The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  “In your dream, who appeared in these theaters?” he asked in a tone that was worried and urgent, though not lacking in firmness.

  “The theater next to the poet’s was vacant and dark, the stage empty,” replied Sandro Vasari. “It would be impossible for me to describe the other one: the third of the four that ascended along the corridor.”

  “Why would that be? Tell me everything you remember. I beg of you.”

  “In its proportions it seemed identical to the poet’s, as I’ve said, but on the stage his recollections didn’t materialize but mine. Inalienable, untransferable memories, because they were imaginings of mine that had life only in my books.” He shrugged almost disparagingly. “From this I deduce that I dreamed the theater I would occupy on the spiral if I had died. Or the future representation of my memories in the theater that will be mine when I die.”

  “You speak as if your dream were … I don’t know how to say it, as if it were a real vision.”

  “I don’t know whether my dream was or wasn’t a real vision, as you call it. I know only that everything I saw seems truer than this café with its people and its tables, than this ashtray of what seems to be aluminum, than you yourself or my own image reflected in that mirror.”

  The old man almost didn’t listen to him. Absorbed, deep in thought, he adopted the same posture and identical gestures as those of his unexpected appearance in the station when I ran into him there as I was leaving Madrid for the last time. If he was leaning his elbows on the bottom of the window then, he leaned them now on the edge of the table, looking at the floor as abstractedly as on that afternoon when he contemplated the platform. Even his jaws seemed to harden, the same as on that day in the distant past, while he strove to order memories, ideas, or fears in that gray head of his. More than aged by the passage of so many years, he seemed disguised as himself in the theater of hell. Dressed and made up by masters, though he was not sufficiently skilled to expand convincingly into the role of the old Ruiz Alonso. Without realizing it, he revealed the man he had been or, better yet, the man he still was and would continue being. (“This is merely a tamed worker! Nothing but a tamed worker! When Gil Robles grows tired of displaying him, he’ll sell him to a provincial circus.”)

  “Did you ever see me on that stage of your dreams, where the poor gentleman”—he paused, as if my name burned his tongue even though he couldn’t say it, or precisely because he couldn’t manage to say it—“where the poor gentleman, may he rest in peace, watched the staging of his memories?”

  Sandro Vasari, the man with the scar, shrugged and stood at the same time that he closed and picked up his notebook. He placed the pen in the breast pocket of his jacket and replied, not lowering his gaze to the old man’s eyes:

  “No, Señor Ruiz Alonso, I never saw you in my dreams when that man’s memories were staged there. Not ever. If you lied to me, as I sincerely believe you did, because many testimonies contradict yours in almost every point, in dreams at least I couldn’t prove it.” He stopped suddenly as he was ready to walk away. “Excuse me, I did see you once and don’t know how I forgot it. In my nightmare, he evoked his departure from Madrid and return to Granada in the summer of his death. His memories appeared accurately in hell. He arrived at the station accompanied by a friend, who carried his suitcase to the sleeper car and left it in the luggage net. They went out to the passageway to say goodbye, and there his manner changed. Filled with anxiety, he pleaded with his friend to leave right away so he could go into his compartment and close the curtains. In the corridor, his back half-turned and looking out the window at the platform, was a deputy for Granada with whom he didn’t want to speak. That traveler, younger by almost half a century, was you. Secretly, so you wouldn’t see or hear him, he told his friend your name: Ramón Ruiz Alonso.”

  Ramón Ruiz Alonso, expressionless and unblinking, contemplated the cups in their saucers. As it cooled the coffee turned gray and looked as if tiny spiders had climbed up from the dregs to weave their webs on the surface. He took a spoon and put it down again on the glass tabletop, making a clinking sound. Then he passed his gaze over his open palms, along the labyrinth of creases that seemed marked with the tip of a knife.

