The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  I refused to go into the clinic or the room I would call iridescent with death throes in the most painful of my poems. I didn’t leave the sidewalk, where I spent long hours asking every visitor how Ignacio was. They replied that he was getting worse by the hour and was losing hope. They looked away, not daring to meet my eyes because my attitude irritated them. They believed that only an irrational fear, the supposed panic of an effeminate man in the face of death, kept me from crossing the threshold of the building. I would have liked to shout at them right there, in the middle of the street, Gide’s declaration of principles: Je ne suis une tapette! Je suis un péderaste! (Know I’m not a fairy! I’m a pederast!) Death didn’t terrify me so much that I thought it was contagious. I was never that irrational, though I didn’t recognize the logic of the universe and don’t accept the senselessness of hell. In fact, there was no one who demonstrated greater courage than I did in my poem when I faced Ignacio’s destiny. If there was, he left no evidence of his manhood, for the response Alberti dedicated to him compares unfavorably to mine. Simply put, I didn’t have the heart to watch Ignacio suffer. To see how gangrene inevitably destroyed him until he was reduced to someone he had never been before: a dead man.

  Ignacio himself must have believed in his delirium that I refused to see him because of a homosexual’s weaknesses. In dreams his eyes would appear to reproach me for that. They were always very large and open in those nightmares of mine, his gaze fixed and hard in his virile, sensitive face, as broad between the temples as it was long. Under his porphyry forehead, which baldness enlarged in his last years, those motionless eyes denounced and pursued me. Even though I knew I was dreaming, I couldn’t wake up or escape his vengeful hounding that reproved me for my absence and the crime of being born homosexual, as he could have blamed me for having been conceived a perfect man.

  Constantly pursued by those eyes, between sleep and waking I must have imagined the main lines of my elegy before he actually died. Like the eyes of the apocalyptic monsters, fixed eternally before the man of sardonyx and jasper, I thought Ignacio’s would not close at the moment of the final goring. I told myself he would keep them open after he was dead and no one ought to cover them with handkerchiefs. Eternity would transform him into a dark minotaur, beast and victim combined into identical sacrifices. None of those machos, the ones whose bones resonate like footsteps or flints, would dare to see himself in his unmoving gaze in the middle of the funeral chapel, as I, for very different reasons, did not have the courage to see him in his agony.

  It was ironic that Ignacio, the most valiant bullfighter who ever lived, would reprimand me for unmanly cowardice. Yes, ironic, since in other circumstances he had meekly and shamefully humiliated himself before me. We all saw him at the festival in Córdoba, holding the muleta, down on one knee in front of a bull as gigantic as one of the stone bulls in Guisando, while with his other hand he smacked the animal’s snout to make it charge. If it had, he would have been run through because the tips of its horns were scratching his chest. His temerity was not completely blind, for he knew the bulls of that herd too well to fear an attack. Still, if he’d had a presentiment, he would not have abstained from testing fate because in his immense daring, Ignacio was immune to fear.

  I’m referring to the physical, for he very well might have felt moral fear. Two or three years before his death, he and La Argentinita had been lovers for almost ten. I was very fond of La Argentinita, who played the Butterfly in my first, very booed piece for the theater in two acts and a prologue. And I would have to dedicate my elegy for Ignacio to her, although at the time none of us could have foretold that. La Argentinita always had the unequivocal affection for me, like a mother’s or a sister’s, that some women feel for men like me. A dancer acclaimed throughout Europe, she agreed to appear in that distant play by a kid barely twenty years old and never blamed me for its failure. I was never forgetful about gratitude, though I was about rancor, and I always remembered her courtesy. Afterward, when my poems and other plays of mine made me well known, she celebrated them and told me she had always believed in my talent and the success that fate would bring me. From the beginning she confided to me her affair with Sánchez Mejías, to whom she held on immediately and irrevocably, though she had loved and enjoyed other men before him. She knew Ignacio would not leave his Gypsy wife, sister of the Gallos, who was both resigned and jealous, or his farm in Pino Montano, or his son, who, to the consternation of his father, insisted on being a bullfighter. (“If a broken body has to come into my house, let it be mine and not my son’s,” Argentinita confessed that Ignacio had said to her.) Only now, in this spiral of hell, do I understand how those words of his were transformed into other lines in my elegy, without my being able to see it, when I state in the poem that no one knows his body, not the stone where he lies, not the black satin where he is destroyed. Even if he left his wife, his son, and his country house, Argentinita went on, shaking her head, Ignacio would go back to them, just as he returned to the bullring after his retirements. “It’s his destiny, you know? He can’t avoid it, and perhaps it’s also written that he’ll die in the arena.”

