Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

The circle of Buñuel’s themes thus closes in on itself, seemingly: saints and sinners meet and fuse and confuse themselves in the authentic experience of the world. All sense of scandal, violence, and critical humor in Buñuel consists, in the end, in this negation of negation, in this most fragile and most difficult act of love.

In an embrace but separate, forever united and forever alone: Nazarín and the female camp followers; Robinson and Friday; Viridiana, the gambler, and the serving woman; Heathcliff and Cathy’s ghost; Séverine and her invalid husband; the fetishist Archibaido de la Cruz and his wax image of the woman he desires; a Jesuit and a Jansenist forever dueling in the ruins of a church designed by Piranesi; Tristana, mutilated of limb, and her sorrowful tyrant of an uncle, mutilated of spirit, who can no longer dominate her when she is condemned to crutches and a wheelchair; a little girl in The Phantom of Liberty and her parents, searching anxiously for her, calling the police, believing she has been kidnapped, and all the while she is there — we see her but the other characters in the film do not, though she insists, Hey, look, here I am.

So, once more, we are startled and dare not come to any conclusions regarding this eternally open and free filmmaker. His last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), prevents me from closing the chapter on Buñuel: even if he has died, his films go on displaying their multiple levels of meaning.

In a third film version of the novel by Pierre Louÿs La Femme et le Pantin, Buñuel goes beyond the simple dichotomy of the Sternberg and Duvivier versions, where Marlene Dietrich and Brigitte Bardot were supposed to be two different women, angel and devil, Jekyll and Hyde. Buñuel, by casting two different actresses in the role of Conchita the flamenco dancer, shows us that they are really the same woman, although the old lover, Don Mateo, played by Fernando Rey as yet another incarnation of Don Juan, would like to see them as two different beings and Conchita, by offering herself as two, sees herself simply as other: she is not two women, she is another woman.

Desire finds its obscure object: Conchita presents herself as one and then another, and Don Mateo, prisoner of the Socratic universe, cannot cut the knots of the girl’s complicated corset with his phallic sword. He cannot accept that, in order to be his, Conchita demands that Don Mateo also become another; he is incapable of transfiguration; he must have Conchita as the object of his desire and can have her only as Don Mateo, a decent, orderly, rich, middle-aged gentleman.

Conchita demands love from Don Mateo, the man of property who would buy the luxury of passion. And her demand inverts the usual roles: Conchita does not deny Don Mateo her love; it is he who denies it to the woman. The object of Don Mateo’s desire is to own Conchita; the object of Conchita’s desire is to be another in order to be herself. I am I, says the man; I am another, says Conchita, and you must also be another if you are to be me.

If Buñuel is perhaps the greatest artist of Surrealism, it is because he assimilates and transcends the two contradictory sides of a movement historically circumscribed but aesthetically unlimited as a permanent activity of the human spirit. Transform the world, change man.

Buñuel never doubted that the internal revolution, the profound liberator of the poetical energy dormant in every individual, is inseparable from an objective transformation of reality, independent of the fact that it may precede, accompany, or follow the latter. The important thing is not to interrupt this activity of the spirit even for a second, in none of its realms, because each and every one of them is the object of desire.

The true mode of this filmmaker is the open ending, the unfinished story, the devolution of responsibility to its purest and most original site: the conscience and the imagination of each filmgoer. This is most beautifully exemplified by the final scene of Nazarín, where the young priest, led away by police officers, is offered a most unwieldy gift by a compassionate peasant woman: a pineapple. Nazarín first says no, then accepts, saying, “May God repay you,” and walks away, a prisoner carrying the spiked offering of another’s compassion. Drums of sacrifice and execution are heard on the sound track. We are left with our own pineapples in our hands.

In Buñuel’s artistry, film is freedom as well because it is capable of giving up its unarmed vision unto our own possible freedom. We can then start thinking honestly, not of the artist’s responsibility, but of our own responsibility as spectators. If Buñuel were to answer in our name, perhaps he would lose his freedom and we would not have won ours.

* * *

I am now going to leave my friend Luis Buñuel as I introduced him to my friend Régis Debray in Paris in 1976. The young philosopher and revolutionary grabbed the old filmmaker by the lapels and shook him in mock anger, accusing him of keeping alive the dogmas and mysteries of the Catholic Church with his obsessions. And Buñuel laughed helpless tears, and Debray went on: “No one would speak of the Holy Trinity and the Immaculate Conception today if it were not for you, Buñuel!! It’s because of your films that religion is still an art!”

I am going to leave him as he celebrated his eightieth birthday and I asked him what he did to keep from being enshrined as a rebel, an agnostic Father of the Church, yet a man who is still attaining youth. He answered: “I know that I would give my life for any man’s right to seek out truth, but also that I would fight to the death any man who believes he has found the truth.”

I am going to leave him as he packed his bags in a seedy hotel overlooking the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, saying: “I am not going to do any more films. I don’t want to die between locations, leaving an open script on my night table and a 5 a.m. call. I want to know whose hand will close my eyes.”

I am going to leave him as I last saw him, in February of 1984. His wife, Jeanne, and his two sons, Juan Luis and Rafael, were there, and as I looked at them and spoke to them, they looked only at Buñuel. “I’ll see you in October,” I said. “No,” he replied, “we’ll never meet again.” I am sure this was another of his famous jokes. As a matter of fact, Luis Buñuel is here all the time, even here today, and certainly every time I see one of his films or when I think of his endless art. I have not met another man of such humor, tenderness, intelligence, and passion. I shall miss him very much.

A neighborhood in Mexico City called Colonia Juárez has given all its streets the names of foreign, mainly European cities. It is an old neighborhood, extensive and populous, formally caught between the boundaries of the two greatest metropolitan avenues, Insurgentes and Reforma.

But something flows out of these municipal frontiers, and it is an avenue surrounding a former racetrack, now a garden of forked paths, which since my childhood has been the most mysterious park in the city: the park of the Colonia Hipódromo, a circular park of broad alleys where you might still hear the pounding of ghostly hoofs, but also of distant feet hurrying over somber, humid pathways that seem to lead from one faraway place to another.

This is perhaps a sensation nurtured by all those signs in the Colonia Juárez reading Rome, London, Geneva, Antwerp, Milan, Warsaw, Prague. It is also an effect of the European migration to its shabbily elegant houses, crowded together in styles going from Parisian Belle Epoque to Barcelona modern to Humphrey Bogart forties to contemporary Las Vegas.

Curiously, most of the Jewish fugitives from Hitler’s Europe who came to Mexico settled in this part of town, as did many refugees from Franco’s Spain. The rundown cosmopolitanism of the neighborhood is accentuated by a Café Vienna, where you can have Sacher torte and coffee with Schlag. There are many kosher delis, German beer gardens, and an international bookstore where you can read the latest issue of Die Zeit or buy an Einaudi pocket edition of Italo Svevo or, for that matter, of Italo Calvino.