Alfabeto de las actitudes / César Moro

Alphabet of Attitudes

Is absence not, for whoever loves, the most efficacious, the most indestructible, the most faithful of presences?
MARCEL PROUST
(Les plaisirs et les jours)

DECEMBER, 1935:

     A gypsy girl comes out of an old house, on Avenue Grau, through the open wicket in the big door, closed. The girl, barefoot, heads toward a straw hat, for a man, knocked over a few steps away, the top inverted, in front of the big door. The girl introduces her left foot in the hat. At that moment another girl comes along the street. The gypsy girl stretches her arms out to her and leans her left arm with familiarity on the girl’s shoulder. They remain like that, without speaking a word, for a moment. Then the girl who has arrived leaves smiling at the gypsy girl.


11th OF JANUARY OF 1936

     When I proceed to open the door of the place called “Museum” there is a man dressed in a blue work blazer in the clock tower of the hospital 十 十 十. He stands out distinctly over the sphere, his arms in a cross, fixing the clock’s dials. Seconds later, when I open the door, he quickly turns his head: several crows fly in the field of the sphere.

                214 ideographic signs
                or 2419 or more
                any story’s din
                climbs the tree from the other side climbs
                arrives from the far edge
                cleaning the clock’s hours
                the little instantaneous man.


JANUARY, 1953:

     It’s unexplainable that man tries to fill his solitude with noise: radio, television, modern architecture are abject, abominable. Journalism was already enough as an efficient mechanism of cretinization.
     While eternity is constituted by minimal vegetative variations and imperceptible atmospheric alterations shining under a forest of orange trees or cypresses.
     The first unbearable revelation of eternal life shone in a leg.
     I can speak about eternity better than the Pope.
     Every life reaches a crossroads in which torment reigns like a monstrous pullulation: pharisaism, philistinism, the mistaken intended similar opinions, the most nefarious assent that frank opposition, hatred against myth, the abandonment of all ideals drown, mark, crush and debase.
     That alternating of obsessive negative thinking with the obsessive pleasant memory is the torment of irrevocable lucidity.
     Guilt has no exit, relief, stillness, save in the momentous loss of lucidity.
     Man is alone with the sea amidst mankind.
     Impotence of desire. While man does not realize his desire the world disappears as reality to transform itself in a nightmare from the cradle to the sepulcher.
     Is there no rhythm that is not our own? Suddenly my veins branch out, grow and I live the world’s pulsing.
     I dreamed a car was taking me toward eternity. I was able to wake up and I didn’t want to know the hour.
     Scorpions guard the horrible subsoil of eternity.
     I wake up in the middle of the night and wait for the discrete call. But it’s the wind and nothing else.


First published by André Coyné in Cultura (Lima, No. 1, 1956).




{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, ed. Julio Ortega, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }

Estrella fugaz / César Moro

Fleeting Star

Oh fate always bound
To the splashing to the usury of the wind
Nocturnal appearance of subdued glow
Winter passes the light
With free nails on a heart without armature
Sharpens its lioness claws

Beautiful night of ancient wounds
Rough wind tender darkness
Keep the moveable castle

May a star fall
Over the nacre blood
Over the alabaster breast
Over the lungs of snow
Under the feet of nocturnal fire

Oh free Night      to you
Forever      Oh word




From Le Château de Grisou (1943)




{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, ed. Julio Ortega, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }

André Breton / César Moro

André Breton

Like a piano of a horse’s tail of a wake of stars
On the lugubrious firmament
Heavy with coagulated blood
Swirling rainbow clouds phalanxes and planets and myriads of
     birds
The indelible fire advances
The cypresses burn the tigers panthers and the noble animals
     become incandescent

The care of dawn has been abandoned
And night looms over the devastated earth

The district of treasures keeps his name forever

                                                               Mexico, April 1938




{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, ed. Julio Ortega, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }

La leve pisada del demonio nocturno / César Moro

The Light Step of the Nocturnal Demon

In the great contact of oblivion
Certainly dead
Trying to steal reality from you
By the deafening rumor of the real
I lift a statue of such pure mud
Of clay of my blood
Of lucid shadow of intact hunger
Of interminable panting
And you rise like an unknown star
With your hair of black sparks
With your rabid and indomitable body
With your breath of wet stone
With your crystal head
With your ears of drowsiness
With your lantern lips
With your fern tongue
With your saliva of magnetic fluency
With your rhythm nostrils
With your fire tongue feet
With your legs of thousands of petrified tears
With your eyes of a nocturnal leap
With your tiger teeth
With your veins of violin arc
With your orchestra fingers
With your nails to open the heart of the world
And predict the loss of the world
In the heart of dawn
With your warm forest armpits
Under the rain of your blood
With your elastic lips of carnivorous plant
With your shadow that intercepts the noise
Nocturnal demon
This is how you rise forever
Stomping on the world that ignores you
And loves your name without knowing it
And moans after the smell of your step
Of fire of sulfur of air of tempest
Of intangible catastrophe that diminishes each day
That portion in which are hidden nefarious designs and the suspicion
     that twists the mouth of the tiger who spits in the mornings to
     make the day




La tortuga ecuestre (1938-1939)




{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, ed. Julio Ortega, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }

El sigilado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Secret One

     The student hands over to the magnate the ballads where he refers to passionate tribulations. He has deserted the classrooms in order to get ahead in the art of the guitar and celebrate the garments of his beloved in the modesty of night, without protecting himself from the concern and curiosity of the neighbors.

     The teachers, with revered capes and perspicacious eyeglasses, reprimand and repress the young man.

     The lyrical compositions discover the accent and apathy of hopelessness, the desire for an inaccessible happiness. The author compares himself to an oxherd with a humble and clandestine life, jostled and made desperate by fate.

     The magnate takes charge of the ideas spouted against the young man’s fame and censures him, in terms animated by sympathy, for wasting time. He reserves his writings in a sheep-skin folder and courteously says goodbye to him, following him with his glance, in secret from the beggars.

     The pious magnate, warned by the caretakers of the religion, stops sponsoring the student, when he watches him go away arm in arm with an equivocal and strolling character, dressed in a scarlet jacket with steel buttons.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

La quimera / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Chimera

     The virgin, seduced by the world’s entertainment and lost amid the idle pursuits of the imagination, has adopted the name Vivianne, and grasps her lute invoking the succor of the fairy. She imitates the assurances and ease of romance.

     She dreams of redeeming and conquering an enchanted prince, victim of the curse of envy, humiliated in the form of a toad and marked on his forehead with the image of a shining circle. A lagoon, with a poisonous breath, defends the gallery of her hiding place. The virgin manages to break the sortilege by staying on her knees, an entire night, amid some ruins, far from human help, and under threat of feral worms. The virgin resists the ghosts of darkness and her victorious canticle, the menace of some diabolical birds, marks the measure with dawn and flames of a devoted color.

     The virgin interrupts the voluble music, likeness of the course of its delirium and shuts away the lute in the ebony box, with a resonant cover.

     The virgin watches the appearance of a vessel and the assurance of a bird from her bridge, and goes with startled voice toward the uncertainty of the messenger.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

La sirte / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Shoal

     Ariel had taken refuge in an acanthus of the Corinthian capital. An architect, grateful to the seductions and memories of Italy, had erected a palace of reliable lines and classical inspiration.

     The king had given it as a present to the astronomer of his court, versed in the predictions of the spheres. In front of the palace, edified on a desert island, the ecstatic sea stretched out. A wandering soul had preferred that panorama to the celestial venture. The fishermen referred to this legend and to the one of the nocturnal hunter, sentenced to pursue an unreachable prey until the universe’s final cataclysm.

     That astronomer had blinded the king’s understanding and was assiduously animating him against his family. He denied the nation the avenues of the throne.

     He shrouded the kingdom in an untimely war and promised brilliant fortunes, reserved in the ground, to outfit a conquering armada.

