置于码头的人群中，突然发狠似的对自己说：“人心的房间比婊子旅馆里的客房还多。”告别的痛苦使他热泪盈眶。然而，轮船才刚消失在地平线上，对费尔明娜·达萨的思念又占据了他全部的空间。
He remembered other widows he had loved. He remembered Prudencia Pitre, the oldest of those still alive, who was known to everyone as the Widow of Two because she had outlived both her husbands. And the other Prudencia, the Widow Arellano, the amorous one, who would rip the buttons from his clothes so that he would have to stay in her house while she sewed them back on. And Josefa, the Widow Zúñiga, mad with love for him, who was ready to cut off his penis with gardening shears while he slept, so that he would belong to no one else even if he could not belong to her.
他也想起了他爱过的其他寡妇。普鲁登西娅·皮特雷，他的情人中尚活在世上最老的一位，人们都叫她“二夫寡妇”，因为她曾两次守寡。还有另一个普鲁登西娅，阿雷利亚诺的遗孀，一个多情的女人。她扯下他衣服上的扣子，只为了让他在她家里多留一会儿，等她重新缝上。他还想起了何塞法，苏尼加的遗孀，她疯狂地爱他，即便不能让他属于自己，也不愿让他属于别人，差点儿在他睡梦中用修枝的大剪刀把他那陀螺似的玩意儿剪掉。
He remembered Andrea Varón, outside whose house he had spent the previous week, but the orange light in the bathroom had been a warning that he could not go in: someone had arrived before him. Someone: man or woman, because Andrea Varón did not hesitate over such details when it came to the follies of love. Of all those on the list, she was the only one who earned a living with her body, but she did so at her pleasure and without a business manager. In her day she had enjoyed a legendary career as a clandestine courtesan who deserved her nom de guerre, Our Lady of Everybody. She drove governors and admirals mad, she watched eminent heroes of arms and letters who were not as illustrious as they believed, and even some who were, as they wept on her shoulder. It was true, however, that President Rafael Reyes, after only a hurried half hour between appointments in the city, granted her a lifetime pension for distinguished service to the Ministry of Finance, where she had never worked a day of her life. She distributed her gifts of pleasure as far as her body could reach, and although her indecent conduct was public knowledge, no one could have made a definitive case against her, because her eminent accomplices gave her the same protection they gave themselves, knowing that they had more to lose in a scandal than she did. For her sake Florentino Ariza had violated his sacred principle of never paying, and she had violated he rs of never doing it free of charge, even with her husband. They had agreed upon a symbolic fee of one peso, which she did not take and he did not hand to her, but which they put in the piggy bank until enough of them had accumulated to buy something charming from overseas in the Arcade of the Scribes. It was she who attributed a distinctive sensuality to the enemas he used for his crises of constipation, who convinced him to share them with her, and they took them together in the course of their mad afternoons as they tried to create even more love within their love.
他想起了安德雷娅·瓦隆。上一个星期他都是在她家门前度过的，但浴室窗子里透出的橙黄色灯光提醒他不能进去：已经有人捷足先登。有人，但不知是男是女，因为安德雷娅·瓦隆的爱混乱不堪，她并不在意这类细枝末节。在他名单上的所有女人中，她是唯一一个靠出卖肉体为生的，但她随心所欲地掌管着自己的身体，并没有老鸨。在最好的年景里，她曾做出一番传奇的地下交际花事业，无愧于她在战时获得的封号：大众圣母。她曾使省长和海军上将为之倾倒，也曾有些军界要人和文化名流趴在她肩头哭泣，他们个个都自认为卓荦不凡，有些的确如此，但有些却名不副实。不过，有一件事倒千真万确，拉法埃尔·雷耶斯总统曾在访问本城期间，利用两场会晤的间歇，用匆匆半小时授予了她一份终身抚恤金，以表彰她对财政部所做出的卓越贡献，虽然她并未在那里工作过一天。她在力所能及的范围内，将自己的欢愉当作礼品分发给众人。她的不检点行为确实众所周知，但谁也无法拿出不利于她的确凿证据来，因为她那些身份显赫的同谋们像保护自己性命一样保护着她，他们知道一旦出现丑闻，损失最为惨重的将是他们，而不是她。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨为她亵渎了自己不付钱的神圣原则，她也为他破了自己连丈夫也不免费的老规矩。他们以象征性的价钱成交，一次只收一比索，但她不亲手接，他也不亲手给，而是把钱放在一个小猪存钱罐里，攒够一定数量后，就拿到“代笔人门廊”去随便买一件别致的外国小玩意儿。正是她使得他在便秘时期使用灌肠剂时有了不同的快感，并说服了他与她分享灌肠剂，在他们疯狂的下午时光一起使用，试图在爱之中创造出更多的爱来。
He considered it a stroke of good fortune that among so many hazardous encounters, the only woman who had made him taste a drop of bitterness was the sinuous Sara Noriega, who ended her days in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum, reciting senile verses of such outrageous obscenity that they were forced to isolate her so that she would not drive the rest of the madwomen crazy. However, when he took over complete responsibility for the R. C. C., he no longer had much time or desire to attempt to replace Fermina Daza with anyone else: he knew that she was irreplaceable. Little by little he had fallen into the routine of visiting the ones who were already established, sleeping with them for as long as they pleased him, for as long as he could, for as long as they lived. On the Pentecost Sunday when Juvenal Urbino died, he had only one left, only one, who had just turned fourteen and had everything that no one else until then had had to make him mad with love.
