My Last Sigh

  Since I’m on the subject of my friends in Madrid, I want to mention Juan Negrín, the future Republican prime minister. Negrín studied in Germany for several years and was a superb physiology professor. I remember trying to intercede on behalf of Pepin Bello, who kept failing his medical exams; but Negrín never made allowances of that kind. There was also the great Eugenio d’Ors, a philosopher from Catalonia and apostle of the baroque, which he saw not merely as a passing historical phenomenon, but as a fundamental tendency in life as well as art. He was the author of a line I often cite against those who seek originality at the expense of everything else. “What doesn’t grow out of tradition,” he used to say, “is plagiarism.” Something about this paradox always seemed to me profoundly true. D’Ors taught in a working-class school in Barcelona, so he always felt somewhat of a provincial when he came to Madrid. He liked to visit the Residencia and mingle with the students, and from time to time he participated in the peña at the Café Gijon.

  There was a cemetery in Madrid called the San Martín, where our great romantic poet Larra is buried. It hadn’t been in use for several decades, but it had a hundred of the most beautiful cypress trees I’ve ever seen. One evening the entire peña, including d’Ors, decided to pay it a midnight visit; we’d given the guardian ten pesetas that afternoon, so we were free to do as we pleased. The cemetery was deserted, abandoned to the moonlight and the silence. I remember going down several steps into an open tomb where a coffin lay in a beam of moonlight. The top was ajar, and I could see a woman’s dry, dirty hair, which had grown out through the opening. Nervous and excited, I called out, and the others immediately rushed down. That dead hair in the moonlight was one of the most striking images I’ve ever encountered; I used it in The Phantom of Liberty.

  Another close friend was José Bergamín, a great friend of Picasso and, later, Malraux. As the son of a former government minister, he was a señorito; he was married to one of the daughters of the playwright Arniches (whose other daughter married my friend Ugarte). Slim, witty, and perceptive, Bergamín was already well known as a poet and essayist. His penchant for preciosity, puns, paradoxes, and word games led him to cultivate several old Spanish chimeras, such as Don Juan and bullfighting. We saw a great deal of each other during the Civil War; and later, after I returned to Spain in 1961 to make Viridiana, he wrote me a magnificent letter in which he compared me to Antaeus because, he claimed, I seemed to be reborn whenever I touched my native soil. Like so many others, he too lived through a long exile, but during the past few years we’ve seen each other frequently; he’s still struggling, and writing, in Madrid.

  And finally there was Unamuno, a philosophy professor in Salamanca. Like Eugenio d’Ors, he used to visit us often in Madrid, where all the important things seemed to be happening. (Primo de Rivera eventually exiled him to the Canary Islands.) He was a serious and very famous man, but he always seemed pedantic and utterly humorless to me.

  LET US leave famous men for a moment and turn to places, particularly the magical city of Toledo, which I discovered in 1921 when I went there for a few days with the philologist Solalinda. My first memories are of a performance of Don Juan Tenorio and an evening at a brothel, where, since I had no desire to avail myself of her services, I hypnotized the girl and sent her to knock at Solalinda’s door.

  Toledo filled me with wonder, more because of its indefinable atmosphere than for its touristic attractions. I went back many times with friends from the Residencia until finally, in 1923, on Saint Joseph’s Day, I founded the Order of Toledo. I was the grand master, Bello the secretary. Among its founding fathers were Lorca and his brother Paquito, Sánchez Ventura, Pedro Garfias, Augusto Casteno, the Basque painter José Uzelay, and one revered female, the librarian Ernestina Gonzalez, a student of Unamuno.

  The first rank was composed of knights, or caballeros. Now, as I read through my old lists, I see the names of Hernando and Loulou Viñes; Alberti; Ugarte; my wife, Jeanne; Ricardo Urgoïti; Solalinda; Salvador Dali (followed by “demoted”); Hinojosa (“executed”); María-Teresa León (Alberti’s wife); René Crevel; and Pierre Unik. Also on the list, but occupying the more modest second rank of escudero, or squire, are Georges Sadoul; Roger Desormière and his wife, Colette; the cameraman Eli Lotar; Aliette Legendre, the daughter of the director of the French Institute in Madrid; the painter Ortiz; and Ana-María Custodio. The most prominent “guest of the squires” was Moreno Villa, who reigned over four other “guests” and later wrote an impressive article about our Order. At the bottom came the “guests of the guests of the squires”—Juan Vicens and Marcelino Pascua.

  To advance to the rank of caballero, one had to adore Toledo without reservation, drink for at least an entire night, and wander aimlessly through the streets of the city. Those who preferred to go to bed early became escuderos at best; the qualifications for the guests and the guests of guests aren’t really worth mentioning.

  The decision to establish the Order came to me, as it does to all founders, after a strange vision. I saw two groups of friends run into each other by accident and decide to make the rounds of the taverns in Toledo together. I’m in one of the groups, outrageously drunk. At one point I walk into the cloister of a Gothic cathedral, and suddenly the air is full of thousands of singing birds. A voice orders me to return to the Carmelites—not to become a monk, but to steal the treasury. I go to the convent, the concierge lets me in, a monk appears. I tell him of my sudden and passionate desire to become a member, but he ushers me out the door, never noticing that I absolutely reek of wine. The following day, I announced the establishment of the Order.

  There were really only two rules: each member had to contribute ten pesetas to the communal pot (meaning, to me), and he had to go to Toledo as often as possible and place himself in a state of receptivity for whatever unforgettable experiences might happen along. We used to stay at an unusual inn called the Posada de la Sangre—the Inn of Blood—which hadn’t changed very much since Cervantes situated La ilustre fregona in its courtyard. Donkeys still stood in the yard, along with carriage drivers, dirty sheets, and packs of students. Of course, there was no running water, but that was a matter of relatively minor importance, since the members of the Order were forbidden to wash during their sojourn in the Holy City.

  We ate either in taverns or at the Venta de Aires, which was located a short distance outside the city and where we always had omelettes, pork with fried eggs, or partridge and drank white wine from Yepes. Afterwards, on our way back to the inn, we made the requisite pilgrimage to Berruguete’s tomb of Cardinal Tavera, where we meditated for a few minutes by the cardinal’s alabaster body with its pale and hollow cheeks. (This is the model for the death mask shown with Catherine Deneuve in Tristana.) Once the ritual was over, we returned to the city and wandered the labyrinthine streets, on the lookout for adventure.

  Our adventures tended toward the bizarre, like the day we met a blind man who took us to his home and introduced us to his family, all of whom were also blind. There was no light in the house, no lamps or candles, but on the walls hung a group of pictures of cemeteries. The pictures were made entirely of hair, right down to the tombs and the cypresses.

  On another occasion, late one snowy night, as Ugarte and I were walking through the narrow streets, we heard children’s voices chanting the multiplication tables. Sometimes the voices would stop suddenly and we’d hear laughter, then the graver voice of the school-master, then the chanting again. I managed to pull myself up to the window by standing on Ugarte’s shoulders, but as I did so, the singing ceased abruptly. The room, like the night, was totally dark and silent.

  Not all our adventures were quite so hallucinatory, however. There was a military officers’ school in Toledo, and whenever a brawl broke out between a cadet and someone in the city, all the cadet’s friends would join forces and wreak brutal vengeance on the upstart who’d dared to challenge one of them. The cadets had formidable reputations, needless to say. One day, as we were passing tw
o of them in the street, one grabbed María-Teresa and shouted, “Qué cachonda estas!”—a dubious carnal compliment. She protested loudly; I came to her rescue and knocked both cadets down with a few well-aimed punches. Pierre Unik ran over to help, kicking one who was lying on the ground. (We scarcely had reason to vaunt our bravery, since there were about seven of us and only two of them.) As we walked away, two civil guards, who’d been watching the scene from a safe distance, came over; but instead of reprimanding us, they merely suggested we leave Toledo as fast as possible.

  After the Posada de la Sangre was leveled when Franco took Toledo, I stopped visiting the city, and didn’t resume my pilgrimages until my return to Spain in 1961. In one of his articles, Moreno Villa wrote that at the start of the Civil War, an anarchist brigade discovered a document bestowing a membership in the Order of Toledo during one of its house searches in Madrid. The unfortunate owner of this piece of paper barely escaped with his life; he had a hard time explaining that he wasn’t a titled aristocrat.

