《渺小一生》:当然，他知道这种羡慕很荒谬

　 “I don’t mean to offend you, Willem,” Kit had said, carefully. “I know you love him. But come on. If he were the love of your life, I’d understand. But this seems extreme to me, to inhibit your career like this.”

“威廉，我不想惹你生气，”基特小心翼翼地说，“我知道你爱他。但是拜托，如果他是你毕生的至爱，那我还能理解。但是你这样为自己的事业设限，我觉得好像太极端了。”

　 And yet he sometimes wondered if he could ever love anyone as much as he loved Jude. It was the fact of him, of course, but also the utter comfort of life with him, of having someone who had known him for so long and who could be relied upon to always take him as exactly who he was on that particular day. His work, his very life, was one of disguises and charades. Everything about him and his context was constantly changing: his hair, his body, where he would sleep that night. He often felt he was made of something liquid, something that was being continually poured from bright-colored bottle to bright-colored bottle, with a little being lost or left behind with each transfer. But his friendship with Jude made him feel that there was something real and immutable about who he was, that despite his life of guises, there was something elemental about him, something that Jude saw even when he could not, as if Jude’s very witness of him made him real.

他有时也很好奇，不知道自己爱其他人时能否像爱裘德那么深。当然，这是因为裘德这个人，也是因为跟裘德在一起那种全然的自在感，他们认识了这么久，他相信裘德永远可以看清当下的他。他的工作、他的生活，全是伪装和演戏。有关他的一切、他所处的的环境时常在改变，包括他的头发、他的身体、他当天晚上要睡的地方。他常常觉得自己是液体做成的，不断被从一个色彩鲜艳的瓶子倒进另一个色彩鲜艳的瓶子，每换一次瓶就会流失一点色彩。但他和裘德的友谊让他觉得自己的身份中有种永远不变的、真实的东西。尽管他的生活有种种伪装，但裘德可以看清连他自己都看不出来的本质，仿佛裘德的见证才让他这个人真实存在。

　 In graduate school he’d had a teacher who had told him that the best actors are the most boring people. A strong sense of self was detrimental, because an actor had to let the self disappear; he had to let himself be subsumed by a character. “If you want to be a personality, be a pop star,” his teacher had said.

读研究生时，有个老师曾告诉他，最好的演员也最无趣。太强烈的自我意识是有害的，因为一个演员必须让自我消失，以便融入角色。“如果你想当个名人，那就去当歌星吧。”他的老师这么说。

　 He had understood the wisdom of this, and still did, but really, the self was what they all craved, because the more you acted, the further and further you drifted from who you thought you were, and the harder and harder it was to find your way back. Was it any wonder that so many of his peers were such wrecks? They made their money, their lives, their identities by impersonating others—was it a surprise, then, that they needed one set, one stage after the next, to give their lives shape? Without them, what and who were they? And so they took up religions, and girlfriends, and causes to give them something that could be their own: they never slept, they never stopped, they were terrified to be alone, to have to ask themselves who they were. (“When an actor talks and there’s no one to hear him, is he still an actor?” his friend Roman had once asked. He sometimes wondered.)

他明白其中的道理，至今依然，但其实，他们人人都渴望有自我，因为你演得越多，就越远离你以为的那个自己，也更难找到回头的路。难怪他有这么多同行都损伤严重。他们借着模仿他人赚钱、建立生活、找到定位——那么还用得着惊讶他们需要不停地寻找一个拍片现场、一个舞台，好让生活有个重心吗？没了这些拍片现场或舞台，他们的定位和身份何在？所以他们会信教，交女朋友，投入公益活动，好从中得到一些自己的东西。他们从不睡觉，从不停下来，也害怕独处，害怕要问自己我是谁（“当一个演员讲话但没人听到时，他还算是演员吗？”他的朋友罗曼有一回这么提问。他自己有时也会纳闷）。

　 But to Jude, he wasn’t an actor: he was his friend, and that identity supplanted everything else. It was a role he had inhabited for so long that it had become, indelibly, who he was. To Jude, he was no more primarily an actor than Jude was primarily a lawyer—it was never the first or second or third way that either of them would describe the other. It was Jude who remembered who he had been before he had made a life pretending to be other people: someone with a brother, someone with parents, someone to whom everything and everyone seemed so impressive and beguiling. He knew other actors who didn’t want anyone to remember them as they’d been, as someone so determined to be someone else, but he wasn’t that person. He wanted to be reminded of who he was; he wanted to be around someone for whom his career would never be the most interesting thing about him.

