The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  Nightmares and apparitions brought him to the memory of a living man, the one he had seen talking with Ruiz Alonso in the Lyon. (“I dreamed about hell and saw it as an endless spiral along which a carpeted corridor ascended. Some theaters open onto the corridor, and a dead person corresponds to each one. And in precisely one of those theaters, the man you arrested and, according to what they say, also denounced, is awaiting trial … ”) Ruiz Alonso became impassioned then, replying that he wasn’t an informer and did no more than follow other people’s orders in arresting him. Evoking his protests in a parenthesis, he had a presentiment that the truth would never be clarified. He himself, victim of the obscure intrigue, was indifferent to it, not because he had forgotten the arrest and the shooting, even less because he had forgiven them, but because everything on earth, including personal tragedies, was material as distant in eternity as horses, ants, and men on the beach from the far-off perspective of the ocean.

  Another distancing of a moral order was imposed by Sandro Vasari with regard to Ruiz Alonso. Though they both sat at the same table, one would say he separated himself from him with an invisible rod, as if his presence were as irritating as it was inevitable. From the beginning of the interview, marked with crosses of Lorraine, Vasari had been his absolute master. He made Ruiz Alonso confess to truths perhaps hidden until then and turned a deaf ear when he assumed he was lying. And yet, toward the end, he didn’t seem as sure of himself. Almost without taking a breath between sentences, he told Ruiz Alonso he had never seen him on the stages of hell when he dreamed them, then immediately said the contrary and admitted that in a nightmare he witnessed the poet’s arrival at the Andalucía express in the company of Rafael Martínez Nadal while Ruiz Alonso, looking out a window in the passageway, pretended to be unaware of his presence. Returning to Sandro Vasari and Ruiz Alonso, he thought he detected a correlation of analogous situations, like those of a single text in various languages on one palimpsest, between the meeting of those two men in a Lyon filled with amorous couples and readers of rustling newspapers, and his own dialogues with his extremely aged doubles in hell. In all three cases an old man apparently at peace with his conscience confronted a young man who turned out to be his hidden, buried truth. Except for all the distances and variants, the coincidence could not help but amaze him. He even asked himself whether that conversation between Ruiz Alonso and Sandro Vasari (“ … What did they do to you, Señor Ruiz Alonso? / Defamed me. Yes, sir, defamed me in writing and in published books”) had ever happened. In other words, the words of a very obvious academic question, wasn’t everything his own dramatic imagination, performed on the stage of the theater that one day would belong to Vasari after his death? He even supposed an unconscious reason for the three phantasmagorias, the one in the Lyon, and the appearances of his ghosts. The three cases were no more and no less than embarrassing versions of the perpetually insoluble dispute between him and his father. Between his pederasty and the old man’s patriarchal virility.

  Almost immediately, and with no effort other than letting himself be carried along by the evidence, he found himself obliged to change his mind. The quarrel with his father had been settled since the day of his arrest on Calle de Angulo. In reality, it had never existed (“Son, I’d give everything for you, including your mother and sisters and brother! May God forgive me! Be very careful! You can never fail me, never, never, never!”), even though his brother-in-law had to be shot and I had to fear losing him to find the courage to make that confession. In this way, and emphasizing the evidence, he saw how his entire reasoning or, to be more accurate, his attempt at reasoning, was invalidated by that call to the Rosales family’s house. A few days later, and after suffering as cruel as it was absurd, they killed him like an animal. There was never the slightest doubt, he told himself ironically, about that fact. Everything else, however, seemed debatable and uncertain. From that point on, the questions stopped being academic and were restated in a different context. Was it even possible that death was merely nothingness, plain and simple nothingness, as Luis Buñuel predicted and proclaimed so often in his obsessive atheism? (“Death, my dear, is nothing more or less than deafness and blindness forever and ever, amen. Without sight or hearing, the other senses encyst and petrify.”) Influenced perhaps by those words, he described death as a heap of extinguished dogs in his requiem for Sánchez Mejías. No, though it might be in the briefest of parentheses or a hurried note in the margin, that line in his elegy came from a more complex source. Almost unwillingly, he confessed it to himself. A few summers before the fatal goring, he had been with Alberti and María Teresa at Fernando Villalón’s farm. It made him uneasy when the other three began to talk about spiritualism, and Fernando, as if subdued by sleepiness, boasted of being able to conjure the souls of dead dogs. It was a motionless, silent night, studded with stars like spurs and fragrant with jasmine and mint. Suddenly, and panting heavily, Villa-lón slipped into sleep and the horizon filled with the barking of a furious pack of hounds. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun when that cattle-raising medium and surrealist poet awoke. He remembered nothing and was very surprised to see everyone overcome by fright.