  One day in 1963 I was interviewed on a hillside overlooking the Tagus River and Toledo by André Labarthe and Jeanine Bazin for a French television program. Eventually, we got to the old chestnut, “How would you compare French and Spanish culture?”

  “It’s very simple,” I replied. “We Spanish know everything about French culture. The French, on the other hand, know nothing about ours. Look at Monsieur Carrière here.” I paused, nodding toward Jean-Claude. “He was a history teacher, but until his arrival yesterday, he was convinced that Toledo was the name of a motorcycle!”

  One day in Madrid, Lorca invited me to lunch with the composer Manuel de Falla, who’d just arrived from Granada. He and Federico began to talk about their mutual friends, in particular an Andalusian painter named Morcillo. It seems that Falla had recently gone to see Morcillo in his studio, where he examined all the paintings Morcillo consented to show him. He praised each painting to the skies, but then, noticing several canvases propped up against the wall, asked if he might see those as well. Morcillo refused, claiming that he didn’t like them. When Falla insisted, Morcillo finally relented and reluctantly turned one of the paintings around.

  “You see,” he said to Falla, “it’s a disaster!”

  Falla protested. He found the painting very interesting.

  “No, no,” Morcillo continued. “The general idea is all right, and some of the detail isn’t bad, but the background is completely wrong.”

  “The background?” Falla echoed, peering at it.

  “Yes, the background … the sky, the clouds. The clouds are terrible, don’t you think?”

  “Well, perhaps,” Falla hesitated. “You may be right. The clouds are perhaps not as successful as the rest.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then,” Morcillo said, “frankly, it’s really the clouds I like more than anything else! In fact, I think those clouds might be the best work I’ve done in years!”

  I’ve spent a lifetime collecting examples of that kind of manipulative humor, which I call morcillismo. In a way, I suppose, we’re all somewhat morcillist. There’s a superb example of it in Lesage’s Gil Blas, in the marvelous Bishop of Granada. Morcillismo comes from an overwhelming desire for unlimited flattery—the morcillist masochistically provokes criticism (generally justified), only to better confound the imprudent soul who falls into the trap.

  During these years, movie theatres were sprouting all over Madrid and attracting an increasingly faithful public. We used to go to the movies with our fiancées, albeit our motivation had more to do with the darkness than with whatever film happened to be showing. When we went en masse from the Residencia, however, our preferences ran to American comedy. We loved Ben Turpin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and everyone in the Mack Sennett gang. Curiously, Chaplin was our least favorite.

  Basically, however, movies were still only a form of entertainment. None of us dreamed that film might be a new mode of expression, much less an art form that could compete with poetry, fiction, or painting. Not once during this entire period did I imagine becoming a filmmaker. Like so many others, I preferred to write poetry. My first effort, called “Orquestación,” was published in Ultra (or was it Horizonte?); Gómez de la Serna liked it very much, which was hardly surprising, given the extent of his influence on it.

  THE MOST important Ultraist journal was La Gaceta Literaria, edited by Giménez Caballero. It published the entire “Generation of 1927” as well as some older authors, several hitherto unknown Catalan poets, and some writers from Portugal, a country we felt to be as distant from us as India.

  I owe Giménez Caballero a great deal, but, unfortunately, politics can sometimes wreak havoc with friendships. Caballero constantly sprinkled his speech with references to the Great Spanish Empire, and as time went on, he began to sound more and more fascistic. Ten years later, on the eve of the Civil War, when each of us was choosing sides, I saw Caballero at the railroad station in Madrid. Neither of us could bear to acknowledge the other’s presence; yet I was still publishing poems in La Gaceta and later sent movie reviews from Paris.

  My sporting life continued, too. Thanks to an amateur boxing champion called Lorenzana, I met the magnificent black boxer Jack Johnson, who’d been a world champion for many years. Rumor had it that he’d taken a dive during his last fight; when I knew him, he was already retired and living with his wife, Lucilla, at the Palace Hotel in Madrid, where their life-style seemed less than irreproachable. Johnson, Lorenzana, and I sometimes went jogging together early in the morning, from the hotel to the race track, a distance of about three or four kilometers. The time I beat him at arm wrestling is still a prize memory.

