El arribo forzoso / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Forced Arrival

The frigate divides the sea of whales and suspends the foray into the archipelago of birds. The natives inhabit wooden sheds and live as fishermen, beneath a sky of soot.
     The myth resumes the origin of the moderate society.
     The crow of adventure, an equal to the wolf in the feast of battle, steers the ship of the ancestral pirate, in an impious age, and stops the flight at the naked mountain, on the summit of glass.
     I propose to travel across the basalt island, to perceive the canvas of snow.
     The waves of funereal rhythm sway a few Spanish vessels in the shady inlet. I turn my memory to the Biscayan mariners, augurers of half the globe in an unlearned century, and I distinguish them astonished in front of the aurora borealis, a dance of lights, a break from court in the humid solitude.
     I visit the episcopal city and suffer the influence of the sudden woman on a grey street, where the elevated sign of the ogive prevails.
     I have described her effigy to the minister of souls, when I stayed at his home that same day. An earthen lamp, supplied with fish oil and drawn according to a secular art, was illuminating the interview.
     He marked in the fortuitous find a present from grace. The face harmonized with that of a queen from an archaic past, devotee of the Via Crucis. The eyes inspired a longing for an invisible world and she wore, in reality, the habit of a recumbent statue, on an iron tomb, in the country of the rain.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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