"I OFFER YOU THE LOYALTY OF A MAN WHO HAS NEVER BEEN LOYAL"

Cuando era una estudiante desinteresada todavía de las cosas que realmente valen la pena en la vida y que perduran a través de los tiempos, el profesor de Literatura Latinoamericana Contemporanea, llamado por nosotras Tío Osmi, nos leyó un poema de Borges que incluía la frase del título de este texto. Me acuerdo que a Marcela y a mí nos conmovió pero hasta ahora por azares del destino, me encontré con esta frase en mi mente y encontré el poema completo. En realidad son dos poemas que Borges escribe en inglés en 1934 o por ahi, y el que voy a compartir a continuación es el segundo. En fin, he aprendido a partir de ese entonces que nunca hay que echar en saco roto nada de lo que alguien pueda enseñarte, al final creo que mucha de la influencia que tengo con respecto a mis gustos literarios se desprende de ese momento de mi vida que si me preguntan bien, creo que no me pasó tan de noche.

Basta de introducciones aburridas, he aqui el poema:

What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of ragged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long at the lonely moon.
I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts that living men have honoured in
marble: my father’s father killed in the frontier of Buenos Aires, two bullets
through his lungs, bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in the hide of a
cow; my mother’s grandfather –just twenty four- heading a charged of three
hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on vanished horses.
I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, whatever manliness or humour my
life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never been loyal.
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow –the central heart that deals
not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by
adversities.
I offer you the memory of yellow rose seen at sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic and surprising
news of yourself.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe
you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

J.L. Borges