by Carlos Rojas
“This never happened!” he exclaimed in agitation, pounding the arm of his seat, for all of it seemed a mockery of his tragedy, as personal and untransferable as his own existence or voice, which no one could live or speak for him.
“How could it not have happened if I’m here now! If I’m dreaming you whoever you may be! Look at the stage and don’t be insolent.”
Another of those transitions, still invisible to the eyes of the dead, occurred and changed the scene. The sky was a concerted howl of sirens and a latticed brilliance of searchlights. In the distance, an increasingly remote Madrid blazed and trembled beneath the bombs. He was in a bus that seemed to be traveling on the Valencia highway. The almost full moon lit the road like a parody of those medieval tales where the Milky Way led pilgrims toward the west. He woke after a brief sleep to which he had surrendered out of anxiety more than fatigue. The vehicle advanced hesitantly, its headlights turned off, past endless fields. (“Rafael, these streets and the fields around Madrid will fill with the dead, covered in their own blood. This city will be shelled and bombed until many of its neighborhoods crumble into ruins.”) By the light of the moon he recognized Don Antonio Machado, sitting next to him with bowed head, his hands on his knees. With his mind still befuddled and half awake, he thought and said to himself that this sick and aged man, for whom he never felt greater admiration and who, in turn, despised everything he had written, was the greatest Spanish-language poet of the last century, as he himself was of the present. He was certain the old man’s poems and his own would survive the ideas and aberrations of the men bombing the city, the men defending it, and perhaps Madrid itself in another time. He repeated in the deepest part of his being that history did not exist, because it almost always was reduced to its own suicide, and only art and literature biologically justified the presence of a people on earth. Then he found himself obliged to admit that as a reader of his own work, and of Machado’s verses, it all left him indifferent, and he hoped only to survive the unspeakable madness of a murderous war.
Looking around the bus flooded with moonlight, he recognized the poet’s entire family. His mother, a tiny, wrinkled old woman who seemed a centenarian or halted at some imprecise point between a century of life and a useless immortality. Two of his brothers, his sisters-in-law, and his nieces. Ten or twelve souls, frightened and numb, like a tribe at the dawn of the world, fleeing the last monsters they would soon fight for the earth, or perhaps pursued by the ghosts of forebears who lived and died without ever having been completely human. On other seats, with their wives and household goods, he saw Ramón Menéndez Pidal, director of the Academy of the Language, with his squared beard; José María Sacristán, another director, but this time of the asylum at Ciempozuelos; Dr. Arturo Duperier, president of the Spanish Society for Physics and Chemistry, for whom each year the press predicted a Nobel Prize; Isidro Sánchez Covisa, of the Academy of Medicine; the poet and painter José Moreno Villa, who drank pitchers of beer in a single, indifferent swallow, and many others half hidden in the silent semidarkness. When his mind cleared he remembered that all of them were part of an expedition of intellectuals, privileged brains, as old Valle Inclán might have said ironically if he hadn’t had the good taste to die shortly before so great and preposterous a tragedy, whom the Alliance of Antifascist Intellectuals evacuated from Madrid to Valencia to keep them out of danger in the ambiguous name of a doubtful posterity. At that precise moment he felt Machado’s hand, a palm too hard and firm for so sick a man, resting on one of his knees as if looking for a place to lean on. “Do you remember the first time we saw each other?” he asked in a quiet voice. He pretended to have forgotten in order to please the old man and not tangle the threads of those memories he was weaving laboriously at the back of his narrow, half-closed eyes behind his glasses. “I’m not really sure, Don Antonio. I think I was still a boy … ” “Exactly, you were a boy and were going to school in your village. I happened to visit it with an inspector for elementary education whose name I never found out. I was surprised by your eyes, too sad for a boy your age. I asked what you wanted to be in this life and you replied in a way that was oblique but very clear: ‘I like poetry and music.’”
“It’s absolutely true!” he exclaimed, unable to contain himself, but he did refrain from grasping the clothing or arm of the apparition, the virtual image of the man they kept him from being if he had lived.
“Of course it’s true! It all is except for you, you’re my dream. Don’t raise your voice or wake the dead who’ve been acquitted! How many times will I have to reprimand you for that? And don’t wake me up either, though I’m alive and haven’t been tried. Look at the stage again.”
