Al pie de un cipo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

At the Foot of a Memorial Stone

His name was José María Milá Díaz, a man who until yesterday suffered life in our oldest eastern city; he spent it singing and weeping, moved in imitation of Arnaldo de Daniel so he thus existed in the purgatory of the Gibeline bard. Because of a great misfortune one could deny that he sang, since his verse, poor in its cadence, would hurry in the manner of tight and brusque sobs. Because of all these merits, in the city of Cumaná they hurry to honor the martyr’s memory, and we fervently applaud the late offering, from here, from very far away, dispersed children of that idolatrous Jerusalem. No other behavior was possible because, among the more recent men of letters in the eastern region, Milá is august. He is so like a numen, because leprosy, the illness that shares with madness a sacred nature, had lit a nimbus of saintliness on his forehead. Since madness is of an inferior majesty, illustrious during paganism, whose reign infuriates the joy of the Bacchae and the predictions of the fortunetellers, our man of thought and sacrifice is best served by the illness known in an obscure biblical mention and which was Dantean terror in the divine inferno.
     Completely justified is the offering to the man who accepted, without groaning from pain or terror, the illness the brilliant people of Colombia accommodate with the expression from the holy book relating to death: king of horrors!
     He exhibits himself as superhuman, tormented by the illness that forces Job to curse his own birth, and inspired the pious men of the primitive Church to compare the face of the ill-fated man to that of the lion, because they were both, ill-fated man and desert lions, familiar to those saints, apostates of happiness, set apart in savage isolation. His dignity grows if we remember that he did not consecrate a single one of his complaints to the immense disgrace, like that of his predecessors in remote centuries, who were separated from society with the lugubrious song of the dead intoned by the priest and with vain and sterile ash scattered over the miserable head.
     Misfortune consecrated him in such a way, that the earth where he rests is sanctified by his corpse. He had no need for hospitality in blessed cemeteries, because every piece of earth where a grave is dug for a martyr is holy like a port that receives a shipwrecked sailor. Besides, our whole earth is blessed, and because of that receives the homage of splendid days and solemn nights. This is so true, that the stars trembling from the celestial blackness like tears of holy water in ecclesiastical ceremonies over the cloth of coffins carry out a funeral rite over our remains.
     A funerary monument should be raised over the final resting place with severe sadness, as for a bitter life and an early death. It would be appropriate if mourning foliage would shelter him, as in Heineian poetry, harmonious with evening songs, in whose shadow lovers would interrupt their dialogue to weep without knowing why, with a sudden sadness. It would speak eloquently to newcomers, if the martyr were to be represented in meditation with his face afflicted by a Nazarene affliction resting on his mutilated hand, when from the window of his sick room he would compare his confinement with the freedom of the distant sea, on whose intermittent breeze on rare occasions an unconscious knell would come to interrupt the overwhelming silence over the neighboring blazing sands. The passer-by would discover himself in front of him, as if facing a demolished and deformed god of unearthed idolatry, and many would compare his attitude to that of the man who descended to the abyss, when he was meditating upon his tremendous punishments.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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

