Spleen / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Spleen

The English traveler was the image of remorse. He had removed himself from mankind and he would portray it without a mask. With an authoritarian step he would walk the length of a skiff belonging to a Cypriot fisherman, in the vicinity of an arid coast, frequented by goats.
     The fisherman was moaning, dissuading the presumptuous magnate from danger with a pirate’s gesture.
     The Englishman proposed to observe the crowd of infidels closely, gathered together for the extermination of civilization. They camped where the vineyards and olive groves used to thrive. The torturous smoke of a bonfire was being cared for in the vestibule of a dump, a relic venerated by the scholars of cultured nations, and it continued to infect the energetic sea air. That smoke blocked the sunlight and meant a fistful of dirt thrown at the divine disc.
     A Croatian officer, a deserter from the faith of his elders and content with the extremes of a mistaken life, directs the artillery of the infidels and undoes the skiff in the second shot.
     The fisherman, wounded in the shoulder, couldn’t even try and became convinced of his fear’s truth. The noisy waves pulled and pushed, an hour later, his anemic and light cadaver.
     The Englishman returned to his friends’ royal and offered himself once again for the service of tugboat.
     He compared himself to a mythological swimmer and insisted on the veracity of the aedas.





Las formas del fuego (1929)




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