但是对裘德来说，他不是演员，他是他的朋友，而这个身份取代了其他一切。他担任朋友这个角色太久了，已经成为他这个人不可磨灭的一部分。对裘德而言，他的首要身份不是演员，就像裘德的首要身份不是律师一样，他们要描述彼此的第一个或第二个或第三个特点，都绝对不是演员或律师。裘德记得他以假扮他人为生之前，是个什么样的人：他有个哥哥，有父母，没见过什么世面，看到什么都觉得很厉害，看到什么人都觉得很迷人。他知道有些演员不希望任何人记得他们过去是什么样的，但他不是那种人。他希望被提醒自己过去是什么样；他希望身边有这么一个人，对这个人来说，他的演员事业永远不是他最值得一提的事情。

　 And if he was to be honest, he loved what came with Jude as well: Harold and Julia. Jude’s adoption had been the first time he had ever felt envious of anything Jude had. He admired a lot of what Jude had—his intelligence and thoughtfulness and resourcefulness—but he had never been jealous of him. But watching Harold and Julia with him, watching how they watched him even when he wasn’t looking at them, he had felt a kind of emptiness: he was parentless, and while most of the time he didn’t think about this at all, he felt that, for as remote as his parents had been, they had at least been something that had anchored him to his life. Without any family, he was a scrap of paper floating through the air, being picked up and tossed aloft with every gust. He and Jude had been united in this.

而且老实说，他也很喜欢裘德身边的人：哈罗德和朱丽娅。裘德被收养使他头一次羡慕裘德所拥有的东西。他在很多方面上佩服裘德（他的聪慧、思虑缜密和机智），但从来没嫉妒过。看着哈罗德、朱丽娅跟裘德在一起，看着他们观察裘德的样子，他感到一种空虚：他的父母过世了，尽管大部分时间他很少想到这一点，却不禁想到父母在世时，即使那么疏远，他们至少是他生活中一股稳定的力量。现在没了家人，他就像一张飘在空中的纸，随着每阵风飘向不同的方向。他和裘德本来就有这个共通点。

　 Of course, he knew this envy was ridiculous, and beyond mean: he had grown up with parents, and Jude hadn’t. And he knew that Harold and Julia felt an affection for him as well, as much as he did for them. They had both seen every one of his films, and both sent him long and detailed reviews of them, always praising his performance and making intelligent comments about his costars and the cinematography. (The only one they had never seen—or at least never commented on—was The Prince of Cinnamon, which was the film he had been shooting when Jude had tried to kill himself. He had never seen it himself.) They read every article about him—like his reviews, he avoided these articles—and bought a copy of every magazine that featured him. On his birthday, they would call and ask him what he was going to do to celebrate, and Harold would remind him of how old he was getting. At Christmas, they always sent him something—a book, along with a jokey little gift, or a clever toy that he would keep in his pocket to fiddle with as he talked on the phone or sat in the makeup chair. At Thanksgiving, he and Harold would sit in the living room watching the game, while Julia kept Jude company in the kitchen.