Mi novia Ítala come flores / Miguel James

My Girlfriend Ítala Eats Flowers

My girlfriend appeared trembling in a bookstore
She showed me lonely street papers and slashed whores
She gave me lovely stones and seashells
An old engraving of untied horses
My girlfriend was on her way from the sun and looked like a gypsy
She told strange stories about twin souls
My girlfriend had a blue dress
She fell in love with me and my sandals
My girlfriend would read Boris Vian
She took a shower bleeding and gave me a body that smelled like nothing
I fell in love with my girlfriend
I braided my hair and took her to the movies
My girlfriend had an ugly blonde child
We would inhabit the city of fog or beyond the seas
My girlfriend became my girlfriend
My girlfriend pashira and ficus colony of herbs graft of flower-eating doves
I loved my girlfriend
My broke girlfriend sold earrings in the markets
She would bring me mandarins when I was in solitary confinement
She would undress in front of bored old men
I was my girlfriend
She adored Fabio and had a balcony to jump from
And it’s just that my sad girlfriend looked like a desolate Maga
My girlfriend was a star
I would have died without my girlfriend
One day my girlfriend said we were looking like open wounds under the sky
That she’d take up the lab books again
That she’d stop sleeping at the foot of the bridge
I didn’t pay attention to my girlfriend
I let her mix Pelusa rock and biology texts
Víctor’s punctual visits and kitchen habits
Johnny’s accurate punches
And it’s just that my girlfriend didn’t wanna eat flowers any more
So then I thought about giving her what she deserves
I’d take her to the mountain top
I’d bathe her in the trail’s creek
Then I’d bombard her with bougainvillea petals from above
I’d spray her with French perfumes
And knowing she was in ecstasy I’d cover her with baby poo
So she wouldn’t stop being my girlfriend
So she wouldn’t get sick of eating flowers
And it’s just that sometimes I don’t feel like being my girlfriend’s boyfriend
Sometimes I don’t feel like being anyone’s boyfriend
But yesterday I saw my girlfriend
She had ripped shoes and she gave me a glass pearl
We looked at a strange dress that cost as much as two hundred cigarette boxes
We talked about banquet fruits with bread and jelly
Because you really start to get sick of eating flowers
But I told my girlfriend that we’d always eat flowers
And I understood my girlfriend
And my girlfriend understood me
But sometimes I worry about my girlfriend
Because my furious girlfriend is capable of hoisting the boy and hitting him like a piñata
She’d shoot her mom on a holiday
She’d blow up the lab with sodium
Because my girlfriend is a beast
She’s a chill she’s a star
And I love my girlfriend
And I know she’ll appear on the avenue singing
She’ll scream absurdities only I understand
She’ll put a knife to my belly button
She’ll say: “Man, take off your pants”
Because my girlfriend’s my girlfriend
Because I know my girlfriend
My eternal girlfriend my girlfriend Ítala
My crazy girlfriend
Ganja plant
Sun
And spring.




Mi novia Ítala come flores (1988)




{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }

El hombre que regala historias / Carles Geli

The Man Who Gives Away Stories

The collected short stories of the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero, creator of a world with its own mythology, confirm him as one of Latin America’s most imaginative authors.

[Photo: Carmen Secanella for El País]


“A tightrope walker performs in a town; everyone shows up because they know that, given the suicidal difficulty, the trapeze artist will fall sooner or later. A young man shows up one day, and another and another and another to see him and nothing ever happens; there are dangers, frights, but nothing; one single time, for reasons beyond his control, and he can’t make it; the tightrope walker actually falls. It's a gift for you: you write it, but you should make it very clear that it was the man who went every day who kept the tightrope walker from falling.” It’s not every day someone gives away a story... to be written, but this is the generosity displayed by the Venezuelan Ednodio Quintero (Las Mesitas, Trujillo, 1947). He can allow himself to give away such expensive ideas considering Combates (Candaya), the first volume of his complete short stories that gathers his most recent production of shorter fiction, ranging from 1995 to 2000: an abundance of stories in a hard landscape that marks a world that is slightly distressing, almost mythological, with warriors and characters with strange codes of conduct, susceptible to metamorphosis and anthropomorphism, about whom we know just the right amount thanks to a language that is as precise as it is brief.

That unsettling point of fantasy is distilled by Quintero himself, with polished skin and slightly slanted eyes –“I consider myself mestizo, but I’m only 16% Indian, I calculated it”– who was destined, according to the highest social aspiration in those latitudes, to be a rural telegrapher and today is one of his country’s most potent voices. “I was born in a village of 500 souls, removed from everything and which you reached on horseback; there was no electricity or anything and the imaginary was nearly medieval, from the 16th century, from when the Spanish explorers arrived.”

The rural geography was curious: “The poorer you were, the higher you went up the mountain,” he formulates. In his case, he arrived at 2,600 meters in a little town called Visún. “I read before I began to speak, more than anything because I was quiet; later on I had an adolescent crisis but my parents thought I was going crazy; I would say to myself: “I don’t know what I am but I’m different from everyone else.” And they took me to the countryside for a change in climate.” The punishment was the house of a relative with a remarkable library which translated into reading Faulkner at age 15 and “an intense contact with nature, the world of plants and, above all, with minerals.” And maybe because of that, the boy who wanted to be a civil engineer –”those who build bridges and roads”– ended up by mistake –”I really made a mistake with my major in college”– as a forest engineer, which allowed him to travel through nearly all the forests of the Amazon and the Ivory Coast, which can be glimpsed as settings in, among others, his first and highly praised novel, La danza del jaguar (1991).

