El retorno / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Return

To enter the kingdom of death I advanced through the bronze portico that interrupted the sinister ramparts. The shade rested on them perpetually like a vigilant monster. Inside the precinct a fearful and dark space extended itself, and a glacial cold that came from very far away prevailed. The ground beneath my feet was like a clumsy carpet, and I moved above it lightly suspended by invisible wings. The astonishment of eternity was revealing itself in august silence, comparable to the calm that surrounds the concert of distant stars. With it the mystery grew in that indefinite region, where no contour was breaking the opaque vagueness. The even spectacle of the invariable shade was perpetuating within me the stupor of the dream of death.
     I had voluntarily invaded the world that begins in the sepulcher, to drown in its breast, as in a sea of oblivion, my damaged spirit. Time there stopped its clock and form succumbed in the funereal color. Darkness was surging from the occult abyss, with the stealth of a delayed tide with no murmur, and it was dragging me and had me at its mercy like a voluptuous deity. A captive of its lethal spell, I wandered a great space at a venture, obstinate in the strange and lugubrious pilgrimage. But when I felt behind me the clamor of life, like that of an abandoned and loving bride, I turned back in my steps.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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