The landscape was different and the bus had changed into an ambulance. Now they were crowded together: Don Antonio Machado, his mother, smiling and mummified in a no-man’s land between the world and eternity, his brother José, his sister-in-law Matea, and himself. Machado was thinner and older, almost as ancient and fleshless as his own mother. From a green thermos that a little while before he had held against his chest, he was pouring them coffee into Catalan bowls. Another city lay behind them, this time Barcelona, also being gutted by bombs. They were traveling on a highway that was covered with an exodus of cars, carriages, trucks, horses, wheelbarrows, other ambulances, soldiers, deserters, men, women, the wounded, children, beneath a quartz winter dawn. “I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had coffee so early,” Machado said to him. “In any event, this coffee must be made of peanuts or who knows what it’s made of. Whatever it is, how courteous the Catalans are, as Cervantes already testified at moments of bitter humor, though his critics still haven’t noticed that aspect of his parody. The coffee we drank at night in Madrid probably wasn’t pure either. Do you remember when we left Madrid? The city seemed about to fall at any moment, but ironically, it’s still resisting and now we’re about to lose Barcelona, the aforementioned Cervantean fountain of good breeding, which I suppose will welcome the Fascists with open arms. What was I saying? Recently, in no time at all, my mind wanders.” “You were speaking about the night we left Madrid,” he replied, warming his hands on the sides of the bowl. “That’s right! They evacuated us in that bus for privileged brains, as you repeated, quoting poor Valle Inclán. Save the intellectuals and afterward, in due course, pregnant women, the old, and the mentally retarded. Do you remember those nights in the Madrid cafes? Don’t you think we did harm to Valle Inclán by telling so many stories about him and enlarging his legend beyond the conceivable?” He didn’t reply because he seemed to sense that the dying man wouldn’t have listened to him. “At least now everything will be clear for the historians, the strategists, and the foreign diplomats. Before you know it Barcelona will fall and from the point of view of history, which is what we learned to call destiny from the Greeks, we’ll have lost the war. Humanly speaking, I’m not so sure. Perhaps we’ve won it, though the time hasn’t come to be aware of that.”
“What happened to Don Antonio Machado?” he was surprised to find himself asking the apparition, as if admitting his reality without noticing it.
“A better question is what happened to me and how did I come to dream you in the image and likeness of my youth. It’s curious; perhaps, even if it’s paradoxical, I ought to speak now of my old youth. We think of age as the accumulation of years at the present moment. But we also refer to it when we evoke times lost in the past: our adolescence and even our childhood,” his ghost continued, between reflective and pretentious.
“For example that Sunday in another era, when my parents, my brother and sisters and I saw Machaquito and Vicente Pastor cross the Buen Retiro in an open calash in front of The Fallen Angel,” he interrupted almost in spite of himself, as if wanting to put to the test this shade that, being the ghost of a man who never was, also tried to be the phantom of himself.
“Precisely!” the old man agreed. “That same morning I saw Monet’s La Gare Saint Lazare. My father ridiculed the painting, w
hich he even called a blotch. Our mother told us that Monet, like Velázquez himself in another century, tried to capture the lights, air, and chiaroscuro of a fleeting instant: the moment the locomotive enters the station. Notice that it all fits together. Individual life and collective history are merely the sum of impressionistic moments subject to the law of chance, which is the negation of all laws.”
He stopped before he could reply. With a gesture in which there was a touch of the effeminate and another touch of the authoritarian, he pointed at the theater, where the scene was quickly changing again. Once more he was seen on the stage, though now and at the front of the proscenium one would call him considerably older. His age oscillated between how old he was when they killed him (“ … shot in the back, calling me queer”), how old he thought he looked in hell, though there were no mirrors on the spiral, and the age of either of the ghosts transformed into two versions of his supposed advanced years. The setting represented a semicircle, very similar to certain classrooms at Columbia University when he was there as a hypothetical student, recovering from the sorrows of dark love following a failed suicide attempt during the ruinous days of the Depression in America. (“Dazzling streams at the feet of the line of unemployed workers waiting for Al Capone’s charity soup at the refectory of Saint Patrick’s.”) At the front of the classroom, facing the desks of boys and girls arranged in tiers, he was speaking in English about Don Antonio Machado. Now he had white hair and was visibly thinner. With the weight he had lost, and bent over by half a century, beneath a head widened by white temples, he looked almost as broad-shouldered as his father had been. His English was that of a calash driver from Gibraltar, and he was convinced that his American students, who seemed to be scribbling notes, did not understand a word of anything he said. Only a girl with green eyes, like the Melibea, perhaps Jewish, of Rojas, or Proust’s Albertine, who may have been an adolescent boy in Sodom though she was also a lesbian in Gomorrah, watched him, smiling, with no pretensions of writing down absolutely anything. “In the Spanish Civil War” (perhaps without knowing why he made an effort to say it with capital letters), “I had to lose two cities, Madrid and Barcelona, with Don Antonio Machado … We were evacuated from Madrid in the fall of 1936, and from Barcelona to France in January 1939. I’ve never felt closer to him, a sick, dying man at the time, than in those circumstances of a mass exodus. I couldn’t say the same about his work, which I always admired, though at a distance, never identifying with his poetry. In ‘A Young Spain,’ Machado attempts to summon in extremely solemn terms a future redemptive youth. He calls it divine, clear, pure, transparent, and even clear-sighted. He compares it to fire and to a diamond. Forgetting the relationship between cause and effect, though strangely conscious of the depraved decadence of his own time, he delegates to the youth of the near future a regenerative task, as they liked to call it at the time, born of spontaneous generation and parthenogenesis. As he says in ‘Portrait,’ an autobiographical poem, in his veins there are drops of Jacobin blood, though his verses do not necessarily correspond to his political convictions. However, in another poetic portrait, this time a sonnet dedicated to Azorín, the old anarchist who shifted to the right, he calls him an admirable reactionary precisely for his disgust with Jacobin squabbling. The Spain that dawns in ‘Ephemeral Tomorrow,’ after a polar night filled with yawns, will be the Spain of rage, of ideas demanding vengeance with torch in hand, according to Machado’s rhetorical prophecy. To this kind of retributive utopia, forged, he says, in the solid past of the race, forgetting that from the same quarry comes the other Spain, which he always denounced, the Spain of bullfighters, flamenco dancers, and church bells, the Spain of philosophers nourished by monastery soup, the devout Spain of Frascuelo and Carancha … ” Strident bells rang and he ended the class. The students picked up their notebooks and went out in groups. Only the girl with green eyes, like the possibly Jewish Melibea of Rojas, or Proust’s Albertine, who perhaps was an adolescent boy in Sodom though she was also a lesbian in Gomorrah, slowly approached the dais to speak to him.
