User:A.W.Shred

The Closed Gate

an excerpt from Platero and I, by Juan Ramón Jiménez. (originally in Spanish)


 * Whenever we went to the wine cellar of Diezmo, I would go by the wall of the Calle de San Antonio and I would stop by the closed gate facing the fields. I would put my face against the bars and I would look right and left, straining my eyes anxiously, as far as they could see. Starting at its own threshold, a little path, well trodden and hidden by nettles and mallows, insinuates itself and then disappears, decending, in Augustias. And following along its dirt wall there is a wide and deep path I have never trodden....What magic attraction to be able to see, through the iron frame of the gate, the landscape and the sky beyond! It is as if a roof and a wall of dreams could remove the limelight from everything else to light up only what could be seen through the closed gate....And one could see the road with its bridge and its smoky poplar trees, and the brick oven, and the hills of Palos, and the haze of Huelva, and at nightfall, the dock lights of Riotinto, and the large and lonely eucalyptus of the Arroyos against the last purple sunset....The wine merchants would tell me, laughing, that the gate did not have a key....