by Carlos Rojas
“He described a generation of supposed poets, dressed in rags in the American style, like hoboes in the films of King Vidor who cross the United States from coast to coast, hiding in a freight car on the Union Pacific. All of them poisoned by the drugs they consume like candied almonds because they’re incapable of thinking and feeling for themselves. ‘Luis,’ I said to him, ‘you talk nonsense and want me to return to this world I have absolutely nothing in common with, though according to you my works are read and performed among those tribes. In the midst of those people I’d live enclosed in an invisible bubble, like an alien. Like those lovers in Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights, imprisoned in a soap bubble or a bladder mislaid at a witches’ Sabbath. If you remembered who we were, you wouldn’t even dare suggest it … And furthermore, furthermore …’ Listen, what else did I say to him?”
“That he shouldn’t advise you to return to The Garden of Earthly Delights.”
“I already know that, imbecile, and I don’t intend to repeat it!” He was becoming enraged as he caressed his pink baldness. “Ah, yes! Then I thought it was my duty to add: ‘If in addition to remembering who we were you maintained the dignity that should be ours, you’d also turn your back on that jungle and hide away here with me.”’
“And he replied he wasn’t free to do that because his destiny was as irrevocable as yours.”
“That’s true, he said that! How did you know?” he asked without too much interest, shrugging. “Perhaps you’re not as foolish as I thought because, after all, you’re my dream. He replied … ”
“He replied that each person has a role in the great theater of the world and the parts in the play were indivisible and nontransferable.”
“Yes, yes, that’s what he said, as if I’d never read Calderón. I was assigned captivity, for this was the destiny imposed by my name. For having the name I had and being the man I was, I had to hide in his house when they wanted to kill me. Now, so many years later, my pride in being who I am keeps me from returning to a country that doesn’t deserve my presence. He was assigned a role different from and subordinate to mine in the farce. By means of inexplicable chance events, he became my guardian or, if you prefer, my jailer and confidant. He was no freer now to reveal my existence so I would be honored as a man come back to life than he was before I was denounced and condemned to be murdered.”
“But one way or another that situation had to end. Nothing is saved from the passage of time, not the stone in the air or the man on the ground. If such an absurdity still exists, it’s because it’s one of my hallucinations, just like you.”
The old man was only half listening, not granting any credit to his words, as he blinked uneasily beneath ashen eyebrows. He himself didn’t dare entirely believe what he had just said. (“Nothing is saved from the passage of time, not the stone in the air or the man on the ground. If such an absurdity still exists, it’s because it’s one of my hallucinations, just like you.”) Then he thought of that female patient of Charcot or the elder Huxley, the uncle or father of the novelist, whose case Luis Buñuel told him about before he happened to learn he had actually read it in Proust and in Sodome et Gomorrhe. (La femme aura Gomorrhe et l’homme aura Sodome.) A woman of the highest British society, who renounced all the receptions of her class, for as soon as her host would offer her a seat, she saw an ancient gentleman sitting there, refined and smiling, with a green frock coat and a lorgnette. Incapable of determining where the illusion lay, in the gesture that offered her the armchair or the formally dressed individual who occupied it, she turned to Huxley or Charcot to resolve her doubts. Supposedly cured, she went to a private concert to test herself. As soon as she was offered a seat in the first row, facing a very well-known soprano, the stranger with the lorgnette appeared to her again. Nonetheless, this time she controlled herself. She drew strength from her weakness and accepted the chair of carved Victorian mahogany, driving away forever the very urbane and distinguished phantom.
Unlike that lady of another time, he couldn’t decide whether he should or should not touch the hand or arm of his presumed parody, just as he hadn’t been able to decide that earlier. It was fitting that the usurper of his identity and even of his life snatched away by bullets would disappear at his touch, in precisely the way Charcot’s or Huxley’s patient finally had dispensed with her own ghost. It was also fitting that he himself would be the one to disappear then, if it was the truth (what sense would truth make in hell?) that he was the man’s dream. Surprisingly, that possibility of melting into interminable nothingness and sleeping with no memories or nightmares, beyond time and space, frightened him for the first time. It was still his absolute, most fervent desire finally to forget himself, but he didn’t want to achieve it by those means or through fear.
