The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

by Carlos Rojas

  “Do you understand now why I can’t publish the original you’ve returned to me?” Sandro asked the stranger as he turned off the tape recorder.

  “Yes, yes, I believe I understand.”

  “An unknown destiny, about which I am totally ignorant except for the fact that it transcended me, obliged me to write this book, born of a dream, so that Marina would compose her sonata. I was a means, not an end, and since the sonata is finished, my novel, we’ll call it that in order to call it something, represents absolutely nothing.”

  “But that’s no reason to destroy it.”

  “Perhaps not. Some bad habits of vanity oblige me to agree with you about this not especially transcendent detail. Which is why I’d like it to be published under your name and dedicated to Marina and me. You won’t refuse, will you?”

  “And suppose I do?”

  “Then I’d burn it in the fireplace when the first snow falls. The one Marina announced would come very soon.”

  Marina didn’t seem to be listening to them. Bent over, arms extended, her hands were crossed between her knees. Her hair fell over her forehead and cheeks, hiding her face, as if she were a penitent forgetful of the faults she had committed or preparing to atone for others she hadn’t committed yet. One would say she was as distant from the woman who composed the piano sonata as if one of them had never existed.

  “All right,” the visitor conceded. “I’ll do as you wish and publish the original as mine.” He picked up the bound typed sheets and slipped them into his leather briefcase, then closed it carefully. He noticed his hands. They were identical to Sandro Vasari’s.

  “You won’t forget to dedicate the book to us when it’s published,” Sandro insisted.

  “No, I won’t forget.”

  “Can we count on it?”

  “You can count on it.” The stranger shrugged.

  “I feel much better now,” Sandro replied. His irony was painful and indecisive, as if gliding along the edge of a barber’s razor.

  “I don’t.” The other man shook his head. “In a way I understand or would like to understand your reasons for not publishing the work under your own name. On the other hand … ”

  “On the other hand … ”

  “I’d like to know what you’ll do with your sonata, Marina. Did both of you decide to destroy it too?”

  He didn’t seem to dare look at her, as if he didn’t expect an answer from her either. Marina lifted her head and made a vague gesture as she looked at him with her gray eyes. Then she began to hum, almost mumbling, a strange melody completely unlike the sonata.

  “Destroying it or publishing it would be two faces of the same aberration,” Sandro replied. “The sonata is ours and will live with us as long as we live. If you’ll forgive the obligatory rhetoric of the circumstance.”

  “You’re forgiven, even though I don’t understand you.”

  “I assumed that too, because you never understood us, though Marina came to believe we lacked existence outside your dreams and your books.”

  “Sometimes I still think that,” murmured Marina.

  “I already told you my original was nothing more or less than an inadvertent way for her to compose the sonata,” Sandro continued, addressing the stranger without listening to her. “Soon after you realize what has happened, you’ll become aware of an erudite consequence. It’s logical and in a sense inevitable that Marina should write this music, as it is also reasonable she would need my manuscript to conceive it. Said another way, and this time so you’ll understand us, the sonata is the child of flesh and blood we’ll never be able to have.”

  “That occurred to me and I had to reject it. On one hand it sounds like a prosopopoeia, on the other it’s too reasonable. The prosopopoeia is an affectation and therefore doesn’t tally with the truth. The excess of reason is no more and no less … ” He hesitated a few moments and then repeated in a loud voice, “ … no more and no less than madness.”

  “It’s true!” Sandro confirmed, struggling to contain his excitement. “It’s true! Don’t you see?”

  “Sincerely, I don’t.”

  “Then listen to me. Marina is sick and her illness has a name not recorded in treatises on the soul because it bears your own surname. Perhaps you’re correct when you claim she suffers from an excess of reason or filthy logic, as Unamuno would say. You governed our lives from the day you chose to introduce us at the university while monarchists and Falangistas, two species that are almost extinct today, were bludgeoning one another in front of Don Juan’s first statement against Franco, which was tacked on the bulletin board. I, always prone to reticence, recounted to you in detail, and in spite of myself, our moments of love in the bedroom beneath the Vallcarca Bridge … ”

  “Nobody forced you to reveal anything,” the new arrival observed with a note of impatience at the back of his voice. “This is all absurd, Sandro, even if it is true.”