     Fate silently prepared an abyss for the projects of grandeur and the ships were dispersed, as a consequence of a greater fear, on the day of the battle.

     That moment occasioned the disappearance of the pernicious councilor.

     The island of his domicile sank a few feet beneath the surface of the sea and became a reef hostile to navigation.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

El venturoso / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Fortunate One

     I left, at the forbidden hour, the solar temple and ran ahead beyond the tower crowned with a star, emblem and souvenir of Hercules.

     I went in service of a woman who had fainted on the shore of an immobile sea with black waters, where an extravagant red glow was foundering. She wore the crown of penitential violets and was asking aloud for the relief of sleep. She disappeared leaving in my hands her garb of lunar gauze.

     I had lost the road to return and followed the steps of a wildcat enraged in the pursuit of a pheasant.

     I came across a wild place and found grace among a few magnanimous hunters. They were fighting the elephant with swords and spears, assisted by some dogs of the breed marveled at by Alexander, conqueror of the Persians. One of them is enough to strangle a lion.

     I easily adopted their customs. They called themselves favorites of the sun and the men closest to where it’s born.

     I have reached the point of presiding over their religion’s only ceremony. At dawn they lift a chorus of laments in memory of the Aurora’s son, sacrificed by Achilles.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

El tósigo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Poison

     The damsel has gone out for the occasions of the century and witnesses the diversions after having been brought up in retirement, inhibited by the dictates of a stern morality, defended by a noble bishop’s host of officers. The black eyes and hair spread an insidious spell.

     The damsel comments the farce carried out in the hall of the lavish coliseum, and abandons herself to the enervating effects of a music invented by the artists of an unfortunate and nomadic race. The melody, of imprecise forms, awakens the image of a chimerical unhappiness.

     A foreigner, of profane sentiments, discovers the damsel’s box seat and follows her steps. He accompanies her to the door of a carriage distinguished by the prelate’s insignias, and defies the protest of an escort of ceremonious servants.

     The foreigner, of a schismatic faith and bacchanalian life, is lost in the dives and mirth until the moment he feels a tenacious drowsiness.

     He rests for a long time in his home and wakes beneath the glare of a reddish morning.

     He tries getting up from his bed and notices the beginning of an inexorable evil when he executes, for the first time, a few unfaithful paralytic movements.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Batallas / Carlos Sandoval

Battles

Miguel Hidalgo Prince, Todas las batallas perdidas (Caracas: Bid & Co. Editor, 2012)


We’ve been hearing Miguel Hidalgo Prince’s name mentioned around Caracas literary circles since the evening when he read at the II Semana de la Nueva Narrativa Urbana in 2007, and even more after he received a mention for his excellent short story “La isla de Xisca,” that same year, in the Concurso Nacional de Cuentos sponsored by the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de Venezuela (SACVEN). His texts have been included in several anthologies of contemporary fiction, and they are remembered for their constant presence in prestigious contests, which had turned him, up to now, into a mythical writer without a book. This is curious, if we consider that Hidalgo Prince is an obstinate fabulist who only looks at the world through short stories, many of which are to be found posted in various places on the web. Thus, the ten compositions that make up this volume constitute barely a fragment (compact and organic) of his creative activity. In the archives of his computer there are finished pieces that will appear in other compendiums or that are complying with the necessary repose before being submitted to exhaustive polishing sessions (his short stories display the sharp trait of meticulous revision, a development of form and content that reveal him as a versatile and prolific craftsman).

We shouldn’t believe, however, that he’s a compulsive fiction writer who seeks to win himself a place by means of saturating our bibliographical register with frequent deliveries. On the contrary, Miguel Hidalgo forms part of a group of Venezuelan writers barely older than twenty-five, who have taken up the task of writing as a declaration of faith and with a high sense of competence.

