August Ghosts

We arrived in Arezzo a little before noon, and we lost more than two hours looking
for the Renaissance castle that the Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva had
bought in that idyllic corner of the Tuscan countryside. It was an early August
Sunday, hot and bustling, and it was not easy to find someone who knew
something on the crowded streets of tourists. After many unsuccessful attempts we
returned to the car, leaving the city on a cypress path without road signs, and an
old shepherdess of geese told us precisely where the castle was. Before saying
goodbye he asked us if we were going to sleep there, and we replied, as we had
expected, that we were only going to have lunch.

"Not bad," she said, "because they are frightened in that house.

My wife and I, who do not believe in midday apparitions, make fun of their credulity.
But our two children, nine and seven, were happy with the idea of meeting a ghost
of the present body.

Miguel Otero Silva, who besides being a good writer was a splendid host and a
refined eater, we waited with a lunch to never forget. Since we were late, we did
not have time to know the interior of the castle before we sat at the table, but its
appearance from the outside was not at all terrifying, and any unease dissipated
with the full view of the city from the flowered terrace where We were having lunch
It was hard to believe that on that hill of houses in which there were barely 90,000
people, so many men of lasting genius would have been born. However, Miguel
Otero Silva told us with his Caribbean humor that none of them was the most
important of Arezzo.

"The greatest," he said, "was Ludovico.

Thus, without names: Ludovico, the great lord of the arts and war, who had built
that castle of his misfortune, and of whom Miguel spoke to us throughout lunch. He
told us about his immense power, his disgruntled love and his frightful death. He
told us how, in an instant of madness of heart, he had stabbed his lady in the bed
where they had just loved each other, and then he whipped at his ferocious war
dogs, who had torn him to pieces. He assured us, very seriously, that from
midnight the specter of Ludovico wandered about the house in darkness trying to
find peace in his purgatory of love.

The castle really was immense and gloomy. But in the middle of the day, with a full
stomach and happy heart, Michael's story could only seem like a joke like so many
others to entertain his guests. The eighty-two rooms that we walked without
astonishment after the siesta, had undergone all kinds of changes of their
successive owners. Miguel had completely restored the ground floor and had built
a modern bedroom with marble floors and facilities for sauna and physical culture,
and the terrace of intense flowers where we had had lunch. The second floor,
which had been the most used over the centuries, was a succession of rooms
without any character, with furniture from different periods abandoned to their fate.
But in the last one was preserved an intact room where time had forgotten to pass.
It was Ludovico's bedroom.

It was a magical moment. There was the bed of curtains embroidered with threads
of gold, and the bed of wrought-iron prodigies still stiffened by the dried blood of
the sacrificed mistress. There was the chimney with the cold ashes and the last log
turned to stone, the cabinet with its well-primed arms, and the oil portrait of the
thoughtful gentleman in a gold frame painted by one of the Florentine masters who
did not have the fortune of Survive your time. However, what most impressed me
was the smell of fresh strawberries which remained stagnant without explanation
possible in the bedroom area.

The days of summer are long and parsimonious in Tuscany, and the horizon stays
in place until nine o'clock at night. When we finished meeting the castle, it was after
five o'clock, but Miguel insisted on taking us to see the frescoes of Piero della
Francesca in the Church of San Francisco, then we had a coffee well conversed
under the pergolas of the square, and when we returned to Pick up the bags we
found the dinner served. So we stayed for dinner.

As we did, under a mauve sky with a single star, the children lit torches in the
kitchen, and went to explore the darkness on the high floors. From the table we
could hear their horses galloping through the stairs, the cries of the doors, the
happy shouts calling Ludovico in the dark rooms. It was to them that they came up
with the bad idea of staying asleep. Miguel Otero Silva supported them delighted,
and we did not have the civil courage to say no.

Contrary to what I feared, we slept very well, my wife and I in a bedroom on the
ground floor and my children in the adjoining room. Both had been modernized and
had nothing of tenebrous. While I was trying to get the dream I counted the twelve
insomniac touches of the pendulum clock in the room, and I remembered the
shepherd's warning of the geese. But we were so tired that we fell asleep very
soon, in a dense and continuous dream, and woke up after seven with a splendid
sun among the vines of the window. At my side, my wife was sailing in the calm
sea of the innocent. "What nonsense," I said to myself, "that someone will continue
to believe in ghosts for these times." Only then did the smell of freshly cut
strawberries shake me, and I saw the chimney with cold ashes and the last log
turned into stone, and the portrait of the sad knight who looked at us from three
centuries before in the gold frame. We were not in the bedroom on the ground floor
where we had slept the night before, but in Ludovico's bedroom, beneath the
cornice and the dusty curtains and the sheets soaked with blood still warm from his
cursed bed.
 REPBLICA BOLIVARIANA DE VENEZUELA

INSTITUTO UNIVERSITARIO TECNOLGICO

AMRICO VESPUCIO

ASIGNATURA: INICIACIN A LA TRADUCCIN

CARRERA: IDIOMAS MODERNOS

Traduccin

Alumno: Reinaldo Romero

C.I. V 21.537.314

Caracas, Enero 2017