Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (17 page)

a curling tangle of locks.

He is the son of a royal father

who was a plain working farmer

to whom good fortune came

with love, power and money.

Of the three Alvargonzáleses

Miguel is the handsomest.

The oldest one’s face is spoiled

with a dominating frown

below a paltry forehead;

the second’s disturbed eyes,

unable to focus straight

ahead, are ferocious and wild.

5

The three brothers contemplate

the sad home in quietude,

and as the night closes in

the cold and wind stiffen.

“Brothers, don’t you have wood?”

asks Miguel. “We have nothing,”

the elder replies.

miraculously opens up

the bulky closed door

with its double bar of iron.

The man who comes inside

wears the dead father’s face.

A halo of golden light

caresses his white locks.

He carries wood on his shoulder

and grasps an iron hatchet.

The Returned Emigrant

1

Out of those cursed acres,

Miguel buys a share

from his brothers. He brings

abundance from America,

and even in bad land, gold

shines better when not buried.

Better in hands of the poor

than concealed in a clay jar.

He starts to work the earth

with faith and emigrant force

while the others look after

their portions of soil and cattle.

And now the fruitful summer

decorates Miguel’s fields

with towering ears of wheat

pregnant with yellow grain,

and soon from village to village

the miracle is recounted,

and the murderers suffer

a curse invading their fields.

Soon the people sing verses

narrating the earlier crime:

“By the border of the spring

What an evil death they gave him,

In the bottomless pool,

they threw the dead father,

and he who worked the land

cannot sleep below the earth.”

2

Miguel with two greyhounds

and armed with his shotgun,

goes toward the blue mountains

on a serene afternoon.

He is walking amid the green

poplars along the highway

and hears a voice singing:

“He has no grave in the earth.

Amid the valley pine trees

they carted their dead father

out to Laguna Negra.”

The House

1

The house of Alvargonzález

is an old humble mansion

with four narrow windows,

a hundred yards from the village

set between two elm trees,

two giant sentinels

who furnish shade in summer

and in autumn dry leaves.

It is a house of farmers,

of people rich but peasants,

where the smoking fireplace

with its seats made of stone

is easily seen from outside,

the door open to the fields.

Set down amid the embers

in the fireplace are two

bubbling stewpots of clay

for nourishing the two families.

On the right, the yard

and the corral; on the left,

the orchard and beehives.

In the back, a worn staircase

leading up to the rooms

divided in sleeping quarters.

The Alvargonzáleses live

in them with their women.

Neither of these couples

have brought sons into the world

and so the paternal house

confers on them ample space.

In one room with a view

onto the luminous orchard,

are a table with thick oak boards

and two chairs of cowhide.

Hanging from the wall

a black abacus with big beads

and some old rusty spurs

lying on a wooden chest.

There is a forgotten room

where Miguel is living now.

It was here where his parents

saw the orchard in spring

buzzing with flowers, a sky

in blue May with a stork

(when roses open up

and brambles turn white)

instructing its fledglings

to use their slow wings to fly.

And on a summer night

when heat excluded sleep,

from the open window they heard

an invisible nightingale singing.

There Alvargonzález,

with pride in his orchards

and love for his new family,

had dreams of grandeur.

He saw the laughing figure

of his first son in the arms

of his mother, the face

radiant under the yellow sun,

and then the boy’s small greedy

hands reached for the red

mazzard berries and the cherries.

That autumn evening

was gold, pleasing, and good,

and he thought it possible

to live happy on the earth.

Now, the peasants sing verses

drifting from village to village,

“House of Alvargonzález,

bad days are waiting for you.

House of the murderers,

Let no one call at your door.”

2

It is an autumn afternoon.

In the golden poplar grove

there are no more nightingales;

the cicada is numb.

The last few swallows

who have not begun to migrate

will die, and the storks

in their nest of broom twigs

on bell towers and spires

have fled.

the wind has left a scattering

of elm leaves torn from the branches,

yet in the church courtyard

three round acacia trees

still have green leafage.

The horse chestnuts, protected

in their husks, one by one

break loose, drop on the ground.

The rose tree again is dropping

seed, and the wide meadows

glitter in the season’s rays.

On hillsides and hollows,

on banks and on clearings,

bits of grass and new green herbs

that summer hasn’t scorched

flap about. Barren summits

and bald knolls and bluffs

wear the crown of sinking

globes of metallic clouds.

On the floor of pine forests,

between withered brambles

and the yellowish bracken

small swollen streams race

to fatten the master river

swirling over rocks and ravines.

The plowed earth is colored

with lead and silver blue,

with stains of red iron rust

enveloped in violet light.

O fields of Alvargonzález

tracing the heart of Spain,

poor lands, sorrowful lands,

so sad they have a soul!

Wasteland. The wolf crosses,

howling under the bright moon,

as it goes from wood to wood,

circled by scrubland and gnawed cliffs

where the vultures pick clean

the remnants of shiny white bones.

The poor solitary fields

have no highway nor inns,

O poor doomed fields,

the poor fields of my country!

Earth

1

One morning in autumn

when the land is being plowed,

Juan and Miguel harness

the farm’s two teams of oxen.

Martín stays in the orchard,

pulling out the bad weeds.

2

One morning in autumn

when the fields are being plowed,

Juan slowly moves ahead

with the yoked oxen up

and over a hill to the skyline

holding morning in its depths.

