Entrevisión del peregrino / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Glimpse of the Pilgrim

The rigorous gale, born in the secret of a plateau, shakes the trees facing the violaceous twilight. The sounds of the wind, mournful and long, traverse the city of monumental ruins, where the rare passerby disappears with mute shadow steps. The sun clears up the cupolas of the mansions with deep echoes.
     In the impenetrable gardens, hemmed in by sublime walls, that awaken the oppressive emotion of being kidnapped in a sunken cell, the green-black and pyramidal trees prosper, remainders of a preterite flora. At each step some spacious enclosure offers its murky solitude, under the guard of ornamental chimera, relics of an exceptional art, symbol of a deserted faith.
     The fracture of the monuments reveals successive profanations by arms, the work of invaders arrived in tumultuous cavalry, and the depopulation recounts visits by wandering epidemics, bred in distant inundated banks, in the heart of warm swamps.
     Ruffled birds, of sanguinary habits, retinue of armies, celebrate the ruin, and describe in the lethal atmosphere, before pouncing on prey, whirled flights in the shape of a funnel. They discern, tangential to the horizon, the final ribbon of execrated light, and their movable group, atop the battered porticoes, disrupts the stagnant night.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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