My Last Sigh

by Luis Bunuel

  Strange as it may seem, I detest publicity and do everything possible to avoid it. Should you ask, as well you might, why I’m writing this book, all I can say is that had I been alone, I’d never have done it. I’ve managed to live my life among multiple contradictions without ever trying to rationalize or resolve them; they’re part of me, and part of the fundamental ambiguity of all things, which I cherish.

  When it comes to the seven deadly sins, however, the only one I find truly lethal is envy, a decidedly Spanish weakness, because it inevitably leads people to desire the deaths of others whose happiness makes them miserable. (The other sins are strictly personal and don’t really harm anyone.) For example, imagine a multimillionaire in Los Angeles whose morning paper is delivered every day by a humble mailman. One fine day the mailman doesn’t show up, and when the millionaire asks his butler why, the man replies that the mailman won ten thousand dollars in a lottery and has quit the profession. The millionaire is outraged at the inconvenience and begins to hate the mailman, and finally to envy him, all because of a mere ten thousand dollars.…

  Finally, I don’t like politics. The past forty years have destroyed any illusions I might have had about its efficacy. In fact, there’s really nothing to say at the sight of left-wing demonstrators marching through the streets of Madrid, as they did one day a couple of years ago, and chanting, “Contra Franco estabamos mejor!”—we were better off against Franco!

  20

  From Spain to Mexico

  to France (1960–1977)

  IN 1960, after I’d been a Mexican citizen for ten years, I applied for a visa at the Spanish consulate in Paris and surprisingly, despite a twenty-four-year exile, had no trouble getting it. My sister Conchita came to Port Bou to pick me up so that someone would be there to raise the alarm in the event of any last-minute catastrophes. Nothing happened, of course, and suddenly there I was, back in Spain. A few months afterward, two plainclothes policemen showed up and asked very politely about my income; but nothing came of this, either. It’s impossible to describe my emotions as I traveled from Barcelona to Saragossa and then back to Madrid, revisiting all the scenes of my childhood; suffice it to say that I wept as I walked down certain streets, just as I’d done ten years before when I returned to Paris.

  This first return trip lasted only a few weeks, but during that time Francisco Rabal (from Nazarin) introduced me to an extraordinary Mexican named Gustavo Alatriste, who was to become both my producer and my close friend. I’d met him briefly years before on the set of Archibaldo de la Cruz, when he was visiting an actress whom he eventually married, then later divorced in order to marry the Mexican singer and actress Silvia Pinal. The son of a cockfight manager, Alatriste loved the sport himself, but he was also the owner of two magazines, a furniture factory, and a fair bit of land. Now, however, he’d suddenly decided to try his hand at the movie business, and today he’s an actor, director, and distributor and owns thirty-six movie theatres in Mexico. A volatile combination of wiliness and innocence, he once went to Mass in Madrid to ask God to help him solve a financial problem—and he was perfectly serious about it. Another time, with an absolutely straight face, he asked me if there were any external signs that distinguished a duke from a marquis or a baron. Handsome, seductive, the friend of people in high places, and incredibly generous (once he reserved an entire restaurant for the two of us, because he knew that my deafness made me uncomfortable in crowded places), he was also apt to hide out in his office bathroom to avoid paying a two-hundred-peso debt.

  I remember the day, for example, that he told me he was leaving Mexico in twenty-four hours and wanted to make an appointment to see me at a later date in Madrid. Three days later, I accidentally heard that he was still in Mexico, and for a very good reason. It seems he was forbidden to leave the country because he owed money. He’d tried to bribe the officials at the airport by offering them ten thousand pesos, and the inspector, the father of eight children, wavered but finally refused. When I talked to him, he told me that the sum that was keeping him from leaving was about eight thousand pesos—less than the bribe. (A few years later, Alatriste offered me a generous monthly salary simply in order to be able to see me from time to time for moral support and cinematographic advice. I declined, of course, but told him he could consult me for free, any time he liked.)

