Carlos Rojas - The Ingenious Gentleman and Poet Federico García Lorca Ascends to Hell

PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

It is Sunday and August whitewashes the sky of the theater on the stage in hell. The swallows fly very high over Calle de Angulo, chasing one another. Church bells are announcing Mass when my father telephones from Huerta de San Vicente. He speaks in a very low voice, which is difficult for me to recognize and understand.

“Son, they’ve killed Manolo. A priest who had already talked to his mother came to tell us. Conchita doesn’t know yet.”

“ … ”

“Your mother went to tell her. I didn’t have the courage, I admit it. Those poor children! My poor grandchildren!”

“ … ”

“Son, promise me you’ll be careful! Swear it, yes, you have to swear to me!”

“ … ”

“Son, we’ve had arguments and differences in this life. But none of that means anything. I swear to you too that even now it was worth the grief of having been born to bring you into the world. You are my greatest treasure, and there’s no father on earth prouder and more boastful than I am.”

“ … ”

“Son, I’d give everything for your sake, including your mother and your brother and sisters! May God forgive me! Be very careful! You can’t fail me, never, never, never!”

“ … ”

Abruptly he hangs up the phone without saying goodbye. “ … We’ve had arguments and differences in this life. But none of that means anything.” He speaks to me as if the two of us had died and together on this spiral were taking into account the smallness of the world. Sprawling on a chair, my head down on my chest and my arms wide, I would like to think about Manolo and my sister’s grief. And yet I can recall only my last nightmare in Madrid. Or rather, I don’t recall it, but it comes back to me intact, like one of those unexpected dreams, enveloped in an amphibian, resplendent light, which submerge us in their brightness when we fall asleep suddenly after a very long period of fatigue. Again I see the alabaster shell and the other shell resembling a split log that at the same time was the eye of a Cyclops. The white Bally shoe, in a sea of crimson clouds, at the foot of the cut-down torso of the Grace with the apple in her hand. The goddess embracing the red scallop shell and Paris sleeping, perhaps dreaming everything just as Manolo may be dreaming us now. “A priest who had already talked to his mother came to tell us. Conchita doesn’t know yet.” “We hope all Spaniards echo our feelings and stop spilling so much innocent blood for the good of Spain! Long live Your Excellency for many years!”

PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

The cacophony of many cars abruptly braking in the gutter and on the sidewalks brings me to the window, constantly covered by curtains embroidered, I had been told, by Aunt Luisa. A swarm of Assault Guards, all armed with rifles, occupies the street corners and doorways. Others appear immediately, leaning over the railings on the flat roofs beneath the indifferent flight of the swallows. Out of a convertible Oakland come Ruiz Alonso, dressed in a blue coverall, and five other civilians, among whom I recognize Juan Luis Tres-castro, a member, like Ruiz Alonso, of Popular Action. Quickly and without looking at one another they invade the home of the Rosales family, escorted by several police officers. Now I know with no room for doubt or hope that it is all over, or that I’m very close to the irreparable end. Again the old fears and terrifying panic that brought me to this house seem as distant and alien as if another man had suffered them. Not me, precisely, in a far off time, but someone who in an equally remote tomorrow describes me, aware of and surprised by my serenity during these moments. Mine is an indescribable calm, but not very different from the patient fortitude, bordering on indifference, that paralyzed me when the curtain went up at any of my openings, after all the torments of the spirit and anguish of the flesh. Whatever it may be, the will of God shall be done, if it hasn’t already been done under these same circumstances.

PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

Aunt Luisa has appeared next to me, as white as a dead woman or one resuscitated. She makes an effort to smile at me sadly, with those bright, large teeth of hers that resemble a sheep’s. She takes me by the hand, just as if I were the son she never had, born a man and almost lost at the same moment.

“Child, now let’s pray.”