If it partly explains a geography, does that childhood also explain certain characters? “If there is an element of mythology, it’s Greek, but my mythologies are invented, they're rituals or totally imagined things or ones that seem to be; imagination is the basic premise of writing; I don’t have anything against realism, but my thing is imagination at the service of nothingness.” And in that vein he cites above all Kafka (“The Metamorphosis gave me nightmares”), Borges and Cortázar, influences that disappeared starting with the short stories in El corazón ajeno (2000). An arduous task. “Writing grinds everything down: a writer, in his early phase, is always an imitation of another preceding author or of his parents until he finds a world, a voice...” This is why some have said of Quintero that he is a unpunished explorer: “Language is an instrument everyone neglects; the writer must answer not to the market but to Cervantes and to the tongue itself, to help create a language, with its own lexicon and particular forms of construction...” A style? “No, what I mean goes further... And then, to die; my Faustian bargain would be that one.”

Those stories that seem like dreams (“many of them come from there, like the story “Caza:” I remember them when I wake up; other times I daydream and can only react by making myself crack the toes of my feet”) are populated by warriors with strange codes of behavior, physically or mentally wounded. Almost an army by the end. “I detest violence; I don’t get into arguments and I don’t carry even a nail clipper, but existence is a war; good and evil; in sum, existence is an evil battle to fight.” And they also fall quite often, whether in external holes or in the deeper ones within themselves, as the story “La caída” makes explicit. “I’m an amniotic rider: when she was pregnant, my mother fell off the horse and I remember that I grabbed onto the umbilical chord like a monkey on a vine: that image has followed me for a long time.”

But Quintero’s characters never give up not even in the worst situations (“In my e-mails I even use the signature: “We don’t give up; there’s only one life.”), they talk to themselves a lot, in first person, and even with their alter ego: “I’ve reached the conclusion that that voice is the result of the solitary manner in which I’ve lived; if I have problems, I still talk to myself out loud; I travel in an autarchic manner.” And could it be they suffer from a type of blindness? “The human eye is constructed to see certain things, it’s not prepared to see everything within reality, like the energies that surround us.” And he says that reflection leads him to consider the story “El hombre caja,” where the character decides to live inside a box from which he watches the world only through a small crack made so he can see. The story belongs to the Japanese writer Kobe Abe, who Quintero cites, along with Banana Yoshimoto, like the good Japanese specialist that he is and after having lived in that country for a year: “Japanese culture is in tune with my way of being: respect for the other, tranquility; they say they’re extravagant and that’s the result of their freedom.” And what does he think of the Haruki Murakami effect? “It’s explained a great deal by his blend of the American and the Japanese and there’s also the connection on the shamanic side.”

Quintero is an established voice –La muerte viaja a caballo (1974); Mariana y los comanches (2004)...- of a Venezuelan literature that, seen from the outside, only produced Rómulo Gallegos or Arturo Uslar Pietri and that during the Latin American Boom barely gave us a glimpse of Guillermo Meneses and Adriano González León. “My theory is that, just like we do with petroleum, we think of ourselves as a country that’s self-sufficient in almost everything; it’s a very 20th century phenomenon; it’s also true that we haven’t had an exile and we’ve definitely had a correct editorial industry,” he points out. But their literary neighbors don’t mention them when they visit Spain. “That’s because of Latin America’s process of sociocultural balkanization,” he responds and adds two indispensable names: Rafael Cadenas in poetry and Victoria de Stefano in fiction. And the influence of a politician like Hugo Chávez in Venezuelan culture? “90% of Venezuelan intellectuals are not with him, but he’s a very skilled ignoramus: the State-owned bookstores are very affordable, for instance, but he equalizes by means of the lowest denominator: the foreigners who arrive, for example, are Bolivians and schools impose a notable ideological orientation.”