  In any case, while I was in Spain, Alatriste proposed that we make a film together; he gave me carte blanche in terms of story. So on the boat from Madrid to Mexico, I decided to write my own screenplay about a woman I called Viridiana, in memory of a little-known saint I’d heard about when I was a schoolboy. As I worked, I remembered my old erotic fantasy about making love to the queen of Spain when she was drugged, and decided somehow to combine the stories.

  My friend Julio Alejandro helped me write the script, but pointed out that we’d have to make the movie in Spain. I accepted on the condition that we work with Bardem Productions, since they had a reputation for opposition to Franco. Yet despite this proviso, the Republican émigrés in Mexico were vociferous in their protests. Once again I was attacked, but this time from my own side. Some of my friends came to my defense, and a nasty debate began as to whether my making a movie in Spain was or wasn’t treason. Some time later, Isaac drew a cartoon depicting, in the first square, Franco awaiting my arrival. In the second square, while I’m disembarking, carrying the Viridiana reels, a chorus of outraged voices is crying “Traitor! Traitor!” The voices continue to shout in the next box, while Franco greets me warmly and accepts the reels, which, in the last box, blow up in his face.

  The movie was indeed shot in Madrid, and on a beautiful estate outside the city; I had a reasonable budget for once, good actors, and an eight-week timetable. I worked once again with Francisco Rabal and for the first time with Fernando Rey and Silvia Pinal. Some of the older actors with bit parts had known me since Don Quintín in the 1930s. I remember in particular the remarkable character who played the leper. He was half beggar, half madman, and was allowed to live in the studio courtyard during the shooting. The man paid no attention whatsoever to my directions, yet he’s marvelous in the movie. Some time later, two French tourists passed him sitting on a bench in Burgos and, recognizing him from the film, congratulated him on his performance. Before they’d finished, he’d leapt to his feet, gathered up his few belongings, tossed his bundle of clothes over his shoulder, and walked off, saying, “I’m going to Paris. There, at least, they know who I am.” He died on the way.

  In Conchita’s article about our childhood, she also talks about the making of Viridiana:

  During the shoot, I went to Madrid as my brother’s secretary, and, as always, Luis lived like an anchorite. Our apartment was on the seventeenth floor of the only skyscraper in the city, and he occupied the space like Simeon on his column. His deafness had gotten worse, and he saw only the people he couldn’t avoid seeing. We had four beds, but he slept on the floor, with a sheet and blanket and all the windows wide open. I remember him walking out of his study many times a day to enjoy the view: the mountains in the distance, Casa Campo, and the royal palace in between. He maintained that the light in Madrid was absolutely unique; in fact, he watched the sun come up every day we were there. He reminisced about his student days and seemed happy.

  Normally, we ate dinner—raw vegetables, cheese, and a good wine from Rioja—at seven o’clock, which is very early for Spain. At noon we always ate heavily in a good restaurant where our favorite meal was grilled suckling pig. (That’s when my cannibalism complex began, and my dreams of Saturn devouring his children.) At one point, Luis’s hearing suddenly improved, and we began to have company—old friends, students from the cinema institute, people working on the film. I have to confess that I didn’t like the Viridiana script, but my nephew Juan-Luis assured me that his father’s scenarios were one thing and what he did with them another, an observation that turned out to be absolutely correct. I watched several scenes being shot and was impressed by Luis’s patience. I nev
er saw him lose his temper, and even when a take went badly, he simply redid it until it came out right.

  One of the twelve beggars in the film, the one called “the leper,” was in fact a real beggar, and when Luis found out that he was being paid three times less than the others, he protested violently. The producers tried to pacify him by promising that on the last day of the shoot, the hat would be passed, but Luis only got angrier. Workers shouldn’t be paid by charitable contributions, he raged, demanding that the leper collect a paycheck every week, just like all the others.

