I remember, too, at about the same period, the Russian director (his name escapes me now) who finally received authorization to come to Paris. As soon as he arrived, he asked me to put together a small, “typically French” orgy for him. I laughed; he couldn’t have picked a more unsuitable person for the job. Finally, I asked Aragon what to do.
“Well, mon cher ami,” he began delicately, “the question is, would you prefer to be …?”
Here he used a word that, even after all this time, I can’t bring myself to write. (In fact, the proliferation of gutter words in the works of modern writers disgusts me. They use them gratuitously, in a pretense of liberalism which is no more than a pathetic travesty of liberty.) In any case, I answered with a resounding negative, upon which he advised me to forget orgies altogether. The poor director eventually returned to his homeland, minus that particular experience.
7
Madrid—The Residencia (1917–1925)
BEFORE I went to Madrid in 1917 with my parents to look for a school, I’d been there only once, for a brief visit with my father. I remember being paralyzed by my provincialism, and spending my time trying to imitate the way people dressed and acted. I can still see my father, in his boater, explaining things to me and punctuating his speeches with his cane on the Calle d’Alcalá. I was so mortified I put my hands in my pockets and turned my back, pretending we had absolutely no connection.
We tried several ordinary boardinghouses, the kind where you eat a daily cocido a la madrileña—chickpeas and boiled potatoes with a bit of bacon or chorizo, or an occasional fragment of chicken—but my mother was adamant. The relaxed moral standards she associated with these places were not for her son. Finally, thanks to the recommendation of Don Bartolome Esteban, a senator and a friend of my father’s, I signed on at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where I was to spend the next seven years. My memories of this period are rich and vivid; without the Residencia, my life would have been very different.
The Residencia looked like the campus of an English university. It was subsidized by private foundations, so a single room cost only seven pesetas a day (four for a double). My parents paid my room and board, and gave me twenty pesetas per week pocket money, a more than adequate sum which was somehow totally inadequate. Each time I went home to Saragossa for vacation, I had to ask my mother to pay my debts from the preceding trimester, a transaction we managed to keep secret from my father.
The director, Don Alberto Jiménez, originally from Málaga, was a man of impressive culture. You could study any subject you wanted, stay as long as you liked, and change your area of specialty in midstream. There were lecture halls, five laboratories, a library, and several playing fields. When my father asked what I intended to do with my life, I told him that I wanted to become a composer and desired above all else to leave Spain, go to Paris, and study at the Schola Cantorum. His refusal couldn’t have been more categorical. I was supposed to do something “serious,” and everyone knew that composers tended to die of starvation. When I then expressed my liking for the natural sciences, entomology in particular, he suggested I become an agronomist. I went ahead and followed his advice, registering for the agronomy degree; but although I got sterling grades in biology, my math, three years in a row, was nothing short of catastrophic. I get lost very easily in the realm of abstract thought, and whereas certain mathematical truths seem self-evident to me, I simply cannot follow, or reproduce, the proofs. At one point, my father was so exasperated that he took me out of the university and kept me in Saragossa with a math tutor for a few months.
When I returned to the Residencia, all the lodgings were full, so I shared a room for a month with Juan Centeno, the brother of my good friend Augusto. Juan was a medical student and left early every morning, although not until he’d spent a significant amount of time combing his hair. The odd thing was that he always stopped combing at the very top of his head, leaving the hair in the back, which he couldn’t see in the mirror, in complete disarray. This absurd habit, repeated day in and day out, irritated me so much that after a couple of weeks I began to hate him. I was grateful to him for taking me in, but I couldn’t help it; it was an irrational aversion prompted no doubt by some dark detour in my unconscious mind. Years later, I still hadn’t forgotten it; there’s even a scene in The Exterminating Angel reminiscent of Juan’s eccentricity.
At a certain point, to please my father, I changed courses and decided to study industrial engineering, a six-year program which required mastery of technical subjects like mechanics and electro-magnetics. I managed to pass industrial design and, thanks to the private lessons, some of my mathematics exams. The following summer, in San Sebastián, I went to my father’s friends for advice; one had an excellent reputation as an Arabic scholar, the other had been one of my high school teachers in Saragossa. I told them my horror of math, my boredom, my aversion to six-year programs. They talked to my father, who finally agreed to let me pursue my penchant for the natural sciences.
