by Carlos Rojas
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
In the house on Calle de Angulo, 1, life glides by as if on tiptoe in the midst of the crimes of war. Partially hidden behind the latticed window of my bedroom, I see the Rosales father leave punctually every morning and afternoon for his stores called La Esperanza. Downstairs, on the floor with the courtyard with the fountain and white columns, he leaves behind the mother, their daughter Esperancita, an ancient cook who looks as old as the world, and a twisted little maid who stutters. Upstairs, on the second floor, which is almost a separate dwelling, Aunt Luisa says goodbye to me to go to early Mass. “God be with you, child, and don’t do anything foolish. I’ll pray for you.” “Pray for everyone, Doña Luisa, the living and the dead, the victims and especially their killers, who will find it so difficult to enter heaven.” At midmorning, Esperancita brings me a coffee with two cubes of sugar and a copy of El Ideal. Every day, as reprisals for the bombings, it announces executions by summary judgment and doesn’t conceal the shootings with no trial at all. In moments of distress, and always insisting on getting me over to the other side, Luis has confessed to me that they also kill hundreds by the cemetery walls and ravines in Víznar. My brother-in-law Manolo is one of the prisoners, if he’s still alive after having been the socialist mayor of Granada for ten whole days. My poor sister, with her young children, must be suffering unimaginable torment, though it’s shared by thousands of women in Granada. In spite of this vast tragedy, which perhaps lies in wait for me, coming closer each night, it imperceptibly moves away from my spirit, as if it were someone else’s dream. Esperancita has a Falangista fiancé in Madrid, and at this point she doesn’t know whether he’s alive or dead. She tells me about her love, her anguish, even her nightmares of a girl in love, as if I were her older sister or we both loved the same man. I do what I can to calm her: “Don’t worry, dear, everything will work out. Before you know it this absurd war will end and you’ll go arm and arm with your fiancé to the opening of my next play.” She smiles through her tears and asks what I’m writing now. “The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by the wrath of God Almighty and the invention of incest by Lot and his daughters.” “Jesus, how awful! It must be more barbaric than Yerma. When will we see a play of yours with people who love each other, marry, and have children as beautiful as angels?” she asks, still smiling, while she dries her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. “Never, Esperancita, because people have forgotten how to love, marry, and conceive children like angels. They give birth only to monsters and buffoons in their image and likeness.” “You may be right,” she agrees, very serious now. Then she picks up the coffee service, says goodbye, kissing me on the cheek, and leaves quickly. We see each other again in the afternoon, when they bomb Granada. Doña Esperanza Rosales calls up to her sister and me to take refuge on the ground floor. We all squeeze together into a tiny room filled with carved credenzas and embroidered scenes. The women pray or sob to the boom of explosions and the interminable howl of sirens. I’m frightened by my serenity when I recall my earlier cowardice. Two days later El Ideal says another fifteen prisoners chosen at random have been executed in very just revenge for the attack. Another page in the same issue carries the note of protest from several prisoners over the most recent bombardment, which even damaged the Alhambra. It is addressed to His Excellency the Military Commander of the Garrison (“We sincerely hope that all Spaniards will echo our sentiments and cease spilling so much innocent blood, for the good of Spain. Long live Your Excellency!”), and one of the signers is my brother-in-law Manolo. In this way I learn he is still alive.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
At my request, Esperancita has brought up À la recherche du temps perdu, in the translation by Quiroga Plá and Pedro Salinas. If I remember correctly, which in this case would be an unavoidable irony, Proust publishes the first volume of his vast novel, Du côté de chez Swann, on the eve of the Great War. Perhaps there’s no other in the entire saga in which the visual evocation of what he has experienced, from the bell towers and shop windows of Combray to the flowering hawthorn and ruined medieval spires in the domain of the Guermantes, is so transparent. Perhaps the invocation of the past, by the grace of Proust in this part of the Recherche, has no rival in the history of any literature. I even wondered sometimes, after I was dead, whether Proust had managed to see in life and from his asthmatic’s bed the anticipated staging of his memories in his theater in hell, only to translate that afterward into precise words. Up to that point, the work is also the retable of a paradise lost and recovered by memory. Then, with the passage of time and in the transition from Combray to Paris, Marcel moves from Eden to Sodom and Gomorrah. From the idyllic little room in his parents’ country house, where the child narrator reads, dreams, and inadvertently perceives his memories, we come by way of jealousy and the perversion of all love to Jupien’s brothels for queers. The world of the novel and its context in the history of those times matured, were corrupted, and became ready for the wrath of God.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
The reasoning for my defense and my examination of conscience return me to my own Sodom and Gomorrah (“ … When will we see a play of yours with people who fall in love, marry, and have children as beautiful as angels?”). This persecution and enclosure were necessary in order for me to think about Proust and guess the real significance of the play I proposed to write. It all fits together now like the implacable cogs of a watch that shows the hours not of time but of destiny. I supposed I conceived this work of mine, which I already foresee will be unfinished forever, as a Voltairean reply to Don Manuel de Falla for his anger at the appearance of my “Ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.” Yet, and it’s always worth repeating, I’d swear with identical certainty that my poem was written by a believer, and that in spite of himself Falla would have taken me in and hidden me in his house. I also think it’s undeniable that my purpose in writing Sodom and Gomorrah was very different from and of course much more complex than that small vengeance. As I once said to Gerardo Diego, and I think he cited it in that poetic anthology of his that so resembled a hodgepodge, every creative act is a man or a woman going astray in a dark wood, which perhaps ought to coincide on never-drawn maps with the dark night of the soul, where poets lose their way because they don’t know themselves. In fact, and even setting aside my pederast’s remorse and pride, Sodom and Gomorrah, or I should say, the idea of Sodom and Gomorrah, was nothing but the allegory before-the-fact of this Civil War, in which the wrath of heaven is the rage that leads us to persecute and torment one another. After this catastrophe, perhaps we won’t even conceive of incest. But the world of our youth, the one where Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Rafael Alberti, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Luis Rosales, and I reached the age of reason and attained our manhood in the same grouping that shrank or expanded in very few years, will have disappeared forever. Nothing will remain but shattered vestiges scattered by the winds of time, like the pilasters, caryatids, and broken statues of a dead Middle Ages, which Proust found in the meadows along Guermantes way. Perhaps one of these broken ruins is my own work. In another time I might have wanted to believe this was so. Now, the possibility of my writing surviving or not leaves me indifferent. In any case, my Sodom and Gomorrah, unfinished forever and never really started beyond some sketches, would have been not only the foretelling of this slaughter but also the last will and testament of our generation.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
It is Sunday and August whitewashes the sky of the theater on the stage in hell. The swallows fly very high over Calle de Angulo, chasing one another. Church bells are announcing Mass when my father telephones from Huerta de San Vicente. He speaks in a very low voice, which is difficult for me to recognize and understand.
“Son, they’ve killed Manolo. A priest who had already talked to his mother came to tell us. Conchita doesn’t know yet.”
“ … ”
“Your mother went to tell her. I didn’t have the courage, I admit i
t. Those poor children! My poor grandchildren!”
“ … ”
“Son, promise me you’ll be careful! Swear it, yes, you have to swear to me!”
“ … ”
“Son, we’ve had arguments and differences in this life. But none of that means anything. I swear to you too that even now it was worth the grief of having been born to bring you into the world. You are my greatest treasure, and there’s no father on earth prouder and more boastful than I am.”
“ … ”
“Son, I’d give everything for your sake, including your mother and your brother and sisters! May God forgive me! Be very careful! You can’t fail me, never, never, never!”
