Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (39 page)

There is a sonnet with a sad history: “Melancholía.” It is dedicated to a poor Venezuelan painter whose last name was the same as the Liberator’s.
¹⁷
He was a man of grief, possessed by his art, but mostly by his despair. I met him in Paris; we were the best of friends; he showed me the wounds to his soul. I attempted to encourage him. After a short time, he left for the United States. And I soon learned that in New York, at the end of his bitter rope, he killed himself.

“Aleluya”
praises the gift of joy in the Universe and in human love.
“De otoño”
(“On Autumn”) explains the difference between the Mays and Decembers of the spirit; in the poem
“A Goya”
(“To Goya”) I bow before the power of that prince, that genius of lights and shadows; in
“Caracol”
(“Sea Shell”), alongside the mystery of nature I set my own unknown mystery; in
“Amo, amas”
I lay the secret of life upon the holy universal fire of love; in
“Soneto autumnal al marqués de Bradomín”
(“Autumn Sonnet to the Marquis de Bradomín”), in praising a great wit of Spain I praise the aristocracy of thought; in another “
Nocturno”
I speak of the sufferings of incorrigible insomnia when the spirit trembles and listens; in
“Urna votiva”
(“Votive Urn”) I pay my debt to friendship; in
“Programa matinal”
(“Dawn Program”) I set forth a poetic epicureanism; in “Ibis” I point out the danger of poisonous relationships; in “Thanatos” I shudder at the inevitable;
“Ofrenda”
(“Offering”) is a light, rhythmic Banvillesque compliment;
“Propósito primaveral”
(“Spring Proposition [or ‘Purpose’]”) once more presents a goblet filled with wine from the amphorae of Epicurus.

“Letanía de Nuestro Señor Don Quijote”
(“Litany for Our Lord Don Quixote”) once again affirms my deep-rooted idealism, my passion for all things elevated and heroic. The figure of the Symbolic Gentleman is crowned with light and sadness. In this poem I attempt the smile of “humor”—like a memory of Cervantes’ portentous creation—but behind the smile lies the visage of human torture by realities that do not touch Sancho. In
“Allá lejos”
(“There, Far Off ”) there is a recollection of tropical landscapes, a memory of my hot native land, and in
“Lo fatal”
(“Mortal”), against my deep-rooted religiosity there rises, like a fearsome shadow, the ghost of desolation and doubt.

There has most certainly existed within me, from the beginning of my life, a profound preoccupation with the end of life, a terror of the unknown, a horror of the tomb, or rather, of the moment the heart halts in its uninterrupted task and life disappears from our body. In my desolation I have clung to God as a refuge; I have clutched at prayer as though at a parachute. I am filled with grief and despair when I examine my beliefs deeply, for I have not found my faith to be sufficiently strong and well founded when the conflict of ideas has made me waver, and I have felt that I am bereft of a constant, secure support.

All philosophies have seemed to me impotent—and some, detestable, or the work of madmen and malefactors. From Marcus Aurelius to Bergson, on the other hand, I have gratefully saluted those who give wings, who impart tranquility, peaceful flight, and who teach us to understand as best we can the enigma of our existence on this earth.

And so the principal merit of my work, if it has any, is that of great sincerity, of having displayed “my heart naked,” of having flung the doors and windows of my interior castle wide open, so as to show my brethren the dwelling place of my most private ideas and dearest dreams.

I have known the cruelties and madnesses of men. I have been betrayed, paid with ingratitude and calumny, misunderstood in my best intentions by ill-inspired men, attacked, vilified. And I have smiled sadly. After all, everything is nothing,
la gloire
included. If it is true that “the bust survives the city,” it is no less true that the infinity of time and space—both bust and city and, ay!, the planet itself—shall disappear before the gaze of the only Eternity.

AZURE

Great God! What hand has scriven that evangel of despair that appeared yesterday in the columns of
La Tribuna
?

Through the dark and bitter sentences one can see the will-o-the-wisp of talent. It makes one want to repeat to that soul who poured so much bile into his ink the words spoken by Sainte-Beuve to Baudelaire: “My son, you must have suffered greatly.”

Fortunately, the world is not the way the pale lovers of Misfortune see it.

The sun shines, women laugh, the air vibrates, and the lips of the roses sing their fragrant songs.

