The third contingency poem in this mini-cycle within the Epigramas deals with the temporality and progression of memory. it is interesting to note the role memory has in all three poems as collapsing time, creating a kind of double temporality in which a past moment becomes layered on top of a present one. In Todavía Recuerdo, this layering is done in the first line which describes the act of remembering in the present a moment in the past. In “Nuestro Amor” the cyclical nature of the malinches binds together the poet’s present with a past moment. In Dueña por muchos años, the poet is, once again engaged in the act of remembering a past moment, a fact which is established rather in the final line. “Hace ya muchos años que no sueño contigo”. This temporal layering occurs via the present tense verb with the present perfect sense of “hace”. (literally: It has been many years since I’ve dreamt of you). Although the verb sueño is in the present tense, “hace” gives it a present perfect reading, connecting present to past. Indeed present and past weave in and out of each other as the poet’s beloved progresses from being the “owner of [his] thoughts” (in other words occupying a present reality) to later becoming the [“owner of his dreams”] . The beloved’s movement from the waking mind to the sleeping one is not merely a movement of consciousness, from conscious to unconscious, but also of time. The beloved occupied the poet’s waking mind because she was a part of his present reality at that particular moment. When the relationship ended, she became a memory and occupied the space of dreams. The clincher, in the last line, is that at the moment the poem is written she occupies neither. She has been forgotten (at least to the degree that she no longer has any ownership of the poet’s mind, but he obviously remembers her enough to write a poem about her).
In the transition from waking thought to dream, the beloved transforms from a living creature to a mythological one “La cegua”, one of the manifestations of the Devil in Nicaraguan folklore. La cegua appears as a beautiful young girl to men walking alone at night in order to tempt them in to picking her up. When they do, her face transforms into that of the skeleton of a horse covered in rotting flesh and the men either die of fear or are carried off to her lair where they are tormented to madness. Here the comparison of the beloved to a “Cegua” is one of life-in-death, in which death itself remains in a kind of intemporal stasis, in an eternal state of corruption without actual death. (indeed one of the contradictions of the Devil is that while representing death, corruption and contingency, he is also eternal). The “Cegua/beloved” is a “lepra, lechuza luna” “leprous, milky moon” trapped between the two temporal poles of contingency (leprousness and corruption) and eternity (eternal return symbolized by both the moon and milk). This position presents a torment for the poet. (interestingly Neruda in his Residenicia poems is also tormented by erotic love as a kind of death that does not die, but exists intemporally even as it fills him with a sense of his own fleshly corruption. Alain Sicard discusses this in great detail, comparing the intemporal love of “residencia” to the temporal, historicized vision of love seen in Neruda’s later poems).
In the last line, however, the poet triumphs over La cegua through the act of forgetting by reiterating love’s contingency. Here the poet states that even the memory of love is contingent, so while the beloved may have thought to escape oblivion by remaining in the poet’s dreaming mind, he reminds her that she has ceased to exist even there. Love’s contingency brings a sense of relief and triumph over evil. The religious implication in this poem is very powerful, as erotic love, like La cegua is only capable of manifesting illusions and dreams which eventually pass away.
