Marginal / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Marginal

A chronicle initiates the episode of an adventurer disillusioned from his forays and wounded by poverty. He had not attained any treasure amid the frights of the encampment. He knew of the case of the destitution of a king and his captivity of nearly three decades with no other company save that of his dwarf.
     The adventurer interrupts the critique of the Homeric rhapsodies in the original Greek, the only solace of his decadence, to embrace in vain the endeavor of freeing him. The captive had been an arrogant despot and was accused of having thrown his pack of hounds against a solicitous bishop.
     The adventurer was returning from a war with the infidels in the plains of the Danube. Seated on a donkey skin drum, he would occupy the sleeplessness of the alarm nights by gathering from a fugitive Byzantine the news from the vibrant language. He must have recreated the surly character in the vicissitudes of the Iliad and from that very scene one can choose the symbol of the vulture, enemy of the moribund, with the object of signifying the ruin of his hardened will.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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