The Kingdom of the Cabeiri
Some black birds with bloody eyes were lodging amid the demolished marble. They were inflicting the affront of vulgar harpies. They would saunter with small leaps and raise an inelegant flight.
The plain of the city abounded in malignant shrubs cited, for the memory of vengeance and bitterness, in more than one wise book.
A bust with an absorbed glance, circled by a garland of ivy, was rising at each moment on its broken pedestal. The floor of the violated gardens had provided shelter, a century earlier, to the victims of a historic epidemic.
The light of day was regurgitating from a rupture in the globe of the sun, and the night that lasted as long as those in the winter, was under the domain of a star, of an incomplete and leaning orb.
Some deformed little men were sprouting from the floor, amid the nocturnal heaviness. They were coming out of an aperture similar to the trap door of a stage. Their eyes were oblique and their lank and thick hair invaded the wide zone of the forehead. They responded to my appeal by employing a lewd gesture and I had to assert to them my fist on the hard face, as though made of stone. My hand is still bleeding.
I did not count on any other friendship save that of a disconsolate woman, attentive to my well-being and to the memories of a superior world. I wouldn’t know how to say her name. I would forget, at the beginning of each morning, her discourse.
She herself put me on the road to the sea and pointed to a star that never set.
Soon after releasing the sails to the prosperous wind, I saw rise, from the place where she had said goodbye to me with lamentations, an interminable spiral of smoke.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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