The expressions “declaration” and “competence” might seem alarming and even to exist outside the field of literature for many who consider the exercise of fiction, in this case, or poetry, the essential genre of the word, as completely removed from everyday “worldly noise”; that voluble world where man consumes himself in mere existence or thoughtless frivolities. And yet, as it’s corroborated in some of the plots of Todas las batallas perdidas, it is precisely there, in the passage of days, in the small miseries to which we must submit in order to survive the hours, that writing fulfills itself. By this I mean: written art only exists in those texts that are able to galvanize a sensation, a gesture, the uncontainable burden of the human; when the author dilutes himself in his material, becomes one with the prose, invisible and volatile: authentic. At which point we feel as though we’re reading a biography in pieces: which makes the collection, the effect belonging to works with an inalienable position of a vocation.

So that profession (control of narrative materials) and competence (a sensibility for giving expression to fundamental events) define the character of a practice that seeks to transcend the debased and transform into memory what must be told without deferment, because of an urgent expressive need. This is why it’s not irresponsible to point out that quite soon we will talk about the poetics of Hidalgo Prince as an example of literary honesty.

A child of the violence of an alienated megalopolis, his plots don’t spare anything, despite the chaos, when representing moving landscapes won over by a confidence in the other, he who goes into the street with the idea of reducing anyone who gets in the way of adding another night to his life; or who struggles against the forces that overcome him: the elements that demolish hills and drown neighbors. In each of these short stories there exists the reverberation of a country driven mad by poverty and disappointment, feeble and lost; but above all his pages shine with characters who are unforgettable because of their amorality and uselessness, aimless and authentic.

If fiction is a guided dream that the artist presents in a subtle and convincing manner for his readers, a pleasant or dangerous dream that makes us see the world differently as soon as we leave the final point of its actions, Miguel Hidalgo Prince is a fine exponent of souls, one of the names that will surely find a place in the list of important fiction writers of our 21st century.




{ Carlos Sandoval, Tal Cual, 3 March 2012 }

La hija del cisne / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Swan’s Daughter

Goethe greeted the presence of Marie Antoinette in Frankfurt am Main, a pause on the road from Vienna to Paris, with the only French verses from his pen.

     I step off the paddle steamer and visit the Benedictine abbey on a peaceful shore of the Danube. An affable young man referred to me the origin of the building, facing a solitary chapel. The monks had built it at the edge of the ancient civilization, undamaged from the vestige of Caesar.

     The monks erected the abbey, expiatory monument, with the goal of eliminating the outcome of a profane affection from the memory of men and they chose the same spot where a pair of proud lovers threw themselves to their deaths in the current.

     The monks facilitated the rescue of Vienna, besieged by the Muslim. They went to the encounter with Sobieski, the heroe of the primitive quiver and the Homeric shield, and guided him to where the chieftain of the infidels, assured of his victory, was freely conversing with his sons over a Bokara tapestry.

     The young man described for me with sadness the monks’ neglect of the reverend house, on a bitter day. The victors of a war were leveling the retinue and the village with the straw on the ground and they were scattering the enraged voice of their mechanisms of death in the desolate field.

     The young man assigned the origin of the hecatomb to Marie Antoinette’s wedding and celebrated her whiteness in fervent terms, wherein shone a chimerical love for the martyred queen. The last director of the pious establishment divined the consequences of the nuptial journey and abstained from glancing at the retinue. The ascetic had locked himself in a place unscathed by the rumors of the sensible world.

     The young man finished the lively apology of his heroine by citing the epithalamium of Goethe, the thinker who was a captive to the marmoreal beauty of Helen and a believer in the return of her ghost.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

La casa se derrumbó / Antonia Palacios

The house collapsed

The house collapsed. It left some scattered dust, slabs of hard cement. It also left memories scattered everywhere. The roof that overflowed with the stirring of doves also came down. I don’t want to rebuild the house, lift new walls, or doors, or roof tiles, or a small window through which the world passed, or that wide threshold where the front door towered and I would penetrate the days, nights, seeking my warmth there. The house collapsed, a transparent house where the day would light up and a thick darkness would tremble at night. Nothing was left of the house, not the light on the walls nor the patio’s splendor. Only silence moves through the vast empty space and the sterile words whose thin filaments the wind will dissolve. I will remain in the open air watching the fog in the trees until the arrival of death, a house erected by time that will never collapse.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Hoy somos otros / Antonia Palacios

