The Dedalus Book of Spanish Fantasy

by Margaret Jull Costa

  So then I turned my attention again to the officer writing the letter and again I thought to myself, more forcibly this time, that he was very like my friend, Lieutenant R., the one who had died in the bombing raid and whose air of abstraction, in the empty officers' mess, I now recalled with a shudder. It was a searing vision. I stared fixedly at him and he seemed to feel my gaze on the back of his head. At any rate, he turned round, looking annoyed, but his face immediately cleared when he saw me, and I realised that it really was him. R. - for there was no doubt it was my friend - moved his lips and some words could be heard, in a tone I recognised, although I immediately noticed something odd: the movement of the lips did not initially correspond precisely to the words spoken, as though there were a slight fault in synchronisation, as sometimes happens with films; but on this occasion, the fault was quickly corrected and everything began to work smoothly. Lieutenant R. had greeted me by name and promised to finish his letter quickly and join me in a couple of glasses of wine and a chat. Though shaken, I agreed, so as to have time to think about what was going on; these strange events could hardly be blamed on the wine I had drunk.

  The girl invited me, as usual, to have one on the house, and I was transfixed with fear on noticing my arm, resting on the counter; around it was the sleeve of a uniform on which I noticed the dull gleam of a lieutenant's stripes. So I did not initially register the fact that Sr. P. had come out into the bar, until I heard his voice commenting with his usual joviality on some aspect of the war, probably the scarcity and cost of everything. I raised my head slowly, hoping to see in his face something that would rescue me from this dreadful delusion into which I was sinking; but my shipwreck continued relentlessly. Senor P. was the same as ever, an elderly man smoking his famous pipe with youthful delight: `So, Lieutenant,' he said to me, `how goes the war? Will the front hold?' I tried to answer politely, but I could tell him nothing; perhaps because I was befuddled with wine, or perhaps because it had been a long time since the events he was asking about (if, indeed, I ever knew the answer). I stammered out a foolish reply and Senor P. must have realised how drunk I was, for he discreetly dropped the subject, puffing instead on his briar pipe and slowly exhaling the smoke.

  When Lieutenant R. joined me and put a friendly arm round my shoulder, I offered him a drink without looking at him, nor did I look at him as he sat drinking it by my side. When the air-raid sirens finally began, I was incapable of running back to the barracks. R. told me later that I collapsed when I tried to stand up - a dispatch rider with a siren had driven noisily past the tavern - and that was what saved our lives. The next day, still suffering the effects of a massive hangover, I learned that the barracks had been destroyed in the bombing and that the wall of the officers' mess had collapsed, though no one could tell me if there had been anyone inside when disaster struck.

  Our unit was transferred, and I was disciplined for not being in the barracks that night, when I should have been on call. When I tried to explain what had happened, it was useless: the year was 1938, and I couldn't be a post-war dramatist. R. died shortly after, fighting at the front, and I was sent to a psychiatric hospital in B . . . , by the sea. As the end of the war approached, I crossed over into France, where I suffered the rigours of a concentration camp guarded by Senegalese soldiers, until I managed to fix myself up with a labouring job in a small town in eastern France, near the German border. Having joined the French Resistance, I marched at the head of the troops that entered the town of T ... the day France was liberated. I must have been drinking too much during all those years, for when I became aware of the danger it was already too late: I had become an alcoholic. I had a reputation as a heavy drinker who got into absurd scrapes. In this lamentable state, I enlisted in the Foreign Legion, at a time when there was a need for cannon fodder in Indochina.

  As I write these lines, I am fighting in Indochina. For some time now, I've been drinking less and I'm even thinking vaguely of sorting out my life. I feel trapped in the military organisation to which I belong, yet I haven't the courage to desert. For the first time since the events of that night, I feel I'm progressing towards a certain serenity which allows me to ask myself certain questions without going mad. At first, I used to scream those questions aloud, and was carted off to hospital. Then I decided to take refuge in silence; but in spite of everything, I believe that my secret, however hard I try to conceal it, is obvious; although I must say that for some years now people have been fairly tolerant of my `eccentricities'. I'm considered unsociable, that's all.

  I've sometimes tried to recreate my plays from memory, and I put my failure down to the fact that my memory never was very good, except for remembering things whose loss brought me suffering: so the results have not been encouraging. I've only managed to write some vague approximations, a few crude, meaningless scenes. (As for thinking up new plays, I have never even contemplated it.) Some time ago, a Spaniard was attached to my company; when I asked about books of mine published in M ... , he said he had never heard of them, nor, of course, of me. Incidentally, he was killed in the latest outbreak of fighting; a grenade shattered his skull. He's buried a few yards from where I'm sitting.

