Rancor
The music of the spinet, solace of an impatient soul, flies off to lose itself in the infinite. The artist distinguishes, through the window at her balcony, the fatigued river and the tempest of a variable sky.
The musical instrument had come from Italy, years earlier, by means of the sea. The natives of my province agreed on the care of its fabrication and desisted, this time, from becoming enemies of each other for a trivial cause. The artisans had put the wood of an eternal coffin to good use.
The artist never showed herself. A jealous drama had ruined her house and divided her progenitors. The brothers kept her out of sight from the young men and quarreled with me when they surprised me on the avenue of her mansion. I lived in suspense by the effect of the anxious songs and endured the arbitrariness and did not adhere to the resentment of my grandparents, wounded by that rival family.
The artist had been born of an illicit passion, opprobrium of intransigent honor. I came to discourse on the aversion of her own against my ancestors and conceived a dark and perhaps unjust legend.
The artist’s brothers accepted my condolences without caution when she succumbed to an exasperated illness. The portraits in the mortuary hall directed at me a penetrating glance and impeded the definitive reconciliation.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
No comments:
Post a Comment