The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  “It could be true if the war had found me in Madrid. My heart was always with the military! I want to give everything to the Insurgency!”

  “I expected another answer from you.” Valdés shrugs. “Or perhaps I no longer expect anything from anybody. Just to sleep and wake in a hundred years.”

  “In a century?”

  “Perhaps by then the Final Judgment will have come and we’ll all answer to God for ourselves.” More than indicating it, his gestures affirm it. “Do you think that people will remember our war in a century, with or without a Final Judgment?”

  He is my judge and my executioner. I know with identical certainty that each moment confirms the impossibility that Pepe Rosa-les can save me. And yet something in his helplessness, in the insomnia that makes his eyes blaze and the sickly softness of his hands, prevents the man of flesh from telling him that from the ruins of war the foundations of a new Spain will be born, or some other cowardly stupidity. I hear the other man in me respond on his own:

  “Probably not, because the dead bury the dead in the Gospels and besides, you’re the Christians in this battle.”

  “We almost agree.” He picks up the newspaper and throws it in a wastebasket after crumpling it. “The dead will bury the dead, but their lies should survive them. Tomorrow, when they think about this war, which should have been only a coup, they won’t be surprised by our sacrifices or our crimes. Only our lies, your side’s lies and this Spain’s, will astonish them.”

  “This is the fate we deserve,” I murmur unexpectedly.

  “No doubt about it.” He agrees again with complete conviction. Then he shakes his head, half engulfed by sleep, as if these considerations consumed his last strength. “Did I tell you that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen each other?”

  “I don’t think I remember ever having seen you … ”

  “It’s true. You didn’t notice me, and you had no reason to. I not only saw you but observed you for hours.”

  “Where, for God’s sake? What monstrous crime do you want to accuse me of now?” The panic of the creature of flesh who inhabits half of me becomes an equally burning curiosity. He moves from one passion to another as if crossing rooms without walls.

  “No crime at all. As for the rest, it was logical you wouldn’t see me because I was nobody. Only a modest commander in the Corps of Military Inspectors, buried in Granada as a commissary general by the Republic because I was suspected of patriotism. Even these signs of identity were reduced to my uniform, without which it was as if I were naked or had never been born. And so, naked or without a body, that is, dressed in civilian clothes, I requested a leave and went to Madrid for a week to have an ulcer treated. In a café on the Gran Vía I came across you and recognized you immediately from newspaper photographs. I thought it strange to run into you there and never to have seen you in Granada, where I had lived since the year the Republic was established, as I’ve said. I understood immediately that only coincidence could bring us together, because in Granada we lived in very distant worlds in a very small city. Yours, which I suspected in part from gossip, was revealed to me by the two flashily dressed Gypsy boys escorting you that morning in the café on the Gran Vía. Should I add more? … ”

  “It was a few months, I don’t remember how many, before Sánchez Mejías was gored in Manzanares.”

  “Very good, that’s exactly what I was getting to. Sánchez Mejías himself came into the café and approached all of you, as if he were following you in an inevitable, embarrassing way. I recognized him right away too, from the papers and because I had seen him fight several times. From my table I heard everything you both said and I wasn’t ashamed of listening. At first my dignity as a soldier disapproved, even though I was dressed as nobody, a civilian. Immediately I told myself that if you, being who you are, appeared with those Gypsies, then I could lower myself too, to the point of eavesdropping on a conversation you held in loud voices even though it was private. I hope you can forgive me … ”

  “I can’t forgive you for anything, Commander Valdés, because I’m a dead man. I don’t even understand why I’m still alive. And I understand even less what the point of all this is.”

