by Luis Bunuel
When I think back today, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and The Phantom of Liberty form a kind of trilogy, or rather a triptych. All three have the same themes, sometimes even the same grammar; and all evoke the search for truth, as well as the necessity of abandoning it as soon as you’ve found it. All show the implacable nature of social rituals; and all argue for the importance of coincidence, of a personal morality, and of the essential mystery in all things, which must be maintained and respected.
(As a footnote, let me just mention the fact that the four Spaniards who execute the French prisoners at the start of the film are played by José-Luis Barros (the tallest), Serge Silberman (with the band around his forehead), José Bergamín (the priest), and me (hidden behind a beard and a monk’s cowl.)
When I made The Phantom of Liberty, I was seventy-four years old and seriously entertaining the idea of a definitive retirement. My friends, however, had other ideas, so I finally decided to tackle an old project, the adaptation of Pierre Louÿs’s La Femme et le pantin, which in 1977 became That Obscure Object of Desire, starring Fernando Rey. I used two different actresses, Angela Molina and Carole Bouquet, for the same role—a device many spectators never even noticed. The title was prompted by Louÿs’s beautiful phrase “a pale object of desire.” Essentially faithful to the book, I nonetheless added certain elements that radically changed the tone, and although I can’t explain why, I found the final scene very moving—the woman’s hand carefully mending a tear in a bloody lace mantilla. All I can say is that the mystery remains intact right up until the final explosion. In addition to the theme of the impossibility of ever truly possessing a woman’s body, the film insists upon maintaining that climate of insecurity and imminent disaster—an atmosphere we all recognize, because it is our own. Ironically, a bomb exploded on October 16, 1977, in the Ridge Theatre in San Francisco, where the movie was being shown; and during the confusion that followed, four reels were stolen and the walls covered with graffiti like “This time you’ve gone too far!” There was some evidence to suggest that the attack was engineered by a group of homosexuals, and although those of this persuasion didn’t much like the film, I’ve never been able to figure out why.
21
Swan Song
ACCORDING to the latest reports, we now have enough nuclear bombs not only to destroy all life on the planet but also to blow the planet itself, empty and cold, out of its orbit altogether and into the immensity of the cosmic void. I find that possibility magnificent, and in fact I’m tempted to shout bravo, because from now on there can be no doubt that science is our enemy. She flatters our desires for omnipotence—desires that lead inevitably to our destruction. A recent poll announced that out of 700,000 “highly qualified” scientists now working throughout the world, 520,000 of them are busy trying to streamline the means of our self-destruction, while only 180,000 are studying ways of keeping us alive.
The trumpets of the apocalypse have been sounding at our gates for years now, but we still stop up our ears. We do, however, have four new horsemen: overpopulation (the leader, the one waving the black flag), science, technology, and the media. All the other evils in the world are merely consequences of these. I’m not afraid to put the press in the front rank, either. The last screenplay I worked on, for a film I’ll never make, deals with a triple threat: science, terrorism, and the free press. The last, which is usually seen as a victory, a blessing, a “right,” is perhaps the most pernicious of all, because it feeds on what the other three horsemen leave behind.
The demographic explosion, on the other hand, strikes me as so terrifying that I still dream of a cosmic catastrophe that would wipe out two billion of us. Of course, a disaster of this kind would make sense only if it were the result of a natural upheaval—an earthquake, for example, or a plague. I have great respect for these natural forces, whereas I can’t endure the makers of petty disasters who bury us a little deeper every day in our communal grave while telling us, hypocrites that they are, how “impossible” it is to do otherwise.
Imaginatively speaking, all forms of life are equally valuable—even the fly, which seems to me as enigmatic and as admirable as the fairy. But now that I’m alone and old, I foresee only catastrophe and chaos. I know that old people always say that the sun was warmer when they were young, and I also realize how commonplace it is to announce the end of the world at the end of each millennium. Nonetheless, I still think the entire century is moving toward some cataclysmic moment. Evil seems victorious at last; the forces of destruction have carried the day; the human mind hasn’t made any progress whatsoever toward clarity. Perhaps it’s even regressed. We live in an age of frailty, fear, and morbidity. Where will the kindness and intelligence come from that can save us? Even chance seems impotent.
