El escolar / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Scholar

The somnambulant girl was suffering a lover’s perfidy. She had grown ill from considering a remote aspiration.
     She deserved the name of visionary and prophetess and spent half the day kneeling in front of an image made of black clay. She always paid it the tribute of an offering of a flower sung in the hyperboles of the Bible and kept by many devoted generations. The exhausted flower was recovering its perfume under the dew of holy water. It had adorned the breastplate of a crusader.
     The somnambulant girl predicted the success of my attempts and inspired in me the will to apply myself more vehemently to games. I would emerge victorious from the gambling house amid the surprise and envy of the dissolute. They wasted their time ordering traps against me and inviting me to country parties. They would surround me slyly and famished.
     The somnambulant girl separated me from following the advice of a doctor during the crisis of an unexpected fever. She saved me from receiving the germs of a filthy illness and once again frustrated the losers’ spite.
     I received her in my company and took her to breathe the auras of the sea in Sicily, which led to the reestablishment of her beauty.
     My enemies shot their arrows at us for the last time from some ruins.
     I had left my native home for the purpose of rebuilding a deplorable moment of antiquity under the shadow of Thucydides.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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