  What happened afterward should have been reduced to a collective hallucination. He tried to believe this even knowing he was translating it into the terms of a rationalist club. Dogs and men really ended in a silence of muffled voices and yelps. This was how he had ended forever, yes, forever, when they shattered his back with bullets and he fell into the ravine on the night of the crime. There was no sleepless consciousness, no hell in a spiral, no orchestra seats, no corridor ascending in alabaster light, no prosceniums, no scenery, no memories revived on stage, no apparitions, no gold letters on windows of trains, no trial, no possible redemption. Only death, which was nothingness. And yet, yes, yes, and yet he could not deny the incontrovertible evidence, because the existence of redemption and judgment was obvious to him (WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?), as well as train windows where the process and hearing were announced to him in letters of fused, burning gold, as clear as the ghosts of his two doubles, or the prosceniums and stages where memories were represented for a population of shades invisible to one another in the alabaster light of passageways and orchestra seats. Paradoxically, all that was as undeniable as absolute annihilation in the rectangular, interminable peace of death. After all, Fernando Villalón himself, a man who said he lived among the living and the dead at the same time, once declared that the important thing wasn’t existing or not existing but knowing who one is.

  From I he passed to he, or rather, to be clear, from himself to Sandro Vasari, the man with hair flat against his skull and a cut on his cheek. He thought he was slowly unveiling his own truth, just as Dalí tore successive layers of rice paper from his collages until he revealed the intended composition, or the one that appeared by virtue of the Calderonian magic of art, where all dream was life. His absolute death was possible, the death of body and soul, of desire and memory, beside the ravine of so many crimes. In that case, all that remained of who he was, the little boy dressed as a girl and a knight on a pony of papier-mâché at the age of one in a photograph hidden in his parents’ bedroom, the boy wearing a knitted tie in the Retiro, the lover of Dalí, the comrade of Sánchez Mejías, the pederast who paid for the kisses of Gypsies and then hated himself for hating them, the author of his verses and plays, the bard who scandalized Bebé and Carlillo Morla reading them The Public, the poet who also offended the piety of Don Manuel de Falla when he dedicated the “Ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar” to him, believing it would please him, the man who saw the aurora borealis over the lake at Edem Mills and the long streaks of the rainbow on the Manhattan asphalt, all, all of it, all, all of him would be nothing but a handful of mute bones rotting in the ground.

  Sandro Vasari told Ruiz Alonso that he wasn’t trying to write a book but a dream. “The one I had on the first of April of this year. I dreamed about hell and saw it as an endless spi
ral along which a carpeted passage ascended. Some theaters open on to the corridor and each of these corresponds to a dead person. And in one of the orchestra seats, the man you arrested and some say also denounced awaits judgment.” When they had reached that point, Ruiz Alonso protested fiercely, shouting that he hadn’t denounced anyone. Sandro Vasari let him have the last word, perhaps without believing him, and continued the account of his nightmare. Perhaps what had happened after his death could be reduced precisely to the dream of the man with the cut cheek and the hair smoothed flat against his head. Or rather, to put it better, to the dream he wanted to write, as he confessed to Ruiz Alonso, and perhaps was writing. In such circumstances, which to a spiritualist cattle rancher and poet like Villalón would seem as evident as the appearances of the dead, he would have no other voice, no other being than the ones lent to him by his author. The man who drew crosses of Lorraine in a notebook as he listened in the Lyon to the confidences of Ruiz Alonso without looking at him, would have begun to sketch a spiral in the same notebook when he was barely awake on the morning of April 1st in some year. Then, he would have drawn lines resembling the arms of the crosses along the spiral at four distinct points not very far from one another. One would be his theater in eternity, the next the one of the stranger acquitted and freed from wakefulness, the third the orchestra seats prepared when the day arrived for Vasari himself, the last the parterre of that being whose name he did not know or whose name he did not care to recall, before the setting of the Apocalypse. From then on, and as Luis Buñuel said to him one day, quoting René Clair, the dream of the man with the cut face would be transformed into a book and needed only to be written.