She has me kneel beside her before a Sacred Heart she keeps beneath a lantern and on the chest of drawers where she stores the sheets, scented with quinces from the plain. With my eyes closed I hear fragments of her Ave Marias, but I cannot give myself over to any of the prayers of my childhood without committing the worst blasphemy for a believer and a writer: taking the name of God or man in vain. I would like to see my parents in the camera obscura where my reason for being is centered. But also a part of myself, the part that silent, nameless, always opposes my most fervent desire and has erased their faces from my memory. Instead I see Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, as I described him in my elegy, having bled to death and transformed into an apparition that climbs the stands in the deserted bullring under the full moon. I’m alone in the arena and know I’m alive, for I’m afraid again even though I may not know the cause of my terror. I call him by name and he turns around, smiling. “You refused to visit me in the hospital and we’ll never meet again on earth or in hell,” he shouts at me. Again I scream his name because I don’t know how to answer him. He laughs openly and responds: “At least I had the death I chose. The one I didn’t want for my son. (‘Son, I’d give everything for you, including your mother and your brother and sisters! May God forgive me! Be very careful! You can never fail me, never, never, never!’) You’ll die the death others impose on you because in this country of iniquity and misfortune, those who do not choose their death are doomed to be killed by imbeciles. Stupidity is our innocence.”

PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

Ignacio falls silent in my imaginings and Doña Luisa’s prayers fade away. Standing now, she calls to me from the window. Ruiz Alonso and Trescastro leave the house, gesticulating and apparently annoyed. They get into the Oakland and the driver speeds away even though the street, houses, and flat roofs are still occupied by the Assault Guard. On the first floor it has grown silent and only now do I realize how much my senses had already found out. On the ground floor, the raised voices of an angry dispute between Doña Esperanza and Ruiz Alonso have stopped, at least for the moment. From that moment on, time begins a pause, as unforeseeable as delays in an entr’acte of a drama where death is real. In any case, the dice have been thrown and at the edge of the table one must wait for their inevitable fall.

PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.

The car returns and this time it carries Miguel Rosales along with Ruiz Alonso, Trescastro, and the driver. Miguel has his arms crossed over his chest and is frowning, like a communicant who unexpectedly had begun to doubt his faith. Beside him, sitting sideways, Ruiz Alonso speaks to him with great insistence and a good deal of hand waving. Miguel doesn’t look at him or answer him. Instead he contemplates the two ways out of Calle de Angulo, the one that leads to the Plaza de los Lobos and the one to Calle de las Tablas, both occupied by Assault Guards. At the instant the Oakland stops in front of the house, Ruiz Alonso rests his palm on Miguel’s shoulder, in a gesture in which a supposed affection is mixed with persistence in support of a repeated statement. Miguel moves his hand away, gets out of the car first, and crosses the threshold without letting them precede him. Trescastro and Ruiz Alonso hesitate and bump into each other when they attempt to follow him at the same time. Finally, almost simultaneously, they enter the half-closed door that a police officer opens for them. Another, on duty at one of the corners of Calle de las Tablas, obliges a girl to go back who came out of a doorway, unaware of everything or compelled to because of an emergency. When she turns around, he extends a long neck with a very prominent Adam’s apple and pays her a compliment. Suddenly, with the same unexpected abruptness that ended the raised voices on the ground floor, the circling of the swallows stops. One might even say they all disappeared into the sky or vanished in thin air. As if the light were Lewis Carroll’s looking glass, the one that can be gone through at will, with the world on one side and hell on the other. However, sounds of discord rise again from the first floor, more contained or more fatigued than the earlier ones. They cease and are followed by footsteps on the stairs, at first very hurried and then hesitant and slow. The door to the landing opens and Miguel appears. Up close, one would call him a soul in torment who comes through the walls. In the past few hours he has aged twenty years and little is left of the boy resembling a character in a satirical sonnet of Machado’s: a versifier, lustful, a drinker, yet an anticlerical Falangista, and above all a devotee of the Virgin of the Alhambra. Little red veins set his eyes aflame with blood, though his lips, very white and numb, meet in an expression of anxiety and bitterness. He avoids looking at Doña Luisa, faces me, and even seems to stand at attention as if saluting a dead man being carried down the street. Then he murmurs: