Memories of My Melancholy Whores-2

Three hundred girls in white blouse with Ash Wednesday crosses on their foreheads were sewing buttons in the vast, illuminated nave. When they saw us come in they sat up straight, like schoolgirls, and watched out of the corners of their eyes as the manager explained his contributions to the ummemorial art of attaching buttons. I scrutinized each of their faces, terrified that I would discover Delgadina dressed and awake.    

看到这段的时候突然想起了小王子，如果小王子发现了一个花园种满玫瑰，他还能一眼认出那朵独一无二的吗？人在眼前时既真实又模糊，茫茫之中任什么，把一个人和一个人连结。

She sighed.Do you know something? In more half a century, this is the first time I haven't received you in bed. We're not who we were, I said. She continued without hearing me: Every time they say things about you on the radio, applaud you for the affection people feel for you, call you the maestro of love, just imagine, I think that nobody knew your charms and your manias as well as I did. I'm serious, she said, nobody could have put up with you better. I could not bear it any more. She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had. The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

Today I look back, I see the line of thousands of men who passed through my beds, and I'd give my soul to have stayed with even the worst of them. Thank God I found my Chinaman in time. It's like being married to your little finger, but he's all mine.  

老情人相见，半生情怨一笑而过。

Still, when I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus' ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another ninety years. 

也许这一句话就可以代替百年孤独了。

I went out to the street, radiant, and for the first time I could recognize myself on the remote horizon of my first century. My house, silent and in order at six-fifteen, began to enjoy the colors of a joyous dawn. Damiana was singing at the top of her voice in the kitchen, and the resusciated cat twined his tail around my ankles and continued walking with me to my writing table. I was arranging my languishing papers, the inwell, the goose quill, when the sun broke through the almond trees in the park and the river mail packet, a week late because of the drought, bellowed as it entered the canal in the port. It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any after my hundredth birthday. 

好一个温暖宜人的结尾。