The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  In reality, hell is a desert very different from the one sketched in that sonnet. It is a spiral, perhaps interminable, in which each of the dead has an empty theater with its curtains raised. I can leave mine whenever I choose through the paneled door that opens with a touch of my hand at one end of the auditorium. Outside, a corridor about ten paces wide slopes upward, which I have walked to the point of exhaustion and which forms part of an arc whose radius I cannot imagine, for the slope of the ground, though real, is almost unnoticeable. From the gradient curve I deduced that an infinite number of turns followed one another around the same center. On the walls of the corridor the transoms of the theater are repeated, fairly far apart but equidistant. The same chrysoberyl light, emanating from I don’t know where, keeps the orchestra section and the covered passage in identical semidarkness.

  At times I stopped to think about the dimensions of hell. It must grow indefinitely, in constantly opening turns, adding new theaters for each new arrival. And it probably won’t close until the last human being comes here, and by then the spiral will be the size of the universe. Don’t ask me why or how I’ve come up with this calculation. I never went past adding on my fingers or multiplying next to the sign of X, but I’d swear I had the dimensions of hell right. Concluded and closed off, it would be as high and vast as the firmament. You could even say that then it would represent another firmament, invisible and parallel to our skies and constellations, empty of humans.

  Like the transoms in the passage, the theaters on this spiral are equidistant. Farther along the corridor, a few hundred paces from my orchestra, is another identical one with the same stage opened at the back. I was there on several occasions but never could detect anyone in the auditorium, before I became certain that each of the dead is invisible to the eyes of all the others in hell. Whoever is there, for I sense that someone is being punished in that place, probably doesn’t evoke his life or his dreams too frequently, for the boards, beyond the proscenium and above the orchestra, are always empty. Even though we cannot see one another, perhaps by virtue of the design that subjects us to this solitude, the visions of our memories or the memories of our illusions are in fact visible when presented on stage.

  The next theater, a replica of the previous one and of mine, just as one tear duplicates another, does serve as the setting for representations. Someone consumes eternity there, devoting himself to strange memories. Through the uncurtained arch, behind the proscenium, a northern city appears. One of those Baltic cities redolent of salt and sun, its light so brilliant and unreal it hurts your eyes beneath the lazy flight of seagulls. Towers, windows, trees, and clouds gleam like precious stones at the heart of a delirium. The houses have red tile roofs onto which discouraged gulls descend, shrieking, while in the distance a flock of storks flies south. On a frozen pond, children wearing caps of scarlet wool glide in ice skates. Gentlemen stroll in top hats along the shore, monocles attached to their lapels, escorting blonde, white-skinned women with blue eyes, their hands hidden in fur muffs. Lights begin to go on in garrets under sloping roofs. Sleepy goblins unwillingly rush to hide under beds and at the bottoms of cedar chests. In large cases of carved wood displaying cornucopias and gilded inlays, all the clocks strike the same hour, while a smiling old man roasts chestnuts at the fireplace in a drawing room. In another room, a lank-haired, extremely thin student in a frock coat and spats cuts out paper dolls with a tailor’s scissors for a little girl, while the scent of elderberry fills the air. Behind the windows of a shop, a cobbler polishes a pair of boots and sings as he works. His is a sad, languid melody that tells of the loves of roots formed by the man-drake in southern lands where men don’t believe in Satan. In the distance a herd of reindeer passes, their horns twisted, their lips pink with cold, their fur covered in frost. In a cabin two hunters warm their frozen hands over a pot where eucalyptus seeds are boiling. The brilliance of many snows has darkened their faces, and they wear sheepskin jackets with curved knives hanging from the waist. In a tavern at the port, fishermen with green eyes and black beards drink dark beer. They are broad shouldered though somewhat hunchbacked, and long scars crisscross their palms. The mounted head of a polar bear looks at them from the wall with its pink glass eyes. In the same living retable an elf in a nightshirt that is too long climbs the stairs of a bell tower, while the back of his shirt trails along the treads and risers of the steps. He carries a lit candle in one hand and a gold umbrella in the other. Brushes and brooms on his shoulder, a chimney sweep crosses the street paved with polished round stones. He is dressed all in black, and his very high top hat of German patent leather is pulled around his ears, like Raskolnikov before his crimes. He passes in front of a bronze statue of a king and queen whose endless shadow extends across the ice to the center of the lake. The monarchs are wrapped in ermine beneath the ruff of their collars and hold scepters in hands crossed on their chests, like the recumbent figures of other sovereigns lying on their tombs. Gulls rest on their shoulders and the wind from the Baltic whips their impassive faces, while evening descends across an amber sky.