“That’s what Luis Rosales came to tell me,” the other man agreed, this time almost exulting. “In any case, he insisted, we ought to settle what was left unfinished. I think I’ve indicated to you my suspicion that after so many years he might want to be rid of me, at any price and by any means. Perhaps it would please him if that were possible, but naturally he wasn’t free to do it. ‘Luis,’ I said to him, ‘think back and remember the days when I taught you what an hendecasyllable was. Now it’s my duty to show you who and where we are. This is the second floor of your house, the house that belonged to your parents, but it’s also hell. The two of us are condemned to immortality, for reasons I don’t know and besides do not concern me. I’ll remain in these two rooms forever, and you’ll come to visit me occasionally across entire eternities, to repeat this conversation in identical terms or in others very similar.”’
“One of the rooms is the bedroom,” he interrupted on an impulse. “It has a single bed with legs and headboard of curved, very thin iron. The walls are white, though perhaps the years have darkened them, and the fringed bedspread is lemon yellow. The bedroom opens on to a kind of small sitting room that has a window with embroidered curtains that faces Calle de Angulo. It has a Pleyel piano, shelves that hold books from the Library of Spanish Authors and some wretched translations of Proust that Pablo Salinas was in charge of. I also recall a chest of drawers where Luis Rosales’s aunt perfumed the sheets with lowland quince. Above the chest and inside a lantern stands a Sacred Heart of Jesus with open arms.”
The old man listened with no great surprise, nodding at times and other times smiling. He seemed to congratulate himself for the detailed description, as if it were his. He wiped his glasses with a large handkerchief, in one of whose corners he saw the initials of his first and family names. Then he pretended to applaud.
“Well done, young man! Everything correct and as it should be! The kingdom of heaven must be made up of men like you. It doesn’t surprise me that you know my hell so well, since you’re one of my dreams. In a sense I could even say you’ll turn out to be me.”
“In a way,” he corroborated, fully conscious this time of his irony.
“Only in a way,” the old man tried to be specific. “If you were my age you’d be much wiser. I have to explain your destiny to you as I did to Luis Rosales, since yours is very similar to his. You’re chained to my dream, as he is to my wakefulness, and you’ll continue to appear on nights like this so I can talk to someone other than Luis and loneliness doesn’t drive me crazy. As you can see, youngster, the laws of hell are very judicious even though the legislators are invisible. Even assuming I wasn’t immortal, in which case Luis Rosales wouldn’t be either, you and I would turn out to be inseparable because when I’m dead I’d go on dreaming you for all of eternity.”
“You’ll disappear as soon as I touch your shoulder with the palm of my hand, because you’re not anyone. They killed me a long time ago and you’re only my false shade: the man I wouldn’t have wanted to be if surviving meant turning into someone so different from myself.”
“Are you sure they killed you, my boy?”
“I’m as certain of that as I am of our being in the true hell, the only one that
exists.”
The apparition laughed again, but his laugh was different. Perhaps harder and less shrill. Without having grown any younger, and without ceasing to be himself, he was changing his appearance, like someone trying on various disguises on the cold eve of a carnival. His shoulders broadened and his spine straightened, until he had the bearing of man very advanced in years but more accustomed to moving through the world and clearing the way with his hands than in spending almost half a century in two rooms with a Sacred Heart of Jesus, a Pleyel, a single bed, the Library of Spanish Authors, and the translations of Don Pedro Salinas.
“You’re not sure of anything because life, death, even eternity itself are the fruits of infuriating chance. No destiny determines them because there’s no providence other than the one made and unmade by every one of us at each instant and in each step we take.”
“Who are you now?” he interrupted, not listening to him, and in a tone that surprised him again because it indicated a horror and perplexity much greater than what he felt.
“I know who I am,” he replied, quoting Cervantes and still smiling, as if he had pronounced a sacrilege. “In other words, the man you could have been.”
“I know who I am too! Why do you persecute me this way?”
“I’m not persecuting you. You said that I’m at your mercy and it would be enough for you to touch my shoulder with your hand for me to disappear immediately. Why don’t you try it?”
