La virtuosa del clavecín / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Spinet Virtuoso

The mines are hidden under the rough ground. The residue fatigues the decimated, linear river. A hill differs brusquely from the unpleasant place. The visitor to the summit is distinguished by his reflection, according to a natural law, in the vapors of the sky.
     The daughter of a pensive miner was guiding me through the dour territory and pointing out its wonders. She stopped applying herself, that morning, to the vague emotions of music and introduced me to a palace and its recondite chapel, underground. The recumbent statue of a distinguished beauty was displaying at its feet the steel of its sacrificed paladin. The chamber or treasure of the sacristy counted with a very singular piece of clothing from a reliquary of ivory figurines. This is where the effigies of the evangelists and the simulacra of the lion and the eagle, defenders of the lamb in a step from Apocalypse, would gather. I thought in an involuntary manner of the symbols for the elements, drawn in a reprobate writing by Hermes.
     The miner’s daughter then took me out into free space and set me en route to the ruins of a fortress built by a descendent of Charlemagne. The fortress had merged, affecting a single form, with the mountain where it had been placed. I saw in that portent a vengeance from the Earth, the retaliation of a telluric divinity.
     I recognized the majestic shadow of Goethe, before I felt it as my confidant. The august poet had meditated right there on the secrets of nature, referring them to the doctrines of the fable, to the symbols of superstition, and he had made an effort to console from life a nostalgic young man, of Werther’s lineage.
     The miner’s daughter enjoyed referring me to the trifles of Goethe’s visit. She was insisting on the gravity and calmness of the salubrious genius and was aspiring to confer upon me that same indifference in the face of the world’s uncertainties merely by presenting me, now and in memory of her friendship, with the anemone of Broken, the flower of sortilege.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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