My Last Sigh

by Luis Bunuel

  Another time, one of our shepherds was killed by a knife in the back during a stupid argument. There was an autopsy, performed in the chapel in the middle of the cemetery by the village doctor, assisted by the barber. Four or five of the doctor’s friends were also present. I managed to sneak in, and as a bottle of brandy passed from hand to hand, I drank nervously to bolster my courage, which had begun to flag at the sounds of the saw grinding through the skull and the dead man’s ribs being broken, one by one. When it was all over, I was blind drunk and had to be carried home, where I was severely punished, not only for drunkenness but for what my father called “sadism.”

  In our village, when there was a funeral for one of the peasants, the coffin stood in front of the church door. The priests chanted while a vicar circled the flimsy catafalque sprinkling holy water, then raised the veil and scattered ashes on the chest of the corpse (a gesture reminiscent of the last scene of my Wuthering Heights). The heavy bell tolled, and as the pallbearers carried the coffin to the cemetery a few hundred yards from the village, the heartrending cries of the dead man’s mother rang through the streets:

  “My son! My son!” she wailed. “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me all alone!”

  The dead man’s sisters, along with other female relatives and friends, joined in the lamentations, forming a chorus of mourners, of plañideras. As in the Middle Ages, death had weight in Calanda; omnipresent, it was an integral part of our lives.

  The same was true of faith. Deeply imbued with Catholicism, we never had a moment’s doubt about these universal truths. One of my uncles was a priest, a sweet, gentle man we called Tío Santos. He gave me Latin and French lessons every summer, and I served as his acolyte. I also sang and played the violin in the Virgin of Carmen choir, along with one of my friends, who played the double bass, and the rector of Los Escolapios, a religious institute in Alcañiz, who played the cello. We were often invited to the Carmelite convent, later usurped by the Dominicans, which stood at the edge of the village. The convent was founded toward the end of the nineteenth century by a man named Forton who lived in Calanda and was married to an aristocrat from the Cascajares family. Both were fiercely pious and never missed a Mass. Later, at the start of the Civil War, the Dominicans in the convent were taken away and shot.

  In Calanda there were two churches and seven priests, in addition to Tío Santos, who fell off a cliff during a hunt and then persuaded my father to hire him as an overseer of his estate. Religion permeated all aspects of our daily lives; I used to play at celebrating Mass in the attic of our house, with my sisters as attendants. I even owned an alb, and a collection of religious artifacts made from lead.

  Our faith was so blind that at least until the age of fourteen, we believed in the literal truth of the famous Calanda miracle, which occurred in the Year of Our Lord 1640. The miracle is attributed to Spain’s patron saint, the Virgin of Pilar, who got her name because she appeared to Saint John at the top of a pillar in Saragossa during the time of the Roman occupation. She’s one of the two great Spanish Virgins, the other being the Virgin of Guadalupe, who always seemed to me vastly inferior.

  The story goes that in 1640, Miguel Juan Pellicer, an inhabitant of Calanda, had his leg crushed under the wheel of a cart, and it had to be amputated. Now Pellicer was a very religious man who went to church every day to dip a finger into the oil that burned before the statue of the Virgin. Afterwards, he used to rub the oil on the stump of his leg. One night, it seems that the Virgin and her angels descended from heaven, and when Pellicer awoke the next morning, he found himself with a brand-new leg.

  Like all good miracles, this one was confirmed by numerous ecclesiastical and medical authorities—for without such attestation, there would, of course, be no miracles at all. In addition, this particular one generated an abundant literature and iconography. It was a magnificent miracle; next to it, the miracle of the Virgin of Lourdes seems to me rather paltry. Here was a man whose leg was dead and buried and who suddenly had a perfect new one! In its honor, my father gave the parish of Calanda a superb paso—one of those large icons carried aloft during religious processions and which the anarchists were so fond of burning during the Civil War. People in our village said that King Philip IV himself had come to kiss the famous leg—and no one ever challenged such claims.