  “Excuse me if I seem long-winded. I’ve had too many sleepless nights and it’s hard for me to state ideas precisely.” He raised his palms to his temples and then folded them over the pit of his stomach, rubbing his tunic. (“ … I requested a leave and went to Madrid for a week to have an ulcer treated.”) His hands were paler than ever, their whiteness resembling that of a boiled or frozen monkfish. “Sánchez Mejías, that rock of a man, all fiery courage, pleaded for the privilege of your company and you persisted in denying it, reproaching him for his affair with a foreign woman when he was Argentinita’s lover. He requested permission to go with you to lunch and you replied drily: ‘Nobody’s invited you.”’

  “He said a restaurant was a public place and he could have coffee there if he wanted to. He left to wait for us in the street and then follow us. He sat at another table, in the rear, and ordered a manzanilla sherry.”

  “Precisely! It seems incredible that you remember everything and have forgotten me because I also followed you to the restaurant, as if I were the shadow of the two of you. Your shadow or your dog. You threw out the Gypsies and called to Sánchez Mejías. ‘Come on, man, tell me what you’re having and how the bulls will turn out this summer.’ Hesitating, but more overwhelmed by fatigue than by doubts, he went to your table and let himself be invited.”

  “I still don’t understand … ”

  “You don’t know how much I admired you then. And I couldn’t decide what astonished me more, your authority or your compassion. Perhaps my respect for your pity was greater than what I felt for your dry power over that giant, because I’ve always had the gift of command and more than enough opportunity to demonstrate it here in Granada, since the beginning of the war. I never felt pity. Not for my neighbor and not for myself.”

  “Not for yourself and not for me.”

  “Exactly, not for you and not for myself. No sir, neither one, though I recognize that it’s more to my advantage to be compassionate even if I were a coward. On the other hand, you must admit that pity makes no sense in this country and in this war. The duty of all of us, your side and ours, is to exterminate one another without caution or hesitation, until one or the other is incapable of killing. It doesn’t pain me and I don’t reproach you for it because we all obey orders and follow moral principles. If we must devour one another like wolves, I’d hope only that we don’t lie to ourselves as men.”

  I wouldn’t know how to lie to myself now either, when my other self, the desperate and fearful one, is lost in some desert in the solitudes of my soul. I’m as much a master of myself as I was that morning in Madrid with Ignacio, even though it’s Valdés who leads me to control myself. In this serenity of a man who at the end of his life discovers a scalpel in the exact center of his being, I realize that the stabbed stranger in my poem is myself. I’m dead in the middle of the main street of any village, which at the same time is the world. People approach my open eyes and wonder who I really was and why I was murdered. Never, until this moment, was I so clearly aware of the oblique autobiographical meaning of poetry. A man writes an eleven-line poem with no purpose other than giving lyrics to a guitar rhythm (“the guitar that weeps for hidden sorrows and distant dawns”), and in reality leaves proof of his destiny, denounces his death, and signs his will.

  “Are you sure you’re telling me the whole truth, Commander Valdés?”

  “No, no, this isn’t all the truth.”

  “What are you hiding from me then?”

  “My envy.”

  “Your envy?”

  “The envy I felt that day for you and Sánchez Mejías. I asked myself then, as I again ask myself now, why it was my duty to recognize the two of you while you were bound to ignore me. Why did fate choose to give the two of you, being so different, fame among men and deny it to me? D
o you have an answer for that?”

  “No, no I don’t, just as you don’t have the right to ask me that.”

  “Of course you don’t. How was I to explain such an injustice to myself? I’m going to surprise you with a confession that perhaps you won’t understand either. Even in these circumstances, and you being who you are, I’d trade my fate for yours. Did you understand me? My fate for yours!”

  The man of flesh in me is silent now, as I myself am silent. If he weren’t so removed from my spirit at these moments, if he were to break brutally into my voice with his panic, I’d respond to the absurdity with another piece of foolishness. I’d tell Valdés that he, that is to say, I, would also trade my destiny for his. Provided he would go on living, the man of flesh in me would change with pleasure into a murderer, master of the gallows and the knife in this city, whose deepest and sole precept in the war was to hate his neighbor as himself. And yet I reply:

  “Not I, Commander. We belong to very different species.”

  “I know that very well! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Your species is the one of people whose names are called to survive them. Mine is the one of people who will die as if we hadn’t lived. Or would be better off never to have existed. Imagine someone writing a book about you in half a century. Someone trying to imagine this interrogation, to give it a name, which people suppose I subjected you to. ‘Valdés’—he would say eventually or say explicitly—‘was nothing but a vulgar killer.’ I was born for that, my dear sir, so that in half a century somebody, whoever he may be, can call me a vulgar killer.

  “And yet it shouldn’t have been like this. No, sir, it shouldn’t have been like this. The real injustice, the most monstrous injustice, isn’t the crimes we commit in Granada or your side perpetrates in Madrid. If the dice had fallen another way and this were a civilized country, those who kill here or there would go to work, to the office, to the brothel and be decent people incapable of killing anybody, not even in dreams. The real injustice is the destiny of men like me, born to be someone and doomed to be no one.

  “Here where you see me, and again supposing this were a civilized nation, I’d be a hero honored by everyone, not the killer they now call me behind my back and later will call me openly. Sixteen years ago, when I was a lieutenant, I thought I’d entered history through the main door and by my own right. Look, I was on leave then in Zaragoza, the year had just begun, and during the coldest, windiest January, the troops at the Barracks del Carmen rebelled one dawn. With a couple of Civil Guards, I was the first to arrive and lay siege to them. I ask you to believe me, even though you think it’s pure humbug. Only the three of us, those two guards and yours truly, were enough to hold them for almost an hour from the roofs of nearby houses. We were good shots and knew how to stay calm. The soldier who looked out a window or doorway to answer our fire was a soldier we finished off with a bullet. When my father arrived, he said: ‘Son, keep up the fire and I hope you conduct yourself to the measure of my expectations.’ ‘Colonel,’ I replied, ‘I hope I have already conducted myself to the measure of Your Excellency’s expectations. Now I want to be worthy of mine.’ And he, in a quiet voice: ‘Damn, but that’s true too! What a wild boar you turned out to be, boy!’ I’ll cut it short because the day that should have been the day of my glory would later turn into a source of resentments and regrets. My father left me his command for all practical purposes, like another father, an ordinary painter, secretly cedes his palette to the son who turned out to be a prodigious artist. With a good shot I mortally wounded one of the soldiers who led the movement. The door of the barracks opened and I quickly climbed to the rebellious unit and at gunpoint obliged them to line up in the courtyard. No one said a word because that morning, all modesty aside, and as my father told me afterward, I seemed to be the god of war.

  “I believe that during the Great War Ludendorff took the fort at Liege in a very similar way. And you see, they gave him the German equivalent of our Laureate Cross of San Fernando and made him a marshal. Well, just as we were saying, this will never be a civilized country and we’re a thousand years behind the rational, cultivated world. Do you know my reward for taking the Barracks del Carmen? No, of course you don’t know, since nobody knows! A miserable simple red cross. Yes, sir, though you may not believe it! A simple red cross, as if I had rescued the general’s Persian cat or taught the multiplication tables to his favorite grandson. A simple red cross, with the hypocritical excuse that there was no other reward at that time!”

  He’s insane. A raving madman, though his derangement had remained hidden until now. Lost in the depths of a rancor that obedience and discipline made him forget about without realizing it. This war was needed so he could obtain power and prestige, and though he looked for them as a hero, he would attain them as an executioner. Absolute master of a city and consumed by sleeplessness, he shoots rashly and takes revenge on the vanquished for the contempt of a world that did not make him a Ludendorff when he had taken the Barracks del Carmen. Spurred on by his insanity, the creature of flesh returns to me. He returns but is shaken now not by horror but by fury. His enraged, effeminate voice raises mine until it’s almost a shout.

