EL BUEN SENTIDO “Mother, you know there is a place somewhere called Paris. It’s a huge place and a long way off and it really is huge.” My mother turns up my coat collar, not because it’s starting to snow, but in order that it may start. My father’s wife is in love with me, walking up, always keeping her back to my birth, and her face toward my death. Because I am hers twice: by my good-bye and by my coming home. When I return home, I close her. That is why her eyes gave me so much, pronounced innocent of me, caught in the act of me, everything occurs through finished arrangements, through covenants carried out. Has my mother confessed me, has she been named publicly? Why doesn’t she give so much to my other brothers. To Victor, for example, the oldest, who is so old now that people say, “He looked like his father’s youngest brother!” It must be because I have traveled so much! It must be because I have lived more! My mother gives me illuminated permissions to explore my coming-home tales. Face to face with my returning-home life, remembering that I have for two whole hearts through her womb, she blushes and goes deathly pale when I say in the discourse of the soul: “That night I was happy!” But she grows more sad, she grew more sad. “How old you’re getting, son!” And she walks firmly through the color yellow to cry, because I seem to her to be getting old, on the blade of a the sword, in the delta of my face. Weeps with me, grows sad with me. Why should my youth be necessary, if I will always be her son? Why do mothers feel pain when their sons get old, if their age will never equal anyway the age of the mothers? And why, if the sons, the more they get on, merely come nearer to the age of the fathers? My mother cries because I am old in my time and because I will never get old enough to be old in hers! My good-byes left from a point in her being more toward the outside than the point in her being to which I come back. I am, because I am so overdue coming back, more the man to my mother than the son to my mother. The purity that lights us both now with three flames lies precisely in that. I say then until I finally fall silent: “Mother, you know there is this place somewhere called Paris. It”s a huge place and a long way off and it really is huge.” The wife of my father, hearing my voice, goes on eating her lunch, and her eyes that will die descend gently along my arms. -- César Vallejo
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 08:47:22 +0000