The old man’s skull was growing a white pelt like that of a Moorish shepherd very advanced in years, while his rimless eyeglasses disappeared. And the tone of his complexion, so pale on his cheeks beneath that pink baldness, darkened and blurred the spots on his temples, as if he had spent a long time exposed to many suns. Only the hobgoblin’s clothes and shoes, the attire of someone in mourning for himself, remained unchanged.
“I’d like to know what you want of me … ”
He abandoned the lament in his plea, though he noticed he had put himself at the mercy of the ghost, clearly similar to the man he would be now if his killers had been pleased to let him live. (“I’d like to know what you want of me.”) He thought of the days of La Barraca, when he traveled all over Spain in trucks with a troupe of young men and women who idolized him as if he were a god dressed as a mechanic. In Burgo de Osma they had been joined by an adolescent, still in school and now on vacation, whose parents allowed him to go away with the actors because even in Burgo he was a public figure. (“You’re still young but very justly celebrated. You have a natural talent no one can deny without offending you”), a kind of grown prodigious boy in the eyes of the entire country. “What do you know how to do?” he asked the boy, constrained by his slim bearing and those deep black eyes where two points of gold (WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?) flashed in two embers: like the fawn devoured in Aleixandre’s Destruction or Love, quivering in the eyes of a Bengal tiger, transformed into a tiny fleece. In a voice with very good timbre for his age, the boy recited for him lines from the Archpriest of Hita’s The Book of Good Love. “Oh, Lord, and how lovely is Doña Endrina in the square! / What a figure, what charm, what a long neck like a heron’s! / What hair, and what a sweet mouth, what color, and what good luck! / With arrows of love she wounds all that her eyes look upon.” Then he welcomed him to La Barraca, though in reality he wouldn’t have wanted to ask him. Afterward, while he lived with the company, he tried in vain to forget him. One night he was surprised to find himself strolling with the adolescent along very old streets in Soria, with greyhounds and fishes in the carvings of the houses silvered by the moon. They stopped at a fountain to drink, and while the boy smiled at him and dried his mouth with the back of his hand, he embraced him and impulsively kissed him on the lips. “What do you want of me?” he had asked in the identical tone of voice, astonished and terrified, that he had directed to the aged shadow of himself. “Nothing, nothing, forgive me. I only wanted to forget who I am and why I was born the way I was born, but it was useless.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” the ghost said, returning him to the reality of hell. “How could I if I’m only your sham reflection? Why don’t you forget about us and look at the stage in this theater?”
He obeyed almost knowing what he would see, even if it weren’t the staging of his recollections but the dramatization of his double’s memories or fantasies, this phantom of his in a new metamorphosis. The stage opened again onto the station platform and the Andalucía express. He and Rafael Martínez Nadal were returning to the compartment with seats upholstered in large dahlias and Rafael was lifting the suitcase onto the rack, above the yellowing photographs of the Rhine in Basel and the Loire in Amboise. Then he put a hand on his friend’s back, and with a look that seemed more helpless than affectionate, accompanied him to the platform to say goodbye from the step.
“What do you think will happen now?” his double asked in a voice low enough not to annoy other spectators, without names or visible shapes, who perhaps were sitting around them throughout the theater.
“Nothing that hasn’t happened and I haven’t seen before, on this very stage,” he replied, irritated and impatient.
“Are you sure? In your place I wouldn’t insist on it. I’ve already said we’re nothing but the whim of chance or many intertwined chances.”
On the train platform and as he talked to Martínez Nadal, he unwittingly turned toward the open door to the passageway. There, in the corridor, absorbed in contemplating the platform, he saw Ruiz Alonso, the tamed worker. Yet at the precise moment he should have been surprised at the similarity his jaws established between that man and his own father, the scene froze on stage and the three of them, he, Ruiz Alonso, and Martínez Nadal were immobilized in a station as still and quiet as Aunt Luisa’s Sacred Heart in its high lantern above the Rosales family’s chest of drawers.
“What’s going on?” he asked the apparition that was at once his parody and the double of the man he might have been. “Why did everything in the scene stop?”
