My Last Sigh

  But I was not the only one who was changing. Since the beginning of World War I, everything around us seemed to be coming apart. Because of the war, Spain was divided into two irreconcilable camps, which were to slaughter each other some twenty years later. The right wing, composed of all the conservative elements in the country, declared themselves strict Germanophiles; the left, or all those who claimed to be up-to-date and “liberal,” were ardent supporters of the French and the Allies. Gone were the serenity of the provinces, the slow repetitious rhythm of daily life, the rigid social hierarchy. The nineteenth century in Spain had finally come to an end.

  Before going any further, however, let me backtrack a bit and talk about the movies. I think I was about eight years old when I discovered the cinema, at a theatre called the Farrucini. There were two doors, one exclusively for exiting, one for entering, set in a beautiful wooden facade. Outside, a cluster of lemonade sellers equipped with a variety of musical instruments hawked their wares to passersby. In reality, the Farrucini was little more than a shack; it had wooden benches and a tarpaulin for a roof.

  I wasn’t allowed to go to the movies alone, but was always accompanied, as everywhere, by my nurse, even when I only went across the street to play with my friend Pelayo. I remember how enthralled I was by my first cartoon; it was about a pig who wore a tricolor sash around its waist and sang. (The sound came from a record player hidden behind the screen.) I’m quite sure that it was a color film, which at that time meant that each image had been painted by hand.

  Movies then were little more than a curiosity, like the sideshow at a county fair. They were simply the primitive products of a newly discovered technique. Apart from trains and streetcars, already habitual parts of our lives, such “modern” techniques were not much in evidence in Saragossa. In fact, in 1908, there was only one automobile in the entire city, an electric one.

  Yet movies did signify a dramatic intrusion into our medieval universe and soon several permanent movie theatres appeared, equipped with either armchairs or benches, depending on the price of admission. By 1914, there were actually three good theatres: the Salon Doré, the Coyne (named after the famous photographer), and the Ena Victoria. (There was a fourth, on the Calle de los Estebanes, but I’ve forgotten the name. My cousin lived on that street, and we had a terrific view of the screen from her kitchen window. Her family finally boarded it up, however, and put in a skylight instead; but we managed to dig a small hole in the bricks, where we took turns watching soundless moving pictures.)

  When it comes to the movies I saw when I was very young, my memory grows cloudy; I often confuse them with movies I saw later in Madrid. But I do remember a French comedian who kept falling down; we used to call him Toribio. (Could it have been Onésime?) We also saw the films of Max Linder and of Méliès, particularly his Le Voyage dans la lune. The first American films—adventure serials and burlesques—arrived later. There were also some terribly romantic Italian melodramas; I can still see Francesca Bertini, the Greta Garbo of Italy, twisting the long curtain at her window and weeping. (It was both wildly sentimental and very boring.) The most popular actors at the time were the Americans Conde Hugo (Count Hugo) and Lucilla Love (pronounced Lové in Spanish). They were famous for their romances and action-packed serials.

  In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and “explained” the action to the audience. “Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,” he would declaim. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!”

  It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.

  I’ll never forget, for example, everyone’s terror when we saw our first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer, growing larger and larger. We simply couldn’t understand that the camera was moving nearer to the head, or that because of trick photography (as in Méliès’s films), the head only appeared to grow larger. All we saw was a head coming toward us, swelling hideously out of all proportion. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we believed in the reality of what we saw.

  Although I think my mother did go to the movies occasionally, I’m sure my father, who died in 1923, never saw a movie in his life. In 1909, a friend of his from Palma de Majorca proposed that they put up the money to finance the construction of a chain of movie theatres in a selection of Spanish cities. My father only snorted; he had nothing but scorn for what seemed to him just another kind of circus. Had he accepted the offer, perhaps I’d now be the largest movie distributor in Spain!

