El tesoro de la fuente cegada / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Treasure of the Blinded Fountain

I was living in the impassable city, desolated by divine vengeance. The ground, work of forgotten cataclysms, was divided into precipices and mountains, links scattered at random. The ancient inhabitants had perished, a soulless and crude nation.
     A yellow sun was illuminating that country of ashen forests, of hypnotic shadows, of illusory echoes.
     I was occupying a millenary building, festooned by the spontaneous undergrowth, an example of an architecture of cyclops, ignorant of steel.
     The escape of the wild elk was alarming the birdless jungles.
     You were succumbing to the memory of the native sea and its kingfishers. Your were imagining that with moans and prayers you could overcome the fatality of that exile, and you were occupying some interval of consolation by musing ballads erased from your afflicted memory.
     The storm was mussing your hair, the increase of a gaunt figure, and its retinue of lightning was startling your violet eyes.
     Your sorrow silenced your voice, plunging you into an inert drowsiness. I laid your recumbent body in the lap of a blinded fountain, hoping for your awakening after an expiatory cycle.
     I was then able to cross the border of the evil country, and I escaped sailing on an extreme sea in a deserted vessel, guided by an unscathed light.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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