He says he has lost energy when writing, but not when reading, to which he has dedicated “14-hour sessions;” maybe that explains why he can cite Bernardo Atxaga, Enrique Vila-Matas or Ignacio Martínez Pisón. And that’s why no one better than him to define the short story, with a few notes he takes out of his small notebook, as if it were a formula: “Geometrical narrative object –its mechanism should respond to a sphere–, precise –without residue or stupidities– and precious –with a very careful language.” He has to go. One apologizes in case he has been delayed excessively. “Don’t worry; I never arrive late: something always happens to make me be there on time no matter how much I might not want to.” Could he be giving away another story?




{ Carles Geli, Babelia, El País, 9 January 2010 }

El olvido / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Oblivion

I didn’t step in the tracks of the extravagant hunter. I wanted to avoid the contagion of his grief.
     We lived as neighbors in a country of august beauty. The sulfur and other preferred fire fossils would gather in the composition of the earth.
     The hunter frequented the granite peaks. His brave gesture was drawn in the zone of candid ether. A fugitive light directed his steps.
     He had domesticated the oldest among the sudden chamois. He was accurate with the object of his shots as he turned his back to them.
     I only approached him once, in order to find the motive for his detour.
     The grave manner of his discourse kept me from collecting a glimmer.
     He had built his cabin in the shadow of a glacial pine tree.
     I went there furtively once I noticed he had been absent for a week. The hunter, free from the deleterious effects of death, was lying in a stone coffin. The frozen face, alien to sorrow, did not inspire conjectures as to the cause of death. A trail of magnetic carbuncles had fallen from his sides.
     A torrent, created by the fortuitous rain, throws a sediment of sand onto the cabin and promises to blind it.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

Atrapar el sol / Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga

Catch the Sun

Combates (1995-2000) is the first volume with which the publishing house Candaya began the publication of the complete short stories of Ednodio Quintero (1947). The rest of Quintero’s short fiction will be collected in the book Ceremonias (1974-1994). Combates gathers the short stories of this Venezuelan writer’s maturity.


On my first night in Mérida, I dream that I wander the mountain on horseback, as though I were a character in a short story by Ednodio Quintero. I descend from the plateau that was a legend he narrated. I descend amid the high mountain sides, as if returning through the years I’ve known him and read his work. On the summit of El Águila’s peak stands the Plaza de Madrid, where I found him as though he had lived in all the cities and all the books. He gave me a copy of his novel La danza del jaguar, and since then I’ve traveled in that dance.

There are writers with no world, architects of their inventions. There are others who spread out over hills of pages, dreams and people, unfinished demons, inhabitants of an internal country that can only belong to the person who governs or is governed by it. This is the case with Ednodio Quintero. His literature is unique.

Let’s look at Combates, the first volume of his complete short stories fortuitously published by Candaya, that gathers texts written between 1995 and 2000, divided into three sections, the first two from previously published books: “El combate,” “El corazón ajeno,” and “Últimas historias.”

From the first story, we are surprised by the poetic prose that displays an updating of Symbolism for the 21st century, a narrative development of the findings of Ramos Sucre and Poe, a gallery toward the purest of literary molds, where consciousness and dreams merge. The stories in this first section seem to be connected to the telluric unconscious of existence, as though the writer’s hand transforms what is dreamed into nature or, by force of imagination and originality, a mythical territory comes alive in a primeval space, but one populated in an ultramodern manner. It’s as though one were to simultaneously read Kafka, Rulfo, Ray Bradbury and Poe’s metaphysical stories under a fabulist illumination that mixes the light from all of them but belongs only to Ednodio Quintero.

Mythical themes are revised, each one with its turn of the screw: birth, combat –and this one is a constant, the fight against something or someone external that is also an internal enemy–, the Luciferian and Miltonian fall, the Orphic descent to the infernos, with a vision that, approaching fantasy literature, also touches the naturalness with which the Greeks imposed the presence of their phantasmagoria. He comes close to it but he isn’t quite fantasy literature. Rather, his work resembles the allegorical vision of Melville or Kafka. The perspective is always contemporary, mature in its use of techniques by which the reader passes through buildings of the highest originality and beauty, as though in a late model sports car.