I was born at the dawn of the century, and my lifetime often seems to me like an instant. Events in my childhood sometimes seem so recent that I have to make an effort to remember that they happened fifty or sixty years ago. And yet at other times life seems to me very long. The child, or the young man, who did this or that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me anymore.
In 1975, when I was in New York with Silberman, we went to an Italian restaurant I’d been fond of thirty-five years before. The owner had died, but his wife recognized me, and I suddenly felt as if I’d eaten there just a few days before. Time is so changeable that there’s just not much point in repeating how much the world has changed. Until I turned seventy-five, I found old age rather agreeable. It was a tremendous relief to be rid at last of nagging desires; I no longer wanted anything—no more houses by the sea or fancy cars or works of art. “Down with l’amour fou!” I’d say to myself. “Long live friendship!” Whenever I saw an old man in the street or in the lobby of a hotel, I’d turn to whoever was with me and say: “Have you seen Buñuel lately? It’s incredible. Even last year, he was so strong—and now, what terrible deterioration!” I enjoyed playing at early senility, I loved reading Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse, I no longer showed myself in bathing suits at public swimming pools, and I traveled less and less. But my life remained active and well balanced; I made my last movie at seventy-seven.
During the last five years, however, true old age has begun. Whole series of petty annoyances attack me; I’ve begun to complain about my legs, my eyes, my head, my lapses of memory, my weak coordination. In 1979 I spent three days in the hospital plugged into an IV; at the end of the third day, I tore out the tubes, got out of bed, and went home. But in 1980 I was back in again for a prostate operation, and in 1981 it was the gall bladder. The enemy is everywhere, and I’m painfully conscious of my decrepitude.
The diagnosis couldn’t be simpler: I’m an old man, and that’s all there is to it. I’m only happy at home following my daily routine: wake up, have a cup of coffee, exercise for half an hour, wash, have a second cup of coffee, eat something, walk around the block, wait until noon. My eyes are weak, and I need a magnifying glass and a special light in order to read. My deafness keeps me from listening to music, so I wait, I think, I remember, filled with a desperate impatience and constantly looking at my watch.
Noon’s the sacred moment of the aperitif, which I drink very slowly in my study. After lunch, I doze in my chair until mid-afternoon, and then, from three to five, I read a bit and look at my watch, waiting for six o’clock and my predinner aperitif. Sometimes I cheat, but only by fifteen minutes or so. Sometimes, too, friends come by to chat. Dinner’s at seven, with my wife, and then I go to bed.
It’s been four years now since I’ve been to the movies, because of my eyesight, my hearing, and my horror of traffic and crowds. I never watch television. Sometimes an entire week goes by without a visitor, and I feel abandoned. Then someone shows up unexpectedly, someone I haven’t seen for a long time, and then the following day several friends arrive at the same time. There’s Alcoriza, my collaborator, or Juan Ibañez, a superb director who drinks cognac all day long, or Father Julian, a modern Domini
can, an excellent painter and engraver and the maker of two unusual films. He and I often talk about faith and the existence of God, but since he’s forever coming up against the stone wall of my atheism, he only says to me:
“Before I knew you, Luis, my faith wavered sometimes, but now that we’ve started these conversations, it’s become invincible!”
I reply only that I could say exactly the same thing about my unbelief, wondering all the while what the surrealists would say if they could see me in a tête-à-tête with a Dominican.
In the midst of this rigidly ordered existence, writing this book with Carrière has been but an ephemeral interruption. I’m not complaining; after all, it’s kept me from closing the door altogether. For a long time now, I’ve written the names of friends who’ve died in a special notebook I call The Book of the Dead. I leaf through it from time to time and see hundreds of names, one beside the other, in alphabetical order. There are red crosses next to the surrealists, whose most fatal year was 1977–78 when Man Ray, Calder, Max Ernst, and Prévert all died within a few months of one another.
Some of my friends are upset about this book—dreading, no doubt, the day they will be in it. I try to tell them that it helps me remember certain people who’d otherwise cease to exist. Once, however, I made a mistake. My sister Conchita told me about the death of a young Spanish writer I knew, and so I entered his name in the lists. Some time later, as I sat having a drink in a café in Madrid, I saw him walk in and head in my direction. For a few seconds, I truly thought I was about to shake the hand of a real phantom.
The thought of death has been familiar to me for a long time. From the time that skeletons were carried through the streets of Calanda during the Holy Week procession, death has been an integral part of my life. I’ve never wished to forget or deny it, but there’s not much to say about it when you’re an atheist. When all is said and done, there’s nothing, nothing but decay and the sweetish smell of eternity. (Perhaps I’ll be cremated so I can skip all that.) Yet I can’t help wondering how death will come, when it does. Sometimes, just to amuse myself, I conjure up old images of hell. Of course, in these modern times, the flames and the pitchforks have disappeared, and hell is now only a simple absence of divine light. I see myself floating in a boundless darkness, my body still intact for the final resurrection; but suddenly another body bumps into mine. It’s a Thai who died two thousand years ago falling out of a coconut tree. He floats off into the infernal obscurity and millions of years go by, until I feel another body. This time, it’s one of Napoleon’s camp followers. And so it goes, over and over again, as I let myself be swept along for a moment in the harrowing shadows of this post-modern hell.
Sometimes I think, the quicker, the better—like the death of my friend Max Aub, who died all of a sudden during a card game. But most of the time I prefer a slower death, one that’s expected, that will let me revisit my life for a last goodbye. Whenever I leave a place now, a place where I’ve lived and worked, which has become a part of me—like Paris, Madrid, Toledo, El Paular, San José Purua—I stop for a moment to say adieu. “Adieu, San José,” I say aloud. “I’ve had so many happy moments here, and without you my life would have been so different. Now I’m going away and I’ll never see you again, but you’ll go on without me.” I say goodbye to everything—to the mountains, the streams, the trees, even the frogs. And, of course, irony would have it that I often return to a place I’ve already bid goodbye, but it doesn’t matter. When I leave, I just say goodbye once again.
I’d like to die knowing that this time I’m not going to come back. When people ask me why I don’t travel more, I tell them: Because I’m afraid of death. Of course, they all hasten to assure me that there’s no more chance of my dying abroad than at home, so I explain that it’s not a fear of death in general. Dying itself doesn’t matter to me, but not while I’m on the road. I don’t want to die in a hotel room with my bags open and papers lying all over the place.
On the other hand, an even more horrible death is one that’s kept at bay by the miracles of modern medicine, a death that never ends. In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival. Sometimes I even pitied Franco, kept alive artificially for months at the cost of incredible suffering. And for what? Some doctors do help us to die, but most are only moneymakers who live by the canons of an impersonal technology. If they would only let us die when the moment comes, and help us to go more easily! Respect for human life becomes absurd when it leads to unlimited suffering, not only for the one who’s dying but for those he leaves behind.
As I drift toward my last sigh I often imagine a final joke. I convoke around my deathbed my friends who are confirmed atheists, as I am. Then a priest, whom I have summoned, arrives; and to the horror of my friends I make my confession, ask for absolution for my sins, and receive extreme unction. After which I turn over on my side and expire.
But will I have the strength to joke at that moment?
Only one regret. I hate to leave while there’s so much going on. It’s like quitting in the middle of a serial. I doubt there was so much curiosity about the world after death in the past, since in those days the world didn’t change quite so rapidly or so much. Frankly, despite my horror of the press, I’d love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers. Ghostly pale, sliding silently along the walls, my papers under my arm, I’d return to the cemetery and read about all the disasters in the world before falling back to sleep, safe and secure in my tomb.