El bienaventurado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Blessed One

Some magic lights were gamboling on the sea’s motionless waters. The cabins on the shore, scarcity and ruin, were alternately surging and foundering in the shadows.
     The natives were interrupting my sleep proclaiming nakedness and the cold. I would retire from their tears to the asperity of some eremitical hills and would return late to their vicinity.
     I lived attentive to the release of pain. The deaconess with an innocent glance and angelic voice had pointed out for me that means of gathering merits, of growing in health and wisdom.
     I received the message of grace in her canticle with a grey accent. The psalm of exile and of anguish would rise from the cell to the windows of my room, in the uncultivated country.
     A childlike pity, a grace from my visit to the dispossessed, and the lamentations of nostalgia at the same hour of the day easily converted me to the habit of sacrifice. Within view of a resplendent sunset’s glow, I suffered from the memory of the path of the Via Crucis.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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