  I'm writing this resting on a box of ammunition, by candlelight, during a lull. in the fighting. My thoughts turn to Spain. I have no idea what's happening there. Drink, misfortune, prison, war and escape, these have been the building blocks of the barrier dividing me from my country, ever since I crossed the Pyrenees on that morning in March, amidst a climate of terror. No, I have no idea what has happened there since my departure, and I don't know what's happening now. If I think about it, I imagine that everything will be just as I knew it, except that I'm not there; everything is probably still as it was, but without me, and if I went back it would all be familiar.

  Everything still the same, but without me! Or not? I mean, is someone perhaps taking my place, does he have the same friends as me, is he writing my plays? I ask that because, a while ago, I happened to hear that a young dramatist had written an anti-war play. Who is this young writer? What's his name? What's the title of his work? Mine was The Squadron of the Dead, but, as I mentioned earlier, I've been unable to reconstruct it. Anyway, is there someone doing in my place what I did, I mean (I'm finding it hard to put this into words) doing what I would have done? (In fact, I was right when I said `what I did'. Often I can still hear the applause ringing in my ears.) If so, perhaps I am surplus to requirements there, just as I am here, caught up in a colonialist war which I detest; and yet...

  And yet it would be nice to think I'm missed, that my absence is felt, that since I was mysteriously removed from that world, my absence has left a gap, at least in the affections of my friends. I think of Dr. H., for example. Is he still alive? Has he been given his Chair at the university in that town? And if that is the case, would he recognise me if I turned up now, but what do I mean when I say `now'?

  Am I truly missed in that world? Does anyone grieve for my absence? Do they say I `mysteriously disappeared'? Will they have searched for my body? Will my obituary have appeared? Or was I never really there? Even for the friends I used to meet in the cafe? Are some of them feeling the same anguish as I do now (again it feels odd to say `now'), exiled in other places? I pose all these questions with a serenity which, as I stated, I have only recently achieved. In any case, ever since the events that led to my stay in the psychiatric hospital, I've learned to be very careful about what I say to other people.

  Well, my plan is to go back, if I get out of this alive. I can hear shots; maybe we're in for a hot time tonight. I'll land, if possible, somewhere near that quiet little university town, and I'll drive without looking to left or right straight to the tavern, because I know that for me there is no other way in, and that if I went anywhere else (the capital city where I enjoyed my modest successes, my home), it would be like a horrible wall bearing down on me, a wall composed of everything that is alien, strange and unknown. As I say, I'll go into the little tavern. Senor P. w
ill be dead, and I'll be really pleased to hear that, and I'll drink to decay and to dear, gloomy old Heraclitus! And they will have renovated the place, and the girl won't be young any more, she'll be a plump matron, who doesn't remember me at all; and, naturally, I won't try to jog her memory. Afterwards, I'll go back to the hotel (where I'm sure I have a room booked), to rest after my conversation with the young people and the slight effort my lecture represented (I should have planned it mentally on the train; I feel it was dull and repetitive because I didn't do that).

  I hope that when I get to the station, early in the morning, my friend Dr H. will be there, waiting to see me off. And I'll go back, after this strange exile, to my life, my plays and all that is familiar.

  © Alfonso Sastre

  Translated by Annella McDermott

  Alfonso Sastre (Madrid, 1926) is a politically committed playwright, who continued to live and write in Spain during the Franco period, when many other intellectuals from the left chose exile. His Escuadra hacia la muerte (1953) is an antiwar play, set during `the next war' and was first performed by a University theatre group which Sastre himself had helped set up. The play was subsequently banned, and, in fact, although the texts were published, Sastre's plays were rarely performed in Franco's Spain. Sastre has also written critical articles and essays, and a book of short stories, Las noches lugubres (1973), from which this story is taken.

  Author's note

  Someone had to write about Cervantes' wife's chickens and one of the avant-garde movements (surrealism) has provided me, normally so hostile to all such movements, with the way to do it.

  Cervantes deserves recognition at least in the small things, since, as regards the large things, he was ignored during his lifetime and received recognition only after his death, when acclaim came from abroad and from foreign critics and philosophers.

  An all too frequent occurrence in Spain.

  I have always been troubled by Dona Catalina de Salazar's insistence on including her chickens in the marriage contract and I have taken it as clear evidence of the kind of ignominy to which any man of imagination in Spain has always been exposed, at least amongst certain sections of the socalled middle classes: for there was already a middle class in sixteenth-century Spain.

  I have referred to surrealism as part of the avant-garde, but the truth is that it has been in existence from Apuleius' The Golden Ass to Dostoevski's `The Crocodile'. The only addition made by the modern school is a slightly lyrical dimension created by an out-of-focus way of looking at real objects or by their deliberate distortion.

  This lyrical dimension is absent from `Cervantes' Chickens' for the simple reason that the incident is, by its nature, too sordid to require any distortion. Or perhaps the reason lies in my feelings of resentment, as a Cervantes enthusiast, which do not permit me to offer any poetic relief to the stupidity of that poor woman, Dona Catalina de Salazar.

