Matinal
Original by Eduardo Talero
Translated, from the Spanish, by Tomás Mesples
At that moment, the electric lights that watch over the four temples of gold at the corner of Bartolomé Mitre and Reconquista, those four stone bellies of modern society, went out.
The policeman tried with the tip of his boot to wake an old worker who snored like a choirmaster, lying in a throbbing reproach along the marble lintel of one of the Banks.
Much must have been the fatigue that brought him down there, for his sleep was deep. His mouth, no, his face panted over the dust of the polished pavement, and his forehead, bandaged with strands of gray hair, had adapted its wrinkles to the golden moldings of the door.
The black stain of a policeman kicking the beggar in the back didn’t diminish, but rather enhanced the solemnity of the scene. Was that old worker, at that very moment, not a sovereign in his own right?
This is how autocrats must sleep: beneath an onyx canopy flourishing in friezes; and near, very near, their great treasures. Only that when someone dares to wake them from their royal sleep, it isn’t with a boot and a constable’s coarseness, but with the fine edge of steel or the bastard power of the explosive.
So the old worker was merely a sovereign in partibus. His kingdom was still found in dreams.
First: Because that marble slab wasn’t precisely the soft bedding where the cubs of the throne are conceived.
Second: Because that criollo policeman wasn’t a honey-tongued, flattering chamberlain.
Third: Because on the friezes of the chapiters did not shine his heraldic arms, but the lives of his companions bitten into by the chisel.
Fourth: Because those piles of gold lying a few steps away belonged neither to him nor to those men who had sweated for them.
Fifth: Because the rags gesticulating on his body were not royal vestments, those were floating ablaze in the depths of his spirit.
Sixth: Because it is said that sovereigns have enough to eat for breakfast, and he was about to wander all that day, and many others, without eating.
Seventh: Because bankers kiss the sovereign’s feet, and he would have been kicked by those same bankers if he didn’t flee soon to the outskirts.
And yet, for that instant, the poor devil thought of none of these circumstances, for he remained motionless and calm, almost permeating the block of onyx, like the grin of some Dantesque rock or a tense Rodin marble. Still, everything indicated that he must soon awaken to his miserable reality:
First: Because the gentlemen were returning from the clubs to their palaces, and it would have been an immoral scandal had they found in a central street at that hour a shabby man.
Second: Because the Catholic bell was already swaying in the towers, with its poking tongue probing the diverted delights of spiritual lust, licking the purulent rot of believers, singing to the golden air with monastic belly-delirium, and shrieking anathemas at the renegades.
Third: Because the insolent copper of the barracks adulterated with its wave of falsehood the aerial morning gold, and the drumroll curled the dawning breeze with a surge of bad blood and vibrated through the flesh like a trembling breath of death.
Fourth: Because the sharp clamor of factories stung its invisible needles into the sleeping flesh of the workshop, and the panting of the siren whipped the workers’ eyelids like a burning breeze.
Fifth: Because the tormented bones rattled when standing up, and the woman had left the worker’s arms with a moan like a wounded beast.
And sixth: and most powerful reason of them all: because the grinding of the garbage cart already announced for him his most beautiful, his only, his fetid world of hope!
At last, he opened his eyes to the black silhouette of his eternal vulture, shoved his cap down amid a fog of greasy gray hair, rose groaning like a stung laboring ox, and wobbled off toward Corrales, grumbling face to face with the sun somewhat hidden, and interrogating with a judge’s gaze the ignoble rose-colored affront of the Customs house.
When I walked back toward my hotel, I noticed that the whole scene: the Bank, the policeman, and the old man: Capital, Authority, and Labor, formed, in the seventh plane of my imagination, three black dots in a triangle. And by a geometric association of thought, I saw something like flashes of rectangles, majestic flights of parabolas, serpents biting their tails, and beyond, in the farthest terms, beyond the russet and rotating circles of death, a whitish nebula, girded with garlands of roses, bound by the supreme circle of life, by a radiant ring. All encrusted with suns and auroras around it…!
******
Matinal
En ese momento apagaban los focos eléctricos que vigilan los cuatro templos del oro de la esquina de Bartolomé Mitre y Reconquista, esas cuatro panzas de piedra de la sociedad moderna.
El policial procuraba despertar con la punta de su bota a un obrero anciano que roncaba como un sochantre, tirado a modo de reproche palpitante a lo largo del dintel de mármol de uno de los Bancos.
Mucha debió ser la fatiga que allí lo desplomó, porque su sueño era profundo. Su boca ¡no! su jeta resoplaba sobre el polvo del pulido pavimento, y su frente vendada con mechones de canas había adaptado sus arrugas a las molduras doradas de la puerta.
La mancha negra del policial que daba al mendigo puntapiés en la espalda no mengua sino realce daba a la solemnidad del cuadro. ¿El viejo obrero no era acaso en aquel momento un soberano?
Así deben dormir los autócratas: bajo un dosel de ónix floreciendo en frisos; y cerca, muy cerca de sus grandes tesoros. Solo que cuando alguien se atreve a despertarlos de su real sueño, no es con la suela del zapato y la grosería del corchete, sino con la hoja fina del acero o el hi. d. p. poder del explosivo.
