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Lazarus's Bride (Dulce María Loynaz) To my sister Flor And he who had been dead came forth, his hands and feet rolled in bandages, and his face was wrapped in a shroud. John 8: I You finally come to me, just as you were, with your ancient emotion and your rose intact, Lazarus, lagging behind, untouched by the fire of waiting, forgotten to disintegrate, while everything else turned to dust, to ashes. You return to me, whole and without gasping, with your great dream immune to the cold of the tomb, when Martha and Mary, tired of waiting for miracles and plucking sunsets, were already quietly descending the slope of all Bethanias. You come; with no more hope than your own hope, no more miracle than your own miracle. Impatient and certain of finding me still yoked to the last kiss. You come all flowers and new moon, ready to envelop me in your restrained tides, in your swirling clouds, in your unsettling fragrances that I recognize one by one. You come always yourself, safe from time and distance, safe from silence: and you bring me, as a wedding gift, the already savored secret of death. But behold, as a bride I become again, I do not know whether to rejoice or weep for your return, for the overwhelming gift you give me, and even for the happiness that suddenly overwhelms me. I do not know if it is late or early to be happy. Truly, I do not know; I no longer remember the color of your eyes. II You say it is not late and that death has no more flavor than water. You say it was only in the recent moon that we left you behind the terrible stone of the sepulcher, and the wheat that was green that morning when we went out to castrate hives and kissed for the last time had not yet been harvested.
I did not count time, you know well. Only when you left did I begin to count it, I began to die under the numbers and hours and days that in my account became infinite, as infinite as the anguish that fits in an instant of a bad dream. Why do you want me to count well now, to hurry now, when I have already worn down all the edges of haste with my teeth? I waited a century without expecting anything. And can you not wait a minute expecting everything? Tell me, Lazarus: Was it not harder to resurrect than to stay, when my soul clung to yours, struggling until it bled, with death? Come, now rein in the steeds of your new blood and come sit beside me, come to recognize me. I too am now new from being so old: from the millennia I aged while the wheat ripened in the same field, while yours was only a child's nap, an innocent and fleeting nap. And do not be impatient, my beloved, for I learned patience like a letter written in well-ingrained blood. III It is not hidden from me, no, that it is happiness that does not wait. It is time to be happy and we must be so or never be so again. The good I thought lost is returned to me, the love, the sweetness in the distance of home, of children, of evenings by the fire in winter; under the vine in summer, one after another sweet, tiny, stretching to the confines of time. All that begins to take shape, to come again within reach of my hand and my small, feminine capacity to imagine happiness. But even knowing this, it is not my fault that this happiness takes me by surprise, finds me unprepared like guests to the party who arrive before the house is in order. There was time to set it in order, and truly I did so many times. Until then I did not set it in order anymore and the dust kept falling, possessing the ownerless house.
The words you say to me from now on will only be the echo of his commanding, victorious over death. They will be the ones I could not wrest from your living or dead chest nor win from his hand, nor quench my thirst. They will fall into my soul hollowed by waiting, like strange flowers in a well. Will it be lawful for you to use them to swear love to me at the window, to pamper the sick calf, to sing to the sound of the lute as you liked to do at dusk, returning from the farm work? I do not know, nor can you know it now. I know you are here, still pale and still erect in the dazzle of your dawn, the kisses you had no time to kiss returned to your lips. But I also know that between you and me something ineffable has happened, and although I am here as you are, I have remained outside the miracle, alien to what they did with your LIPS, with your body, with your soul, with all that was once mine. True, life presses and we must not ask more miracles of the Miracle: life presses and your lips are close, exact in their pink crescent. I could kiss them if I wanted to, and I will want to very soon, my beloved. But what fear like leprosy, what doubt forever of not kissing in them what I kissed then, what perhaps was not worth resurrecting! VI I will learn again the flight of your herons, the tiny rivers of your blood, the intimacy of your stars. From death brushed by a wingtip, we will erase the minimal scars, light or shadow on your rescued flesh. Among all that was lost, I will find the honey that pleased you, the song that made you smile and the one that once won you a tear. And once more I will tie a ribbon to my braid, a bride's illusion to my window. But what if it were you who did not find me? If it were you who in vain sought what you left behind that vainly adorned window, and in the honey did not recognize your bees, and in the offering of myself only had my ghost?
If it were you who in turn spoke to me deaf, kissed me cold, shook me rigid. You who found me dead, dead, yes, inexorably dead even in the smile, freed already from all that could be glory or tragedy in our destiny. Ah, you shudder, Lazarus, because until now you only wanted to remain yourself and have not asked if I remain myself. I could have died before your eyes that see me still alive. I could have died an instant ago from the encounter with you, from the clash at this corner of my bones with your lost face. Clash of your presence and my memory, of your reality and my dream, of your new ephemeral life and the other that I had already given you in it and where you floated perfect, marvelous, immutable, fiercely defended. Yes, I am the one who has died and no one knows it. Go and tell him who passed by, to return, to raise me too. To set me walking.