The Museum of Natural History was only a stone’s throw from the Residencia, and I worked there happily for a year under the guidance of the great Ignacio Bolívar, at that time a world-famous orthopterist. Even today, I can still identify many varieties of insects at a glance and give you their Latin names.
During the following year, while I was on an excursion to Alcalá de Henares led by Americo Castro, a professor at the Center for Historical Studies, I heard about the need in certain foreign countries for Spanish instructors. I was so eager to get out of Spain that I immediately offered my services; unfortunately, no one seemed interested in hiring a student of the natural sciences. So in a fast and final metamorphosis I became a candidate for a degree in philosophy, a broad course of study involving literature, philosophy itself, and history—my area of specialization.
(These details are excruciatingly boring, I know, but if you want to follow the sinuous route of a single life, if you want to see where it came from and where it went, it’s impossible to tell what’s superfluous and what’s indispensable.)
My passion for sports began at the Residencia, where every morning, in shorts and bare feet, I ran on a track that belonged to the cavalry of the civil guard. I organized the first interscholastic track and field teams at the university and even became an amateur boxer. (Of my two matches, one was won by default because my opponent never showed up, the other lost on points in the fifth round for lack of what they called “combativity.” If the truth be known, I spent the entire five rounds worrying about how to protect my face.)
I loved all forms of exercise; one day I even managed to climb the facade of the Residencia. The muscles I developed during that period remained throughout most of my life; in fact, I still have a hard stomach. I remember toughening up my stomach muscles by lying on my back and having my friends jump up and down on me. My other specialty was arm wrestling; well into a “respectable” middle age, I was still fighting tournaments on bar and restaurant tables.
Finally, however, I had to face the real question of what to do with my life. So many things influenced me, particularly the literary movement that was shaking Madrid at the time. Yet all in all, it was a period during which Spain was relatively calm. The only significant political event was the revolt of Abd-el-Krim in Morocco and the defeat of the Spanish forces at Anual in 1921, the same year that I was supposed to begin my military service. The army wanted me to go to Morocco because I’d met Abd-el-Krim’s brother at the Residencia, but I refused the assignment.
Traditionally, Spanish law allowed well-off families to buy a reduction in their sons’ military service, but this law was suspended in 1921 because of the Moroccan war. I thus found myself in an artillery regiment which, since it had distinguished itself in the colonial war, was exempt from duty in Morocco. Suddenly, however, circumstances changed, and one morning we were ordered to get ready to leave the following day. That evening, I seriously contemplated desertion; in fact, two of my friends did take off—one eventually wound up an
engineer in Brazil. At the last minute, however, the departure order was canceled and I spent the entire fourteen months of my service in Madrid. Absolutely nothing worth mentioning occurred—I continued to visit friends, since we were allowed to leave the barracks every evening, and even to sleep at home, except for guard-duty nights. They were the worst. We slept fully dressed, down to our ammunition belts, with a full component of the requisite lice and fleas. Next door, the sergeants sat around a warm stove playing cards and drinking wine. I was consumed with envy. More than anything in the world, I yearned to be a sergeant.
Like everyone else, I rediscover certain periods of my life in a single image, or feeling, or just an impression—my hatred for Juan Centeno and his uncombed hair, my envy of the sergeants’ stove. Yet, despite the cold and the boredom, I have fond memories of both my sojourn with the Jesuits and my military service. I saw and learned things that I couldn’t have elsewhere. Once, after my tour of duty was over, I ran into my commanding officer at a concert. “You were such a good soldier!” was all he said to me.
For several years, Spain had been governed by the “benevolent dictator” Primo de Rivera, the father of the founder of the Falangists. Both labor and the anarchists were beginning to organize, however, as was the Spanish Communist party. One day, at the railroad station in Madrid on my way back from Saragossa, I learned that Dato, the prime minister, had been assassinated by anarchists on the street in broad daylight. I grabbed a coach and drove immediately to the Calle d’Alcalá, where the coachman showed me the bullet holes. Soon afterward, we heard that the anarchists, led by Ascaso and Durutti, had assassinated Soldevilla Romero, the archbishop of Saragossa, an odious character who was thoroughly detested by everyone, including my uncle the canon. That evening at the Residencia, we drank to the damnation of his soul.
To be frank, I would have to confess that our political consciousnesses had been more or less asleep for so long that they were only just beginning to stir. Most of us did not come fully awake until 1927–1928, just before the proclamation of the Republic. Up until that moment, we paid only minimal attention to the infant Communist and anarchist publications, although they did introduce us to Lenin and Trotsky. The only political discussions I participated in—and they may have been the only ones in Madrid!—took place at the peña of the Café de Platerias on the Calle Mayor.
A peña is a kind of meeting that takes place regularly in certain cafés; it’s a tradition that’s played a major role in Spanish life, and not only for the literati. People meet according to their profession, and always in the same place, from three to five in the afternoon, or after nine in the evening. A standard peña consists of anywhere from eight to fifteen regulars, all of whom are men. (The first women appeared in the early 1930s, and their reputations suffered accordingly.) In the political peña at the Café de Platerias, you might meet Sam Blancat, for example, an anarchist from Aragón who wrote for a variety of journals, such as España Nueva. His articles were so notoriously extreme that he was automatically arrested the day after any assassination. Then there was Santolaria, who edited a journal with anarchist leanings in Sevilla. There was also Eugenio d’Ors, and the bizarre, magnificent poet Pedro Garfias, who could spend two weeks looking for the right adjective.
“So … your adjective?” I used to ask whenever we met. “Have you found it yet?”
“Still looking,” he’d reply dreamily, before drifting off.
I can still recite one of his poems by heart. It’s called “Peregrino” and is part of a collection entitled Bajo el ala del sur—Under the Wing of the South:
Fluían horizontes de sus ojos
Traía rumor de arenas en los dedos
Y un haz de sueños rotos
Sobre sus hombros trémulos
La montaña y el mar sus dos lebreles
Le saltaban al paso
La montaña asombrada, el mar encabritado.…*
Even though Madrid was an administrative and artistic capital, it was in many ways still a small town. People walked great distances to get from one place to another; everyone knew everyone else; all sorts of encounters were possible. I remember arriving one evening at the Café Castilla with a friend and seeing screens set up which divided the room in half. A waiter told us that Primo de Rivera and company were expected for dinner! He did in fact arrive, and the first thing he did was to order the screens removed. When he saw us, he shouted, “Hola, jóvenes! Una copita!” The dictator was buying the leftists drinks!
I also remember the day I met King Alfonso XIII. I was standing at my window at the Residencia, my hair slicked back fashionably with brilliantine under my boater. Suddenly the royal carriage, complete with two drivers and someone young and female, pulled up to the curb directly below me; the king himself got out of the car to ask directions. Speechless at first (I was theoretically an anarchist at that moment), I somehow replied with perfectly shameful politeness, addressing him correctly as “Majestad.” Only when the carriage pulled away did I realize that I hadn’t removed my hat. The relief was overwhelming: my honor was still intact. When I told the story to the director of the Residencia, my reputation as a teller of tall tales was already so great that he called up a secretary in the royal palace for verification.
Sometimes during a peña there is a moment when everyone suddenly shuts his mouth and lowers his eyes. A gafe has entered—an evil eye, a bearer of bad tidings. People in Madrid honestly believed that there were such characters and that they had to be avoided at all costs. My brother-in-law, Conchita’s husband, once knew a captain whom everyone believed was a gafe and who was feared by all his associates. The same was true of the playwright Jacinto Grau, whose name it was best not even to mention. Wherever he went, bad luck seemed to dog him with uncanny perseverance. Once when he was giving a speech in Buenos Aires, the chandelier suddenly crashed to the floor, seriously wounding several people in the audience. Some of my friends even used to accuse me of being a gafe under the pretext that certain actors who had worked with me had died soon afterward! (I categorically deny their accusations, but should you still have your doubts, I do have other friends who would be glad to testify on my behalf.)
