El aventurero / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Adventurer

I was disarmed by effect of the secular dispute with the bourgeois and the villain. I had successively lost my privileges.
     A legitimate affection reposed the initial days of my youth.
     The rustic maiden, pilgrim of the dream world, carried a silver sickle on the occasion of the first visit.
     I was widowed in the course of active hostilities. The uproar of the rebels abbreviated my companion’s final instants.
     I would pass the nights, alone and dressed in steel, at the foot of the bed of her final ailment. Friends and servants had abandoned me amidst the danger.
     I was scrutinizing, leaning out the window, the sky stained with timid light.
     The crowd was stirring at the foot of the walls, preparing arms and vociferating threats.
     I took advantage of the celebration of an armistice and escaped, in demand of fortune, on a nervous horse. I was seeking more important dangers.
     I slept with the reins in my hand on the rude floor. The lethargic night was erasing silhouettes.
     I rode on a barge of Levantine commerce and found the army of Christians where they had run, under divine sanction, during the first days of humanity.
     The goshawks and steeds had died of thirst in the deserts of sand. The paladins were panting on their feet or riding the modest ass and the coarse ox.
     A schemer, fugitive from a Byzantine dungeon, proposed to divert me from the lacerated host. He was insinuating the conquest of command in defenseless kingdoms, within arm’s reach, and promised me the unequal cohort of his adepts.
     I executed the project after the chastisement of our own. The unfaithful emerged in squads, from the womb and caves of a mountain ridge.
     We were cornered and defeated by the multitude of their riders. They used horses enabled to combat by simulating escape. Their arms, of a clear metal, slashed tenaciously.
     The women, kept safe in the middle of the camp, preferred servitude to sacrifice. They wore jewels and gems to augment their beauty in the eyes of the victor.
     My adviser wound up among the dead. I emerged unscathed, with the retinue of his partisans, following a ruined Roman highway.
     I traversed the rubble of a civilization historified by the Gentiles.
     I arrived to where I was acclaimed by unknown, segregated people.
     I have cemented my kingdom’s fortune by means of my marriage to the niece of an Armenian prince.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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