Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (22 page)

 

While the lark was singing these words, Orpheus accompanied her upon his lyre, and a vast, thrilling breath of music rose from the green and fragrant woods. The deaf satyr began to grow impatient. Who was this strange visitor? Why had the wild, voluptuous dancing stopped? What were his two councillors saying?

Ah, the lark had sung, but the satyr had not heard! At last he turned his glance upon the ass.

The ass’s opinion was required? Well then, standing before the immense, echoing forest, under the sacred azure sky, the ass shook his head, from one side to the other—stubborn, silent, like a wise man meditating.

At that, the satyr wounded the ground with his cleft foot, thrust his face forward angrily, and without hearing a thing, raised his finger and pointed Orpheus the way out of the forest, exclaiming:

“No! . . .”

The echo of his cry reached nearby Olympus, and there, where the gods were sporting, it inspired a chorus of laughter that was later called Homeric.

Orpheus, his heart downcast, made his way out of the deaf satyr’s woods, almost ready to hang himself from the first laurel tree he came upon.

He did not hang himself, but he did marry Eurydice.

MY AUNT ROSA

The young woman sobbing at one end of the large, comfortable sitting room had been “spoken to,” as people used to say, but in that common proceeding within families it had been learned, or determined, that she was not so much to blame. No, the person upon whose head fell most of the reprobation was “this boy who one would think was always off in the clouds somewhere, and who’ll drive me to an early grave!”

My own head was lowered, but (happy, deliciously guilty) it still held the dazzling image of paradise found: a blond, fifteen-year-old paradise, all roses and lilies and fruit of good and evil, fruit of the first harvest, when the grape’s sweetness still has a hint of tartness. . . .

My father, a tyrant, was thundering on . . .

“Because you think yourself a man, but you’re no more than a dawdling boy . . . an idle boy chasing butterflies in the garden. . . . Roberto, look at me when I talk to you! I’ve forgiven you many things. You are hardly a model student. Your mathematics teacher says you’re an utter failure, in fact, and I’m beginning to believe he is right. You hardly speak, and when you do, it’s to yourself. The day they booted you out of school, your mother found love notes in among your schoolbooks. Is this the work of a serious student? Well, this thing now is serious. What you’ve done this time deserves the strictest punishment, and punished you shall be. This is what all that idling about and dreaming has brought you to! Dreaming indeed!

“Tell me, d’you really think you’re of an age to take responsibility for this, like a man? I vow to teach you your responsibilities, with a severity I’ve never shown before. You want to be a man? I’ll teach you to be a man! You’ll do the work of a man. Oh, lolling about, playing at being in love, doing things worse than poetry is hardly worthy of a young person who wants to be a gentleman. Poetry indeed! And after the poetry, or poetasting, we’ve come to
this!
. . . You rascal!”

He had never preached at me this way.

“But I want to get married!” I managed at last to exclaim, like some offended Poil-de-Carotte.

At that, after a burst of laughter
à deux
over what I’d said (which must indeed have been quite ridiculous), it was my mother who came at me next.

“Get married! What will you marry on? How will you support your wife? Do you honestly think you can patch up this atrocity you’ve committed?
I want to get married!
. . . Have you ever in your life seen schoolboys marry? For you’re no more than a schoolboy, Roberto. And your father is right: those absurd stories, those verses of yours, those useless scraps of paper are the cause of it all. They are the reason you spend your days daydreaming and never study. Idleness is the devil’s workshop, boy. What you’ve done comes from idleness, because if you would just do something useful, you wouldn’t have those evil thoughts . . .

“And our hesitation to call you to task over your behavior has not improved things—in fact, you’ve gone from bad to worse. We should have sent you to the country long ago, to work in the fields! You won’t have a career? Then to the fields with you! Your father gave a great deal of thought to a career in business for you, but you wouldn’t have it, and only after I pleaded with you on bended knee did you agree to go to school, and even promised me you’d become a lawyer . . . But what have you done since? You haven’t even entered the university yet.
I want to get married!

“What do you suppose there’ll be to eat in your house? Because you’ll need a house. Married at sixteen! What are you and your wife going to eat? Poetry, flowers, stars? . . . You’ll throw all that paper in the fire this minute, young man. . . . And give me those letters that silly girl has written you . . . Go on now, start packing, because you’re off to the country—no backtalk, now, I mean it—to work on a farm. That’ll make you a man! . . . You want to be a grown-up? Then you’ll work like one! You rascal!”

And the paternal thunder once again:

“Well said, my dear!”

You, divine Spring, and you, imperial Dawn, know whether I was in truth that dreadful character painted by my parents. For it was my own springtime, and the dawn of my young manhood, and in my body and in my soul there blossomed, in all its magnificence, the grace of life and love. My poetic dreams had already unfurled their azure canopies, their tents of wondrous gold. My visions were triumphant mornings, and nights of silk and perfume in the light of a full moon. My star was Venus; my birds, fabulous peacocks and lyrical nightingales; my fruits, the symbolic apple and the pagan grape; my flower, the rosebud, for I dreamt that it adorned women’s snowy breasts; my music was Pythagorean, which, like Pan, was everywhere; my yearning was to kiss, love, live; my ideal incarnate, the blond creature whom I had come upon one day at her bath. I was adolescent Actaeon before my white goddess—silent, but bitten by the ravenous dogs of desire. Yes, I was the burglar of life, the bandit of dawn; yes, father and mother mine, you were right to thunder at my sixteen years, for I was about to put on my coat and tie and enter April, step into the butcher shop of May, and celebrate the triumph of youth and love, the omnipotent glory of sex, in all the stirring reveille of my blood. And while I was listening to your reproaches, standing in the tempest of your wrath with me, I was staring at the most luxuriant, perfumed head of blond hair as it blazed like a royal standard, and I was thinking of the red corolla of the two prettiest lips, behind which lay the otherworldly honey of the sweetest fruit, and I was listening to the amorous voice that had first awakened me to the passion of passion, and under my nervous, hungry fingers, all the dovelike treasure, all the gold and marble and ruby—the swan’s white wing, the wave, the lyre! No, I was not, quite, the guilty one. I was no more than a new instrument in the infinite orchestra, and however furiously, however madly, however loudly I played, I amounted to no more than the tiniest sparrow in the trees, the smallest fish in the ocean.

I was to go and pack. Pack, and be cast from the paradise I had conquered, my throne of love, my city of marble, my garden of enchanted flowers, my bower of inebriating perfume . . . And so, head down, sad, I believed this was the eve of my execution, and that my departure would be a voyage to the land of Death.

Because what was the world but death, if I was far from all that was life to me?

So I sat alone in the garden, while my parents sent their niece, “for reasons that they would explain later,” home to her own parents.

I was stunned—wrenched from my destiny, from my lovely angel of flesh, from my dreams, from everything and everyone. . . . Oh, black existence! And since I was quite long-haired and romantic then, I could not stop thinking about an old pistol. . . . I knew what armoire it was kept in . . . I would write two letters: one for my parents and one for. . . . And then . . .

“Psst! Psst!”

And then I’ll shoot myself as I speak the name of the most beloved of . . .

“Psst! Psst!”

Heavens! My aunt Rosa was motioning to me from a window that opened onto the garden, motioning to me with a look that promised some consolation, in the midst of so much misfortune.

“Yes, Aunt Rosa!”

And in four bounds I reached her window, which was just above a little garden-bed perfumed with flowering orange trees, visited often by doves and hummingbirds.

Allow me to introduce my aunt, Rosa Amelia. At the time we are speaking of she had reached the virgin age of fifty. In her youth she had been quite a beauty, as witnessed by a miniature she wore about her neck. Now her hair had grown white—
mais oú sont les neiges d’antan?
—and her body had lost the lithe elegance of former times, but her face still had the soft freshness of an apple, though a bit pale: the face of an aristocratic abbess, illuminated duskily by a fleeting, melancholy smile. In that youth, Rosa, when she was still a rose and, among all the lovely young women, a princess, had had a suitor, whom she had loved greatly. But he did not please the family, and then the wedding was embittered forever, because the young man died. My aunt, so beautiful, began to fade and wither, and she withered, and withered . . . until, her flowering bough dry upon the tree, the poor woman remained a spinster for the rest of her days.

She had the consolation, however, of adoring her nieces and nephews as though they were her own children, and of making lovely bouquets and matches of the matrimonial kind, sending off anyone that approached her to the epistle of St. Paul.

“I heard everything!” she told me. “And I know what’s happened. Don’t be so downcast.”

“But I’m being sent to the country, and I won’t be able to see her.”

“That doesn’t matter, child. Does she love you? Good! And do you love her? Good again! And so you two shall marry, your Aunt Rosa promises.”

And then, after a pause, and giving a great sigh, she went on in this way:

“My dear, you must not waste the most beautiful time of your life. One is young but once, and the poor soul that lets the time of flowers pass without cutting a few will never find them again, as long as he lives. Look at this white hair—once it was lovely black. I loved, but I could not obey the law of love, and so I go to my grave with the most grievous sadness. You love your cousin, and she loves you. You do mad things, you have let yourselves be swept up by the whirlwind. That is not prudent, but it is certainly natural enough, and God surely cannot be too angry with you. So, Roberto, my dear, trust me—your Aunt Rosa will see you married. You are still very young, though. In three or four years, you can have one another. Meanwhile, pay no attention to your father—love her!

“You’re going off to the country. I’ll keep the fire lit here—you write me (oh, sublime aunt!), and I will pass on your letters. . . . They laugh at you because you want to get married! Well, get married you shall. But go first to the country for a while; after what’s happened, she shall be your wife. And she’s surely mad for you!”

Having said this, she pulled back from the window, as though slipping back into her rooms. And this is the hallucination I had then: My aunt still remained close to me, but was changed by a marvelous power. Her white, combed hair—the hair of an aging spinster—was changed into a thick mane of gold. Her pearl-gray dress vanished, and the most divine of nudes appeared, perfumed by the rarest and most subtle fragrance, as though sacred snowy flesh exuded a diaphanous haze of light. Through her azure eyes shone the delightfulness of the universe, and her mysterious red mouth spoke to me in the language of the lyre:

“I am the immortal Anadyomene, the glorious patron saint of swans! I am the wonder of all things, whose presence stirs the arcane nerves of the world. I am the divine Venus, empress of kings, mother of poets; my eyes are more powerful than Jupiter’s brow, and I have enchained Pan with my girdle. Spring is my herald, with its trumpet, and Dawn my tambor-player. All the gods of Olympus have died, save this goddess who is immortal, and all the other deities will disappear, while my face shall cheer the world’s sphere for all time. Oh, holy Puberty, triumph and sing in your season! Bloom, May; bear fruit, Autumn. The sin of May is the world’s greatest virtue. The doves that draw my chariot through the air have multiplied to the four corners of the earth, and they take messages of love from north to south, from east to west. My roses bleed in all climes, and offer up their balm to all races. The time will come when the august liberty of kisses will fill the world with music. Unhappy the soul who does not enjoy the sweetness of his dawn, and who allows the flower or grape to wither, or to rot, on the stalk or vine. Happy, though, the youth who is called Bathyllus, and the old man named Anacreon!”

On a mule with rich saddle and bridle, and in the company of a good black valet, I departed for the farm. There I wrote more poetry than ever, and some time later I journeyed far away. I never saw my cousin again until she was a widow, and a mother of many children. And my Aunt Rosa I never saw again ever, because she went to the other world with her dry orange-blossoms.

Allow me, across time and despite the tomb, to send her a kiss.

TALE OF THE SEA

Yes, my friend, a story of the sea—a legend, rather, or perhaps more accurately, a tale. It was told me by a fisherman whose brow looks as though it were made of rock, one evening when I had traveled out to the lighthouse at Punta Mogotes. Do you recall those plans of yours for a novel about the lighthouse? Well, you had good reason to believe that the elements of novels and poetry soar like seabirds around these light-machines. It was near the lighthouse that the fisherman told me the story, because it was there that he’d seen old María pass by—like a specter, or a shadow. Who is old María? This is her story. You can tell it to your prettiest lady friend, someday when she’s laughing hardest.