Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition)

by Antonio Machado

  which recalls Lorca making the moon into a musical instrument, a tambourine for his gypsy girl to play:

  Preciosa comes playing

  her moon of parchment.

  “Preciosa y el viento”

  Whether influence, affinity, or mere coincidence, Machado and Lorca shared a fantastic playfulness in domesticating the moon and bringing her down to earth for a girl to use as a fan or Castanet. Both poets equally esteemed popular Andalusian song and its mischievous joy in paradox. But beyond these possibilities of common sources, national or foreign, there were deeper labyrinths of transfer. Lorca adored Machado’s poetry. He would recite Machado’s short-story-length ballad, “The Land of Alvargonzález” at gatherings, and surely Machado’s revolutionary use of the ballad to capture the Castilian peasant affected the form and violent scene of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. And we may also recall that in Lorca’s last poetic drama, The House of Bernalda Alba, the setting is no longer the gypsy south but, for whatever reason, peasant Castilla, the precincts of Machado’s rebirth.

  But the thread of confidence and art went both ways. The older poet found in the poetry of his fellow Andalusian a colorful surrealism and sensuality. Using elements of the surreal, Machado took his own fantastic dream imagery one step further. Lorcan imagery and intense eroticism glow in Machado’s many love poems to Guiomar. In fact, Lorca’s mark cuts even deeper in the poems to Guiomar than in “The Crime Was in Granada,” Antonio Machado’s later elegy to the assassinated poet, where he consciously uses Lorca’s gypsy images to honor and mourn the death of the fabled poet of Granada.

  Almost naked like the children of the sea

  When the Spanish Civil War began on July 18, 1936, Machado was in Madrid. He tried to enlist in the Republican army, but he was too old and, moreover, not in very good health. Friends, particularly the poet Rafael Alberti, persuaded him to be evacuated to Valencia, and in November 1936 he went together with his mother, his brother José, and José’s wife and children to Rocafort, a small village twenty minutes from the city of Valencia. There he wrote poems about the luxuriant nature, about the orchards and fields, which provoked other scenes of childhood in Andalucía. There he also wrote his “Poesías de la guerra” (“Poems of the War”).

  In April 1938 Machado followed the government from Valencia to Barcelona. Louis MacNeice relates that he saw Machado during those last days in Barcelona, at a time when the Spanish poet was expending all his energy toward trying to save the remnants of the tormented Spanish Republic. He wrote regularly for Hora de España and La Vanguardia of Barcelona. Ever since the exodus from Madrid, he had suffered from arterial sclerosis and a heart ailment, which now caused a swelling in his feet and compelled him to walk with a cane. Though in frail health, he was chain-smoking and, as MacNeice notes in his Autumn Journal (1939), he was scarcely aware that his clothes were covered with ashes fallen from his cigarettes. But his health problems and the gloom of war only made him write more intensively in essays and war journalism. (We do not know how much unpublished poetry was lost.) And he was in close touch with many dear literary friends who had taken refuge in this part of Spain, which had not yet been overrun by the Nationalist troops.

  During the last months in Barcelona, Antonio and a number of his friends used to have weekly reunions in a house outside the city. On a Sunday, January 11, 1939, the explosion of bombs from Italian airplanes constantly interrupted the singing that was going on inside the house. At least thirty bombers were in the sky all day long. Nevertheless, the music continued, Joaquin Xirau9 recounts, and on Monday, the several professors who were at the university gave their usual lectures at the university.10