  “Are you trying to tell me that I was arrested because sixteen years ago you obtained only a simple red cross instead of the Laureate Cross of San Fernando? Or will they kill me because on another day, in Madrid, you envied Sánchez Mejías and me without my even realizing it? How am I to blame for being born or for our being conceived so differently?”

  “My dear sir,” he responds, suddenly very calm, though with a certain irritation in his voice. “I’m not responsible either for your finding yourself here with me now. Ruiz Alonso arrested you when I was at the front, with or without the consent of Lieutenant Colonel Velasco, since that’s something I still haven’t been able to determine. I can only assure you I did not order your arrest and learned about your return to Granada only in a newspaper from before the war … ”

  “All of this is a mistake, a monstrous mistake,” the creature of flesh wails again. “Why don’t they release me?”

  “In due course. You accused me of having taken you prisoner and I have the duty and the right to defend myself. Look, I was so unaware of your arrest that when Pepe Rosales came to reproach me for it, without my knowing anything about anything, I said to him: ‘Pepe, old friend, if this Ruiz Alonso arrested your friend and searched your parents’ home, take him to an empty field and shoot him a few times.”’

  “Then why don’t you order my release?”

  “In due course. In due course. Granada is filled with violent men who make war on their own and prefer killing behind the lines to fighting at the front. If I released you in daylight, they’d arrest you again and shoot you against the cemetery wall, and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

  “You’re the civilian governor. Where’s your authority?”

  “I have very little. I hope God isn’t blind and can see that.”

  “You hope only that God isn’t blind?”

  He sighs and closes his eyes, but opens them again immediately, as if he were afraid of falling asleep unexpectedly. Suddenly he looks into mine and murmurs:

  “When I told you I would trade my fate for yours, it wasn’t a lie. I have cancer and I’m dying. For the first time since the war began, I was able to see the doctor yesterday for a few moments. He spoke to me openly and I thanked him for his frankness. ‘Commander,’ he said, looking at me as I’m looking at your now, ‘you don’t need a surgeon, you need a confessor. The end will come in a few weeks or a couple of months. From now on, I can prescribe for you only the morphine I don’t have.’”

  I’ll never know whether his claim that Ruiz Alonso arrested me behind his back and without his knowledge is true. Yet I know with certainty that he isn’t lying when he speaks to me of his imminent death. Fatigue, which I supposed was devouring him whole, consumes him only in part. His earthen color, his features drawn with a knife and a bevel, his slow and at
times petrified gestures give him the air of a dead Castilian who has turned the color of earth beneath the frost.

  “I’m not your confessor!” my other self manages to reply. “I don’t know whether or not you’re resigned to your death. I’ll always rebel against mine, because it’s an inconceivable mistake.”

  “I don’t want to confess either!” he shouts. “I mean, I don’t want to confess yet. I’ll do that in due course.”

  “What do you want from me then?”

  “To talk. Just to talk.”

  “Why with me? Since I entered the Civilian Government building, I’m not anybody anymore.”

  “Because one day I envied and respected you, even more than Sánchez Mejías himself, and because I sense you won’t stop listening to me.”

  “You could talk to your soldiers and your family.”

  “I have no family. I’m alone in the world.” He states this without pitying his solitude or taking pride in his independence. In the same straightforward way, bordering on indifference, that he might use to confess his ignorance of a foreign language. In the identical tone he continues: “My officers and my soldiers, I don’t talk to them. I give them orders, and they obey, just as I obey when Queipo or Franco give me their orders from Sevilla.”

  “As you could give instructions for my death at this moment.”

  “I suppose so. It would cost me nothing to do that.” He shrugs, and a rapid shadow of tedium crosses his fatigue. “Yet I didn’t bring you here for that,” he explains without a hint of irony. “And I don’t want to talk about you, or Franco, or Queipo, and in a sense not even about myself. No, sir, all of us and this war really aren’t anything but clouds, ants, nothing.”