LUIS BUÑUEL
My Last Sigh
Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) was one of the twentieth century’s greatest filmmakers. His many credits include Un Chien Andalou (1924), which he conceived with Salvador Dalí, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
THE FILMS OF LUIS BUÑUEL
Un Chien andalou 1928
L’Age d’or 1930
Trerra sin pan 1932
En el viejo Tampico 1947
El gran calavera 1949
Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned) 1950
The Devil and the Flesh 1951
Daughter of Deceit 1951
Una mujer sin amor 1951
Mexican Bus Ride 1951
The Brute 1952
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe 1952
El (This Strange Passion) 1952
Wuthering Heights 1953
Illusion Travels by Streetcar 1953
Death and the River 1954
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz 1955
Cela s’appelle l’aurore 1956
Death in the Garden 1956
Nazarin 1959
La Fièvre monte à El Pao 1960
The Young One 1960
Viridiana 1961
The Exterminating Angel 1962
Diary of a Chambermaid 1964
Simon of the Desert 1965
Belle de jour 1967
The Milky Way 1969
Tristana 1970
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie 1972
The Phantom of Liberty 1974
That Obscure Object of Desire 1977
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MARCH 2013
Translation copyright © 1983 by Alfred A. Knopf
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in France as Mon dernier soupir by Editions Robert Laffont, Paris, in 1982. This translation originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1983.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Photograph credits: Archive of Georges Sadoul: Plate 2c; Courtesy of Cahiers du Cinéma: Plate 5, Plate 10a, Plate 11, Plate 12a, Plate 13, Plate 14b; Collection of Juan-Luis Buñuel: Plate 7b, Plate 8a, Plate 8b, Plate 9, Plate 16; Collection of Luis Buñuel: Plate 1b, Plate 2a, Plate 3a, Plate 4b, Plate 6a, Plate 6b; Greenwich Films Production: Plate 15; J. Dreville/Cahiers du Cinéma: Plate 3b; Courtesy of Keystone Press Agency, Inc.: Plate 7a; Mary Ellen Mark: Plate 12b, Plate 14a; The Museum of Modern Art/Film Stills Archive: Plate 4a; Photo Perauer: Plate 10b; Photo Petit: Plate 1a; Photo Vandel: Plate 2b.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Buñuel, Luis.
My last sigh:the autobiography of Luis Buñuel / Luis Buñuel, translated by
Abigail Israel
p. cm.
Translation of Mon dernier soupir.
1. Buñuel, Luis. 2. Moving-picture producers and directors—Spain—Biography.
I. Title.
PN1998.A3B7413 1983
791.43′0233′0924 83-48105
eISBN: 978-0-345-80371-9
www.vintagebooks.com
Cover design: John Gall
Cover photograph: Luis Buñuel, 1929, © Man Ray Trust/ ADAGP-ARS/Telimage, 2012
Artwork: © 2012 Man Ray Trust / Artist Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris
v3.1
To Jeanne … my wife, my companion
I’m not a writer, but my friend and colleague Jean-Claude
Carrière is. An attentive listener and scrupulous recorder during
our many long conversations, he helped me write this book.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
The Films of Luis Buñuel
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1 Memory
2 Remembrances from the Middle Ages
3 The Drums of Calanda
4 Saragossa
5 Conchita’s Memories
6 Earthly Delights
7 Madrid—The Residencia (1917–1925)
8 Paris (1925–1929)
Photo Insert
9 Dreams and Reveries
10 Surrealism (1929–1933)
11 America
12 Spain and France (1931–1936)
13 Love and Love Affairs
14 The Civil War (1936–1939)
15 Still an Atheist … Thank God!
16 Back to America
17 Hollywood Sequel
18 Mexico (1946–1961)
19 Pro and Con
20 From Spain to Mexico to France (1960–1977)
21 Swan Song
1
Memory
DURING the last ten years of her life, my mother gradually lost her memory. When I went to see her in Saragossa, where she lived with my brothers, I watched the way she read magazines, turning the pages carefully, one by one, from the first to the last. When she finished, I’d take the magazine from her, then give it back, only to see her leaf through it again, slowly, page by page.
She was in perfect physical health and remarkably agile for her age, but in the end she no longer recognized her children. She didn’t know who we were, or who she was. I’d walk into her room, kiss her, sit with her awhile. Sometimes I’d leave, then turn around and walk back in again. She greeted me with the same smile and invited me to sit down—as if she were seeing me for the first time. She didn’t remember my name.
When I was a schoolboy in Saragossa, I knew the names of all the Visigoth kings of Spain by heart, as well as the areas and populations of each country in Europe. In fact, I was a goldmine of useless facts. These mechanical pyrotechnics were the object of countless jokes; students who were particularly good at it were called memoriones. Virtuoso memorión that I was, I too had nothing but contempt for such pedestrian exercises.
Now, of course, I’m not so scornful. As time goes by, we don’t give a second thought to all the memories we so unconsciously accumulate, until suddenly, one day, we can’t think of the name of a good friend or a relative. It’s simply gone; we’ve forgotten it. In vain, we struggle furiously to think of a commonplace word. It’s on the tip of our tongues but refuses to go any farther.
