《渺小一生》:这两年，病痛太常拜访他们了
He nodded, barely. “Of course,” he said, just as quietly. This was always how their own trip on the Camino was supposed to end: with a train ride south to visit the Alhambra. And over the years, even as he knew their walk would never happen, he had never gone to the Alhambra, had never taken a day at the end of one shoot or another and come, because he was waiting for Jude to do it with him.
他勉强点点头。“当然记得。”他说，同样小声。这里向来是他们梦想中圣雅各布之路朝圣之旅结束的地点：搭上往南的火车，去拜访阿尔罕布拉宫。多年来，即使他知道他们这趟步行之旅永远不可能实现，但他始终没去过阿尔罕布拉宫，从来没在拍摄完毕后花一天时间去一趟，因为他等着裘德跟他一起去。
“One of my clients,” Jude said, before he could ask. “You defend someone, and their godfather turns out to be the Spanish minister of culture, who lets you make a generous donation to the Alhambra’s maintenance fund for the privilege of seeing it alone.” He grinned at Willem. “I told you I’d do something for your fiftieth—albeit a year and a half later.” He placed his hand on Willem’s arm. “Willem, don’t cry.”
“是我的一个客户。”裘德在他开口问之前就说，“你帮某个人辩护，结果他的教父是西班牙文化部长，他让你捐一大笔钱给阿尔罕布拉宫的维修基金会，就可以换来单独参观的特权。”他朝威廉咧嘴笑。“我说过我会帮你庆祝50岁生日的——虽然已经是一年半之后。”他把手放在威廉的胳膊上，“威廉，别哭。”
“I’m not going to,” he said. “I can do other things in life besides cry, you know,” although he was no longer sure that was even true.
“我不会哭的。”他说，“你知道，除了哭之外，我的人生还有别的事情可以做。”虽然他已经不确定这话是不是真的了。
He opened the envelope that Jude handed him, and inside there was a package, and he undid the ribbon and tore the paper away and found a handmade book, organized by chapters—“The Alcazaba”; “The Lion Palace”; “The Gardens”; “Generalife”—each with pages of handwritten notes by Malcolm, who had written his thesis on the Alhambra and who had visited it every year since he was nine. Between each chapter was a drawing of one of the complex’s details—a jasmine bush blooming with small white flowers, a stone façade stippled with cobalt tilework—tipped into the pages, each dedicated to him and signed by someone they knew: Richard; JB; India; Asian Henry Young; Ali. Now he really did begin to cry, smiling and crying, until Jude told him that they had better get moving, that they couldn’t spend their entire time at the entryway, crying, and he grabbed him and kissed him, not caring about the silent, black-clad guards behind them. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
他打开裘德递给他的那个信封，里头是一个小包裹，他拆开外头的丝带和包装纸，发现是一本手工书，分章编排——《阿尔卡萨瓦堡》《狮子宫》《庭园》《建筑师花园》。每一章都有马尔科姆的手写笔记，他的学位论文就是写阿尔罕布拉宫，而且从他9岁开始，每年都会造访。每一章之间，都穿插着一幅宫内的手绘细节图——一丛盛开着白色小花的茉莉，一片由精细的钴蓝彩瓷砖拼贴而成的岩石建筑物正面，都是他们认识的艺术家朋友绘制、题献给他的，包括了理查德、杰比、印蒂亚、亚裔亨利·杨、阿里。现在他真的哭了，又哭又笑，直到裘德说他们最好开始参观，总不能把所有时间都浪费在门口哭。他抓住裘德吻了他，也不管身后那几位穿黑衣的沉默警卫。“谢谢你，”他说，“谢谢你，谢谢你，谢谢你。”
Off they moved through the silent night, Jude’s flashlight bouncing a line of light before them. Into palaces they walked, where the marble was so old that the structure appeared to be carved from soft white butter, and into reception halls with vaulted ceilings so high that birds arced soundlessly through the space, and with windows so symmetrical and perfectly placed that the room was bright with moonlight. As they walked, they stopped to consult Malcolm’s notes, to examine details they would have missed had they not been alerted to them, to realize that they were standing in the room where, a thousand years ago, more, a sultan would have dictated his correspondence. They studied the illustrations, matching the images to what they saw before them. Facing each of their friends’ drawings was a note each had written explaining when they had first seen the Alhambra, and why they had chosen to draw what they had. They had that feeling, the same one they had often had as young men, that everyone they knew had seen so much of the world and that they hadn’t, and although they knew this was no longer true, they still felt that same sense of awe at their friends’ lives, at how much they had done and experienced, at how well they knew to appreciate it, at how talented they were at recording it. In the gardens of the Generalife section, they walked into a room that had been cut into a labyrinth hedgerow of cypresses, and he began to kiss Jude, more insistently than he had allowed himself to do in a long time, even though they could hear, faintly, one of the guard’s shoes tapping along the stone walkway.
