Читать книгу Selected Writings of César Vallejo - César Vallejo - Страница 14

FROM The Black Heralds

THE BLACK HERALDS

There are blows in life, so powerful … I don’t know!

Blows as from the hatred of God; as if, facing them,

the undertow of everything suffered

welled up in the soul … I don’t know!

They are few; but they are … They open dark trenches

in the fiercest face and in the strongest back.

Perhaps they are the colts of barbaric Attilas;

or the black heralds sent to us by Death.

They are the deep falls of the Christs of the soul,

of some adored faith blasphemed by Destiny.

Those bloodstained blows are the crackling of

bread burning us at the oven door.

And man … Poor … poor! He turns his eyes, as

when a slap on the shoulder summons us;

turns his crazed eyes, and everything lived

wells up, like a pool of guilt, in his look.

There are blows in life, so powerful … I don’t know!

[CE]

________________

THE SPIDER

It is an enormous spider that now cannot move;

a colorless spider, whose body,

a head and an abdomen, bleeds.

Today I watched it up close. With what effort

toward every side

it extended its innumerable legs.

And I have thought about its invisible eyes,

the spider’s fatal pilots.

It is a spider that tremored caught

on the edge of a rock;

abdomen on one side,

head on the other.

With so many legs the poor thing, and still unable

to free itself. And, on seeing it

confounded by its fix

today, I have felt such sorrow for that traveler.

It is an enormous spider, impeded by

its abdomen from following its head.

And I have thought about its eyes

and about its numerous legs …

And I have felt such sorrow for that traveler!

[CE]

________________

THE POET TO HIS LOVER

My love, on this night you have been crucified on

the two curved beams of my kiss;

your torment has told me that Jesus wept,

that there is a goodfriday sweeter than that kiss.

On this strange night when you looked at me so,

Death was happy and sang in his bone.

On this September night my second fall

and the most human kiss have been presided over.

My love, we two will die together, close together;

our sublime bitterness will slowly dry up;

and our defunct lips will have touched in shadow.

There will be no more reproach in your holy eyes;

nor will I offend you ever again. In one grave

we two will sleep, as two siblings.

[CE]

________________

DREGS

This afternoon it is raining, as never before; and I

have no desire to live, my heart.

This afternoon is sweet. Why should it not be?

Dressed in grace and pain; dressed like a woman.

This afternoon in Lima it is raining. And I recall

the cruel caverns of my ingratitude;

my block of ice over her poppy,

stronger than her “Don’t be this way!”

My violent black flowers; and the barbaric

and terrible stoning; and the glacial distance.

And the silence of her dignity

with burning holy oils will put an end to it.

So this afternoon, as never before, I am

with this owl, with this heart.

Other women go by; and seeing me so sad,

they take on a bit of you

in the abrupt wrinkle of my deep remorse.

This afternoon it is raining, raining hard. And I

have no desire to live, my heart!

[CE]

________________

THE BLACK CUP

Night is a cup of evil. Shrilly a police

whistle pierces it, like a vibrating pin.

Listen, bitch, how come if you are gone now

the flicker is still black and still makes me burn?

The Earth has coffinesque edges in the dark.

Listen, bitch, don’t come back.

My flesh swims, swims

in the cup of darkness still aching me;

my flesh swims in her,

in the marshy heart of woman.

Astral ember … I have felt

dry scrapes of clay

fall upon my diaphanous lotus.

Ah, woman! Flesh formed of instinct

exists because of you. Ah, woman!

That is why—oh, black chalice! even after you left

I am choking on dust,

and more urges to drink paw at my flesh!

[CE]

________________

IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS

I

In the landscapes of Mansiche the twilight

fashions imperial nostalgias;

and the race takes shape in my word,

a star of blood on the surface of muscle.

The bell tower tolls … There is no one to open

the chapel … One could say that

a biblical opuscule died in the words of

this twilight’s Asiatic emotion.

A stone bench with three gourd pots, is an altarpiece

on which a chorus of lips have just raised

the Eucharist of golden chicha.

Beyond, smoke smelling of sleep and stable

rises on the wind from the farms,

as if a firmament were being exhumed.

II

Like a relief on a pre-Incan block,

the pensive old woman spins and spins;

in her Mama fingers the thin spindle

shears the gray wool of her old age.

A blind, unlit sun guards and mutilates

her sclerotic snowy eyes …!

Her mouth is scornful, and with a deceptive calm

her imperial weariness perhaps holds vigil.

There are meditating ficuses, routed

shaggy Incan troubadours,

the rancid pain of this idiotic cross,

in the shameful hour that now escapes,

and is a lake soldering crude mirrors

where shipwrecked Manco Capac weeps.