  Now everything suddenly changes on stage. The city has been transformed into an Italian villa, perhaps from the Renaissance. Next to a large window, a gentleman contemplates the dusk and sips distractedly from a glass of port. His trimmed, graying beard gives him a certain similarity to a figure by Veronese in The Wedding Feast at Cana. Perhaps to Aretino, who looks up to the heavens after the miracle is complete. In a darkened leather baroque chair with carved armrests sits an old woman in mourning who may be his mother, to judge by their vague resemblance. Through lace cuffs one can catch glimpses of her tiny white hands, furrowed with blue veins. In her right hand she squeezes a Mechelen handkerchief as she reprimands the nobleman in a German I don’t understand. The same salmon-pink late afternoon shines through the windows of a painter’s studio where a cardinal is posing. His mouth has the implacable expression of one who has seen the ghosts of poisoned popes slipping at Advent through the labyrinths of the Vatican rose garden. Very soon, in the semidarkness, his habits will flame like embers enlivened by a gale, while his dark eyes glitter beneath his brows. Around a solid marble table, the kind they say Blasco Ibáñez once had, thirteen velvet-clad councilors conspire in quiet voices. They have identical hands and faces, like thirteen twins. A perspiring rider gallops down the steep street, spurring his horse. At the door of an inn, a plump hussy, her breasts bare, calls to him by name and laughs, arms akimbo. As he passes he lashes her face with his whip, not stopping. A landscape of vineyards opens behind the city. The vines climb the slopes of the hills, cut into terraces of earth as red as cinnabar. Farther away blackbirds fly over a pine grove that perfumes the air with resin and honey. Yellow bees alight on the beds where fennel, thyme, bergamot mint, and pennyroyal all flower. A cloud of martins screeches and a snake slithers into the heather. Slow-moving white oxen, their haunches spattered with dark scabs, the inner corner of their eyes black with flies, come along the path pulling a wagonload of hay. They are led by a drowsy, barefoot boy, his torso bare, who sings a tune in an Italian I don’t understand either. On the square a squad of soldiers parades to the roll of drums, as Milanese and Vatican standards wave. Muskets at the shoulder, a dagger at the waist, gored breeches, polished helmets, breastplates gleaming, mercenary beards and smiles, the troop opens before the church. At the open main door a naked woman appears, her flesh as fair as if exposed for the first time to the light of heaven. She has the gaze of one possessed who perhaps has forgotten her own visions or was blinded when she contemplated them. Her deep black hair falls over her breasts and back while the soldiers present their arms to her, their harquebuses raised to the sun of an afternoon as luminous as on Corpus Christi. The crowd presses as she passes and roars in a frenzy: “Viva, viva la ragione nuda e chiara!”—Long live naked fair reason!

  Whoever pays here for the sin of being born or, for that matter, of dying, deserves to be my brother in hell. I sense this at first and then deduce it, ba
sed on the illusions he invokes on the stage of his theater. It is written, however, that we who are dead will not see or hear one another in the orchestra sections along this spiral. I called to him so often in vain, among the empty seats, as the gentlemen in top hats, the sleepy goblins, the monarchs with ruffs at the neck, the vines on the terraces, the clouds of blackbirds, or the squadron of condottieri moved across the stage! “Who are you? Where are you from? What were you called among men?” My voice sounds enlarged by an echo, which gives it the tone of a baritone cantor, but no one hears me and no one answers. Only silence descends and remains.

  On the other hand, I wouldn’t like to see or speak with the damned sinner in the following theater. That is, the third after mine, ascending along the curve of the spiral. I realize now that I always locate the place exactly, as if I wanted to exorcize it. Just as the savage, when time was still young, painted his monsters in caves to imprison them. This theater fascinates and terrifies me for reasons I would never dare explain to myself, not even in hell. It is identical to the others, but as soon as I set foot in it I am overcome by the cold of frozen cemeteries. At the front of the stage the same scene always appears: a landscape of groves of pine, oak, and poplar where rockrose, which I recognize immediately, blooms. It is the Risco de la Nava, near Cuelgamuros, between the Portera del Cura and the Cerro de San Juan. The Mujer Muerta and the Pedriza must be close by. The panorama has not changed very much since the days of my adolescence or early youth. And it probably hasn’t changed a great deal since another time, when Philip II chose the spot for El Escorial, between the peaks of the Abantos and the one they call his seat in the rock, past Cervunal and the Machotas. Only the forests have grown a little denser as the years passed over the mountains. The greatest change, the only one to my eyes, is the biggest cross I’ve ever seen in my life, defying the heavens on Risco de la Nava.

