by Carlos Rojas
“Was this absolutely necessary?”
“Necessary or not, that’s how it happened,” the apparition replied.
“And afterward?”
“Afterward? Did you believe perhaps that life is a serialized novel? There is no afterward or before. Only an eternally perishable present whose fiction yellows in photographs.”
“Or in the theaters of hell.”
“Or on the stage of this nightmare of mine, which you insist on calling your hell. So be it, if it makes you happy, but don’t miss this scene, which will be the last.”
The scene changed again and in a sense revolved around itself. Now he saw the garden that the bedroom window, protected by Venetian blinds, overlooked. Completely transformed into that ghost, with the same head and identical tanned age, he was pruning laurels at the foot of some pines. A flock of blackbirds, like those at the rear of The Garden of Earthly Delights, flew beneath a slate-colored sky. (“In the midst of these people I’d live enclosed in an invisible bubble, like an alien. Like those lovers in Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights, imprisoned in a soap bubble or a bladder mislaid at a witches’ Sabbath.”) That woman, the one with green eyes like Melibea or Albertine, came to the window and called him by name. From the orchestra, it took him a few moments to recognize her, and he could identify her only by her voice when she began to speak to him in English. She too seemed older or prematurely aged, with short white hair around a face where only her eyes, perhaps of a Jewish girl of the Renaissance or a youth who had been a girl, like the Mercuries of Giovanni da Bologna in the precise words of the poet Rubén Darío, on the eve of the Great War, and at the time that two bullfighters rode in a calash past The Fallen Angel to the astonished admiration of some Granadian provincials, and as a gay, confident world lazed indifferently at the wrath of God ready to destroy it, only her eyes were the same. “The cultural attaché of the Swedish embassy called and is on the phone. He is desperate to speak to you and says they’ve given you the Nobel Prize in Literature for … let’s see if I remember exactly, ah, yes! una contribución sin precedentes, unprecedented contribution to the poetry of Spain and to Western Civilization, a la poesía de España y a la civilización occidental. No, no, excuse me! To the Cultural Heritage, la herencia cultural de la civilización de Occident. You can’t tell me it doesn’t sound harmonious and beautiful even though it seems somewhat rhetorical.” From the bottom of the firmament the blackbirds returned, tracing a figure eight in the sky. He left the pruning shears on the ground and waited, looking at them, open and motionless, like a parody of a stork, while he rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Listen, what shall I tell this man?” She pretended to be impatient. “You could tell him that so notable a distinction doesn’t belong to me because my life is a loan. I’m convinced they would have murdered me in Granada, just as they killed my brother-in-law Manolo, if I had boarded the Andalucía express on the afternoon Martínez Nadal took me to the station. (‘Rafael, I changed my mind and I’m staying in Madrid. Please, go to the compartment and bring my suitcase. Don’t ask me anything now.’) If I survived it was at a very high price, since from that time on my poetry has seemed the work of a stranger: a man very different from me who is embarrassed that all of you wrote so many theses on his dead work. Standing shades make up the literary kingdom of Mr. Nobel, that right-wing dynamite maker. But in the final analysis, I must answer to my conscience for what I write. Tell this Swedish gentleman that I renounce his prize in order not to repudiate myself.” “It would be better if you told him personally.” “I will in due course. As soon as I finish cutting the laurels,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. The two burst into laughter and the scene shattered like a stained-glass window broken by a stone. Then the stage sank into the darkness of a dreamless sleep.
“Lies, all lies!” he yelled in exasperation in the orchestra.
“Why is that?” his apparition asked, his expression between astonished and confused.
“Because everything, absolutely everything I saw is a cruel mockery of what happened!”
“Are you sure about what you’re saying? Why are you shouting like that? Really, boy, you’ll end up waking me if you haven’t already roused the innocent dead.”
“Sarcasm and a carnival trick! … ”
“I thought it was a very faithful interpretation. I don’t know why you’re protesting so much.”
“I’m not your dream, wretch!” Almost without realizing it he began to use familiar address with the latest intruder. “I took the Andalucía express that afternoon, because in a sense I was obliged to.”
“Who would oblige you to?”