III

Like old caciques the oxen walk

the road to Trujillo, meditating …

And in the iron of the evening, they feign kings

who wander dead domains sobbing.

Standing on the wall, I ponder the laws

happiness and anguish keep exchanging:

already in the oxen’s widowed pupils

dreams that have no when are rotting.

The village, as they pass, is dressed in

harsh gray, where a cow’s mooing

is oiled with dreams and huaca emotion.

And in the banquet of the blue iodized sky

an ancient exiled corequenque¹³ moans in

the chalice of a melancholy cattle-bell.

IV

La Grama—gloomy, secluded, unadorned—

stifled I don’t know what unknown protest:

it resembles the exhausted soul of a poet,

withdrawn in an expression of defeat.

La Ramada¹⁴ has carved its silhouette,

a cadaverous cage, alone and broken,

where my sick heart calms itself in

a statuesque tedium of terra-cotta.

The song saltlessly arrives from the sea

fitted out in the farcical mask of a thug

who drools and staggers, hanged!

The fog weaves a bandage about the lilac hill

enwalled with milliary dreams,

like a gigantic huaco holding vigil.

[CE]

________________

EBONY LEAVES

My cigarette sparkles;

its light cleansed by gunpowder alerts.

And to its yellow wink

a little shepherd intones

the tamarind of his dead shadow.

The whole ramshackle house drowns in

an energetic blackness

the faded distinction of its whiteness.

A delicate odor of downpour lingers.

All the doors are very old,

and a sleepless piety of a thousand hollow eyes

sickens in their worm-eaten Havana brown.

I left them robust;

today spiderwebs have already woven into

the very heart of their wood,

clots of shadow smelling of neglect.

The day the woman by the road

saw me arrive, she shrieked

as if crying for joy, tremulous and sad,

while half-opening her two arms.

For in every fiber there dwells,

for the loving eye, a sleeping

bridal pearl, a hidden tear.

My anxious heart

whispers with I don’t know what recollection.

—Señora? …—Yes, señor; she died in the village;

I still see her wrapped in her shawl …

And the grandmotherly bitterness

of an outcast’s neurasthenic song

—oh defeated legendary muse!—

sharpens its melodious outpouring

under the dark night;

as if below, below,

in an open grave’s

muddy gravel eye,

celebrating perpetual funerals,

fantastic daggers were shattering.

It’s raining … raining … The downpour condenses,

reducing itself to funereal odors,

the mood of ancient camphors

that hold vigil tahuashando¹⁵ down the path

with their ponchos of ice and no sombreros.

[CE]

________________

AUTOCHTHONOUS TERCET

I

The laborer fist velvetizes

and outlines itself as a cross on every lip.

It’s feast day! The plow’s rhythm takes wing;

and every cowbell is a bronze precentor.

What’s crude is sharpened. Talk pouched …

In indigenous veins gleams

a yaraví¹⁶ of blood filtered

through pupils into nostalgias of sun.

Quenaing¹⁷ deep sighs, the Pallas,¹⁸

as in rare century-old prints, enrosarize

a symbol in their gyrations.

On his throne the Apostle shines, then;

and he is, amid incense, tapers, and songs,

a modern sun-god for the peasant.

II

The sad Indian is living it up.

The crowd heads toward the resplendent altar.

The eye of twilight desists

from watching the hamlet burned alive.

The shepherdess wears wool and sandals,

with pleats of candor in her finery;

and in her humbleness of sad and heroic wool,

her feral white heart is a tuft of flax.

Amid the music, Bengal lights,

an accordion sol-fas! A shopkeeper

shouts to the wind: “Nobody can match that!”

The floating sparks—lovely and charming—

are wheats of audacious gold sown by

the farmer in the skies and in the nebulae.

III

Daybreak. The chicha finally explodes

into sobs, lust, fistfights;

amid the odors of urine and pepper

a wandering drunk traces a thousand scrawls.

“Tomorrow when I go away …” a rural

Romeo bewails, singing at times.

Now there is early-riser soup for sale;

and an aperitive sound of clinking plates.

Three women go by … an urchin whistles … Distantly

the river flows along drunkenly, singing and weeping

prehistories of water, olden times.

And as a caja from Tayanga¹⁹ sounds,

as if initiating a blue huaino,²⁰ Dawn

tucks up her saffron-colored calves.

[CE]

________________

HUACO

I am the blind corequenque

who sees through the lens of a wound,

and who is bound to the Globe

as to a stupendous huaco spinning.

I am the llama, whose hostile stupidity

is only grasped when sheared by

volutes of a bugle,

volutes of a bugle glittering with disgust

and bronzed with an old yaraví.

I am the fledgling condor plucked

by a Latin harquebus;

and flush with humanity I float in the Andes

like an everlasting Lazarus of light.

I am Incan grace, gnawing at itself

in golden coricanchas²¹ baptized

with phosphates of error and hemlock.

At times the shattered nerves of an extinct puma

rear up in my stones.

A ferment of Sun;

year of darkness and the heart!

[CE]

________________

DEAD IDYLL

What would she be doing now, my sweet Andean Rita

of rush and tawny berry;

now when Byzantium asphyxiates me, and my blood

dozes, like thin cognac, inside of me.

Where would her hands, that showing contrition

ironed in the afternoon whitenesses yet to come,

be now, in this rain that deprives me of

my desire to live.

What has become of her flannel skirt; of her

toil; of her walk;

of her taste of homemade May rum.

She must be at the door watching some cloudscape,

and at length she’ll say, trembling: “Jesus … it’s so cold!”

And on the roof tiles a wild bird will cry.

[CE]

________________

AGAPE

Today no one has come to inquire;

nor have they asked me for anything this afternoon.

I have not seen a single cemetery flower

in such a happy procession of lights.

Forgive me, Lord: how little I have died!

On this afternoon everybody, everybody passes by

without inquiring or asking me for anything.

And I do not know what they forget and feels

wrong in my hands, like something that is not mine.

I have gone to the door,

and feel like shouting at everybody:

If you are missing something, here it is!

Because in all the afternoons of this life,

I do not know what doors they slam in a face,

and my soul is seized by someone else’s thing.

Today no one has come;

and today I have died so little this afternoon!

[CE]

________________

THE VOICE IN THE MIRROR

So life goes, like a bizarre mirage.

The blue rose that sheds light, giving the thistle its being!

Together with the dogma of the murderous

burden, the sophism of Good and Reason!

What the hand grazed, by chance, has been grasped;

perfumes drifted, and among them the scent of

mold that halfway down the path has grown

on the withered apple tree of dead Illusion.

So life goes,

with the treacherous canticles of a shriveled bacchante.

Completely rattled, I push onward … onward,

growling my funeral march.

Walking at the feet of royal Brahacmanic²² elephants

and to the sordid buzzing of a mercurial boiling,

couples raise toasts sculpted in rock,

and forgotten twilights a cross to their lips.

So life goes, a vast orchestra of Sphinxes

belching out its funeral march into the Void.

[CE]

________________

OUR BREAD

For Alejandro Gamboa

One drinks one’s breakfast … The damp graveyard

earth smells of beloved blood.

City of winter … Mordant crusade

of a cart that seems to drag along

a feeling of fasting in chains!

One wants to knock on each door

and ask for who knows who; and then

see to the poor, and, crying softly,

give morsels of bread to everybody.

And to strip the rich of their vineyards

with the two saintly hands

that with a blast of light

flew off unnailed from the Cross!

Matinal eyelash, don’t raise up!

Our daily bread—give it to us,

Lord …!

All my bones belong to others;

maybe I stole them!

I took for my own what was perhaps

meant for another;

and I think that, had I not been born,

another poor man would be drinking this coffee!

I’m a lousy thief … Where will I go?

And in this cold hour, when the earth

smells of human dust and is so sad,

I want to knock on every door

and beg who knows who, forgive me,

and bake him morsels of fresh bread

here, in the oven of my heart …!

[CE]

________________

THE MISERABLE SUPPER

How long will we have to wait for what is

not owed to us … And in what corner will

we kick our poor sponge²³ forever! How long before

the cross that inspires us does not rest its oars.

How long before Doubt toasts our nobility for

having suffered …

We have already sat so

long at this table, with the bitterness of a child

who at midnight, cries from hunger, wide awake …

And when will we join all the others, at the brink

of an eternal morning, everybody breakfasted.

For just how long this vale of tears, into which

I never asked to be led.

Resting on my elbows,

all bathed in tears, I repeat head bowed

and defeated: how much longer will this supper last.

There’s someone who has drunk too much, and he mocks us,

and offers and withdraws from us—like a black spoonful

of bitter human essence—the tomb …

And this abstruse one knows

even less how much longer this supper will last!

[CE]

________________

THE ETERNAL DICE

FOR MANUEL GONZÁLEZ PRADA,

this wild, choice emotion, one for

which the great master has most

enthusiastically applauded me.

My God, I am crying over the being I live;

it grieves me to have taken your bread;

but this poor thinking clay

is no scab fermented in your side:

you do not have Marys who leave you!

My God, had you been a man,

today you would know how to be God;

but you, who were always fine,

feel nothing for your own creation.

Indeed, man suffers you; God is he!

Today there are candles in my sorcerer eyes,

as in those of a condemned man—

my God, you will light all of your candles

and we will play with the old die …

Perhaps, oh gambler, throwing for the fate of

the whole universe,

Death’s dark-circled eyes will come up,

like two funereal snake eyes of mud.

My God, and this deaf, gloomy night,

you will not be able to gamble, for the Earth

is a worn die now rounded from

rolling at random,

it cannot stop but in a hollow,

the hollow of an immense tomb.

[CE]

________________

DISTANT FOOTSTEPS

My father is asleep. His august face

expresses a peaceful heart;

he is now so sweet …

if there is anything bitter in him, it must be me.

There is loneliness in the house; there is prayer;

and no news of the children today.

My father stirs, sounding

the flight into Egypt, the styptic farewell.

He is now so near;

if there is anything distant in him, it must be me.

My mother walks in the orchard,

savoring a savor now without savor.

She is so soft,

so wing, so gone, so love.

There is loneliness in the house with no bustle,

no news, no green, no childhood.

And if there is something broken this afternoon,

something that descends and that creaks,

it is two old white, curved roads.

Down them my heart makes its way on foot.

[CE]

________________

TO MY BROTHER MIGUEL

In memoriam

Brother, today I am on the stone bench by the door,

where we miss you terribly!

I recall how we would play at this hour, and Mama

would caress us: “Now, boys …”

Now I go hide,

as before, all those evening

prayers, and hope you do not find me.

Through the living room, the hall, the corridors.

Then, you hide, and I cannot find you.

I recall that we made each other cry,

brother, with that game.

Miguel, you hid

one night in August, at dawn;

but, instead of hiding laughing, you were sad.

And your twin heart of those extinct

evenings has grown weary from not finding you. And now

shadow falls into the soul.

Hey, brother, don’t take so long

to come out. Okay? Mama might get worried.

[CE]

________________

JANUNEID²⁴

My father can hardly,

in the bird-borne morning, get

his seventy-eight years, his seventy-eight

winter branches, out into the sunlight.

The Santiago graveyard, anointed

with Happy New Year, is in view.

How many times his footsteps have cut over toward it,

then returned from some humble burial.

Today it’s a long time since my father went out!

A hubbub of kids breaks up.

Other times he would talk to my mother

about city life, politics;

today, supported by his distinguished cane

(which sounded better during his years in office),

my father is unknown, frail,

my father is a vesper.

He carries, brings, absentmindedly, relics, things,

memories, suggestions.

The placid morning accompanies him

with its white Sister of Charity wings.

This is an eternal day, an ingenuous, childlike,

choral, prayerful day;

time is crowned with doves

and the future is filled with

caravans of immortal roses.

Father, yet everything is still awakening;

it is January that sings, it is your love

that keeps resonating in Eternity.

You will laugh with your little ones,

and there will be a triumphant racket in the Void.

It will still be New Year. There will be empanadas;

and I will be hungry, when Mass is rung

in the pious bell tower by

the kind melic blind man with whom

my fresh schoolboy syllables, my rotund

innocence, chatted.

And when the morning full of grace,

from its breasts of time,

which are two renunciations, two advances of love

which stretch out and plead for infinity, eternal life,

sings, and lets fly plural Words,

tatters of your being,

at the edge of its white

Sister of Charity wings, oh! my father!

[CE]

________________

EPEXEGESIS²⁵

I was born on a day

when God was sick.

Everybody knows that I am alive,

that I am bad; and they do not know

about the December of that January.

For I was born on a day

when God was sick.

There is a void

in my metaphysical air

that no one is going to touch:

the cloister of a silence

that spoke flush with fire.

I was born on a day

when God was sick.

Brother, listen, listen . . . . . . . . .

Okay. And do not let me leave

without bringing Decembers,

without leaving Januaries.

For I was born on a day

when God was sick.

Everybody knows that I am alive,

that I chew … And they do not know

why in my poetry galled winds,

untwisted from the inquisitive

Sphinx of the Desert,

screech an obscure

coffin anxiety.

Everybody knows … And they do not know

that the Light is consumptive,

and the Shadow fat . . . . . . . . . . . . .

And they do not know how the Mystery synthesizes . . . . . . . .

how it is the sad musical

humpback who denounces from afar

the meridional step from the limits to the Limits.

I was born on a day

when God was sick,

gravely.

[CE]