讀了黑羊

上個週末我在養生的蘇州渡過，因為時間空閒的關係所以讀了一個小小說。

一隻羊長成黑色，並不表示所有的白羊都是對的，但是特立獨行的人，命定是活得比較辛苦。

這是一篇大約寫在五十年前的小小說，以下是「黑羊」的原文：

Black Sheep, by Italo Calvino

There was a country where they were all thieves.

At night everybody would leave home with skeleton keys and shaded lanterns and go and burgle a neighbour’s house. They’d get back at dawn, loaded, to find their own house had been robbed.

So everybody lived happily together, nobody lost out, since each stole from the other, and that other from another again, and so on and on until you got to a last person who stole from the first. Trade in the country inevitably involved cheating on the parts both of the buyer and the seller. The government was a criminal organization that stole from its subjects, and the subjects for their part were only interested in defrauding the government. Thus life went on smoothly, nobody was rich and nobody was poor.

One day, how we don’t know, it so happened that an honest man came to live in the place. At night, instead of going out with his sack and his lantern, he stayed home to smoke and read novels.

The thieves came, saw the light on and didn’t go in.

This went on for a while: then they were obliged to explain to him that even if he wanted to live without doing anything, it was no reason to stop others from doing things. Every night he spent at home meant a family would have nothing to eat the following day.

The honest man could hardly object to such reasoning. He took to going out in the evening and coming back the following morning like they did, but he didn’t steal. He was honest, there was nothing you could do about it. He went as far as the bridge and watched the water flow by beneath. When he got home he found he had been robbed.

In less than a week the honest man found himself penniless, he had nothing to eat and his house was empty. But this was hardly a problem, since it was his own fault; no, the problem was that his behaviour upset everything else. Because he let the others steal everything he had without stealing anything from anybody; so there was always someone who came home at dawn to find their house untouched: the house he should have robbed. In any event after a while the ones who weren’t being robbed found themselves richer than the others and didn’t want to steal any more. To make matters worse, the ones who came to steal from the honest man’s house found it was always empty; so they became poor.

Meanwhile, the ones who had become rich got into the honest man’s habit of going to the bridge at night to watch the water flow by beneath. This increased the confusion because it meant lots of others became rich and lots of others became poor.

Now, the rich people saw that if they went to the bridge every night they’d soon be poor. And they thought: ‘Let’s pay some of the poor to go and rob for us.’ They made contracts, fixed salaries, percentages: they were still thieves of course, and they still tried to swindle each other. But, as tends to happen, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer and poorer.

Some of the rich people got so rich that they didn’t need to steal or have others steal for them so as to stay rich. But if they stopped stealing they would get poor because the poor stole from them. So they paid the very poorest of the poor to defend their property from the other poor, and that meant setting up a police force and building prisons.

So it was that only a few years after the appearance of the honest man, people no longer spoke of robbing and being robbed, but only of the rich and the poor; but they were still all thieves.

The only honest man had been the one at the beginning, and he died in very short order, of hunger.


如果你也耐心看完原文了，那下面是簡單的翻譯，可以跳過 :p

這個故事說的是，從前有個國家全國都是賊，每個晚上每一戶人都離開自己家去偷別人家，在偷別人家的同時，自己家也被別人偷了，如此每天大家彼此偷著彼此，沒人變窮也沒人變富，你幸福我美滿，大家都過著幸福快樂的日子。

一直到有一天，有個誠實的人住進這個國家，他不知道晚上必須出門去偷別人，這樣也好被人家偷，他每天晚上躲在家裡抽煙讀小說，結果每個該偷他家的人都不敢進他家，有人好心的提醒他，這人只好在晚上刻意離開家，以讓別人來偷他，但是他卻堅持不去偷別人。

這下問題又來了，他不去偷人家，就會有人回家時變有錢了，他不去偷人家，家裡空空如也，就有人到他家因為偷不到而變窮，於是有錢的人開始學會不去偷東西了，這些富人把多出來的錢拿一部份出來雇用窮人幫忙他偷東西，他還用錢雇了警察保護自己不被偷和蓋監獄關那些偷東西的人。

於是這國家完全變了樣，貧者越貧，富者越富，大家活在另一種情境裡，有人活得更好，有人活得更壞，而最後，那個堅持不偷的老實人很快就活活餓死了。

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非常好的作品呀，裡面完全沒有直接說作者支持或反對那種社會體制，只簡單清楚的呈現故事，讓讀者自己去思考。