  He himself knew how fragile, though not invisible, were the boundaries between dream and literature. As he said to Gerardo Diego, the poet was a creature lost in the dark night of the soul where he went hunting, blind and ignorant of the prey he pursued. How and why verses arose, with their essence and form, from so much disorder no one knew, or at least he would never know. He had only the certainty, he added then in a way whose rhetorical pedantry he could not escape now, that he could destroy the Parthenon every night and erect it again from the beginning every daybreak. He had other certainties as well as doubts in that hell constructed to the measure of his destiny by Sandro Vasari. Above all he wondered what the extent of his liberation would be, if in some way he became free, in the book that undoubtedly bore his name. Were his acts, his feelings, his reflections his own or were they all foreseen, as he foresaw the fate of El Amargo in his “Ballad of the Summoned One”? The messages interpolated in the staging of his memories, PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL, WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED? Were they real advice from his creator or merely false short cuts to lead him into dungeons of paper and words in a monstrous board game? If he could have spoken to Sandro Vasari, supposing the partially conceived creature were capable of arguing with his biographer in hell, he would ask him only to be as fair with him as he was with his own characters. In the days when he published volumes of poems and staged dramas, when his unexpected fame preceded him wherever he went, he never considered himself better than the helpless humanity in his verses and plays. His was the brittle abandonment of the roll call of Gypsies, statues, dead men no one knew, women denied maternity, girls seized by black grief, blind dead women, knifed smugglers, blacks covered in mushrooms, crushed squirrels, minotaurs, bullfighters gored open from top to bottom, goblins, masks, girls drowned in wells, chimeras, and marvelous shoemakers’ wives. Perhaps the reason for his success with the public and even among people who despised his pederasty was the vulnerability intimately shared with his characters. So that flattery would have been one side of the coin of his fate. The other was being shot to death in the back, which perhaps had been carried out to determine whether he was a creature of flesh and blood or a creature from his books.

  Suddenly he felt terribly tired. With almost amused curiosity, he wondered whether the fatigue was his or had been imposed by the implacable Sandro Vasari. In any case, if he had been able to sleep without contradicting himself and without having been acquitted at trial, he would have sunk into an endless sleep, like the sleep of someone who sinks into a lake and encounters a blind mirror as the center of the world. From those hypothetical ciphers of a futile language, the lake and the world, he moved to the spiral that Vasari would believe as certain as himself, if he was a truthful, authentic writer. He told himself, or believed he sensed it, that then it wouldn’t be enough for their creator to point out the four theaters where his novel took place. He also would have to write down the action and divide it into another four acts whose names were revealed to him, as obvious as his life or his death: THE SPIRAL, THE ARREST, DESTINY, and THE TRIAL.

  THE TRIAL

  The bolt slides and the same soldier who tried to hit me with his musket (“How do you dare, wretch? In my presence!”) opens the door. Startled at first, then immediately terrified, I recognize him by the childish dewiness that still fills his eyes.

  “Move, you son of a bitch, the governor wants to question you!”

  “The governor? … ”

  “You’re lucky, you damn queer. The governor is as good as a saint. If I didn’t have orders from him to bring you to his office in one piece, I’d squash you like a scorpion, you fucking red, and we’d save the bullets we’ll shoot you with.”

