I have written this variant of a traditional story has been told since antiquity (the oldest versions are believed to date from the Judeo-Talmudic tradition, around the sixth century) about the old gesture of death. Among the contemporary authors who have told it, for me the versions of Jean Cocteau and Bernardo Atxaga are notable.
We make a fiction about death, perhaps with the vain desire to subtract from it, to be able to deceive it, perhaps. It doesn't matter that our reason proves it to be a vain gesture, we'll keep trying.
Today, with this corrected and edited translation of my story, I try again and in vain, as it should be.
I hope you enjoy it.
I am grateful.
Source
The plum
It is told that a rich merchant, fond of philosophical flings and a little poet, had a servant whom he had come to love because he was an intelligent man of great literary talent. He wanted the fortune that, just as he had endowed him with talents, also made him countermade and crippled, in such a way that the merchant justified his services by entrusting him with small errands.
So this gentle man went every morning to the market to choose with his own hand fruits and delicacies for his patron's table. He also took advantage of these tastes, as they were consumed by the patron and servant during the long discussions they held in the afternoons on the most diverse, deep, curious and entertaining themes. Thus, arguments and reflections were seasoned with aromatic pomarroses, sweet chirimoyas, red and lustrous plums, golden pineapples and mangoes...
One day that looked like any other day, our servant chose plums in a market stall and noticed, without a doubt, that a young woman with slanted eyes, very beautiful, even when her lips seemed something prominent, looked at him with intensity and almost with impudence. Since the servant was a gallant man, he offered with zalem one of the precious fruits to the young woman. The young woman rejected him with polite words, as she approached him, and with an icy finger she touched the servant firmly between the eyes.
Our gallant was ecstatic, his senses gone, his face white. When he returned to himself, the lady was gone.
The servant ran shamelessly and, amidst tremors, referred the strange encounter to his patron.
The merchant moved swiftly to save his friend, for both in his heart sensed the final threat implicit in the lady's gesture. He chartered a boat without delay that placed the servant on a property he owned in a village lost on the opposite shores of the gulf they inhabited.
He spent one day with his night, and another day passed.
The merchant, bored, was reading a novel to which he was losing his taste for not having anyone to discuss it with. He decided to go to the market by majares to have at hand his green velvet armchair where now he read in the solitude of his study. But also encouraged by the restless (and puerile) desire to confront those who had deprived him of his beloved friend.
It did not take him long to find the beautiful lady. She seemed to be waiting for him sitting on a bench, dressed as a shopkeeper.
"Beautiful Lady", the merchant then inquired with a troubled heart (repenting for his stupidity before beginning), faithful without blemish among them all, deserved perhaps the gallant boldness of my friend the threat that two days ago you made to him and that has deprived me of his affectionate company? Do I deserve your threat also for venturing me to ask you?
To which the Lady, already stripped of her disguise and exhibiting her pale true face of bones, answered:
I did not threaten your servant. I only gave him one reason to stay away from the market, because I had to take you from this plum stand and I have been waiting for you ever since.
Freedom for my country!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://adncabrera.vornix.blog/2019/04/01/the-plum-a-version-of-the-traditional-story-the-gesture-of-death/