by Pablo Neruda
* * *
I saw Valle-Inclán only once. Very thin, with an endless white beard and a complexion like a yellowing page, he seemed to have walked out of one of his own books, which had pressed him flat.
I met Ramón Gómez de la Serna in his crypt, the Pombo café, and later on I saw him at home. I can never forget Ramón’s booming voice guiding, from his spot in the café, the conversation and the laughter, the trends of thought and the smoke. Ramón Gómez de la Serna is for me one of the finest writers in our language, and his genius has some of the variegated greatness of Quevedo and Picasso. Every page of Ramón Gómez de la Serna pries like a ferret into the physical and the metaphysical, into the truth and the spectrum, and what he knows and has written about Spain has been said by him and no one else. He has put together a secret universe. He has changed the syntax of the language with his own hands, leaving his fingerprints so embedded in it that no one can wipe them off.
I saw Don Antonio Machado several times, sitting in his favorite café dressed in his black notary’s suit, silent and withdrawn, as sweet and austere as an old Spanish tree. Incidentally, mean-tongued Juan Ramón Jiménez, diabolical old brat of poetry, said of him, of Don Antonio, that he went around covered in ashes and that cigarette butts were all he carried in his pockets.
It was Juan Ramón Jiménez, poet of great splendor, who took it upon himself to teach me all about that legendary Spanish envy. This poet who had no need to envy anyone, since his work is a resplendent beam flashing on the dark beginnings of the century, affected the life of a hermit, lashing out from his hideaway at anything he thought might overshadow him.
The younger generation—García Lorca and Alberti, as well as Jorge Guillén and Pedro Salinas—were doggedly needled by Juan Ramón, a bearded demon who dug his knife daily into one or another. He said unfavorable things about me every week in the elaborate critical commentaries he published Sunday after Sunday in the newspaper El sol. But I made up my mind to live and let live. I never answered back. I never replied to literary attacks, and I still don’t.
* * *
The poet Manuel Altolaguirre, who had a printing press and the vocation of printer, came by my house one day to tell me that he was going to bring out a handsome poetry review, in the finest format and with the best work in Spain.
“There’s only one person who can edit it,” he said to me, “and you’re that person.”
I had been a heroic founder of magazines who quickly dropped them or was dropped by them. In 1925 I started Caballo de bastos (Jack of Clubs). In those days we wrote without punctuation and were discovering Dublin by way of the streets in Joyce. Humberto Díaz Casanueva sported a turtleneck sweater, a very daring thing for a poet at that time. His poetry was lovely and immaculate, as it has continued to be. Rosamel del Valle always dressed in black from head to toe, as poets should. I remember these two distinguished friends as my active collaborators. I have forgotten some of the others. At any rate, our galloping horse jolted the times.
“Yes, Manolito, I’ll edit the review.”
Manuel Altolaguirre was an excellent printer whose own hands arrayed the cases with magnificent Bodoni characters. Manolito honored poetry with his poems and with his hands, a hard-working archangel’s hands. He also printed Pedro de Espinosa’s Fábula del Genil (Fable of the Genil River). What brilliance flashed from the lustrous golden verses of the poem in that majestic typography that made the words stand out as if they had been recast in the smelting furnace.
Five fine, handsome issues of my Caballo verde appeared on the bookstands. I liked to watch Manolito, always full of laughter and smiles, pick out the type, set the characters in the cases, and then activate the small letterpress with his foot. Sometimes he would set off with the copies of the review in his daughter Paloma’s baby carriage. People in the streets made much of this: “What a wonderful father! Going out even in this hellish traffic with his baby!”
The baby was Poetry, riding her Green Horse. The review published Miguel Hernández’s first new poem and of course the poems of Federico, Cernuda, Aleixandre, Guillén (the good one, the Spaniard). Neurotic, turn-of-the-century Juan Ramón Jiménez went on aiming his Sunday darts at me. Rafael Alberti didn’t like the title: “Why a green horse? ‘Red Horse’ is what it should be called.”
