A los vencidos ancianos la noche les cae encima / Lorenzo García Vega

Night Falls On the Defeated Old People

Walking, as if headed to the brothel that only ends up being a trompe l’oeil, I sing to Saint John of the Cross.
     I ramshackle in my song, then. Somber night. Oh dark night of the soul!
     I don’t know how to get there.
     I take the wrong road.
     Ugly people, oh canticle!, through the streets with the blackness of ink (do you want anything more stupid than what I’m whistling?).
     I don’t think I’ll get there.
     Incredibly, in the years of my youth, when I was at the Havana Institute of Secondary Teaching, I would always go around (but why does it occur to me to evoke such an idiotic thing?) dressed in a coat and tie.
     Don’t ask me anything.
     I’d have to sing what a somber Venezuelan priest once sang.
     Oh canto, pretty or ugly, I’m an old man and I walk. I love the dark night, repeat and repeat my Nonsense Nocturne.
     “And he kept sleeping forever / hugging the rigid skeleton,” sang the priest Borges.
     And then, at the moment when the guitars should come in, what’s said, even if it makes no sense, is said.
     But a light rain —keep singing this Nonsense Nocturne— is falling on the green house in front of my house.




{ Lorenzo García Vega, Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto, Madrid: Ediciones La Palma, 2011 }