La sala de los muebles de laca / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Room with the Lacquer Furniture

The hetaira placed her feet on an ivory foot-stool and began to pluck a lute with twenty double strings. She was altering the length of those strings at will by means of movable frets.
     She was anxious about the fate of a painter of ducks, lost in the crowds of Canton or in its dives. The disloyal players had mined the ground of the suburbs with the patience of moles.
     The hetaira found herself subjugated by a girl aspiring to the love of the absent man. She was imploring in vain for help from a plaster image, armed with a mandarin’s scepter and diviner of happiness.
     The rival was able to detain the fugitive in the most dangerous of places, in the chamber of the opium smokers. He stood out at that moment among the hallucinating and furious ones.
     The perspicacious rival was congratulating herself for having plunged the painter in misfortune. She was announcing the final success of her maneuver when she burned in the fire, without producing any ash, a stone of fecund virtue.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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