The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  You listened to her until that point (the point being staged now, with the ghosts of all of you like actors in this theater in hell). Then you stopped hearing her in order to observe your own personal revelation before the painting. As had happened before, when your family crossed paths with Vicente Pastor beside The Fallen Angel, you told yourself you ought to treasure the moment, with La Gare Saint Lazare in the background, because on another occasion in your life its true significance would be revealed to you. Again in the station in Madrid and at the end of the Andalucía express, you knew the moment foreseen twenty-four or twenty-five years earlier had arrived. Like water in water, the memory of the painting by Monet merged into the present reality, in which you weren’t listening to Rafael just as in the Retiro you stopped hearing your mother as she attempted to explain to all of you the secret intentions of impressionism before your father’s sarcastic smile. Smoke with smoke, platforms with platforms, iron horses with iron horses, everything intermingled with everything. So tight was the weave of the living and the painted that you didn’t know with certainty if you were entering a station or a picture. Suddenly, like a note in the margin of that experience, you repeated everything your mother had said in the Retiro. Monet tried to capture a fleeting instant in La Gare Saint Lazare, one of the transitory, marvelous seconds whose passage we are almost never aware of in our lives. He painted an ordinary train entering Paris and performed a miracle achieved previously only by Velázquez. In other words, he stopped time so that men could take delight in the silent miracle, assuming they weren’t blind to his painting as your father was. Now his painted moment and your lived moment were one, when your arrival in and departure from Madrid were confused into a single instant at both ends of a quarter of a century that was also the time of your self-aware life.

  The rest was foreseeable and you made an effort to shorten it, though you would be overcome again by the certainty of having experienced everything before in some unknown dimension of time or of your soul. Rafael Martínez Nadal insisted on carrying your suitcase into your compartment and lifting it onto the luggage net above some faded photographs of the Rhine in Basel and the Loire as it passed through Amboise, which crowned the seats upholstered in open, embroidered dahlias. You walked with him to the platform to say goodbye from the step of the car, when you saw that man in the passageway and were overcome by terror.

  Leaning out one of the windows, his back almost turned to you, he looked absentmindedly at the platform. You recognized his corpulence, his firm jaws that gave him a faint resemblance to pictures of your father in his youth, his camel driver’s shoulders, and that hair as black and kinky as an African’s. Being a right-wing deputy, he attended meetings wearing a butcher’s smock identical to Vicente Pastor’s in his early amateur bullfights. In his speeches he took God’s name in vain, with the same arrogant indifference he brought to taking a taxi in Granada to go to Madrid, though afterward he tried to avoid paying, hiding somewhere or other. At one of the dinners you and José Antonio Primo de Rivera would go to, also in secret, you referred to the calluses on his hands, which he would show to the Party to prove that a weather-beaten worker could be loyal to Law, Order, and the Indivisible Fatherland. José Antonio Primo de Rivera would laugh heartily. “He’s just a tamed worker!” he exclaimed. “Nothing but a tamed worker! When Gil Robles gets tired of exhibiting him, he’ll sell him to a provincial circus.”

  “Go now, Rafael,” you said to Martínez Nadal on the platform. “Don’t wait for the train to leave.”

  “Don’t be impatient. All in good time. I’m in no hurry.”

  “You’ll do me a huge favor if you leave right now.”

  “Why so much urgency and mystery? You’re like a conspirator.”

  “Do you see that man? The husky one, with the big jaws, looking out the window. He’s a deputy from Granada and a bad character. Under no circumstances do I want to talk to him. As soon as you leave, I’ll go into my compartment and close the curtains. Please leave before he sees us.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll go if you insist.” Wearily he shook his sheep’s head again. “You’re the most fearful, superstitious creature I’ve ever known.”

  “Whatever you say; but go now. I beg you. He can turn around at any moment.”

  “Who is that man, after all? A ghost, the bête noire of your sleepless nights, or simply a messenger of fate?”

  “I just told you, a right-wing deputy for Granada.” You hesitated and summoned all your courage to say his name, which for reasons as yet unknown brought terror to your soul. “His name is Ramón Ruiz Alonso.”

  With a shrug to express his ignorance or his indifference, Rafael Martínez Nadal said goodbye with a handshake. You saw him walk down the platform, not turning around even once, far removed from any presentiment that your final encounter was ending here. With no nostalgia and no sadness, because your uneasiness mixed an unexpected coldness into your spirit, you watched him until he was lost in a turbulent crowd of hurrying people running toward the Andalucía express. Then, in your compartment, you closed the door to the passageway and closed the curtains. In the shadows Basel grew dark, and a yellowish-gray Loire ran through Amboise, where you thought Leonardo had been buried. In one of his notes he described the river water we touch as the last of the water that has gone and the first of the water to come. In his opinion, that’s what the present was like. No need to even say he was wrong, just as you were mistaken when you supposed the dead were blind. If the days of our lives were like river water, each river would be a circle bound to empty into its own headwaters. Each drop identical to all the rest and each hour the same as one lived earlier. Through you Monet’s train began to fuse with the Andalucía train. One was coming into the Gare Saint-Lazare, the other slowly leaving Madrid to carry you to an irrevocable death you had already experienced earlier.

