The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  “Rafael, Rafael, I have a wonderful idea! I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier!”

  “What are you trying to do? Demolish Madrid with burning sulfur? Maybe it’s the fate we all deserve.”

  “No, no, how awful! I’m not the God of the Old Testament. I’m only an ambiguous creature and a terrified poet. Rafael, come with me to Granada!”

  “But, when?”

  “Right now. We’ll buy two sleeping-car tickets instead of one. Case closed.”

  “You’re out of your mind. Why would I go to Granada? And why this afternoon, for God’s sake?”

  “Because I’m inviting you. I’ll pay for everything, including the ticket, naturally. You’ve never been to Granada and it’s high time you saw it. Besides, I need you. I have the feeling that if you’re with me, you’ll change my destiny and make me invulnerable.”

  “You’re out of your mind! You think the world owes you everything, as if you were the sorcerer’s apprentice.” Little by little, Martínez Nadal was growing irritated with you, but you didn’t become angry or restrain yourself. You were only overcome by an infinite fatigue, because even his reaction to your proposal had been seen earlier. “I’m going to decide to take a trip right away because you order me to! Just like that, just the way it sounds, and only to please you. I don’t know what to call it!”

  The taxi stopped in front of Cook’s, on one shore of the Gran Vía. You paid the fare while Martínez Nadal continued his oration. He spoke now just to hear his own voice, and you didn’t listen. You once believed or believed again that this was the world, or at least the country: a chorus of lunatics talking to one another and never hearing anything.

  “It’s all right, man, it’s fine. It doesn’t matter,” you lied. “We’ll go to the Huerta de San Vicente another time. Forgive me if I’ve offended you in any way.”

  You took his arm and you both went into Cook’s. When you gave your name so they’d extend a very British welcome, the open-mouthed clerk looked you up and down. Were you the poet? We’re all poets in our own way. He was referring to the poet and playwright, the one who wrote Yerma. Damn, what a play! He had seen it three times! We’re all playwrights in our dreams. Did you ever stop to think about that? No, it hadn’t occurred to him, but he persisted in his questioning. Were you or were you not the poet of “The Unfaithful Wife” and the author of Yerma? No, you were only your brother’s brother. Rafael Martínez Nadal laughed, looking aside, leaning his elbows on the counter. He had reconciled with the sorcerer’s apprentice almost without realizing it. Now more than ever he reminded you of a sheep about to change into a man. You thought about old verses of yours, scrawled in New York just as you left that black church service (“Go down, Moses! Go down, Moses!”). You bore witness there to the effort in each metamorphosis. The interminable attempt of the horse to be a dog, of the dog to change into a swallow, of the swallow to become a bee. And finally, closing the dance of life, of the bee to transform into a horse. This was the idea of the poem, though you had forgotten the verses, if you ever knew them by heart. The boy in Cook’s did not come out of his distressed astonishment. “Excuse me, I’m afraid I don’t understand. Are you the brother of your brother?” Without answering you said goodbye, sweeping the air with a gesture. Outside you saw the same taxi that had taken you from Puerta de Hierro to Cook’s (or from Cook’s to this theater in hell), its flag lowered. You climbed in and gave your address, Alcalá, 102.

  You never learned how to pack. When you went to the Huerta de San Vicente from Madrid, you tended to travel with your hands in your pockets. This time you were resigned to dragging a suitcase to avoid a scandalized uproar from Rafael Martínez Nadal. He took charge of collecting your things, while you told him yes, you see, so much running around the world the past few years and you’d put old shoes with new shirts. Or you’d go with a toothbrush in the breast pocket of your jacket. A red brush, with hard bristles, like the orchid George Carpentier always wore in his lapel. You know. At the door of your house, beside the sidewalk on Alcalá, stood the same taxi. Stopped at the edge of traffic, it wasn’t waiting for the two of you or anyone else. One might say it had come miraculously from a space without time to take you to an ineluctable destiny. Like the gondola Gustave Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach, takes when he arrives in Venice. When he is unaware that his days are numbered and that before he dies he will experience love, always incomprehensible, for a seraphic adolescent. Though you confessed nothing to Rafael, you would have sworn that the taxi and its driver were strangers in Madrid and had never appeared in any company, registry, or union. Just like Aschenbach’s gondola, yes, with its nameless rower (“I’m only the brother of my brother”), or with a name the other gondoliers never learned. “The gentleman will pay,” that brutal-looking, distant creature had said to Aschenbach when he asked to be taken to the Lido. Nevertheless, as soon as they arrived, man and boat surprisingly disappeared, as if they had slipped away through the air and not the turbid waters of the canal. Gustave Aschenbach or von Aschenbach could not pay for the service, though his debt, incomprehensible to implacable creditors, still stood.

