I belonged to a town of big snake eaters, sensual, vehement, quiet and able to go mad with love. But my race was of a different lineage. It is written and known—or supposed—by those who occupy themselves in reading signs that are not expressly manifested that their austerity had a proverbial nature. It was possible to notice it, rummaging a bit through the history of human collapse, in the doorways of houses, in their suits, in their words. That is where I get my taste for gloomy bedrooms, half-closed doors, exquisitely crafted furniture, plastered basements, exhausting caves, playing cards where the face of a banished king is bored.
My ancestors had never danced under the light of the moon, they were incapable of reading the signs of birds in the sky like dark commandments of extermination, they didn't know the value of eminent earthly splendor, they were immune to curses and too inept to understand the major ceremonies the chronicles of my town meticulously register, in a crude but vigorous style.
Ah! I descended from barbarians who had stolen from adjacent nations certain refinement of manners, but my fate was decided by semi-savage priests who, adorned with bright red tunics, made predictions from rocks shaded by giant palm trees.
But they—my ancestors—were definitely shackled by immemorial rigidities at the point of the spirit, they were elastic, swift and sure of their bodies.
I did not inherit their virtues.
I am awkward, I walk slowly and balancing myself with my shoulders and advancing, not clumsily, but more with a morose movement, one foot, then another; the quiet madness protects me from blandness keeping me alert like the faithful soldier who has been entrusted with guarding his platoon, and like a shade, I survive within indecision.
Regardless, I thought I was marked by high endeavors that in time would demolish me.
On the other side of the dice, I will relate not without fabulations my course through a land of ignominy and sweetness, ruptures and meetings, splendors and collapses.
A horoscope appointed me to a full existence, though bound with torment.
I carried no message. My pretensions were minimal. The edges of dream settled within me next to the edges of fear. When I came into the use of reason the sorcerers frightened me with predictions of inevitable future unfoldings.
Their revelations have been fulfilled. One day the shifting of faces began. One supplanted another, unceassingly. One day they were a hundred, the next, a thousand; all of them played out a scene of the possessed on my shoulders. Where was the face my parents bequeathed me? Maybe between anguished wedding sheets or in front of unanswering mirrors that the eyes of a cruel damsel set on fire or in the memory of a woman who still sacrifices seagulls to evoke me? My face, where was it? I had to admit, after painful evidence, I had lost it.
The fog would give it back to me.
I was not the same. Reiterated failures had branded my forehead. I forgot the language. I felt inept for love. Implacable anguish bound my breathing. My fertile propensities were annulled by intermittent snow storms. I had turned primitive, inextricable and perverse as a child. I conformed my actions with simple ceremonies, just like a savage. I was silent as a pilot. And like a smuggler I had abolished trust.
My remains piled up like the colors of an unarmed island amid tornadoes that no one could conjure.
I was the guardian of my own disgrace.
The inhabitant of a world populated by senseless imaginations, the marks of the journeys I had undertaken to sacred regions, against prudent warnings, remained on my hands.
At night, under the stalking of uneasy dreams, I would awaken with a grain of salt on my forehead. Unaided like the first infant, crossed throughout by incurable fears, taken and brought back by a force not yet identified, I tended the last coals into the human fire. Dissolution. My head fell chopped by a hurricane leaf.
I have fled. I proclaim my flight, generous heroes, but I am here. You and I are sentenced to glorify old wounds and to return our daily corpse to the waters. We truly remain. No one can escape. Everyone burns on the fire of their perplexities and their incoherence. One must accept the flaming iron of birth like the shore from which we don't leave. We will remain in this circle that opens in the morning and closes at night, devouring our mirrors with volcanic jaws. And it is not enough to arrive at the river and say: "Give me back the gold hatchet with which my nanny gave away the purple days" and then wait in the lauded margins, nor to squander our inspirations to the fog, nor to close like a coffin, in allegiance with night, the unspeakable raptures, like a day or an eyelid is closed. Impossible to flee. We are prisoners of a loving or defiant glance shackled by days the color of hake and our inability to name. Death is a nebula from where we return to visit our possessions. Sleep does not exist. There is only that hole we leave when we move so that swelling or shrinking it someone else might occupy it. Regardless, we talk.
But the edge of obsession is a face.
In the whirlwind of my native premonitions, during the first migrations of the fatidic birds, at the demand of the segregated bodies, I saw it under a triumphal dome. Afterward was the rotation around its aura and later the false ablation, beneath the sign of death, which was to continue, because love is not discontinuous, nor can it be pushed or stopped at will like a sedan. And always inside it a body nourishes itself against another.
A sorcerer, who officiated between the walls of a green chamber, told me: Cut the ties of Orion. The two stars of the chest, the one that closes the waist, the un-treaded roses of your feet and the one belonging to Can, the most dangerous one.
The best fate for many beings is...is...to have lost reason. Your illness has hereditary causes and psychic motivations. Your fear can destroy you. You should be on guard. Avoid wandering, delirious blackness, nightly terrors. Strengthen your body and spirit like a dancer. Speak with all types of people.
You react well to adverse situations, but not to those that can bring you happiness. Do you feel you've lost your memory? The best fate...the best fate...(here my heart, precisely here it felt lulled and wanted to smile)...el mejor destino...The psychic deed is a dynamic force. It can act like any chemical substance. Harden yourself. Read Whitman, Nietzsche, Mayakovsky. Enter into commerce with nature. Doing this frequently can calm you after several moons.
In varied tone and within the sphere of stellar precisions, gradually built up, the sapient enchanter of the loveless gave me notices, proferred warnings, marked paths. Myself, refined, slow-moving like an actor who trusts his own means, careful with gestures like one who knows he is being observed, amid grave anticipations, I destroyed my cars of fire.
And I cursed my fortune, insulted humanity with vituperations, abused my sweet tongue that inhabited me and oppressed me.
I was hopeless. I laid down every day with a fictitious death. Fearful of numbers, signs, combinations, of the previous and next minute, of symbols, letters, lamb’s blood; full of arbitrary associations, abandoned by reality, by words and their links, by silence and its separations, by the frighteningly sweet couplings, by the playing cards and the seasons, I decided to seek out new faces.
I have disembarked like a new day. But the breath that sustains me is joined with other beaches.
Meanwhile my poverty is covered up here in high forms.
I suffer the illness of making my enemies giants.
Afflicting hosts of disorder, I will take back the line in flight. I will use another name.
I will get rid of accomplices. I will judge myself harshly.
Everything is clearer. Regardless, a slight movement is all that is needed to fall into confusion. A brief expansion of the body and chaos is reborn. It is present like a multitude of sharpened edges.
Still the clearest objects wear a shroud to confuse the exiled.
A step away from happiness, I flee from it denying its whiteness, vilifying its courtesy, reproaching its lightness.
Supreme politeness of life, I have broken with the light.
I am left with the recourse of caresses, even if they’re false.
Surviving softness, the beautiful lashes me.
I have refused to transit through roads of grace. Let darkness be. I will conform to my nature like the sunflower to the flame. I will be an arc docile to the tensions. I will fill myself with servitude at the demand of weak imposition. But I want within me a flowering, insurmountable, ductile angle where I might reign undisturbed, to retreat there when the temporal liquor is tasteless and there are no more confines to trespass. Sheltered by such limits I will open my house to travelers.
1960
Rafael Cadenas, Los cuadernos del destierro (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001).
