The Abduction
The lifeless foliage of a willow, on the island of the hurricanes, brushes against her marble tombstone.
I had taken her from her homeland, a place far from the maritime routes. The most skilled navigators could not recall correctly nor reconstruct the course. I considered her a funest gift and I wanted to return her.
But I also wanted to surprise my compatriots with that headstrong creature, of citrine skin, with strong and straight hair. Her language consisted of indistinct sounds.
She grew ill with nostalgia a week after we departed. The green-eyed sailors, flushed by the sun of the Indian regions, listened, uneasily, to her lamentations. They descried a remote place to bury her, once she was dead. They abstained from tossing her into the water, fearful of releasing her weeping soul in the immensity.
Compassion and sorrow enervated my organism. I requested and was given my license for naval service. I have retired to the native town, deep in an industrial country, where forges and chimneys burn over the ground of iron and coal.
My health continues to decline amid rest and elusiveness. I feel the threat of an inexorable fatality. When I pull back the curtains of my bed, facing the sighed apparition of the day, I will recognize in an old man with an expressionless face, more fearsome the more ceremonious he is, the father of the savage girl, resolved to an improbable vengeance.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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