《美食祈禱和戀愛》Chapter 2 (4):我也不想要婚姻了大綱

I'd been attempting to convince myself that this was normal. All women must feel this way when they're trying to get pregnant, I'd decided. ("Ambivalent" was the word I used, avoiding the much more accurate description: "utterly consumed with dread.") I was trying to convince myself that my feelings were customary, despite all evidence to the contrary—such as the acquaintance I'd run into last week who'd just discovered that she was pregnant for the first time, after spending two years and a king's ransom in fertility treatments. She was ecstatic. She had wanted to be a mother forever, she told me. She admitted she'd been secretly buying baby clothes for years and hiding them under the bed, where her husband wouldn't find them. I saw the joy in her face and I recognized it. This was the exact joy my own face had radiated last spring, the day I discovered that the magazine I worked for was going to send me on assignment to New Zealand, to write an article about the search for giant squid. And I thought, "Until I can feel as ecstatic about having a baby as I felt about going to New Zealand to search for a giant squid, I cannot have a baby."

我試圖說服自己這很正常。我推斷，每個女人在嘗試懷孕的時候，都一定有過這樣的感受。（我用的詞是“情緒矛盾”，避免使用更精確的描述：“充滿恐懼”。）我試着安慰自己說，我的心情沒啥異常，儘管全部證據都與此相反 ——比方上週巧遇的一個朋友，在花了兩年時間、散盡大把鈔票接受人工受孕，剛發現自己第一次懷孕後。她欣喜若狂地告訴我，她始終夢想成爲人母。她承認自己多年來暗自買嬰兒衣服，藏在牀底下，免得被丈夫發現。她臉上的喜悅，我看得出來。那正是去年春天在我臉上綻放的那種喜悅；那一天，我得知我服務的雜誌社即將派我去新西蘭，寫一篇有關尋找巨型魷魚的文章。我心想：“等到我對生孩子的感覺，像要去新西蘭找巨型魷魚一樣欣喜若狂的時候，才生小孩。”

I don't want to be married anymore.

我不想再待在婚姻中。

In daylight hours, I refused that thought, but at night it would consume me. What a cata-strophe. How could I be such a criminal jerk as to proceed this deep into a marriage, only to leave it? We'd only just bought this house a year ago. Hadn't I wanted this nice house? Hadn't I loved it? So why was I haunting its halls every night now, howling like Medea? Wasn't I proud of all we'd accumulated—the prestigious home in the Hudson Valley, the apartment in Manhattan, the eight phone lines, the friends and the picnics and the parties, the weekends spent roaming the aisles of some box-shaped superstore of our choice, buying ever more appliances on credit? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life—so why did I feel like none of it resembled me? Why did I feel so overwhelmed with duty, tired of being the primary breadwinner and the housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog-walker and the wife and the soon-to-be mother, and—somewhere in my stolen moments—a writer . . .?

白天的時候，我拒絕想及這個念頭，但到了夜幕降臨，這念頭卻又啃噬着我。好一場災難。我怎麼如此渾蛋，深入婚姻，卻又決定放棄？我們纔在一年前買下這棟房子。我難道不想要這棟美麗的房子？我難道不愛它？那我現在爲何每晚在門廳間出沒時，嚎叫有如瘋婦？我難道不對我們所積聚的一切——哈德遜谷（HudsonValley）的名居、曼哈頓的公寓、八條電話線、朋友、野餐、派對、週末漫步於我們選擇的大型超市的過道、刷卡購買更多家用品——感到自豪？我主動參與創造這種生活的每時每刻當中——那爲什麼我覺得這一切根本就不 像我？爲什麼我覺得不勝重擔，再也無法忍受負擔 家計、理家、親友往來、蹓狗、做賢妻良母，甚至在偷閒時刻寫作……？

I don't want to be married anymore.

我不想再待在婚姻中。

My husband was sleeping in the other room, in our bed. I equal parts loved him and could not stand him. I couldn't wake him to share in my distress—what would be the point? He'd already been watching me fall apart for months now, watching me behave like a madwoman (we both agreed on that word), and I only exhausted both knew there was something wrong with me, and he’d been losing patience with it. We'd been fighting and crying, and we were weary in that way that only a couple whose marriage is collapsing can be weary. We had the eyes of refugees.

我先生在另一個房間裏，睡在我們的牀上。我一半愛他，卻又受不了他。我不能叫醒他，要他分擔我的痛苦——那有什麼意義？幾個月來，他見我陷於崩潰，眼看我的行爲有如瘋婦（我倆對此用詞意見一致），我只是讓他疲憊不堪。我們兩人都知道“我出了問題”，而他已漸漸失去耐心。我們吵架、哭喊，我們感到厭倦，只有婚姻陷入破裂的夫婦才感受的厭倦。我們的眼神有如難民。

The many reasons I didn't want to be this man's wife anymore are too personal and too sad to share here. Muchof it had to do with my problems, but a good portion of our troubles were related to his issues, as well. That's only natural; there are always two figures in a marriage, after all—two votes, two opinions, two conflicting sets of decisions, desires and limitations. But I don't think it's appropriate for me to discuss his issues in my book. Nor would I ask anyone to believe that I am capable of reporting an unbiased version of our story, and therefore the chronicle of our marriage's failure will remain untold here. I also will not discuss here all the reasons why I did still want to be his wife, or all his wonderfulness, or why I loved him and why I had married him and why I was unable to imagine life without him. I won't open any of that. Let it be sufficient to say that, on this night, he was still my lighthouse and my albatross in equal measure. The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn't want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.

我之所以不想再做這個男人的妻子，涉及種種私人、傷心的原因，難以在此分享。絕大部分涉及我的問題，但我們的困境也很大程度和他有關。這並不奇怪；畢竟婚姻中總是存在兩個人——兩張票，兩個意見，兩種相互矛盾的決定、欲求與限制。然而，在我的書中探討他的問題並不妥當。我也不要求任何人相信我能公正無私地報道我們的故事，因此在此略過講述我們失敗婚姻的前因。我也不願在此討論我真的曾經想繼續做他妻子、他種種的好、 我爲何愛他而嫁給他、爲何無法想象沒有他的生活等一切的原因。我不想打開這些話題。讓我們這麼說吧，這天晚上，他仍是我的燈塔，也同時是我的包袱。不離開比離開更難以想象；離開比不離開更不可能。我不想毀了任何東西或任何人。我只想從後門悄悄溜走，不惹出任何麻煩或導致任何後果，毫不停歇地奔向世界的盡頭。

This part of my story is not a happy one, I know. But I share it here because something was about to occur on that bathroom floor that would change forever the progression of my life—almost like one of those crazy astronomical super-events when a planet flips over in outer space for no reason whatsoever, and its molten core shifts, relocating its poles and altering its shape radically, such that the whole mass of the planet suddenly becomes oblong instead of spherical. Something like that.

這部分的故事並不快樂，我明白。但我之所以在此分享，是因爲在浴室地板上即將發生的事，將永久改變我的生命進程 ——幾乎就像一顆行星毫無來由地在太空中猝然翻轉這類天文大事一般，其熔心變動、兩極遷移、形狀大幅變形，使整個行星突然變成長方形，不再是球形。就像這樣。

What happened was that I started to pray.

You know—like, to God.

Eat, Pray, Love

發生的事情是：我開始祈禱。

你知道— —就是向神禱告那樣。