El escudero de Eneas, Il. 1,49 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Aeneas’s Shield-Bearer
Il. 1,49

The events of the conflict safeguard the calm of Aeneas, the patient hero. He goes toward the greatest danger, where the voices of his own demand him.
     The smoke of the funerals rises to deface the summer’s red glow.
     The clamor of the combatants, dressed in metal, wounds the concave sky.
     The hero moves on foot, followed by a single shield-bearer. He occasionally feels the graze of a missile or a stone.
     He suddenly gathers a squadron of enthused soldiers and launches it onto a throng of islanders, scattered in the middle of celebration over a recent success.
     The enemies, raised amid the sea’s pounding, resist and die with weapons in their hands, before repairing their disorder.
     Aeneas confirms the ferocious companions, attentive to the fate of the native city, in the hope of a superior destiny, free from the contingencies of the present war.
     His discourse dominates the protest of the vanquished.
     The gesture of his hand, always exempt of blood, announces the design of a city, a shoal against the waves of time, terminus and relief of the world’s avenues. Over the sumptuous palaces, a troop of consecrated birds flies perpetually, joined in the form of a triangle or an arc; and its ruins, on the day of final decadence, will not nourish the bonfire, where the victor’s orgy will warm itself.
     The hero comforts his friends and moves away until he loses himself in the scalding horizon.
     The shield-bearer turns to look, and fires from the edge of the field.
     The contenders marvel at the luminous cape and the terrifying sound of his arrows.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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