  The fact is that the chickens in the margin of the marriage contract have been crowing now for more than three centuries, crying out for a chronicler, as I said to Americo Castro when he mentioned to me how little had been written about Cervantes' private life.The only noteworthy, insightful comment that has been made, or which I recall, is that one of the dukes to whom Cervantes dedicated his finest work did not even bother to thank him, although the duke's assured place in history is due entirely to that dedication. Without it, he would long ago have been forgotten.

  In Spain, more than in any other country, glory is the sun of the dead. That sun shines very rarely during the lifetimes of heroes, poets or saints, be they Hernan Cortes, Pizarro, Miguel Servet, Gracian or Cervantes. The envy of their contemporaries usually clouds the atmosphere.

  Sometimes it becomes almost suffocating.

  Especially the atmosphere breathed by Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who, after all his failures and disasters, was able to give us, in Don Quixote, a sublime self-caricature as the thwarted (but undefeated) gentleman.

  He taught us too that not all those who play the fool in the name of God - humanitarian idealists - necessarily go to hell. Cervantes' heaven is vast, it surrounds the entire planet and is peopled by angels who repeat Don Quixote's words in every language in the world.

  As a reward for his desire for symmetry - which exists in the moral world as it does in the physical world - Cervantes (who sought his Dulcinea in vain) was given, begging her pardon, the most stupid wife in all of La Mancha.

  At first, what was happening to Cervantes' wife, Dona Catalina, seemed merely rather strange, then it became alarming and, ultimately, bizarre and incredible.

  But it was true and can be confirmed by documents of the period.

  For Dona Catalina de Salazar was turning into a chicken. Putting it bluntly like that may seem a little shocking, especially when one considers the chicken's rather libidinous reputation. The natural habits of chickens tend to be judged unfairly. I mean that Dona Catalina was a chaste and, above all, a faithful wife. I should have used the expression `poultry bird' and avoided the word `chicken' altogether, or used `hen' instead, since that word has some attenuating grace. How to say these things, however, is the least of the problem.

  With all these provisos and with all due respect, the fact is that Dona Catalina de Salazar was turning into a chicken, and if Cervantine scholars have not as yet come up with an explanation, one day they will with the help of the documents I have been able to gather together to the astonishment of laymen and to the satisfaction of scholars. The truth before all else.

  Cervantes never spoke of this transformation, which began on the very day he read the marriage contract, where his brother-in-law, the cleric, had set down the bride's possessions, including five wool mattresses, six straw mattresses, a few reams of writing paper and two pigs that came and went in the yard.

  On the day of the wedding, when the guests had all left, one person remained sitting in the corner of the room: an uncle of Dona Catalina called Don Alonso de Quesada y Quesada, whose family name suggests that his parents were first cousins, which may go a little way to explaining some of his eccentricities. He was a tall, thin, robust man with a noble, slightly crazed expression and he was dressed half as a military gentleman and half as a courtier.

  Impressed by the man's decorative presence and by his silence, Cervantes had initially regarded him with great respect.

  But something unexpected happened. When they were about to sign the marriage contract, the bride paused with quill in mid-air when she heard her imposing uncle say the first and last words he would utter that day:

  `Count the chickens and note them down too.'

  Cervantes was confused for a moment when he saw the old serving woman approach the gentleman and whisper in his ear the number of fowl in the yard. Cervantes was deeply impressed by the secrecy surrounding the act. Don Alonso went over to the desk and, in the margin of the marriage contract, alongside the list of items in the dowry and the trousseau, he wrote: twenty-nine chickens. Half-recovered from his perplexity, Cervantes raised his eyebrows a little and, pointing to the contract, said:

  `If you're putting down everything, Senor Don Alonso, you'd better include the cockerel as well.'

  He said it with no ironic intention, but realised afterwards that it could have been taken that way. Don Alonso de Quesada nodded and added the cockerel to the list.

  It seemed to Cervantes that this posturer, Don Alonso, was frighteningly, extraordinarily contradictory. His body was inhabited by two very different beings. That remark about the chickens was the last thing Cervantes would have expected Don Alonso to say; for he seemed to combine the appearance and the inner qualities of generosity and largesse of such heroes as Amadis de Gaula. Amongst the worthy people who have studied the matter, there are those who believe they can prove that the idea of noting down the number of chickens came from the bride's brother, the cleric. There are even those who say it was the bride's idea.

  The truth is that it was Don Alonso, the uncle, who wrote it down.
<
br />   For a moment, Cervantes thought that it would be good to separate the two people who seemed to inhabit Don Alonso's body, since together they created a monster. Dona Catalina laughed quietly, gleefully, and, seeing her husband still looking at Don Alonso rather oddly, said in a low voice: