The Other Adam

By Pablo Armando Fernandez

Hemingway was the other Adam
That English-speaking man of Williams' poem
searching for Paradise on an island.
He bought a colonial retreat
with gardens that faced 
an old cemetery.

He was an Anglo-Saxon: each day he struggled
with the climate, his idol and friend,
the savage hurricane,
the sunburned flesh,

But he did not conquer
the restlessness that the
evening murmur
of tropical death
produces in men from the North,
a death that blows from the palm trees
and sprouts from sea shells.

In the hunt, as a fisherman,
He trained himself in the use of arms.

But he did not conquer the fragrance of flowers,
the death that awakens at midnight
to return to dust at midday along the roads.

Neither the safaris in the jungles of Africa,
nor the fishing in the gulf nor the autumn
sky of Cuban seas,
nor the sensuality of island women
who admired his virile squanderings,
could defeat the blush of shame
that the perennial lips of death
blow against men who arrive
from the North to conquer the islands.

His hard large legs
agile in action and always alert
failed to serve him,
so too his obstinate heart, his feverish head
that persisted in populating with
heroes of his race
the Paradise that rejected him.

Did his cold Anglo-Saxon gaze see
the native's resolve
to expel the conqueror from his shores?

He wished to renounce life in the tropics
and one day he returned from whence he came,
fleeing the evening murmur of death.
But she repeated her same steps,
she followed him quietly
to his birthplace in Idaho.

	      Translated from the Spanish by Elias Hruska July 1990

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