Today we are others

Today we are others. Today we are others who yesterday were breathing in the extremity of that short silence. We are others who would touch with absent rubbing the sharp edge of things. Today we are others who rise through the air and its high climbs. The old splendor was extinguished in quietest oblivion. Today we are others in merciless waiting stopped.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Aquí donde me he detenido / Antonia Palacios

Here where I’ve stopped

Here where I’ve stopped I listen to strange sounds, flights of invisible birds, and I think of a firmament only my mind retains. Stilled I’m awaiting some diaphanous delivery, an ignored promise. The air is tinged with an impossible color and the wind intensely shakes the crossroad trees. In these parts of the world behind white mountains no one dares pass. Maybe the fear of death, a quick death with no time for pain. I hope the night will sprout with its mystical torment, its mantle of darkness. A star might shine in this wide open air that never has any end.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

De pronto llegó la noche / Antonia Palacios

Suddenly night arrived

Suddenly night arrived, its tormented presence. It opens furrows in the earth, the earth I carry inside. Arid my earth. Night approaches and touches my heart. Tumbling it breaks me. My heart is keeping vigil and night enslaves it, leaves it so darkened that it forgets the light. Time passes very slowly in this night without end. I open the leaves of my window one by one. I want to watch the other night, the one that stays outside in rigid darkness. A night without presences, monotonous and without stars. The one that penetrated my lodgings was maybe my own night.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Estoy escuchando el temblor / Antonia Palacios

I’m listening to the trembling

I’m listening to the trembling of a distant night. A night that murmurs amid its dense foliage. I’m barely listening to it from this closed place where my spirit drags itself over hard foundations that wound me without bleeding. I want to penetrate the night, know of its occult aroma, have it fill me slowly with its stillness, its adventure. Go towards other continents where the night turns, raises small things that soar intact in a flight toward the skies. This night is magic, its curvature in sleeplessness. The wind carries me in its fervor to imagine another recondite and generous night that could illumine me completely from afar, from outside, and clear up this babbling subdued without violence. This night is so long.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Regresa de tu nostalgia / Antonia Palacios

Return from your nostalgia

Return from your nostalgia. Watch the sun burn the leaves. Dance again. Turn in the middle of the patio beside the cypress tree bending its sadness, its vast mute sadness, leaning and breathlessly touching the edge of the water. What does it matter that you find yourself alone? Recover old habits, return to hope carrying in your hand the chalice of a flower stripped of its petals.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Yo soy la que se incorpora / Antonia Palacios

I’m the one who sits up

I’m the one who sits up, who rises from the ground of a remote origin. I’m the disorderly one, the one who silenced her senses within infinite spaces to dislike the world. I’m the woman who returns on paths born amid yesterday’s dust. There is no word to name me. I’m the one who is pregnant with cursed rebels, feeling their deep pulse, their spying, their stupor. I’ve kept still here, diluted in darkness. I’m the one who noiselessly awaits immersed in solitude.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

¿Por qué dices que nada resplandece? / Antonia Palacios

Why do you say nothing shines?

Why do you say nothing shines? Don’t you see a burning daydream in the twilight? Don’t look at the dark. Uncover your face and let the intense brightness wash over you. I know very well the only thing that reaches us from the dead is shadow and life is barely a wait for light. Stay crouched in the final glow. Maybe the night will guard a secret clarity.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Retírate / Antonia Palacios

Retreat

Retreat. Retreat within. Just beyond, further inside. Push until you touch the edge. Breathe hard. Exhale the repressed air in your breath. Don’t stop. Learn to walk backwards. Leave your forehead uncovered. If they injure you make your body jump, shake off the blood, the dark dust. Don’t let the light dazzle you. Close your eyelids and watch what the darkness radiates. Carry your faded word with you, your budding song. Inaugurate your voice in the depths.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Estoy en contra de todo / Antonia Palacios

