La cuestación / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Petition

     I would leave my cell, at dusk, to gather alms for the burial of the punished and the consolation of their children. I received them copiously from the city’s eminent figures, friends of diversion and risk, attentive to the optimal benefit from the present hour, according to the custom of pagans and the warning of their mendacious authors. The morning frequently eclipsed the torches watching over the orgy, when it didn’t declare the victims of sensuality or allow the reconstruction, within view of an overturned carriage, of the quarrel of satellites.

     The sky would have rained its devastating meteors upon the incredulous city, had it not been for the presence of the maiden with the astonished glance and the exhausted face, example of a religious fraternity and of its strict law. She would fly over the nefarious earth and her voice prevented the murderer’s gesture.

     She belonged to a lineage of knights, the most enthusiastic ones of a crusade, flattered with the promise of a crown overseas. She satisfied an atavistic penitence, motivated by one of her grandmothers, the fairy known as Melusina, accused of changing half her body, once a week, into a siren’s lewd skirt.

     The maiden’s devotion redeems her relatives from the visit of a ghost. The fairy known as Melusina, resentful toward her descendants, would frequent the towers of their palaces, threatening calamities.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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