The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  “At least I suppose I do. Go on.”

  “The next part you know better than anyone and I’ll summarize it, pushing together what happened over many years. Marina and Sandro become lovers in a little house you rent to them beneath the Vallcarca bridge, not very far from the place where Don Antonio Machado y Ruiz, part of the cast of the manuscript that so far you refuse to accept, lived during his last months in Barcelona. As they say in the movies, any similarity to reality is purely coincidental.”

  “Understood. Continue.”

  “Marina always has the feeling that someone is watching her through an antique mirror when she and Sandro make love in their bedroom at the Vallcarca Bridge. It’s the start of a long process that I’ll move forward and conclude right here, in which she’ll come to believe that she and Sandro are nothing but characters in a permanently unfinished book of yours. Earlier, much earlier, in the dispensable history of the university under Franco and the years following the Second World War, Marina aborts Sandro’s child at the hands of a sweet old woman on Calle Montcada whose address, naturally, you give them. What no one knows then is that after this difficulty, Marina can have no more children.”

  “Let’s move on to the second act.”

  “Between one act and another many years go by, during which Marina and Sandro stop seeing each other. She marries a gentleman as dispensable as the protohistory of which she continues to be an oblique product. Sandro goes to the Indies of Eisenhower, marries twice, divorces twice. He has two children by his second wife, all of whom die in a car accident though he suffers no injuries. Then he begins a long process of alcoholization that he will virtuously cure though he is never cured of the cure, which he pays for with a good part of his talent. Earlier and as a result of a trip to Spain to confirm that the damn country has never existed and is simply an absurdity dreamed by Goya Lucientes, he meets Marina again at the house of someone who bears your name. I have no choice but to specify that the lovers begin to live in mortal sin and the dispensable gentleman married to Marina discreetly disappears, while the Caudillo of all Spain dies in installments at the Clinic de la Paz. I’ll spare you another interpolated history, like the tale of the Recklessly Curious Man, about a book proposed to Sandro Vasari by someone who bears your name, which Sandro never writes because you do it yourself, I mean to say, your double in my fable.”

  “I believe I’ve read all that somewhere.”

  “Perhaps in the catechism of Father Ripalda.”

  “That’s very possible. What’s the hidden side of the fable?”

  “Marina should tell you that but I don’t know if she’ll want to.” He saw Sandro turn toward the woman with a deferential expression he had not noticed before on the Italian’s face marked by a long scar on the cheek. “Darling, you can enlighten us with the final outlandish lines of our story.”

  “Friday at the latest, the entire street will be covered with snow,” said Marina. Looking at her in the indecisive light of dusk that gradually descended to the stage, he thought he saw a Piero della Francesca. One of the women painted in the Church of San Francesco, in Arezzo, or in the Diptych of Federigo da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza in the Uffizi. “At midmorning on Sunday, the silence will melt it.”

  “Fine. I’ll do it,” Sandro continued, fairly nervous now. “No one knows anyone else, as Señor Goya Lucientes says so well in one of his printed Caprices. You and I didn’t know that Marina had studied music, to great advantage, before and after her brief passage through the university. At least I didn’t find out until I finished the original you’ve brought me now. I gave it to her to read and she gave it back with no comment. A few days later, she asked me to buy her a piano.”

  “A piano?”

  “Exactly. A Wurlitzer we chose together, on which I spent my modest savings. Only then, when she had the piano, did she reveal her purpose. She wanted to compose a sonata inspired by the original of my book.”

  “A sonata.” The newcomer shook his head as if making an effort to comprehend the real meaning of the word. “I don’t really understand … ”

  “Perhaps I expressed myself badly. More than being inspired by what I had written, the sonata would be its translation into musical terms. Perhaps you remember that the book is divided into four parts, THE SPIRAL, THE ARREST, DESTINY, and THE TRIAL. The sonata would also have four, though the titles wouldn’t necessarily coincide or end with the death of Galadí at the hands of the Assault Guard.”

  “Then how can you two call it a translation?”

  “Heavenly bliss must be made up of people like you,” Sandro Vasari said with a smile. “Did you ever stop to notice that music not only has its own language but also its inalienable meaning? Demanding textual coincidence would be asking myth simply to repeat history.”

  “In any case, perhaps there’s only myth, and history doesn’t exist.”

  “Precisely, precisely. Perhaps you’re not as foolish as I thought. In the same way, my book ceases to exist as soon as Marina transforms it into a sonata. She worked on her composition for an entire year, and you have to judge the result for yourself. Are you ready, or do you prefer to wait until tomorrow?”

  “You can begin whenever you like.”

  Neither one bothered to consult Marina. From his orchestra seat he told himself that she seemed to have vanished from the minds of both men, as if unavoidable forces had sacrificed her to her own unpublished music. At the same time he thought that only a dead pederast could notice that kind of negligence. Immediately all that there was of man in him, even in hell, led him to forget about Marina while Sandro turned on the tape recorder (“ … defamed me in writing and in printed books. That Englishman or Irishman, the same one who surreptitiously collected everything I said on a … What did he say it was called? … Yes, that’s it, on a tape recorder”). The first chords did not fail to disconcert him. For reasons he could not explain, contemplating the woman who resembled those of Piero, he did not expect music as descriptive as the sounds that took him by surprise. The sonata opened with the evocation of a noman’s land covering the entire world, as if the planet, empty or abandoned by life, turned silently in infinite space. Suddenly that aboriginal time, initiated in so vast and desolate a manner, was concretized into a sign isolated in the midst of solitudes. A grave as lost as a tomb in Antarctica. A grave, however, that was his, in the unpopulated land of ice and wilderness. The theme of that music confused him as much as the mode. It would have suited the ending of an elegy and reminded him of the last part of his lament for Sánchez Mejías, perhaps his best poem, conceived precisely as a sonata in four movements, but he felt it was too obvious and solemn for the start of a piano piece. He opened and closed an oblique parenthesis to recall the phrase he had once written to Gerardo Diego: “ … we’re mad about bad music.” But this was not reprehensible music from any more or less social, historical concept of the arts, and therefore he was not obliged to praise it to himself. Only to follow it with complete interest, though its execution was fairly poor. Deficient, typical of someone in whom ideas raced faster than hands and whose fingers had been away from the keyboard for a long time. The elegy transformed suddenly into a sustained shout of hope and counteracted his own weeping for the death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, where only his voice and a gentle wind in the olive trees sounded to recall the bullfighter, his present body, his absent soul. Here, on the other hand, existence was affirmed in all its vigor, repeating and defining itself by means of interminable death, in terms very similar to his. (“Any instant of my fleeting, impetuous life, any of these moments, present now and impossible on the stage of the theater, is preferable to immortality in hell.”) The spiral, which according to Sandro Vasari was the title of the sonata’s first movement, shattered into fragments before the burning experience of all memory. His in the restaurant in Madrid, reconciling with Ignacio. (“Come on, man, tell me what you’ll have and how the bulls will be this summer.”) An imagined Julius Caesar’s in the radiance of the aurora
borealis, reciting arrogant blank couplets like: “Better first in a village / than second in Rome.” Martínez Nadal’s saying goodbye to him on the step of the Andalucía express and then walking away along the platform, unaware that their last encounter on earth had concluded there. The man of flesh inside him, asking Valdés whether both of them would set aside everything that had been arranged, whether they weren’t insisting in vain on improvising an impossible outcome. If Sandro Vasari said he had divided the book he wrote about him, or the dream that inspired him, into four parts: THE SPIRAL, THE ARREST, DESTINY, THE TRIAL, the music cut across everything the words divided and Marina expounded almost from the first her entire purpose: to reduce to an irreducible unity the history of a poet. The first movement ended in a kind of fugue, a rapid declaration of principles with his name as counterpoint. The story, the music affirmed, would embrace not only existence but death. The other face of life as a function of eternity and even the irrevocable destiny that preceded the birth of man on earth. An academic question, perhaps unnecessary because it was so obvious, underscored the purpose of the entire sonata in its formal aspect. Would it be possible to incorporate into his immortality and mortal biography presentiments like the one he had in the South Station when, like a good Andalusian, he believed his steps measured and prescribed since a time before all times? Almost without transition the sonata entered its second part with an analogous theme and different counterpoint. While the second established constant references to lines and citations from his dramatic work, the first returned his calvary in Granada and the Rosales family’s house to the present. Its execution was also cleaner and perhaps excessively skilled for someone accustomed to the labored awkwardness of the first part. He thought of two Marinas existing together, and created the image of Piero della Francesca’s women, the one who conceived the unnamed sonata and the one the music demanded for its realization and performance. Between the two of them, and in another no-man’s land like the one he sometimes thought separated him from the man of flesh, a third Marina wandered: the plaintive, fragile creature who looked at the heavens as if they were a mirror and apparently had seen the characters of Goya’s Blind Man’s Bluff dancing on the snows of yesteryear. He forgot about Marina, or her three images disappeared, in the