El domicilio del eider / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Eider’s Domicile

The contaminated butter, the rancid food provisions, the fetid fish were provoking scurvy and scabies on the secret island. The natives were congratulating themselves for their longevity. I met more than one elderly person with a devoured face.
     The fishermen were easing my nostalgia by pulling me away from the iron coast in their sharp skiffs, on an impassive sea.
     The straggling sun, the one from an anomalous latitude, was varying the colors of the ice floe amidst a surface of cobalt and was delighting in the religious amethyst and in the opal of Byzantium.
     I was returning from maritime wanderings to hide desperation in a singular home. The bones of a whale had served for its fabrication.
     I was fruitlessly struggling to reconcile sleep after repeating a moaning psalm. A king had banished me from Denmark.
     I would turn my mind to the maiden of my affection and celebrate her bravery in the act of encouraging myself for exile. A wart-covered frog, in the clumsy mud, was lifting his voice in honor of the moon and of the fatidic aureole of its sadness.
     The maiden of my affection had attained the visions of Saint Bridget and often felt the voice of the Crucifix. Her imperishable cadaver reposes in a glass coffin, in view of some nuns with celestial souls.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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