I’m against everything

I’m against everything, the one who told me I love you, the bird that flew off, the disphaneity of the sky, the downhill trail and the trail that crawls upward. A cloud passes and the air passes. The voice is dissolved in space and there’s a perennial longing in the earthly spot where I find myself, an annulment of everything as though a giant sponge had erased life. I recall the other times, the transparency of the air, the bonds of love, the infinity of hours cultivating each instant and that taste for things, that recreation of touch, my fingers on an animal’s skin.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Hay un círculo que me envuelve / Antonia Palacios

There’s a circle that shrouds me

There’s a circle that shrouds me and leaves my body trapped. Far off maybe day breaks. People might think insistently of their daily affairs. The circle is closing. I think of the first slopes, of those humid stones. I remember distant shouts and the hidden roads. The dew is falling on the grass of then. I have forgotten the beginnings. I have forgotten the places. Only this circle tightens around me. Maybe it’s already midday. The sun is probably at its peak celebrating its glare. I’m fixed here in the dark locked in this circle.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

Estoy rodeada de sombríos aires / Antonia Palacios

I’m surrounded by somber airs

I’m surrounded by somber airs. They suffocate me and silence my words. They are words from distant times, when the roads were spacious trails and I would travel them in a transparency that was granted me by chance. Everything seemed at hand and distant. They were times of lucid summers, of trees where birds of vivid colors would build their nests and from the earth rose a warm vapor, a silent fog that would settle over the patio. Windows with balusters seemed to protect a dense quietude that kept the screams and wails very far away. Today I’m sharpening the ear to listen once again to those secret words I hadn’t yet discovered, they would arrive, burning and trembling at a previously set hour. They came and went. They stopped for a fugitive instant that barely contained my breathing. I evoke them this afternoon of dark airs and feel how they deny themselves to me.




{ Antonia Palacios, Ese oscuro animal del sueño, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1991 }

La espía / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Spy

     The graduate writes a short novel of equivocations and unforeseen cases, occupying the delays of a court where he passes sentence, poorly remunerated and idle.

     The graduate doesn’t spend the night in the city, but rather in the outskirts. He retires to a house with long passageways and solemn chambers, covered in whitewash, crouched in an anonymous village. The ingenuous locals notice the unpleasantness of its facade.

     The graduate recovers from the tedium inventing quarrels and misfortunes. He imagines the yearnings and accusations of lovers and records them in indelible letters. He reclines, once in a while, the forehead made of parchment, full of memories, in his right hand. He prolongs the task until morning’s approach, under the dim waxen light.

     The graduate abandons the pen just as dawn reveals its face like a ruddy-cheeked girl.

     He proceeds to the adornment of his person in front of a Lorena mirror, of faded splendor, and when he retires the grey hairs, he observes at his back the astute skeleton of death.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

La ventana / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Window

     She is seated at the window, barren of handsome men. Dressed in mourning and pensive, she requires attention from artists and demands reverence from dreamers. Faded by time, she regales and soothes afflicted souls.

     She turns her eyes from the solitary street to the opposite hill, where the day disappears like an Asiatic king on a slow elephant. She observes the shade that advances with the furtive step of the beggar to some regal feast.

     She shapes her disposition with the dwindling of the light; and watches how the painful cloudscapes compose a scene of holocaust, where her hope, chaste Iphigenia, succumbs amid laments.




La torre de Timón (1925)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

La plaga / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Plague

     My colleague, inspired by an equivocal curiosity and by a vehement sympathy for dejected and reprobate beings, was going around arm in arm with a lost girl.

     I tried to dissuade him from such company, alleging the woman’s censurable bearing, affected by the memory of an insane brother, author of his own death.

     We separated on a memorable night. Fortunes were being made and unmade in the den of the loudest uproar. The furnaces were spilling a chlorotic light and whetting the physiognomy of the gamblers. Anguish was electrifying the air of the place and suppressing the applause and laughter of the libidinous women.

