La taberna / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Tavern

The libertines would fire off an abundant laugh when kicking, in different ways, the landlady’s cap. Their drunkenness, the effect of a mortal brew, would become entangled with derangement. The flame of the reflectors would imitate the tinge of absinthe.
     A red imp would fly over the empty glasses that had been knocked over.
     The oldest of the libertines had become phlegmatic and adipose. His companions would try to irritate him with entertaining nicknames. But they achieved nothing with the veteran of licentiousness and bacchanalia. He had tossed from himself the buffoon’s hood with little bells.
     Someone had flung a lit match onto the sleepy faun and startled his clumsiness and turned it into affliction and fear. The skeletons formed a festive wheel around him and tried to refresh him with sprinklings of water. They witnessed, astonished, the ignition of the drunk, a case that has been marveled at and even denied by science.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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