This technical ease also affects the structure of the stories in this volume that, thanks to their ingenious turns, manage to annul the difference between what’s dreamed and what’s lived, between unconscious fears and reality’s brutal actions: don’t miss “La casa” or, from the second section, “El corazón ajeno,” “El otro tigre,” or “Un rostro en la penumbra,” that, within the atmosphere of a Maupassant story, creates a version of the theme of otherness from a well-known story by Borges. But Borges hadn’t read Murakami nor had he learned the diagonal manner of receiving that other side of the fantastical and the disturbance that’s born in the shadow of hidden I’s, one never knows where, in some unconscious that belongs to all of us.

As if new. Ednodio Quintero has the gift of pure creators. When one reads “El sur,” the first story in the second section, one regains the enthusiasm of reading Jack London, Stevenson or, more recently, Guimarães Rosa, nonetheless receiving a type of magic that belongs only to the author of Combates. The structures of his stories flow while shuffling past, present and future, merged into a single time, the literary, where we can remain stable and surprised as we continue reading. Two affirmations by the narrator of “El corazón es ajeno” give us two important clues about Ednodio Quintero’s art: “A story, when presented to us as such, is always accompanied by a second intention like the bird and its shadow. Most of the time it’s unknown to the author.”

“A worthwhile story should contain within itself, in the manner of a paper kamikaze, the seed of its own destruction.”

These two lessons are found throughout the book up to its “Últimas historias.” These final stories seem to me to contain and conclude the range of the previous skills and themes.

“Ojos de serpiente” offers a version of the structure of “El otro tigre,” based on otherness and violence.

The intense eroticism that inundates the entire universe of his fiction is concentrated in “La hora del Ángelus,” whose voice reminds me of a Marqués de Bradomín with a high-precision clock.

“Una pelea con el demonio” unveils the crowd of the unconscious, making it stand up naturally in the form of plot and character.

The last story, “Owner of a lonely heart,” is linked by means of its poetic prose and its oneiric transcription to this book’s first dream, “Sobreviviendo” (a Kurosawa dream according to Gregory Zambrano; facing the dream produced by a Yes song).

However, I want to conclude with the penultimate story, “Un rayo de sol,” which was wisely removed from his novel Mariana y los comanches, because of its unique importance.

Ednodio Quintero once told me this book would gather his final short stories forever.

Were that the case, “Un rayo de sol” would be a testament, a secret passed down in the form and light of a spot of sun fixed on the floor, which a child’s hand tries to catch. The spot floats above the surface of the skin, never beneath it, a fugitive once again, a few centimeters away, as the hours pass. Space is sharp and time is slow. Life is evident and inexplicable, just like that disc of sun over the ground. The child’s hand tries to cover it, catch it. But he will never be able to in the story. He’ll have to wait for an adult hand, spent in many battles, that will decide to reinvent that instant by means of words capable of creating and bringing back reality itself. Only literature, a great literature like Ednodio Quintero’s, is able to trap the blurry disc of the sun floating over the floor.




{ Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 20 February 2010 }

El castigo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Punishment

The visionary would teach me numeration using a tree of incalculable leaves. He proceeded to initiate me in the figures and volumes pointing out the example of the crystal and the proportion held between the parts of a flower. He would discover an atom of the insinuating light in the dark body.
     The visionary would disappear in a skiff of superficial capacity when dusk fell. It created the illusion of foundering at an ambiguous distance, amidst a tumult of waves. I would watch the relics of his garb and his cypress crown floating.
     He would return the next day hidden from me, wearing the same solemn gown of a Hebrew priest, according to the ritual of Moses.
     At the time he was commenting the passage on a parchment scroll, written without vowels. The cover showed the image of the lycaeon, the African wolf. He would conclude by citing the name of the vengeful prophets and loosening onto the morning’s face a grandiose hymn that would exhaust the torrent of his voice.
     I stopped seeing him when he began to speak recklessly, across free space, with a magnetic star.
     The rotunda, where he had taken shelter, fell to the ground suddenly, surrounded by splendid flames.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El herbolario / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Herbalist

