El Recado
I came Martin and you are not here. I have sat on the step of your house, reclined (dumped) on your door and I think that in some place of the city, by a wave that crosses the air, you should sense that I am here. This is your piece of garden; your **mimosa** inclines toward outside and the children pass remove the most accessible branches...On the Earth, sown around the wall, **very rectilinear**, and serious I see some flowers that have leaves like swords. They are blue marine, they appear like soldiers. They are very serious, very honest. You are also a soldier. You march by the life, one, two, one, two.. All of your garden is solid, it's like you, it has a strength that inspires confidence.
Here I am against the wall of your house, as well as I am sometimes against the wall of your back. The sun also gives against the glass of your door, against the glass of your windows and little by little is weakened because it’s already is late. The reddened sky has heated your honeysuckle and its smell returns still more sharply. It is dusk. The day is going to decline.
Your neighbor passes. I do not know if I will be seen. He is going to water his piece of garden. I remember that she brings soup when you are sick and that her daughter gives you shots. I think about you very, very slowly, as if he drew you inside me and remained there engraving.
I wanted to have the certainty that I am going to see you tomorrow and past tomorrow and always in an uninterrupted chain during the day; that I will be able to look at you slowly although I already know each memory of your face: that nothing between us has been provisional or an accident.
I am inclined before a sheet of paper and I write you all this and I think that now, in some block where you walk, hasty, determined as are used to doing, in some of those streets through where I imagine you always: Donceles and Cinco de Febrero or Venustiano Carranza, in some of those broken monotonous and gray stools only by the swirl of people that is going to take the truck, should know inside you that I desire you. I came for nothing more than to tell you that I want you and because you are not here I write it you.
**Already I almost cannot write because already the sun went down and do not I know to well what I put you.** Outside more children pass, running. And a lady with a pot notifies irritated: "do not shake my hand because I am going to throw away the milk..." And I leave this pencil, Martin, and I abandon the bordered sheet of paper and I abandon that my arms hang vainly along my body and I desire you. I think that I would have wanted to hug you. At times I wanted to be older because youth carries in itself, the imperious one, the unappeasable necessity to relate with love.
A dog barks; it barks aggressively. I believe that it is time for me to go. Before long the neighbor will come to turn on the light of your house; she has the key and will turn on the light bulb of the bedroom that gives toward outside because in this neighborhood they steal a lot. They steal from the poor lot; the poor steal from themselves. You know, since I was a baby I have sat thus to desire, I was always submissive, because I desired you. Sometimes, close by the window. I know that all women wait. They await the future life, all those images forged in the solitude, all that forest that walks toward them; all that immense promise that is the man; a pomegranate that suddenly is opened and shows its shiny, red grains; a pomegranate as a pulpy mouth of a thousand parts. Later those times lived in the imagination, facts, real hours, will have to acquire weight and importance and immediacy. We are all -oh, my love- so full of interior portraits, so full of non-living landscapes.
The night has fallen and already I almost can’t see what I am writing on the bordered paper. No longer do I perceive the letters. There where he does not understand in the white spaces, in the holes, put “I want you”... I do not know if I am going to throw this paper under the door, I do not know. You have given me such respect and I give you the same… Perhaps now that I’m going, I will just ask the neighbor to give the message to you; to tell you that I came.
End
**Indicate that I'm not sure if it's right
Original Spanish Version