These two poems by Jorge Pimentel, from the forthcoming Ave Soul Bilingual Edition, published by Ediciones Norteadas, a press run by Rubén Medina in Madison, Wisconsin, translation and introduction by John Burns.
Editor’s note: Pimentel’s Ave Soul, which was first published in 1973, reflects Lima of this period, but also, as Pimentel said of it in a 1972 interview with the. magazine Caretas “Everything is concentrated [in Ave Soul]: the people who move through the streets, their suffering, everything. That’s why I call my poems ballads: there is, for example, a ballad of a mother who cries for her 12 year old son who is going to die. It is a more human plane.”
BALLAD FOR A HORSE
Through these streets I walk and all those who humanly walk
in essence I feel like a whole animal, a wild horse
trotting through the city crazily sweaty going about thinking
very sad about you very sweet about you, my hooves hit
the cement of the street. I trot and everyone tries
to fence me in, they throw stones at me, they throw ropes
around my neck, ropes around my legs, they set up
all sorts of traps, in a devilish labyrinth where men
go on outings to hunt me armed with police dogs
and flashlights, and when this happens my veins swell
and I shoot off at a speed unmatchable
by men, I fly in the wind and fly in the dust.
Wondrous visions appear before my eyes. And I fly
and I fly. My front limbs exert pressure
on my rear limbs in one parallel rhythm
before settling in the dust they echo across the earth.
I whinny. And my body takes on a beautiful elasticity,
hair grows on my chest and it is a murmuring grass
that sways and it is a music and it is a whirlwind
of pressures that move forward and back through my flight. There are
thousands of kilometers behind me and I carry on free. Free
in these sleeping forests that I awaken with the sound
of my hooves. I step on weeds and spray my warm
piss, boiling in something like stone.
I rest freely, I drink water from rivers, I nibble grasses,
stalks, I graze. My jaws clench and loosen. I move my long tail
shooing off mosquitoes. The birds called guardacaballos watch
from the treetops. Dry leaves fall.
The days follow one by one and I often gallop softly towards life.
In winter the paths grow winding: mud invades everything.
For the cold I use abandoned cabins, caves in the hills
that shelter me from storms. I observe the rain
from my cave. The rain falls and soaks everything. With this weather
I usually gallop little taking care to avoid things falling apart.
Many times, I feel lonesome and I go up to the ferns
of the rivers to think very sweet about you very sad about you
and I go about galloping along the edge of the river longing for a mare
who came up to run beside me. Sometimes children
that wander on the loose among the fields while their parents
carry out tasks of picking or tilling ride me bareback
and we usually cover a certain distance, gaining years
increasing them. I get a bit of sugar from them.
In the summer, the sun turns red and displays its happiness
and the inhabitants of the forests and fields often greet me
with their hats and their hands. I reply with a whinny
rising up on two legs. And with the sunlight which invades everything
I usually gallop toward life. There
where my presence is expected I become reality.
There where not even a dream is revealed I become reality
I become reality in those eyes that are weary
of seeing the same things. And it is in summer when life
ignites and my hooves gather the beauty of the afternoon
and I ascend the hilltops where I spot stretches
of sea, of sky, of earth.
My figure dominates nature.
A squadron of mourning doves crosses the sky.
Night falls.
My shadow gets back on its feet.
The branches crunch.
And for an instant I thought very sad about you very sweet about you.
Night falls on these forests, it would seem the land
spreads through the night, extends itself, manifests itself.
And all night I have gone about growing. And I was growing and growing
even more, even more, how big will you grow?
Are you not afraid? No, I replied. I am free.
The day, the new day like something fresh is announced on its own.
During this time of year usually herds of horses that have been chased off
cross in search of new fields.
I remember I managed to catch up with them and they told me
they managed to save themselves from a hunt carried out
against them to send them to an enclosed pasture
and that after being subjected to water in buckets
and alfalfa they are obliged to run distances
of one, two or three miles on racetracks
and you are not free to run and instead they dope you, they hook up
electric shocks to you, they grope you, they flay you
with a whip that shreds your skin. And it this way for
a good long time while you see saddlebags pile up
with gold and silver. Until you get to the moment of being
subjected to mating, cornering a mare for you
in plain sight while everyone waits, with no intimacy
on a dark morning and little light and later
they pull filly from mare and you will spend
your years merciless as an old stallion and when
you limp they put a bullet in your temple. I had already
galloped a good stretch with the herd
that was fleeing in terror and they told me that probably
come winter they would pass through here again to go further
north. And they went off in a hurry. I already knew
what becomes of a horse in the city. And
that is why I keep myself far away from it. But sometimes
I go in and what has to happen does happen. But if I
rebel and persist and love terribly my possibilities
of fulfilling myself in a place where civilization kills itself
and hatreds remain, I prefer to be a horse. I will wet
the land with my hot and boiling piss with this immense
desire to live and I will join the herds to gallop
toward life, to remain united and overcome,
to not be alone, to become green-blue-yellow
orange-red and trot toward the new fresh air
and the endless field.
I will be free and at least my birds called guardacaballos will take care of me
and my mare
and my filly.
THE LAMENT OF THE SERGEANT OF AGUAS VERDES
I was born on the side that faces Plateros Street
plateaus between the mist slipping away among shouts and the meridian
of white nights where my only dream was
to get as far away as I could until I became the king of these streets.
