My Last Sigh

by Luis Bunuel

  Scarcely a week after my arrival, I met a medical student named Angula at La Rotonde. He took me to his hotel—the Saint-Pierre on the rue de l’Ecole de Médicine—just a moment away from the boulevard St.-Michel. It was simple and friendly, and right next door to a Chinese cabaret. I moved in immediately.

  The next day I caught the flu and had to stay in bed. In the evenings, I heard the drums from the cabaret through the walls of my room. Across the street was a Greek restaurant, which I could see from my window, and a café. Angulo recommended champagne for my flu, a treatment I was happy enough to follow; but I was less happy to discover why the right wing felt such animosity toward métèques. The recent, and drastic, devaluation of the franc meant that anyone with foreign currency, particularly pesetas, could live like a king. The champagne I drank to coddle my cold cost me eleven francs, the equivalent of one peseta a bottle. While French buses were covered with posters warning people not to waste bread, there we were, drinking Moët et Chandon as if it were water.

  One evening, when I’d recovered, I went to the Chinese cabaret. One of the hostesses sat down at my table and began to talk; this was her job, of course; but, much to my surprise, her conversation was both natural and stimulating. She talked about wine and Paris and the details of daily French life, but with such an absence of affectation that I was dumbfounded. Through a hostess in a Chinese nightclub, I’d discovered a new relationship between language and life. I never slept with this woman, I never even knew her name; but she was still my first real contact with French culture.

  There were other cultural surprises, like couples kissing in the street and unmarried men and women living together. The abyss between Spain and France widened with every passing day. At this time, Paris was considered the capital of the artistic world. I remember reading somewhere that it could boast of having forty-five thousand painters, a truly prodigious number. Many of them, including a number of Spaniards, lived in Montparnasse, having abandoned Montmartre after World War I. Les Cahiers d’Art, probably the most prestigious art journal, devoted an entire issue to Spanish painters in Paris. They were the artists I saw every day—Ismael de la Serna, an Andalusian just slightly older than I; Castanyer, a Catalonian who opened a restaurant called Le Catalan just opposite Picasso’s studio on the rue des Grands-Augustins; Juan Gris, whom I visited once at his home in the suburbs and who died shortly afterward; Cossio, who was short, lame, and blind in one eye, and who harbored a bitter resentment against strong healthy men. (He later joined the Falange and acquired a certain artistic reputation before his death in Madrid.) Finally, there was Bores, a well-known Ultraist painter, who once went with Hernando Viñes and me to Bruges and who managed to visit every museum in the city.

  These painters met regularly in a peña that also included Huidobro, the well-known Chilean poet, and Miliena, a small, thin writer from the Basque country. A short time after L’Age d’or was released, several members—Huidobro, Castanyer, and Cossio in particular—wrote me a letter full of criticism and insults. Our relationship was strained for a while, but eventually we had a reconciliation. Of all these artists, my closest friends were Joaquín Peinado and Viñes. The latter was originally from Catalonia; he married a marvelous woman named Loulou, the daughter of the writer Francis Jourdain, a good friend of Huysmans and closely connected to the impressionists.

  At the end of the nineteenth century, when Loulou’s grandmother presided over a literary salon, she’d given Loulou an extraordinary fan on which many of the greatest writers and musicians of the age had scribbled a few words or notes. Side by side on this frivolous article were inscriptions from Massenet, Gounod, Mistral, Alphonse Daudet, Heredia, Banville, Mallarmé, Zola, Octave Mirbeau, Pierre Loti, Huysmans, and Rodin; together, they summed up the spirit of an era. Loulou gave it to me, and I can still see Daudet’s phrase: “As you go north, the eyes are refined and extinguished.” Close by, there are some lines from Edmond de Goncourt: “Anyone who cannot feel passionate love—for women or flowers or bibelots or wine—anyone who is not in some way unreasonable or unbalanced, will never never never have any talent for literature … A brilliant, if unpublished, thought.” Elsewhere on the fan, there’s an unusual stanza by Zola:

  Ce que je veux pour mon royaume

  C’est à ma porte un vert sentier,

  Berceau formé d’un églantier

  Et long comme trois brins de chaume.*

  Shortly after my arrival, I met Picasso in Manolo Angeles Ortiz’s studio on the rue Vercingétorix. He was already a highly controversial artist, but despite his friendliness and gaiety, he nonetheless seemed to me selfish and egocentric. Not until the Civil War, when he finally took a stand, did I feel he was a human being; at that point, we saw each other rather frequently. Once he gave me a small painting, a woman on a beach, but it was lost during the war. Rumor had it that just before World War I, when Picasso’s friend Apollinaire was interrogated by the police after the famous Mona Lisa caper, Picasso was asked to be a character witness. Instead of coming to Apollinaire’s defense, he repudiated him, a bit like Saint Peter denying Christ. On another occasion, the Catalonian ceramist Artigas, one of his close friends, went to Barcelona in 1934 with an art dealer to see Picasso’s mother. She invited them to lunch, and during the meal, she told them that there was a trunk in the attic filled with drawings that her son had done when he was very young. When she took them upstairs and showed them the work, the dealer made an offer; Picasso’s mother accepted, and he brought about thirty drawings back to Paris. When the exhibition opened in a gallery in St.-Germain-des-Prés, Picasso arrived and went from drawing to drawing, reminiscing over each one and clearly very moved. Yet the minute he left, he went straight to the police and denounced both Artigas and the dealer. Artigas had his picture in the newspaper under the headline “International Crook”!

  Don’t ask me my opinions about art, because I don’t have any. Aesthetic concerns have played a relatively minor role in my life, and I have to smile when a critic talks, for example, of my “palette.” I find it impossible to spend hours in galleries analyzing and gesticulating. Where Picasso’s concerned, his legendary facility is obvious, but sometimes I’m repelled by it. I can’t stand Guernica (which I nonetheless helped to hang). Everything about it makes me uncomfortable—the grandiloquent technique as well as the way it politicizes art. Both Alberti and José Bergamín share my aversion; in fact, all three of us would be delighted to blow up the painting, but I suppose we’re too old to start playing with explosives.

  La Coupole did not yet exist, but we went regularly to the other Montparnasse cafés—the Dôme, the Rotonde, the Select—as well as the popular cabarets in the neighborhood. There was one annual event, however, which I wanted desperately to attend, Le Bal des Quat’zarts, organized by the nineteen divisions of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Painter friends were constantly describing it as the most fabulous and original orgy of the year. I managed to get an introduction to one of the organizers, who sold me a pair of large, ornate, and very expensive tickets. A group of us decided to go together—my friend Juan Vicens from Saragossa; the sculptor José de Creeft and his wife; a Chilean whose name I’ve forgotten; his woman friend; and me. The student who’d sold me the tickets told us we could get in as part of the St.-Julien atelier.

  When the magic night finally arrived, we began with dinner in a restaurant, during which one of the St.-Julien students rose, placed his testicles delicately on a plate, and made a full circle of the room. I’d never seen anything quite like this before, not even in Paris. Later that evening, when we arrived at the entrance to the Salle Wagram, the police had already cordoned off the area and were trying to keep back the hordes of rowdy voyeurs. At one point, a naked woman arrived on the shoulders of a student dressed as an Arab sheik. (His head served as her fig leaf.) The crowd went wild as she entered the hall; I was dumbfounded. What kind of a mad world had I stumbled into?

  The door was guarded by the strongest students from each atelier; but
when we walked up the steps and held out our gorgeous tickets, they refused to let us in.

  “Someone’s pulled a fast one on you!” was all they said.

  De Creeft was so outraged and made such a fuss that they finally admitted him and his wife, but Vicens, the Chilean, and I had no such luck. The bouncers were all for letting the Chilean’s date go in, and when she refused they drew a large cross in wax on the back of her coat.

  And so I never did get to join the gaudiest orgy in the world, and now the orgy itself seems to be a dying art. Rumors flew about the scandalous carryings-on inside the Salle Wagram; apparently all the professors left at midnight, whereupon the action really got under way. Those who survived wound up at five in the morning thoroughly drunk and frolicking in the fountains at the place de la Concorde.

  (A couple of weeks later, I ran into my counterfeiter, who’d managed to acquire a nice case of the clap. He had such difficulty walking that he was using a cane, a vengeance I felt it would be superfluous to add to.)