They were conversing quietly when the scene froze anew in the light projected by the windows upon the semicircle. With their heads very close together, the two of them remained on stage, the young woman paralyzed like Lot’s wife on the road to Segor (“I shall give you my daughters! I shall give you my daughters for you to know them and conceive in them! All of you use them and heal your sickness before the One, The One Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken, destroys this city as punishment for your sins!”); he was stopped at the very moment he was closing his briefcase, still listening to her.
“What does that mean? What place is this, where in the United States?”
“How many times must I repeat that nothing is anything and probably we’re not anyone? As for the place, I know it very well because I live there now. But its name doesn’t matter, because every point on earth is the same point. We’re on the edge of a different period in my life,” the apparition continued. “Though you, in your innocence, or rather your ignorance, couldn’t predict it. Everything happened as you’re going to see it, though it could’ve happened some other way.”
“Everything? What’s everything?”
“Nothing, just like us, as I just told you so you could immediately forget it. You’re incorrigible,” replied his grotesque, aged double. “But I won’t lose the hope of educating you, if you remain in my nightmare. Prepare to witness the most didactic of spectacles.”
(WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?) The madman, or madmen, who controlled the magic lantern of a sort, changed slides but not protagonists. A window covered by Venetian blinds, like the ones he had seen during a distant summer in Vermont, opened onto a copper late afternoon, similar to the ones that had dazzled him so often when he left the Columbia library or on the bridges over the East River. At the height of the windowsill, and in a room that the half-light infused with a vague aquarium atmosphere, stood a bed with a yellow bedspread, identical perhaps to the one on his single bed in the Rosales house. Yet in this new retrospective incarnation, he had never taken refuge on Calle de Angulo or been pursued like a mad dog, because he had stayed in Madrid, obeying an accurate presentiment. In a whirlpool of memories and contradictory feelings, where for a few moments he thought he might drown, his recollection of the single bed where he had spent so many nights awake, trembling and afraid he’d be arrested before dawn, became confused with the other bed on stage, at the bottom of the Venetian blinds, in the scarlet of dusk. A shriek of horror, scandalized though not free of a certain complacency, very similar to the one Falla perhaps gave vent to when he read for the first and last time the “Ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar” and the dedication that began it, broke off at the back of his throat. In the bed next to the window, slim and with white hair, the way he had looked in the classroom but completely naked now, he was embracing the girl with very green eyes, like Fernando de Rojas’s Melibea or Marcel Proust’s Albertine, who was completely naked too. They were going to make love but were still talking in whispers that spread throughout the theater in hell. They were going to make love, with the inevitable fatality that very soon the sun would set, perhaps in obedience to identical laws, but their intimate murmurs sounded all over the theater. “I never was with a woman before,” he confessed, “with men, yes, and perhaps with too many because I desired very few and loved even fewer. I did love others and never dreamed of going to bed with them. (‘I looked into his eyes. He lowered them and his shoulders seemed to collapse under the overcoat tailored in London. My attendants, the flamenco boys, began to smile at one another and exchange depraved whispers.’) My ode to Whitman is my proof of identity and my confession.” “I was with only one man, my father, who raped me a year before he killed himself,” replied the girl with green eyes who perhaps was a youth in Sodom though she was also a lesbian in Gomorrah. (La femme aura Gomorrhe et l’homme aura Sodome.) “Since then I’ve made love with several women, whom I never desired
though I couldn’t repudiate them either. I thought I gave myself to them out of hatred for my father and all men. Now I see that in their embraces and caresses I was looking for you without realizing it.” “You also must have looked for your dead father in me, since at my age I could’ve been him,” he replied, holding her to his body. “You would’ve looked for him to bestow your forgiveness, because the same wind will sweep away all flesh and perhaps he raped you to justify his suicide. If we don’t have the courage to pardon one another, we won’t deserve having been born.” The sun set and night came through the window. From the orchestra seats, and perhaps because he had never loved anyone, man or woman, the way he loved his poems, or to put it more precisely, his own vertigo, standing at the boundaries of the universe when he created them, he thought of his verse where the evening left with the night over its shoulder. On the stage, darkened now, there were sounds of moans, groans, murmurs, sobs, panting, and howls. Afterward, nothing, only silence. An interminable silence.