在这许许多多的冒险幽会中，他认为唯有一个女人让他幸运地尝到了一滴苦涩的滋味，那就是令人难以捉摸的萨拉·诺列加。她在圣牧羊女疯人院里结束了自己的一生，整日不停地背诵淫秽的旧诗句，以至于人们不得不把她隔离，以免她让其他疯女人更疯。然而，当弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨接管了CFC的全部重任后，就没有太多时间，也没有太多心情去找人代替费尔明娜·达萨了：他知道，她是不可取代的。渐渐地，他落入了常规，只去看那些他已经结交的女人，只要她们还能为他提供欢愉，只要他还有能力，只要她们还活着，他就和她们做·爱。而到圣神降临节的那个星期日，胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生去世的时候，他已经只剩下一个情妇了，只有一个。她刚刚年满十四岁，具备一切能令弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨爱得发狂的特质，这是到那时为止其他任何女人都没能做到的。
Her name was América Vicuña. She had arrived two years before from the fishing village of Puerto Padre, entrusted by her family to Florentino Ariza as her guardian and recognized blood relative. They had sent her with a government scholarship to study secondary education, with her petate and her little tin trunk as small as a doll’s, and from the moment she walked off the boat, with her high white shoes and her golden braid, he had the awful presentiment that they were going to take many Sunday siestas together. She was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees, but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse. For her it was immediate: the doors of heaven opened to her. All at once she burst into flower, which left her floating in a limbo of happiness and which motivated her studies, for she was always at the head of her class so that she would not lose the privilege of going out on weekends. For him it was the most sheltered inlet in the cove of his old age. After so many years of calculated loves, the mild pleasure of innocence had the charm of a restorative perversion.
她叫阿美利加·维库尼亚，两年前从父亲港的海滨来到这里。她的家人请求弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨当她的校外监护人，并称二人间有亲戚关系。家里人送她来时，她身上带着一份供她接受高等师范教育的政府奖学金，还有铺盖卷和一只像洋娃娃用的马口铁皮小箱。从她穿着白色短靴、扎着金色辫子从船上走下来的那一刻起，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨就强烈地预感到，他们将在一起度过无数个星期日午后的小憩时光。不论从哪个角度看，她都还是个孩子，锯齿般的牙齿，膝盖像小学生的那样光滑，但他即刻就隐约地预见到她将很快成为哪一种女人。在漫长的一年中，他为自己精心地培育着她，星期六带她去看马戏，星期日带她去公园，吃冰激凌，伴她度过一个个童年般纯真的黄昏，赢得了她的信任和喜爱。他以慈祥祖父般的温和，狡诈地牵着她的手，逐渐把她领向自己的地下屠场。对她来说，这一切都是在顷刻间发生的：天堂的大门为她敞开了。花蕾瞬时绽放，令她漂浮于幸福的净界之中。这对她的学业是一种有效激励，为了不失去周末离校的机会，她始终保持着班上第一名的成绩。而对他来说，这是他暮年港湾中最温暖的角落。在这么多年一次次精心算计的爱情之后，天真无邪的生涩味道别有一番新鲜的堕落的快乐。
They were in full agreement. She behaved like what she was, a girl ready to learn about life under the guidance of a venerable old man who was not shocked by anything, and he chose to behave like what he had most feared being in his life: a senile lover. He never identified her with the young Fermina Daza despite a resemblance that was more than casual and was not based only on their age, their school uniform, their braid, their untamed walk, and even their haughty and unpredictable character. Moreover, the idea of replacement, which had been so effective an inducement for his mendicancy of love, had been completely erased from his mind. He liked her for what she was, and he came to love her for what she was, in a fever of crepuscular delights. She was the only one with whom he took drastic precautions against accidental pregnancy. After half a dozen encounters, there was no dream for either of them except their Sunday afternoons.
两人契合之极。她表现的就是她本来的样子，一个在一位饱经风霜、对一切司空见惯的可敬男人的引领下，准备好去了解生活的姑娘；而他则有意识地扮演起他原本最怕成为的角色：一位年老的恋人。他从没有把她和费尔明娜·达萨比较过，尽管两人的相似之处一目了然，不止是年龄、校服、发辫和欢快奔放的走路方式，就连那高傲任性的性格都十分相像。更有甚者，曾经爱情于他最大的诱·惑便是找到一个费尔明娜·达萨的替代品，可如今这想法竟被彻底地抹掉了。他喜欢她本来的样子，而且最终，他怀着一份人到暮年的狂热欢欣，爱上了她本来的样子。她是唯一一个他倍加小心地防止其受孕的女人。幽会了六次以后，对两人来说，都再没有任何美梦可以和星期日的下午相比。
Since he was the only person authorized to take her out of the boarding school, he would call for her in the six-cylinder Hudson that belonged to the R. C. C., and sometimes they would lower the top if the afternoon, was not sunny and drive along the beach, he with his somber hat and she, weak with laughter, holding the sailor hat of her school uniform with both hands so that the wind would not blow it off. Someone had told her not to spend more time with her guardian than necessary, not to eat anything he had tasted, and not to put her face too close to his, for old age was contagious. But she did not care. They were both indifferent to what people might think of them because their family kinship was well known, and what is more, the extreme difference in their ages placed them beyond all suspicion.
他是唯一有权把她从寄宿学校里接出来的人。他坐着CFC的六缸哈德逊汽车去找她。有时，在没有太阳的下午，他便降下车篷带她去海滩兜风。他戴着他那顶忧郁的帽子，她则笑得前仰后合，用两只手护住与校服配套的水手帽，以免它被风吹跑。有人跟她说，除非必要，否则不要跟她的校外监护人走在一起，不要吃他尝过的任何东西，也不要离他的呼吸太近，因为衰老是会传染的。可她毫不在乎。两人全然不理会别人的眼光，毕竟，他们的亲戚关系尽人皆知，更何况年龄相差甚远，这让他们避免了一切猜疑。
They had just made love on Pentecost Sunday when the bells began to toll at four o’clock. Florentino Ariza had to overcome the wild beating of his heart. In his youth, the ritual of the tolling bells had been included in the price of the funeral and was denied only to the indigent. But after our last war, just at the turn of the century, the Conservative regime consolidated its colonial customs, and funeral rites became so expensive that only the wealthiest could pay for them. When Archbishop Dante de Luna died, bells all over the province tolled unceasingly for nine days and nine nights, and the public suffering was so great that his successor reserved the tolling of bells for the funeral services of the most illustrious of the dead. Therefore, when Florentino Ariza heard the Cathedral bells at four o’clock in the afternoon on a Pentecost Sunday, he felt as if he had been visited by a ghost from his lost youth. He never imagined they were the bells he had so longed to hear for so many years, ever since the Sunday when he saw Fermina Daza in her sixth month of pregnancy as she was leaving High Mass.
圣神降临节的那个星期日，下午四点，丧钟敲响的时候，他们刚刚做完爱。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨不得不竭力压制内心的惊慌。在他年轻的时候，丧钟仪式是包含在葬礼的价格中的，只有那些一贫如洗的人才会负担不起。但在最近的一次战争之后，保守党政府在世纪之交巩固了殖民时期的习俗，葬礼变得极其昂贵，只有最富有的人才付得起费用。大主教但丁·德鲁纳死的时候，全省的钟没有停歇地敲了整整九天九夜，公众惊恐万分，以至于他的继任者把丧钟仪式从葬礼中单列出来，只有最显赫的死者才有权享受。所以，当弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨在圣神降临节的下午四点听见大教堂响起丧钟时，他仿佛觉得早已逝去的青年时期的幽灵又来拜访他了。他完全没有想到，这竟是自从在大弥撒的出口处看见怀有六个月身孕的费尔明娜·达萨的那个星期日起，多年以来他一直满心期待的丧钟。
“Damn, ” he said in the darkness. “It must be a very big fish for them to ring the Cathedral bells.”
“见鬼！”他在昏暗中说道，“肯定是哪条大鱼，才会让大教堂敲起丧钟来。”
América Vicuña, completely naked, had just awakened.
全身赤裸的阿美利加·维库尼亚刚刚醒来。
Florentino Ariza was in no way expert in matters pertaining to the Church, and he had not gone to Mass again since he had played the violin in the choir with a German who also taught him the science of the telegraph and about whose fate he had never been able to obtain any definite news. But he knew beyond any doubt that the bells were not ringing for Pentecost. There was public mourning in the city, that was certain, and that is what he knew. A delegation of Caribbean refugees had come to his house that morning to inform him that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour had been found dead in his photography studio. Although Florentino Ariza was not an intimate friend of his, he was close to many other refugees who always invited him to their public ceremonies, above all to their funerals. But he was sure that the bells were not tolling for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, who was a militant unbeliever and a committed anarchist and who had, moreover, died by his own hand.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨对教堂的事务丝毫也不在行，自从跟一个教他拉小提琴的德国人一起在唱诗班拉过一段时间琴之后，他便再也没去望过弥撒。那个德国人还教给他发电报的学问，但关于他的去向，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨没有得到过任何确切的消息。不过，他确信无疑，这钟声不是为圣神降临而敲响的。他知道，城中确实有一场葬礼。那天早上，一个加勒比流亡者委员会的代表到他家，通知他赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔清晨在自己的工作室里去世了。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨虽然与他交情不深，却跟其他很多加勒比流亡者是朋友，常被邀请去参加他们的公共活动，尤其是葬礼。但他敢肯定，丧钟不是为赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔而敲的，他是个不信教的军人，还是个顽固的无政府主义者，更何况，他是自杀的。
“It must be for Pentecost,” she said.
“应该是因为圣神降临吧。”她说。
América Vicuña, her pale body dappled by the light coming in through the carelessly drawn blinds, was not of an age to think about death. They had made love after lunch and they were lying together at the end of their siesta, both of them naked under the ceiling fan, whose humming could not hide the sound like falling hail that the buzzards made as they walked across the hot tin roof. Florentino Ariza loved her as he had loved so many other casual women in his long life, but he loved her with more anguish than any other, because he was certain he would be dead by the time she finished secondary school.
阳光从没有关严的百叶窗里照进来，阿美利加·维库尼亚苍白的身体上映出一道道虎皮似的斑纹。她还远没有到能够想到死亡的年龄。午饭后，他们做了爱，此时正处在午睡后似醒非醒的昏沉中，两人赤裸着身体，躺在叶式吊扇下，吊扇的嗡嗡声并不足以掩盖那一只只在晒得滚烫的锌皮屋顶上走动的兀鹫噼里啪啦的脚步声。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨爱她，就像爱其他偶然出现在他漫长生命中的女人，但对她的爱却带有更多的辛酸，因为他确信，等她从高等学校毕业，他早已衰老而死。
“No,” he said, “tolling like that must be for a governor at least.”
“不！”他说，“这样的丧钟只可能是为省长以上的人物敲的。”
The room resembled a ship’s cabin, its walls made of wooden laths covered by many coats of paint, as were the walls of boats, but at four o’clock in the afternoon, even with the electric fan hanging over the bed, the heat was more intense than in the riverboat cabins because it reflected off the metal roof. It was not so much a formal bedroom as a cabin on dry land, which Florentino Ariza had built behind his office in the R. C. C. with no other purpose or pretext than to have a nice little refuge for his old man’s loves. On ordinary days it was difficult to sleep there, with the shouts of the stevedores, and the noise of the cranes from the river harbor, and the enormous bellowing of the ships moored at the dock. For the girl, however, it was a Sunday paradise.
这个房间更像船上的一个舱室，墙壁上嵌的木板条也给人轮船的感觉，一层层地刷过很多次漆。尽管床上方挂着吊扇，但下午四点时，由于金属屋顶的反射，这里比河道上的船舱要热得多。与其说这是间正式的卧室，不如说是间陆地舱室，是弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨命人在他的CFC办公室后面建的，没有别的目的和借口，不过就是为了给他的暮年爱情提供一个不错的巢穴。平日里，码头工人吵吵闹闹，河道港口的吊车震耳欲聋，轮船的汽笛声也响彻云霄，在这里很难睡得着觉。但对阿美利加·维库尼亚来说，这里是星期日的天堂。
The offices were closed and dark because of the holiday, and at the deserted dock there was only one ship, its boilers damped. The sultry weather presaged the first rains of the year, but the transparent air and the Sunday silence in the harbor seemed to belong to a more benevolent month. The world was harsher here than in the shadowy cabin, and the bells caused greater grief, even if one did not know for whom the y tolled. Florentino Ariza and the girl went down to the patio of saltpeter, which the Spaniards had used as a port for blacks and where there were still the remains of weights and other rusted irons from the slave trade. The automobile was waiting for the m in the shade of the warehouses, and they did not awaken the driver, asleep with his head on the steering wheel, until they were settled in their seats. The automobile turned around behind the warehouses enclosed by chicken wire, crossed the area of the old market on Las Ánimas Bay, where near-naked adults were playing ball, and drove out of the river harbor in a burning cloud of dust. Florentino Ariza was sure that the funerary honors could not be for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, but the insistent tolling filled him with doubts. He put his hand on the driver’s shoulder and asked him, shouting into his ear, for whom the bells tolled.
因为是假日，办公室的门都关着，漆黑一片。空无一人的码头上只停着一艘锅炉已经熄灭的船。天气闷热，预示着今年的又一场雨就要降临，然而，此刻空气纯净，加之星期日的港口格外宁静，这一切又似乎使人觉得这是个温和的月份。比起昏暗的舱室，这外部的世界更加酷热难耐，丧钟也更让人悲伤，虽然还是不知它为谁而鸣。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨和女孩走下台阶，来到遍地硝石的院中，这里原是西班牙人贩卖黑奴的港口，至今仍留有磅秤的残件，以及现已生锈的曾在奴隶交易中使用的各种铁器。汽车正在仓库的阴凉处候着，他们在座位上坐好之后，才把伏在方向盘上睡着了的司机叫醒。车从鸡笼式铁丝网围着的仓库后面绕了一圈，然后穿过灵魂湾老市场的空地。那里有几个几乎全裸的成年人在玩球。在一阵飞扬的灼热尘土中，汽车驶出了内河港口。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨十分肯定丧钟不是为赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔而敲，但这一直响个不停的钟声让他心中疑惑。他把手搭在司机肩上，在他耳边大声问丧钟是为谁敲的。
They had planned to be together on Pentecost until she had to return to school, five minutes before the Angelus, but the tolling of the bells reminded Florentino Ariza of his promise to attend the funeral of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, and he dressed with more haste than usual. First, as always, he plaited her single braid that he himself had loosened before they made love, and he sat her on the table to tie the bow on her school shoes, which was something she never did well. He helped her without malice, and she helped him to help her, as if it were an obligation: after their first encounters they had both lost awareness of their ages, and they treated each other with the familiarity of a husband and wife who had hidden so many things in this life that there was almost nothing left for them to say to each other.
圣神降临节那天，他们本想一起待到她必须回寄宿学校的时候，也就是《三钟经》祈祷前的五分钟，但丧钟让弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨突然想起他许诺过去参加赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的葬礼，于是他比平时更快地穿好衣服。而在此之前，他像往常一样，先给女孩编好做爱前他亲手散开的辫子，然后把她抱到桌上，为她系上校鞋的鞋带，她自己总是系不好。他毫无邪念地帮她，而她也配合他完成这些事，就好像是一种义务：从最早的幽会起，两人便都失去了对年龄的意识，互相信任，就像一对一生中互相隐瞒了太多事情，以至于彼此间已无话可说的夫妻。
All that Florentino Ariza had done since Fermina Daza’s marriage had been based on his hope for this event. But now that it had come, he did not feel the thrill of triumph he had imagined so often in his sleeplessness. Instead, he was seized by terror: the fantastic realization that it could just as well have been himself for whom the death knell was tolling. Sitting beside him in the automobile that jolted along the cobbled streets, América Vicuña was frightened by his pallor, and she asked him what was the matter. Florentino Ariza grasped her hand with his icy one.
从费尔明娜·达萨结婚时起，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨所做的一切都只是基于同一个希望，那就是有朝一日能听到这个消息。然而，这个时刻终于来临，他却并不像他在无数个不眠之夜中预见的那样，因胜利的激动而颤抖万分，相反，他颤抖是因为被一种恐惧感所包围：他以某种令人难以置信的清醒意识到，如果他死了，丧钟也会这样为他而敲。汽车在石子路上颠簸，坐在他旁边的阿美利加·维库尼亚被他苍白的脸色吓坏了，问他出了什么事。弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨用自己冰冷的手握住了她的手。
Florentino Ariza did not have to wonder who that was. Nevertheless, when the driver told him how he had died, his instantaneous hope vanished because he could not believe what he heard. Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies, and no death could resemble the man he was thinking about less than this one. But it was he, although it seemed absurd: the oldest and best-qualified doctor in the city, and one of its illustrious men for many other meritorious reasons, had died of a broken spine, at the age of eighty-one, when he fell from the branch of a mango tree as he tried to catch a parrot.
弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨不用想就明白司机说的是谁。可当司机告诉他医生是怎么死的，他瞬间涌起的希望就又破灭了，因为他觉得那不像是真的。通常，一个人的死法最能彰显其为人，可没有什么比这样的死法与他想象中的那个人更不相称了。尽管看起来荒唐，但那的确就是他：本城最高寿、医术也最高明的医生，此外，还由于其他诸多功绩，位列本城最杰出的人士之一。他八十一岁，试图去捉一只鹦鹉，结果从芒果树杈上摔下来，跌断脊椎而亡。
“It’s for that doctor with the goatee,” said the driver. “What’s his name?”
“是那个医生，留山羊胡子的那个。”司机说，“他叫什么名字来着？”
“Oh, my dear,” he sighed, “I would need another fifty years to tell you about it.”
“唉，我的孩子，”他叹了口气，“我得再活五十年才能把这一切讲给你听。”
He forgot Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s funeral. He left the girl at the door of the school with a hurried promise that he would come back for her the following Saturday, and he told the driver to take him to the house of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He was confronted by an uproar of automobiles and hired carriages in the surrounding streets and a multitude of curious onlookers outside the house. The guests of Dr. Lácides Olivella, who had received the bad news at the height of the celebration, came rushing in. It was not easy to move inside the house because of the crowd, but Florentino Ariza managed to make his way to the master bedroom, peered on tiptoe over the groups of people blocking the door, and saw Juvenal Urbino in the conjugal bed as he had wanted to see him since he had first heard of him — wallowing in the indignity of death. The carpenter had just taken his measurements for the coffin, and at his side, still wearing the dress of a newly-wed grandmother that she had put on for the party, Fermina Daza was introspective and dejected.
他忘记了赫雷米亚·德圣阿莫尔的葬礼。他把女孩放在了寄宿学校的大门口，匆忙向她允诺说下星期六再来接她。接着，他便命令司机送他到胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺医生家里去。他在附近的街道上看到蜂拥而至的汽车和出租马车，房前也站满了看热闹的人。拉希德斯·奥利维利亚医生的宾客们在庆祝宴会的高潮时忽闻噩耗，乱哄哄地赶了过来。家里被挤得水泄不通，挪动一下都不容易，但弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨愣是挤出了一条道来，走到主卧室门前。他踮起脚尖，从堵在门口的一群人的头顶望去，只见胡维纳尔·乌尔比诺躺在双人床上，正在蹚过屈辱的死亡之潭，就像弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨从第一次听说他起，就希望看到的样子。木匠刚刚为棺材量过尺寸。在他身旁，费尔明娜·达萨还穿着为参加午宴而换上的如同新婚老妇似的衣服，若有所思，神色黯然。
Florentino Ariza had imagined that moment down to the last detail since the days of his youth when he had devoted himself completely to the cause of his reckless love. For her sake he had won fame and fortune without too much concern for his methods, for her sake he had cared for his health and personal appearance with a rigor that did not seem very manly to other men of his time, and he had waited for this day as no one else could have waited for anything or anyone in this world: without an instant of discouragement. The proof that death had at last interceded on his behalf filled him with the courage he needed to repeat his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love to Fermina Daza on her first night of widowhood.
自从青年时代就完全献身于这项胆大妄为的爱情事业以来，弗洛伦蒂诺·阿里萨连这一刻最微小的细节都预想到了。为了她，他不太计较手段地得到了名誉和财富，为了她，他细心保护着自己的健康和外表，其严谨程度会让同时代的其他男人觉得缺乏男子气。在这个世界上，没有任何一个人能为了什么人或事物像他这样等待：片刻也不曾气馁。终于证实了乌尔比诺医生的死，这为他注入了足够的勇气，在费尔明娜·达萨成为寡妇的第一个晚上，他便向她重申了他永恒的忠诚和不渝的爱情。
He did not deny the accusations of his conscience that it had been a thoughtless and inappropriate act, one he had rushed into for fear that the opportunity would never be repeated. He would have preferred something less brutal, something in the manner he had so often imagined, but fate had given him no choice. He left the house of mourning, full of sorrow at leaving her in the same state of upheaval in which he found himself, but there was nothing he could have done to prevent it because he felt that this barbarous night had been forever inscribed in both their destinies.
他心里并不否认，那是个轻率的举动，丝毫没有顾及时间和方式，但他如此匆忙是因为害怕机会失去就永不再来。他真心希望能以一种不这么莽撞的方式，而且他也的确曾设想过很多种可能，但命运不容他有别的选择。他从那个服丧的家里走出来，内心痛苦万分，因为他把她留在了和自己一样的激动状态之中。但同时他又无能为力，无法阻止事情发生，因为他感觉到，这个残酷的夜晚是从一开始就铭刻在两人命运之中的。
For the next two weeks he did not sleep through a single night. He asked himself in despair where Fermina Daza could be without him, what she could be thinking, what she would do, in the years of life remaining to her, with the burden of consternation he had left in her hands. He suffered a crisis of constipation that swelled his belly like a drum, and he had to resort to remedies less pleasant than enemas. The complaints of old age, which he endured better than his contemporaries because he had known them since his youth, all attacked at the same time. On Wednesday he appeared at the office after a week at home, and Leona Cassiani was horrified at seeing him so pale and enervated. But he reassured her: it was insomnia again, as always, and once more he bit his tongue to keep the truth from pouring out through the bleeding wounds in his heart. The rain did not allow him a moment of sun to think in. He spent another unreal week unable to concentrate on anything, eating badly and sleeping worse, trying to find the secret signs that would show him the road to salvation. But on Friday he was invaded by an unreasoning calm, which he interpreted as an omen that nothing new was going to happen, that everything he had done in his life had been in vain, that he could not go on: it was the end. On Monday, however, when he returned to his house on the Street of Windows, he discovered a letter floating in a puddle inside the entrance, and on the wet envelope he recognized at once the imperious handwriting that so many changes in life had not changed, and he even thought he could detect the nocturnal perfume of withered gardenias, because after the initial shock, his heart told him everything: it was the letter he had been waiting for, without a moment’s respite, for over half a century.
在接下来的两个星期里，他没有睡过一夜安稳觉。他不断绝望地问自己，没有他在身边的费尔明娜·达萨会在哪里，在想些什么，他把这样一个沉重的负担交到她手中，在余下的岁月里她会怎么做。他遭受了便秘的折磨，肚子胀得像一面鼓，不得不求助于缓和剂，这可并不比灌肠剂舒服。和新的疾病相比，他更能忍受这些老毛病，因为从年轻时起他就了解它们了。可此时，所有的老毛病却一齐向他袭来。休息一周之后，星期三他出现在办公室里。莱昂娜·卡西亚尼看到他竟苍白和邋遢到如此地步，不禁大惊失色。但他让她平静下来：不过是像平时一样，又失眠了。他再一次咬紧牙关，才没有让真相从他伤痕累累的心中滑落出来。大雨天，没有一丝阳光好让他静心思考。他在恍惚中又度过了一个星期，干什么都无法集中精神，吃不好，睡得更糟，一心寻找能给他指明获救之路的标记。但从星期五开始，一种平和的心境无缘无故地征服了他，他把这理解为一个征兆，预示着不再会发生什么新的事情了，他一生所做的一切努力都是徒劳，而且没有理由再继续下去：一切都已走到尽头。然而星期一，他回到窗户街的家中，竟发现有一封信漂在门厅的积水里。他立即认出了湿漉漉的信封上那高傲不屈的字体，生活中的无数波澜并没能改变它。他甚至相信自己闻到了凋谢的栀子花的夜间芬芳，因为在惊喜的第一瞬间，他的心就把一切告诉了他：这就是半个多世纪以来，他一刻也无法平静地等待的，那封信。
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