Selected Writings of César Vallejo - César Vallejo Wesleyan Poetry Series

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with its sweaty self, permeating the first of the earth’s pores. And that old-timer who suddenly stops yelling? What’s he going to do? Ah! He turns toward a young Franciscan who rises up from his imperial dawn-ward genuflection, as if facing a crumbling altar. The old man walks up to him and, with an angry expression, tears off the wide-cut sacred habit that the priest was wearing … I turn my head. Ah, immense palpitating cone of darkness, at whose distant nebulous vortex, at whose final frontier, a naked woman in the living flesh is glowing! …

      Oh woman! Let us love each other to the nth degree. Let us be scorched by every crucible. Let us be cleansed by all the storms. Let us unite in body and soul. Let us love each other absolutely, through every death.

      Oh flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone! Do you recall those budding passions, those bandaged anxieties of our eight years? Remember that spring morning warmed by the sierra’s spontaneous sun, when, having played so late the night before, we, in our shared bed sleeping late, awoke in each other’s arms and, after realizing that we were alone, shared a nude kiss on our virgin lips. Remember that your flesh and mine were magnetized, our friction course and blind; and also remember that we were thenceforth still good and pure and that ours was the impalpable pureness of animals …

      Oneself the end of our departure; oneself the alvine equator of our mischief, you in the front, I behind. We have loved each other—don’t you recall?—when the minute had yet to become a lifetime. In the world we’ve come to see ourselves through lovers’ eyes after the bleakness of an absence.

      Oh, Lady Supreme! Wipe from your bona fide eyes the blinding dust kicked up on winding roads and tergiversate your concrete climb. And rise higher even still! Be the complete woman, the entire chord! Oh flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone! … Oh my sister, my wife, my mother!

      And I break down into tears until dawn.

      “Good morning, Mr. Mayor …”

      [JM]

      ________________

      Wait. I can’t figure out how to get this going. Wait. Now.

      Aim here, right where the tip of my left hand’s longest finger is touching. Don’t back down, don’t be afraid. Just aim here. Now!

      Vrrrooommm …

      So, now a projectile bathes in the waters of the four pumps that have just combusted in my chest. The recoil sears and burns. Thirst ominously saharangues my throat and devours my gut …

      Yet I hear three lonely sounds bombard and completely dominate two ports and their three-boned piers that, oh, are always just a hair shy of sinking. I perceive those tragic and thricey sounds quite distinctively, almost one by one.

      The first comes from one errant strand of hair still mincing upon the thick tongue of night.

      The second sound is a bud, an eternal self-revelation, an endless announcement. It’s a herald. It constantly circles a tender ovoid waist like a hand carved from a shell. Thus it always appears and can never blow past the last wind. So it’s ever-beginning, the sound of all humanity.

      The final sound. The one final sound watches over with precision, pedestyled in the clearing of those communicating vessels. In this final blow of harmony, thirst dissipates (one of threat’s little windows slams shut) and acquires a different sensation, becomes what it was not, until it reaches the counter key.

      And the projectile in the blood of my stranded heart

      used to sing

      to make plumes

      in vain has forced its way in order to put me to death.

      “And so?”

      “This is the one I’ve got to sign twice, Mr. Scribe. Is it in duplicate?”

      [SJL/JM]

      ________________

      On this swelter of a night, one of my inmates tells me the story of his trial. He finishes the abstruse narration, stretches out on his soiled cot, and hums a yaraví.

      I now possess the truth of his conduct.

      This man is a criminal. His mask of innocence transparent, the criminal has been arrested. Through the course of his prattle, my soul has followed him, step-by-step, through his unlawful act. Between us we’ve festered through days and nights of idleness, garnished with arrogant alcohol, chuckling dentures, aching guitar strings, razor blades on guard, drunken bouts of sweat and disgust. We’ve disputed with the defenseless companion who cries for her man to quit drinking, to work and earn some dough for the kids, so that God sees … And then, with our dried-out guts thriving on booze, each dawn we’d take the brutal plunge into the street, slamming the door on the groaning offspring’s own fat lips.

      I’ve suffered with him the fleeting calls to dignity and regeneration; I’ve confronted both sides of the coin; I’ve doubted and even felt the crunching of the heel that insinuated a one-eighty. One morning this barfly, in great pain, thought about going on the straight and narrow, left to look for a job, then ran into an old friend and took a turn for the worse. In the end, he stole out of necessity. And now, given what his legal representative is saying, his sentence isn’t far off.

      This man is a thief.

      But he’s also a killer.

      One night, during the most boisterous of benders, he strolls through bloody intersections of the ghetto, while at the same time, an old-timer who, then holding down an honest job, is on his way home from work. Walking up next to him, the drinker takes him by the arm, invites him in, gets him to share in his adventure, and the upright man accepts, though much to his regret.

      Fording the earth ten elbows deep, they return after midnight through dark allies. The irreproachable man with alarming diphthongs brings the drinker to a halt; he takes him by the side, stands him up, and berates the shameless scum, “Come on! This is what you like. You don’t have a choice anymore.”

      And suddenly a sentence bursts forth in flames and emerges from the darkness: “Hold it right there! …”

      An assault of anonymous knives. Botched, the target of the attack, the blade doesn’t pierce the flesh of the drunkard but mistakenly and fatally punctures the good worker.

      Therefore, this man is also a killer. But the courts, naturally, do not suspect, nor will they ever, the third hand of the thief.

      Meanwhile, he keeps doing pushups on that suspicious cot of his, while humming his sad yaraví.

      [JM]

      ________________

      I’m pasty. While I comb my hair, in the mirror I notice that the bags under my eyes have grown even blacker and bluer and that the hue of my shaved face’s angular copper has scathingly jaundiced.

      I’m old. I wipe my brow with the towel, and a horizontal stripe highlighted by abundant pleats is highlighted therein like a cue of an implacable funeral march … I’m dead.

      My cell mate has gotten up early and is making the dark tea that we customarily take in the morning, with the stale bread of a new hopeless sun.

      We sit down afterward at the bare table, where the melancholic breakfast steams, within two teacups that have no saucers. And these cups afoot, white as ever and so clean, this bread still warm on the small rolled tablecloth from Damascus, all this domestic morning-time aroma reminds me of my family’s house, my childhood in Santiago de Chuco, those breakfasts of eight to ten siblings from the oldest to youngest, like the reeds of an antara,56 among them me, the last of all, glued to the side of the dining room table, with the flowing hair that one of my younger sisters has just endeavored to comb, in my left hand a whole piece of sweet roll—it had to be whole!—and with my right hand’s rosy fingers, crouching down to hide the sugar granule by granule …

      Ah! The little boy that

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