Читать книгу The One Before - Juan José Saer - Страница 17

The Septuagenarian Poet

I ate the foods of the world. My hand touched the stones of famous cities and my body, shriveled now but fit and feral, walked streets more numerous than the ripples in a river. What man have I not known? What book have I not read? What might there be in the warehouse of visible and invisible things that could still be sold to me as a novelty? In the mornings of the month of October, full of sunlight and pigeons, I contemplate the slow explosion of peach blossoms and I stroll leisurely along, enjoying good digestion and good respiration, the taste of coffee on my tongue and a lit cigarette between my fingers. I had to go through all of that, the long night of desire and possession, to get here.

My mind hammers strange iron verses. They echo in me as if for the first time. Beauty, which for Plato is reminiscence, for me, defenseless and free, is nothing but immediate reality. The same alliterative music makes me shudder again, each time, with resplendent delight. Coffee: a shadow compared to its aftertaste, with its perfumed heaviness now subtly radiating from the tip of my tongue. What saves us now, we old people, is to see the world burning behind us, seated on a blazing bed of ash. Upon that mattress I sit and contemplate my own shadow as the morning makes it slowly shrink away.

Today I hope that others enjoy the miracle of birth and the flavor of their first perfumed presentation to the world, or of the throngs of people at a party at night. To a blind man the sun is blacker than night, and the ideal birth is death. My light is unique. I cannot change it. And the smoke from my cigarette is bluer and more solid than a cluster of cities.