  On January 22, three days ahead of the incoming Franco army, Machado and his family left Barcelona for the border in a government vehicle that carried other writers and scholars. His close friend Tomás Navarro Tomás, the Spanish linguist and director of the National Library, had been with him in those days, but Navarro Tomás delayed his flight, finally leaving with his wife on the day that Barcelona fell. Machado’s vehicle, with his mother, his brother, and his brother’s wife, Matea Mondero de Machado, left Barcelona near eleven in the evening. On a slow, painful trip they reached Cervià de Ter, ten kilometers north of Gerona, where they remained until the 26th, exhausted, with little food, sleeping on a winter floor. It was in leaving Cervià that Antonio was obliged to leave behind most of their luggage, including the suitcase that contained his unpublished writings of the last years. The convoy went on, stopping at a farmhouse at Mas Faixà, outside Figueras, twenty miles from the frontier. There, eighteen or twenty well-known Spanish intellectuals—including Navarro Tomás who had by now caught up with the Machados— spent their last night in Spain. On January 27, in the rain they boarded a military truck-ambulance and headed for the French border. Another passenger in the crowded vehicle was Juan Roura-Parella, who related that in the cold and rain of that January evening, he witnessed the noblest action he remembered in his life:

  There was scarcely room for all the passengers in the vehicle. Again personal belongings had to be left behind. When all were boarding, Machado insisted on being the last to find a seat. While his friends and relatives urged him to take a place, he remained in the patio and then insisted on being the last to enter the ambulance, saying, “Yo tengo tiempo, yo tengo tiempo”: I have time, I have time.11

  At Cervià de Ter each passenger had been allowed to take only one small traveling bag. There are conflicting reports about how Antonio Machado lost his luggage and arrived only with the rain-soaked suit on his back at Collioure, “almost naked like the children of the sea” (“Portrait”). But it is almost certain that his suitcases were taken from him by soldiers as they boarded the truck leaving Cervià, his first stop after Barcelona, and that the soldiers were entrusted to get them to him at the border. At the French crossing, despite his sickness, Machado tried in vain to find his luggage and was profoundly depressed at their loss. It is thought that among these lost papers in one suitcase was a songbook to Guiomar, which may have been part of a larger manuscript of recent poems. We do not know what writings were in the luggage, and there is little hope that the bags will turn up on some Spanish farm.

  The scene of the voyage to the border was further described to me by Navarro Tomás:

  Machado sat opposite me in the crowded vehicle. We were all so numbed from the last sleepless nights and the most painful conditions of our traveling that none of us was able to utter a coherent sentence. During the trip, Machado sat with his head lowered, lost in deep reflection and a tremendous sadness. Occasionally, he mumbled a word to his brother José, who sat crammed next to him in the ambulance. When we reached the border at Port Bou, it was already night, cold, and raining heavily. The French police were preventing a crossing of the border between Port Bou and Cerbère. The accumulation of people and vehicles was so great that we had to get down from the ambulance and walk half a mile by foot, in the rain, with hordes of terrified women and children, until we reached the immigration office. There Machado walked with difficulty. I had to help him, supporting his arm.

  I spoke to the chief customs officer and explained to him who Machado was, that he was sick, and that if he had to walk any farther he would certainly die on the way.12 Fortunately, the officer remembered his name from a Spanish textbook when he was studying the Spanish language, and was a man of understanding. He offered his private car to take Machado and his family to Cerbère.

  I was the only one who had any negotiable money, fifty prewar francs from a recent trip. With this money the writer Corpus Barga and I could go by train from Cerbère to Perpignan in search of financial resources for our immediate needs. Corpus Barga received a sum of money from a friend in Perpignan and returned to Cebère to share this among his companions. With this same help I was able to go to Paris to seek aid from the Spanish embassy. The ambassador, Dr. Marcelino Pascua, with great urgency, cabled money to Machado at Collioure, so that, contrary to some reports, it can be said
that Machado was not in financial straits during the last weeks of his life in France.

  In the vehicle for most of the trip Machado held his mother on his lap. She was in her late eighties, frail, and confused. The chaotic moment of reaching the border is also described by Corpus Barga, who had found the Machados at the crossing point: “Antonio, ever resigned and silent, contemplated his mother with her fine white hair stuck to her temples by the rain that slid down her beautiful face like a bright veil of tears,”13Immediately after the frontier, the road curved high to the slope of Balitres and down to the French coastal village of Cerbère, where the family spent the first night in France in winter cold and rain in an abandoned railroad car left on a dead rail. There Don Antonio, already asthmatic, caught cold, a bronchitis from which he was not to recover. The next morning, the 28th of January, accompanied by Barga, they took the train to Collioure.