当然，他知道这种羡慕很荒谬，而且太不厚道了。他从小有父母，裘德却没有。而且他知道哈罗德和朱丽娅很喜欢他，就像他也喜欢他们那样。他们夫妻看过他的每一部电影，而且两个人都会写长信仔细评论，总是对他的表现赞美有加，而且会针对合演的明星和整部电影发表睿智的评语（他们唯一没看过的，或至少没提过的是《肉桂王子》，就是裘德企图自杀时他正在拍摄的那部电影。他自己也始终没看过）。他们阅读每一篇关于他的报道，比如他向来避开的评论，而且每本有他特写报道的杂志他们都会买来看。每年他的生日前，他们会打电话问他打算怎么过，哈罗德还会提醒他要满几岁了。到了圣诞节他们总会送他礼物，比如一本书，加上一个幽默的小礼物，或是可以放在口袋里的巧妙小玩具，让他讲电话或坐在片厂化妆时可以把玩。感恩节时，他和哈罗德会坐在客厅里看球赛，朱丽娅则在厨房忙碌。

　 “We’re running low on chips,” Harold would say.

“薯片快吃完了。”哈罗德会说。

　 “I know,” he’d say.

“我知道。”他会说。

　 “Why don’t you go get more?” Harold would say.

“你再去拿一点吧？”哈罗德会说。

　 “You’re the host,” he’d remind Harold.“You’re the guest.”

“你是主人哦。”他会提醒哈罗德。“你是客人哦。”

　 “Yeah, exactly.”

“是啊，一点也没错。”

　 “Call Jude and get him to bring us more.”

“叫裘德帮我们拿一点过来。”

　 “You call him!”

“你去叫！”

　 “No, you call him.”

“不，你去叫。”

　 “Fine,” he’d say. “Jude! Harold wants more chips!”

“好。”他会说，“裘德！哈罗德还要薯片！”

　 “You’re such a confabulator, Willem,” Harold would say, as Jude came in to refill the bowl. “Jude, this was completely Willem’s idea.”

“威廉，你真会胡说八道。”等到裘德拿薯片进来时，哈罗德会说，“裘德，这完全是威廉的主意。”

　 But mostly, he knew that Harold and Julia loved him because he loved Jude; he knew they trusted him to take care of Jude—that was who he was to them, and he didn’t mind it. He was proud of it.

最重要的是，他知道哈罗德和朱丽娅爱他是因为他爱裘德；他知道他们相信他会照顾裘德——他对他们的意义就是如此。他不介意，甚至引以为荣。

　 Lately, however, he had been feeling differently about Jude, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. They had been sitting on the sofa late one Friday night—he just home from the theater, Jude just home from the office—and talking, talking about nothing in particular, when he had almost leaned over and kissed him. But he had stopped himself, and the moment had passed. But since then, he had been revisited by that impulse again: twice, three times, four times.

但总之，最近他对裘德的感觉不太一样了，他不确定该怎么办。有个星期五晚上，很晚了，他刚从剧院回来，裘德也刚下班。两人坐在沙发上聊天，没有什么特定的主题，他差点靠过去吻裘德。但他忍住了，捱过那一刻。但从此以后，他就一再冒出那样的冲动：两次、三次、四次。

　 It was beginning to worry him. Not because Jude was a man: he’d had sex with men before, everyone he knew had, and in college, he and JB had drunkenly made out one night out of boredom and curiosity (an experience that had been, to their mutual relief, entirely unsatisfying: “It’s really interesting how someone so good-looking can be such a turnoff,” had been JB’s exact words to him). And not because he hadn’t always felt a sort of low-key hum of attraction for Jude, the way he felt for more or less all his friends. It was because he knew that if he tried anything, he would have to be certain about it, because he sensed, powerfully, that Jude, who was casual about nothing, certainly wouldn’t be casual about sex.

这让他开始担心了。不是因为裘德是男人，他跟男人也有过接触，每个他认识的人都有过类似经验。上大学时，他和杰比有天晚上喝醉，就出于无聊和好奇亲热过（结果两个人都松了口气，觉得完全没劲。“真的很有趣，没想到一个长得这么好看的人，这么让人倒胃口。”当时杰比这么跟他说）；也不是因为他以前从没察觉到裘德对自己有吸引力——其实所有的好友多少都对他有种淡淡的吸引力——而是因为他知道一旦自己想尝试什么，就得非常确定，因为他强烈感觉到，像裘德这样凡事认真的人，对感情也不可能随便。