A dagger rests in a drawer.
It was forged in Toledo at the end of the last century. Luis Melian Lafinur gave it to my father, who brought it from Uruguay. Evaristo Carriego once held it in his hand.
Whoever lays eyes on it has to pick up the dagger and toy with it, as if he had always been looking out for it. The hand is quick to grab the waiting hilt, and the powerful obeying blade slides in and out of the sheath with a click. This is not what the dagger wants.
It is more than a structure of metal: men conceived it and shaped it with a single end in mind. The dagger that last night knifed a man in Tacuarembo and the daggers that rained on Caesar are in some eternal way the same dagger. The dagger wants to kill, it wants to shed sudden blood.
In a drawer of my writing table, among draft pages and old letters, the dagger dreams over and over its simple tiger’s dream. On wielding it the hand comes alive because the metal comes alive, sensing itself, each time handled, in touch with the killer for whom it was forged.
At times I am sorry for it. Such power and singlemindedness, so impassive or innocent its pride, and the years slip by, unheeding.
[1954]