  One day in 1923, a telegram arrived from Saragossa, announcing my father’s imminent death. He was very weak from pneumonia when I arrived; I told him I’d come back to do some entomological research, to which he replied that I should take good care of my mother. He died four hours later.

  When the whole family gathered that evening, there wasn’t a centimeter of breathing space. The gardener and the coachman from Calanda were sleeping on mattresses in the living room. One of the maids helped me dress my father; I remember we had to slit his boots up the side to get them on. Finally, everyone went to bed and I remained alone with the body. As I sat by my father’s bedside, I drank cognac steadily; sometimes I thought I saw him breathing; sometimes I went out on the balcony to smoke a cigarette while I waited for the carriage that was bringing my last cousin from the station. It was May, and the air was filled with the perfume of flowering acacias. Suddenly I heard a loud noise in the dining room, as if a chair had been thrown against the wall. I spun around and there was my father, standing up, an angry look on his face, his arms outstretched. This hallucination—the only real one I’ve ever experienced—lasted no more than ten seconds, but that was long enough for me to decide that I needed some sleep. It seemed wiser not to sleep alone, so I spent the night in a room with the servants.

  The funeral took place the following day; and the day after that I slept in my father’s bed. Just in case the ghost decided to reappear, I slipped a revolver—a handsome piece with my father’s initials in gold and mother-of-pearl—under the pillow. (Needless to say, my sleep was thoroughly uneventful.)

  My father’s death was a decisive moment for me. My friend Mantecon still remembers that for many days afterward, I wore my father’s boots, sat at his desk, and smoked his Havanas. My mother was barely forty when I took over as head of the household. Had it not been for his death, I probably would have stayed longer in Madrid, but I’d already passed my philosophy exams and decided not to continue for my doctorate. All I really wanted was to leave Spain, but it wasn’t until 1925 that the right moment finally came along.

  *Horizons flow from his eyes / He brings the sound of sands between fingers / And a bouquet of broken dreams / On his trembling shoulders / Mountain and sea, his two hounds, / Leap when he passes, / The marveling mountain, the
unyielding sea.…

  †Night hanged / on the gibbet of a tree / pleasures on bended knee / kiss and anoint his sandals.…

  ‡God’s first fair / Is San Antonio de la Florida / Luis: in the charm of the early morning / Sing my blossoming friendship / the great moon gleams and spins / in the high silent clouds / my heart gleams and spins / in the green and yellow night / Luis my passionate friendship / weaves a braid with the wind / The child plays a little organ / sadly, unsmilingly / under paper arches / I clasp your hand.

  §Blue sky / Yellow field / / Blue mountain / Yellow field / / On the empty plain / Waves an olive tree / / Just one / / Olive tree.

  8

  Paris (1925–1929)

  IN 1925, I learned that an organization called the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation was being formed in Paris under the aegis of the League of Nations. When Eugenio d’Ors was appointed to represent Spain, I told the director of the Residencia that I wanted to go with Eugenio as a sort of secretary. I got the job, but since the organization hadn’t really come into being yet, I was told to go to Paris, read Le Temps and The Times every day to perfect my French and learn some English, and just wait. My mother paid for my ticket and promised to send me a monthly check.

  When I arrived in Paris, I had no idea where to stay, so I headed for the Hôtel Ronceray in the passage Jouffroy, where my parents had spent their honeymoon in 1899 and where, incidentally, I’d been conceived. Three days later, I found out that Unamuno was in Paris; it seemed that some French intellectuals had outfitted a boat and gone to rescue him from his exile in the Canary Islands. He participated in a daily peña at La Rotonde in Montparnasse, where I met my first métèques, those “half-breed foreigners” the French right wing was always vilifying for cluttering up the sidewalks of Paris cafés. I went to La Rotonde almost every day, the way I used to go to cafés in Madrid, and sometimes I’d walk Unamuno back to his apartment near the Etoile, a distance that gave us a good two hours’ worth of conversation.