  “Rafael … ”

  “What’s on your mind now?”

  “I forgot the cup on the balcony again when I was in the house.”

  “Sweet Jesus! What are you talking about? I don’t understand a word!”

  “An empty coffee cup. It was left on the balcony when you came by. Then I was distracted while I said goodbye to that actor who boasted of being a descendant of Máiquez by way of a sister, and I forgot about it again a second time until now.”

  “You’re incomprehensible.” The small-eared sheep smiled in the back of the taxi. “Simply incomprehensible.”

  “Why is that?”

  “On one hand, you predict a war and say it will devour you as soon as it begins. On the other, you worry about a cup left on the balcony of your apartment.”

  “It’s all tragically joined,” you answered, surprising yourself. “Rafael, these streets and the countryside around Madrid will fill with corpses covered in their own blood. This city will be shelled and bombarded until many of its neighborhoods crumble into ruins. Yet I sense too that the cup will remain intact, on my balcony, through all the catastrophes.”

  Martínez Nadal was silent now. You imagined him deep in thought, trying to imagine your words without understanding them, assailed by another man’s imaginings. In the meantime, the afternoon fled up among the roofs, as in some paintings by Pissarro. Thinking about your dream the night before, you wondered whether by chance everything we thought alive were actually printed. In other words, did we really exist as beings doomed to die, or were we conscious images in someone else’s painting? You rejected the idea, shaking your dark head that, behind your back, people said looked like a farmhand’s. Everyone’s destiny was as inexorable and irrevocable as the course of the river, its sources hidden beyond nothingness, which for want of another name people called time. But in paintings, as in dreams, its water and the hours did not flow by. Everything was immobilized on canvases, Van Gogh’s hurricanes, Monet’s water lilies, and Velázquez’s exceedingly slow ladies-in-waiting.

  And at that instant, in a kind of sudden revelation, you thought you understood hell.

  It couldn’t be anything but the previous night’s dream, which you also foresaw as your last. Until your death, anticipated with a cold, almost inhuman lucidity, you would sleep blind and in pitch darkness. But you would not forget that nightmare, the sum of all you had lived and dreamed, and at the same time a very accurate foreboding (that, at least, is what you believed then) of endless hell, which would be nothing but the interminable presence of incomprehensible images, surrounding you and settling inside you forever. There, in you and with you, the shell opened with a barber’s razor, the goddess cut off from her breasts down, and the appeal adhering to the shell with its long red and gray turns. The fossilized eye of a species earlier than our own, turned into the blue heart of another
mother-of-pearl shell. The gigantic yellow ape, its eyes like turquoises, squatting under a transparent burden before cliffs cut by a pickax. The hacked torso of the nude, apple in hand, which even in the dream you attributed to another of the Graces. The white Bally shoe and the onyx slipper snail, lost at the bottom of your nightmare and watching over Paris’s rest.

  Evidently you were wrong. No one, except the dead, can ever understand hell. This is the only eternal truth and, at the same time, the most idle gossip.