     A crowd of winged insects, fell, the next day, over the city and spread a contagious disease. Their larvae would domicile themselves in men’s hair and from there they would penetrate to devour the encephalon, aided by a sharp mechanism. They would toss from themselves a fibrous casing to protect them from any medicinal lotion. They would wound, in an irreparable manner, the resorts of thought and will. The infected would run through the streets shrieking.

     My colleague resisted my advice of fleeing and came to perish, without news from anyone, at his house in the suburb.

     The natives of the kingdom were abstaining from stepping within the environs of the cursed city. The agents of order situated at opportune places, were impeding the visits of petty thieves and were circumscribing the zone of the illness.

     I braved the prohibition and managed to discover my friend’s fate.

     I opened, after some struggle, the door to his house and I saw him lying on the floor, with signs of having rolled about.

     Some spiders, with phosphorescent eyes and bland and tremulous feet, were jumping nimbly over his cadaver. The new breed had depopulated the city, running in pursuit of survivors.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

El emigrado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Emigrant

     I was left alone with my son when the mortiferous plague had devastated the capital of the ruined kingdom. He had not emerged from infancy and he occupied me day and night.

     I conceived and executed the project of settling in another city, more interned and safe. I took the child in my arms and crossed the savannah infected by the effluvia of the salt marsh.

     I had to pass a small river. I found myself forced to dispute the ford with a man of advantaged stature, red hair and long teeth. His face declared desperation.

     I pitied him despite his impertinent attitude and his injurious discourse.

     I was able to take up lodgings at a long-abandoned house and I accommodated the child in a chamber of tapestries and rugs. He was enduring a slow fever and delirium manifested in screams.

     The same inopportune man came to offer me, after a night of anguish, the remedy for my son. He was offering it for an exorbitant price, inwardly mocking my exiguous resources. I found myself in the position of dismissing him and cursing him.

     I spent that day and the next without help of any kind.

     I was keeping a vigil close to dawn, in the hostile night, when I felt, at the door to the street, a series of vehement loud knocks.

     I looked out the window and saw only the street flooded in shadows.

     My son was dying at that moment.

     The man of citrine nature had been the author of the noise.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Cita comentada: Miyó Vestrini / Gabriel Payares

Commented Citation: Miyó Vestrini

“[The collectives of the 50s and 60s] were experiences full of vitality, that were never able to crystallize. We are a burnt-out, lost generation. A generation of frustrated people” (1976)

This citation by Vestrini invites me to a reflection. Maybe hers was a generation of frustrated people, as she herself says, because having had so much youth and such a wealth of literary groups, important names and revolutionary proposals of radical ideologies, in sum, a frenetic and abundant time period, the future with its drowsiness and its eternal crisis, its slow and opulent decomposition of the country and its institutions, would have represented for them the absolute confirmation of the failure of the optimists, the beginning of the era of the hopeless and cynical. Were that to be so, Miyó foresaw it, and she chose to commit suicide before languishing and becoming a fossil.

We, who today remember that “lost generation” as the inhabitants of a type of golden era or, at least, a prodigious and abundant time, are on the other hand a disconsolate generation, born of its own broken dreams and guided in life by the maxim that the latter is elsewhere. By nature desirous, we have been given the fate of witnessing how the country intends to return to its own empty shell, and how, within a panorama of grandiloquence and of the highest numbers of weekly murder rates, amid poverty and marginality and historic petroleum prices, it has been our place to know ourselves as foreigners, since every form of nationalism hides and involves –compensates– a galloping defamiliarization. Our Venezuela doesn’t belong, doesn’t apply, to anyone. We have a borrowed, portable, mobile country. We are the generation of the precipice, who look toward the future down below and with dread, while we dream with the wings of our ancestors that were broken.

“I don’t think our generation will ever mean anything, for anyone,” Miyó said, and today we’re surprised how wrong she was.




{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 9 January 2012 }