The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  Dióscoro Galindo González must now be in a theater along this spiral if he hasn’t been acquitted and sleeps in peace in nothingness because the kingdom of heaven must be made up of people like him However and even though he figures in the cast of the drama you watch from your orchestra seat it is yours and has you as an obligatory protagonist I too would have liked to ask you at this precise moment as I see you again with your hands tied in the Buick between Cabezas and the teacher from Pulianas while Galadí darkens in his self-absorption Trescastro hides his face from all your eyes and the two Assault Guards make an effort to repair the car all beneath the same distant moon what you are thinking my man of flesh the one they killed at a dawn more distant than this moon whose fictitious image is represented on your stage Ask you man to man very privately and just between us whether you really imagine that all this is the parody of a crime devised by Valdés or whether in some remote chamber deep inside you that you share with me you didn’t realize without admitting it to yourself that before you knew it they would slaughter all of you as if you were cattle For my part and in retrospect I’m certain that if you insist on believing that all of it is the mockery of a murderer determined to be thought of as crazy your deception is nothing but a desperate means of freeing yourself from madness and safeguarding the privilege of dying honorably and in accordance with reason instead of giving in to the contained panic that would drive you insane Dying like an enlightened man who would climb up to the gallows indifferent to his fate and convinced the same lucid laws will one day govern the history of men and the stars in the sky Dying as a Lavoisier would for example even though you were the surrealist poet who spoke of the frozen honey spilled by the moon of fever of the sea with its immense face of a sky turned into an elephant of swallows that soak in blood of a heart in the shape of a shoe and a glove of smoke in a landscape of rusted keys And now one of the Guards not the driver the other one with the Mauser picks up his rifle distractedly and with lowered head approaches Trescastro who is still testing the ground with his foot as if preparing to run from all of you “It’s no use” he tells him “We can’t fix the car” “What does that mean? Why can’t you fix it?” Trescastro asks impatiently “You need a mechanic here and my friend and I aren’t mechanics” “Try again” “I already told you it was no use” The police officer wipes his palm on his hip “It could be a minor thing or something very serious Whatever it is we don’t know about it” “What do I do now?” “That’s up to you You give the orders” Exasperated Trescastro gets out of the car You think or want to believe that he would like to prolong the farce In a moment you tell yourself everything will have ended shamefully for those pretending to be our executioners Trescastro will give the order to return on foot to the Colony Down the highway and following the course of the irrigation channel you’ll retrace your steps in single file like a chain gang One police officer at the head and the other behind you with Trescastro rounding out the party Or perhaps there is another variant at the end of this incomplete monstrous tragedy Perhaps he orders one of the Guards probably the driver to return to the Colony and have them send another car that will take us to Granada (“The mercy of the governor is infinite and this time he decided to give you the gift of life”) Meanwhile day will have dawned and the night sounds will cease What chirps what warbles what sips nectar will follow what slithers what gnaws and what ambushes Only the sound of the irrigation channel from Ainadamar will remain identical to itself disregarded by men and their crimes or perhaps the moon similarly detached transformed into the hazy image of itself will contemplate you from the blue sky Now Trescastro turns around and grasps the pistol in his shaking hand He hurries to the open car door with wide open eyes and quivering lips to shout at Galadí “Get out right now!” Galadí’s voice after his silence of the last few hours or for the agonizing eternity we have just lived through sounds very different Heartrending it roughens breaks or sinks into the chasms of his panic “Me? Are you calling me?” “Who else you bastard? Get out now! That’s an order!” Galadí shrinks into his seat and gradually seems to hide his head between his shoulders His teeth chatter and he trembles like quicksilver “Out! Out!” barks Trescastro “Paco! Paco! At least let them see us die like men! Let them see us die the way we always lived!” shouts Cabezas Dióscoro Galindo González closes his eyes and murmurs something no one understands A prayer or a blasphemy Perhaps both things at the same time “Paco! Paco! Don’t let them ever make fun of how we died! Paco my brother Paco of my soul! Don’t give in now! Don’t give up!” Cabezas’s efforts are so great the veins in his throat swell up so much one would say he’s about to break the cords that secure his arms In despair over the complete surrender of Galadí who does not even seem to hear him he confronts Trescastro “You son of a bitch kill me first and I’ll show you how to die when it’s your turn! Kill me first! I beg you!” “This isn’t the time for shouting Cabezas” Dióscoro Galindo González says suddenly not opening his eyes and Cabezas in his excitement is not able to hear him “Dying like men isn’t doing it with shouts but with self-respect” “Out! Out! Out for the last fucking time!” Tres-castro is still bellowing bouncing up and down like one possessed holding the pistol in his hand Shaped like a hook Galadí keeps shrinking in his seat not saying a word In the moonlight his eyes blaze just above his chest When Trescastro tries to grab him by the shirt he kicks out and forces him to retreat “Paco! Paco! Don’t give in don’t surrender! Don’t let them ever say we were afraid when it was time to die!” “Dying like men isn’t doing it with shouts but with self-respect” “Shove self-respect up your ass” replies Cabezas sobbing openly “We were like brothers! We were like brothers!” You man of flesh my other self inside me you feel an absolute serenity that confuses and disconcerts you Everything was theater as you foresaw but in the end it was reduced to a drama where you really die as you do in the bullring (“Do you know what Pepe-Hillo replied when he was fat, old, and suffering from gout and was advised to stop fighting the bulls: I’LL LEAVE HERE ON FOOT, OUT THE MAIN GATE, HOLDING MY GUTS IN MY HANDS”) Death is the final demand of a completed performance Its unexpected presence and the barbarity of the killing about to happen terrify and astonish you less than your own insensitivity bordering on indifference Upon seeing yourself on the stage in hell when your ghost returned to the night of the crime you don’t understand the reasons for your inertia at the most irrevocable of moments Perhaps you decided that everything was nothing and nothing is known about nothing Perhaps as the man of the theater you were you thought any role has unexpected demands in rehearsals that become unavoidable at the moment of the definitive performance Perhaps you eventually had a presentiment that immortality was nothing but another drama the one of the staging of all memories in anticipation of the end of your insomnia Suddenly Trescastro signals to the driver The Assault Guard takes Galadí by the knees and drags him out of the car “Kill me first! Kill me first!” the other banderillero’s shouting persists Dióscoro Galindo González gives up trying to persuade him and shakes his head again taking refuge in himself while he mumbles the prayers of a non-believer “Never Paco! Never never never!” (I’LL WALK OUT OF HERE, THROUGH THE MAIN GATE, HOLDING MY GUTS IN MY HANDS) Galadí his hands tied rolls on the ground to Trescastro’s feet For a moment his screams silence all of you and drown out the sound of the irrigation channel “Encarna! Encarnita my daughter! Encarna my love don’t abandon me! Encarna baby don’t leave your father! Give me some of the life I gave you when you were conceived!” Then the other police officer (“We’re not volunteers and we never would have offered to do this”) puts the butt of the Mauser to his shoulder and fires