I did not change its color. And Rafael and I didn’t bicker over it. We never bickered over anything. There is plenty of room in the world for horses and poets of all the colors of the rainbow.
The sixth number of Caballo verde was left on Viriato Street, the pages not yet collated and sewn. It was dedicated to Julio Herrera y Reissig—a second Lautréamont, produced by Montevideo—and the texts written in his honor by the poets of Spain were silenced in all their beauty, stillborn, having nowhere to go. The magazine was to have come out on July 19, 1936, but on that day the streets were filled with shooting. In his African garrison an obscure general, Francisco Franco, had risen against the Republic.
THE CRIME WAS IN GRANADA
Right now, as I write these lines, Spain is officially celebrating many—so many—years of successful insurrection. In Madrid at this very moment, dressed in blue and gold, surrounded by his Moorish guards, and at his side the ambassadors of the United States, England, and several other countries, the Supreme Commander is reviewing his troops. Troops made up mostly of boys who did not see that war.
But I saw it. A million dead Spaniards. A million exiles. It seemed as if that thorn covered with blood would never be plucked from the conscience of mankind. And yet, perhaps the boys who are now passing in review before the Moorish guards don’t know the truth about the terrible history of that war.
For me, it started on the evening of July 19, 1936. A resourceful and pleasant Chilean, Bobby Deglané, was the wrestling promoter in Madrid’s huge Circo Price arena. I had expressed my reservations about the seriousness of that “sport” and he convinced me to go to the arena that evening with García Lorca to see how authentic the show really was. I talked García Lorca into it and we agreed to meet there at a certain time. We were going to have great fun watching the truculence of the Masked Troglodyte, the Abyssinian Strangler, and the Sinister Orangutan.
Federico did not show up. He was at that hour already on his way to death. We never saw each other again: he had an appointment with another strangler. And so the Spanish war, which changed my poetry, began for me with a poet’s disappearance.
What a poet! I have never seen grace and genius, a winged heart and a crystalline waterfall, come together in anyone else as they did in him. Federico García Lorca was the extravagant “duende,” his was a magnetic joyfulness that generated a zest for life in his heart and radiated it like a planet. Openhearted and comical, worldly and provincial, an extraordinary musical talent, a splendid mime, easily alarmed and superstitious, radiant and noble, he was the epitome of Spain through the ages, of her popular tradition. Of Arabic-Andalusian roots, he brightened and perfumed like jasmine the stage set of a Spain that, alas, is gone forever.
García Lorca’s monumental command of metaphor seduced me, and everything he wrote attracted me. For his part, he would sometimes ask me to read him my latest poems, and halfway through the reading he would break in, shouting: “Stop, stop, I’m letting myself be influenced by you!”
In the theater and in a silence, in a crowd and in a small group, he generated beauty. I have never known anyone else with such magical hands, I never had a brother who loved laughter more. He laughed, sang, played the piano, leaped, invented, he sparkled. Poor friend, he had all the natural gifts, and he was a goldsmith, a drone in the hive of great poetry, but he also wasted his creative talent sometimes.
“Listen,” he would say, taking hold of my arm, “do you see that window? Don’t you think it’s chorpatelic?”
“And what does ‘chorpatelic’ mean?”
“I don’t know either, but one must know what is and what’s not chorpatelic. Otherwise, you’re lost. Look at that dog, he’s really
chorpatelic!”
Or he would tell me that he had been invited to a ceremony commemorating Don Quixote at a school for boys, and that when he walked into the classroom the children, led by the headmistress, sang:
This book, which was explicated
by F. Rodríguez Marín (Ph.D.),
will be everywhere celebrated
forever and ever. Amen.
Once I gave a talk on García Lorca, years after his death, and someone in the audience asked me: “In your ‘Oda a Federico García Lorca,’ why do you say that they paint hospitals blue for him?”