The mole and the lynx were the ministers of my secret wisdom. They had followed me when I established myself in a naked landscape. A few white birds were lamenting the fate of Euphorion, the one with wings of fire, and they attributed it to an early burn out, to a desire for danger.
     The mole and the lynx were helping me discover the future by means of dancing flames and an effusion of wine, of somber purple. I was telling them about the privilege of tracking the steps of the invisible angel of death.
     I wandered the earth, suffering the shouting and stones of the multitude.
     I didn’t gain my neighbors’ affection by illuminating for them the subterranean waters in a lime desert.
     A maiden abstained from censuring my ridiculous suit, a present from Klingsor, the infallible wizard.
     I saved her from an inveterate illness, from her constant tears. A specter had blown on her face and I brought her back to health with the help of disciplined and fragrant dittany flowers, a lenitive for grief.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

Spleen / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Spleen

The English traveler was the image of remorse. He had removed himself from mankind and he would portray it without a mask. With an authoritarian step he would walk the length of a skiff belonging to a Cypriot fisherman, in the vicinity of an arid coast, frequented by goats.
     The fisherman was moaning, dissuading the presumptuous magnate from danger with a pirate’s gesture.
     The Englishman proposed to observe the crowd of infidels closely, gathered together for the extermination of civilization. They camped where the vineyards and olive groves used to thrive. The torturous smoke of a bonfire was being cared for in the vestibule of a dump, a relic venerated by the scholars of cultured nations, and it continued to infect the energetic sea air. That smoke blocked the sunlight and meant a fistful of dirt thrown at the divine disc.
     A Croatian officer, a deserter from the faith of his elders and content with the extremes of a mistaken life, directs the artillery of the infidels and undoes the skiff in the second shot.
     The fisherman, wounded in the shoulder, couldn’t even try and became convinced of his fear’s truth. The noisy waves pulled and pushed, an hour later, his anemic and light cadaver.
     The Englishman returned to his friends’ royal and offered himself once again for the service of tugboat.
     He compared himself to a mythological swimmer and insisted on the veracity of the aedas.





Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

Como Mérida con Blanca / Miguel James

Like Mérida with Blanca

Sometimes I think
A Gardener should be a Garden
And the world like Mérida with Blanca
Because if it isn’t like Mérida with Blanca
There’s no point in
The Gardener
Or the Garden.




A las diosas del mar (1999)




{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }

La casa del olvido / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The House of Oblivion

A mirror displays the darkness of the room, where the ancient furniture increases the majesty of the shadow. The yellow of the marks, garnish and engravings vacillates and perishes in a black border. The room occupies an inner edge of the deserted mansion, safe from noise and alarms; it is agreeable for engrossed meditation and for infinite distress; it recalls illusions of years past, a parade of laments. The dream of a livid semblance and funeral wings visits the impregnable retreat, finally posing on the rug-covered floor; he is the only interruption for the vertiginous soliloquy.
     A high window uncovers the sublime sky, where the cloud floats with a naiad’s swim and runs with Atalanta’s scattered escape. A flexible vegetable follows the window jamb, doubles an arc and turns out to be a single flower; a flower that seems like an artifice: chaste, untouched by time, of an alabaster color and odorless; and that beatific flower of liturgical paleness strikes up blessed relations with a star, glimpsed from the window in a single spot of sky.
     But the flower suffers another secret and more vehement love: it solicits the neighboring pond, a lair of nude sleeping water, and wants to escape the shadow, to die submissive beneath the sun’s dart, equaling the sacrifice of a certain captive, the lover of the victor in a barbarous epic.
     The moon places a silver nimbus over the lean flower, a nun refusing sleep and subtracted from the world, a night livened by an immense remote light, a prelude and message from the sky; and that night of contemplation, in its flat pond, the virginal water murmurs in its dreams.
     The enormous mansion multiplies the ghosts of the shadow and receives the sun’s inundation with the calm of a desert. It disposes the mind to a scrupulous meditation on death and its sealed enclosure enunciates auguries of eternity.
     In the center of the funeral dwelling, built with severe regularity, the empty ancient well, turned into ditch, can sustain the life of a still cypress. The elusive tree endlessly watches over the unnoticed ditch, and its cusp, finally elevated over the walls of the rigorous mansion, demands the distant horizon and the lenitive of dawn.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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

