Triptych Number 1: Fidelio Ponce

Abstract

Triptych Number 1: Fidelio Ponce Orlando Ricardo Menes (bio) I. He Comes Around at Vesper Time after Ponce’s undated painting Novices The Brides of the Lamb are growing oldin their convent of coconut fronds with coral-rock floors;the gulls awaken them at first light each dayto pray with porcelain hands, soot-veined, salt-scabbed;their spines, fragile as quills, skew to benedictionas they trod to a shrine inside a tree hollow,their small heads drooping from leaden scapulars.They envy Christ, who remains youngwith lacquered hair and jasmine cerements.He comes around at vesper time to eat guavas and smokea maduro cigar beneath his canopy of palms,and though they take great pains to massage his feetin aguardiente, bake those sugary confectionsof egg yolk they learned from the Carmelite nuns,Christ glances at them sideways, without a word or any touch,but they do not fuss or grouse about their plight.Their spouse is just plain tired of being divine,they believe, so often jabbering away about his cousin Johnkissing him in the river or those spring morningswhen he and Judas tossed the lambs of Bethlehem.The past cannot be changed and youth is a chimeraof deceit, so the Brides take solace in knowingthat marriage means having knees knotted as mahoganyand that the sweat of their brows is the vinegarof salvation. Pure they live and pure they will diein their bamboo cells as they count the dayswith breadcrumbs, and every Sunday they will washtheir sins away with lye soap of the gospel.And when is their day of joy, their time of glory?Easter Sunday when their husband returnsfrom Golgotha with passionflowers, quince angels,and custards beatified with the darkest rum. [End Page 160] II. Manifesto In that studio by the sea, a shack full of black pigeonsand cannibal crabs, I sought my muse in hunger andthirst, drinking the baptismal turpentine, eating thelead of Cremnitz white that is the skin of Jesus in thewomb, tasting the linseed oil that christens a canvason its easel of fear. My gift is to deny the tropics, denyjoy, deny the sensual. I am El Greco born in Camagüeywhere the churches are humble, the trees ashen, andeven the cows graze on the bitter grass of Lent. I wishI’d been born in a faraway land of snow and ice wherethe sun hides behind tungsten clouds, not like in Cubawhere sunlight is vulgar, those lascivious hues thatcorrupt one’s faith. I am truer to Christ’s creed than heever was. My mission is to smother Eden with bladdergreens, dun blues, muddy ochers. My palette is faithfulto the simplicity of martyrdom, pure as the witheredlungs that will take me to the Paradise of the poor. Sowhat if I get drunk on hand-me-down booze and wan-der the city in linen rags. So what if I mix my whiteswith too much oil, let the paste crack and creak onmy canvases, let my spatula unload all my grievancesagainst the rich, against the prissy painters, against thepriests who speak with two tongues. Pure white, acridand acrimonious, is the color of heaven, the color ofspectral saints, the color of my own tubercular bloodas it worms its way to resurrection. [End Page 161] III. The Brines of Good Friday after Ponce’s circa 1944 painting The Procession Despite how hard they might prayKneeling on gravelly corn,Children learn from priests and mothersThat the sun will betray their joyOn Easter day and boil their fleecy cloudsTo muddled sobs of lanolin rain—How their little boats of waxWill set sail from coral shrinesYet find no haven from the melting sunIn the still waters of Galilee.The saints say that to resist fateIs pride that must be snuffed outLike silt packed into a blenny’s gills,This tiny Galilean fish that knows [End Page 162] Its place in the great chain of beingAnd will not pretend it’s a...