Incidental sound is another fundamental element in Cardenalian poetics, playing a role similar to flashing signs, lights, billboards and newspaper headlines. They place the reader/listener into the flow of time, in an imagistic ambience stamped with the elements of real life demonstrating points of contact between the private sphere and the public, between the state and the realm of the intimate. In these two poems in Epigramas, sound also functions to place the reader inside the ambience of the Somoza regime through two manifestations of incidental sound both of which have very strong political significance a police siren, and gunshots. These of course are two sonic elements which characterized the nightly soundscape of life under the Somoza regime, night being the time when secret (really not so secret) arrests and killings took place.
“De pronto suena en la noche una sirena”
This poem not only describes but actually imitates the sound of a police siren heard on the streets at night through the use of word repetition, assonances alternating vowel sounds, first “A” “U” “I” and “E”
“El alarma larga, larga
el aullido lúgubre de la sirena
de incendio o de la ambulancia blanca de la muerte
como el grito de la cegua en la noche
que se acerca y se acerca sobre las calles
y las casas y sube y sube y baja
y crece y crece y se aleja
creciendo y bajando. No es incendio ni muerte
es Somoza que pasa.
There is a pattern to this poem. The poet hears the sound of the siren and begins to imagine what it could be. Lines 1 and 2, as well as 5, 6 and 7 focus on the act of hearing through assonance and repetition. Lines 3 and 4, attempt to put the sound into several different contexts, first a realistic, historicized one (de incendio y de la ambulancia blanca de la muerte) then a poetic/mythological one (como el grito de la cegua en la noche). Thus while this is fundamentally an imagistic/sonic poem, Cardenal also brings to it the thematic and political streams of the other poems. La Cegua is once again mentioned as a point of comparison this time adding a second semantic layer to the word “sirena”. La cegua is a type of “Siren” in the mythological sense, invading the dreams of the poet. Just as in “Dueña por muchos años” the Cegua/Siren represents the pale faced life-in-death . The siren is described as potentially originating from “la ambulancia blanca de la muerte” reiterating the use of white and the Cegua herself as a sign of both life and death/corruption and eternity. (indeed the image of an ambulance is somewhat ambiguous, in that ambulances either infer a life being saved or a life ending, Cardenal removes the former meaning however, by associating the ambulance with death alone). Lines 8 and 9 return the poem to its proper context, by reaching a conclusion about the origin of the sound, it is Somoza who is causing it (cruising through the streets in one of his armored vehicles) In a sense Cardenal is simultaneously associating and dis-associating Somoza with the Cegua. He is causing the siren sound and indeed is associated with corruption and decay but he is not powerful enough to be the true harbinger of death (echoed in the line “no es incendio ni muerte”).