  “It’s very true, but also very strange,” he said at last, shaking his head. “I don’t know how you could know all that if your dreams didn’t illuminate the past. Yes, that friend of his recounted the story afterward, and today his biographies say we met on the Andalucía express. This is the reality, and I never affirmed or denied it. I couldn’t prove or disprove it, because I assumed I never saw him that afternoon. Even so … ”

  “Even so … ”

  In the café, which suddenly had begun to empty out, Sandro Vasari and Ramón Ruiz Alonso formed an unusual picture. The hunched old man, his hands still open, forehead, brows, and eyes reflected in the glass of the table; beside him stood the man with the scar, his energy and circumspection reborn, though not without an obvious note of astonishment when he was already preparing to leave. Together they resembled models for one of those biscuit-shaped pantheons from the period when our parents took us to Madrid for the first time and the French impressionists were on view at the Retiro. Pantheons signed by Mariano Benlliure or one of his outstanding students, in which a patrician old man, carved in alabaster statuary beside a marble table, like Blasco Ibáñez’s, showed his empty hands to the exterminating angel.

  “I did see him and see him again now just as I did then. As you say you witnessed the apparition in your memories, in your dream. A man was with him, almost as young as he was, who resembled a sheep. He must have had his head shaved a little while before and a curly fuzz was beginning to darken his skull.” Ruiz Alonso continued, not looking up from his open hands, his words growing quieter and more spaced apart. “I noticed how he avoided me, obliging me to keep leaning out the window in the passageway, pretending to look at some rustics right out of a zarzuela like The Festival of La Paloma. I don’t know if you understand me because people like that are rare now in Madrid. Women in long polka-dotted skirts, shawls with long fringe around their shoulders, and kerchiefs on their heads, escorted by men in caps pulled to one side, tight trousers, and starched handkerchiefs around their necks, armed with willow branches like foils. I don’t know how much time I spent looking out the window, watching them run along the platform, sometimes to catch a train that wasn’t ready to leave yet, other times buying pink candied almonds, or simply showing themselves off as if the station were a theater, while I knew I was obliged to listen to their laughter, their remarks, their shrieks. That kind of sentence, imposed by the gentleman, may he rest in peace, seemed as endless to me as eternity itself.”

  “What else happened?”

  “Nothing else. The man who resembled a sheep left, and the poet, God rest his soul, said goodbye to him from the car steps. I watched, pretending not to see anything, so they in turn wouldn’t see me. After so many years, the whole scene must seem completely crazy to you. But I know very well what I felt … ”

  “What did you feel, Señor Ruiz Alonso?”

  “That gentleman went back to his compartment and closed the doors and curtains, as if I were carrying the plague,” said Ruiz Alonso, not listening to him. “Yes, exactly as if I were carrying the plague, or was a leper or monster. Look, he had no right to treat me that way. He didn’t, I assure you. I’m a poor typesetter, a workman, retired now, and proud of it. But back then I was also a deputy and author of a book about corporatism, with a prologue by Señor Gil Robles. Above all and more than anything else, I was an honest man, a Christian gentleman even though I was a worker, which doesn’t discredit my honor but increases it. Yes, sir, increases it! I had a name that now they want to stain with all kinds of lies, because these days and in this country there’s no honor and no shame. I moved through the world with my head high because my conscience was clear, and I knew that Almighty God, at whose feet I will soon lie prostrate, looked upon my face as He looks upon it today.”

/>   “Did you also hold your head high when the governor asked you to arrest that man, Señor Ruiz Alonso?”

  “The acting governor.”

  “Fine, the acting governor.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Velasco. That was his name. I don’t know why I remember it now.”

  “Did you hold your head high when Lieutenant Colonel Velasco asked you to arrest the poet?”