The only thing my time showed me was an indefinite color
of bards or criollo singers covering the city
with their booming voices telling us stories
wrapped up in a crummy and pernicious padding.
Already tired of a life without possibilities
at 18 years old I already looked like a run-down man
and the proof of that is that I vaguely remember
the faces of my loved ones my youthful
partners the out-of-the-way places where my soul
wandered solitary and so many so many things you know.
I wouldn’t stop telling you my friend about my life.
It’s true that this slurped on beer has helped
me to shuffle to erase the hidden part
of a life 64 years long.
And
what things didn’t I do buddy
when I turned 15, just a little bitty
greenhorn you know, my relations condemned me
to live on my own and at my own risk.
I was a bus boy in La Victoria restaurant
a stevedore in La Parada market
a refinisher of tires at a gas station in the middle of nowhere
for twenty soles I let them grab my dick
I ate rice with eggs on a newspaper
that I later used to clean my ass
what else can you use a newspaper for nowadays.
And
I found myself wrapped up in a whirlwind of horrific temptations.
Frankly I don’t know how it is I’m still here talking
with you.
Long are the years that I’ve skipped over but my memory
conjures up images of a woman who I lived with for years
and have never seen again.
She was a slender dark-skinned woman from under the bridge
her father had a little bodega on Petateros Street.
She had a sad face and a happy ass with hair
that came down to her shoulders.
I loved her like one condemned to love a lassie
and then I had to abandon her.
It’s the law of life, man.
I made her a son who I never met and I ran away.
In 1941 there was that dispute with Ecuador
Tumbes Jaén and Maynas you know.
I was there among the troops of Field Marshall Eloy Ureta
and I hurled myself out in a parachute
in Aguas Verdes I grabbed a rifle for the first time
but more than killing we would sing and write letters
and we would compose waltzes inside a trench
that spared us from a stray bullet
from a grenade from a machine gun booming out
all over the place. There even the bravest would fall apart.
Once the conflict was over they granted me the rank
of sergeant.
Oh right there my Calvary began my true Via Crucis.
When I came home one day to my Amanda
nobody answered my calls and I knocked and I knocked
on the door of the alleyway until her father came out
badmouthing his daughter, saying she had abandoned him
that she was scum without a care for her poor old man
that she was heartless. Period.
It was all useless
everything was too late
and I decided to find my Amanda.
I looked for her asking after a loved one
in charity hospitals
in the brothels of Lima and the provinces
in insane asylums
in convents
city after city inland
living with ruffians, the worst riffraff
trying to find out about her in the strangest places.
At forty-eight years old, under the shade of a tree I carved
a heart with our names in it
each day I woke up lying in a sleazy
alleyway how I needed you Amanda.
Amanda, Amanda, come back, you really have to come back home!
Come, I love you more than ever.
It seems as if in dreams one day I met you
it seems as if the earth has swallowed you.
Not one vestige of you to be seen
not so much as a shoeprint
not so much as the least rumor as to your whereabouts.
It’s the law of life, man, I’m repeating myself
and in the night under the moon, Amanda will never come back.
And so there were many causes for my downfall
alcohol under whose gray shadow I lived
never letting me see the light given to me
freely, it would have been enough just to raise my head
but I never did so, I feared that clear fresh diaphanous light
given to all, I feared confronting that light with its radiant
sun and its green grass scared me, because I don’t know who
told me that light bares all and each time I felt just how they pulled me
toward caves without light and without love and thereby toward solitude
and destruction.
As I said there were many causes for my downfall
and even though I don’t blame or finger point,
Whoever didn’t add a grain of sand to my collapse,
raise your hand!
(Everyone shit on me, goddamn it, I’m so sorry)
People went about forgetting me
if your friends see you they don’t know who you are
without a wife
and without children
without a job
my life is the sad and celebrated triangle
whereas the life of others is round
with an opening and many perspectives.
I live with two sisters from my father’s second
marriage.
They barely give me room and board.
I’ve been looking for work for 25 years, boss.
You know, I tried it in that veterans’ benefits thing
to work in those dime stores they have
and I offered myself as an employee, I mean I really have been
offering myself for a long time, but given
my record, out you go again, on the path to drink
to read some little love-struck schoolboy poems soon, to be
the clown at the tables to make the regular customers laugh
at my little love-struck schoolboy poems, with my stories
about the conflict with Ecuador, with Aguas Verdes, green and moldy waters,
to cry about my bus ticket at 3 AM
to laugh because someone took pity on me and offered me
a cigarette
to get serious while I sip my drink getting
my mustache wet.
And I don’t want to do it anymore
I don’t want to
spend my whole life among the ashes
kneeling for what happens to me
with my fancy three-piece suit, my disgusting shirt
my whole life wishing for a dignified job
my whole life is not going to be an eternal lament
I don’t want to continue poisoning you all.
My lament only spellbinds the heartless and the foolish.
I am a scoundrel
I am a bad example
that children should see and throw stones at and spit upon
I am only just a lament of cigarette butts
so you can see look how my tears are starting to flow
look how they’ve left me, turned to shit.
What have I done with my life, by God!
My name is Pedro Sifuentes Calderón, 64 years old,
(AKA) Sergeant of Aguas Verdes, at your service