by Carlos Rojas
Consternation opened the stranger’s eyes wide behind the round lenses of his glasses. He told himself that in the past, in another world lost in a very remote time, his eyes had been large and dark. He didn’t know then whether he remembered the other man’s eyes or supposed he ought to remember him without being able to specify who he was. The old man’s accent eventually disconcerted him, because free of intonation and inflections, in the end it disappeared. It made him think of a Trappist who, returned to the world after eternities in silence, spoke as if he had learned the language of his fellow men in the midst of a species other than human. In turn, and to his own annoyance, he caught himself speaking to the man in mourning in the tranquil, slow tone of someone who insists on proving the veracity of his words before the most cynical of deaf men or the most skeptical of judges.
“On stage my memories are revived when I evoke them. Only mine, though other dead people invisible to me must see them as well, as I sometime look at theirs in other theaters. If one of us is acquitted at trial, he obtains the grace of sleep freed from consciousness and memories. At other times, I believe that men’s evocations precede their death and their presence in hell … ”
He was cut off by the old man’s laughter. It seemed uncontrollable, though he soon took delight in his own outburst. He laughed as if he were clucking, out of breath and trembling. Behind his toothless gums was the dark palate of a sheep dog.
“Where did you get this absurd idea of hell turned into a tower of theaters?”
“It’s not a tower. It’s a spiral. All you have to do is go out to the corridor to understand. The passageway climbs in very wide, open curves to all the theaters.”
“A spiral!” Hilarity doubled the old man over as if he were a hook. It made him slap his knees with bony hands spotted by the years. “It’s the most grotesque thing anyone could imagine! Hell a spiral of theaters. One for each man, I suppose.”
“One for each man,” he agreed, more and more humiliated and surprised, incapable of escaping from the phantom and even of ignoring his unexpected presence. “One for each dead person.”
The apparition shook his head and for the first time looked away. His guffaws turned into panting with the coughs and snorts of an old rutting stag, though he soon gained control of himself. He spoke now with a kind of ironic commiseration, as an experienced and to a certain extent sadistic shepherd would with a very young apprentice goatherd.
“Boy, this isn’t hell and we aren’t dead. I’m very well acquainted with hell, to my sorrow, and I can assure you it’s on earth.” He turned to face him, as if trying to convince him with his sincerity after abusing him with his sarcasm. “Do you know where we really are?”
“Where do you want me to say?”
“I haven’t wanted anything, my boy, not even to go on living, for a very long time. But facts are facts, even though they may be dreams. This supposed spiral of hell, these theaters where, as you so absurdly say, their memories at times precede the dead, the other stage set of your ridiculous vocations, the eternal sentence to wakefulness and memories, the possible liberation in forgetting, all of it, absolutely all of it, is nothing more or less than my nightmare. You’re not anyone, only a crazed phantom in one of my dreams, from which I’ll wake whenever I please.”
(WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?) The crazy one was that man, whoever he was, placed in his path by an inexplicable but perhaps not completely irrational destiny as he prepared, or should have prepared, for his trial. If that withered creature was truly mad and not simulating derangement, perhaps the purpose of an oblique providence was to offer him as a model for his own feigned madness. On the other hand, the man believed both he and hell were his dream, the nightmare of a possible megalomaniac who perhaps feared being immortal. (“I haven’t wanted anything, my boy, not even to go on living, for a very long time”), but Sandro Vasari had also dreamed the endless spiral, him in his assigned theater, and even some of the memories that preceded Vasari himself into eternity. One by one, the words of the man with the plastered-down hair and the scar on his cheek came back to him: “I said to myself: This can’t be, dreaming you went crazy. And then: Dreaming you went to hell. Parts of that nightmare, perhaps the most terrible ones, disappeared upon waking.”
“If I’m your dream, who are you?”
“I don’t want to tell you my name because it’s my curse. At one time, when I was as young as you, I was vain about having the name I have. Now I wish I had never been born.”
“I became proud of mine too. I was dazzled to know it was repeated and proclaimed. Now I agree with you, it would be better never to have been born.”
“Be quiet and don’t interrupt! Even in my dream you’re too young to understand prestige like mine, the prestige I had at your age. People recognized me on the street and came over to shake my hand, as if I had worked miracles. At first I told myself: ‘It’s fair because I am who I am.’ Then I started to ask myself: ‘Can they be talking about me? Can they be talking to me?’ You’d never understand … ”
“I understand you perfectly because the transformation in my own legend, I’ve experienced that too.”
“I told you to be quiet! At your age what do you know about me and the times I’m referring to? If you interrupt again, I’ll stop talking. But then you won’t find out what hell really is.”
It was the most ironic of threats, but he made it unaware of the sarcasm. Perhaps he was sincerely convinced he was nothing but part of a dream, though that dyspeptic old man with no accent seemed accustomed to deceiving himself. With an effort he controlled the anger provoked by the old man’s presence, though he could control himself only to the point of replying:
“I’m not a phantom in your nightmare. You’re an apparition in my derangement, and since I can’t explain how I ever imagined you, I must conclude that you’re right and I’ve lost my mind.”
“What? What did you say? Repeat everything more slowly.”
Suddenly he was pretending to be deaf, or at an unexpected moment age had deafened him. He cupped his right hand behind his ear, and he could see his palm crossed by lines and wrinkles. His hand trembled, as if his words had pierced it.
“I think I’ve lost my mind. But you aren’t dreaming me in your nightmare. In fact you exist only to the extent of my hallucination.”
“How do you dare to say I don’t exist?” He flew into a rage, threatening him with his desiccated index finger. “For precisely this reason, for existing and having the name I had, they wanted to kill me like a dog. Ah! What can you know, you fool, about a tragedy like mine! How to make you understand at your age the manhunt and horror I had to live through!”
“Yes, I understand because I’ve suffered them too. Be quiet and go away because you tire me. You didn’t come to hell to tell me anything new, and I have to prepare for my trial.”
From being his hallucination, as he almost came to believe, he must have taken on a life of his own and delighted in displaying it. He passed from anger to a kind of sardonic contempt, stretching out on his seat and smiling at him as he would at a shadow he could brush away or illuminate on a whim. Perhaps that stain on the wall at the Civilian Government building next to Commander Valdés’s door, though it was also Lieutenant Colonel Velasco’s in Valdés’s absence, that plagiarized the shadow puppet of a rabbit and above whose memory the most disconcerting advice had lit up: WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED? Yes, why not, in fact, he wondered again, insistent on convincing himself: on transforming the question that was beginning to gnaw at and devour him into an academic one. Because simply put, dementia was much more difficult to represent than reason, in the savage comedy of life or the incomprehensible wakefulness of hell. To the exact dimensions of a civilization that for centuries had been calling itself rational and enlightened, men simulated a sanity that would disappear at the first opportunity they had to exterminate one another in the name of their beliefs, without the victims, who prob
ably became executioners when they stopped being victims, able to defend themselves in any way other than to cry out in vain about the mistake, the monstrous mistake, of their sacrifice.
… And the intruder continued to delight in his living presence, stretched out in his seat like a challenge or an insult. He wanted to change his desperate desire to have him disappear without a trace into muffled shouts at some wailing wall of the soul. With useless nostalgia he thought about the characters in his plays or poems whom he would bring down at will at the most unexpected and at the same time the best moment. The man finally dying in peace at the end of a ballad. The Gypsy repeatedly stabbed by envy. The woman possessed and abandoned by her scornful lover when he learns he’s been deceived. The child lost in the sky holding the moon in his hand. They all disappeared immediately, obeying creative demands. “A painter never knows when he’s finished or should finish his painting,” Salvador Dalí had told him, repeating another phrase of Picasso’s he wouldn’t discover until much later. “A poet, on the other hand, never fails to know,” he replied then, truthfully. Now he ought to retract it, because this phantom of his wakefulness in hell, if it really was an image from his hallucinations, remained at his side, imperturbable and tenacious, pointing at him several times with his finger and at other times placing his lined palm behind his ear in order not to miss any of his words or to feign a deafness that might be derisive.
“What did you say you’re preparing for now?” the old man asked, like a burlesque echo of his own thoughts.
“For my trial. You came only to get in my way and interfere with me.”
“You’re not preparing for anything because you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he clucked again, with that exasperating, almost womanish laugh. “I spent all these years in hell, but not in limbo. I have very precise reports about you and yours.”
“ … About me and mine?”
“Yes, sir, that’s what I said. Have you become deaf? You’re a swine, a real swine. When I think about all the sacrifices and suffering of my own youth, of its capacity for devotion and its idealism, the depravity of this gang of yours still seems worse, much worse, than our crimes.”
He thought of Ruiz Alonso telling Sandro Vasari that in view of so much pornography and delinquency, his own times seemed very far away. He thought of his own father, not the father whose words on the day of his brother-in-law’s murder and his own arrest were to tell him he would give anything for him, including his mother and his siblings, because he could never fail him, never, never, never, but the other one: the one of that morning in the Retiro and of his adolescence, standing before Monet’s La Gare Saint Lazare and railing against the impostures of some delinquents who didn’t know how to attract the attention of the ignorant. He thought of himself that day in Madrid, wondering for a moment, which he would then forget until this other instant in eternity, whether he would ever feel and express himself as his father was doing then. Thinking about all this, and in an unconscious transposition that he would immediately understand all too well, he asked:
“Who gave you those reports, the ones you alluded to?”
“Who else would it be? Luis, naturally.”
“Luis … ”
“Luis Rosales.” He said the name impatiently, as if it were taken for granted. “I’ll never leave his house again; it’s where I hid in the summer of 1936. I slept there last night and I’m dreaming you now. How many years have I been hidden in these two rooms on the second floor? Forty, forty-five, fifty? I lost count, but I didn’t forget my decision not to leave there alive. In one winter or another all the Rosales family died except Luis and Esperancita. Now they visit me very rarely, though she knocks on the door three times a day with the flat of her hand and leaves my meals on the floor. They know I prefer not to see them or speak to them because I chose hell and not the world. I can’t free myself from Luis as easily as I avoid Esperanza. He has a key, and from time to time he bursts in, at the most unexpected moments, to talk to me for hours. In the end we almost always argue and I still don’t know whether he wants me to go or expects me to die in his house, God knows when … Just yesterday I told him … ”
“Be quiet! Be quiet! Damn you! I don’t want to endure this martyrdom!”
(WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?) No, I can’t pretend to, when I really did lose my mind, and after I was dead. I created this awful hallucination, the image and likeness of my caricature, and now it not only has a life of its own but has come to usurp mine, in another hell that’s a sinister parody of this spiral. What does this implacable old man want of me, the man I would have turned into if I had lived? Is he trying to tell me that my derangement is my only truth and he has become the avatar of my madness? Or perhaps the truth is just the opposite, as he proclaims, and I’m part of the dementia of an old man driven crazy by loneliness? If Ruiz Alonso, Trescastro, and the thugs in the Assault Guard hadn’t arrested me that Sunday morning, perhaps everything he’s telling me is true now and I stayed hidden in that attic of a sort on Calle de Angulo. (“I have orders to take you to the Civilian Government. I’d be grateful if we could make it fast because a lot of time has been lost here.”) Or perhaps, in the most absurd of possibilities, the thugs from the Assault Guard, Trescastro, and Ruiz Alonso never went to Calle de Angulo, 1, and his entire Calvary, with his arrest, interrogations, being shot in the back, and wakefulness in hell were nothing more than the recurrent nightmare of the old man, who he must be as well.
“Be quiet! Be quiet! Damn you! I don’t want to endure this martyrdom!”
