El enviado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Envoy

The bard, afflicted by senescence, would clarify for the humble ones the calendar of fortunate and unfortunate days, work of his numen. He would enunciate to them healthy precepts for life and the work of navigator and farmer. He preferred, for his discourse, the vespertine tranquility, in days distinguished by the flowering of the thistle.
     He spoke of himself as alive and active over the course of various human generations and superior in age to the holm oaks.
     He was intruding in the house of the magnates. He had not been able to reconcile with them, despite his success with the mountain beasts.
     He was pitying the indigent situation of his adepts and took them with him, to found a peaceful establishment, facing a fountain’s stone circle.
     A lightning bolt was announcing the fortuitous exit from the water and the river would take shape along the way, fertilizing a bed of rushes.
     He was able to put in order the strata of the city, anticipating the motives of discord. In accordance with his teachings, an intimate force gathers and sustains, around a center, the elements of each being of natural fabrication and he pointed out the case of the star and its separate points. Speaking of this fate, he would scrutinize in his hand a grain of sand the color of pearl.
     He taught them the administration of milk from the herds and how to ferment it in wooden cubes.
     He imposed on them the observation of a tolerant policy toward the people of the region and allowed them to start a war if one of three arrows tossed in the direction of the sun’s rotation fell fixed onto the floor. By means of this advice his nation came to grow from victory to victory.
     He disappeared to die, always attentive to hiding the smallness of his human nature, and left climbing a ruinous hill, in the company of a grey bear.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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