于是他们在静寂的夜晚往前走，裘德的手电筒在两人之间照出一道光。他们走过一个个宫殿，那些大理石年代久远，像是用柔软的白奶油雕刻而成；走过一个个接待厅，上头的拱顶好高，鸟儿在其间无声地飞过，还有对称完美的窗子，被月光照得一片明亮。他们走到一半，停下来参考马尔科姆的笔记，检视他们本来会错过的种种细节，这才发现眼前所在的房间，一千多年前曾有一个苏丹王在这口述信件。他们审视手工书上的插图，跟眼前的景象对照。他们的朋友绘制的每幅图画旁边的跨页，是一段手写的文字，解释他们第一次看见阿尔罕布拉宫是什么时候，还有他们为什么选择画这一部分。此刻，他们两个人又有年轻时常有的那种感觉，就是他们认识的每个人都去过好多地方，他们却没有。尽管他们知道现在不是这样了，还是体验到和当年同样的那种敬畏，敬畏这些朋友的生活，敬畏他们的成就和经验，也敬畏他们多么懂得欣赏，又拥有记录下来的才华。在建筑师花园那部分的庭园里，他们走进一个以柏树构成的迷宫树篱，他开始吻裘德，好久以来没有那么急切了，即使他们隐约听到警卫沿着石头走廊而行的脚步声。
Back in the hotel room they continued, and he heard himself thinking that in the movie version of this night, they would be having sex now, and he was almost, almost about to say this out loud, when he remembered himself, and stopped, pulling back from Jude as he did. But it was as if he had spoken anyway, because for a while they were silent, staring at each other, and then Jude said, quietly, “Willem, we can if you want to.”
回到饭店房间里，他们继续拥吻，他不觉间想着，在电影里的这一夜，他们现在就会做爱了。接着他差点、差点就要说出口，随即忽然醒悟，停下来往后退开。但感觉上，仿佛他还是说出来了，因为两人沉默了好一会儿，凝视着彼此。然后裘德低声说：“威廉，如果你想要的话，我们可以的。”
“Do you want to?” he asked, finally.
“那你想要吗？”最后他终于问。
“Sure,” Jude said, but Willem could tell, by the way he had looked down and the slight catch in his voice, that he was lying.
“当然。”裘德说，但从他低头的动作和声音里微微的紧绷，威廉看得出来他在撒谎。
For a second he thought he would pretend, that he would allow himself to be convinced that Jude was telling him the truth. But he couldn’t. And so “No,” he said, and rolled off of him. “I think this has been enough excitement for one evening.” Next to him, he heard Jude exhale, and as he fell asleep, heard him whisper, “I’m sorry, Willem,” and he tried to tell Jude that he understood, but by this time he was more unconscious than not and couldn’t speak the words.
有一秒钟，他想着自己就假装下去吧，假装自己相信裘德说的是实话。但他没办法。于是，“不，”他说，翻身从他旁边退开，“我想今天晚上兴奋的事情已经够多了。”在他旁边，他听到裘德吐出一口气，就在他睡着时，听到裘德低声说：“对不起，威廉。”他想告诉裘德他了解，但此时他已经昏睡过去，说不出话来了。
But that was that period’s only sadness, and the source of their sadnesses were different: For Jude, he knew, the sadness rose from a sense of failure, a certainty—one Willem was never able to displace—that he wasn’t fulfilling his obligations. For him, the sadness was for Jude himself. Occasionally Willem allowed himself to wonder what Jude’s life would have been like if sex had been something he had been left to discover, rather than forced to learn—but it was not a helpful line of thought, and it made him too upset. And so he tried not to consider it. But it was always there, running through their friendship, their lives, like a vein of turquoise forking through stone.