  Through the window pane, passing faster and faster, were tracks, crossties, switch rails, sand traps, walls, sidings, ballast, tenders, cars, platforms, and sidetracks. They pass now across the stage in this theater, where memories return to you intact the life you’ve lived. Each man carries hell inside him, because hell is absolute memory. Those rivers turned into circles, which were your lives, return at any point from their water to the exorcism of desire. Night was falling, as it falls now on stage, as the train moved away from Madrid. The first lights cross the windowpane as they were being lit at dusk in 1936. You felt fatigued and drowsy at the end of that interminable day, the last of your days in Madrid. You stood to close the curtains, as you had closed the ones on the door to the passageway. As your image stands now in the theater to close them. The entire representation is identical to what happened, down to the last and most insignificant detail, as it was so many other times when you relived that final trip to the land where you were born and your inevitable death.

  Suddenly, and in a manner as unforeseen as it was unexpected, something on the stage differs from what occurred! One might say you take an eternity, if one can speak of eternity in hell, to close the curtains. You would swear that in the reality of the past you closed them quickly in order to lie down on the bed in your compartment and forget everything, absolutely everything, Ruiz Alonso and Martínez Nadal, Monet and Vicente Pastor, Aschenbach’s gondolier and the taxi driver always waiting for you, Sánchez Mejías and Primo de Rivera, Sodom and the church in Harlem, The Public and Yerma, The Fallen Angel and the Huerta de San Vicente, the empty cup on the closed balcony and the great-grandson of Medioculo, the onyx slipper snail in your dreams and your admirer in Cook’s. Now, however, your standing image pauses, his back to the door to the passageway, while hell prints an unexpected and terrible message on the windowpane. There, in large, bright letters that never appeared before on the windows of the express, four golden, gleaming words: PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  THE ARREST

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  I don’t know whether I’m accused of having been born or having been murdered. I sense only that
, whoever my judges may be, if I’m acquitted I’ll sleep in forgetfulness and be free of my memories.

  PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

  As soon as they appeared, those words on the window faded. They might have been fleeting, but I had no doubt I had seen them. How I would prepare for a trial, alone and not knowing the charges, struck me as grotesque and senseless. The absurdity of the situation filled me with an unexpected hilarity no less irrational than this supposed trial of mine. Twisted over an arm of my orchestra seat, I laughed wildly, like a madman, a mad dead man, my palms at my temples. I stopped laughing when I realized that if life and reason were exceptions lost in the firmament, this other universe too, the one of our spiral, could be just as pointless, just as alien to human consciousness. Therefore, once everything had been taken into account, I was still under the same constraints. I was being exhorted to prepare for a trial but not being told what crimes I was charged with. At the same time, by means of a design as obvious as it was inexplicable, I was infused with the certainty that acquittal would represent eternal forgetfulness, the limitless freedom of sleeping with no dreams and no memories.

  Agitation suddenly brought me to my feet and took me up the corridor to the next theater. I was carried away by the presentiment, more than unjustified, that there I would find part of the answer to my uncertainty. As usual the theater was empty, on stage and in the seating area. And yet, for the first time, I was stopped by a sensation unknown in that place. I always believed that whoever stayed there rarely evoked his past, because I never saw his memories on stage. I even thought we dead were blind after all, like the ghost of that Gypsy girl of mine, because we saw only one another’s memories without being able to tell to whom they belonged. To add to my solitude, in that theater I didn’t even confront the man’s evocations. It was then, on one of my walks around the deserted theater, when I observed that each dead person was a Robinson Crusoe sitting on the head of a pin, taking on the entire guilty conscience of the universe.

  For no reason, but with absolute certainty, at that instant I changed my mind and told myself that the auditorium, its proscenium and stage, all of it was empty. Whoever had been punished there had been acquitted at his trial. He slept now without dreams in hell, and for that reason, freed from consciousness and memory, he no longer was anyone. Never again would he turn his gaze to the shades of his past, and these would not appear again on stage. Immediately, and in an unconscious synthesis of terrifying realities, I thought that perhaps the spiral was not another universe the size of all humanity, where each dead person had a corresponding theater. It was conceivable that it had closed, while people still lived in the world with their foolishness and hope. Perhaps the seats and stages of those who had been acquitted and freed into nothingness, where not even memory exists, were waiting for other people and the staging of their memories.

  Hypotheses entwined and knotted like threads. I was obliged to wonder whether some unknown but not inconsequential reason connected those who stayed in the same theater. It was possible that not having known one another on earth, secret analogies had governed their lives, and as a consequence they were assigned the same orchestra seats and identical stages. Perhaps, in the final analysis, an analysis as logical as it is ironic, that and only that was humanity’s reason for being. In contrast, and maybe with identical verisimilitude, I could imagine the opposite was true. In other words, suppose that irony was sarcasm, and attribute to senseless chance the successive passage of different ghosts through the same theaters. I was shaken by the idea of randomness so great that if I were acquitted at my trial, Ruiz Alonso would one day be assigned my space in hell so he could eternally watch my arrest in Granada.

  It was this anticipatory, irrational fear—my theater and stage inherited by Ruiz Alonso—that took me up the corridor and under the skylights to the next theater. Again and as always, I called to someone there who I supposed was allied to me in feelings or in interests. “Who are you? Where do you come from? What was your name among men?” And now, for the first time I wanted to ask: “Who judges us? Why do they try the dead?” Only silence replied, harboring the echo of my questions. Perhaps the one chosen to fill that theater by himself was still alive, and his memories and fantasies preceded him along the road to the proscenium. At least, this was always my belief in the next theater, where the gigantic cross of the Risco de la Nava appears. Here, for arbitrary and inexplicable reasons, I was not as certain of my presentiment. In any event, if the man had died, we would not be able to meet in our sleeplessness, for we were incapable of hearing or seeing one another in the theater or along this corridor that curves and moves up the endless spiral.

  Regardless of whether his memories preceded him, they began suddenly to illuminate the stage. Where once there had been a parade of gentlemen in top hats, monarchs with ruffs around their necks, storks flying over Baltic cities, white-skinned ladies with their hands in muffs, sleepy elves, herds of reindeer gleaming with frost, hunters huddled over the pot of eucalyptus, fishermen with green eyes, Aretino’s double, the thirteen twins around Blasco Ibáñez’s table, the prostitute whose face was crossed by a whip, fields of fennel and thyme covered by bees, and the enlightened nude who was the ragione chiara acclaimed by the musketeers, there now appeared the glass front of the Lyon across from the Post Office, its window overlooking the sidewalk of Calle de Alcalá. The café had changed very little since the days when I would sit there with Buñuel or Alberti, after the theater. The same sofas leaning against the wall, which at first were made of plush and then of oilcloth. The same bar covered in zinc and marble, in front of the same shelves of illuminated bottles. Identical tables and chairs in the usual places. Two men were talking beside the window at the entrance, but their voices came through the glass very clearly. One was tall and must have measured a good two meters, as the peasants of my childhood used to say. He wore his pitch-black hair brushed back, flat against his skull. The scar from an accident or a knife blade divided his cheek, darkened by the sun and bluish because of his beard. From time to time he wrote in a notebook lying open on the table or toyed with an aluminum ashtray. He was a stranger to me and could have been any age, between mine when they shot me and plunged me into hell, and fifty.

  The other man must have been close to eighty or perhaps older. He had reached that point in elderliness when people stop aging and turn into their own vanished likeness. I couldn’t identify him until I heard his voice. With a disengaged coldness that did not fail to surprise me, I realized he would be someone I knew very well. His cottony kinky hair was thinning now, and his angular, large-jawed features had grown smaller around his dark eyes. His shoulders too, which once seemed to belong to a stevedore or a large, husky man, were collapsing, defeated by the years. His hands, stained by time with liver spots, rubbed the space between his eyebrows or stopped with the edge of his palm a yellow dribble that kept appearing at the corner of his mouth. It was Ramón Ruiz Alonso.

  They were talking about me, even though they made a curious effort, as if by mutual agreement, not to ever mention me by name. The man with the scar on his cheek nodded occasionally at Ruiz Alonso’s words with a vague gesture, almost for the sake of courtesy. Most of the time he seemed to listen without believing most of what Ruiz Alonso was telling him. They never looked each other in the eye, but they were absorbed in their conversation. Two cups of coffee grew cold on the table.

  “Here, in this very place, I spoke some years ago about that poor gentleman, God rest his soul, with an Englishman or an Irishman who picked up everything I said, in secret and without my knowing it, on one of those things, what do you call them?” Ruiz Alonso stammered.

  “A tape recorder,” the man with the cut on his face suggested.

  “That’s it, a tape recorder. Then he published it in a book about the death of that poor unfortunate, may he rest in peace. Can you imagine the lack of principles?”

  The man with the scar did not venture a comment. He limited himself to tracing in his n
otebook two parallel, very short lines, which he then crossed with another vertical, drawing a kind of Cross of Lorraine.

  “I don’t have any tape recorder,” he said as if he were talking to himself.

  “I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt it.” His emphasis betrayed Ruiz Alonso’s hidden uncertainty. By then he already must have regretted agreeing to the interview. “You’re a gentleman.”

  “There isn’t a single creature on earth capable of knowing who he is,” the man with the cut face replied, quoting Léon Bloy.

  “It’s possible. It’s possible, though I don’t really understand these things. I’m only a poor retired typesetter.” He hesitated a moment, as an actor would who gauged his audience before uttering an obscenity in the middle of a mystery play or a classical tragedy. “I’m a son of the people.”

  “Excuse me, what did you say?”

  “I said I’m a son of the people.”

  “Son of the people or not, you will pass into history, Señor Ruiz Alonso. Or, to be honest, you’ve already entered it, because once a poet was murdered whom you had arrested,” the man with the sliced face replied, with no irony.