La cábala / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Kabbalah

The gentleman, with a famished face and savage beard, was crossing the old bridge suspended by means of chains.
     He dropped a carnation, passionate flower, in the insalubrious water of the creek.
     I was surprised to see him alone. A horseman with a faithful visor had been preceding him before, waving a banner on the vertex of his spear.
     They had been arguing at every moment, despite the solid friendship. The man had immersed himself in the science of the rabbis ever since his visit to secular Toledo. He would illuminate his lodgings with the seven-branched candelabrum, removed from the synagogue, and he had received it from his lover, a Jewish beauty seated on a tapestry from Smyrna.
     The servant resolves to save the gentleman from permanent seduction and persuades him to traverse a distant sea, where the names of the Italian admirals sound and the Cyclades, Horace’s refulgent islands, imitate the vocal chorus of the Oceanides.
     Cervantes recounted for me the incident of the gentleman restored to health. He reestablished himself when he discerned in a crowd of strollers the only dark-skinned maiden in Venice.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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