但那段时间里唯一的哀伤只有这个，而且他们哀伤的源头不一样：他知道，对裘德来说，哀伤源自一种失败的感觉（而威廉永远无法改变），因为裘德很确定自己没有尽到应尽的义务。但对他来说，他的哀伤是为了裘德自己。偶尔威廉会允许自己胡思乱想，如果性爱是裘德可以自行探索而非被迫学习的东西，不知道他的人生会是什么样。但这样想也没有用，只会害自己更心烦。于是他设法不要去想。但这个想法一直在，贯穿着他们的友谊、他们的人生，就像岩石里的一条绿松石矿脉。
In the meantime, though, there was normalcy, routine, both of which were better than sex or excitement. There was the realization that Jude had walked—slowly, but assuredly—for almost three straight hours that night. There was, back in New York, their lives, the things they used to do, resuming because Jude now had the energy to do so, because he could now stay awake through a play or an opera or a dinner, because he could climb the stairs to reach Malcolm’s front door in Cobble Hill, could walk down the pitched sidewalk to reach JB’s building in Vinegar Hill. There was the comfort of hearing Jude’s alarm blip at five thirty, of hearing him set off for his morning swim, the relief of looking into a box on the kitchen counter and seeing it was full of medical supplies—extra packets of catheter tubing and sterile gauze patches and leftover high-calorie protein drinks that Andy had only recently said Jude could stop ingesting—that Jude would return to Andy, who would donate them to the hospital. In moments he would remember how two years ago from this very date, he would come home from the theater to find Jude in bed asleep, so fragile that it seemed at times that the catheter under his shirt was actually an artery, that he was being steadily and irreversibly whittled down to only nerves and vessels and bone. Sometimes he would think of those moments and feel a sort of disorientation: Was that them, really, those people back then? Where had those people gone? Would they reappear? Or were they now other people entirely? And then he would imagine that those people weren’t so much gone as they were within them, waiting to bob back up to the surface, to reclaim their bodies and minds; they were identities now in remission, but they would always be with them.
不过同时，这段时间的常态性、例行性，两者都比性爱或兴奋更好。比如，他发现裘德那一夜缓慢但坚定地连续走了将近三个小时。比如，回到纽约之后，他们重拾过往的生活，可以做他们以前常做的事情，因为现在裘德有力气做了，他现在有办法醒着看完一出舞台剧、歌剧或吃完一顿晚餐，他有办法去科布尔山的马尔科姆家，爬上一段阶梯到前门，有办法沿着布鲁克林醋丘倾斜的人行道走到杰比住的那栋大楼前。比如，每天早晨5点半能听到裘德的闹钟响，听到他出去晨泳，让他很安心。比如，看着厨房料理台上的一个盒子装满了医疗用品，有备用的导管包、消毒纱布片和剩余的高热量蛋白饮品（安迪最近才说裘德可以不必喝了）；裘德打算拿去还安迪，再由安迪捐给医院。有时他会想起两年前的今天，他从戏院回来时会发现裘德在床上睡觉，虚弱得让人觉得他衬衫底下的导管其实是一根动脉，而他持续、不可逆地萎缩，一直到只剩神经、血管和骨头。有时他会想着这些时刻，茫然不知所措：当时那两个人真的是他们吗？那两个人去了哪里？他们还会再出现吗？或者现在的他们才是外来的？然后他会想象那两个人其实没有远离，而是躲在他们体内，会伺机跑出来，再度夺走他们的身体与心灵；那两个人是暂时蛰伏的分身，但会永远跟着他们。
Sickness had visited them recently enough so that they still remembered to be grateful for every day that passed so uneventfully, even as they grew to expect them. The first time Willem saw Jude in his wheelchair in months, saw him leave the sofa when they were watching a movie because he was having an episode and wanted to be alone, he had been disquieted, and he’d had to make himself remember that this, too, was who Jude was: he was someone whose body betrayed him, and he always would be. The surgery hadn’t changed this after all—it had changed Willem’s reaction to it. And when he realized that Jude was cutting himself again—not frequently, but regularly—he had to remind himself that, once again, this was who Jude was, and that the surgery hadn’t changed this, either.
这两年，病痛太常拜访他们了，所以他们依然记得要庆幸每一天可以如此平淡无奇地度过，他们甚至逐渐开始期待这样的状况。几个月来，威廉第一次看到裘德坐轮椅，是有一天两人看电影看到一半，裘德背痛发作离开沙发，想要独自静一静。威廉觉得非常不安，但还得逼自己想起来，这也是裘德原来的样子：他是个被身体背叛的人，永远都是。截肢手术毕竟没有改变这一点，只不过改变了威廉的反应而已。当他发现裘德又在割自己（不频繁，但是很规律），他也得再一次提醒自己，这就是裘德的老样子，那场手术也没有改变这点。
Still, “Maybe we should call these The Happy Years,” he told Jude one morning. It was February, it was snowing, and they were lying in bed, which they now did until late every Sunday morning.
然而，“也许我们该把这段时间称为‘快乐年代’。”某天早上他告诉裘德。那是二月，外头正下着雪，他们躺在床上，现在他们每个星期日早上都会赖床到很晚。
“I don’t know,” Jude said, and although he could only see the edge of his face, Willem could tell he was smiling. “Isn’t that tempting fate a little? We’ll call it that and then both of my arms will fall off. Also, that name’s taken already.”
“不知道。”裘德说。虽然只看得到他的侧脸，威廉看得出他在微笑。“这样会不会有点在挑衅命运？我们取了这个名字，然后我的两条手臂就会掉下来了。而且这个名字已经有人用了。”
And it was—it was the title of Willem’s next project, in fact, the one he would be leaving for in just a week: six weeks of rehearsals, followed by eleven weeks of filming. But it wasn’t the original title. The original title had been The Dancer on the Stage, but Kit had just told him that the producers had changed it to The Happy Years.
的确，这是威廉下一部电影的片名，他再过一个星期就要出门去工作了：排练六周，接着拍摄十一周。原来的片名不是这个，而是《舞台上的舞者》，但基特刚刚通知他，制片方已经把片名改为《快乐年代》了。
He hadn’t liked this new title. “It’s so cynical,” he told Jude, after complaining first to Kit and then to the director. “There’s something so curdled and ironic about it.” This had been a few nights ago; they had been lying on the sofa after his daily, thoroughly draining ballet class, and Jude was massaging his feet. He would be playing Rudolf Nureyev in the final years of his life, from his appointment as the ballet director of the Paris Opéra in nineteen-eighty-three, through his HIV diagnosis, and until he first noticed the symptoms of his disease, a year before he actually died.
他不喜欢这个新片名。“太挖苦了，”他告诉裘德，之前他跟基特、跟导演都抱怨过，“这个新片名有点太尖酸、太讽刺了。”这是几天前的晚上，每天的芭蕾课后，他都筋疲力尽地躺在床上，裘德正在按摩他的双脚。他将饰演人生最后几年的鲁道夫·努里耶夫[7]，从他在1983年被任命为巴黎歌剧院的芭蕾总监开始，到被诊断出艾滋病，到第一次出现艾滋病的病征，直到他死前一年。
“I know what you mean,” Jude had said after he had finally finished ranting. “But maybe they really were the happy years for him. He was free; he had a job he loved; he was mentoring young dancers; he had turned around an entire company. He was doing some of his greatest choreography. He and that Danish dancer—”
“我明白你的意思。”他终于大骂完之后，裘德这么说，“但或许对他来说，那几年真的是快乐年代。他自由了；他有热爱的工作；他指导年轻舞者，改变了整个芭蕾舞团；他交出了几件最棒的舞作。他和那个丹麦舞者……”
“Erik Bruhn.”
“埃里克·布鲁恩。”
“Right. He and Bruhn were still together, at least for a little while longer. He had experienced everything he had probably never dreamed he would have as a younger man, and he was still young enough to enjoy it all: money and renown and artistic freedom. Love. Friendship.” He dug his knuckles into Willem’s sole, and Willem winced. “That sounds like a happy life to me.”
“对。他那几年跟布鲁恩还在一起，至少又维持了一阵子。他经历了他年轻时可能从没梦想过的种种，而且他还够年轻，可以享受一切：金钱、名望、艺术的自由。爱情。友谊。”他的指节用力压着威廉的脚掌，威廉皱起脸，“我觉得，这样就是快乐人生了。”
They were both quiet for a while. “But he was sick,” Willem said, at last.
他们两个都沉默了一会儿。“可是他病了。”威廉终于说。