  You believed everything was a fleeting part of this kingdom, reduced here to a simple memory, which you can witness on the stage in your theater whenever you please. Perhaps we can deduce an obvious lesson, like the ones in the moral texts of your parents’ little schools, and with similar consequences. All of you imagine death, like life itself, as the creation of your dreams. You make man the measure of all things, including eternity. Bluntly, he is not the proportion or scale of anything. His dream of hell is merely a phantom, one of his shades, on this spiral that is the other universe.

  When you reached the station, you got out of the taxi, Rafael carrying your suitcase. He was astonished that the driver drove away without waiting to be paid. You weren’t surprised. It was written that the gentleman would pay in any case and that man, who had waited for the two of you so patiently at the door to Cook’s and in front of your house, had fulfilled his ordained role in your destiny. You still lacked time and space for your sacrifice. You lacked them with nothing left over for you to be killed or your martyrdom repeated, for the dual sensation of a steadily diminishing period of time remaining, and events already experienced, acquired greater intensity on the platforms. With almost oppressive detachment, exhausted by the burden like the gigantic ape in your nightmare, you made an effort to correct all that had been written.

  “Rafael, you really won’t decide to come to Granada with me?”

  “Really, I decided right now,” he said with a smile. “Would the gentleman care for anything else?”

  “Nothing else, I ought to make the rest of the trip alone, if I’m obliged to undertake it at all.”

  “As you probably realize, I couldn’t reply in any other way.”

  “And I couldn’t fail to ask this time, though it may seem incredible to you.”

  “All right, man, all right. Let’s not make another Roman tragedy.” Your sleeper was at the end of the platform, two or three cars behind the locomotive. In the station, as on the streets filled with peddlers, Madrid rejuvenated and became provincial in a way Granada never was. You were pleased to confirm it, in spite of your state of mind. You definitely had not lost your capacity for observation, which had brought you to Góngora’s many years before Dámaso Alonso attempted to reveal it to you. Seeing clearly was thinking clearly at any moment, as Ortega said in his first book. Along the platform a man dressed in khaki pushed his two-wheeled cart filled with grenadine drinks, sodas, candied almonds, chocolates in tins painted with the canals of Amsterdam at dawn and the bell tower of San Giovanni, in Montepulciano, the one whose clock had been stopped at exactly 12:00 ever since a day in 1452 when Leonardo was born in Vinci. Granadina, grenadine, you thought in a parenthesis as you looked at those reds like the recently liquefied blood of San Gennaro, was also the flamenco song of Granada. The one you tried to express as a long sad onomatopoeia of the course of its rivers in one of your early poems. But granada, the pomegranate, was also the fruit of the shades in the kingdom of the dead, the one Ascalaphus saw Persephone eat, when Hades abducted her to his domain in the heart of eternity and the center of the earth.

  At the end of the platform, Madrid retraced its steps until it returned to the time of vaudeville, outdoor festivals on the eve of a holiday, vernacular operettas, and pasodobles in La Bombilla for the banderilleros and flashy girls of another day. (“Did you know a great-grandmother of mine was the sister of the great Máiquez?”) Peasant women in incredible long skirts and kerchiefs tied beneath the chin in a tight square knot ran, laughing and shrieking, toward a train waiting for them patiently. Their livelier husbands, rustics in their Sunday best though it was Thursday, button caps pulled slightly to the left, ironed handkerchiefs around their necks, and tight trousers, followed them. The women had empty straw baskets on their arms, in which they may have carried a capon or a speckled hen. The men grasped walking sticks as slender as reeds, similar to the ones barkers used at raffles, which they wielded in the air with many flourishes of their dark wrists.