  At the four angles of the gigantic pedestal stand four statues of the Evangelists. Their grandiose bad taste stuns the spirit. I suppose the women at the base of the cross are the theological virtues. They too injure the stone and the landscape with their pompous vulgarity. The monument presides over an underground basilica that, evoked by whoever evokes it in this theater, seems as large as hell itself. Above the bronze door a Pietà no less sacrilegious than the Evangelists in its aberrant conception, becomes a crude parody of Buonarroti’s. In view of religious sculptures like these, and perhaps to defend myself against their oppressive coarseness, I thought of my ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, which I dedicated to Manuel de Falla, not anticipating how much it would offend him. In it I spoke of seeing Christ alive in the monstrance, pierced by his Father with a burning nail, beating like a frog’s heart on a slide in a laboratory.

  The basilica opens into the rock through a portico that precedes an atrium followed by two angels with swords (Swords Like Lips), apparent guardians of a bronze gate. This divides the construction, as if after finishing it they were afraid they had made it larger than Saint Peter’s in Rome, or than hell itself. The central nave, with its barrel vault, is preceded by a trail of martyrs and soldiers. Six chapels are sheltered there, with a single altar, a triptych painted on leather, and alabaster statues. Part of the vault is successful, for it allows you to see the living rock, contradicting the vile grandiosity of the rest. Great Flemish tapestries hang from the walls. Incredibly, they all represent the Apocalypse.

  Here is the throne, where a man of jasper and sardonyx sits, encircled by a celestial halo as green as newly washed emeralds. Here, also surrounding the throne, are the twenty-four chairs where the twenty-four ancients sit, dressed in white and crowned in gold. Here are the seven lamps that burn before the man of sardonyx and jasper and are the seven Spirits of God, as the Illuminated Evange-list would say. Here is the sea of glass that Saint John would see before the throne, not knowing it was identical to other seas, not yet painted, of Patinir and Dalí. Here are the four beasts recently appeared at the sea and facing the throne. Here is one that resembles a lion, another a wild calf, another a man, and another a flying eagle. Here is each monster with six wings, and six eyes on the wings. Here are the eyes that do not rest day or night, saying: Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. Here are the ancients throwing their crowns at the feet of the man of jasper and sardonyx, saying in turn: Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou hast created all things, and by thy will they must be and were created.

  The truth is I don’t know if the man who imagines this basilica and landscape on stage is still alive or has died. It is possible that our memories precede us into the theaters of hell shortly before our own descent into death. In any case, he existed or wanted to exist only to raise this temple to the exact measure of his pride. An arrogance so vast that, as I said, it almost rivals in appearance the interminable extent of this spiral. Whoever it is who suffers or soon will suffer here, eternally reanimating the same obsessive memories, he fills me with both fear and compassion. He terrifies me because I, who imagined so many creatures in my verses, am incapable of imagining a being like him. And yet I feel compassion, because in spite of his immense self-importance, he never really lived even if he still lives.

  No, the beasts’ eyes never closed before the sea of the Apocalypse. I read that verse when I was fifteen years old and never could forget it. Even now, in hell itself, I can repeat it word for word: “And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him, and they were full of eyes within; and they had no repose either day or night, saying: Holy, holy, holy.” No one noticed, but I was thinking of that passage from Saint John when I wrote one of my most quoted romances: the one I called the Ballad of the Summoned One. Like the eyes of the four beasts at the end of the world (one of them a man, remember), the eyes of Amargo and his horse never close. His restless insomnia takes them through Dalinian landscapes of metallic mountains, where playing cards turn into frost. When they finally announce his death, after two months, he finds peace, lies down, and sleeps serenely, concluding his time on earth. The truth made him free, as Saint John would have said, but Amargo pays for his freedom with his life. His motionless shadow on the whitewashed wall of the bedroom concludes the poem.

