Perhaps a way of preparing myself before I am judged is to evoke Hamlet and Proust in order to infer their oblique presentiments of hell and their sojourns there. The theater Proust imagined, to the admiring praise of Dalí, where each spectator would observe the staged work isolated and separated from the rest of the audience, is nothing but his own conception of À la recherche du temps perdu: a dead time of people and places destroyed and devastated by war, which the novelist patiently resuscitates in a bedroom lined with cork in order to better remove himself from the other world around him. At the same time, and perhaps this is the most original of his portents, it is an oblique analogy to hell, where every deceased person awaiting trial or condemned at trial contemplates the return to the life of his past, blind to the others and exiled among them. In another, no less notable, coincidence, the Recherche begins under the sign of sleeplessness and sleeplessness is hell, where the dreams in death feared by Hamlet become staged memories. Or where at times the staging of memories also precedes the arrival of those predestined to watch them in their corresponding theaters.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
On earth they never tried me. They killed me without imposing a sentence. Until the day Ruiz Alonso and his underlings came to arrest me in the house on Calle de Angulo, 1, which perhaps no longer exists in Granada though it rises again on my stage, I thought I was as safe from death as if I hadn’t been born. I didn’t know then either how to prepare for my trial, which, ironically, would never come. The house, which belonged to the Rosales family, is all white on the stage beneath that August’s sun. It has two stories and a terrace, with a well-lit door on the narrow, shady street. It has a courtyard, a fountain, a marble staircase, a grilled window facing the sidewalk, and another side door. This opens onto narrow steps that lead to the second floor, almost isolated from the rest of the property. The window illuminates the library of my friend the poet Luis Rosales, who is almost never here now except at night. Luis has hidden me on the upper floor with the complicity of his family, even though all his brothers are Falangistas and the Civilian Government has decreed the death penalty for anyone who shelters a fugitive. The Rosales family hid others as well or arranged for their escape from Granada. On several occasions I was wakened from an uneasy sleep by strange voices and footsteps on the ground floor. I never asked anyone anything. Surviving in this city of terror these days is as private and shameful as an act of love between two men.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
If the systematic memory of my dying were part of my defense before the hidden judges, they would condemn me again with no trial at all. Recollections of the Civil War, when the fields of Spain filled with the dead as I predicted to Martínez Nadal, are not in order. They are jumbled together in streaks of images, glittering, almost flashing behind the stage. Luis Rosales, back from the firing lines, comes one night to my hiding place. The front must be very odd, because the unmarried Rosales brothers often return from there at nightfall to sleep in their parents’ house. Luis has come from the Motril sector, where, as he assures me, he can get me to the Republican lines without any danger, as he has done already with many others. And to be fair, he says he also helped several fugitives from the government to escape to this side. “In those fields you get lost without hearing a shot or finding a soul,” he reiterates in a low voice so as not to wake his aunt Luisa, who shares the upper floor with me and takes care of my cavalry almost like a mother. “Taking you to the other side would be the easiest thing in the world.” I shake my head and say I don’t want to be hunted down like a rabbit coming out of a wood or beside an irrigation ditch. On several occasions we’ve had the same useless debate, and now Luis withdraws and unexpectedly concedes, perhaps so as not to make me think that he and his family are moved by the desire to be free of my presence. “Whatever you want,” he agrees, shrugging. “In the final analysis, they can’t arrest you here either.”
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
“In the final analysis, they can’t arrest you here either.” After the panic of the first few days, I almost began to believe it. But in some buried part of my soul throbs the clouded presentiment that I am not master of my fate. There, in that chamber excavated, perhaps, in the center of my being, I knew I had lived my final day in Madrid before, step by step and instant by instant, it was enough to abandon myself to that obscure memory, lost in an existence earlier than the irrevocable time of clocks, to almost predict forgetting the coffee cup on the balcony or the presence of Ruiz Alonso on the express. I also know now that if I had yielded to Luis’s advice, I would have passed over to the government’s side through Motril. In a war where officers of the Falange, like the Rosales brothers, sleep at home at night, the front is undoubtedly deserted in many places. And yet I even exaggerate my fear of escaping when Luis suggests it to me, resorting to the memory of my extreme panic when I came to hide in this house. In reality, and given the reign of terror that the rebels imposed on Granada, the risks of those of us who hide in the city are greater than the dangers of a flight across the countryside. I fell into similar contradictions even before I hid on Calle de Angulo, when Luis himself urged me to seek refuge in the house of Don Manuel de Falla. In his opinion, I would be safer there than with his parents because no one would dare burst into the home of a universally celebrated composer so well known for his piety. I guessed immediately he was right, and sensed that Don Manuel, who had been so fond of me in my early, more ambitious youth, would have helped me gladly even if only not to miss the chance to perform a charitable act. Even so, I rejected his urging and cited the fact that Falla had silently become angry when I decided to dedicate the “Ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar” to him. A Catholic as traditional and sensitive as he would never forgive me for having compared the Lord of his devotions and mine, though I was a nonpracticing believer, to the heart of a frog pierced by a needle. The truth is I chose the Rosales family’s house as a refuge and want to remain here until they come to arrest me, because in this way I fulfill my inevitable destiny. One might say that the book of my life and death, including my sleeplessness and banishment on the spiral of hell, precedes me and determines my fate and my actions.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
In the house on Calle de Angulo, 1, life glides by as if on tiptoe in the midst of the crimes of war. Partially hidden behind the latticed window of my bedroom, I see the Rosales father leave punctually every morning and afternoon for his stores called La Esperanza. Downstairs, on the floor with the courtyard with the fountain and white columns, he leaves behind the mother, their daughter Esperancita, an ancient cook who looks as old as the world, and a twisted little maid who stutters. Upstairs, on the second floor, which is almost a separate dwelling, Aunt Luisa says goodbye to me to go to early Mass. “God be with you, child, and don’t do anything foolish. I’ll pray for you.” “Pray for everyone, Doña Luisa, the living and the dead, the victims and especially their killers, who will find it so difficult to enter heaven.” At midmorning, Esperancita brings me a coffee with two cubes of sugar and a copy of El Ideal. Every day, as reprisals for the bombings, it announces executions by summary judgment and doesn’t conceal the shootings with no trial at all. In moments of distress, and always insisting on getting me over to the other side, Luis has confessed to me that they also kill hundreds by the cemetery walls and ravines in Víznar. My brother-in-law Manolo is one of the prisoners, if he’s still alive after having been the socialist mayor of Granada for ten whole days. My poor sister, with her young children, must be suffering unimaginable torment, though it’s shared by thousands of women in Granada. In spite of this vast tragedy, which perhaps lies in wait for me, coming closer each night, it imperceptibly moves away from my spirit, as if it were someone else’s dream. Esperancita has a Falangista fiancé in Madrid, and at this point she doesn’t know whether he’s alive or dead. She tells me about her love, her anguish, even her nightmares of a girl in love, as if I were her older sister or we both loved the same man. I do what I can to calm her: “Don’t worry, dear, everything will work out. Before you know it this absurd war will end and you’ll go arm and arm with your fiancé to the opening of my next play.” She smiles through her tears and asks what I’m writing now. “The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by the wrath of God Almighty and the invention of incest by Lot and his daughters.” “Jesus, how awful! It must be more barbaric than Yerma. When will we see a play of yours with people who love each other, marry, and have children as beautiful as angels?” she asks, still smiling, while she dries her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. “Never, Esperancita, because people have forgotten how to love, marry, and conceive children like angels. They give birth only to monsters and buffoons in their image and likeness.” “You may be right,” she agrees, very serious now. Then she picks up the coffee service, says goodbye, kissing me on the cheek, and leaves quickly. We see each other again in the afternoon, when they bomb Granada. Doña Esperanza Rosales calls up to her sister and me to take refuge on the ground floor. We all squeeze together into a tiny room filled with carved credenzas and embroidered scenes. The women pray or sob to the boom of explosions and the interminable howl of sirens. I’m frightened by my serenity when I recall my earlier cowardice. Two days later El Ideal says another fifteen prisoners chosen at random have been executed in very just revenge for the attack. Another page in the same issue carries the note of protest from several prisoners over the most recent bombardment, which even damaged the Alhambra. It is addressed to His Excellency the Military Commander of the Garrison (“We sincerely hope that all Spaniards will echo our sentiments and cease spilling so much innocent blood, for the good of Spain. Long live Your Excellency!”), and one of the signers is my brother-in-law Manolo. In this way I learn he is still alive.