Thistles, burdocks and thorns,

wild oats and darnel

spread through the cursed land,

resisting hoe and sickle.

The curved oak plow,

drowned in weeds, struggles deep

against the soil in vain. It seems

as soon as it splits the tangle

to dig a furrow ahead, the sod

closes up again behind.

“When a murderer plows,

his labor will be heavy.

Before each furrow in the land

he’ll cut a wrinkle on his face.”

3

Martín is in the orchard,

digging. He stops and leans

on his hoe a moment,

paralyzed as cold sweat

drowns his face.

the full moon stained

with a purple haze

glows behind the garden

fence.

in horror. The hoe

that sank into the earth

is dyed with blood.

4

In the land where he was born

the emigrant knows how to prosper.

He weds a young woman

who is rich and beautiful.

The Alvargonzález hacienda

belongs to him. His brothers

sold all of it: farmhouse,

orchard, beehives and fields.

The Murderers

1

Juan and Martín, the elder

Alvargonzález brothers

go on a grim journey

at dawn to the upper Duero.

The morning star

is burning in high blue.

The white and dense mist

of the valleys and ravines

is gradually dyed pink,

and some leaden clouds

by Urbión where the Duero starts

to place a turban on the peak.

They come near the spring.

The water is racing bright,

sounding as if it were telling

an old story, a tale told

a thousand times, and told

a thousand times again:

Water racing in the fields

says in its monotony:

“I know the crime. A crime

beside the water? A life.”

As the two brothers near,

the pristine water relates:

“At the edge of the spring

Alvargonzález was sleeping.”

2

“Last night, when I got back

to the house,” Juan tells

his brother, “under the moon

I saw a miracle in the orchard.

Far off, among the rose trees

I made out a man leaning

toward the earth. His silver hoe

was glistening in his hand.

Then he stood up and turned

his face, took a few steps

in the garden, not looking

at me, and soon I saw him

hunched over the earth again.

His hair was all white.

The light was glowing full,

the orchard was a miracle.”

3

They come down from the pass

of Santa Inés, the afternoon

half gone, a filthy evening

in November, cold and dull.

Toward Laguna Negra

they are walking in silence.

4

When dusk comes on

through the venerable beeches

and centenary pines,

the red sun filters away.

There is a patch of woods

and jutting cliffsides:

Here are yawning mouths

or monsters with iron claws;

here, a shapeless hunchback,

there, a grotesque belly.

Steel snouts of wild beasts

and cracked false teeth,

rocks and rocks, trunks

and trunks, branches and branches.

In the depth of the canyon

night, terror and water.

5

A wolf emerges, its eyes

shining like two hot embers.

It is night, a rainy,

dark and enveloping night.

The two brothers want

to go back. The forest howls.

A hundred wild beasts in

the forest burn at their backs

6

The two murderers

reach Laguna Negra,

transparent and still water,

an enormous wall of stone

where the vultures nest

and echo sleeps and circles;

bright water where the eagles

of the sierra drink,

where the wild mountain boar,

stag and doe drink together.

Pure and silent water

copies eternal things.

The indifferent water holds

the stars in its heart.

Father!
they scream. Down

to the bottom of the serene pool

they plunge, and the echo
father!

booms from boulder to boulder.

²⁶
A high peak northwest of Soria. The Duero River rises toward it.

Al olmo viejo, hendido por el rayo

y en su mitad podrido,

con las lluvias de abril y el sol de mayo,

algunas hojas verdes le han salido.

¡El olmo centenario en la colina

que lame el Duero! Un musgo amarillento

le mancha la corteza blanquecina

al tronco carcomido y polvoriento.

No será, cual los álamos cantores

que guardan el camino y la ribera,

habitado de pardos ruiseñores.

Ejército de hormigas en hilera

va trepando por él, y en sus entrañas

urden sus telas grises las arañas.

Antes que te derribe, olmo del Duero,

con su hacha el leñador, y el carpintero

te convierta en melena de campana,

lanza de carro o yugo de carreta;

antes que rojo en el hogar, mañana,

ardas de alguna mísera caseta,

al borde de un camino;

antes que te descuaje un torbellino

y tronche el soplo de las sierras blancas;

antes que el río hasta la mar te empuje

por valles y barrancas,

olmo, quiero anotar en mi cartera

la gracia de tu rama verdecida.

Mi corazón espera

también, hacia la luz y hacia la vida,

otro milagro de la primavera.

On the old elm split in two by a ray

of lightning and half rotted,

with the rains of April and the sun of May

a few green leaves have sprouted.

The elm one hundred years on the hill

lapped by the Duero! A yellowish musk

has stained the whitish bark until

its trunk is a worm-eaten bulk of dust.

Unlike the canticling poplars that trail

and guard the road and riverbank,

it will not nest the tawny nightingales.

A division of ants files along its flank,

and climbs all over it, and spiders spread

into its entrails, dropping their gray webs.

Elm tree by the Duero, before you fall

under the woodman’s ax, and the carpenter’s awl

and plane convert you into yokes or beams

to stay a bell in place, or cut

you into carts; before you are a red gleam

of lumber burning in a wretched hut

at the edge of a road;

before the mountain whirlwinds explode

under your roots, and white sierra gales

blast you; before the river pulls you through valley

and gorges to the sea,

elm, in my copybook I want to note

the grace of your greening leaf.

My heart is waiting

also—before light and before life—

another miracle of spring.