A confession of love 154 years later

The lord stays on the other side of the street. He watches me calmly, undaunted and while I also look at him, I inspect him, I dwell on the details that others will not notice, I try to unravel some vestige of sunsets … and I do not succeed.

I try to follow my path, but its powerful look prevents any movement. I am seduced by his magnanimous, impetuous, subjugating air. I feel as if before his presence my fears were undressed, disturbed by the long wait before his absence, but I do not distrust. I know that when he is ready, completely beautiful, when he regains his freshness, he will return to me.

Many say that its stillness is confused with inertia and death of spirit, that they have lost hope that it recovers its gallant movements and that it will rest in shadows even if someday, perhaps not very distant, it finds its lost steps.

That tranquility is strange. Some people confuse her with agonies, but I know her solitudes, the ones she keeps hidden, I’ve seen her ghosts wandering and I feel her breathing rhythmically on my back.

After discovering in you the necessary rebirth, the timely caress to my despair, the warm embrace before the goodbye of my children, I can not but strip myself of stormy omens, exorcise me of hurries. I miss him so much that there would be no selfishness between him and me.

That would be perhaps the end of the long, powerful and seductive idyll that we began that day of 1863 when I knew that he would fill me with glories, love hidden in the night darkness, an overflowing passion dressed in art and culture.

No longer are they ladies in wide suits, or men in elegant suits; And the rumble of carriages on the cold dust of the street does not scratch the calm of the nineteenth-century painters. Time has passed, I have changed and so has he. In the extension of my body the wrinkles seem wounded, they lacerate my pride of splendid goddess, of Athens.

But he remains in the opposite corner of this sidewalk where I baptized the first men who gave me life. I look into the mirror of her soul and, in the midst of the apparent stillness that is there, I still find myself beautiful, as when we met more than a century and a half ago.

It has been too long and we are united facing storms of the absurd of this open silence that consumes us. I extend my hand. Sauto takes it with the sweetness of a medieval knight, as if there were no one outside, nothing more. Confident closes his eyes, he follows me blindly and I smile at the center of my existential conflicts.

The immensity of the night caresses us … but time has passed. And I surrender to the immeasurable pleasure of finding our lost steps together.

Original text by Jessica Mesa Duarte on April 7th, 2017

Gloria Machado León

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