  If there were an invisible book of his life that would precede it point by point before it was lived, it would also have a footnote about other loves, this time incidental. Ignacio had an affair with a foreign woman, married and with children, whose name I forgot even though I introduced them myself. La Argentinita, who was never jealous of Ignacio’s wife, was carried away now by resentment, suspicions, and rancor. She called or came to see me almost every day to tell me, in almost identical words, her desperation. I ran from Madrid to Granada, to my parents’ house, to avoid her. Or rather, I imposed a truce and escaped the city for the same reasons I didn’t want to go to Ignacio in his agony: because I could never bear my own impotence in the face of other people’s sorrow. When I returned, on a very quiet Sunday morning, I was with some friends in a café on the Gran Vía when Ignacio happened to come in. He stopped at our table, spreading his legs wide and planting his feet firmly on the floor, his overcoat open and his arms crossed behind his back beneath his Herculean shoulders, his hat pushed back on his bald head of quartz and feldspar, and no one asked him to sit down. He looked contemptuously at my companions, young Gypsies and unripe flamenco singers, very affected and not rich in talent.

  “When did you get back from Granada?” he asked me.

  “About ten days ago,” I lied, because it was only five.

  “Why are you so hard to see? You promised to let me know when you got back.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “What reason do you have for avoiding me?”

  “You know better than anyone.” I lowered my voice without taking away its coldness or severity. “You acted like a thug with someone I’ve always loved. This foreigner has her husband and you had La Argentinita.”

  “That’s no reason for you to avoid me as if I were a leper. Can we talk in private?”

  “I have nothing to say to you, Ignacio, and it would be better if we didn’t see each other again.”

  He had been recognized in the café and people were looking at us. He knew he was being observed by the curiosity and evil-minded gossip of strangers, as if he were a circus clown, but he couldn’t move. Incapable of leaving or of taking a seat when one wasn’t offered, the man who kneeled in front of bulls and slapped them to incite them to attack was rooted to the floor and submitted to that contempt in the presence of strangers and my Gypsy adolescents. I looked straight into his eyes. He lowered his, and his shoulders seemed to collapse beneath the coat tailored in London. My attendants, the flamenco boys, began to smile and exchange poisonous whispers.

  “Where are you going now?” he asked in a thin voice, biting his lips.

  “I was going to have lunch.”

  “With your friends?”

  “With them, in the usual restaurant.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he murmured.

  “Nobody invited you.�
�

  Ignacio slowly began to stoop as if he were looking for a crack in the floor to hide his vanquished eyes. He knew how much I had always admired him and respected his valor in the ring and his talent in the theater. He met the bulls from the base of the barrier, as they left the bullpen, and wrote mad short pieces for the stage. For some time and without ever asking him about it, I had been convinced that his surrealist works and his bullfighting were part of a single magnificent, almost suicidal effort to give meaning to his life and make himself known to the universe. In a kind of symmetrical irony, when I saw him subjugated in that way, I detested my unexpected strength and absurd cruelty. And yet I couldn’t renounce either one, once they had been revealed, without ceasing to be myself.

  “The restaurant is a public place,” he finally muttered. “I can go there to have coffee, if I want to.”

  I refrained from answering and he left, dragging his feet, not looking at me. He left the way he came, though now his shoulders were bent, his hands still clasped behind his back beneath his open overcoat. I had almost forgotten about La Argentinita and my indignation at her suffering, but I thought about the many women Ignacio had loved. He wasn’t drawn to them by lust, pride, or even love, though he thought he was in love with all of them at the same time. The bed, the bullring, and the theater were stage sets or benchmarks where he tried to augment and play the part of the authentic Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. An Ignacio Sánchez Mejías who constantly overflowed the person the universe condemned him to be. I would think about Ignacio and the synthesis of his biographical sketch that I was doing then, when on the eve of the war and my own death, Don José Ortega y Gasset came to talk to me during an intermission at the Club Anfistora. “The man is always more than the man,” he said about I don’t know who, his long ivory cigarette holder that looked as if it belonged to Marlene Dietrich, the Pall Mall lit at the end, held between those teeth of his that were so incredibly young for his age. “No,” I replied. “But some men make the effort. Ignacio Sánchez Mejías was one, and soon it will be two years since his deadly goring in the Manzanares arena.”

  As soon as I sat down in the restaurant with my two apprentice flamenco singers, Ignacio came in alone. He went to a corner table and sat with his back to the wall. He stayed there for eternities, bending over a glass of sherry or manzanilla as if waiting for the wall to split and fall on his back. From time to time he glanced at me surreptitiously and then became lost in thought again, contemplating the tablecloth. They hadn’t finished their garlic soup when I rudely dismissed the Gypsies. They left without embarrassment or surprise because my lavishness made them servile. They were my version of the dark vice as opposed to the love that could not say its name, which in those days I didn’t feel for anyone. I had met them in my only period of plenty and squandered the rights to my theater pieces on them so they would kiss me on the sly. Afterward I hated myself for hating them.

