Bajo el velamen de púrpura / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Under the Purple Canvas

I had spent half the night within view of the cold constellations and came to gather myself and sleep in a cavity, in the manner of Orpheus.
     I was encountering the companion of my fatigues less frequently. He was the son of a king precipitated from the throne and had come to me after traversing different climes.
     He appeared in dreams and referred me to his death at the hands of some insensible goatherds. His body had been abandoned in a desert of stones. There, some beasts born of the ocean would crawl heavily.
     He moaned inconsolably until the moment I offered him my right hand, in assurance of my worship of his memory. He especially feared a neighborhood gravedigger, enraged in his effort to break the skulls of all the dead. He retired in peace, promising me his immediate return to the native whirlwind of the sun.
     I gave his cadaver to the fire in the morning of the next day.
     I keep his ashes in an urn of incorruptible cypress, so I might add them to my own on the supreme day and that urn is the only treasure I have won on this involuntary journey.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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