Once this happens, there are other lapses, and only then do we understand, and acknowledge, the importance of memory. This sort of amnesia came upon me first as I neared seventy. It started with proper names, and with the immediate past. Where did I put my lighter? (I had it in my hand just five minutes ago!) What did I want to say when I started this sentence? All too soon, the amnesia spreads, covering events that happened a few months or years ago—the name of that hotel I stayed at in Madrid in May 1980, the title of a book I was so excited about six months ago. I search and search, but it’s always futile, and I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s.
So far, I’ve managed to keep this final darkness at bay. From my distant past, I can still conjure up countless names and faces; and when I forget one, I remain calm. I know it’s sure to surface suddenly, via one of those accidents of the unconscious. On the other hand, I’m overwhelmed by anxiety when I can’t remember a recent event, or the name of someone I’ve met during the last few months, or the name of a familiar object. I feel as if my whole personality has suddenly disintegrated; I become obsessed; I can’t think about anything else; and yet all my efforts and my rage get me nowhere. Am I going to disappear altogether? The obligation to find a metaphor to describe “table” is a monstrous fe
eling, but I console myself with the fact that there is something even worse—to be alive and yet not recognize yourself, not know anymore who you are.
You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.
Imagine (as I often have) a scene in a film where a man tries to tell a friend a story but forgets one word out of four, a simple word like “car” or “street” or “policeman.” He stammers, hesitates, waves his hands in the air, gropes for synonyms. Finally, his friend gets so annoyed that he slaps him and walks away. Sometimes, too, resorting to humor to ward off panic, I tell the story about the man who goes to see a psychiatrist, complaining of lapses in memory. The psychiatrist asks him a couple of routine questions, and then says:
“So? These lapses?”
“What lapses?” the man replies.
Memory may be omnipotent and indispensable, but it’s also terribly fragile. The menace is everywhere, not only from its traditional enemy, forgetfulness, but from false memories, like my often repeated story about Paul Nizan’s wedding in the 1930s. The Church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, where he was married, is crystal clear in my mind’s eye. I can see the congregation, myself among them, the altar, the priest—even Jean-Paul Sartre, the best man. And then suddenly, one day last year, I said to myself—but that’s impossible! Nizan, a militant Marxist, and his wife, who came from a family of agnostics, would never have been married in a church! It was categorically unthinkable. Did I make it up? Confuse it with other weddings? Did I graft a church I know well onto a story that someone told me? Even today, I’ve no idea what the truth is, or what I did with it.
Our imagination, and our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths. Of course, fantasy and reality are equally personal, and equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance.
In this semiautobiography, where I often wander from the subject like the wayfarer in a picaresque novel seduced by the charm of the unexpected intrusion, the unforeseen story, certain false memories have undoubtedly remained, despite my vigilance. But, as I said before, it doesn’t much matter. I am the sum of my errors and doubts as well as my certainties. Since I’m not a historian, I don’t have any notes or encyclopedias, yet the portrait I’ve drawn is wholly mine—with my affirmations, my hesitations, my repetitions and lapses, my truths and my lies. Such is my memory.
2
Remembrances from the Middle Ages
I WAS thirteen or fourteen years old when I left the region of Aragón for the first time to visit some friends of the family who were spending the summer in Vega de Pas near Santander, in northern Spain. The Basque country was astonishing, a new landscape completely the opposite of my own. There were clouds, rain, forests dripping with fog, damp moss, stones; from then on, I adored the north—the cold, the snow, the great rushing mountain rivers. In southern Aragón, the earth is fertile, but dry and dusty. A year can go by, even two, without so much as a single cloud in the impassive sky. Whenever an adventuresome cumulus wandered into view just above the mountain peaks, all the clerks in the grocery next door would rush to our house and clamber up onto the roof. There, from the vantage point of a small gable, they’d spend hours watching the creeping cloud, shaking their heads and murmuring sadly:
“Wind’s from the south. It’ll never get here.”
And they were always right.
I remember one agonizingly dry year when the population of the neighboring town of Castelceras organized a procession called a rogativa, led by the priests, to beg the heavens for just one small shower. When the appointed morning arrived, a mass of clouds appeared suddenly and hung darkly over the village. The procession seemed irrelevant; but, true to form, the clouds dispersed before it was over. When the blistering sun reappeared, a gang of ruffians retaliated. They snatched the statue of the Virgin from her pedestal at the head of the procession, and as they ran across the bridge, they threw her into the Guadalope River.
In my own village of Calanda, where I was born on the twenty-second of February, 1900, the Middle Ages lasted until World War I. It was a closed and isolated society, with clear and unchanging distinctions among the classes. The respectful subordination of the peasants to the big landowners was deeply rooted in tradition, and seemed unshakable. Life unfolded in a linear fashion, the major moments marked by the daily bells of the Church of Pilar. They tolled for Masses, vespers, and the Angelus, as well as for certain critical, and more secular, events—the tocsin that signaled fire, and the glorious chimes which rang only for major Sunday festivals. There was also a special toque de agonía, a deep, somber bell that tolled slowly when someone had begun his final combat, and a lighter bronze bell that rang for a dying child. In the fields, on the roads, in the streets of the town, everyone stopped whatever he was doing to ask who was about to die.