  It’s true, though, that for the first twenty or thirty years, the cinema was considered more or less the equivalent of the amusement park—good for the common folk, but scarcely an artistic enterprise. No critic thought the cinema worth writing about. I remember my mother weeping with despair when, in 1928 or 1929, I announced my intention of making a film. It was as if I’d said: “Mother, I want to join the circus and be a clown.” A family friend, a lawyer, had to be enlisted to convince her that there was a lot of money to be made in films. In fact, he pontificated, someone might even produce an interesting piece of work on the order of the spectacular Italian films about ancient Greece and Rome. (My mother allowed herself to be persuaded, but she never saw the film she’d financed.)

  *Where does all the water go / That ripples in this stream so slow? / A child once asked his mother. / By this river that we love / We watch the water flowing past / But will we see it flowing back?

  5

  Conchita’s Memories

  ABOUT twenty years ago, my sister Conchita wrote an article for a French magazine called Positif. Here is our childhood, as she described it.

  There were seven children: Luis, the oldest, followed by three sisters, of whom I was the youngest and the silliest. The fact that Luis was born in Calanda was purely accidental; he grew up in Saragossa. Since he’s constantly accusing me of beginning my reminiscences at some prenatal period, I’ll just say that my earliest memories date from the age of five, and consist of an orange in a hallway, and of a pretty young girl scratching her white thigh behind a door.

  At that time, Luis was already a student with the Jesuits. Early every morning, he and my mother waged their daily battle over his refusal to wear his student cap. Although she was usually very lenient with her eldest and favorite, she was inexplicably adamant on this point. (Even when Luis was well into his teens, she always sent a maid to follow him and make sure he didn’t take it off and hide it under his jacket—which he always did, of course.)

  High grades always seemed to come automatically to Luis; in fact, he used to make deliberate errors on certain final exams, just to avoid the embarrassment of sweeping all the prizes at the end of the year. Every night at dinner, we breathlessly followed the trials and tribulations of Luis’s school days. I remember one evening when he told us that he’d found a Jesuitical undershirt in his soup at lunch. Always the staunch defender of both school and teachers, my father refused to believe him; and when Luis insisted, he was ordered to leave the table. He got up slowly and walked proudly to the door; then, parodying Galileo as he went, “And yet,” he declaimed, “there was an undershirt!”

  Luis began to study the violin when he was about thirteen. It was something he’d always wanted to do, and he did seem to have a natural gift for it. I remember how he used to wait for us to go to bed, then come into our bedroom with his instrument and begin his music lectures. He was very enamored of Wagner at the time, althou
gh I now realize he knew as little about him as we did. In fact, I doubt the music he played could be called “real” music, but to me it made a rich accompaniment to my fantasies and imaginary adventures. Luis even formed a small orchestra; and on important religious holidays, Perosi’s Mass and Schubert’s “Ave Maria” thundered down from the choir loft onto a delighted congregation.

  On one of my parents’ frequent trips to Paris, they brought Luis a toy theatre, complete with backdrops and scenery. I remember two of the backdrops—a throne room, a forest—a cardboard king and queen, a court jester, and some knights. The figures couldn’t have been more than ten centimeters tall, and always faced the audience; you could move them sideways by pulling on a wire. To enlarge his cast, Luis added a lion made out of zinc (a paperweight in better days) and a small golden statue of the Eiffel Tower. I can’t remember if the Eiffel Tower represented a citadel or a cynic, but I do remember it bobbing into the throne room attached to the tail of the formidable lion.

  Rehearsals for these plays always began a full week before opening night, but only a chosen few were allowed to participate. Chairs were set up in the attic and invitations sent to all the children in the village over twelve. Just before curtain time, we’d put together a feast of candies and beaten egg whites, with water mixed with vinegar and sugar to drink, fantasizing that it was a strange nectar imported from some exotic land. (Luis did everything, and it was only on our father’s intervention, and his threats of canceling the show, that we three sisters were allowed to attend the performances.)

  I also remember the day the mayor of Saragossa organized a special assembly at the municipal school to celebrate some sort of serious civic occasion. Luis arrived onstage dressed as part gypsy, part bandit, brandishing an enormous pair of barber’s shears and chanting:

  With this pair of scissors

  And my will to fight, it’s plain

  We’ll have a revolution

  And capture all of Spain!

  The audience applauded wildly and threw the actors cigars and cigarettes.

  Luis was a boxer as well as an actor. When he’d beaten the toughest boy in the village, he arranged a series of boxing matches and gave himself the title of “the Lion of Calanda.” (In Madrid, he was a lightweight champion, but I don’t know the details of this particular incarnation.)

  After Luis passed his baccalaureate exams with flying colors, he began to talk of becoming an agronomist. The notion pleased my father, who already saw his son improving the family property in Aragon. My mother, on the other hand, was horrified; to pursue his studies, her son would have to go to Madrid! Of course, that was precisely what attracted Luis to the subject; it was a way out of both the family and Saragossa.

  During this time, we were spending our summers in San Sebastián, and we saw Luis only in Saragossa, for vacations or for family catastrophes, such as our father’s death in 1923. In Madrid, he studied at the university and lived at the Residencia de Estudiantes, whose students later distinguished themselves in the sciences, letters, and the arts. These friendships remain crucial to my brother. Biology immediately captured Luis’s fancy, and for many years he was a research assistant to Ignacio Bolívar.

  Luis ate like a bird and, despite snow and subzero temperatures, dressed only in lightweight clothes and sandals with no socks. These idiosyncrasies drove my father wild with rage; in his heart he was delighted to have sired a son with such extraordinary powers, but he was furious each time he saw Luis washing first one foot, then the other, in ice-cold water in the sink.

  As children, we had strange pets. The most bizarre was an enormous rat, as big as a rabbit, a rather filthy beast with a long, rough tail; but he was treated like one of the family. He accompanied us on trips in a bird cage; in fact, he complicated our lives for a long time. The poor creature finally died, like a saint, showing obvious symptoms of poisoning. (We had five servants and were never able to discover the murderer; but before his odor had disappeared, we’d forgotten all about him.)

  At one time or another, we had monkeys, parakeets, falcons, frogs and toads, grass snakes, and a large African lizard who the cook killed with a poker in a moment of terror. My favorite was Gregorio, the sheep, who just missed crushing me when I was ten. I think we brought him from Italy when he was a baby. Poor Gregorio was always a misfit, a true “black sheep”; the only thing he loved was Nene, the horse. Luis also had a hatbox filled with tiny gray mice whom he allowed us to look at once a day—well fed, fairly comatose couples who procreated nonstop. Before he left for Madrid, he took them up to the attic and, much to our dismay, gave them their freedom while admonishing them to “grow and multiply.”

  We loved and respected all living creatures, even those from the vegetable kingdom, and I think they felt the same way about us. As children, we could walk through a forest crawling with wild animals and come out unscathed. There was one exception, however—spiders. These hideous and terrifying monsters threw us into an inexplicable panic; but given our Buñuelesque penchant for morbidity, they were often the main topic of conversation. And our stories about them are outrageous, like the one about Luis seeing an eight-eyed, jagged-toothed monster and fainting away in the middle of dinner at an inn in Toledo and coming to only after he was back in Madrid.

  Then there was my oldest sister, who could never find a sheet of paper large enough to draw even the head of the spider she said was spying on her in a hotel. I remember her sobbing while she described the four pairs of eyes that stared at her, and the impassive waiter who picked it up by one leg and removed it from the room. With her hand, she imitated the ghastly wavering crawl of old, dusty, hairy, one-legged spiders that trailed their filthy webs behind them and which still haunt the memories of our childhood. (My latest spider adventure occurred as I was coming downstairs and heard the familiar nauseating, squishy sound behind me. I knew immediately that it was our hideous hereditary enemy, and I thought I would faint when I heard the hellish crunch it made as my savior, the paper boy, crushed it with his foot.) Spiders! Scorpions! Tarantulas! Our nightmares, like our dinner-table conversations, were filled with them.

  Most of our pets belonged to Luis, and I never saw any who were better cared for, each according to the needs of its species. In fact, he still loves animals; sometimes I even suspect he tries not to hate spiders. In Viridiana, there’s a scene where a tired dog is attached by a rope to the underside of a cart as it rumbles along the road. Luis suffered when he shot this scene because in real life it was so very common. The habit was so ingrained in the Spanish peasant that to try to break it would have been like Don Quixote tilting at windmills. When we were on location, Luis had me buy a kilo of meat for the dog, or for any other animal who happened to wander in.

  The Great Adventure of our childhood, however, occurred during a summer in Calanda when Luis must have been in his early teens. We’d decided to sneak away to the neighboring town with some cousins our age, but without our parents’ permission. Heaven only knows why, but we all got dressed as if we were going to a fancy party. When we got to Foz, which was about five kilometers away and where we owned some farm land, we made the rounds of all our tenant farmers. At every house, they fed us sweet wine and cookies, and by the time we’d seen them all, we were so euphoric that we decided to explore the local cemetery. I remember Luis stretching out on the autopsy table and demanding that someone take out his entrails. I also remember one of us sticking her head through a hole in a tomb and becoming so firmly wedged in that Luis had to tear away the plaster with his nails to get her out.

  (After the war, I revisited this same cemetery, which seemed much smaller and older than I remembered. In the corner stood a small white coffin which had been pried open, exposing the mummified remains of a child, and a huge cluster of scarlet poppies that had grown up through what had once been its stomach.)

  After our innocent, albeit blasphemous, invasion, we started back through the sun-blasted mountains in pursuit of some appropriately magical cave. Still fi
lled with wine, we did crazy things, like jumping down a deep, narrow crevice and crawling through another until we found ourselves in a grotto. All we had by way of speleological equipment was a candle stub from the cemetery. We walked as long as the flame lasted, and then suddenly there was nothing—no light, no courage, no euphoria. The air was filled with bat wings, but Luis vowed to protect us from the “prehistoric pterodactyls.” When we began to get hungry, he heroically offered himself for consumption. I burst into tears; he was my idol, and I begged to be allowed to sacrifice myself in his place. After all, I was the youngest, the silliest, and clearly the most tender of the Buñuels!

  The terror of those hours has long been forgotten, as one forgets physical pain the moment it’s gone, but I do remember our hysterical relief, as well as our fear of the consequences, when they finally found us. Oddly enough, we weren’t punished, probably because of our sorry condition. On our way home in the carriage drawn by Nene, Luis fainted, and to this day I don’t know whether it was from heat stroke, drunkenness, or very clever tactics!

  For several days afterward, our parents spoke to us only in the third person, but when he thought we weren’t listening, my father regaled his friends with the story of our exploit, exaggerating the obstacles we’d had to overcome and praising Luis’s proposed self-sacrifice. (No one ever mentioned mine, which seemed to me every bit as heroic, but in our family Luis was the only one who recognized my small human worth.)

  Years went by in which Luis and I rarely saw each other. He was busy at the university, and I was occupied with the useless education designed for young girls of good families. My two older sisters married young. I remember how Luis loved to play checkers with our second sister, but the games always ended disastrously, since both were fiercely determined to win. It was a real war of nerves. If my sister won, she had the right to pull a sort of pale mustache under Luis’s nose until he cried “Enough!” He’d endure the torture for what seemed like hours and then leap up suddenly and throw whatever came into his hands, usually the checkerboard, as far as he could. On the other hand, if he won, he’d light a match and move it closer and closer to my sister’s face until she said a certain taboo word we’d learned from our coachman. (When we were little, he used to tell us that if we burned a bat’s face, it would say “Culo! Culo!”) Since my sister stubbornly refused to utter the word, the games were forever ending in chaos and tears.