“The same destiny you denied. I mean, the sensation of fulfilling a fate lived through twice, once that day and the other in a very distant time, perhaps before watches and calendars.”
“You’re completely mad! Why would I dream about a lunatic like you, so similar to who I was in my youth? This is the only mockery, and now I wish I had wakened. Go on, shout louder and wake me!”
(“I believe I’ve lost my mind. But you aren’t dreaming me in your nightmare. In fact you exist only in my hallucination.”) Thinking about his words to the other ghost, the one with the pink bald head, dark temples, and eyeglasses, he lowered his voice until it was almost transformed into a murmur that the apparition made an effort to follow, coming close to his face.
“I reached Granada and then Huerta de San Vicente just in time for them to kill me. With the uprising triumphant and the reprisals started, I hid in the Rosales family’s house. But they came for me even there. (‘ … he told me you did more harm with your pen than others with a pistol.’) An individual named Ruiz Alonso seemed in command of the men who arrested me. He took me to the Civilian Government building, offered me some broth, shook my hand, and left me alone in a room with scratched walls that smelled of dried blood. I could describe for you in detail each instant of what happened but I prefer to cut it short because any victim is ashamed of his suffering. Those who are proud of their martyrdom are the ones who think they deserve it. I wasn’t tortured physically, thanks, I believe, to the good offices of the Rosales family. At least, that’s what Pepe Rosales told me when he visited a short while before my death to promise I would be released. I remember that, overcoming the contempt I must have inspired in a hot-blooded drinker like him, more for my chastity than my pederasty, he pinched my cheek when he said goodbye and said: ‘Sleep well tonight, my boy, and tomorrow we’ll all hug you at home and I’ll kiss you on this cheek if you promise not to pinch my ass.’ I smiled and lied, saying I would pray for the victory of the military. He looked around, even though we were alone in that drab room, and said in my ear: ‘Don’t pray for anybody, my boy, because we all deserve hell. This war has divided Spain in two, like a river, and on both sides the only ones doing their duty are the killers.’ The acting civilian governor interrogated me in person and in terms that don’t concern you. Aside from Pepe Rosa-les, Don Manuel de Falla visited me the night before the crime. He came to beg my forgiveness for having hated me. But I won’t say more about this either because what we spoke about is none of your business. I forgave him everything and didn’t want to forget anything, since rancor is a completely useless passion in eternity. My hating those who killed me would be as absurd as my parents’ despising having given birth to me. I’ll keep the end to myself, because it’s inalienable and mine though you might want to mis-represent it. It’s impossible to imagine but simple to describe. Some shots in the back at the edge of a ravine and another, the coup de grâce, to shatter the heads of the dead.”
“Exactly right!” the intruder corroborated. “The coincidence cannot be clearer!”
“The coincidence? What are you talking about now?”
“Everything you told me is the same thing I often imagined in my house in America. In other words, my fate in Granada if instinct hadn’t taken me off the Andalucía express that afternoon. It began as a game and turned into a kind of obsession. I even
understand your reticence in refusing to comment on certain passages of the farce. I didn’t want to confess any of that to my own wife. Still, one day I’m going to write it, just for myself. When one has refused the Prize of the Dynamiter, flatly and unhesitatingly, one can allow oneself moderate pleasures.”
“Enough! Enough! I’m not going to tolerate this parody of my tragedy from you!”
“How would you stop it, wretch? When did dreams ever govern the dreamer?” He paused and smiled, shrugging his shoulders. “You wouldn’t try to destroy me after absolving your imaginary killers?”
“I’m not trying anything. I want only to be left alone. Alone with my memories, if I can’t free myself or they don’t want to free me from my sleeplessness.”
“I’ll go, I’ll go,” the apparition yawned. “Dreams, like the flesh, end in tedium. It’s time to wake and perhaps write about our dispute. Didn’t you ever think about an interminable autobiography, infinite, really, where you told not only all we were but also all we could have been in all their variations? It would be the only appropriate kind for any life. Even in ours the two of us would fit, and who knows what extended multitude of men in our image and likeness”—he was shaking off his drowsiness and rubbing his eyes with sharp knuckles. “All together, like dice thrown from the same cup. You know, son, un coup de dé jamais n’abolira l’hasard. The combinations of the fortuitous are infinite, in all the avatars of identity and their Ortegan consequences. Here, for example, are you and I like a pair of facing mirrors, in the middle of the same desert, though each comes from a different time. You, arrested in my youth and on the day I didn’t take the train going to Granada. I, shackled in my present old age.”