  Lest one think I exaggerate about these inter-Virginal rivalries: Once in Saragossa a priest delivered a sermon about the Virgin of Lourdes, and while recognizing her merits, he nonetheless argued that they were substantially less significant than those of the Virgin of Pilar. It happened that there were a dozen Frenchwomen, tutors and governesses to the aristocratic families in Saragossa, in the congregation. Shocked by the sermon, they protested bitterly to the Archbishop Soldevilla Romero (who was assassinated several years later by the anarchists). They couldn’t bear the idea that anyone might denigrate the most famous of all French Virgins!

  Years later, in 1960, while I was living in Mexico, I told the Calanda miracle story to a French Dominican.

  “But my dear friend,” he smiled knowingly. “You do lay it on a bit thick, don’t you?”

  Given this heavy dosage of death and religion, it stood to reason that our joie de vivre was stronger than most. Pleasures so long desired only increased in intensity because we so rarely managed to satisfy them. Despite our sincere religious faith, nothing could assuage our impatient sexual curiosity and our erotic obsessions. At the age of twelve, I still believed that babies came from Paris—not via a stork, of course, but simply by train or car. One day an older friend set me straight, and suddenly there I was, initiated at long last into the great mystery and involved in those endless adolescent discussions and suppositions that characterize the tyranny of sex over youth. At the same time, “they” never ceased to remind us that the highest virtue was chastity, without which no life was worthy of praise. In addition, the strict separation between the sexes in village life only served to fuel our fantasies. In the end, we were worn out with our oppressive sense of sin, coupled with the interminable war between instinct and virtue.

  “Do you know why Christ remained silent when Herod interrogated him?” the Jesuits used to ask. “Because Herod was a lascivious man, and lasciviousness is a vice that our Savior abhorred!”

  I’ve often wondered why Catholicism has such a horror of sexuality. To be sure, there are countless theological, historical, and moral reasons; but it seems to me that in a rigidly hierarchical society, sex—which respects no barriers and obeys no laws—can at any moment become an agent of chaos. I suppose that’s why some Church Fathers, Saint Thomas Aquinas among them, were so severe in their dealings with the disturbing aspects of the flesh. Saint Thomas went so far as to affirm that the sexual act, even between husband and wife, was a venial sin, since it implied mental lust. (And lust, of course, is by definition evil.) Desire and pleasure may be necessary, since God created them, but any suspicion of concupiscence, any impure thought, must be ruthlessly tracked down and purged. After all, our purpose on this earth is first and foremost to give birth to more and more servants of God.

  Ironically, this implacable prohibition inspired a feeling of sin which for me was positively voluptuous. And although I’m not sure why, I also have always felt a secret but constant link between the sexual act and death. I’ve tried to translate this inexplicable feeling into images, as in Un Chien andalou when the man caresses the woman’s bare breasts as his face slowly changes into a death mask. Surely the powerful sexual repression of my youth reinforces this connection.

  In Calanda, it was customary for the young man who could afford it to go twice a year to a brothel in Saragossa. I remember in 1917, during the Festival of the Virgin, some camareras (waitresses reputed to have loose morals) were imported by one of the cafés. For two days, clients prodded and pinched (the ritual pizco) until the girls finally gave up and left. (It goes without saying that no one went beyond the pinch; had they tried anything else, the civil guard would have stepped in
immediately!)

  Wicked pleasures like these, all the more to be savored because they were mortal sins, transpired only in our imaginations. We played doctor with little girls; we studied the anatomy of animals. In all naiveté (none of us had even heard of sodomy) one of my friends once tried to experiment with a mare, but succeeded only in falling off the ladder! During the summer siesta hour, when the heat was at its fiercest and the flies droned and buzzed in the empty streets, we used to meet secretly in a neighborhood dry goods store. When the doors were closed and the curtains pulled tight, one of the clerks would slip us some so-called erotic magazines—heaven only knows how he got hold of them—the Hoja de Parra, for instance, and the KDT, whose photos, I distinctly remember, were somewhat more realistic. These forbidden delights, devoured in secret, would seem divinely innocent today. At most, all we could make out was an ankle or the top of a breast, but this was sufficient to inflame our ardor and wreak havoc with our fantasies. Even now, when I think back to my first sexual stirrings, I can still smell the odor of those bolts of cloth!