  When I was alone, I looked at Ignacio openly. You could almost see his skull beneath the skin, just as Freud’s cranium was visible in the charcoal sketch Dalí made of him. (“A perfect example of the Spanish fanatic,” Freud very accurately said of Dalí.) Sánchez Mejías’s was broad across the forehead, the cheekbones, and the temples. Obstinacy had hardened his jaws and pressed his lips against his teeth. Inadvertently I must have guessed then that the two of us, Ignacio and I, would die soon with all our blood spilled on the ground. Almost ten years earlier and in an indirect way, I made one of my characters in the “Sleepwalking Ballad” foretell my destiny. He asks the father of his dead lover to let him die in his bed, the metal one with linen sheets, when he arrives with stab wounds, pursued by the Civil Guard. The transaction cannot be concluded in the poem, just as I failed to be aware of my inevitable fate. Yet the poet’s senses and instinct must have perceived whatever reason and conscience did not elucidate, because I suddenly surprised myself by beckoning to Ignacio with my hand. He looked at me without seeing me, as if he could not credit my intentions or my very existence. Finally he stood up, urged on by my impatience, and staggered to the table. You might say he wasn’t certain whether this was happening to him or to someone who was his living facsimile in soul and appearance. Once again, as in the café, everyone was looking at us. They had recognized Ignacio, when he hadn’t managed to identify himself, but at that point I didn’t care about the attention of strangers. Life was truly becoming a lie, and knowing you were being observed was as appropriate to the circumstances as the audience in a theater might have been. I embraced his shoulders and offered him the menu, looking into his eyes. They were very dark and wide open, with silver threads flashing near the iris.

  “Go on, man,” I murmured, “tell me what you’re going to eat and how the bulls will be this summer.”

  In your theater, the one you were assigned to in hell, your last day in Madrid appears and is staged when you recall it. Everything comes back to life exactly as it was, as it happened to you on that Thursday, July 16, 1936, the eve of the outbreak of the war in Africa. The previous night you had a dream that was another man’s painting. At the bottom of the composition, which seemed to be conceived in glass and the glass secured on a wooden panel, slept Raphael’s Paris unnoticed by the three Graces. Beside him you saw an open shell, which you had once contemplated in Port Lligat beside some magical sea of the kind painted by Dalí, in the days when you dedicated an ode to him. It was half white and half ocher and scarlet in its hollow, surrounded by an edge gilded by the sun. (“It’s called Crepidula onyx, which is its exact, technical name in Latin,” Dalí had told you during one of the last summers of your friendship, for he liked to collect useless information. “In the tropical Pacific, it’s known as the onyx slipper snail.”) On the other side of the onyx slipper snail, flanking it with Paris, was a white Bally shoe. A white, low-cut shoe you recognized immediately because it was yours. Your friend Carlillo Morla, the Chilean diplomat, made you buy it because he was sick of seeing you wear those clumsy buckled shoes he called the house slippers of Queen Juana the Mad. Above the onyx slipper snail, in the middle of the glass that was a painting, hung an enormous, mother-of-pearl shell. Hanging or perhaps held over the void that was a vortex of red and gold cobras was an amputated naked woman’s torso holding an apple. It was undoubtedly part of the body of one of Raphael’s Graces, though Raphael had not painted that monstrosity. Neither had Dalí, even though a mountain or cliff, with smooth slopes and metallic peaks, appeared to the right of the carcass to remind me of Port Lligat. Above that rocky terrain appeared a gigantic ape, squatting as if overcome by a burden that was invisible or omitted in the dream. Though almost as tall as the headlands themselves, one would say he was carved out of tiger’s eye because of his yellow transparency. His eyes, on the other hand, were round and turquoise blue. Just in the center of the titanic, mother-of-pearl shell, you saw another that was perhaps a cut panel or the drying incision in a very old tree. You might also have thought it was the fossilized gaze of a man who preceded this species of ours, which has not always been human and perhaps is condemned to cease being human. It was indigo on its exterior that was similar to bark, and the color of dry resin underneath. In the middle of the transverse cut, it became dark and blue again as if revealing the hidden pupil of the metalized eye. A stub of the dream remained, which now erupts at the highest part of the stage, above the sleeping image of Paris. It was another spiral, that of a shell as gigantic as the ape on the cliffs, a great red curve in the rear followed by another that was gray like parchments with a good number of palimpsests. Joined to those curves were those of another of Raphael’s Graces, her arms opened to press them against her naked body, seen from the back. Of the third divinity, all you could see, as you see it here, was her torso severed at the height of her breasts. That living bust leaned over the forearm of her companion, or perhaps erupted from the divided exterior of the singular shell, or from a fold opened with a knife between its red and gray ramps.

  When you awoke after so many strange dream
s, you thought everything that would happen to you that day had already occurred, including the memory of your nightmare. More than thinking it you felt it, in a kind of presentiment. When the two of you went into details, yours was not the sensation you imagined in Ignacio and he then confirmed, that he had been someone else as he approached your table on that winter Sunday in the restaurant on the Gran Vía. No, yours was the certainty that each of your acts and words on that Thursday, July 16, 1936, had been carried out and spoken on another identical day long ago. And still you hesitate and ask yourself whether you really lived those hours twice or foresaw, in the most irrational part of your spirit, that their representation preceded you in hell. It is very possible that our memories anticipate us on the stages of this spiral and that what is remembered appears here before we experience it on earth. In short, you are unable to decide whether the man in the third theater along the ramp of the corridor is alive or has died. Seeing the basilica on his stage, you suspected at times that perhaps memories precede us into eternity just before death. Perhaps it is appropriate to amplify that suspicion and wonder whether each of us might not have our private seating ready in this universe long before we are conceived in the other one.