“And the desert?”
“I call my dream the desert and you say it’s hell. Perhaps we’re both right.”
The old man was becoming blurred, as if someone were erasing him with a fingertip, taking away volume, outlines, and profile. Eventually he disappeared without leaving a trace or vestige in the theater or his seat. Alone again, he looked around him. The stage became a dark emptiness, the proscenium open to infinity, like the mouth of a tunnel excavated in the middle of the firmament. He heard or thought he had imagined the sound of footsteps in the vicinity of the corridor and the alabaster lights. Immediately he became aware that he was isolated and abandoned or abandoned and isolated on that spiral, where the dead were blind or invisible to one another. His doubles, the phantoms, having disappeared, the notion of his insignificance oppressed him. Eternity was the greatest of sarcasms, an illogicality more absurd than perishable life. In this untransferable theater before his trial, he was nothing but a spectator of his past in an endless succession of shades condemned to the same wakefulness. Perhaps the first of them, his most distant ancestor, saw on the stage memories of a recent time he had experienced when still a gorilla or an amphibious fish, with the eyes of a man, in the dark jungles of the beginning of the world.
The last of his aged replicas, the one living in the United States with the woman in whose eyes and behind the gates of Gomorrah Melibea and Albertine had met, told him his martyrdom in Granada was only a dream of his, as were Ruiz Alonso, the Rosales family’s house, the yellow bedspread, the piano, the Sacred Heart, the translations by Salinas, the window facing Calle de Angulo, the Rosales family themselves, and Valdés’s interrogation. Of the two nonsensical grotesques in their hypothetical old ages, the one with white hair and dark traces seemed more hateful. He imagined him in an America very different from the one he had known. The one of the unemployed, the beggars, the supplicants in lines for watered soup, the one of despair, of prostitutes, of suicides. The America that he predicted would be devoured one day by hissing cobras climbing like lianas to the highest terraces. (Brother, can you spare a dime? The one of the multitude that urinates, of the multitude that vomits, of the blacks disguised as janitors, the one of the king of Harlem tearing out the eyes of crocodiles and banging the hindquarters of monkeys with a spoon, of narrow defiles of masonry and brick under an empty sky, of the moon buried in the Jewish cemetery.) All of that America at the edge of the apocalypse, waiting for a resurrected Bosch to paint it before the fall. (“ … and Dalí still very young, not dressed as a janitor like the king of Harlem, whom he would take many years to meet, but as a soldier, the newest replacement, when his brush was still imperfect and he struggled to imitate everybody, from Picasso, naturally, to Chagall, passing through Matisse, telling me in his deep voice and Ampurdanese accent: Each painter responds to his environment, just as each child is nourished by the juices and salts and potash and will-o’-the-wisps and lotteries and cellos that constitute the maternal womb. Here in Cadaqués, I can’t paint like Bosch in Flanders. And I, giving him almost inadvertently the advice that would transform the little soldier and amateurish dauber into one of the most original painters of this insane, suicidal century: That’s precisely why you should keep painting like Bosch. You could spend your whole life in the undertaking, but you’ll end up discovering the great artist you have hidden under your blood, in your unconscious.) That America, yes, indelible and magnificent in its vast tragedy, stretching from coast to coast and from ocean to ocean with its pus and its ringworm, its lice and its scabs, transformed into the other America of gardens with laurels, bedrooms with pale ironed curtains, and the Swedish cultural attaché announcing the granting of the Dynamiter’s Prize in Literature.