  When I reached my early teens, I discovered the bathing cabanas in San Sebastián, fertile ground for other educational experiences. These cabanas were divided by partitions, and it was easy to enter one side, make a peephole in the wood, and watch the women undressing on the other side. Unfortunately, long hatpins were in fashion, and once the women realized they were being spied upon, they would thrust their hatpins into the holes, blithely unconcerned about putting out curious eyes. (I used this vivid detail much later, in El.) We used to minimize the risks, however, by wedging small pieces of glass into the holes.

  One of Calanda’s intellectuals, a doctor named Don Leoncio, would have roared with laughter had he known of our struggles with our consciences. A fierce Republican, Don Leoncio papered his office walls with full-color pages from El Motín, a violently anticlerical and proanarchist journal with a wide circulation. I remember one cartoon vividly: two well-fed priests sitting in a small cart while Christ, harnessed to the shafts, sweats and grimaces with the effort. And just to give you a sampling of the tone, here’s El Motín’s description of a demonstration in Madrid during which some workers attacked a group of clergymen and wound up smashing windows and wounding passersby:

  “Yesterday afternoon,” the article began, “a group of workers were walking calmly down Calle Montera when they saw two priests coming toward them on the opposite side of the street. Given this provocation …”

  Up until 1913, when I discovered northern Spain, we didn’t leave Calanda except for Holy Week and for summer vacation. My father’s new house created an uproar; the curious came all the way from neighboring villages just to have a look. It was a monument to art deco, that “bad taste” which art historians now praise and whose most brilliant Spanish practitioner was the Catalonian Gaudi. Whenever we opened the front door, there was a cluster of poor children staring open-mouthed into our “luxurious” interior. Most of the children carried smaller brothers and sisters in their arms, babies too young even to shoo away the flies that gathered at the corners of their eyes and lips. Their mothers worked in the fields, or were already in their kitchens preparing the traditional potatoes and beans.

  My father also built a country house called La Torre near the river not quite three kilometers away. It was surrounded by a superb garden and clumps of fruit trees, which led down to a small pond, where we kept a rowboat, and finally to the river itself. A narrow irrigation ditch cut across the garden to facilitate the gardener’s work. The entire family—a minimum of ten people—went to La Torre every day during the summer in two horse-drawn jardineras. As we rolled along, our children’s cart often passed a thin village child dressed in rags who was collecting horse manure in a shapeless basket to fertilize his family’s scanty vegetable garden. When I think back, it seems to me that these images of abject poverty made no impression on us whatsoever.

  We often dined, copiously, in the garden at La Torre, under the soft glow of acetylene lamps, returning to Calanda only late at night. It was an easy life, idle and secure. Had I been one of the children who watered the earth with the sweat of his brow and collected manure along the roadside, I can imagine how different my childhood memories would be!

  We were undoubtedly the last scions of an ancient way of life characterized by the rare business transaction, a strict obedience to natural cycles, and a completely fossilized mode of thought. The only industry in the region was olive oil; everything else—cloth, metals, medicines—came from the outside world. Local artisans supplied only our most pressing needs; there was a blacksmith, a coppersmith, a few tinsmiths, a saddler, some bricklayers, a weaver, and a baker. Agriculture was semifeudal; tenant farmers worked the land and gave half their harvest to their proprietors.

