Paisaje

A short way on, he paused.

The sun had pierced the opaque veil of the clouds, bathing a bend in the road in golden and pearly light. There a few willows bowed their green tresses until they grazed the turf. In the background rose high bluffs showing black earth, red clay, and stones shining like glass. Beneath the drooping willows, some asses were browsing, shaking their philosophical heads—oh, great master Hugo!—and near them a fat bullock, with large, melancholy, pensive eyes wherein dwell the looks and tenderness of unknown, supreme ecstasies, slowly and lazily chewed its pasture. Above all things floated a warm vapor and the pleasing rustic scent of crushed herbs. Deep down could be seen a patch of blue. A robust huaso—one of those sturdy peasants, coarse Herculeses who can halt a bull—suddenly appeared atop the highest ridge of the bluffs. Behind him lay the vast sky. His legs, all sinew, were bare. On one arm he carried a thick, coiled rope. Upon his head, like an otter cap, his tangled, dense, wild hair.

He approached the bullock directly and cast the lasso around its horns. Near him a dog, panting with tongue hanging out, wagged its tail and gamboled.

From a neighboring house issued a rhythmic, metallic clangor.

In a narrow chamber, within soot-stained walls, black, very black, men were working at the forge. One pumped the bellows that snorted, making the coals crackle and throwing up whirlwinds of sparks and flames like pale, golden, bluish, incandescent tongues. In the glow of the fire wherein long iron bars turned red, the faces of the smiths were seen with a flickering gleam. Three anvils fitted into rough timbers endured the beating of sledgehammers that crushed the white-hot metal, sending up a scarlet shower. The forgers wore open-collared woolen shirts and long leather aprons. One caught sight of their thick necks and the beginning of hairy chests; and from loose sleeves emerged gigantic arms wherein, as in those of Amycus, the rounded muscles resembled boulders washed smooth and polished by mountain torrents. In that cavernous blackness, beneath the flare of the flames, they possessed the stature of Cyclopes. To one side, a small casement barely let through a shaft of sunbeams. At the entrance to the forge, as in a dark frame, a fair girl was eating grapes. And against that background of soot and coal, her delicate, smooth shoulders, which were bare, set off her lovely lily hue with an almost imperceptible tint of gold.

He walked on, walked on.

He was already returning to his dwelling. He was heading for the funicular when he heard a child’s laughter, silvery and musical; and he, incorrigible poet, sought the lips from which that laughter welled.

Beneath a bower of honeysuckle, amidst fragrant plants and flowering urns, stood a pale, august woman, a mother with a tender, smiling babe. She held him in one arm, while raising the other, and in her hand was a dove—one of those snowy doves that coo to their nestlings with iridescent wings, swelling their crops like a virgin’s breast, and parting their beaks whence pours the sweet music of their caress.

The mother was showing the dove to the child, and the child, eager to grasp it, opened his eyes wide, stretched forth his tiny arms, and laughed joyously; and in the sunlight his face seemed haloed with a nimbus. And the mother, with the tender beatitude of her gaze, her solemn and graceful slenderness, the dawn in her pupils, and blessing and kisses upon her lips, seemed like a sacred lily, a Mary full of grace, radiating the light of an ineffable candor. The infant Jesus, royal as a child God, lovely as a paradisiacal cherub, sought to grasp that white dove beneath the immense dome of the azure sky.

Ricardo went down, and took the road to his home.