1、GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia in 1928, but he has lived most of his life in Mexico and Europe. He attended the University of Bogot and later worked as staff reporter and film critic for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. In addition to ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. he h
2、as also written two collections of short fiction, NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL and LEAF STORM (both available in Bard editions). Garca Mrquez currently lives with his wife and children in Barcelona. Other Avon Bard Books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH IN EVIL HOUR Avon Books a
3、re available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions, premiums, fund raising or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs. For details write or telephone the office of the Director of Special Markets, Avon Books, Dept. F
4、P, 105 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016, 212-481-5653. ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY GREGORY RABASSA AVON BOOKS NEW YORK This book was first published in Argentina in 1967 by Editorial Sudamericana, S.A., Buenos Aires, under the title Cie
5、n Aos de Soledad. Assistance for the translation of this volume was given by the Center for Inter-American Relations. AVON BOOKS A division of The Hearst Corporation 105 Madison Avenue New York, New York 10016 English translation 1970 by Harper by a messenger who crossed the mountains, got lost in m
6、easureless swamps, forded stormy rivers, and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair, plague, and wild beasts until he found a route that joined the one used by the mules that carried the mail. In spite of the fact that a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at that ti
7、me, Jos Arcadio Buenda promised to undertake it as soon as the government ordered him to so that he could put on some practical demonstrations of his invention for the military authorities and could train them himself in the complicated art of solar war. For several years he waited for an answer. Fi
8、nally, tired of waiting, he bemoaned to Melquades the failure of his project and the gypsy then gave him a convincing proof of his honesty: he gave him back the doubloons in exchange for the magnifying glass, and he left him in addition some Portuguese maps and several instruments of navigation. In
9、his own handwriting he set down a concise synthesis of the studies by Monk Hermann. which he left Jos Arcadio so that he would be able to make use of the astrolabe, the compass, and the sextant. Jos Arcadio Buenda spent the long months of the rainy season shut up in a small room that he had built in
10、 the rear of the house so that no one would disturb his experiments. Having completely abandoned his domestic obligations, he spent entire nights in the courtyard watching the course of the stars and he almost contracted sunstroke from trying to establish an exact method to ascertain noon. When he b
11、ecame an expert in the use and manipulation of his instruments, he conceived a notion of space that allowed him to navigate across unknown seas, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study. That was the period in which he acquir
12、ed the habit of talking to himself, of walking through the house without paying attention to anyone, as rsula and the children broke their backs in the garden, growing banana and caladium, cassava and yams, ahuyama roots and eggplants. Suddenly, without warning, his feverish activity was interrupted
13、 and was replaced by a kind of fascination. He spent several days as if he were bewitched, softly repeating to himself a string of fearful conjectures without giving credit to his own understanding. Finally, one Tuesday in December, at lunchtime, all at once he released the whole weight of his torme
14、nt. The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wrath of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: “The earth is round, like an orange.” rsula lost her patience. “If you have to go crazy, pl
15、ease go crazy all by yourself!” she shouted. “But dont try to put your gypsy ideas into the heads of the children.” Jos Arcadio Buenda, impassive, did not let himself be frightened by the desperation of his wife, who, in a seizure of rage, mashed the astrolabe against the floor. He built another one
16、, he gathered the men of the village in his little room, and he demonstrated to them, with theories that none of them could understand, the possibility of returning to where one had set out by consistently sailing east. The whole village was convinced that Jos Arcadio Buenda had lost his reason, whe
17、n Melquades returned to set things straight. He gave public praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure astronomical speculation had evolved a theory that had already been proved in practice, although unknown in Macondo until then, and as a proof of his admiration he made him a gift that was t
18、o have a profound influence on the future of the village: the laboratory of an alchemist. By then Melquades had aged with surprising rapidity. On his first trips he seemed to be the same age as Jos Arcadio Buenda. But while the latter had preserved his extraordinary strength, which permitted him to
19、pull down a horse by grabbing its ears, the gypsy seemed to have been worn dowse by some tenacious illness. It was, in reality, the result of multiple and rare diseases contracted on his innumerable trips around the world. According to what he himself said as he spoke to Jos Arcadio Buenda while hel
20、ping him set up the laboratory, death followed him everywhere, sniffing at the cuffs of his pants, but never deciding to give him the final clutch of its claws. He was a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind. He had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Mal
21、ayan archipelago, leprosy in Alexandria, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, and a disastrous shipwreck in the Strait of Magellan. That prodigious creature, said to possess the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look
22、that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with widespread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of the centuries had skated. But in spite of his immense wisdom and his mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an ea
23、rthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life. He would complain of the ailments of old age, he suffered from the most insignificant economic difficulties, and he had stopped laughing a long time back because scurvy had made his teeth drop out. On that suffocating noonti
24、me when the gypsy revealed his secrets, Jos Arcadio Buenda had the certainty that it was the beginning of a great friendship. The children were startled by his fantastic stories. Aureliano, who could not have been more than five at the time, would remember him for the rest of his life as he saw him
25、that afternoon, sitting against the metallic and quivering light from the window, lighting up with his deep organ voice the darkest reaches of the imagination, while down over his temples there flowed the grease that was being melted by the heat. Jos Arcadio, his older brother, would pass on that wo
