《渺小一生》:他站在他们家车道的尽头
“Really?”
“真的？”
Malcolm’s persistent credulity makes him grin. “Yes,” he says. “Ready, guys?”
马尔科姆总是这么好骗，他不禁咧嘴笑。“真的，”他说，“两位准备好了吗？”
As he drives, they talk about how long it’s been since they’ve seen one another, about how glad Sophie and Malcolm are to be home, about Malcolm’s disastrous driving lessons, about how perfect the weather is, how sweet and haylike the air smells. The best summer, he thinks again.
他开车时，三个人聊着他们很久没见，聊着苏菲和马尔科姆有多高兴回到家，聊着马尔科姆学开车的悲惨状况，聊着今天的天气真完美，空气闻起来甜蜜又有干草气味。最棒的夏天，他再度想着。
It is a thirty-minute drive back to the house from the station, a little faster if he hurries, but he doesn’t hurry, because the drive itself is pretty. And when he crosses the final large intersection, he doesn’t even see the truck coming toward him, barreling into traffic against the light, and by the time he feels it, a tremendous crush crumpling the passenger-seat side of the car, where Sophie is sitting next to him, he is already aloft, being ejected into the air. “No!” he shouts, or thinks he does, and then, in an instant, he sees a flash of Jude’s face: just his face, his expression still unresolved, torn from his body and suspended against a black sky. His ears, his head, fill with the roar of pleating metal, of exploding glass, of his own useless howls.
从车站开到灯笼屋要三十分钟，赶时间的话可以更快，但他不赶时间，因为沿途风景很漂亮。当他经过最后一个大型十字路口时，他甚至没看到那辆卡车朝他而来，闯了红灯冲进车阵里，等他感觉到时，巨大的撞击压皱了副驾驶座那一侧，苏菲就坐在那里，此时他已经被弹出车外，飞在空中。“不！”他大喊，以为自己在大喊，然后刹那间，他看到裘德的脸一闪而过：只有脸，表情还不清楚，也没有身体，只有一张脸悬在一片黑色天空里。同时他的耳朵、他的头，充满了金属被压扁和玻璃爆炸的巨响，以及他自己徒劳的嚎叫。
But his final thoughts are not of Jude, but of Hemming. He sees the house he lived in as a child and, sitting in his wheelchair in the center of the lawn, just before it slopes down toward the stables, Hemming, staring at him with a steady, constant gaze, the kind he was never able to give him in life.
但他最后想到的不是裘德，而是亨明。他看到他小时候住的那栋房子，亨明坐在草坪中间的轮椅上，前方就是往马厩的斜坡。亨明用一种持续、恒定的眼光注视着他，那是他在世时从来没有过的。
He is at the end of their driveway, where the dirt road meets the asphalt, and seeing Hemming, he is overcome with longing. “Hemming!” he shouts, and then, nonsensically, “Wait for me!” And he begins to run toward his brother, so fast that after a while, he can’t even feel his feet strike the ground beneath him.
他站在他们家车道的尽头，泥土路和柏油路交会之处。他看到亨明，难以抑制心中的渴望。“亨明！”他大喊，然后荒谬地叫道，“等等我！”他开始跑向亨明，跑得太快了，才跑了一会儿，就连碰撞地面的双脚都感觉不到了。
[ VI ]
第六部分
Dear Comrade
亲爱的同志
1
1
ONE OF THE first movies Willem ever starred in was a project called Life After Death. The film was a take on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and was told from alternating perspectives and shot by two different, highly regarded directors. Willem played O., a young musician in Stockholm whose girlfriend had just died, and who had begun having delusions that when he played certain melodies, she would appear beside him. An Italian actress, Fausta, played E., O.’s deceased girlfriend.
威廉最早主演的电影中，有一部名叫《死后的生活》。电影取材自希腊神话中俄耳甫斯和欧律狄刻的故事，展现了两种不同的观点、由两位备受赞誉的导演各自拍摄。威廉饰演俄尔甫斯，是一个斯德哥尔摩的年轻音乐家。他的女朋友刚过世，在他弹奏某些乐曲时，会产生幻觉，看到女朋友出现在他身旁。一个意大利女演员福丝塔饰演俄尔甫斯刚过世的女朋友欧律狄刻。
The joke of the movie was that while O. stared and wept and mourned for his love from earth, E. was having a terrific time in hell, where she could, finally, stop behaving: stop looking after her querulous mother and her harassed father; stop listening to the whining of the clients she tried to help as a lawyer for the indigent but who never thanked her; stop indulging her self-absorbed friends’ endless patter; stop trying to cheer her sweet but perpetually morose boyfriend. Instead, she was in the underworld, a place where the food was plentiful and where the trees were always sagging with fruit, where she could make catty comments about other people without consequence, a place where she even attracted the attention of Hades himself, who was being played by a large, muscular Italian actor named Rafael.
