El bejín / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Churl

     I lived in the shadow of a church in the devout city. The air of a faint sky would stir up the dust and spread it around the severe confines.

     I would muddle myself in the pleasures of a free life and lose my senses while sipping a depraved liquor all alone.

     I belonged to a fraternity of rogues and I would raise and serve myself with their renown. I wasn’t able to perform with lucidity and would refer pusillanimous heists and robberies.

     The most faithful of my companions guided me in the assault of a palace. The adventure became my repentance and the loss of his life. He was precipitated from a large window.

     I picked up in my attic, that same night, a lacerated child. He would call me blowing hiccups and sighs of pity and grief. I cursed his round eyes and his stork nose. His head was a mountain of obstinate hair.

     I strained to facilitate his life and make his infancy prosper and I would surround him with the solicitude of a philanthropist. He angered me with his voracity and his prickly character and I sent him away filling him punches.

     The abuse of my impatience brought, according to my conjectures, a quick unraveling. I persist in maintaining the identity of my frequent friend with the perverse child.

     My capture by the apparitors of justice came on the day after my rage. I was pressed to confession by means of the whip and the wheel. The surgeon retired me from the chamber when the syncope threatened with death.

     The judge moved to pity me and celebrated the aid of a person in the discovery of my cell. He reproduced the gesture and the habits of my previous counselor.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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