  A mute wind, like the one that seemed to shake Galadí in the Buick, carried him to the theater that anticipated Sandro Vasari’s memories. On the stage of the bronze monarchs, impassive gulls resting on their shoulders beneath the Baltic sky, the triumph of la ragione nuda e chiara on an afternoon resembling the afternoon of Corpus Christi, and the interview between Vasari and Ru
iz Alonso in Madrid, there emerged now the street of an unknown city that his recollections of 1928 or 1929 guessed was North American.

  On a corner a cement post like the ones marking bus stops in the New York of his youth, where he had seen the line of unemployed beside Saint Patrick’s, then witnessed the aurora borealis above the Edem Mills lake surrounded by bulrushes spattered with tiny snail shells, he made out the name of the street at its intersection with a deserted avenue: BRIARWOOD DRIVE.

  A gray car drove along BRIARWOOD DRIVE and stopped before a house that had a small sloping front garden with azaleas in bloom. Someone blew the horn, and Sandro Vasari, taking long strides, came down from the porch, while a stranger holding a leather briefcase under his arm got out of the car. The two men stopped to greet each other at the foot of a myrtle tree. Sandro was half a head taller than his visitor, and both seemed the same age. Looking at them in the middle of the proscenium, he told himself they were probably close to half a century old, more or less, and thought, instinctively and inexplicably, that they could both be his sons if he hadn’t been killed that dawn on the Ainadamar road with Galadí, Cabezas, and Dióscoro Galindo González, the public school teacher from Pulianas. At that moment his death felt not like someone else’s, as it had on other occasions along the spiral of hell, but very distant and committed by people he could neither pardon nor despise, because on one hand they knew perfectly well what they were doing, and on the other he never wanted to consider them his enemies. He did a fast accounting of the past and decided that his sole vanity, a degree lower than his pride, was refusing to tell Valdés he was crazy.

  On the glass-enclosed porch with open curtains, which perhaps in the days of another owner and a different generation might have been a conservatory, a small blond woman of uncertain, undetectable age, greeted the newcomer by extending her hand. He kissed her on both cheeks, but she turned her face to avoid returning his kisses. Looking at them, he thought that at one time she had hated and feared the man.

  “Marina,” he said to her, “I suppose you won’t think now that I’ve been dreaming you and Sandro since the day I introduced the two of you at the university. How many years has it been? Perhaps thirty-five or more.”