  “Antonio Machado arrived at Collioure on January 29, 1939, drenched by a torrential rain. He had walked a long way and was so exhausted that he was obliged to take a taxi simply to cross the square and reach the hotel.”14 José helped his brother make it to the Bougnol-Quintana Hotel, and Corpus Barga carried their mother in his arms. She weighed not more than a little girl. She kept asking, “Will we soon get to Sevilla?”15 They were treated very well in the hotel, given hot food and drinks, and for the first time since they left Barcelona, a week earlier, they slept in a bed.

  Most of the days that followed, Machado spent in his room, writing letters and gazing out of the window. As for meals downstairs, the family sat alone in a corner, almost hidden; in the first days the two brothers never came to eat at the same time. When questioned it came out they had only one clean shirt between them and they were taking turns wearing it for meals. They had arrived with no French money, only worthless Spanish currency. Later funds were to come from the Republican embassy, permitting them to buy cigarettes and writing material, and to take care of the hotel. Antonio’s French friends also worried about Antonio’s clothes, which were torn and shabby after the escape from Spain. If he died, how could he be buried in a decent suit?

  Antonio was able to go out on one occasion for a longer walk down to the beach of this Mediterranean village. Three decades earlier in Collioure, in the winter of 1909-10, George Braque and his compatriot Picasso invented cubism, and much later Matisse went there to paint and find his cutout sun. Most of Antonio’s short walks were up the narrow alley by the hotel, around the cemetery, and back to the Hotel Quintana, sometimes stopping at a store to chat in his good French with new acquaintances. In his memoirs José draws a sensitive and lovely picture of Machado and the sea:

  A few days before his death and in his infinite love for nature, he told me before the mirror, while he tried in vain to straighten out his unruly hair, “Let’s look at the sea.”

  This was his first and last outing. We set out for the beach. There we sat down on one of the boats that was resting on the sand.

  The noon sun gave almost no heat. It was at that unique moment when one might say that his body buried its shadow under his feet.

  It was windy, but he took off his hat that he fastened with one hand to his knee while his other hand rested, in its own way, on his cane. So he remained absorbed, silent, before the constant coming and going of the waves, untiring, stirring as under a curse that would never let it rest. After a long while of contemplation, he told me, pointing to one of the small humble houses of the fishermen, “If I could only live there behind one of those windows, freed at last from worry.” Then he got up with a great effort and, walking laboriously over the slipping sand in which his feet were almost completely sinking, we went back in the most profound silence.16

  In addition to the desolation of many losses—of Spain, his last manuscripts, and his health—Antonio spoke often of missing his two young nieces who had been evacuated, like many children, to parts of Russia. It was impossible to contact them. He called them las rosas del jardín—the roses of the garden.

  The poet’s health did not improve. Very early one morning on the 18th of February, his sister-in-law Matea Machado noticed that Antonio had taken a turn for the worse. His chest was completely congested. They called for the doctor, who came, gave him medicines, but could not help him.

  The poet was gravely sick. He agonized for four days. At times he was saying, “Adiós, madre; adiós, madre!” Next to him on her cot his mother had fallen into a coma. On the evening of February 21, Matea used a bottle of champagne, given to them by the hotel landlady, Madame Quintana, to wet their lips. Antonio was still conscious and thanked her with a smile. He fell into a coma, and in his last moments he was saying in a low, monotonous voice, “Merci, madame; merci madame.” He died on February 22 at half-past three in the afternoon. In the deathbed photograph taken of the poet in his iron-frame bed in his room at Hotel Bougnol-Quintana, Machado is covered with the Republican flag. The eyes are not closed. They are gazing as they always were.

  Antonio Machado was buried the next day in the local Collioure cemetery. Madame Quintana provided the plot. The morning of the funeral, José sent a telegram to the Spanish Embassy in Paris announcing the death of the poet. The funeral was simple. A great many Spaniards in Collioure came. The coffin, covered with the tricolor flag of the Republic, was carried by officers of the Spanish army to the grave.

  On February 25, his mother died. Antonio Machado and his mother, Ana Ruiz Hernández, remain at Collioure today, in the same tomb.

  And when the day for my final trip arrives,

  and the ship, never to return, is set to leave,

  you will find me on board with scant supplies,

  and almost naked like the children of the sea.

  (“Portrait”)

  The last lines from Machado’s pen were found by his brother José, a few days after the poet’s death, scrawled on a scrap of paper in his overcoat.17

  Through the sun of Collioure he saw his childhood in Sevilla:

  These blue days and this sun of childhood.

  The true biography of a poet

  Antonio Machado’s life ended dramatically. But while his exile, suffering, and extinction represented the body and entombed spirit of Spain perfectly and clearly, his end—alone in Collioure, the sick wet man, almost naked as he disappeared from his Spanish life—was not the whole Machado. His last close Spanish companion, Tomás Navarro Tomás, told me memorably, “La verdadera biografía de Antonio Machado queda en su poesía”: The true biography of Antonio Machado resides in his poetry.”

  We cannot know what poems Machado wrote between 1937 and his death in February 1939; they have disappeared in the rain. Among his best poems are those last sonnets and coplas of succinct pathos, with colors of stone and flower, which he composed at the start of the civil war. They are a simple culmination of his poetic life. Yet having said this, one might also say that his poetic life is contained in the first poem with which he chose to begin his Solitudes,“The Voyager,” an extraordinary biography of foretelling, one projected on a disappeared brother or himself, which ends,

  The grave portrait on the wall is still

  flashing light. We are rambling.

  In the gloom of the den pounds

  the clock’s ticktock. None of us talks.

  My eyes in the mirror / are blind eyes looking / at the eyes I see with

  In the end Don Antonio is always and never the paradoxical philosopher; meaning, he alternates between being the poet who speaks through images, eschewing philosophical abstractions, and the philosopher who loves to play with contradictory ideas in cunning wisdom-verse. He can justify his blatant contradictions, just as Whitman did, when he asserts, “I am never closer to thinking one thing than when I have written the opposite.”18 It is strange, the Andalusian garden of whimsy and contradictions that was Machado. He was famous for his public silences, for being a man of a few plain, deep words, as the early Darío elegy paints him and as do countless pious portraits of the poet; yet there are even
more personal reminiscences that reveal a talkative, humorous Sevillano, a grand raconteur, who exalted conversation second only to poetry, which often, from Machado, seems to be overheard thought or conversation. Yet Machado’s is the quieter verse of solitudes, for he knows that words are just subjective sounds bound in letters, and cannot be counted on for what they seem to record. Certainly, truth like the lover is absent. In fact his poems aspire to wordlessness, to “silent paintings” as the Chinese call Wang Wei’s poems—or to la música callada (the music of a silence), a phrase from San Juan de la Cruz.

  Antonio Machado was a philosopher who spoofed, who was grave, who laughed at the failure of his speech, used words to prove that the events of the mind are always beyond the frailty of language and that attempts to impose absolutes of truth upon elusive consciousness are laughable, pompous nonsense. He loved to make rich, insightful points of linguistic failure. Machado’s gods—among them Cervantes—always saved him from truth and other falsehoods.

  A relativist sworn to eternal movement, he grins melancholically at conceptual phrases (including his own) that others would endow with fixed attributes. It is enough for him to give you, at an indeterminate hour of an endless afternoon, a stork on a tower, or a violet mountain with perhaps its geographical name—but no verb or event.

  He is satisfied with speaking through landscape or saying a few tart aphorisms.