  The “costumes” in the movie are authentic; we scoured the outlying districts of Madrid for them, particularly under bridges, giving poor people new clothes in exchange for their rags, which were then disinfected but not washed. Dressed in these clothes, the actors felt their poverty in a real way.

  While Luis was shooting, I hardly ever saw him; he’d get up at five in the morning, leave the apartment well before eight, and not come back until eleven or twelve hours later, only to eat a quick dinner and fall asleep immediately on the floor. Yet there were moments of relaxation, like launching paper airplanes from our window on Sunday mornings. We didn’t remember how to make them very well, so they flew awkwardly and looked quite bizarre, but the one whose plane landed first was the loser. (The penalty consisted of having to eat a plane seasoned either with mustard or with sugar and honey, depending on the preference.) Another of Luis’s pastimes was to hide money in unlikely places and give me one chance to find it using the deductive method; I found it an effective way of padding my secretarial salary.

  When our brother Alfonso died in Saragossa, Conchita left, but she returned from time to time to our skyscraper with its huge bright apartments, now transformed into sober offices. We often went out to eat with friends at Doña Julia’s, one of the best taverns in Madrid. Unfortunately, Doña Julia had been corrupted by Alatriste, who once left her an eight-hundred-peseta tip for a two-hundred-peseta dinner, so the next time I ate there she gave me an astronomical check. I was surprised, but paid without a word, typically refusing to haggle over money matters. Later, however, I mentioned it to Paco Rabal, who knew her well. When he asked her why she’d charged me such a monumental sum, she replied, “But he knows Señor Alatriste, so I thought he was a millionaire.”

  During this period, I used to go every day to what was almost certainly Madrid’s last peña, which took place at an old café called the Viena and brought together José Bergamín, José-Luis Barros, the composer Pittaluga, and the matador Luis-Miguel Dominguín, as well as several other friends. We greeted each other with the secret freemason’s sign, just to defy Franco.

  Censorship in Spain was, at the time, notorious for its petty formality, and since Viridiana’s original ending showed her knocking at her cousin’s door, entering, and the door closing slowly behind her, the board of censors rejected it out of hand. I had to invent a new one, which in the end was far more suggestive than the first because of its implications of a ménage à trois. In this second ending, Viridiana joins a card game being played between her cousin and his mistress. “I knew you’d end up playing tute with us,” the cousin smiles.

  In any case, the film created a considerable scandal in Spain, much like the one provoked by L’Age d’or; but, happily, the hue and cry absolved me in the eyes of my Republican friends in Mexico. Hostile articles appeared in L’Osservatore Romano, and although the film won the Golden Palm at Cannes, it was outlawed in Spain. The head of the cinema institute in Madrid, who’d gone to Cannes to accept the award, was forced into a premature retirement because of it. Finally, the affair created such a storm that Franco himself asked to see it, and according to what the Spanish producers told me, he found nothing very objectionable about it. After all, given what he’d seen in his lifetime, it must have seemed incredibly innocent to him, but he nonetheless refused to overturn his minister’s decision.

  In Italy, the film opened first in Rome, where it was well received, and then in Milan, where the public prosecutor immediately closed the theatre, impounded the reels, and sued me in court, where I was condemned to a year in jail if I so much as set foot in the country.

  The whole affair still amazes me. I remember when Alatriste saw the film for the first time and had nothing to say about it. He saw it again in Paris, then twice in Cannes, and again in Mexico City, after which he rushed up to me, his face wreathed in smiles.

  “Luis!” he cried happily. “You’ve done it! It’s wonderful! Now I understand it all!”

  I had, and still have, no idea what he was talking about. It all seemed so simple to me—what was there to understand?

  On the other hand, when de Sica saw it in Mexico City, he walked out horrified and depressed. Afterwards, he and my wife, Jeanne, went to have a drink, and he asked her if I was really that monstrous, and if I beat her when we made love.

  “When there’s a spider that needs getting rid of,” she replied, laughing, “he comes looking for me.”

  (Once in Paris, in front of a movie theatre near my hotel, I saw a poster that said, “By Luis Buñuel … the Cruelest Director in the World.” Such foolishness made me very sad.)

  The Exterminating Angel was made in Mexico, although I regret that I was unable to shoot it in Paris or London with European actors and adequate costumes. Despite the beauty of the house where it was shot and my effort to select actors who didn’t look particularly Mexican, there was a certain tawdriness in many of its aspects. We couldn’t get any really fine table napkins, for instance, and the only one I could show on camera was borrowed from the makeup artist. The screenplay, however, was entirely original. It’s the story of a group of friends who have dinner together after seeing a play, but when they go into the living room after dinner, they find that for some inexplicable reason they can’t leave. In its early stages, the working title was The Castaways of Providence Street, but then I remembered a magnificent title that José Bergamín had mentioned when he’d talked to me in Madrid the previous year about a play he wanted to write.

  “If I saw The Exterminating Angel on a marquee,” I told him, “I’d go in and see it on the spot.”

  When I wrote him from Mexico asking for news of his play, he replied that he hadn’t written it yet, and that in any case the title wasn’t his. It came, he said, from the Apocalypse, and was therefore in the public domain.

  There are many things in the film taken directly from life. I went to a large dinner party in New York where the hostess had decided to amuse her guests by staging various surprises: for example, a waiter who stretched out to take a nap on the carpet in the middle of dinner while he was carrying a tray of food. (In the film, of course, the guests don’t find his antics quite so amusing.) She also brought in a bear and two sheep—a scene in the movie that prompted several critics to symbolic excesses, including the bear as Bolshevism waiting to ambush capitalistic society, which had been paralyzed by its contradictions.

  In life, as in film, I’ve always been fascinated by repetition. Why certain things tend to repeat themselves over and over again I have no idea, but the phenomenon intrigues me enormously. There are at least a dozen repetitions in The Exterminating Angel. Two men introduce themselves and shake hands, saying, “Delighted!” They meet again a moment later and repeat the routine as if they’d never seen each other before. The third time, they greet each other with great enthusiasm, like two old friends. Another repetition occurs when the guests enter the hall and the host calls his butler twice; in fact, it’s the exact same scene, but shot from different angles.

  “Luis,” my chief cameraman said to me while the film was being cut, “there’s something very wrong here.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The scene where they enter the house is in there twice!”

  (Since he was the one who filmed both sequences, I still wonder how he could possibly have thought that such a colossal “error” had escaped both me and the editor.)

  The Exterminating Angel is one of the rare fi
lms I’ve sat through more than once, and each time I regret its weaknesses, not to mention the very short time we had to work on it. Basically, I simply see a group of people who couldn’t do what they wanted to—leave a room. That kind of dilemma, the impossibility of satisfying a simple desire, often occurs in my movies. In L’Age d’or, for example, two people want to get together but can’t, and in That Obscure Object of Desire there’s an aging man who can’t satisfy his sexual desire. Similarly, Archibaldo de la Cruz tries in vain to commit suicide, while the characters in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie try very hard to eat dinner together, but never can manage to do it.

  Two years after Exterminating Angel, Alatriste suggested I make a film in Mexico on the strange character of Saint Simeon Stylites, the fourth-century hermit who spent forty years perched on top of a column in the Syrian desert. I’d been intrigued by this figure ever since Lorca introduced me to Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend when we were both university students in Madrid. He used to laugh when he read how the hermit’s excrement, which ran the length of the column, looked like the wax from a taper. (In reality, since all St. Simeon ate was lettuce leaves, it must have looked more like goat turds.)

  And so one very rainy day in New York, I set out for the Public Library on Forty-second Street to do some research. But when I looked up what I knew to be the best book on the subject (by Father Festugières), the card was missing from the catalogue. As I turned around in frustration, what did I see but the man sitting next to me, who was holding the card in his hand.