这部电影开的玩笑，就是正当俄尔甫斯在茫然地哭泣、哀悼他的挚爱离开人世时，欧律狄刻却在地狱里过得开心极了。在那里，她终于可以不必再那么乖了：不必再照顾她挑剔的母亲和疲惫的父亲；身为公设辩护律师、尽心协助穷人的她，不必再倾听那些从来没谢过她，还发牢骚的客户；不必再纵容那些只关心自己的朋友们喋喋不休；不必再设法鼓舞那个贴心、但长期闷闷不乐的男朋友了。反之，她在食物充足、树上永远果实累累的阴间，可以毒舌地批评他人而不会引发后果。她甚至吸引了冥界之王哈迪斯的注意；哈迪斯由一个肌肉发达的大块头，意大利男演员拉斐尔饰演。
Life After Death had divided the critics. Some of them loved it: they loved how the film said so much about two different cultures’ fundamentally different approach to life itself (O.’s story was shot by a famous Swedish director in somber grays and blues; E.’s story was told by an Italian director known for his aesthetic exuberance), while at the same time offering glints of gentle self-parody; they loved its tonal shifts; they loved how tenderly, and unexpectedly, it offered solace to the living.
《死后的生活》当时引起了两极的评价。有些人爱极了：他们喜欢这部电影充分反映了在两种不同的文化中对于生活本身截然不同的取向（俄尔甫斯的故事是由一位知名的瑞典导演拍摄，充满了阴郁的灰色与蓝色调；欧律狄刻的故事则由一位素以热情奔放的美学风格著称的意大利导演拍摄），但片中同时闪现着温和的自我恶搞意味；他们喜欢片中的色调转换；他们喜欢这部电影极其温柔且意想不到地为活着的人提供了抚慰。
But others had hated it: they thought it jarring in both timbre and palette; they hated its tone of ambivalent satire; they hated the musical number that E. participates in while in hell, even as her poor O. plinks away aboveground on his chilly, spare compositions.
但也有些人很讨厌这部电影：他们认为音乐刺耳、美术刺眼；他们讨厌那种矛盾的讽刺基调；他们讨厌可怜的俄尔甫斯在人间缓缓弹奏着他凄凉、简朴的作品时，欧律狄刻在地狱中参与表演的那段歌舞场面。
But although the debate over the movie (which practically no one in the States saw, but about which everyone had an opinion) was impassioned, there was unanimity about at least one thing: the two leads, Willem Ragnarsson and Fausta San Filippo, were fantastic, and would go on to have great careers.
针对这部电影（在美国几乎没人看过，但每个人都对它有意见）的争论很热烈，但至少大家一致同意：男女主角威廉·拉格纳松和福丝塔·圣菲利波的表现太精彩了，两个人的前途大好。
Over the years, Life After Death had been reconsidered, and rethought, and reevaluated, and restudied, and by the time Willem was in his mid-forties, the movie had become officially beloved, a favorite among its directors’ oeuvres, a symbol of the kind of collaborative, irreverent, fearless, and yet playful filmmaking that far too few people seemed interested in doing any longer. Willem had been in such a diverse collection of films and plays that he had always been interested in hearing what people named as their favorite, and then reporting his findings back to Willem: the younger male partners and associates at Rosen Pritchard liked the spy movies, for example. The women liked Duets. The temps—many of them actors themselves—liked The Poisoned Apple. JB liked The Unvanquished. Richard liked The Stars Over St. James. Harold and Julia liked The Lacuna Detectives and Uncle Vanya. And film students—who had been the least shy about approaching Willem in restaurants or on the street—invariably liked Life After Death. “It’s some of Donizetti’s best work,” they’d say, confidently, or “It must’ve been amazing to be directed by Bergesson.”
之后多年，《死后的生活》被重新讨论、思考、评价、研究，等到威廉45岁左右，这部电影已经成为公认的杰作，也成为那两位导演最受喜爱的作品之一，象征着一种协力合作、没有包袱、大胆无畏又幽默的电影制作方式，现在没什么人有兴趣这样拍电影了。威廉演过太多各式各样的电影和舞台剧，裘德总是很有兴趣听人们讲出他们最喜欢的作品，再转述给威廉听。比方说，罗森·普理查德律师事务所比较年轻的男性合伙律师和普通律师喜欢他的“间谍三部曲”。女性则喜欢《二重唱》。临时雇员（其中许多也是演员）喜欢《毒苹果》。杰比喜欢《不败者》。理查德喜欢《星光下的圣雅各布》。哈罗德和朱丽娅喜欢《空隙侦探》和《凡尼亚舅舅》。而学电影的学生则一致喜欢《死后的生活》，在餐厅里或大街上，他们是最勇于上前跟威廉攀谈的。“那是多尼采蒂最棒的作品。”他们信心十足地说，或者“能跟博格森导演合作，一定棒呆了”。
Willem had always been polite. “I agree,” he’d say, and the film student would beam. “It was. It was amazing.”