He began to pity the simpleton who attempted to represent him in an old age snatched away by bullets. He imagined living in another unspeakable hell where he would be incapable of writing because he had lost his identity. A hell that ironically, paradoxically, was not the real one, the spiral of wakefulness, but the one he had feared so much in life: the renunciation of all he had been on earth. As on so many other occasions, he thought again about the conversation with Alberti and María Teresa León, at the foot of the Maqueda Castle, while the three of them in their incredible, vulnerable youth, appeared on stage where they again experienced the teasel and the merlons. Alberti confessed his uncertainty when it was time to choose between two horrors, ignorance of his own fate in death or its unending eternity. He immediately replied that his panic had another name: the loss of his self, the being who had never been, in no-man’s land. If the destiny of the second apparition had been realized, a very conceivable fate beginning with a fact that only seemed insignificant, his giving up the trip to Granada in time, he would still be living in an America different from the one in his Poet in New York, but at the same time he would be totally distinct from the one who had written that book or, in fact, any other of his more typical works. Stripped of his identity, as you divest yourself of an old, shoddily made suit, he would dream occasionally and always in vain of death at the hands of other men, which in Granada had fulfilled the doom anticipated in some of his plays and poems: in one of the two songs of the horseman, in “Ballad of the One Summoned,” in “Sleepwalking Ballad,” in “Surprise,” in The Public, and in Blood Wedding. An execution that confirmed not only the fate written and described in his own hand but also the universal dimension of his renown as poet, prophet, and martyr.
Old, incapable of writing, and exiled to the American hell of gardens with pruned laurels (Les Lauriers sont Coupés), he could still go on dreaming his destiny, his arrest, and the endless spiral itself. He could dream himself murdered in the fullness of his creative talent. Lost afterward in his orchestra seat or in the curving corridor, until he became aware that the strange construction, a Tower of Babel where shades witnessed their memories without seeing one another, was nothing more or less than eternity. Always in dreams with a woman whose eyes combine Melibea and Albertine, he would feel nostalgia for any lived moment no matter how often memory obliged its representation on the stage, and a desperate desire for nothingness to put an end to insomnia. From the darkened theater and in those nightmares, he would deduce the trial and acquittal of certain of the dead, while Sandro Vasari’s orchestra seats and stage made him infe
r the anticipatory staging of the memories of the living. Finally, dreaming beneath the window with Venetian blinds, he would see himself in the third theater along the corridor: the addition to the theater that would be Vasari’s one day and where now, without his guessing it on earth, his future dead man’s memories were holding a general rehearsal. Occasionally he walked the distance that would take him to the damn theater, knowing the terror it held. In that theater, identical to the others but frosted with cemetery cold, he would witness the appearance of a gigantic cross above the Risco de la Nava, between Portera del Cura and Cerro de San Juan, crowning the basilica that housed the tapestries of the Apocalypse. “And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy … ”
The recollection of one apparition restored to him the memory of the other: the irascible, myopic one with the bald head, pink and polished like rare porphyry. The one who stated with certainty that after almost half a century he still lived hidden on Calle de Angulo, first because of fear of losing his life and now because of disgust with the present world and its vanities. (“If in addition to remembering who we were you maintained the dignity that belongs to us, you too would turn your back on that jungle and shut yourself in with me here in hell.”) According to that ill-tempered phantom, hell was the upper floor of the Rosales family’s house, where they hid him in a long-ago summer to protect him from the fury of crime unleashed. The world considered him dead and disappeared, to his moderate satisfaction, since his extreme passions were reduced to rage and rancor. His protector and jailer who, believing he was saving him, shut him away in a refuge that resembled him, was no freer now to resuscitate him than he was before to betray him. Furthermore, the old man thought himself eternal and also said he dreamed of him on the spiral to the precise extent he needed him in order not to lose his reason. (“You’re chained to my sleep, as he is to my waking, and you’ll continue to appear on nights like this so I can speak with someone other than Luis and solitude does not eventually drive me mad.”) Seized with the fear of having really lost his mind, as he must have felt at other times in his dialogues with phantoms (WHY DON’t YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?), he began to ask himself whether that old man, half demented and driven wild by loneliness, wasn’t correct when he called him one of his dreams and for good measure would not dream of the second ghost, the one who thought he lived on the other side of the world with an ambiguous woman and a garden of laurels.