And in order for a man to seek the praise of that woman “who, unique in the world, has no breasts,” as Matías Behety wrote, one’s soul must lack any spark of the divine light of hope.

Humanity is sick, it’s true. But what a way to cure it! The preachers of death do not see that the cure is worse than the disease.

It is not disdain for life, it is not horrifying surgery or suicide that will cure the sickness. It is hygiene, moral hygiene that is needed—one must raise one’s eyes to the firmament, cool the heart with the dew of the ideal, fumigate oneself against the most horrible contagions of the plague, look at the invading wave and foresee its force, the bitterness of its white spray, be worthy of human nobility and divine goodness, be strong, and bear the saving
sursum!
¹⁸
always in one’s soul. That is handsome action; that is the rule.

And it is the easiest thing in the world to do. One learns this lesson from a little book that was once read a great deal but that today is relatively forgotten: the catechism.

This little book has never once been found in the pockets of children who kill one another.

And above all, oh writers!, it is good not to be one of the preachers of the tomb.

Blessèd be those who announce the dawn.

Do you think because you suffer you have the right to poison the world with your complaints?

Writers, your first duty is to give humanity all the azure possible.

Death to black!

Azure! Azure! Azure!

FRONTISPIECE FOR “THE MISFITS”
¹⁹

Pan, divine ancient Pan, rises at the entrance. But since the voices that one day announced his death did not lie, that Pan that rises in the night, upon the black mountain enchanted by the moon, is the theophany, the god-appearing. Look at his mummy arms, how they hold up the seven reeds of his pipe; look at that eyeless head, that dry chin to which some relic of the savage beard still clings, like sepulchral vegetation. That mouth which knew so much of laughter, kisses, and sensual love-bites and which blew so brilliantly songs upon the flute, today breathes forth a cold wind over the dead instrument, from which emerge weird sounds of music—the music of dreams, melodies of profound mysteries.

This Mountain of Visions, impregnated with the breath of night, raises its towers of dark trees filled with wandering, sobbing spirits. Look, look into the blackest part of the mountain, and sometimes you will see eyes of fire gleam forth. The vast and arcane mountain keeps its deepest secrets, and only those who have been lost in their pilgrimage and have heard—oh!—the sound that issues from the lipless mouth of the spectral Pan will know the wordless voices of the visions.

The moon’s pale light enchants this fearsome, mysterious, perilous place, where often one may see, dancing in the wan and sickly moonglow, Madness who plucks the petals off daisies, and Death, crowned with roses.

From time to time, in the midst of the silent bosks, the moonlight reveals the roundness of a snowy thigh, and if one pricks up one’s ear, one may think one hears the vibrant laughter of a nymph.

I see the young walker coming, with his knapsack and his lyre. The bloodthirsty star comes to hide himself; he comes with his lovely hair still wet, because he has secreted the dew of dawn in it; with his cheeks rosy with kisses, because it is the time of Love; with his arms strong, to squeeze fleshly torsos—and so he comes, making his way to the black mountain!

I run, run toward him, before he reaches the place where, in the empire of the night, the head of the god-appeared rises, with horns, and without eyes: “Oh, young walker, go back,” I say to him, “you have taken the wrong road. This road, you may be sure, takes you not to the peninsula of naked graces, fresh loves, pure, sweet stars. You have taken the wrong way: This is the road to the Mountain of Visions, where your beautiful hair will turn white, and your cheeks wither, and your arms grow tired, because upon this mountain is the spectral Pan, to the sound of whose pipes you will tremble before enigmas you can only glimpse, before mysteries you can only vaguely see....”

The young walker, with his knapsack and his lyre, as though he had not heard my voice, continues on his way, unhalting, and soon he is lost to sight upon the Mountain, which is impregnated with the breath of night and enchanted by the Moon.

THE MISFITS (
LOS RAROS
; EXCERPTS)

It was a cold, damp morning when I arrived for the first time in the immense nation of the United States. The steamer moved slowly, and the foghorn sounded, for fear of hitting another vessel. Fire Island and its erect lighthouse lay astern; we were just off Sandy Hook, from which the Health Department lighter set forth to meet us. The barking Yankee slang could be heard everywhere, under the canopy of stars and stripes. The cold wind, the nasal whistles, the smoke from smokestacks, the movement of machines, the big-bellied waves of that leaden sea, the steamer making its way into the great harbor—everything said
All right!
Through the fog and haze loomed islets and ships. Long Island showed us the immense ribbon of its coast, and Staten Island, as though framed in a vignette, stood in all its loveliness, tempting the pencil if not, due to lack of sun, the photographer’s camera. The passengers gathered on the deck: the paunchy merchant, stuffed as a turkey, with a curving Jewish nose; the bony clergyman in a long black frock coat, a broad-brimmed felt hat, and, in his hand, a small Bible; the girl who wears a jockey’s cap and throughout the crossing has sung in a phonographic voice, to the strumming of a banjo; the robust young man as smooth-skinned as a baby; an amateur boxer whose fists look as though he could knock out a rhinoceros with a single blow. . . . In the Narrows, we begin to make out the picturesque and flowered land, the Forts. Then, raising her symbolic torch above her head, the Madonna of Liberty, whose plinth is an entire island. From my soul there rises a salutation: “To thee, prolific, immense, dominant. To thee, Our Lady of Liberty. To thee, whose bronze breasts suckle multitudes of souls and hearts. To thee, who standest solitary and magnificent upon thy island, raising the divine torch. I salute thee as my steamer passes, and I prostrate myself before thy majesty: Hail, and
good morning!
I know, divine icon, oh great and grand statue, that thy mere name, the name of the great beauty thou incarnat’st, has made stars bloom above the world, like the Lord’s
fiat lux.
There they are, shining upon the stripes of thy flag, the stars that illuminate the flight of the eagle of America—this, thy formidable blue-eyed America. Hail, Liberty, full of strength, blessed art thou above all women. But wouldst thou know an unhappy truth? Thou hast been wounded a good deal by the world, and thy splendor hath somewhat dimmed. Abroad in the earth there is another, who has usurped thy name, and instead of a torch bears a flaming brand. She is not the holy Diana of incomparable arrows; she is Hecate.”

My salute done, my eyes look upon the enormous mass before me, that land crowned with towers, that region from which you can almost feel the breath of a terrible, subjugating wind. Manhattan, the island of iron. New York, the bloody, the cyclopic, the monstrous, the stormy, the irresistible capital of Capital. Surrounded by lesser islands, she is flanked by Jersey on the one side and linked to Brooklyn on the other by the enormous bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, upon whose palpitating breast of iron there lies a bouquet of bell towers.

One thinks one hears the voice of New York, the echo of a vast soliloquy of figures, numbers. How unlike the voice of Paris, when one thinks one hears it—as seductive as a love song, a song of poetry and youth! Out of the soil of Manhattan one thinks that at any moment there might rise up some colossal Uncle Sam, calling all the people of the earth to a grand auction, and the auctioneer’s hammer will fall upon cupolas and roof-tops, making a deafening metal racket. . . .

The men of Manhattan live in their towers of stone, iron, and glass, as in the castle-fortresses of days gone by. In their fabulous Babel, they shout, bellow, thunder, roar; they cheer on the Stock Market, the locomotive, the forge, the bank, the printing press, the dock, the ballot box. Within the iron and granite walls of the Produce Exchange gather as many souls as in a small town. . . . Here is Broadway. Seeing it, one feels a sensation almost like pain, an overpowering vertigo. Down a grand canal whose banks are formed by monumental houses with their hundred glass eyes and sign tattoos flows a powerful river, a confusion of merchants, runners, horses, trams, omnibuses, sandwich-men dressed in advertisements, and fabulously beautiful women. As one’s eyes take in the immense artery with its constant agitation, one begins to feel an anguish like that of certain nightmares. This is the life of ants: an anthill whose inhabitants are gigantic Percherons yoked to the monstrous tongues of every kind of wagon. The newspaper boy, pink and smiling, flits like a swallow from tram to tram, shouting at the passengers
Eentramsooonwooood,
which means he is hawking the
Evening Telegram,
the
Sun,
and the
World.
The noise is dizzying, and in the air there is a constant vibration—the clatter of horses’ hooves, the echoing rumble of wheels—and it seems to grow louder every second. Every second, one would fear a collision, an accident, did one not know that this immense river flowing with the force of an avalanche moves with the precision of a machine. In the thickest mass of the crowd, in the most convulsive wave of motion, an elderly lady in her black cape, or a blond “miss,” or a nanny with her baby will want to cross the street. A corpulent policeman raises his hand, the torrent halts, and the lady crosses—
All right!