“ … ”
Abruptly he hangs up the phone without saying goodbye. “ … We’ve had arguments and differences in this life. But none of that means anything.” He speaks to me as if the two of us had died and together on this spiral were taking into account the smallness of the world. Sprawling on a chair, my head down on my chest and my arms wide, I would like to think about Manolo and my sister’s grief. And yet I can recall only my last nightmare in Madrid. Or rather, I don’t recall it, but it comes back to me intact, like one of those unexpected dreams, enveloped in an amphibian, resplendent light, which submerge us in their brightness when we fall asleep suddenly after a very long period of fatigue. Again I see the alabaster shell and the other shell resembling a split log that at the same time was the eye of a Cyclops. The white Bally shoe, in a sea of crimson clouds, at the foot of the cut-down torso of the Grace with the apple in her hand. The goddess embracing the red scallop shell and Paris sleeping, perhaps dreaming everything just as Manolo may be dreaming us now. “A priest who had already talked to his mother came to tell us. Conchita doesn’t know yet.” “We hope all Spaniards echo our feelings and stop spilling so much innocent blood for the good of Spain! Long live Your Excellency for many years!”
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
The cacophony of many cars abruptly braking in the gutter and on the sidewalks brings me to the window, constantly covered by curtains embroidered, I had been told, by Aunt Luisa. A swarm of Assault Guards, all armed with rifles, occupies the street corners and doorways. Others appear immediately, leaning over the railings on the flat roofs beneath the indifferent flight of the swallows. Out of a convertible Oakland come Ruiz Alonso, dressed in a blue coverall, and five other civilians, among whom I recognize Juan Luis Tres-castro, a member, like Ruiz Alonso, of Popular Action. Quickly and without looking at one another they invade the home of the Rosales family, escorted by several police officers. Now I know with no room for doubt or hope that it is all over, or that I’m very close to the irreparable end. Again the old fears and terrifying panic that brought me to this house seem as distant and alien as if another man had suffered them. Not me, precisely, in a far off time, but someone who in an equally remote tomorrow describes me, aware of and surprised by my serenity during these moments. Mine is an indescribable calm, but not very different from the patient fortitude, bordering on indifference, that paralyzed me when the curtain went up at any of my openings, after all the torments of the spirit and anguish of the flesh. Whatever it may be, the will of God shall be done, if it hasn’t already been done under these same circumstances.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
Aunt Luisa has appeared next to me, as white as a dead woman or one resuscitated. She makes an effort to smile at me sadly, with those bright, large teeth of hers that resemble a sheep’s. She takes me by the hand, just as if I were the son she never had, born a man and almost lost at the same moment.
“Child, now let’s pray.”
She has me kneel beside her before a Sacred Heart she keeps beneath a lantern and on the chest of drawers where she stores the sheets, scented with quinces from the plain. With my eyes closed I hear fragments of her Ave Marias, but I cannot give myself over to any of the prayers of my childhood without committing the worst blasphemy for a believer and a writer: taking the name of God or man in vain. I would like to see my parents in the camera obscura where my reason for being is centered. But also a part of myself, the part that silent, nameless, always opposes my most fervent desire and has erased their faces from my memory. Instead I see Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, as I described him in my elegy, having bled to death and transformed into an apparition that climbs the stands in the deserted bullring under the full moon. I’m alone in the arena and know I’m alive, for I’m afraid again even though I may not know the cause of my terror. I call him by name and he turns around, smiling. “You refused to visit me in the hospital and we’ll never meet again on earth or in hell,” he shouts at me. Again I scream his name because I don’t know how to answer him. He laughs openly and responds: “At least I had the death I chose. The one I didn’t want for my son. (‘Son, I’d give everything for you, including your mother and your brother and sisters! May God forgive me! Be very careful! You can never fail me, never, never, never!’) You’ll die the death others impose on you because in this country of iniquity and misfortune, those who do not choose their death are doomed to be killed by imbeciles. Stupidity is our innocence.”