“Look, my friend,” I replied, “asking a poet that kind of question is like asking a woman her age. Poetry is not static matter but a flowing current that quite often escapes from the hands of the creator himself. His raw material consists of elements that are and at the same time are not, of things that exist and do not exist. Anyway, I’ll try to give you an honest answer. For me, blue is the most beautiful color. It suggests space as man sees it, like the dome of the sky, rising toward liberty and joy. Federico’s presence, his personal magic, instilled a mood of joy around him. My line probably means that even hospitals, even the sadness of hospitals, could be transformed by the magic spell of his influence and suddenly changed into beautiful blue buildings.”
Federico had a premonition of his death. Once, shortly after returning from a theatrical tour, he called me up to tell me about a strange incident. He had arrived with the La Barraca troupe at some out-of-the-way village in Castile and camped on the edge of town. Overtired because of the pressures of the trip, Federico could not sleep. He got up at dawn and went out to wander around alone. It was cold, the knife-like cold that Castile reserves for the traveler, the outsider. The mist separated into white masses, giving everything a ghostly dimension.
A huge rusted iron grating. Broken statues and pillars fallen among decaying leaves. He had stopped at the gate of an old estate, the entrance to the immense park of a feudal manor. Its state of abandonment, the hour, and the cold made the solitude even more penetrating. Suddenly Federico felt oppressed as if by something about to come out of the dawn, something about to happen. He sat down on the broken-off capital of a pillar lying toppled there.
A tiny lamb came out to browse in the weeds among the ruins, appearing like an angel of mist, out of nowhere, to turn solitude into something human, dropping like a gentle petal on the solitude of the place. The poet no longer felt alone. Suddenly a herd of swine also came into the area. There were four or five dark animals, half-wild pigs with a savage hunger and hoofs like rocks. Then Federico witnessed a bloodcurdling scene: the swine fell on the lamb and, to the great horror of the poet, tore it to pieces and devoured it.
This bloody scene in that lonely place made Federico take his touring company back on the road immediately. Three months before the civil war, when he told me this chilling story, Federico was still haunted by the horror of it. Later on I saw, more and more clearly, that the incident had been a vision of his own death, the premonition of his incredible tragedy.
* * *
Federico García Lorca was not merely shot; he was assassinated. It would never have crossed anyone’s mind that they would kill him one day. He was the most loved, the most cherished, of all Spanish poets, and he was the closest to being a child, because of his marvelous happy temperament. Who could have believed there were monsters on this earth, in his own Granada, capable of such an inconceivable crime?
This criminal act was for me the most painful in the course of a long struggle. Spain was always a battleground of gladiators, a country where much blood has flowed. The bullring, with its sacrifice and its cruel elegance, repeats—glamorized in a flamboyant spectacle—the age-old struggle to the death between darkness and light.
The Inquisition incarcerated Fray Luis de León; Quevedo suffered torments in a dungeon; Columbus hobbled with irons on his ankles. And the great showplace was the charnel house of El Escorial, just as the Monument to the Fallen is today, with its cross standing over a million dead and numberless dark prisons.
THE SONNETS OF DARK LOVE
In his romances and his impassioned or descriptive poems about human love, Lorca very rarely offers the keys to certain deep feelings. Perhaps his love life passed through a number of different cycles. I know too little of those problems to illuminate them.
But there is an old sonnet in which, at a certain point, he seems to reveal himself. Indeed, it is one of Federico’s best. I always asked him to recite it, and one time he wrote it down for me with a pencil and paper when the two of us were seated in a restaurant. After repeating it aloud from memory, he slid it over to me, saying: “I am truly giving this to you. What I mean is no one else has a copy.”
One of the verses says:
An Apollo of bone sweeps the inhuman riverbed
Where my blood weaves rushes in spring …
And ends:
Oh lithe brunette with the slender waist!
Oh metal and melancholy Peru!
