La virgen de la palma / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Virgin of the Palm

I was living in seclusion in the darkness and the dust of my deserted house. The cold air, at one point transformed into a damned gust, was raising in absence from the light the lymphatic and sinister mushroom and would brusquely force the austere living room into the shade, suppressing the candelabra. A veil of purplish satin, ancestral jewel, would imitate the tapestries of the temple in Jerusalem, scratched by an invisible hand at the death of Jesus.
     I had grown up an orphan and without notice or discipline. The mute enclosure of the home would persuade me to solicit in the streets and plazas the ease, the leisure of my rebellious youth. An immaculate woman, foreign to herself, shied away from me and from the petulant trot of my horse in the secrecy of her window. She had settled her glance in the forms of a magic rouge.
     Count Alfieri, insistent on the emphasis of tragedy, had stayed in the same city before and more than one neighbor pondered his detour from mankind, his refuge on the avenue of the astounded cypress and the elegiac willow. The artist meditated alone upon an inclement love, upon a tacit vision.
     I repeatedly assayed the discovery of the pensive woman and her graceful palace and I lost myself hopelessly in the middle of the day. In the night calm I drew a few dominant letters on the face of the building and I came to lose my enthusiasm for the darkness and the dust of my recondite house. A fright, the threshold of misfortune, was dividing my thought at each step and was tossing me toward an impure friendship.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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