“Shhhh!” The old man brought his index finger to his lips. “Don’t raise your voice. If this is hell you might wake the innocent dead. Those you claim sleep free of memory.” Then, almost shouting, he threw the question back at him. “What do you think will happen now?”
“The same thing that happened then. The past isn’t foretold because it’s irrevocable. I’m going to ask Rafael to leave, and I’ll hide in my compartment so that man doesn’t see me.”
He was going to observe that Ruiz Alonso had seen him in any event, though he didn’t find that out until after he was dead and living in hell. (“If I insisted on carrying out my duty alone, it was to show him that I didn’t hide behind the curtains at the moment of truth.”) He felt tempted to add that as soon as he returned to the compartment, life again frozen in a tableau vivant, and prepared to close the curtains on the window after closing the ones to the passageway, letters of cast gold would blaze on the glass. PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL. He immediately restrained himself because the old man’s mordant smile, resembling that of his first incarnation, gave him a sense of foreboding about the uselessness of such details.
“I think you’re wrong again and everything happened very differently. Or else the past is revocable after all, though you say otherwise.”
“Rafael,” he said to Martínez Nadal when the petrified memory was reanimated, “I changed my mind and I’m staying in Madrid. Please go to the compartment and get the suitcase. Don’t ask me anything else now.” “But you’re deranged!” “I beg you, Rafael. I can’t, I don’t want to go to Granada with that man: the heavyset one leaning out the window in the passageway.” “You’ve lost your mind! Before you know it you’ll bay at the moon like a rabid dog!” “Whatever you say, but do as I ask. Or leave the damn suitcase on the train. I’m getting out of here and I’ll wait for you in the station café.” “All right, all right. Whatever you say,” Martínez Nadal agreed in this unexpected variation on his destiny. Afterward, as if
what happened in the theater melted into sudden darkness only to dawn again in a different scene after a transition too fleeting even for the eyes of the dead, he and Martínez Nadal appeared together in the restaurant. A waiter in a stained swallow-tailed jacket was serving them another two cognacs, while the man with the head of a sheep, still worried about and exasperated with him, seemed to be taking care of the suitcase. Again he paid for their drinks and the tip, as he had done in Puerta de Hierro. He drank and continued to face his friend, who silently seemed to be demanding a full exegesis of his lunacies.
“What does all this mean?” he asked, more impatient now than disconcerted.
“This means absolutely nothing, because life has no meaning. It’s only what happened a long time ago. The result of one of my hastiest and smartest decisions. Listen for a moment and you’ll hear my reasons.”
“Rafael,” he said to Martínez Nadal on the stage, “a premonition made me see my destiny if I went to Granada. In a few days there would be or will be a military insurgency. They’ll believe they’re carrying out a coup to avoid an attempt at revolution. But they’ll precipitate the revolution and war that will fill the fields and streets of this country with corpses. In Granada the insurgents would win and hunt me down like a wild boar, not for what I did, since I haven’t done anything, but for being who I am. To escape their fury I would have to hide in the house of some Falangista friends. But this man we saw on the train, the one with the jaws of a mule, would come there to arrest me. Then, without a trial, they’d shoot me in the back, calling me a queer.” Then the voice, broken, on the verge of a lament and perhaps not very far from weeping, seemed to become calm. “Yes, this would be my fate if I’d gone to Granada now,” it resumed dispassionately, as if stating universal laws known to everyone.
Once again Martínez Nadal seemed to have forgotten his irritation in order to observe him with an absorbed expression. “I’m the one who advised you to stay in Madrid if your panic is so great.” Deep inside, and in a certain sense in spite of himself, Martínez Nadal felt convinced that everything he’d just said would have occurred inevitably if he’d left on the Andalucía express. “Here at least you’ll be out of danger,” he mumbled to escape his own thoughts. “We won’t be out of danger anywhere. But at least here I don’t know my fate. In Granada I know it too well to forget it.” “In short, God’s will be done, as you’ve said so many times. All right, let’s go. We’ll take a taxi and I’ll ride with you to your house.” “No, not to my house, no! I beg you. Even now I’m very, very afraid. Rafael, couldn’t I hide in your moth-er’s house, with my suitcase and my play The Public, a work so absurd that only God knows whether we’re all characters in it?”
