La conseja de los alabarderos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Council of Claqueurs

     The king’s minister had accused the selfish purposes of the cardinal who was muddied by pleasures. At every moment they would confront each other, animated by a venomous hatred. They had been born in the heart of the same dynastic family. Their servants had squabbled at the foot of a prison tower.

     The cardinal, accustomed to seduction, had insinuated an unworthy discourse in the mind of the minister’s daughter, under the secret of confession. He did not prosper in his evil, but instead emerged disillusioned and offended.

     He chose a second route for the disgrace of his antagonist and directed the passions of the frivolous king in prejudice of the inflexible woman.

     The minister is disposed to the defense of honor and suffers in his person and property. He does not survive, in the cell’s darkness, the amputation of the ears and the tonsure, legal affronts of the falsifiers.

     The minister’s daughter faints in the hands of a few innoble religious ladies. She hears the reference to her misfortune in the risible serenade of those partial to the cleric. She is lost in conjectures and hallucinations and discovers a gathering of capering rats around the butterfly of light. They dance back to back and prance about, in the manner of witches.

     The religious ladies persuade her to immobility and to the abandonment of her resistance. They announce to her the decease of her progenitor and show her the needle used to sew her shroud and destined to join together the curtains of her prisoner’s bed.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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