  “Perhaps there’s nothing more absurd than truth itself. Marina came to believe that someone, perhaps you, was watching us from behind the mirror that the years had turned ashen black. I’d say that what happened was different and of course more inexplicable. In a way I’ll never understand, because thank God I’m not a writer or a dramatist, before my revelations you already knew everything I was going to tell you, including the fact of my confession.”

  “The act of love is identical to the act of lust, says Graham Greene in one of his exemplary novels. Even a blind man like Borges would add that any couple in the act of love, or of simple pleasure, is every couple in any of those acts.”

  “I care very little about what those old hypocrites say. I’ll save you another recounting of the abortion on Montcada Street, though I can’t hide from you that even then I thought it had been anticipated by your mediocre fantasy, with the two of us acting as protagonists. We’ll forget many years to return to those of the death throes and passing of the Caudillo Franco, when you reunited Marina and me and commissioned me to write a book on the life and painting of Goya.”

  “Now you’ll say I did it knowing you wouldn’t write it.”

  “You did it knowing I wouldn’t write it, though naturally you did publish another book about my inability to finish mine.”

  “Sandro, I’m more a master of both your destinies than I am of my own.”

  “Possibly you’re less the master of your own than of ours because you too submit to another’s will without knowing it. The fact is I don’t care, because ever since that distant day when you joined the three of us in the courtyard of Arts and Letters, the case is ours only as it relates to me. Shall I go on?”

  “If you like.”

  “After I forgot about Goya, I dreamed about our murdered poet in hell, talked to Ruiz Alonso, and wrote this book, which I did finish and therefore give to you. Because it is all mine from beginning to end.” He rested his palm on the briefcase that contained the original, close to the hand of his visitor. From his orchestra seat, he was surprised again at the similarity between the hands of the two men. “I won’t hide from you that at times, as I was writing, I suspected I was your puppet again, your Doppelgänger with a different face. I told myself then: ‘ … Marina’s right. He dreams I’m struggling to move this book forward. It never would’ve occurred to me to begin it, since I never had any great interest in the poetry of that unfortunate man, though it’s still applauded in lecture halls, on stages, and profusely printed in textbooks so many years after his death.”’

  “Why did you finish it then?”

  “Inadvertently, so that Marina would compose her music. I think I told you this before. When I heard the entire sonata, after having listened to fragments, not paying much attention, I understood it was our child and our freedom because you had lost all power over us. For the first time we counted on something of ours created behind your back. Something that would free us forever and transform us into our own and only reason for being.”

  “How should I interpret all this?”


  “However you choose. Perhaps as a love story. Notice that now I’m the one who reveals to you our present and immediate past and not the reverse. We lived a circumstance diametrically opposed to that of my confessions, following the afternoons beneath the Vallcarca Bridge. When in a way I knew you knew, with no need to play the voyeur behind the mirror. Now I also know that whatever happens, it will be for the best and we’ll never see one another again.”

  From the orchestra seats, he thought he detected on stage the silence of the denouement, as unforeseen as it was irrevocable. At the same time and in one of those sudden vacillations he was as prone to in hell as on earth, he thought that perhaps, in spite of what had been said by Sandro Vasari, the performance of other people’s memories would go on endlessly. So that the appearance of their sudden end was due only to a sudden fatigue that unexpectedly began to overwhelm him. Yet on stage he saw the stranger stand and pick up the briefcase that held the original.

  “I suppose you’ll invite me to leave.”

  “There’s no hurry at all,” Sandro replied, still sitting and spreading his arms in an imprecise gesture. “I didn’t ask you to go and in fact you can stay as long as you like, because you’ve already lost all power over us. I said only that we’d never see one another again.”

  “You may be right. Are you really prepared to renounce your book?”

  “I turn it over to you gladly and won’t change my mind.”

  “Very well.” He rested a palm on Marina’s shoulder. She hesitated a few moments and then quickly caressed that hand, as if it were a statue’s.

  “I’ll walk with you to the end of the garden,” said Sandro Vasari, while the stranger shrugged. “Don’t get lost in the labyrinth of streets when you leave this neighborhood, and hurry. You don’t want to get caught by snow on the highway.”