counter-point’s literary evocations. Antoñito el Camborio, “Camborio with the strong mane,” was arrested by five Civil Guards, leaving behind him a river of lemons. The same Camborio was knifed to death, murmuring words lost in a gush of blood. A dead Ignacio Sánchez Mejías climbed the steps in an empty bullring, searching in vain for his lost body. Invisible bells tolled each afternoon in Granada for a child. The moon went across the sky holding another child by the hand like his mother, sleepwalking, rescued him from the water where he sank, asleep. A hyacinth light illuminated the keyboard and his right hand, while his father contemplated him in the semi-darkness of the Huerta de San Vicente. From the top of railings bathed in the brilliance of the stars, the shadow of a girl inclined over a cistern, while he repeated in silence the words he said to himself so often on the spiral of hell: “I thought the dead were blind, like the ghost of the Gypsy girl in one of my poems who, poured into the reservoir in the garden, did not see things when they were looking at her.” Another woman ran through her house as if mad, pursued by a grief that would be black if it were visible. An identical sorrow assailed a horseman riding through magnetic mountains, on a sea crossed by thirteen ships. A lover declared he hadn’t wanted to fall in love, as if love were the result of will and not passion. To fulfill his obligation to himself and not the woman who had given herself to him, to behave like the man he was, he gave her a satin sewing basket before he left her. An ironic note, some rhythms that changed when repeated, revealed his own mordancy toward that poem. Universally known for its piercing eroticism, it had been written by someone who perhaps had never gone to bed with or desired a woman. (“Then like now it was impossible for you to reply because the words burned like embers before turning into dust into nothing and your heart seemed to crack open at each beat or turn into porous, worn stone like those birds trapped in amber before man walked the earth … ”) The third movement altered the brilliant tonalities of the second. At least at first one might say it was painted entirely in sepia and gold, like the murals by Sert in the Vic Cathedral that Dalí had forced him to admire against his will. So sudden a change confounded him again, even though by then he thought himself accustomed to the sonata’s variations. The visitor murmured something about how interconnected he judged the music and the third part of the unpublished book to be. Sandro obliged him to be quiet with an impatient gesture. At that instant he understood that the composition did not refer precisely to him, alive or dead, but to one of his hypothetical phantoms or hallucinations. In other words, to the first of his doubles who had appeared in hell. (“Boy, this isn’t hell and we’re not dead. I know hell very well to my misfortune and I can assure you it’s on earth. Do you know where we really are?”) The ill-tempered old man said he dreamed him in a sepia nightmare on the top floor on Calle de Angulo, where he had spent close to half a century in hiding. He had taken refuge there to avoid being arrested, but then the hiding place turned into a voluntary prison made to the measure of his pride. In his judgment, very well expressed in the somewhat mocking rhetoric of the music, the real penitentiary or authentic cemetery was his unfortunate country that in vain thought itself free after the death of a dictator and the attempted metamorphosis of one regime into another. (“ … reconsider and recall the time when I taught you what an hendecasyllable was. Now it’s up to me to show you who and where we are.”) In spite of a repeated note like the dripping of a fountain in spring onto the ice of the past winter, the old man continued his derisive denial. “You’re not me but my imprisoned dream,” the dialoguing water sang softly, as in some of Machado’s poems. “You’re merely my delirium because in so many years, constantly hidden in the Rosales family’s house, you didn’t write a single line; you didn’t outline one piece for the theater. I, so fearful, would not have renounced being who I am only to save my hidden life.” With the thaw, the fountain transformed into a stream and then a river that pulled the ghost underwater. The current carried away the flailing and shouting of a Punchinello in the commedia dell’arte. It reduced him to its own image by bouncing him against polished stones. Then to the shade of its shade. Afterward to nothingness. Solemn chords made Don Antonio Machado pass across the sky, his lapels sprinkled with cigarette ash, his green thermos pressed to his chest. (“I like poetry and music.”) Machado disappeared and the water stopped at a beach of golden sand. His other self in his delirium, the one who stayed in Madrid when he said he had left for Granada and then passed through France to the United States at the end of a war he considered lost, stood on the shore with his arms crossed behind him. He was the strongest of the three, as the music stated while the river was lost in its bed as if it had never existed. He assumed his latent manhood with the woman whose gaze resembled Melibea’s; he turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature because he thought it the vanity of vanities, and acknowledged that his life as a university professor in America was a hell to which he submitted willingly and not without lucid irony. Yet he was as much an impostor as the old man hiding on Calle de Angulo. Implacably, the music alluded to his skeptical competence and sarcastic disdain in contrast to the fragile condition of the true poet, in whom something of the boy he had been persisted, until they decided to murder him in his own Granada. If he had lived a hundred years, the same innocence would have endured inside him and in that no-man’s-land that distanced him at times from the man of flesh. The third movement ran into the fourth, joining in something like parallel whirlpools, where as soon as he dreamed any of his three ghosts they were the three dreamed by Sandro Vasari. Then the last part of the sonata opened with a trial, in part solemn and in part almost festive, as if Antoñito el Camborio and Ignacio Sánchez Mejías accused him of considering them dead in two of his poems. Characterized in broad stroke
