SOUNDTRACK
BY ISA SUAREZ .
Let
us recall the names of these imaginary beings of angelic nature whom
my pen, during the second canto, has drawn from a brain brilliant with
a radiance emanating from themselves. They die stillborn, like sparks
whose rapid obliteration the eye can scarcely trace, upon the burnt
paper. Leman!... Lohengrin!... Lombano!... Holzer! ... for one instant,
covered again with the insignia of youth, you appeared on my charmed
horizon.
But
I let you fall back like diving-bells into chaos. You shall leave it
never more. For me it is enough to have retained the memory of you.
You must make room for other substances, less beautiful perhaps, and
spawned by the stormy excesses of a love that has resolved not to slake
its thirst anywhere near the human race. A ravenous love that would
devour itself did it not seek nourishment in celestial fictions: creating,
in time, a pyramid of seraphim more numerous than insects swarming within
a drop of water, it will intertwine them into an ellipse which it will
cause to whirl around itself.
Meanwhile,
if the traveller, pausing at the sight of a cataract, raises his head,
he will see in the distance a human being being born towards the cave
of hell by a garland of living camellias! But silence ... The floating
image of the ideal fifth outlines itself slowly, like the blurred folds
of an aurora borealis, upon the vaporous map of my intelligence, and
takes on a growing, definite consistency ... ³Mario and I were riding
along the beach. The wintry blast hit us full on, flapping our cloaks
and sweeping back the hair on our twin heads. A seagull strove vainly
with screams and wing-beats to warn us of the stormıs possible proximity
and cried out: ³Where are they going at that mad gallop?² We said nothing;
sunk in reverie we let ourselves be carried away, flying off on this
furious course.
The
fisherman, seeing us pass swift as the albatross and realising that
he saw speeding past him the two mysterious brothers, hastened to cross
himself and hid with his stupefied dog deep beneath a rock. The oldest
beachcomber would frown gravely, affirming that the two phantoms were
the spirit of the land and the spirit of the sea, who would parade their
majesty amid the skies during great revolutions of nature, united in
an eternal amity. It was said that, flying side by side like two Andean
condors, they liked to glide among the strata of the atmosphere adjacent
to the sun; that in these regions they fed upon the purest essences
of light; but that they would decide only reluctantly to lower the incline
of their vertical flight towards the dismayed orbit where the human
globe deliriously turns -
inhabited by cruel spirits who massacre one another on fields where
battle roars (when they do not kill each other treacherously, secretly,
in the midst of towns, with the dagger of hatred or ambition), and who
feed upon beings as full of life as themselves but placed a few rungs
lower on the ladder of existence.
Or
else, when the pair firmly resolved - in order to excite men to repentance
through the strophes of the prophecies - to swim with great strokes
towards the sidereal regions where, amid dense exhalations of avarice,
pride, cursing, and mockery reeking like pestilential vapours from its
hideous surface, that planet moved seeming as small as a boule and almost
invisible because of the distance, they would not fail to find occasions
on which they bitterly regretted their (misunderstood and decried) benevolence
and would go and hide in volcanoesı depths to converse with the everlasting
lava that boils in the vat of the central vaults, or to the sea bed,
there to let the disillusioned gaze rest pleasantly upon the most ferocious
monsters of the deep, which to them appeared models of mildness compared
with the bastards of mankind. When, with her propitious obscurity, night
fell, they leapt from porphyry-crested craters of submarine currents,
and left very far behind them the rocky chamberpot where strains the
constipated anus of the human cockatoos - until they could no longer
discern the suspended silhouette of the filthy planet.
Then
- grieved by their fruitless attempt - amid the compassionate stars
and under the eye of God - the angel of the land and the angel of the
sea kissed, weeping!... Mario and he who galloped beside him were not
unaware of the vague and superstitious rumours which the coastal fishermen
recounted in whispers, behind bolted doors and windows, during their
evenings round the hearth, while the night wind, wanting to warm itself,
vents its whistlings about the straw shacks, whose foundations are encrusted
with fragments of shells washed ashore by the dying wrinkles of the
waves. We did not speak. What do two hearts who love each other say?
Nothing. But our eyes expressed everything. We do not laugh. He endeavours
to smile at me, but I see that his countenance bears the weight of the
terrible impressions engraved there by reflection - constantly bent
over the sphinxes which with sidelong glance baffle the mortal intellect
and its great agonies. I try to remind him of his gilded youth which
seeks only to progress like a queen through the palace of pleasures.
But he notices that my words emerge with difficulty from my emaciated
mouth, and that the years of my own springtime have passed sad and glacial
like a relentless dream which brings to banqueting table and satin beds
wherein (paid with glistening gold) the pale priestess of love slumbers,
the bitter delights of disenchantment, old ageıs pestilential wrinkles,
solitudeıs shocks, and the torches of woe. Seeing my manoeuvres are
useless, I am not surprised I cannot make him happy. ³Do you weep? Tell
me if you can, king of snows and mists. I see no tears on your face
- beautiful as the cactus flower - and your eyelids are dry as the riverbed.
Yet I discern in your eyesı depths a vat full of blood, in which your
innocence boils.² He gazed at me with great tenderness while closing
and opening his lily eyelids like the ebb and flow of the sea. He badly
wanted to answer my bold question, and did so thus: ³Take no notice
of me. I assure you that there is no fire in my eyes, although I do
feel as if my skull had sunk into a helmet of blazing coals. I am, however,
of your opinion that the blood filling the vat has been extracted from
my veins by an invisible executioner, during last nightıs sleep. I have
awaited you a long time, beloved son of the ocean; and my drowsing arms
engaged in a vain combat with whoever crept into the vestibule of my
house ... Yes I feel that my soul is bolted into my body and cannot
free itself to flee far from the beaches beaten by the human sea. But
I do not complain. I received life like a wound, and I have forbidden
suicide to heal the scar. I want the Creator - every hour of his eternity
- to contemplate its gaping crevasse. This is the punishment I inflict
upon him.²
