El talismán / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Talisman

He was living alone in the room garnished by a series of magic mirrors. He was rehearsing, before an interview with an enemy, a fake smile.
     He had exterminated the daughters of the poor, abducting and losing them disdainfully. Albrecht Dürer discovered him one night soliciting a heedless girl. The young man had equipped himself with a patrol lantern so as to cowardly scrutinize and he returned to his house after a fruitless round and on a gaunt horse. The artist drew, the next day, the image of the gentleman in the act of returning to his den. He turned him into a riding specter and he substituted his patrol lantern with an hourglass.
     The gentleman inhabits a house without guardians, immersed in the shade once the sun sets. No one has mentioned a concerted assault by its ill-wishers.
     He abandons himself without anxiety to a defenseless sleep. He entrusts his safety to the effluvium of a phosphorescent flask, where he keeps a human creature, the greatest wonder from Faust’s laboratory.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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