  “Yes sir, I did, because an inevitable justice, divine justice, seemed to settle our debts! If he hadn’t avoided me on that train, I still would have taken him prisoner, but then there would have been no pride or satisfaction on my part, limiting myself strictly to fulfilling my duty. If I had known they were going to kill him in a few days, I would have been horrified, but I still would have arrested him because, as I told you before, in wartime orders are sacred. Command is hard and obedience can be even harder. If I insisted on carrying out my duty alone, it was to show him that I didn’t hide behind the curtains at the moment of truth. I, a humble typesetter, could take him to the Civilian Government building with my face as our only escort, because my presence was enough to keep anyone from assaulting him.” He paused, shaking his grieving head, only to raise it immediately and face Sandro Vasari. “Am I as reprehensible as they say—the Irishman, the Frenchman, and someone from Barcelona who’s from a very pious family so I don’t know how he turns up—when heaven decreed I could arrest him, knowing its will coincided with my satisfaction for the insult in the Andalucía train? Answer me from the bottom of your soul: Am I or am I not an honest man?”

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  If man is the guilty conscience of the universe, the only consciousness that can detect its almost absolute dehumanization, then man, alive or dead, on earth or in hell, is perhaps the most complex of its constructions. Sandro Vasari (“Why do you insist, a Spaniard though your name sounds Italian, Señor Vasigli, on writing a book about that poor unfortunate instead of dedicating a Mass to his soul?”), I repeat, Sandro Vasari, born perhaps after other men killed me or a child when they did, dreamed about me in hell, awaiting trial. He saw both the seats and the stage, which one day will be assigned to him on the spiral, and this seems an even greater portent to me. Here and now, in the interminable wakefulness of my own death, and returned to my assigned theater, I perceive with dismay the close correspondence between dreams and eternity in the warp where life and death are interwoven and become identified. I would also affirm, though I can confess this certainty only to myself, that literature is the closest key to this labyrinth where the living and the dead are commingled.

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  To die is to sleep or perhaps to dream, says Hamlet. Immediately, and having a presentiment of his destiny on this spiral, which at one time or another we all inhabit, he asks himself with surprising clairvoyance what dreams await him in death. That consideration leads him to reject suicide, fearful of the worst nightmare: this long insomnia that only acquittal at trial can bring to an end. Three centuries after Hamlet, Proust believed as a boy that each spectator watched performances at the theater in isolation (“ … In other words, as we read history or a voyeur shamefacedly spies through the keyhole”). When he was finally taken to see Berma in Phèdre, he discovered the stage shared by the entire audience. He then deduced that artifice, an inheritance of Greek democrats, transformed each person into the center of the theater. In hell, I now deduce that in this way we would have a Ptolemaic world, the boxes, orchestra seats, mezzanine, and top balcony, in the middle of a Copernican firmament. Two concentric universes, their signs forever opposed.

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  Perhaps a way of preparing myself before I am judged is to evoke Hamlet and Proust in order to infer their oblique presentiments of hell and their sojourns there. The theater Proust imagined, to the admiring praise of Dalí, where each spectator would observe the staged work isolated and separated from the rest of the audience, is nothing but his own conception of À la recherche du temps perdu: a dead time of people and places destroyed and devastated by war, which the novelist patiently resuscitates in a bedroom lined with cork in order to better remove himself from the other world around him. At the same time, and perhaps this is the most original of his portents, it is an oblique analogy to hell, where every deceased person awaiting trial or condemned at trial contemplates the return to the life of his past, blind to the others and exiled among them. In another, no less notable, coincidence, the Recherche begins under the sign of sleeplessness and sleeplessness is hell, where the dreams in death feared by Hamlet become staged memories. Or where at times the staging of memories also precedes the arrival of those predestined to watch them in their corresponding theaters.

