Entre los beduinos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Among the Bedouins

     We gathered in a channel carved by the waters from the rain and breathed with perennial fright. The whirlwinds of dust were blinding the horizon.

     The clouds were randomly and briefly watering the dream country. The sun mitigated the candid sand and the pebble with a rough profile spreading an amethyst gauze, drawing a vespertine illusion of the Bosphorus.

     We didn’t dare raise our voice in the ritual silence. Thought was submerging itself in the infinite ecstasy. The dust remained unharmed under the elastic foot of the camel. The guides were secretly invoking the name and the assistance of Moses.

     The monks of a secular convent, addicts of Greek dogma appeared to facilitate for us a visit to the area of the sun’s glare. They had cultivated their warlike and feudal house in the presence of a low relief sculpted into the face of a stone. I recognized the effigy of Sesostris.

     I have always kept a slight aversion to the relics of the Pharaoh’s kingdom and have attributed evil announcements to them. A highwayman of the sands, marked by a superstitious tattoo, visited me for the purpose of selling me an infallible bow, of millenarian fabrication and with a single recurring arrow. I thought of the privilege of Thor’s hammer.

     I fired the fallacious arm in pursuit of some gryphon birds, viciously attacking the hares. I lost sight of the arrow’s escape into the depths of the air and the threatened flying creature faded in the summer haze.

     A pain knocked me down suddenly in the abundance of my blood.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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