El valle del éxtasis / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Valley of Ecstasy

I lived perplexed discovering the ideas and habits of the furtive wizard. I established his relationship and similarity to the Irish musicians, brought together at court by an honorable invitation from Charlemagne. One of those apparitors had deposited an artistic gospel in the hands of the deceased emperor when the burial was held.
     The furtive wizard never stopped honoring the memory of his daughter and between his fingers he weighed the crown of pearls of her forehead. The maiden had been born with the privilege of visiting the world at a winged pace. Death captivated her in a net of air, an artifice for hunting birds, armed in the heights. Her progenitor had baptized her in the sea, following a schismatic rule, and he never reached his goal of communicating to her the invulnerability of a shining paladin.
     The wizard played a prelude on his bagpipes, in celebration of his daughter’s name, a warrior ballad in the nighttime serenity and from that same luck he was marking the arrival of the swallow in the wet winds of March.
     The dream voice inspired his whim of beautifying the final days of his terrestrial time with the presence of a fabulous jewel, in imitation of Eucharistic gentlemen. He said goodbye to me with a warning of his hope to gather at the foot of an invisible tree the zafir cup of Teodolinda, a Lombardian queen.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

Bajo el cielo monótono / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Under the Monotonous Sky

In my early years, I followed the path of Shakespeare’s imagination. From the frigate, I could make out a few windmills, dissipated in the liquid atmosphere.
     The storks were resting in the towers and lanterns of a church.
     Popular devotion conferred upon them naive advantages and privileges. They had denounced the lack of hospitality for the Virgin Mary from the gypsies who were expected on the roads where people would make pilgrimages for her, executing an immemorial vengeance.
     I interned myself, after disembarking, in a jungle of ash trees and a branch furiously scratched my face. At that instant the insomniac owl of the regicidal night had just flown off, as my guide and confidant, a benevolent old man, immediately clarified for me. I found less of its presence when I came out onto a field of flowers of light.
     I retreated in demand of the first neighborhood and a woman with loose hair and an inspired forehead described for me the signs of my protector. She had died on an ancient date and her apparition augured happiness. She would only appear for children.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

La inspiración / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Inspiration

I was struggling up a river’s course. I never let go of the oars on the quick boat, made of bark. I had pulled it off an independent tree, a family of the larks and a disseminator of its virginal flowers in the august jungle, reflected in the ether mirror.
     On the front of the boat I drew the easy image of love and redeemed its eyes from the captivity of blinds. I had used when penetrating the fragrant crust a steel style.
     I stumbled on open plains, where a pack of burning horses was fuming and running, victors in a lion assault.
     It would speed forward to the presence of the ocean and would come back when it felt the frenetic sound of trumpets. The beauty of the gait and race presented me at each instant with a new and singular motive of admiration. I was thinking of a few rhetoricians of gentility, divided and hostile when it came to qualifying merits in the horses of a frieze, livened by the chisel of Fidias.
     The frenetic sound of the trumpets resounded in the diaphanous sky and was announcing the sovereign of the chimeric country. She came at the head of an escort of huntsmen and ancient grand men, equals in a courteous order from the earliest days of youth. She had left an ineffable world, just as Beatriz and with the same raiment of flames, brandishing the steel of Clorinda. She invited me to the step of her car and imposed a signal of her authority on my forehead, through which I was visited by thoughts and feelings of an unlimited greatness.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

La presencia / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Presence

The image of the towers was being drawn on the sea. A few tenuous birds were surrounding them with their methodical flight. They couldn’t sustain themselves on their false, elemental feet.
     The lightning bolts were falling randomly and frequently from the empty sky. I was forcing my thought and I couldn’t discover its impossible origin. The towers and a wilting cypress remained undamaged.
     I had awoken from a still dream and from its fateful visions, which came from the moon. The view of the cypress put me on the path to an unprecedented sepulcher.
     Isolde had disappeared from the earth and was resting right there from her agonized passion. I wanted to speak and my words flew through the air, spontaneously transformed into moans.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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