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  On earth they never tried me. They killed me without imposing a sentence. Until the day Ruiz Alonso and his underlings came to arrest me in the house on Calle de Angulo, 1, which perhaps no longer exists in Granada though it rises again on my stage, I thought I was as safe from death as if I hadn’t been born. I didn’t know then either how to prepare for my trial, which, ironically, would never come. The house, which belonged to the Rosales family, is all white on the stage beneath that August’s sun. It has two stories and a terrace, with a well-lit door on the narrow, shady street. It has a courtyard, a fountain, a marble staircase, a grilled window facing the sidewalk, and another side door. This opens onto narrow steps that lead to the second floor, almost isolated from the rest of the property. The window illuminates the library of my friend the poet Luis Rosales, who is almost never here now except at night. Luis has hidden me on the upper floor with the complicity of his family, even though all his brothers are Falangistas and the Civilian Government has decreed the death penalty for anyone who shelters a fugitive. The Rosales family hid others as well or arranged for their escape from Granada. On several occasions I was wakened from an uneasy sleep by strange voices and footsteps on the ground floor. I never asked anyone anything. Surviving in this city of terror these days is as private and shameful as an act of love between two men.

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  If the systematic memory of my dying were part of my defense before the hidden judges, they would condemn me again with no trial at all. Recollections of the Civil War, when the fields of Spain filled with the dead as I predicted to Martínez Nadal, are not in order. They are jumbled together in streaks of images, glittering, almost flashing behind the stage. Luis Rosales, back from the firing lines, comes one night to my hiding place. The front must be very odd, because the unmarried Rosales brothers often return from there at nightfall to sleep in their parents’ house. Luis has come from the Motril sector, where, as he assures me, he can get me to the Republican lines without any danger, as he has done already with many others. And to be fair, he says he also helped several fugitives from the government to escape to this side. “In those fields you get lost without hearing a shot or finding a soul,” he reiterates in a low voice so as not to wake his aunt Luisa, who shares the upper floor with me and takes care of my cavalry almost like a mother. “Taking you to the other side would be the easiest thing in the world.” I shake my head and say I don’t want to be hunted down like a rabbit coming out of a wood or beside an irrigation ditch. On several occasions we’ve had the same useless debate, and now Luis withdraws and unexpectedly concedes, perhaps so as not to make me think that he and his family are moved by the desire to be free of my presence. “Whatever you want,” he agrees, shrugging. “In the final analysis, they can’t arrest you here either.”

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  “In the final analysis, they can’t arrest you here either.” After the panic of the first few days, I almost began to believe it. But in some buried part of my soul throbs the clouded presentiment that I am not master of my fate. There, in that chamber excavated, perhaps, in the center of my being, I knew I had lived my final day in Madrid before, step by step and instant by instant, it was enough to abandon myself to that obscure memory, lost
in an existence earlier than the irrevocable time of clocks, to almost predict forgetting the coffee cup on the balcony or the presence of Ruiz Alonso on the express. I also know now that if I had yielded to Luis’s advice, I would have passed over to the government’s side through Motril. In a war where officers of the Falange, like the Rosales brothers, sleep at home at night, the front is undoubtedly deserted in many places. And yet I even exaggerate my fear of escaping when Luis suggests it to me, resorting to the memory of my extreme panic when I came to hide in this house. In reality, and given the reign of terror that the rebels imposed on Granada, the risks of those of us who hide in the city are greater than the dangers of a flight across the countryside. I fell into similar contradictions even before I hid on Calle de Angulo, when Luis himself urged me to seek refuge in the house of Don Manuel de Falla. In his opinion, I would be safer there than with his parents because no one would dare burst into the home of a universally celebrated composer so well known for his piety. I guessed immediately he was right, and sensed that Don Manuel, who had been so fond of me in my early, more ambitious youth, would have helped me gladly even if only not to miss the chance to perform a charitable act. Even so, I rejected his urging and cited the fact that Falla had silently become angry when I decided to dedicate the “Ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar” to him. A Catholic as traditional and sensitive as he would never forgive me for having compared the Lord of his devotions and mine, though I was a nonpracticing believer, to the heart of a frog pierced by a needle. The truth is I chose the Rosales family’s house as a refuge and want to remain here until they come to arrest me, because in this way I fulfill my inevitable destiny. One might say that the book of my life and death, including my sleeplessness and banishment on the spiral of hell, precedes me and determines my fate and my actions.