威廉总是很有礼貌。“我同意。”他会这样说，那个电影学生则满面笑容，“真的，真的很棒。”
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Life After Death, and one day in February he steps outside to find that Willem’s thirty-three-year-old face has been plastered across the sides of buildings, on the backs of bus-stop shelters, in Warholian multiples along long stretches of scaffolding. It is a Saturday, and although he has been intending to take a walk, he instead turns around and retreats upstairs, where he lies down in bed again and closes his eyes until he falls asleep once more. On Monday, he sits in the back of the car as Mr. Ahmed drives him up Sixth Avenue, and after he sees the first poster, wheat-pasted onto the window of an empty storefront, he shuts his eyes and keeps them shut until he feels the car stop and hears Mr. Ahmed announce that they are at the office.
今年是《死后的生活》上映二十周年。二月的某一天，他走出公寓楼下大门，发现威廉33岁的脸被贴在巴士站后方建筑物的临时支架上，仿照安迪·沃霍尔的绢印版画风格，重复地贴了一大片。那是星期六，他本来想去散步，结果却转身上楼，回床上躺着，闭上眼睛，直到再度入睡。星期一，艾哈迈德先生开车载他去第六大道上班。他坐在后座，看到一张海报贴在一间空店面的橱窗上，就闭上眼睛不再睁开，直到他感觉车子停下，听到艾哈迈德先生宣布办公室到了。
Later that week he receives an invitation from MoMA; it seems that Life After Death will be the first to be screened in a weeklong festival in June celebrating Simon Bergesson’s films, and that there will be a panel following the movie at which both of the directors as well as Fausta will be present, and they are hopeful he will attend and—although they know they had extended the offer before—would be thrilled if he might join the panel too and speak about Willem’s experiences during shooting. This stops him: Had they invited him earlier? He supposes they had. But he can’t remember. He can remember very little from the past six months. He looks now at the dates of the festival: June third through June eleventh. He will make plans to be out of town then; he has to be. Willem had shot two other films with Bergesson—they had been friendly. He doesn’t want to have to see more posters with Willem’s face, to read his name in the paper again. He doesn’t want to have to see Bergesson.
那个星期稍晚，他接到了一封纽约现代艺术博物馆寄来的邀请函。他们要在六月举办西蒙·博格森的电影节，为期一周，看来《死后的生活》将是第一部放映的电影，而且播放后会有一场座谈会，两位导演和福丝塔都将出席，所以主办单位希望他能参加（虽然他们知道之前已经邀请过他了），而且希望有幸邀请他担任座谈会的贵宾，谈谈威廉拍摄期间的经验。他看到这里停下来：他们稍早邀请过他吗？想必是有吧。但他不记得了。过去六个月他记得的事情非常少。这会儿他又查了一下那个电影节的日期：六月三日到六月十一日。他得计划一下，到时候得离开纽约市；非离开不可。威廉后来又跟博格森合作过两部电影，彼此交情不错。他不想再被迫看到更多有威廉脸部特写的海报，不想再在报纸上看到他的名字。他不想看到博格森。
That night, before bed, he goes first to Willem’s side of the closet, which he still has not emptied. Here are Willem’s shirts on their hangers, and his sweaters on their shelves, and his shoes lined up beneath. He takes down the shirt he needs, a burgundy plaid woven through with threads of yellow, which Willem used to wear around the house in the springtime, and shrugs it on over his head. But instead of putting his arms through its sleeves, he ties the sleeves in front of him, which makes the shirt look like a straitjacket, but which he can pretend—if he concentrates—are Willem’s arms in an embrace around him. He climbs into bed. This ritual embarrasses and shames him, but he only does it when he really needs it, and tonight he really needs it.
那天夜里，上床前，他先走到衣柜间威廉的那一头。他一直还没把那清出来，威廉的衬衫还挂在衣架上，毛衣还叠好放在搁板上，鞋子则排列在下方。他拿出自己需要的那件衬衫，是一件酒红加黄色的格子衬衫，威廉春天在家里常常穿。他把衬衫套在身上，但手臂没有伸进袖子里，而是把袖子在身前打了个结，于是那件衬衫看起来就像束缚衣，但这么一来，专心想象的话，他就可以假装是威廉的双臂在拥抱他。他爬上床。这个仪式让他丢脸又羞愧，但他只有在真正需要的时候才会这样做，而今天晚上他就需要。
He lies awake. Occasionally he brings his nose down to the collar so he can try to smell what remains of Willem on the shirt, but with every wear, the fragrance grows fainter. This is the fourth shirt of Willem’s he has used, and he is very careful about preserving its scent. The first three shirts, ones he wore almost nightly for months, no longer smell like Willem; they smell like him. Sometimes he tries to comfort himself with the fact that his very scent is something given to him by Willem, but he is never comforted for long.
他躺着没睡，偶尔把鼻子凑到领口上，设法闻闻衬衫上威廉残留的气味，但每穿一次，气味就淡一点。这是他用过的第四件威廉的衬衫；他非常小心地保存上头的气味。前面三件他几乎每晚都穿，穿了几个月，闻起来已经不像威廉，而像他自己了。有时他设法安慰自己，说他身上的气味也是威廉给他的，但这从来不能让他安心太久。