He raised his hands to his ears because a rough sea, one of those metallic oceans by Dalí or Patinir, suddenly agitated and disturbed by a storm of blazing volcanoes, seemed stirred up inside him and threatened to blow apart the bones of his skull.
“Be quiet! Be quiet!”
He heard the old man’s words through his hands. But he could distinguish only the dark echo of his own shrieks. An echo that began to irritate and embarrass him, because it wasn’t the broken bellow of the pederast he always knew he was but the screaming of the fairy he never wanted to be. At the same time and in the light of a bright flash of memory, it brought to mind the first time his father guessed at his homosexuality, one infinitely distant summer between his first trip to Madrid and his first stay in Cadaqués, when he dedicated the ode to Salvador Dalí where he said he wasn’t praising his imperfect adolescent brush but his longings of an eternal visionary. It was another Sunday afternoon, because his destiny always seemed to be decided on Sundays, and he was playing from memory something by Chopin on the piano at Huerta de San Vicente. He stopped suddenly when the final ray of late afternoon slipped through the half open window, divided in a prism of the chandelier, and stained his right hand with all the colors in the spectrum. Only then, as he looked at the rainbow on his fingers and perhaps began inadvertently to write a line published years later, where he spoke of a hyacinth light illuminating his hand, did he become aware of his father’s presence, sitting in the semidarkness of a corner in the living room. A mirror reflected his eyes and in his glance he saw the infinite sadness of the first man on earth, different from the monsters that had preceded him, when he discovered loneliness after the death of a child.
“Yes, yesterday afternoon Luis showed up unexpectedly on his return from Madrid,” continued the vampire who was dreaming him or the apparition of his own madness. “He came with the excuse of picking up some recent books he’d lent me. Collections of poems by people your age, or perhaps even younger. Scattered over the floor where I had thrown them, he tripped over the books. ‘If this is the garbage that’s current, that they’re writing today, tell me why a generation of poets like ours ever lived?’ I asked him at the outset. He shook his head, not daring to look me in the eye, and tried to respond with some fallacy about the previous regime, which in its fumbling had castrated the people intellectually. ‘Don’t try to convince me with that kind of specious reasoning. I’m the victim
of that regime, locked away in your house for almost half a century, not these kids whose mental capacity doesn’t go beyond impudence and commonplaces. Ours was a generation of exceptional poets and masterpieces. When I say this, I’m not indulging in vanity but summarizing the true history of literature. We were also a group of free men, at least in the best and happiest years. Don’t tell me now about the new pieties, with the people as an object of worship, when we’ve survived so many idiotic catastrophes that we’ve turned into two old wrecks. We’re all people, the two of us, the mason who’s whitewashing that house on Plaza de los Lobos, and even the ones who murdered half of Granada in the name of God. In the universe there’s no effect without a corresponding cause and …’ He interrupted himself suddenly while he was quoting himself almost in shouts, as if he had forgotten ideas and words. ‘… And besides, besides.’ Listen, where was I?”
“You said that in the universe there’s no effect without a corresponding cause,” he replied, not unaware of the irony.
“Exactly, yes, sir, that’s what I said and he couldn’t answer me. ‘The only origin of all our misfortunes, the slaughter of hyenas that our war was, the dictatorship that followed it, and even the foolishness that passes today for poetry, is reduced to this people of yours who have never measured up as an intelligent, civilized community in the eyes of history.’ He found himself obliged to agree, though unwillingly. Then he spoke to me about men your age and others even younger, all of you who could be my sons, though you’re only a splinter of my dream … ”
“I’m not your son and I’m not your dream. I’m a dead man who reasons and has delusions. You’re an apparition in my hallucination.”
He affirmed it now without conviction, as perhaps his father had tried to tell himself that Sunday in Huerta de San Vicente that a pervert could not be a son of his, that he was a ghost who would vanish with the last sun of the afternoon. Besides, the old man, absorbed in the memory of his shouting and diatribes, wasn’t listening to him either.
