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

“I believe that during the Great War Ludendorff took the fort at Liege in a very similar way. And you see, they gave him the German equivalent of our Laureate Cross of San Fernando and made him a marshal. Well, just as we were saying, this will never be a civilized country and we’re a thousand years behind the rational, cultivated world. Do you know my reward for taking the Barracks del Carmen? No, of course you don’t know, since nobody knows! A miserable simple red cross. Yes, sir, though you may not believe it! A simple red cross, as if I had rescued the general’s Persian cat or taught the multiplication tables to his favorite grandson. A simple red cross, with the hypocritical excuse that there was no other reward at that time!”

He’s insane. A raving madman, though his derangement had remained hidden until now. Lost in the depths of a rancor that obedience and discipline made him forget about without realizing it. This war was needed so he could obtain power and prestige, and though he looked for them as a hero, he would attain them as an executioner. Absolute master of a city and consumed by sleeplessness, he shoots rashly and takes revenge on the vanquished for the contempt of a world that did not make him a Ludendorff when he had taken the Barracks del Carmen. Spurred on by his insanity, the creature of flesh returns to me. He returns but is shaken now not by horror but by fury. His enraged, effeminate voice raises mine until it’s almost a shout.

“Are you trying to tell me that I was arrested because sixteen years ago you obtained only a simple red cross instead of the Laureate Cross of San Fernando? Or will they kill me because on another day, in Madrid, you envied Sánchez Mejías and me without my even realizing it? How am I to blame for being born or for our being conceived so differently?”

“My dear sir,” he responds, suddenly very calm, though with a certain irritation in his voice. “I’m not responsible either for your finding yourself here with me now. Ruiz Alonso arrested you when I was at the front, with or without the consent of Lieutenant Colonel Velasco, since that’s something I still haven’t been able to determine. I can only assure you I did not order your arrest and learned about your return to Granada only in a newspaper from before the war … ”

“All of this is a mistake, a monstrous mistake,” the creature of flesh wails again. “Why don’t they release me?”

“In due course. You accused me of having taken you prisoner and I have the duty and the right to defend myself. Look, I was so unaware of your arrest that when Pepe Rosales came to reproach me for it, without my knowing anything about anything, I said to him: ‘Pepe, old friend, if this Ruiz Alonso arrested your friend and searched your parents’ home, take him to an empty field and shoot him a few times.”’

“Then why don’t you order my release?”

“In due course. In due course. Granada is filled with violent men who make war on their own and prefer killing behind the lines to fighting at the front. If I released you in daylight, they’d arrest you again and shoot you against the cemetery wall, and I wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

“You’re the civilian governor. Where’s your authority?”

“I have very little. I hope God isn’t blind and can see that.”

“You hope only that God isn’t blind?”

He sighs and closes his eyes, but opens them again immediately, as if he were afraid of falling asleep unexpectedly. Suddenly he looks into mine and murmurs:

“When I told you I would trade my fate for yours, it wasn’t a lie. I have cancer and I’m dying. For the first time since the war began, I was able to see the doctor yesterday for a few moments. He spoke to me openly and I thanked him for his frankness. ‘Commander,’ he said, looking at me as I’m looking at your now, ‘you don’t need a surgeon, you need a confessor. The end will come in a few weeks or a couple of months. From now on, I can prescribe for you only the morphine I don’t have.’”

I’ll never know whether his claim that Ruiz Alonso arrested me behind his back and without his knowledge is true. Yet I know with certainty that he isn’t lying when he speaks to me of his imminent death. Fatigue, which I supposed was devouring him whole, consumes him only in part. His earthen color, his features drawn with a knife and a bevel, his slow and at times petrified gestures give him the air of a dead Castilian who has turned the color of earth beneath the frost.

“I’m not your confessor!” my other self manages to reply. “I don’t know whether or not you’re resigned to your death. I’ll always rebel against mine, because it’s an inconceivable mistake.”

“I don’t want to confess either!” he shouts. “I mean, I don’t want to confess yet. I’ll do that in due course.”

“What do you want from me then?”

“To talk. Just to talk.”

“Why with me? Since I entered the Civilian Government building, I’m not anybody anymore.”

“Because one day I envied and respected you, even more than Sánchez Mejías himself, and because I sense you won’t stop listening to me.”

“You could talk to your soldiers and your family.”

“I have no family. I’m alone in the world.” He states this without pitying his solitude or taking pride in his independence. In the same straightforward way, bordering on indifference, that he might use to confess his ignorance of a foreign language. In the identical tone he continues: “My officers and my soldiers, I don’t talk to them. I give them orders, and they obey, just as I obey when Queipo or Franco give me their orders from Sevilla.”

“As you could give instructions for my death at this moment.”

“I suppose so. It would cost me nothing to do that.” He shrugs, and a rapid shadow of tedium crosses his fatigue. “Yet I didn’t bring you here for that,” he explains without a hint of irony. “And I don’t want to talk about you, or Franco, or Queipo, and in a sense not even about myself. No, sir, all of us and this war really aren’t anything but clouds, ants, nothing.”

“You wanted to talk to me about God, Commander Valdés.”

He looks at me with eyes that astonishment widens around his bloodshot whites and inflamed irises. For the first time I dared to say his name (“Commander Valdés”), as if I or the man of flesh — I’m not exactly sure which one — had found the strength to exorcise him. Also for the first time, I realize he doesn’t want to shoot me, that this executioner consumed by cancer and delirious from lack of sleep, absolute master of the city with the authority of Queipo and Franco, a murderer who during this time has arranged and sanctioned hundreds of deaths, as Luis Rosales, almost in tears, finally confessed to me, has decided to free me from his squads and underlings for reasons that neither he nor I will ever understand. Awareness of my salvation, perhaps dimly sensed from the moment they burst into the house on Calle de Angulo to arrest me (“This son of a bitch, and may all the devils in hell give it to him up the ass, told me you did more harm with your pen that others do with a pistol”), sends me to a kind of no-man’s land where, sometimes calmly, and sometimes with irresolute apprehension, I confront the certainty of freedom.

Inside me as well, and to my irritated astonishment, the creature of flesh turns around and reacts very differently. He grows and shouts recklessly. He is seized with a coward’s delight when he believes himself safe at any price. His horror and panic, which had moved him earlier to say that he prayed for the victory of the military, now would lead him to impetuous extremes that courage cannot even conceive of. My only fear is of his audacity, for I’m aware that so much daring is nothing but an inadvertent desire for self-destruction.