  A sense of imperative symmetry, as those people passed by, obliged you to evoke the first time you saw Madrid. It was in the years before the European war and in a time as distant now as the Rome of Scipio Aemilianus. Your parents took you and your brother and sisters in a delayed fulfillment of an almost forgotten promise. As if you were figures in a daguerreotype, you all appeared in Retiro Park on another morning in an uncertain, early summer. The girls almost shivering in their white dresses with big yellow ribbons in their hair. Your brother and you in knit ties with large knots and one-button jackets fastened almost in the middle of your chests. They showed you the statue of The Fallen Angel, the only monument to the devil in the world, as your father said emphatically, when Machaquito and Vicente Pastor passed by in an open hackney carriage. You recognized them right away because you had seen them a few times in the bullring in Granada and many more times in the illustrations in La Esfera and Mundo Gráfico. Machaco had the dull air of a Cordoban impresario or a bookkeeper who had suddenly become wealthy. Beside him, like a giant, his body, arms, and face long, his broad smile, and protuberant bluish jaw, the very Madrilenian Vicente Pastor, the Kid in the Smock. There was no trace or memory left of the work-man’s smock he had worn to his first amateur bullfight. Still, upon seeing him dressed in his Panama hat and high buttoned boots, his tight vest, trousers, and short jacket, a white silk handkerchief around his neck, a watch chain with three loops across his chest, and a full-blown carnation in his lapel, you were overcome by the certainty that even in your earliest childhood you knew, clearly and powerfully. One day, you told yourself, after many years you would remember the carriage driving the bullfighter through the park. Until then your memory of him in the Madrilenian morning, including The Fallen Angel, would lie dormant, preparing for the appointed hour. When that came, it would be returned to you, as the stereotype plate is revealed in the developing tray, to give meaning and fulfillment to a time as irrevocable and irreversible as the water in rivers.

  And now Vicente Pastor was returning. The relic of your memory of him suddenly glimmered and identified with the good-looking men in traditional dress, with their starched handkerchiefs, tight trousers, and caps pulled down on one side. One was also the Kid in the Smock with the peasant women in their Gypsy skirts, baskets still warm and redolent of speckled hens on their arms. Everything shuffled together and confused to give you the image of the other Madrid, the one of sea and river crabs hawked in the streets along with cheeses from Miraflores and cakes from Astorga, just as you saw it that morning in your childhood and were witnessing it again now, complete and alive, almost as a loan. The death throes of the Madrid of bull-fighters in open carriages and flashy men and women at open-air festivals were coinciding with yours. That entire world, heir to Goya’s cartoons for tapestries through various avatars, would end forever as soon as the streets and fields filled with dead bodies, as you had just predicted to Rafael Martínez Nadal.

  In the Retiro they were exhibiting old French impressionists. All of you stopped in front of Monet’s La Gare Saint Lazare. Your father shook his head, a scornful smile spread to his jaws, and he asked what the devil that blur was. He understood perfectly well that after centuries painters cannot paint as Murillo did in his time. He also had known Moreno Carbonero, the great artist of Málaga, and he understood and appreciated art. This was why, this was precisely why, he grew increasingly sure of himself, he denounced these frauds by impostors who did not know what to do to attract attention. Your brother and you answered immediately, ex
pressing much more admiration for the painting than the two of you felt. Even though he was normally ill-tempered and did not tolerate arguments, he took almost no notice of your dissent. He merely shrugged his shoulders, which the years had not bent, taking into account your innocence as well as your ignorance. The girls were silent, and as if she were talking only to them, in a quiet, unhurried voice, your mother began to tell them that Monet did not intend to represent the world of surfaces, contours, and volumes (she was on the point of adding, “the world that, after all, we don’t see but imagine so we can understand one another,” but didn’t dare to in order not to enrage your father, who so far was listening to her with the same studied indifference he used when listening to you), but the other world, the one that light and shadows transform constantly. “His intention, like Velázquez’s in the Meninas we saw yesterday in the Prado, was to capture a fleeting instant: one of the unnoticed, evolving moments that come, pass, fade, and together constitute our brief lives. To create this painting, constantly fluid and in transition, Monet used very short, thick brushstrokes that stand out perfectly in the picture, the kind we pointed out to you in Las Meninas. Needless to say,” your mother concluded, “the similarity is not accidental, if we keep in mind that both Velázquez and Monet were trying to represent a pause in time. Velázquez, the instant in which the lady-in-waiting offers the princess a vase, and Monet the arrival of the train puffing smoke at the far end of the Saint-Lazare station.”