in some ice-cold or sun-dried travesty of sex,

一条冰冷或是干热的女性的挂毯上
and even grandmothers seemed to have had no traffic with the flesh.

甚至祖母辈的人都好像和她们没有交集
And what distinguished the men was that they seemed incapable of age.

男人的特点则是他们都看不出年龄
They smelled of soap, which seemed, indeed, to be their

他们身上有肥皂味闻起来的确能够
preservative against the dangers and exigencies of any more intimate odor.

能够抵御任何更直接体味带来的危险
The boy he had been shown somehow unsoiled, untouched,unchanged

他看到过的男孩还未经世事原原本本
through the eyes of the man of sixty,

变成了六十岁的老人
booking passage with his smiling wife to Rome.

和微笑的妻子一起预订参加去罗马的行程
His wife might have been his mother

我们也可以把他的妻子看成他的母亲
forcing more oatmeal down his throat,

正迫使他喝下燕麦粥
and Rome might have been the movie she had promised to allow him to see.

或者把罗马看成母亲许诺带孩子看的电影
Yet, I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth,

但我也怀疑我看到的只是部分事实