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THE STRESS OF STORMS EMELINA AND THE WOLF |
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THE STRESS OF STORMS EMELINA AND THE WOLF |
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FELIX RUBEN GARCIA SARMIENTO
(RUBEN DARIO)
(1867-1916)
He was born in the Nicaraguan town of Metapa, today called
Ciudad Dario, in
1867. He died of cirrhosis in Leon, Nicaragua, in 1916.
Although he did not have formal schooling, his readings and travels (diplomatic duties in several countries in Europe and America) allowed him to possess a large cultural knowledge. He is considered the creator of the term “modernism” which consolidated the rupture with the prevailing realism. Modernism is characterized by its use of a new language, conscious of itself, exquisite, full of metaphors and musicality, a language that runs away from reality to take refuge in exotic worlds inhabited by princesses.
Dario was the most influential poet of the Spanish language during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. In 1893, at the age of twenty-six, he became a widower when his wife Rafaela Contreras died. The poet would then drown his grief in alcohol.
That same year he was forced to marry Emelina Murillo, a beautiful woman that Dario had fallen in love with in his younger years. However, the poet never consented to live with a woman he had married during a drunken feast and, as soon as he recovered from his hangover, he left Emelina.
Among Dario’s mayor works we can mention the following: Blue (1888), Profane Prose (1896), Songs of Life and Hope (1905), The Wandering Song (1907), Autumn’s Poem (1908) and Song to Argentina (1910).
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EMELINA AND THE WOLF
The gentleman with a heart like a lake, with the bohemian soul and the modernistic quill, the proud and rough Ruben Dario, lied drunk in his hotel room in the ancient Spanish colonial city of Leon, in his homeland, Nicaragua. He dreamed of gentle poems as he embraced Emelina Murillo, a beautiful woman whose green eyes had captivated Ruben since their first kiss.
“Emelina…how beautiful the sea! And the wind carries...,” Dario mumbled in ecstasy without suspecting that his lover, that same night, would play on him the most bizarre trick of his life.
“He owes you, Emelina! He owes you! Hasn’t this man used you for years!
This is your chance…and it is his duty!” Those had been the words of her brother Juan that morning as he pointed at her belly.
“Yes, it’s true, but… his wife just died and… and he’s still so vulnerable,”
answered the woman who, since the youthful day when the poet had kissed her, had yearned after him as after a star.
“Life is hard and starvation is terrible,” her brother reminded her. “Why should we keep suffering…? We have been served a poet on a plate garnished in his own glory!”
“Yes!” answered Emelina, “Ruben will stay by my side once and for all!”
“Good, good, Emelina! Listen, this is what we are going to do: you just get him drunk, that won’t be difficult. I will take care of the rest,” said Juan with great excitement.
That hot night on March 8th, 1893, the couple was making love under the hotel sheets when Juan kicked down the door and stormed like a wild boar into the room, gun in hand.
“Seducer! This is how I wanted to find you! You have taken advantage of my sister for many years, but now that she is pregnant I will not allow you to abandon her in shame,“ he yelled waving the gun in Ruben’s face.
Dario grinned without really understanding what was going on.
“Get up, you scoundrel, and put on your clothes. The priest is coming! You will marry my sister right here and right now!” ordered Juan.
Emelina dressed her lover, and the moist sheets of the bed became an improvised wedding gown.
The very responsible priest who had accepted a good contribution to perform the ceremony arrived and went ahead with the wedding, oblivious to the groom’s obvious state of drunkenness or his silly smile. He even had to help Emelina hold Ruben while Juan and his gun oversaw the ceremony.
After the wedding they let go of Ruben, who fell on the bed giggling uncontrollably. The priest hurried out, robes flying, and the Murillo brother and sister went out to celebrate their victorious treachery.
Emelina returned to the hotel room the next morning, carrying a golden whisky
bottle. She found her husband sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees; his fingers were rubbing his wide temples.
“Good morning, my love!” cried Emelina holding out her arms to steady her steps while waving the bottle in her right hand.
The poet lifted his transformed face; he gazed at her with Lucifer-like hatred beating in his eyes and his voice in silent inner struggle, cracked as he said, “My dear Emelina, don’t come too close. I was calm, away in other lands…, I came to this town of mine to look for you… and if you gave me something I was happy. I slept peacefully next to you and dreamed many dreams…, but today you have filled me with infamy and fraud. Go with your brother, leave that bottle and take my name.
Leave me on the mountain of my loneliness, where only dogs, anger and treachery dwell… Leave!”
Emelina could not utter a word; she kneeled down without taking her eyes off him. Very carefully she placed the bottle on the floor; she backed away until she reached the door, not daring to turn her back on him, and she fled and fled far away from the sharp chisel of that gaze.
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| ANTERIOR | ÍNDICE | SIGUIENTE |
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© Alberto Sibaja Álvarez. San José, Costa Rica
® The Stress of Storms