  They went down together to the myrtle hedge along the sloping lawn and he observed that not once did Marina turn to look at them. Suddenly the sky began to darken and an absolute silence, with no wind and no birds, descended over the street. They couldn’t hear the grass growing, covered with dark spots of autumn, but their steps made a noise when they walked on it.

  “All right, then. I suppose we say goodbye forever here.”

  “We say goodbye forever here,” Sandro Vasari agreed. “Good luck with your book.”

  “I’ll dedicate it to you and Marina.”

  “You don’t have to, but do as you like.”

  “I will in any case.”

  The man Sandro accused of having ruled their lives, as if they were dreamed puppets, opened the car door, tossed the briefcase on one of the upholstered seats, and closed the door again. In that quiet the slam sounded like a pistol shot, while Marina shivered and for the first time turned to look at them. Across the street, in some of the houses also separated by small sloping gardens, lights began to go on. One would say they went on by themselves, as if each afternoon they punctually held a vigil for the absence of persons who had gone away, or were very distant, in a world populated only by Sandro, Marina, and the visitor. From his orchestra seat, he thought in a very quiet voice: “Soon it will be autumn on earth.”

  “When you get to the end of Briarwood, turn right. Then, after the first light, take the street immediately to the left,” Sandro Vasari explained.

  “I know, I know. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried at all. But as I told you, this is a labyrinth.”

  “They say the only way to get out of a labyrinth is to always go left.”

  “Perhaps that was true in other times and different latitudes. These days in this country, it isn’t.”

  The stranger smiled when he opened the other car door. For an instant, while Marina looked at them and the clouds seemed to rise in the sky, they shook hands with the coldness of two strangers. Then, in a sudden, mutual impulse, before the stranger got into his car and Sandro walked back to the house, they embraced closely. Afterward, the car drove off toward the labyrinth.

  The proscenium went dark and there was nothing on stage. Recalling that embrace, he thought of the one between Don Quixote and Cardenio at their first meeting in the Sierra Morena, at the end of Chapter XXIII of the First Part. When he read it in his adolescence, he hesitated about the vocation that had already been planned, telling himself he could never write anything as beautiful and as true. Now, dead though not tired and on the spiral of hell, he admitted willingly to not having written it, while a sudden fatigue was taking possession of him. Some shepherds had told the knight the tale of Cardenio, driven mad by love, who runs almost naked over the rugged terrain, sometimes very sane and other times quite deranged. As soon as chance arranges the meeting of the two madmen (the Ragged or Bad-looking One and the Sad One), Don Quixote descends from Rocinante, approaches that other stranger, and holds him to his chest. Cardenio, perhaps the less demented of the two, moves him back a little and looks into his eyes to see if he recognizes him. Or perhaps to determine whether in those eyes he can detect himself, with the correct and essential clarity that knowing oneself alive demands. Years later he told Dalí in Cadaqués that he had never read anything more profound and didn’t believe anything more profound had ever been written. Cardenio sees himself in Don Quixote as Don Quixote sees himself in Cardenio. Each of the two men is the fellow and mirror of the other: his confessor, his image, and his witness. At the same time and even though centuries have to pass for anyone to become aware of it, Cardenio is also Cervantes embracing the most successful and universal of his creations only to come upon himself in his eyes. No, he had never written anything like it in a fairly extensive work given the few years he walked the earth. No, and he didn’t lament it either. That was simply the way it was and with the unexpected fatigue came a serene resignation. In any case and somewhat in spite of himself, he admitted that Cervantes had determined his life as a writer (since the idea of never writing was very fleeting), in the same way that so long after his death, he had led Sandro Vasari and through him Marina to create the book and the sonata. Having that kind of influence, after years or after centuries, on strangers like them was the sole and the true immortality. But he did not proceed with that trend of thinking because an infinite exhaustion prevented it as he slowly slipped toward the center of himself, where waiting for him were peace, sleep, and a very dark light resembling nothingness.

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  CARLOS ROJAS is a novelist, an art historian, and since the age of fifty a creator of visual works of art. He was born in Barcelona and came to the United State as a young man. In 1960 he joined the faculty of Emory University, where he is now Charles Howard Candler Professor of Spanish Emeritus. He has received numerous important Spanish literary prizes, including the Premio Nadal. He lives in Atlanta.