Merry England / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Merry England

The moribund man props himself up on the pillow. The sound of his threat is suspended in the air. The restless family looks at each other, questioning themselves with a gesture. The abbot was manifesting his intolerant character in the crisis of agony. I was comparing his tyrannical gesture and his earthly discourse with the docile bearing of Falstaff in the same trance. An innkeeper had told me in compassionate terms about the dazed man’s decease.
     The family of the impatient abbot enabled me for the rupture of a perplexity and left in my hands the magisterial thread of a celebrated tangle among politicians of that age, ennobled afterward by the fantasy of dramatists. The family was imputing the abbot’s death to the fading of his guilty projects. He desired his king’s defeat at the very moment a war with the French one was born and he had aroused the anger of several unjust noblemen.
     A few rakes discerned the conspiracy amid the dialogue of some dissolute gentlemen and they ran to tell Falstaff about it. In this manner they offered him the chance to return, in his extreme days, to the king’s grace, when he had fallen out with his grandiloquent buffoonery.
     The king was grateful for the affection of his partials and confessed the advantage of having submitted, when he was a turbulent youth, to the company of idlers.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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