Muleteer, you walk fabulously glazed in sweat.

Menocucho hacienda

charges a thousand displeasures a day for life.

Itis noon. We’ve arrived at the waist of the day.

The sun that hurts so much.

Muleteer, with your beet-red poncho you depart,

savoring the Peruvian romance of your coca.

And, from a hammock,

from a century of doubt,

I ponder your horizon and observe, deploring

the long-shanked mosquitoes and the charming feeble

refrain of a “paca-paca.”

In the end you will arrive where you should arrive,

muleteer, you who, behind your sanctimonious burro,

trudge on …

trudge on …

Lucky you, in this heat in which all anxieties,

all motives rear up;

when the spirit that barely animates the body

goes without coca, and does not manage to halter

its beast toward the oxidental

Andes of Eternity.