“An Old Historian Tells His Story”

by William Ospina

I dreamed that there was a hole in the reddened summer sky,
a chunk of the universe as balck as charred paper
and I awoke with a bitter tastes on my lips.
There was the light from the windows,
the light of Mexico, lively as if corrupted by carnations
and the sky lay whole upon the sleeping, snow-capped mountains.

Light from the sky fell amongy my books,
made the letters of Cortes' history shine
fell upon the engraving of a pyramid
half hidden by forest.

Always a din of violins in the background
and I never know if it is pulsing in the air or in my mind.
Always the sensation that there is a dead man,
enormous, eistinguished, ancient, patient,
upon whom grow mountains, rains, wars, towns.
And I remembered the instant that marked my destiny,
that instant which, after the wars, moved me to attend school,
to travel leagues and leagues on silent mules to petition for entrance to the Academy,
to read day and night in those gloomy rooming houses
while around me the city grew huge.

I recalled the instant that ripped me from the fields,
from pasturelands blue in the dawn,
from nights of the town, lulled by Latin liturgies, punctuated by bullets,
from the sad sound of the pitcher at the dry bottom of a well,
and that made me the man I am,
aging among volumes of History, among motley chronicles,
searching through fragments day after day, reviewing old hatreds,
sharpening rusty daggers,
inserting yet again warm words between the dry lips of the dead.

I did not want to be a soldier:
I was gamboling over my father's lands young and carefree,
when the draft arrived, when I was called up.
And I chose to hunt out the rebel bands,
to join the troops fighting the insurgents.
But what does a seventeen-year-old boy know of his country?
He only knows how to pull the trigger when ordered to fire
and to look into those ineffaceable eyes at their final shining moment.

Since then I have researched whether wars are just,
I have ruined my vision reviewing glorious infamies,
and I only know that the play is profound and blind,
and that there once was innocence in those eyes.

The earth is a vast cemetery endlessly blooming with clouds and birds,
there is not an atom of a tree that was not once human
or that is not going to be,
everything we step on is sacred ash.
Like a side beach where the sea casts its relics,
leavings of admirable generations, the calcified remains of an old order,
years of splendid life dissolved into docile sand,
the world is the pitcher of anxious, exhausted generations.

But in no region of the planet do the dead live
as they do in this country that bends around the gulf
as the arms of a woman embrace a pitcher.
Here every memory kindles and endures,
dead Gods dine in the mountains
and each man's chest is the tomb of his elders
and he who kills is the sepulcher of those he kills.

And I edit long books of History,
I study again the life of the sad Emperor and his sick wife,
the pageantry of Napoleon's court, the showy plans for his boulevards,
the melancholia of the house of Hapsburg,
the life of Juarez , and his tragic devotion to justice,
the ardor of young Mexicans who surrendered their lives to German sabers,
and the breasts full of love that were cracked by French bullets.
I look at it all again, again I turn the pages, and something doesn't happen,
because I was in the army, and I fulfilled my duty, and I was victorious,
and I never killed a man in battle
(though I was wounded and captured and freed)
but without hate, and without understanding it all, and more alone than a falcon on a crag,
I took my place with the others on that terrible line
and the captain gave us the order to fire.

translated from the Spanish by Elaine Fowler Palencia and Michael Palencia-Roth