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

“Was this absolutely necessary?”

“Necessary or not, that’s how it happened,” the apparition replied.

“And afterward?”

“Afterward? Did you believe perhaps that life is a serialized novel? There is no afterward or before. Only an eternally perishable present whose fiction yellows in photographs.”

“Or in the theaters of hell.”

“Or on the stage of this nightmare of mine, which you insist on calling your hell. So be it, if it makes you happy, but don’t miss this scene, which will be the last.”

The scene changed again and in a sense revolved around itself. Now he saw the garden that the bedroom window, protected by Venetian blinds, overlooked. Completely transformed into that ghost, with the same head and identical tanned age, he was pruning laurels at the foot of some pines. A flock of blackbirds, like those at the rear of The Garden of Earthly Delights , flew beneath a slate-colored sky. (“In the midst of these people I’d live enclosed in an invisible bubble, like an alien. Like those lovers in Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights , imprisoned in a soap bubble or a bladder mislaid at a witches’ Sabbath.”) That woman, the one with green eyes like Melibea or Albertine, came to the window and called him by name. From the orchestra, it took him a few moments to recognize her, and he could identify her only by her voice when she began to speak to him in English. She too seemed older or prematurely aged, with short white hair around a face where only her eyes, perhaps of a Jewish girl of the Renaissance or a youth who had been a girl, like the Mercuries of Giovanni da Bologna in the precise words of the poet Rubén Darío, on the eve of the Great War, and at the time that two bullfighters rode in a calash past The Fallen Angel to the astonished admiration of some Granadian provincials, and as a gay, confident world lazed indifferently at the wrath of God ready to destroy it, only her eyes were the same. “The cultural attaché of the Swedish embassy called and is on the phone. He is desperate to speak to you and says they’ve given you the Nobel Prize in Literature for … let’s see if I remember exactly, ah, yes! una contribución sin precedentes, unprecedented contribution to the poetry of Spain and to Western Civilization, a la poesía de España y a la civilización occidental. No, no, excuse me! To the Cultural Heritage, la herencia cultural de la civilización de Occident. You can’t tell me it doesn’t sound harmonious and beautiful even though it seems somewhat rhetorical.” From the bottom of the firmament the blackbirds returned, tracing a figure eight in the sky. He left the pruning shears on the ground and waited, looking at them, open and motionless, like a parody of a stork, while he rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Listen, what shall I tell this man?” She pretended to be impatient. “You could tell him that so notable a distinction doesn’t belong to me because my life is a loan. I’m convinced they would have murdered me in Granada, just as they killed my brother-in-law Manolo, if I had boarded the Andalucía express on the afternoon Martínez Nadal took me to the station. (‘Rafael, I changed my mind and I’m staying in Madrid. Please, go to the compartment and bring my suitcase. Don’t ask me anything now.’) If I survived it was at a very high price, since from that time on my poetry has seemed the work of a stranger: a man very different from me who is embarrassed that all of you wrote so many theses on his dead work. Standing shades make up the literary kingdom of Mr. Nobel, that right-wing dynamite maker. But in the final analysis, I must answer to my conscience for what I write. Tell this Swedish gentleman that I renounce his prize in order not to repudiate myself.” “It would be better if you told him personally.” “I will in due course. As soon as I finish cutting the laurels,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. The two burst into laughter and the scene shattered like a stained-glass window broken by a stone. Then the stage sank into the darkness of a dreamless sleep.

“Lies, all lies!” he yelled in exasperation in the orchestra.

“Why is that?” his apparition asked, his expression between astonished and confused.

“Because everything, absolutely everything I saw is a cruel mockery of what happened!”

“Are you sure about what you’re saying? Why are you shouting like that? Really, boy, you’ll end up waking me if you haven’t already roused the innocent dead.”

“Sarcasm and a carnival trick! … ”

“I thought it was a very faithful interpretation. I don’t know why you’re protesting so much.”

“I’m not your dream, wretch!” Almost without realizing it he began to use familiar address with the latest intruder. “I took the Andalucía express that afternoon, because in a sense I was obliged to.”

“Who would oblige you to?”

“The same destiny you denied. I mean, the sensation of fulfilling a fate lived through twice, once that day and the other in a very distant time, perhaps before watches and calendars.”

“You’re completely mad! Why would I dream about a lunatic like you, so similar to who I was in my youth? This is the only mockery, and now I wish I had wakened. Go on, shout louder and wake me!”

(“I believe I’ve lost my mind. But you aren’t dreaming me in your nightmare. In fact you exist only in my hallucination.”) Thinking about his words to the other ghost, the one with the pink bald head, dark temples, and eyeglasses, he lowered his voice until it was almost transformed into a murmur that the apparition made an effort to follow, coming close to his face.

“I reached Granada and then Huerta de San Vicente just in time for them to kill me. With the uprising triumphant and the reprisals started, I hid in the Rosales family’s house. But they came for me even there. (‘ … he told me you did more harm with your pen than others with a pistol.’) An individual named Ruiz Alonso seemed in command of the men who arrested me. He took me to the Civilian Government building, offered me some broth, shook my hand, and left me alone in a room with scratched walls that smelled of dried blood. I could describe for you in detail each instant of what happened but I prefer to cut it short because any victim is ashamed of his suffering. Those who are proud of their martyrdom are the ones who think they deserve it. I wasn’t tortured physically, thanks, I believe, to the good offices of the Rosales family. At least, that’s what Pepe Rosales told me when he visited a short while before my death to promise I would be released. I remember that, overcoming the contempt I must have inspired in a hot-blooded drinker like him, more for my chastity than my pederasty, he pinched my cheek when he said goodbye and said: ‘Sleep well tonight, my boy, and tomorrow we’ll all hug you at home and I’ll kiss you on this cheek if you promise not to pinch my ass.’ I smiled and lied, saying I would pray for the victory of the military. He looked around, even though we were alone in that drab room, and said in my ear: ‘Don’t pray for anybody, my boy, because we all deserve hell. This war has divided Spain in two, like a river, and on both sides the only ones doing their duty are the killers.’ The acting civilian governor interrogated me in person and in terms that don’t concern you. Aside from Pepe Rosa-les, Don Manuel de Falla visited me the night before the crime. He came to beg my forgiveness for having hated me. But I won’t say more about this either because what we spoke about is none of your business. I forgave him everything and didn’t want to forget anything, since rancor is a completely useless passion in eternity. My hating those who killed me would be as absurd as my parents’ despising having given birth to me. I’ll keep the end to myself, because it’s inalienable and mine though you might want to mis-represent it. It’s impossible to imagine but simple to describe. Some shots in the back at the edge of a ravine and another, the coup de grâce, to shatter the heads of the dead.”