Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
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up to no good.
“My poor little son. Some day he won’t have anyone to hide the sugar from, when he’s all grown up, and his mother has died.”
And the first meal of the day was coming to an end, while mother’s two blazing tears were soaking her Nazarene braids.
[JM]
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BEYOND LIFE AND DEATH
Hackneyed rockrose of July; wind belted around each of the great grain’s one-armed petioles that gravitate inside it; dead lust upon omphaloid hillsides of the summertime sierra. Wait. This can’t be. Let’s sing again. Oh, how sweet a dream!
My horse trotted that away. After being out of town for eleven years, that day I finally drew near to Santiago, where I was born. The poor irrational thing pushed on, and from all my being to my tired fingers that held onto the reins, through the attentive ears of the quadruped and returning though the trotting of the hooves that mimicked a stationary jig, in the mysterious score-keeping trial of the road and the unknown, I wept for my mother who, dead for two years now, would no longer be waiting the return of her wandering wayward son. The whole region, its mild climate, the color of harvest in the lime afternoon, and also a farmhouse around here that recognized my soul, stirred up in me a nostalgic filial ecstasy, and my lips grew almost completely chapped from suckling the eternal nipple, the ever lactating nipple of my mother; yes, ever lactating, even beyond death.
As a boy I had surely passed by there with her. Yes. For sure. But, no. It wasn’t with me that she’d crossed those fields. Back then I was too young. It was with my father—how long ago must that have been! Ah … It was also in July, with the Saint James festival not far off. Father and mother rode atop their mules; he in the lead. The royal path. Perhaps my father who had just dodged a crash with a wandering maguey:
“Señora … Watch out! …”
My poor mother didn’t have enough time and was thrown from her saddle onto the stones of the path. They took her back to town on a stretcher. I cried a lot for my mother, and they didn’t tell me what had happened. She recovered. The night before the festival, she was cheerful and smiling, no longer in bed, and everything was fine. I didn’t even cry for my mother.
But now I was crying more, remembering her as she was sick, laid out, when she loved me more and showed me more affection and also gave me more sweetbread from underneath her cushions and from the nightstand drawer. Now I was crying more, drawing near to Santiago, where I’d only find her dead, buried beneath the ripe fragrant mustard plants of a poor cemetery.
My mother had passed away two years earlier. The news of her death first reached me in Lima, where I also learned that my father and siblings had set out on a trip to a faraway plantation owned by an uncle of ours, to ease the pain, as best one can, of such a terrible loss. The country estate was located in the most remote region on the mountain, on the far side of the Río Marañón. From Santiago I’d head that way, devouring unending trails of precipitous puna and unknown blistering jungles.
My animal suddenly started huffing. Fine dust kicked up abundantly with a gentle breeze, blinding me nearly. A pile of barley. And then, Santiago came into view, on its jagged plateau, with its dark brown rooftops facing the already horizontal sun. And still, toward the east, on the ledge of a brazil-yellow promontory stood the pantheon carved at that hour by the 6:00 p.m. tincture; and I couldn’t go any farther, as an atrocious sorrow had seized me.
I reached the town just as night did. I made the last turn, and as I entered the street that my house was on, I saw someone sitting alone on the bench in front of the door. He was alone. Very alone. So much so that, choking on my soul’s mystical grief, I was frightened by him. It must’ve also been due to the almost inert peace with which, stuck by the penumbra’s half strength, his silhouette was leaning against the whitewashed face of the wall. A particular bluster of nerves dried my tears. I moved on. From the bench jumped my older brother, Ángel, and he gave me a helpless hug. He’d come from the plantation on business only a few days earlier.
That night, after a frugal meal, we stayed up until dawn. I walked through the rooms, hallways, and patios of the house; even while making a visible effort to skirt that desire of mine to go through our dear ole house, Ángel also seemed to take pleasure in the torture of someone who ventures through the phantasmal domain of life’s only past.
During his few days in Santiago, Ángel did not leave home, where, according to him, everything lay just as it was left after Mom’s death. He also told me about the state of her health during the days preceding the fatal pain and what her agony was like. Oh, the brotherly embrace scratched at our guts and suctioned out new tears of frozen tenderness and mourning!
“Ah, this bread box, where I used to ask Mom for bread, with big crocodile tears!” And I opened a little door with plain dilapidated panels.
As in all rustic constructions of the Peruvian sierra, where each doorway is almost always accompanied by a bench, alongside the threshold I’d just crossed, there sat the same one from my boyhood, without a doubt, repaired and shined countless times. With the rickety door open, we each took a seat on the bench, and there we lit the sad-eyed lantern that we were carrying. Its firelight went in full gallop onto Ángel’s face, which grew more tired from one moment to the next, while night ran its course and we pressed on the wound some more, until it almost seemed transparent. As I noticed his state, I hugged him and, with kisses, covered his severe bearded cheeks that once again got soaked in tears.
A flash in the sky, without any thunder, the kind that comes from far away, during the highland summer, emptied the guts of night. I kept wiping Ángel’s eyelids. And neither he nor the lantern, nor the bench, nor anything else was there. I couldn’t hear. I felt like I was in a tomb.
Then I could see again: my brother, the lantern, the bench. But I thought I saw in Ángel a refreshed complexion now, mild and perhaps I was mistaken—let’s say he looked as though he’d overcome his previous affliction and gauntness. Perhaps, I repeat, this was a visual error on my part, since such a change is inconceivable.
“I feel like I still see her,” I continued weeping, “without the poor thing knowing what to do about that gift, she keeps scolding me, ‘I caught you, you little liar; you pretend you’re crying when you’re secretly laughing!’ And she kissed me more than all of you, since I was the youngest!”
After the vigil, Ángel again seemed broken up and, as before the flash of light, shockingly emaciated. I’d surely suffered a momentary loss of sight, brought on by the strike of the meteor’s light, when I found in his physiognomy relief and freshness that, naturally, couldn’t have been there.
The dawn had yet to crack the following day when I mounted up and left for the plantation, bidding farewell to Ángel, who’d stay a few days more for the matters that had motivated his arrival to Santiago.
With the first leg of the journey behind me, an inexplicable event took place. At an inn I was leaning back, resting on a bench, when from the hut an old woman suddenly stared at me with an alarmed expression.
“What happened to your face?” she asked out of pity. “Good God! It’s covered in blood …”
I jumped up from the bench and, in the mirror, confirmed that my face was speckled with dried bloodstains. A giant shudder gripped me, and I wanted to run from myself. Blood? From where? I had touched my face to Ángel’s, who was crying … But … No. No. Where was that blood from? One will understand the terror and shock that knotted my chest with a thousand thoughts. Nothing is comparable with that jolt of my heart. There are no words to express it now, nor will there ever be. And today, in the solitary room where I write, there’s that aged blood and my face smeared with it and the old woman from the wayside inn and the journey and my brother who cries and whom I don’t kiss and my dead mother and …
… After tracing the lines on my face, I fled onto the balcony, panting in a cold sweat. So frightening and overwhelming is the memory of that scarlet mystery …
Oh nightmarish night in that unforgettable shack, where the image