  I still have several photographs taken in 1904 and 1905 by a family friend. There is my father, sometimes in a boater, sometimes a Cuban hat, looking well fed and sporting a full white mustache. And my mother at twenty-four, being greeted by the village notables as she emerges, tanned and smiling, from Mass. There are my mother and father, posing with a parasol; in another, entitled “Flight into Egypt,” my mother sits astride a donkey. And here I am at the venerable age of six, in a cornfield with some other children. There are pictures of washerwomen and sheep shearers; of my baby sister Conchita clutching my father’s legs as he talks with Don Macario; my grandfather feeding his dog; a gorgeous bird in a nest.

  Today, in Calanda, there are no more poor people sitting outside the church on Fridays begging for bread. The village has become quite comfortable; people live well. The traditional costume disappeared a long time ago—the wide belt, the cachirulo on the head, the tight pants. The streets are paved and well lit. There is running water, a sewage system, movie theatres, bars. As elsewhere, television has contributed to the loss of its viewers’ sense of identity. There are cars, refrigerators, motorcycles—all the elements of a meticulously designed material well-being—kept in smooth working order by that technological “progress” which has exiled morality and spirit to a far distant territory. Chaos, in the form of entropy, has assumed the demonic disguise of the population explosion.

  I’m lucky to have spent my childhood in the Middle Ages, or, as Huysmans described it, that “painful and exquisite” epoch—painful in terms of its material aspects perhaps, but exquisite in its spiritual life. What a contrast to the world of today!

  3

  The Drums of Calanda

  THERE is a custom, practiced perhaps only in certain Aragonian villages, called the Drums of Good Friday. On that day, drums are beaten from Alcañiz to Hijar; but nowhere are they beaten with such mysterious power as in Calanda. The ritual dates from the end of the eighteenth century and had already died out by 1900, but one of Calanda’s priests, Mosen Vicente Allanegui, brought it back to life.

  The drums of Calanda beat almost without pause from noon on Good Friday until noon on Saturday, in recognition of the shadows that covered the earth at the moment Christ died, as well as the earthquakes, the falling rocks, and the rending of the temple veil. It’s a powerful and strangely moving communal ceremony which I heard for the first time in my cradle. Up until recently, I often beat the drums myself; in fact, I’ve introduced these famous drums to many friends, who were all as strongly affected as I was. I remember a reunion in 1980 with a few friends in a medieval castle not far from Madrid where we surprised everyone with a drum serenade imported directly from Calanda. Many of my closest friends were among the guests—Julio Alejandro, Fernando Rey, José-Luis Barros—and all of them were profoundly moved, although unable to say exactly why. (Five even confessed to having cried!) I don’t really know what evokes this emotion, which resembles the kind of feeling often aroused when one listens to music. It seems to echo some secret rhythm in the outside world, and provokes a real physical shiver that defies the rational mind. My son, Juan-Luis, once made a short film about these drums, and I myself have used their somber rhythms in several movies, especia
lly L’Age d’or and Nazarin.

  Back in my childhood, only a couple of hundred drummers were involved in this rite, but nowadays there are over a thousand, including six hundred to seven hundred drums and four hundred bombos. Toward noon on Good Friday, the drummers gather in the main square opposite the church and wait there in total silence; if anyone nervously raps out a few beats, the crowd silences him. When the first bell in the church tower begins to toll, a burst of sound, like a terrific thunderclap, electrifies the entire village, for all the drums explode at the same instant. A sort of wild drunkenness surges through the players; they beat for two hours until the procession (called El Pregón, after the official “town crier” drum) forms, then leaves the square and makes a complete tour of the town. The procession is usually so long that the rear is still in the square when the leaders have already reappeared at the opposite side!

  When I was young, there were all sorts of wonderful characters in the parade—Roman soldiers with false beards called putuntunes (a word that sounds very like the beating of the drums), centurions, a Roman general, and Longinos, a personage dressed in a full suit of medieval armor. Longinos, the man who theoretically defended Christ against his attackers, used to fight a duel with the general. As they locked swords, the host of drummers would form a circle around them, but when the general spun around once, an act that symbolized his death, Longinos sealed the sepulchre and began his watch. Nearby, Christ himself was represented by a statue lying in a glass box.