Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
murderous
burden, the sophism of Good and Reason!
What the hand grazed, by chance, has been grasped;
perfumes drifted, and among them the scent of
mold that halfway down the path has grown
on the withered apple tree of dead Illusion.
So life goes,
with the treacherous canticles of a shriveled bacchante.
Completely rattled, I push onward … onward,
growling my funeral march.
Walking at the feet of royal Brahacmanic22 elephants
and to the sordid buzzing of a mercurial boiling,
couples raise toasts sculpted in rock,
and forgotten twilights a cross to their lips.
So life goes, a vast orchestra of Sphinxes
belching out its funeral march into the Void.
[CE]
________________
OUR BREAD
For Alejandro Gamboa
One drinks one’s breakfast … The damp graveyard
earth smells of beloved blood.
City of winter … Mordant crusade
of a cart that seems to drag along
a feeling of fasting in chains!
One wants to knock on each door
and ask for who knows who; and then
see to the poor, and, crying softly,
give morsels of bread to everybody.
And to strip the rich of their vineyards
with the two saintly hands
that with a blast of light
flew off unnailed from the Cross!
Matinal eyelash, don’t raise up!
Our daily bread—give it to us,
Lord …!
All my bones belong to others;
maybe I stole them!
I took for my own what was perhaps
meant for another;
and I think that, had I not been born,
another poor man would be drinking this coffee!
I’m a lousy thief … Where will I go?
And in this cold hour, when the earth
smells of human dust and is so sad,
I want to knock on every door
and beg who knows who, forgive me,
and bake him morsels of fresh bread
here, in the oven of my heart …!
[CE]
________________
THE MISERABLE SUPPER
How long will we have to wait for what is
not owed to us … And in what corner will
we kick our poor sponge23 forever! How long before
the cross that inspires us does not rest its oars.
How long before Doubt toasts our nobility for
having suffered …
We have already sat so
long at this table, with the bitterness of a child
who at midnight, cries from hunger, wide awake …
And when will we join all the others, at the brink
of an eternal morning, everybody breakfasted.
For just how long this vale of tears, into which
I never asked to be led.
Resting on my elbows,
all bathed in tears, I repeat head bowed
and defeated: how much longer will this supper last.
There’s someone who has drunk too much, and he mocks us,
and offers and withdraws from us—like a black spoonful
of bitter human essence—the tomb …
And this abstruse one knows
even less how much longer this supper will last!
[CE]
________________
THE ETERNAL DICE
FOR MANUEL GONZÁLEZ PRADA,
this wild, choice emotion, one for
which the great master has most
enthusiastically applauded me.
My God, I am crying over the being I live;
it grieves me to have taken your bread;
but this poor thinking clay
is no scab fermented in your side:
you do not have Marys who leave you!
My God, had you been a man,
today you would know how to be God;
but you, who were always fine,
feel nothing for your own creation.
Indeed, man suffers you; God is he!
Today there are candles in my sorcerer eyes,
as in those of a condemned man—
my God, you will light all of your candles
and we will play with the old die …
Perhaps, oh gambler, throwing for the fate of
the whole universe,
Death’s dark-circled eyes will come up,
like two funereal snake eyes of mud.
My God, and this deaf, gloomy night,
you will not be able to gamble, for the Earth
is a worn die now rounded from
rolling at random,
it cannot stop but in a hollow,
the hollow of an immense tomb.
[CE]
________________
DISTANT FOOTSTEPS
My father is asleep. His august face
expresses a peaceful heart;
he is now so sweet …
if there is anything bitter in him, it must be me.
There is loneliness in the house; there is prayer;
and no news of the children today.
My father stirs, sounding
the flight into Egypt, the styptic farewell.
He is now so near;
if there is anything distant in him, it must be me.
My mother walks in the orchard,
savoring a savor now without savor.
She is so soft,