s, Valdés, Ruiz Alonso, Trescastro, and the Assault Guards appeared. He didn’t acquit them or tell himself to forgive them. In the voice he had learned to recognize as his in the sonata, he simply stated that he pitied them since he, or the innocent with whom he had always lived, couldn’t have endured the death of another person in his heart or his gut. Immediately all his executioners disappeared because, after all, as the music was not afraid to affirm, the immortality of those poor souls was part of his own. Just as his memory among men was due in part to the arrest and death of Antonio el Camborio. As if the memory of that character in two of his poems could determine Marina’s music retrospectively and transfix eternity itself on a slant, the sonata repeated phrases and allusions from many other poems of his, poured like a rain of gold over a limitless area. A horseman rode toward Córdoba, knowing he’d never reach the promised city because death would come out to meet him. From the towers of Córdoba, identifying at the same time the man’s end and his purpose, death watched him like a lover who would then come down to wait for him at the gates and along the inaccessible walls. The amputated hands of Saint Eulalia still clasped each other, like decapitated prayers. Narrow streams, rushing like water buffalo, charged with silver horns the naked boys swimming. The prematurely aged silence of his dead profile foretold during a summer filled with red fish, flushed like a crocodile. In the absence of another dead man, the clock and the wind sounded together, as in a line of Machado’s that perhaps had inspired his though he couldn’t remember it now, the bell in the tribunal building struck one above sleeping Soria. The moon descended to the forge looking for a boy and her fragrant skirt was made of illuminated tuberoses in the summer night. Death transformed Ignacio Sánchez Mejías on the bier and turned him into a dark minotaur. His coffin borne by a carriage descended slowly along the streets of Madrid on the way to Atocha Station. A landscape of nascent America, with sibilant railroads, fences covered by advertisements, and land gutted by coal mines contemplated the passing of Walt Whitman, dressed in corduroy, his beard covered by butterflies. Not far away, in another landscape of a cubist stage prepared for a ritual or a ballet, Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar, and their father, King David, cut the strings of his harp. The rain of gold having fallen to earth, the music seemed to become quiet and recede toward silence along the path of the first solitudes, those that populated only his lonely grave. The gold poured from the heavens dimmed gradually, as fire beetles and lightning bugs disappear at dawn. A single light, gold like a flame at its very center, began to burn on his grave. At that point he expected the end of the sonata, unwilling to confess to himself his disenchantment with a rather conventional ending. That is to say, a few chords tapering off until they disappear, in the way a bright, sonorous stream empties its last threads of water into a shoreless lake never discovered by man. But Marina surprised him again, sustaining this movement of the sonata until she had elevated it to a new dimension. The golden light in the silent solitudes stopped being the one on his grave and became his alert consciousness burning in hell. He was surrounded now not by the spiral and infinite eternity (assuming the spiral wasn’t infinite eternity patiently awaiting the last dead person for the last theater) but by his own unfathomable, interminable unconscious that held every reference alluded to in Sandro Vasari’s book. There, inhabiting him and redeeming himself in the poet, Sandro himself, his nameless visitor, his executioners, his parents, his friends whom he always loved, his lovers whom he never loved, the landscapes of his soul and his childhood, the vertical perspectives of Madrid and New York (“Gas in every apartment,” Brother, can you spare a dime), Dalí’s Cadaqués and Maqueda Castle with Alberti and María Teresa, La Gare Saint Lazare and the South Station, Machaquito and Vicente Pastor, the flashy young men and women on the platforms, la Argentinita and Esperancita Rosales, the dogs summoned by Villalón and Dióscoro Galindo González, Galadí and Cabezas, Martínez Nadal and the Morla Lynches, The Public and Lament, his ghosts in hell and his midmorning visitors, the old unemployed actor, Isidro Máiquez and Medioculo, swift-footed Achilles and José Antonio Primo de Rivera laughing at Ruiz Alonso, his dreams and all the dreams of the living and the dead, the gold slipper and the house shoes of Doña Juana the Mad. There, finally, Marina herself sharing with him that entire world with no bottom and no shores, as a queen would with the king, her husband.