Paradiso by José Lezama Lima

Author:José Lezama Lima [Lima, José Lezama]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780374229849
Amazon: 156478228X
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1974-01-14T13:00:00+00:00

The next day, when he reached Upsalón in the morning, Cemí noticed in all the groups a festivity, almost a stir, which interrupted the classes. The mocking gravity of the god Terminus seemed to be at the root of those groups. A single theme brought on remarks that were rich, pseudo-scientific, libertine, or disapproving. At the center, the god Terminus, his jawbone moving with a laugh celebrating this single theme in song, with an enormous phallus and a horn in his right hand. Each time his jaw moved up and down, there was a corresponding rhythmic movement of the hand with the horn that covered the hymnlike length of the phallus.

The remarks cheered all the groups in their nascent sperm. One narrator, and afterwards the variants and inventive games. Cemí recalled his vision of the day before, at the fortress of La Fuerza; that was the kind that made him laugh, when he had mounted dolphins on horses whose mutations ran from the inorganic world to tetanus. Dolphins, symbols of sexual deviation, gamboling beside the shell where the Cyprian goddess wraps herself in veils of salt spray.

Cemí listened to three or four conversations about what had happened. The tales crisscrossed and blossomed into a colorful polyhedron, a macaw that fell apart in the midst of a burst of laughter. Jokes astride a goat with a hernia. A slap on a dark boy’s shoulder, saying: You great whore. The slapped one’s answer: You great pimp. And the first: You’re so ugly I should have said gore, with all your spit. And the second, putting on airs: As Victor Hugo said, “The starry sky is the spit of God.” And the first, coming back with: The starry sky is a vast whorehouse. But buffoonery is never far from a sacred punishment, and each laugh was a noose that bound the fallen one more tightly. He rose up bleeding, stumbled, and brought on more laughter.

Baena Albornoz, the athlete, was virile and strong; people well remembered how, after a soccer game that his team had lost, in protest he had left his incisors stuck in an out-of-bounds post. He would shoot down Almendares in his racing scull, amid curses and rowing songs. If anyone slept at the oars, which was the phrase he used for somebody he thought wasn’t holding his own, he would shake him up, and as soon as the fellow was walking on dry land in his white pants and crew shirt he would get a good splashing. He would go into waterfront cafés at midnight and roar with a voice like Roland’s horn: “If there’s some son of Sodom among you, he’d better get out of here.” The boys with congenital megacolons would file out in a grumbling procession. If any of the hustlers tried to stay, he would shout: “I can see your lilac ears behind that mask.” And he would advance on him, giving out all the curses that Telamonian Ajax made before he entered combat.

The shell slipped along the drowsiness of the Almendares current.

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