Oh Spain, oh dead moon on hard stone!
The poet wrote these verses for a Peruvian friend, Carmen, the wife of the Chilean Alfredo Condon.
I also cannot forget those verses he uttered once from memory, a few weeks before they killed him, in the home of Manuel Altolaguirre, with the title Sonnets of Dark Love. They struck me as very beautiful, and must have been dedicated to his last, his true love.
They say the book remained intact among the papers of the murdered poet. If this is true, and if, from a false sense of morality, the García Lorca family has barred its publication, this is an unpardonable sin. But I am not certain it is true. When I met Francisco García Lorca some years back in São Paolo, I didn’t have the chance to clarify this matter.
THE LAST LOVE OF THE POET FEDERICO
There are those who treat with a kind of obscurantism the homosexuality of García Lorca, a subject that to me seems unavoidable. This is the way in Spain and Latin America: scrupulously concealing Federico’s personal inclinations. In many ways, this attitude shows respect for the murdered poet. But there is also a sexual taboo there, the ecclesiastical legacy of imperialism and Spanish colonialism, nineteenth-century hypocrisy.
Then there are those scandal-mongers, almost always reactionaries, who, to suppress this horrendous political crime, have proffered García Lorca’s erotic proclivities as a probable reason of his death. This is a smoke screen. Fascism in Spain, as in Germany and Italy, specialized in the extermination of intellectuals.
In the occupied territories, the Nazis massacred writers, professionals, artists, men of science. In Poland, their hope was to let live no more than a few thousand Poles with rudimentary skills who could serve as amanuenses in their decimated nation.
The Spanish didn’t do badly, either. The persecution of teachers, professionals, masons, university graduates, reached the peak of its ferocity in Galicia. They would round people up at night, searching for intellectuals they would gather in the bullring in Badajoz or else shoot at dawn wherever they were. The Galician painter Maruja Mallo told me she used to sleep out in the open in the fields, dying from cold. She spent three months like that, terrified that they might find her. In the morning, she would sneak into her house. On her way home, she would come across a half dozen bodies, those executed that day at sunup.
García Lorca’s execution was surely no different than Alberti’s or Machado’s would have been, had they been caught. In his only declaration concerning the poet’s death, Franco blamed it on the reigning disorder of the early days of the civil war. But the long captivity, martyrdom, and death of the imprisoned poet Miguel Hernández disprove his words. There were many chances to free him. Embassies, cardinals, and writers intervened against the fascist authorities, and all they could do was prolong Miguel Hernández’s incarceration. His death, like Federico’s, was a repellent political assassination.
Returning to García Lorca’s intimate disposition: I will say I have known and dealt with a great num
ber of homosexuals, but even after seeing the poet nearly every day in Buenos Aires in 1933, I never saw this side of him, and I couldn’t say he exuded any sort of feminine charm. He emanated a splendid intelligence the way a precious stone refracts rays of light. His dark, fleshy face was not effeminate in the least, his seductiveness was natural and intellectual. His homosexuality has been confirmed, and I saw proof of it eventually. But perhaps there are also happy and doomed homosexuals, and the visible becomes more so in sorrow. Federico radiated happiness and in that overflowing cup there must have been something of his satisfied loves.
In Buenos Aires I began to suspect the nature of his amorous inclinations. One time, he told me his hotel room was filled with girls, almost all of them budding poetesses, and they gave him no room to breathe. He told me this amid a series of jokes about his situation. This gave me some sense of his panic when besieged by women, and immediately I offered my assistance. We agreed that in moments of authentic alarm, he would call me on the phone, and I would rush quick as lightning to the hotel and take charge, one way or another, of the agreeable mission of dragging off one or another of his admirers.
We sealed our pact gladly, and with a certain degree of success: my collaboration brought me more than one unexpectedly exquisite reward. Several of those little doves, dazzled by Federico’s brilliance, wound up falling into my arms.
