La salva / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Salvo

A perfidious lover had submerged me in dishonor. Her discourse was occupying my thought with the image of an absurd race, in a proscribed vessel. I was raving in the hall of a cynical orgy.
     The whale hunters, venturing forth before Columbus and Vasco de Gama in the direction of the unknown countries, had not foreseen in their letters the place of deviation. The sea birds succumbed to fatigue on the masts and decks of my galley. I stopped at the foot of some inhuman cliffs, under a gaseous sky.
     In my memory I was wandering the passages of the Divine Comedy, where a certain star, signaled by Dante’s augural gaze, serves to set him on course amid the smoke of hell and over the mountain of purgatory.
     My journey was being carried out at the same time as the decadent orgy. I wanted to interrupt the boredom of the grave coastline, firing the prow canon. The crash reduced the house of infamous amusement to dust.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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