El disidente / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Dissident

San Francisco De Sales advised channeling invectives at the demon, to drive him away from our presence. I had read in another ascetic writer about the healthy habit of throwing oneself face down on the naked earth.
     The crowd of the possessed had disturbed the attention of Bodin, the honest French jurist, and motivated extensive works from his pen.
     The tortures spread terror and grieved the spirit. The cases of alienation multiplied and the father of a hanged man declared himself equal to Jesus Christ and went out at night to complain with a sepulchral voice.
     I never reconciled myself with the gloomy art of the bewitched and I was able to wait at close range for the end of the bonfires of repression.
     Amid the constant threat, I wanted to expiate my ignored faults and throw off the satellites of a skittish power. I remembered the ceremony of the Israelites with the emissary goat and I used it with a nocturnal bird.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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