De manera que el viejo obrero era tan solo un soberano in partibus. Su imperio estaba ubicado todavía en el ensueño.
Primero: porque aquella plancha de mármol no era precisamente el lecho mullido donde se engendran los cachorros del trono.
Segundo: porque ese vigilante criollo no era un almíbarado y zalamero chambelán.
Tercero: porque en esos frisos de los capiteles no lucían sus armas heráldicas, sino las vidas de sus compañeros mordidas por el cincel.
Cuarto: porque esos montones de oro que yacían a pocos pasos, no eran suyos ni de los que los habían sudado.
Quinto: porque esos andrajos que gesticulaban en su cuerpo no eran sus reales púrpuras, que esas flotaban encendidas en lo más hondo de su espíritu.
Sexto: porque dicen que los soberanos tienen con qué desayunarse, y él iba a pasearse todo ese día y muchos otros sin comer, y
Séptimo: porque los banqueros besan los pies al soberano, y él tendría que ser pateado por los banqueros si no huía muy pronto al arrabal.
Con todo, el pobre diablo no pensaba por ese instante en aquellas circunstancias, pues seguía inmóvil y sereno, casi compenetrado con el bloque de ónix, como la mueca de una roca dantesca o como un crispado mármol de Rodin. Y sin embargo, todo indicaba que ya debía despertar a su miserable realidad:
Primero: porque los caballeros regresaban de los clubs a sus palacios, y escándalo inmoral hubiera sido que a esa hora se encontrasen en una calle central con un hombre harapiento.
Segundo: porque la campana católica ya se bamboleaba en las torres, hurgando con su lengua aduladora los deleites desviados de la lujuria espiritual, lamiendo la purulencia moral de los creyentes, cantando al aire de oro el delirio de las panzas monacales y chillando anatemas contra los renegados.
Tercero: porque el cobre insolente de los cuarteles adulteraba con su onda de falsedad el oro aéreo de la mañana, y el redoble de los tambores encrespaba la brisa matutina con un oleaje de rencor y vibraba en las carnes como un soplo trémulo de muerte.
Cuarto: porque el clamor agudo de las fábricas clavaba sus agujas invisibles en la dormida carne de taller, y el resoplido de la sirena azotaba los párpados de los trabajadores como brisa de fuego.
Quinto: porque ya los huesos atormentados traqueaban al ponerse de punta y la hembra dejaba los brazos del obrero con un quejido como bestia adolorida, y
Sexto: y más poderoso motivo: porque el rechinar del carro de la basura ya anunciaba para él su más hermoso, su postrer, su único, su fétido mundo de esperanzas!…
Al fin abrió los ojos ante la silueta negra de su eterno buitre, se hundió la gorra entre un nimbo de canas grasientas, se incorporó quejándose como buey de carga aguijoneado, y tomó bamboleante el camino de los corrales, refunfuñando cara a cara al sol algo recóndito e interrogando con mirada de juez al innoble atentado de rosa de la Aduana.
Cuando seguí en dirección a mi hotel, noté que todo aquel cuadro: el banco, el polizonte y el anciano: Capital, Autoridad y Trabajo, formaba en el séptimo plano de mi imaginación tres puntos negros en triángulo. Y por asociación de ideas geométricas, vi algo como relampagueos de rectángulos, majestuosos vuelos de parábolas y serpientes mordiéndose las colas; y allá, en último término, más allá de bermejos y giratorios círculos de muerte, una nebulosa blanquecina, ceñida como por guirnaldas de rosas, ajustada por el círculo supremo de la vida, por un anillo radiante ¡todo incrustado de soles y de auroras en torno…!
Eduardo Talero (1869–1920) was a Colombian writer and journalist. After being imprisoned and exiled from Colombia, he settled in Buenos Aires. He worked as a journalist and served as a correspondent for the newspaper La Nación.
Tomás Mesples is a writer based in Jujuy, Argentina. He holds a B.A. in History and Philosophy from Rutgers University. His research interests include Latin American intellectual and social history.
Translator’s Note: “Matinal” appears in the tenth issue of the Argentinian anarchist magazine Martín Fierro and was written by the Colombian anarchist Eduardo Talero, who naturalized as an Argentinian in 1903. The piece explores economic modernity as a force shaping the social relations of labor by following an observer who witnesses an encounter between a policeman and an elderly worker. The narrative opens at the entrance of a bank in Buenos Aires, at the corner of Bartolomé Mitre and Reconquista, described by the author as the belly of modern society, watched over by electric lights that illuminate the elderly worker’s presence as unwanted and subject to vigilance. In translating Talero’s prose, I encountered challenges in maintaining the tone of the text. His long and sometimes winding sentences, paired with imagery reflecting the sensibilities of Argentinian society against which he writes, as well as an almost psychedelic turn toward the end, complicated the task of balancing fidelity to his political vision with readability in English. With this in mind, and considering that the piece offers an ideological insight into historical conditions of labor, I aimed to reproduce the lyrical language as close as possible in order to convey its socio-political critique in its most faithful form, particularly given the depiction of working-class displacement through which Talero explores the relationship between laboring workers and the alliance of Capital and Authority that worked together to sustain an existing mode of production.