Lucía / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Lucia

I was opening the windows of the naked chamber and entrusting the name of the absent girl to the errors of an insalubrious gust of wind. My voice was fighting a gravestone, imitating the seabird’s assault on the harbor beacon.
     I was guessing the clear accents of dawn, emerging from my retreat and stepping with reverence and fear on the flight of steps corroded by the open air. I was entertaining sorrow with the view of a diaphanous horizon. The ash tree and the pine were abounding far off and haphazardly in the country of lakes and torrents.
     I was censuring myself faithfully. I wanted to find a slip of ineptitude or apathy in the process of her inhuman pains and I couldn’t remember anything besides my activity and my continuous presence in the room. Her death reproduced the countenance of the agony of Jesus.
     The slow mists were being born, when night began, from the wells of rainwater, they would calm the noises and lose themselves in the hallucinated home.
     The veils of malarial water facilitated the return of the assiduous virgin. She agreed to leave in my hands, a sign of acknowledgment, the jewel of her candor. She gave me back the crown of her forehead.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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