Calanda, where each day was so like the next that they seemed to have been ordered for all eternity, was a large village in the province of Teruel, with fewer than five thousand inhabitants and absolutely nothing to offer the passing tourist. When we came by train from Saragossa, we got off eighteen kilometers away in the town of Alcañiz, where three horse-drawn carriages were always waiting for us at the station—a jardinera (the largest), a galera (with a top), and a small two-wheeled cart. Despite the fact that we were a large family laden with excessive luggage, we all managed to squeeze in somehow or other. It took us close to three hours, under a burning sun, to cover the distance to Calanda, but I don’t remember a single moment of boredom.
Except for the Feast of Pilar and the annual September fairs, few outsiders ever came to Calanda. Every day around twelve-thirty, a swirl of dust announced the arrival of the Macan coach, pulled by a mule team, which brought the mail and an occasional traveling salesman. There wasn’t a single automobile in town until 1919, when Don Luis Gonzalez, a liberal and very up-to-date anticleric, bought the first one. His mother, a general’s widow named Doña Trinidad, was an elegant woman from an aristocratic Sevillian family, but her refined tastes made her a victim of her servants’ indiscretions. It seemed that she used a scandalous apparatus for her intimate ablutions, which the prudish upper-crust ladies of Calanda used to sketch with sweeping gestures in the air—a shape vaguely resembling a guitar; and because of this bidet, Doña Trinidad was ostracized for a significant period of time.
Don Luis also played a decisive role when the Calanda vineyards were struck with a devastating phylloxera. While the roots shriveled and died, the peasants adamantly refused to pull them out and replace them with American vines, as growers were doing throughout Europe. An agronomist came specially from Teruel and set up a microscope in the town hall so that everyone could examine the parasites, but even this was useless; the peasants still refused to consider any other vines. Finally, Don Luis set the example by tearing out his whole vineyard; as a result, he received a number of death threats, and never went out to inspect his new plants without a rifle. This typically Aragonian collective obstinacy took years to overcome.
Southern Aragón produced the best olive oil in Spain, perhaps even in the world; and despite the ever-present threat of drought, which could strip the trees of their olives, we had some particularly superb years. The Calanda peasants were renowned for their expertise; some went each year to oversee the harvests in Andalusia, near Jaén and Córdoba. The olive harvest began at the onset of winter; while everyone sang the “Jota oliverera,” the men climbed ladders and beat the branches with sticks, and the women gathered the fallen fruit. (In curious contrast to the brutal power of the typical Aragonian song, the “Jota oliverera” has a delicate, lilting melody.)
I remember, too, another song from that
period, which often comes to me halfway between waking and sleeping. (It’s probably vanished by now, since to my knowledge it’s never been written down, only transmitted orally from generation to generation.) The “Song of Sunrise” was sung every day during the harvest season by a group of boys running through the streets to rouse the workers at dawn. Perhaps some of these singers are still alive and would remember the words and the melody; it was a magnificent song, half sacred, half profane, a relic from the distant past. I remember waking to it as a child in what seemed to me to be the middle of the night.
During the rest of the year, two night watchmen, armed with oil lamps and small spears, punctuated our sleep.
“God be praised!” one would cry. “Alabado sea Dios!”
“May He be praised forever and ever,” the other replied. “Por siempre sea alabado.”
Or, “Eleven o’clock, fair weather. Las once, sereno.”
Much more rarely—what a joy!—“It’s cloudy.” And every once in a while—a miracle—“It’s raining!”
There were eight mills in Calanda for making olive oil; one was operated hydraulically, but the others still functioned exactly as they had in Roman times—a massive conical stone, turned by horses or mules, which ground the olives on another heavy stone. Indeed, it seemed pointless to change anything at all in Calanda. The same gestures and desires were repeated from father to son, mother to daughter. Progress, a word no one seemed to have heard, passed Calanda by, just like the rain clouds.
Every Friday morning would find a dozen old men and women sitting with their backs against the church wall opposite our house; they were the poorest of the poor, los pobres de solemnidad. One of our servants would give each of them a piece of bread, which they kissed respectfully, and a ten-centavo coin—generous alms compared to the “penny a head” wealthy people in the village usually gave.
It was in Calanda that I had my first encounters with death, which along with profound religious faith and the awakening of sexuality constituted the dominating force of my adolescence. I remember walking one day in the olive grove with my father when a sickeningly sweet odor came to us on the breeze. A dead donkey lay about a hundred yards away, swollen and mangled, serving as a banquet for a dozen vultures, not to mention several dogs. The sight of it both attracted and repelled me. Sated, the birds staggered about the cadaver, unable to take to the air. (The peasants never removed dead animals, convinced that their remains were good for the soil.) I stood there hypnotized, sensing that beyond this rotten carcass lay some obscure metaphysical significance. My father finally took hold of my arm and dragged me away.