  In those days, the Closerie des Lilas was still only a café. I used to go there frequently, as well as to the Bal Bullier next door. We always went in disguise. I remember dressing up one night as a nun, in an elaborate and wholly authentic costume. I even put on false eyelashes and lipstick. As we were walking down the boulevard Montparnasse, with Juan Vicens dressed as a monk, we saw two policemen coming toward us. I began to tremble under my head-dress; in Spain, a joke like that could get us five years in jail. But the policemen only stopped and smiled.

  “Good evening, Sister,” one of them said. “Can we help you?”

  Sometimes Orbea, the Spanish vice-consul, came with us to the Bal Bullier. One night, he asked if he too could have a costume, so I whipped off my nun’s habit and gave it to him. (Ever prepared, I wore a complete soccer uniform underneath.) Vicens and I wanted to open a cabaret on the boulevard Raspail, so I went to Saragossa to ask my mother to back us. Needless to say, she refused. Shortly afterward, Vicens was hired to manage the Spanish bookstore on the rue Gay-Lussac. He died, in Peking, after the war.

  Another thing I learned to do in Paris was dance correctly. Not only did I take French classes, but I went to a dancing school and mastered all kinds of steps, including the java, despite my aversion to the accordion. I can still remember the tune to “On fait un’ petite belote, et puis voilà.…” The melody was everywhere, as at this time Paris was filled with accordions.

  I still loved jazz and continued to play the banjo. My record collection had reached the impressive number of sixty discs, which was not inconsiderable for the period. We used to go to the Hôtel Mac-Mahon to hear jazz or to the Château de Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne to dance.

  I also discovered anti-Semitism, something I simply hadn’t been aware of before coming to France. I remember hearing a man tell a story about his brother, who’d gone to eat dinner at a restaurant at the Etoile. When he entered, he saw a Jew sitting there and became so enraged that he walked up to him and, without a word, struck him so hard that he fell off his chair. Such an act was absolutely incomprehensible to a Spaniard; so when I heard the story, I asked a lot of questions—which must have been hopelessly naive, since the answers weren’t very satisfactory. This was also the period when right-wing groups like the Camelots du Roi and Jeunesses Patriotiques organized raids on Montparnasse. We used to see them leap from their trucks, yellow clubs in their hands, and start beating up the métèques on the sidewalks of even the most elegant cafés. (I had my fair share of fist fights with them myself.)

  Around this time, I moved to a furnished room at 3 bis, place de la Sorbonne, a quiet little square surrounded by trees very much like those in the provinces. Automobiles were still rare; the streets were full of carriages. I dressed with studied concern—gaiters, a waistcoat with the fashionable four pockets, and a bowler hat. (All men at that time wore either hats or caps; in fact, there was a story about a group of young men in San Sebastián who went out bare-headed and were attacked for being maricones.) It was a great relief when I found myself one day taking off my bowler, placing it carefully on the edge of the sidewalk on the boulevard St.-Michel, and jumping up and down on it in a definitive adieu to tradition.

  One day at the Select I met a slender, dark-haired young Frenchwoman named Rita. She had an Argentinian lover, whom I never saw, and they lived in a small hotel on the rue Delambre. We often went out together to cabarets or the movies, but there was nothing serious between us. I knew she was interested in me, and I wasn’t exactly indifferent, but a while later, when I’d gone home to Saragossa to ask my mother (once again) for money, I received a telegram from Vicens announcing Rita’s suicide. An investigation revealed that relations had been stormy between her and her lover (perhaps because of me?). The day I left the city, he’d waited outside the hotel until he saw her go in, then followed her to their room. No one knew exactly what happened afterward, but it appeared that Rita had a gun and had shot first her lover, then herself.

  Joaquín Peinado and Hernando Viñes shared a studio, where I went to visit them about a week after I arrived in Paris. While I was there, three charming young women appeared. The most beautiful one, Jeanne Rucas, was originally from the north of France; thanks to her dressmaker, she knew the Spanish milieu in Paris very well. A student of anatomy, she was also a serious gymnast who studied with Irène Poppart and had won a bronze medal at the 1924 Olympic Games. I was seized with an embarrassingly naive but very Machiavellian (or so I thought) idea about how to seduce these women. A cavalry officer in Saragossa once told me about a powerful aphrodisiac, some kind of chloride, that he swore was strong enough to overcome the resistance of even the most obstinate. I told Peinado and Viñes that we should invite the women again, offer them champagne, and pour a few drops of the magic potion into their drinks. Frankly, I truly believed it would work; but Viñes, a devout Catholic, refused to participate in such satanic enterprises. In the end, nothing happened, of course—except that I must have seen Jeanne Rucas many times, since she became my wife, and is still.

  It was during that time that I wrote and directed my first short play, called Hamlet, which a group of us staged in the basement of the Select. Toward the end of 1926, however, a more serious project appeared. Hernando Viñes was the nephew of the famous pianist Ricardo Viñes, the first to recognize the genius of Erik Satie. At this time, there were two famous orchestras in the city of Amsterdam: the first had just staged a production of Stravinsky’s Histoire du soldat, while the second, led by the great Mengelberg, was considering a production of Falla’s El retablo de maese Pedro, a short work based on an episode from Don Quixote. What was more interesting was the fact that they were looking for a director.

  Viñes knew Mengelberg, and thanks to my Hamlet I had a “reference,” albeit a rather flimsy one. Regardless, they offered me the job, and suddenly I found myself working with a world-famous conductor and a group of remarkable singers. We had two weeks of rehearsals at Hernando’s in Paris. It was a curious work; the retablo refers to a small puppet theatre, and all the characters are marionettes whose voices are provided by the singers. I introduced some new twists by adding four real characters to the puppets; they were masked, and their role was to attend the puppeteer’s, Maese Pedro’s, performance and interrupt from time to time. Their voices too were provided by singers hidden in the orchestra pit. Of course, I got my friends to play the silent parts of the four people in the audience, which is how the cast came to include Cossio, Peinado (who played the innkeeper), and my cousin Rafael Saura (Don Quixote).

  The work was performed a few times in Amsterdam and played to packed houses. The first evening, however, I’d completely forgotten to arrange for lighting, so the audience saw very little. Working overtime with a lighting designer, I somehow managed to get things ready for the second night, which went off without a hitch.

  The only other time I directed for the theatre was in 1960 in Mexico: Zorrilla’s perennial Don Juan Tenorio, a beautifully constructed play
which he wrote in a week. It ends in Paradise where Don Juan, who’s been killed in a duel, finds that his soul has been saved because of Doña Ines’s love. The staging was very classical, a far cry from the satirical scenes from such classics we used to do at the Residencia. It played for three days in Mexico City during the Feast of the Dead and was so successful that during the stampede to get in, the windows in the theatre were broken. Luis Alcoriza played Don Luis, and I played the role of Don Juan’s father, but my deafness made it difficult for me to follow the lines. I kept playing nervously with my gloves until Alcoriza finally walked over and tapped my elbow in the middle of a scene, as a sign that my turn had come.

  In Paris, I went to the movies far more frequently than I had in Madrid, often as many as three a day. Thanks to a press pass I’d inveigled out of a friend, I saw private screenings of American films in the morning at the Salle Wagram. During the afternoon, I went to a neighborhood theatre, and in the evenings to the Vieux Colombier or the Studio des Ursulines. Actually, my press card wasn’t entirely undeserved. Thanks to Zervos, I wrote reviews for Cahiers d’Art as well as a few publications in Spain. I remember writing about Adolphe Menjou, Buster Keaton, and von Stroheim’s Greed.

  Among the films that made strong impressions on me was Battleship Potemkin, and even now I feel again the emotion it aroused in all of us. When we left the theatre, on a street near Alésia, we started erecting barricades ourselves. The police had to intervene before we would stop. For many years I argued that Potemkin was the most beautiful film in the history of the cinema, although today I’m not so sure. (I also remember being struck by Pabst’s films, as well as Murnau’s The Last Laugh.)

  The films that influenced me the most, however, were Fritz Lang’s. When I saw Destiny, I suddenly knew that I too wanted to make movies. It wasn’t the three stories themselves that moved me so much, but the main episode—the arrival of the man in the black hat (whom I instantly recognized as Death) in a Flemish village—and the scene in the cemetery. Something about this film spoke to something deep in me; it clarified my life and my vision of the world. This feeling occurred whenever I saw a Lang movie, particularly the Nibelungen films and Metropolis.