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
Ignacio falls silent in my imaginings and Doña Luisa’s prayers fade away. Standing now, she calls to me from the window. Ruiz Alonso and Trescastro leave the house, gesticulating and apparently annoyed. They get into the Oakland and the driver speeds away even though the street, houses, and flat roofs are still occupied by the Assault Guard. On the first floor it has grown silent and only now do I realize how much my senses had already found out. On the ground floor, the raised voices of an angry dispute between Doña Esperanza and Ruiz Alonso have stopped, at least for the moment. From that moment on, time begins a pause, as unforeseeable as delays in an entr’acte of a drama where death is real. In any case, the dice have been thrown and at the edge of the table one must wait for their inevitable fall.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
The car returns and this time it carries Miguel Rosales along with Ruiz Alonso, Trescastro, and the driver. Miguel has his arms crossed over his chest and is frowning, like a communicant who unexpectedly had begun to doubt his faith. Beside him, sitting sideways, Ruiz Alonso speaks to him with great insistence and a good deal of hand waving. Miguel doesn’t look at him or answer him. Instead he contemplates the two ways out of Calle de Angulo, the one that leads to the Plaza de los Lobos and the one to Calle de las Tablas, both occupied by Assault Guards. At the instant the Oakland stops in front of the house, Ruiz Alonso rests his palm on Miguel’s shoulder, in a gesture in which a supposed affection is mixed with persistence in support of a repeated statement. Miguel moves his hand away, gets out of the car first, and crosses the threshold without letting them precede him. Trescastro and Ruiz Alonso hesitate and bump into each other when they attempt to follow him at the same time. Finally, almost simultaneously, they enter the half-closed door that a police officer opens for them. Another, on duty at one of the corners of Calle de las Tablas, obliges a girl to go back who came out of a doorway, unaware of everything or compelled to because of an emergency. When she turns around, he extends a long neck with a very prominent Adam’s apple and pays her a compliment. Suddenly, with the same unexpected abruptness that ended the raised voices on the ground floor, the circling of the swallows stops. One might even say they all disappeared into the sky or vanished in thin air. As if the light were Lewis Carroll’s looking glass, the one that can be gone through at will, with the world on one side and hell on the other. However, sounds of discord rise again from the first floor, more contained or more fatigued than the earlier ones. They cease and are followed by footsteps on the stairs, at first very hurried and then hesitant and slow. The door to the landing opens and Miguel appears. Up close, one would call him a soul in torment who comes through the walls. In the past few hours he has aged twenty years and little is left of the boy resembling a character in a satirical sonnet of Machado’s: a versifier, lustful, a drinker, yet an anticl
erical Falangista, and above all a devotee of the Virgin of the Alhambra. Little red veins set his eyes aflame with blood, though his lips, very white and numb, meet in an expression of anxiety and bitterness. He avoids looking at Doña Luisa, faces me, and even seems to stand at attention as if saluting a dead man being carried down the street. Then he murmurs:
“Get dressed, please, and while you’re dressing I’ll tell you everything.”
At this moment, precipitated by the tone and timbre of Miguel’s voice, I understand several truths just as the lightning flash illuminates a crossroads, a bell tower, a fountain with seven spouts, or a flowering apple tree where there were only dark shadows. Above all I realize that I’m still in pajamas and slippers. The house shoes with no back or sides Miguel lent to me, and the white pajamas, heavily starched by the one-eyed maid with a stutter, I brought from Huerta de San Vicente. I’m also aware that Miguel Rosales’s proud, disdainful air in the Oakland, when with folded arms he ignored Ruiz Alonso’s words, does not contradict the evidence that the latter’s will has been imposed on his. Finally, I deduce that Señora Rosales refused to turn me over in the absence of her sons. The others must have been at the front, on those tours of vigilance and propaganda from which they return at night, and Miguel was the only one available in the Convent of San Jerónimo, where, according to what Luis has told me, the Falange has its barracks. In fact, Miguel himself will immediately confirm the accuracy of my assumptions. On the other hand, he is silent, though I guess it in his evasive glance, about the fact that if he had resisted Ruiz Alonso until the arrival of his brother Pepe, who has a great deal of prestige and is more powerful, they wouldn’t have arrested me. In fact, and even though Miguel Rosales doesn’t know it, he is no freer to save me than I was to escape through Motril or to ask Don Manuel de Falla for asylum. Everything is arranged and must be repeated as it has already occurred in this place and in another universe.