The Impossible Love of Cruz Salmerón Acosta

Hello, kind readers. Although many of us know that love is celebrated every day and every hour, February arrived, the month of love and friendship. As I said in a previous post, talk about love and happiness in the couple is usually normal, so I wanted to get out of everyday life and talk about impossible loves, those that could not be given and if they happened, ended badly and even in tragedy. Today I want to tell you a beautiful but sad story: the love story between the poet Cruz Salmerón Acosta and Conchita Bruzual.

Cruz Salmerón Acosta was a Venezuelan poet, born in the state of Sucre, in a town called Manicuare. His poems with great influence of modernism are usually sonnets. In these poems he talks about his feelings, his land and his people. From a very young age he left Manicuare to study in Cumaná and then in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, where he enrolled in the Central University of Venezuela to study Political Science. It is there that he is diagnosed with leprosy and asked to stay away from others because it is feared that he may spread it. In this way, Salmerón Acosta returns to his village to take refuge in a small and remote house that he designed himself.

Manicuare

He met love when he was barely a schoolboy, 13 years old. In those years he met Conchita Bruzual, who told him at that moment that she would always love him. Supposedly, when he was young, he didn't believe him. It is said that when Salmerón Acosta took refuge in Manicuare, more than solitude, what he had most was company, since his friends, fishermen, family and even Conchita went to visit him:

When my eyes saw your beloved silhouette
approaching the door of my eternal enclosure,
I thought he was coming back for me.
that I lost in the best abriles of my life.

Conchita was always the eternal muse of the poems of Cruz Salmerón Acosta, who saw in the blue eyes of his beloved not only the sky and the sea that enveloped him in his native Manicuare, but the distance that separated them. In his confinement, he writes poems about her and her love, but he also talks about his illness, about the impossibility of that love that makes him slippery and so longed for:

In my dark nights a star
that burns in my sky, that in mourning you saw,
makes me dream of the look that
that only for me you always had.

Postcards of Cruz for Conchita

He also writes about the many loves that he had when he was healthy, that with time were moving away, and how Conchita Bruzual's love is the only true love that has survived in spite of time and his illness:

And this afternoon in the peace of my retreat,
a woman who with astonishment I look at
he says to me, twenty years I've adored you
and today that you're almost buried alive,
I feel that I am, my heart, more yours.

Likewise, in spite of her sadness, Salmerón Acosta wants to see her beloved and every time he sees her, he comes back to life, he wants to be with her. His desire is to rise from the bed where he is prostrate and be at her side:

And a deep sob escapes my chest,
because in vain I wish to rise from my bed
when I've been anxious for some time, to go with you.

Conchita

Although Conchita must separate from Cruz Salmerón Acosta, the poet manages to maintain the joy and writing of his poems where he leaves all the suffering caused by the absence of his beloved. He writes letters to her reminding her of his love and fidelity, promising her an upcoming meeting. When he stops writing to her, she is destroyed and breaks the relationship. She decides to move further away from him, to put more distance. He accepts her decision, but when she asks him why he didn't write to her anymore, he tells her that he can no longer move his hands, and that he has decided not to believe in new treatments for his illness. Death was near.

On July 29, 1929 at 9 p.m., Cruz Salmerón Acosta died, after his long illness, next to his friends and family. That day, after a terrible drought in the village, a torrential rain fell. The whole town said that nature was mourning the death of the great poet from Manicuare and that the rain was a miracle. To his burial were all, except his great love, Conchita, who could not move from Caracas to Sucre.

Years after the poet death, Conchita confessed that she kept some booties she had knitted for the son she wanted to have with Cruz Salmerón Acosta. She died at the age of 90, single and still in love with the poet.

I hope you enjoyed reading this story. Remember to vote for @adsactly as a witness and join our server in discord. Until a next smile. ;)