Those of us who grew up in the early teens were profoundly influenced by the extraordinary writers Spain produced at the turn of the century. I was lucky enough to know most of them—Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno, Valle Inclán, d’Ors, and Galdós, whose Nazarin and Tristana I later adapted for the screen. Galdós was older than the others and had remained somewhat solitary. I met him only once, at his home, when he was already very old and almost blind, wrapped in a blanket in front of the stove. And there was Pío Baroja, an important novelist not very much to my liking, Antonio Machado, the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Guillén, and Salinas.
After these famous artists, whose frozen faces you can see today in every wax museum in Spain, came my infamous “generation of 1927”—Federico García Lorca, Alberti, the poet Altolaguirre, Cernuda, José Bergamín, and Pedro Garfias. Between these two generations were two men of whom I was very fond—Moreno Villa and Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Although fifteen years older than I, Moreno Villa, an Andalusian from Málaga (like Picasso and Bergamín), was very much a part of our group. Because of special connections, he lived at the Residencia; we all went out together frequently. During the devastating flu epidemic of 1919, we were practically the only boarders. Villa, a talented painter and writer, used to loan me his books—I especially remember Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir and Apollinaire’s L’Enchanteur pourrissant, which I devoured during that particular plague.
When the Republic was declared in 1931, Moreno Villa was made director of the Royal Library. Later, during the Civil War, he went to Valencia, from which, like so many other prominent intellectuals, he was eventually exiled. I came across him again in Paris, then later in Mexico, where I saw him frequently until he died in the middle fifties. I still have a portrait he painted of me in 1948, a year during which I could get no work at all.
I shall be speaking of Ramón Gómez de la Serna again, because it was with him, some years later, that I failed in my debut as a cinéaste.
At this time, I was more or less connected to a movement called the Ultraists, which claimed to represent Spain’s avant-garde. We were admirers of Dada, Cocteau, and Marinetti. (Surrealism had not yet come into being.)
The most important literary cafés in Madrid were the Café Gijon (which, miraculously, is there still), the Granja del Henar, the Café Castilla, the Fornos, the Kutz, and the Café de la Montaña, whose marble-topped tables finally had to be replaced because they’d been so covered with artists’ graffiti. I used to go there alone to work, after my classes in the afternoon. At the Café Pombo, where de la Serna held court every Saturday night, we used to arrive, greet each other, and order a drink—usually coffee, and a lot of water—until a meandering conversation began about the latest literary publications or political upheavals. We loaned one another books and foreign journals, and gossiped about our absent brothers. Sometimes an author would read one of his poems or articles aloud, and Ramón would offer his opinion, which was always respected and sometimes disputed. The time passed quickly. Afterwards, small groups would continue the discussions as they roamed the streets of the city in the middle of the night.
The world-famous neurologist and Nobel Prize-winner, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the most learned men of his time, used to spend part of every afternoon at a table at the back of the Café del Prado. A few tables away sat a peña of Ultraist poets, to which I belonged. To illustrate the Ultraist spirit, let me tell you the story about the journalist and writer Araquistán, whom I encountered later during the Civil War when he was Spain’s ambassador to Paris. One day in the street he ran into José-María Carretero, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall third-rate novelist who signed his works “El Caballero Audaz”—the Audacious Knight. When they bumped into each other, Carretero grabbed Araquistán by the collar, insulted him, then began screaming at him for writing an unfavorable (but absolutely accurate) review of his latest book. Araquistán retaliated by slapping him; they began to scuffle until some concerned passersby separated them. The fight caused a certain uproar in literary circles, particularly when we decided to organize a dinner and circulate a petition in Araquistán’s support. At the time, I was preparing slides for Cajal at the Museum of Natural History, so my Ultraist friends asked me to talk him into adding his prestigious signature to the petition. Already well advanced in years, Cajal refused, explaining that the review ABC, for whom El Caballero Audaz wrote regularly, was due to publish Cajal’s memoirs, and he was afraid that if he signed the petition, the journal would cancel his contract.