PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
At my request, Esperancita has brought up À la recherche du temps perdu, in the translation by Quiroga Plá and Pedro Salinas. If I remember correctly, which in this case would be an unavoidable irony, Proust publishes the first volume of his vast novel, Du côté de chez Swann, on the eve of the Great War. Perhaps there’s no other in the entire saga in which the visual evocation of what he has experienced, from the bell towers and shop windows of Combray to the flowering hawthorn and ruined medieval spires in the domain of the Guermantes, is so transparent. Perhaps the invocation of the past, by the grace of Proust in this part of the Recherche, has no rival in the history of any literature. I even wondered sometimes, after I was dead, whether Proust had managed to see in life and from his asthmatic’s bed the anticipated staging of his memories in his theater in hell, only to translate that afterward into precise words. Up to that point, the work is also the retable of a paradise lost and recovered by memory. Then, with the passage of time and in the transition from Combray to Paris, Marcel moves from Eden to Sodom and Gomorrah. From the idyllic little room in his parents’ country house, where the child narrator reads, dreams, and inadvertently perceives his memories, we come by way of jealousy and the perversion of all love to Jupien’s brothels for queers. The world of the novel and its context in the history of those times matured, were corrupted, and became ready for the wrath of God.
PREPARE FOR YOUR TRIAL.
The reasoning for my defense and my examination of conscience return me to my own Sodom and Gomorrah (“ … When will we see a play of yours with people who fall in love, marry, and have children as beautiful as angels?”). This persecution and enclosure were necessary in order for me to think about Proust and guess the real significance of the play I proposed to write. It all fits together now like the implacable cogs of a watch that shows the hours not of time but of destiny. I supposed I conceived this work of mine, which I already foresee will be unfinished forever, as a Voltairean reply to Don Manuel de Falla for his anger at the appearance of my “Ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.” Yet, and it’s always worth repeating, I’d swear with identical certainty that my poem was written by a believer, and that in spite of himself Falla would have taken me in and hidden me in his house. I also think it’s undeniable that my purpose in writing Sodom and Gomorrah was very different from and of course much more complex than that small vengeance. As I once said to Gerardo Diego, and I think he cited it in that poetic anthology of his that so resembled a hodgepodge, every creative act is a man or a woman going astray in a dark wood, which perhaps ought to coincide on never-drawn maps with the dark night of the soul, where poets lose their way because they don’t know themselves. In fact, and even setting aside my pederast’s remorse and pride, Sodom and Gomorrah, or I should say, the idea of Sodom and Gomorrah, was nothing but the allegory before-the-fact of this Civil War, in which the wrath of heaven is the rage that leads us to persecute and torment one another. After this catastrophe, perhaps we won’t even conceive of incest. But the world of our youth, the one where Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, Rafael Alberti, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, Luis Rosales, and I reached the age of reason and attained our manhood in the same grouping that shrank or expanded in very few years, will have disappeared forever. Nothing will remain but shattered vestiges scattered by the winds of time, like the pilasters, caryatids, and broken statues of a dead Middle Ages, which Proust found in the meadows along Guermantes way. Perhaps one of these broken ruins is my own work. In another time I might have wanted to believe this was so. Now, the possibility of my writing surviving or not leaves me indifferent. In any case, my Sodom and Gomorrah, unfinished forever and never really started beyond some sketches, would have been not only the foretelling of this slaughter but also the last will and testament of our generation.
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!”