  “No. Now I’m finally convinced of my own existence,” she replied with no hesitation but no great satisfaction either. “Sandro and someone who died a long time ago filled me with that certainty.” She looked at the high clouds that gave the sky the tonality of slate, of the roof on a French house recently washed by rain. “The snow will begin soon.”

  “It doesn’t look it,” Sandro Vasari observed.

  “It doesn’t look it, but the first snow will start soon.”

  Sandro invited them to sit on the porch. Three or four low bookcases filled with books in disorder seemed to have been placed haphazardly. They sat at an iron table painted black, and Marina served herself and Sandro coffee. She offered the recent arrival cognac in a very large tulip-shaped glass. An aroma of extremely old wooden barrels and aged wines aerated by the winds of time seemed to spread over the orchestra seats. He recalled the two cognacs he’d had with Martínez Nadal in Puerta de Hierro on his last day in Madrid, while the vans of the Assault Guards drove down Princesa and newsboys hawked papers. (“ … I moved writing for the theater, mine included, naturally, ahead by several generations. Perhaps entire centuries, though it may be hard for you to believe.”)

  “Once, near your house, Sandro and I saw the characters from Blind Man’s Bluff dancing in the snow,” Marina said now in an abstracted tone. “When they disappeared, the title of another work by Goya was left on the snowy grass: Raging Absurdity.”

  The two men pretended to ignore the comment, though she expressed it in a tone of absolute veracity. On a round table covered by a red cloth, he could see a strange gray device topped by a kind of visor. Sandro Vasari pointed at it with a vague gesture and then said:

  “When I interviewed Ruiz Alonso, in Madrid, he suspected I was hiding a tape recorder. He asked me whether I intended to write a book about the death of the poet, and I said I wanted only to write a dream. It was the truth.”

  “In any case you achieved your goal.” The stranger took from the leather briefcase a stack of onionskin sheets, typed and hurriedly bound in cardboard. He left it on the table, leaning his open palm on the napkins. “I read your original and thought it was very acceptable. You ought to publish it.”

  “I won’t,” Sandro Vasari obstinately shook his head, “though I’m not sorry I wrote it.”

  “Why would you be sorry? Why don’t you want to publish it? I’m not trying to play devil’s advocate, but I admit it needs a good job of editing. I pointed out in the margin some passages you might rewrite. It’s the final pass of the pumice stone that Ortega thought indispensable for rounding out not only the form but also the content of any original. It all comes down to a few days of work before or after I take the book to a publisher.”

  “You can take it to whomever you please and say it’s yours, if you like, to speed up publication. I give it to you gladly because I renounced the original though I don’t regret having written it, as I said before.”

  “I don’t understand anything. You want to publish the book as if it were mine? How could you imagine I’d lend myself to that?”

  “It’ll be better if we forget about it,” Marina interrupted. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Absolutely not,” replied Sandro Vasari and then, in a different tone to the visitor: “If you don’t publish the book, neither will I. I’ll keep it, unsigned, in some drawer, and there my happy heirs, whoever they may be, will find it. They may even come to believe then that the original was yours. Which means you don’t help anything by refusing to accept it.”

  “The snow’s coming earlier than we thought,” said Marina. “In this part of the country, the first snowfalls melt right away. They disappear in two days and are white tinged with pink, like the color of old coral and conch shells.”

  From his orchestra seat in hell, he looked at her silently. Though her appearance might have been arrested at some very distant point in the past, and the years passed without disturbing her small features, he thought he could confirm her an age as similar to Sandro’s or their visitor’s. (“Marina, I suppose you won’t think now that I’ve been dreaming you and Sandro since the day I introduced the two of you at the university.”) Neither of them seemed to have heard his comment, as if in the theaters along the spiral unnoticed asides were possible. For a moment he forgot about them, and Sandro Vasari’s dream that later became a book about his own life and his stay in hell, to enjoy contemplating Marina. The pink, perishable whiteness of the first snows on BRIARWOOD DRIVE was merely an inevitable analogy or an obligatory identification with her brittle fragility.

  “Fine,” the visitor seemed to give in. “Let’s hear the secret of so peculiar a decision. Or perhaps you’d prefer Marina to tell me about it, assuming she shares it with you. In any event, I’m all ears.”

  “The secret is simple even if telling it turns out to be difficult,” replied Sandro Vasari, resting his palm for a moment on one of the stranger’s knees. “I’ll translate it into a fable or a parable, as Gerardo Diego would write elegies in the shape of a hare. Imagine three people like us in their first year at the university. One of them, let’s say the one most similar to a ridiculously rejuvenated image of you, introduces the other two, reinvigorated caricatures of Marina and me, in the courtyard of the School of Arts and Letters. If you’ll forgive the interruption, and to shorten the fable for you, from now on I’ll call the protagonists by our names. Do you follow?”