26、nderful image as a hereditary memory to all of his descendants. rsula on the other hand, held a bad memory of that visit, for she had entered the room just as Melquades had carelessly broken a flask of bichloride of mercury. “Its the smell of the devil,” she said. “Not at all,” Melquades corrected h
27、er. “It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate.” Always didactic, he went into a learned exposition of the diabolical properties of cinnabar, but rsula paid no attention to him, although she took the children off to pray. That biting odo
28、r would stay forever in her mind linked to the memory of Melquades. The rudimentary laboratoryin addition to a profusion of pots, funnels, retorts, filters, and sieveswas made up of a primitive water pipe, a glass beaker with a long, thin neck, a reproduction of the philosophers egg, and a still the
29、 gypsies themselves had built in accordance with modern descriptions of the three-armed alembic of Mary the Jew. Along with those items, Melquades left samples of the seven metals that corresponded to the seven planets, the formulas of Moses and Zosimus for doubling the quantity of gold, and a set o
30、f notes and sketches concerning the processes of the Great Teaching that would permit those who could interpret them to undertake the manufacture of the philosophers stone. Seduced by the simplicity of the formulas to double the quantity of gold, Jos Arcadio Buenda paid court to rsula for several we
31、eks so that she would let him dig up her colonial coins and increase them by as many times as it was possible to subdivide mercury. rsula gave in, as always, to her husbands unyielding obstinacy. Then Jos Arcadio Buenda threw three doubloons into a pan and fused them with copper filings, orpiment, b
32、rimstone, and lead. He put it all to boil in a pot of castor oil until he got a thick and pestilential syrup which was more like common caramel than valuable gold. In risky and desperate processes of distillation, melted with the seven planetary metals, mixed with hermetic mercury and vitriol of Cyp
33、rus, and put back to cook in hog fat for lack of any radish oil, rsulas precious inheritance was reduced to a large piece of burnt hog cracklings that was firmly stuck to the bottom of the pot. When the gypsies came back, rsula had turned the whole population of the village against them. But curiosi
34、ty was greater than fear, for that time the gypsies went about the town making a deafening noise with all manner of musical instruments while a hawker announced the exhibition of the most fabulous discovery of the Naciancenes. So that everyone went to the tent and by paying one cent they saw a youth
35、ful Melquades, recovered, unwrinkled, with a new and flashing set of teeth. Those who remembered his gums that had been destroyed by scurvy, his flaccid cheeks, and his withered lips trembled with fear at the final proof of the gypsys supernatural power. The fear turned into panic when Melquades too
36、k out his teeth, intact, encased in their gums, and showed them to the audience for an instanta fleeting instant in which he went back to being the same decrepit man of years pastand put them back again and smiled once more with the full control of his restored youth. Even Jos Arcadio Buenda himself
37、 considered that Melquades knowledge had reached unbearable extremes, but he felt a healthy excitement when the gypsy explained to him atone the workings of his false teeth. It seemed so simple and so prodigious at the same time that overnight he lost all interest in his experiments in alchemy. He u
38、nderwent a new crisis of bad humor. He did not go back to eating regularly, and he would spend the day walking through the house. “Incredible things are happening in the world,” he said to rsula. “Right there across the river there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like do
39、nkeys.” Those who had known him since the foundation of Macondo were startled at how much he had changed under Melquades influence. At first Jos Arcadio Buenda had been a kind of youthful patriarch who would give instructions for planting and advice for the raising of children and animals, and who c
40、ollaborated with everyone, even in the physical work, for the welfare of the community. Since his house from the very first had been the best in the village, the others had been built in its image and likeness. It had a small, well-lighted living roost, a dining room in the shape of a terrace with g
41、aily colored flowers, two bedrooms, a courtyard with a gigantic chestnut tree, a well kept garden, and a corral where goats, pigs, and hens lived in peaceful communion. The only animals that were prohibited, not just in his house but in the entire settlement, were fighting cocks. rsulas capacity for
42、 work was the same as that of her husband. Active, small, severe, that woman of unbreakable nerves who at no moment in her life had been heard to sing seemed to be everywhere, from dawn until quite late at night, always pursued by the soft whispering of her stiff, starched petticoats. Thanks to her
43、the floors of tamped earth, the unwhitewashed mud walls, the rustic, wooden furniture they had built themselves were always dean, and the old chests where they kept their clothes exhaled the warm smell of basil. Jos Arcadio Buenda, who was the most enterprising man ever to be seen in the village, ha
44、d set up the placement of the houses in such a way that from all of them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort, and he had lined up the streets with such good sense that no house got more sun than another during the hot time of day. Within a few years Macondo was a village th
45、at was more orderly and hard working than any known until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died. Since the time of its founding, Jos Arcadio Buenda had built traps and cages. In a short time he filled n
46、ot only his own house but all of those in the village with troupials, canaries, bee eaters, and redbreasts. The concert of so many different birds became so disturbing that rsula would plug her ears with beeswax so as not to lose her sense of reality. The first time that Melquades tribe arrived, sel
47、ling glass balls for headaches, everyone was surprised that they had been able to find that village lost in the drowsiness of the swamp, and the gypsies confessed that they had found their way by the song of the birds. That spirit of social initiative disappeared in a short time, pulled away by the
48、fever of the magnets, the astronomical calculations, the dreams of transmutation, and the urge to discover the wonders of the world. From a clean and active man, Jos Arcadio Buenda changed into a man lazy in appearance, careless in his dress, with a wild beard that rsula managed to trim with great e
49、ffort and a kitchen knife. There were many who considered him the victim of some strange spell. But even those most convinced of his madness left work and family to follow him when he brought out his tools to clear the land and asked the assembled group to open a way that would put Macondo in contact with the great inventions. Jos Arcadio Buenda was completely ignorant of the geography of the region. He knew that to the east there lay an impenetrable mountain chain and that on the other side of the mountains there
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