El hallazgo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Find

The mariners had lain me down in the sycamore coffin, fitting me for subterranean sleep. They absented themselves after testing on me an onion plant, with a nauseating smell. They made me drink the juice from its hairy leaves and its root, of the width of a finger. It was paid from the unirrigated ground and its flowers fed the voracity of a swarm of double corselet insects, stocked with an executioner’s gear.
     The headache and a mild frenzy assaulted me after the cessation of drowsiness. I saw nothing but images of fright and cruelty. A bird was tormenting its child.
     I have unknowingly broken the cipher of an inexpressible thought, drawn on the forehead of a monolith, and I watched a series of indignant statues, with enamel eyes, rising in front of me.
     I have discarded, suspecting perfidy, the ship loosed in the neighboring river of mud, amidst a withered jungle.
     I forced my steps in demand of a serene mountain, where the happy numens of the place were born and had put down the fugitive plant, once they were banished.
     I discovered a memorial stone adhered to an inaccessible spot of the slope, and I reached it dragging myself and panting. It displayed, in the manner of a signal, a human figure finished in the beak of a rapacious bird. It easily gave way to a push from my hands and revealed a humid and phosphorescent chamber.
     I have hidden from the unfaithful companions the secret of my inexhaustible wealth.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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