Selected Writings of César Vallejo. César Vallejo
I tell you,
then, that life is in the mirror, and that you are
Death. The original.
While the wave goes, while the wave comes,
with impunity one is dead. Only when
the waters burst upon the facing shores
curling and churning do you then transfigure
and, believing you’re dying, sense the sixth chord
that’s no longer yours.
You are dead, not having ever lived before.
Anyone would say, not being now, in another time
you were. But, really, you are the cadavers
come from a life that never was. Sad fate.
Not having been anything but dead, always.
To be a dry leaf, without ever having been green.
Orphanhood of orphanhoods.
And nonetheless the dead are not, cannot be
cadavers of a life they’ve not yet lived.
They died of life.
You are dead.
[SJL]
LXXVII
It hails so hard, as if to remind me
and increase the pearls
I’ve gathered from the same snout
of every tempest.
May this rain not dry up.
At least allow me now
to fall for her, or be buried
soaked in water
that will surge from all the fires.
How far until this rain will hit me?
I’m afraid of being left with one side dry;
afraid that she may leave, without having tasted me
in the droughts of incredible vocal chords,
through which,
to reach harmony,
one must always arise—never descend!
Don’t we in fact arise downward?
Rain, sing, on the coast still without a sea!
[JM]
FROM Scales
NORTHWESTERN WALL
Penumbra.
The only cell mate left now sits down to eat in front of the horizontal window of our dungeon, a barred little opening in the upper half of the cell door, where he takes refuge in the orange anguish of evening’s full bloom.
I turn toward him.
“Shall we?”
“Let’s. Please be served,” he replies with a smile.
While looking at his bullish profile thrown against the folded bright red leaf of the open window, my gaze locks onto an almost aerial spider, seemingly made of smoke, emerging in absolute stillness on the wood, a half meter above the man’s head. The westerly wind wafts an ocher glitter upon the tranquil weaver, as if to bring her into focus. She has undoubtedly felt the warm solar breeze, as she stretches out some of her limbs with drowsy lackadaisical languor, and then she starts taking fitful downward steps, until stopping flush with the man’s beard so that, while he chews, it appears as if he were gobbling up the tiny beast.
And as he finally finishes eating, the animal flanks out in a sprint for the door hinges, just as the man swings the door shut. Something has happened. I go up and reopen the door, examine the hinges, and find the body of the poor wanderer, mashed and transformed into scattered filaments.
“You’ve killed a spider,” I say to him with evident enthusiasm.
“Have I?” he asks with indifference. “All the better: this place is roach motel anyway.”
And as if nothing had happened, he begins to pace the length of the cell, picking food from his teeth and spitting it out profusely.
Justice! This idea comes to mind.
I know that this man has just harmed an anonymous, yet existing and real being. And the spider, on the other hand, has inadvertently pushed the poor innocent man to the point of murder. Don’t both, then, deserve to be judged for their actions? Or is such a means of justice foreign to the human spirit? When is man the judge of man?
He who’s unaware of the temperature, the sufficiency with which he finishes one thing or begins another; who’s unaware of the nuance by which what’s white is white and the degree to which it’s white; who is and will be unaware of the moment when we begin to live, the moment when we begin to die, when we cry, when we laugh, when sound limits with form the lips that say: I … he won’t figure out, nor can he, the degree of truth to which a fact qualified as criminal IS criminal. He who’s unaware of the instant when 1 stops being 1 and starts being 2, who even within mathematical exactitude lacks wisdom’s unconquerable plenitude—how could he ever manage to establish the fundamental and criminal moment of any action, through the warp of fate’s whims, within the great powered gears that move beings and things in front of things and beings?
Justice is not a human function. Nor can it be. Justice operates tacitly, deeper inside than all insides, in the courts and the prisoners. Justice—listen up, men of all latitudes!—is carried out in subterranean harmony, on the flipside of the senses and in the cerebral swings of street fairs. Hone down your hearts! Justice passes beneath every surface, behind everyone’s backs. Lend subtler an ear to its fatal drumroll, and you will hear its only vigrant cymbal that, by the power of love, is smashed in two—its cymbal as vague and uncertain as the traces of the crime itself or of what is generally called crime.
Only in this way is justice infallible: when it’s not seen through the tinted enticements of the judges, when it’s not written in the codes, when there’s no longer a need for jails or guards.
Therefore, justice is not, cannot be, carried out by men, not even before the eyes of men.
No one is ever a criminal. Or we all are always criminals.
[JM]
________________
ANTARCTIC WALL
Desire magnetizes us.
She, at my side, in the bedchamber, charges and charges the mysterious circuit with volts by the thousand per second. There’s an unimaginable drop that drips and pools and burns wherever I turn, trying to escape; a drop that’s nowhere and trembles, sings, cries, wails through all five senses and my heart, and then finally flows like electrical current to the tips …
I quickly sit up, leap toward the fallen woman, who kindly confided in me her warm welcome, and then … a warm drop that splashes on my skin, separates me from my sister, who stays back in the environs of the dream that I wake up from overwhelmed.
Gasping for breath, confused, bullish my temples, it pierces my heart with pain.
Two … Three … Foooooouuuuur! … Only the angry guards’ voices reach the dungeon’s sepulchral gloom. The cathedral clock tolls two in the morning.
Why with my sister? Why with her, who now must surely be sleeping in a mild innocent calm? Why did it have to be her?
I roll over in bed. Strange perspectives resume their movements in the darkness, fuzzy specters. I hear the rain begin to fall.
Why with my sister? I think I’m running a fever. I’m suffering.
And now I hear my own breathing rise, fall, collide, and graze the pillow. Is it my breathing? Some cartilaginous