  It goes without saying that in retrospect, recalling that ballad, I realize I had foretold my destiny in reverse. If Amargo’s wakefulness, unnoticed by his fate, recalls the endless insomnia of hell, death is not repose or forgetting but the eternal presence of what you have lived in the world and in your soul. You might say that the poet’s obligation is to invent the past that men forget, and foresee the inverted image of all the future, on earth and on this spiral.

  (“Do you know what Pepe-Hillo replied when he was fat, old, and suffering from gout, and they advised him to abandon bullfighting? I’LL LEAVE HERE ON MY OWN TWO FEET, THROUGH THE MAIN GATE, HOLDING MY GUTS IN MY HANDS.”) I thought again of the monsters at the end of the world, full of eyes before the sea of the infinite, the ones the aged virgin Saint John had seen, when Sánchez Mejías died. It was the year of Our Lord 1934 and once again, when I evoke it, I understand how clear the signs were then of the great tragedy awaiting our people and how blind we were not to be aware of them. We always take note of our imminent fate too late, in the world and in this prison of empty orchestra sections and theaters populated by the memory of ghosts.

  Forty bullfighters were seriously wounded that year. Twelve, one a month, died at various points around the Iberian Bullring. Ignacio Sánchez Mejías had already retired twice from bullfighting, always for the same reason: “At my age, a man doesn’t appear in public in pink stockings without looking ridiculous.” Two more times he had renounced his decision and returned to the arena. He was rich and aging, very old for the bulls at forty-three, his age on the afternoon he was gored. At the beginning of August he appeared in La Coruña with Belmonte and Ortega. When Belmonte entered the ring for the kill, he had an Ayala bull, and the sword pierced the back of the animal’s neck, pulling out of
the bullfighter’s hand. Incredibly, the bull leaped to the seats and fell, his horns in the neck of a spectator, slashing him open from ear to ear. Not yet twenty, he died in the infirmary, unconscious and bleeding. At the end of the fight, a telegram came from Madrid announcing the sudden death of one of Ortega’s brothers. Ortega left by car, accompanied by his cousin and Dominguín, his agent. They were still in Galicia when they had an accident and Paco Caballero, Ortega’s relative, died immediately. The bullfighter, overwhelmed by so much misfortune, refused to participate in the event scheduled in Manzanares on the eleventh. The night before, in Zaragoza, where he had just arrived after fighting in Huesca, Sánchez Mejías agreed to replace Ortega, against the advice of his entire crew. The following afternoon they thought he was too fatigued to face more Ayala bulls without running serious risks. The Gypsy toreadors in his crew kept silent about their reasons, at once more terrible and more inevitable. For the past two or three weeks, Ignacio had smelled to them like a dead man. The stink of putrefaction and withered violets that non-Gypsies never could detect was intolerable in small rooms, like the ones in hotels. The flamencos had to make an effort not to tell Sánchez Mejías about it.

  They say Ignacio was exhausted when he arrived in Manzanares after countless hours of traveling on roads ablaze with light and past fields of cicadas. He appeared with Armillita and Corrochano on the afternoon he was gored, when the first bull was his: another Ayala animal, dark and powerful, named Granadino. Sitting on the base of the barrier, the bullfighter made a contrary, suicidal pass. Urged on by the crowd, he tried to repeat it. That was when Granadino gored him in the left thigh and threw him over the barrier. Still conscious, he asked to be taken to Madrid. He had seen the town’s infirmary before the bullfight and thought it was poorly staffed and inadequate. Still, they had to care for him first in Manzanares and bandage the wound, which was bleeding profusely. Perhaps the wound would not have been fatal if it had been treated correctly at the bullring. Nonetheless, from that moment on misfortunes ensued in frantic disarray. On the way to Madrid the car broke down and no one wanted to take Ignacio in his for fear he would stain it with blood. It took forever—hours and hours—to repair the damage and get the vehicle going again. In the meantime, it was necessary to change Sánchez Mejías’s dressings because they were beginning to rot in the hellish heat. When they finally reached Madrid and Dr. Segovia’s clinic, he hadn’t lost consciousness, but a very high fever made him delirious. He shouted for his son and for me. That man who did not seem to have been born of woman but simply carved out of oak had become a child. He howled, asking us to play Simon says and corner tag with him.