  “I want to see Pepe Rosales! Pepe told me yesterday I’d be released today! I want to see Pepe Rosales!”

  “We shot Pepe Rosales at dawn for hiding you. You’ll see him soon in hell!”

  I guess that he’s lying, not even stopping to think about it. I read it in his twisted smile and dewy eyes, while he takes me by the arm and pushes me toward the open door.

  “No! Pepe’s alive! He was here yesterday and swore that today he’d take me to his house!”

  I’m frightened by my own voice, the resonant tone of my reply. (“Sleep well tonight, my boy, and tomorrow we’ll all embrace you at home, and I’ll kiss your cheek if you promise not to pinch my ass.”) I believed him and last night I could sleep for the first time since my arrest. Dreamless sleep, as if I had been born blind or had just lost all my memories. Sleep indifferent to the screams of the tortured that previously had driven me to bang my head against the walls, like an enraged minotaur. Sleep, though it was on the floor with my arm for a pillow, since there wasn’t even a cot in the room they gave me for a cell.

  “Yeah, right, whatever you say.” My shouts seem to have moderated his obtuse cruelty. Through my panic, and in a kind of revelation, I imagine a mountain village where this boy, now armed, endured taunts, stones, and gobs of spit. “We’ll play the call to arms, we’ll surrender our weapons to you, and you’ll leave here under a canopy, like the Virgin.”

  “Pepe’s alive! Pepe can’t abandon me! He’ll be back right away to release me. You’ll all have to answer to him!”

  “Yeah, fine, we’ll answer. Get moving, you fairy, or I’ll break your back with the butt of my gun. Look at those hips, like a little whore from the Albaicín.”

  Again the corridor and the door to the governor’s private office. Again a beardless soldier standing guard beside it. Again the unexpected copy of shadow play that dampness drew on the wall. The man with the toothless smile speaks for a moment with the sentinel and rings a bell beneath the stain. Without waiting for a reply, he pushes me and lifts the latch.

  “At your orders, Excellency. I have the detainee you asked for.”

  Behind a carved desk covered by thick glass and an embossed leather desk set, stands a dark-haired, very thin man dressed in a military uniform, his eyes reddened and vague with lack of sleep. One of his long hands, very white and bony, indicates a wicker chair on the other side of the desk.

  “Sit down, please, I’m Commander José Valdés.”

  At a signal from him the boy withdraws and closes the door behind him. The civilian governor drops into an armchair upholstered in garnet-colored velvet. Beside a go
lden inkwell where two gold roosters attack each other with outstretched wings, he has a newspaper diminished by several folds, with a short article circled in red pencil.

  “Read this, if you’d be so kind, and then tell me what you think of it.”

  I read in silence though my lips tremble at each word, as if in that paper and precisely that article I was struggling to learn the letters. The paper is from Huelva and the report has my name, followed by a comment that closes the headline: “Now they’re killing one another.” It says that among the many corpses found every dawn on the streets of Madrid, mine has been discovered. “The disorder among the reds is so great they don’t even respect their own. For the author of Gypsy Ballads it was no help being Azaña’s coreligionist in politics, literature, and unresolved sexuality.”

  “Well, what do you think of our press?” the governor insists.

  As on the day of my arrest, in the Rosales family’s house, I divide into two beings. One thinks coldly about a poem of mine where an anonymous lament tells a story that has no names either. The one about a stranger who turns up dead, with a dagger in his chest, under a streetlamp shaken by the wind. (“Oh mother, how the lamp trembled!”) No one dares look into his eyes opened by death and the dawn. People are more shocked by his being abandoned, a stranger lost forever among them, than by the crime itself and the terrible certainty that someone in the village had become a murderer for dark, unknown reasons. Paradoxically, I had to come to the office of Commander José Valdés to realize that the germ of a tragedy I would never write lay in a thirteen-line poem. The impossibility of bringing to the theater a situation like that one, barely outlined but so rich in dramatic power, overflows with despair at my fate and leads the other man in me, the one I would call the man of flesh, to give a despicable reply: