“It’s absolutely true!” he exclaimed, unable to contain himself, but he did refrain from grasping the clothing or arm of the apparition, the virtual image of the man they kept him from being if he had lived.
“Of course it’s true! It all is except for you, you’re my dream. Don’t raise your voice or wake the dead who’ve been acquitted! How many times will I have to reprimand you for that? And don’t wake me up either, though I’m alive and haven’t been tried. Look at the stage again.”
The landscape was different and the bus had changed into an ambulance. Now they were crowded together: Don Antonio Machado, his mother, smiling and mummified in a no-man’s land between the world and eternity, his brother José, his sister-in-law Matea, and himself. Machado was thinner and older, almost as ancient and fleshless as his own mother. From a green thermos that a little while before he had held against his chest, he was pouring them coffee into Catalan bowls. Another city lay behind them, this time Barcelona, also being gutted by bombs. They were traveling on a highway that was covered with an exodus of cars, carriages, trucks, horses, wheelbarrows, other ambulances, soldiers, deserters, men, women, the wounded, children, beneath a quartz winter dawn. “I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve had coffee so early,” Machado said to him. “In any event, this coffee must be made of peanuts or who knows what it’s made of. Whatever it is, how courteous the Catalans are, as Cervantes already testified at moments of bitter humor, though his critics still haven’t noticed that aspect of his parody. The coffee we drank at night in Madrid probably wasn’t pure either. Do you remember when we left Madrid? The city seemed about to fall at any moment, but ironically, it’s still resisting and now we’re about to lose Barcelona, the aforementioned Cervantean fountain of good breeding, which I suppose will welcome the Fascists with open arms. What was I saying? Recently, in no time at all, my mind wanders.” “You were speaking about the night we left Madrid,” he replied, warming his hands on the sides of the bowl. “That’s right! They evacuated us in that bus for privileged brains, as you repeated, quoting poor Valle Inclán. Save the intellectuals and afterward, in due course, pregnant women, the old, and the mentally retarded. Do you remember those nights in the Madrid cafes? Don’t you think we did harm to Valle Inclán by telling so many stories about him and enlarging his legend beyond the conceivable?” He didn’t reply because he seemed to sense that the dying man wouldn’t have listened to him. “At least now everything will be clear for the historians, the strategists, and the foreign diplomats. Before you know it Barcelona will fall and from the point of view of history, which is what we learned to call destiny from the Greeks, we’ll have lost the war. Humanly speaking, I’m not so sure. Perhaps we’ve won it, though the time hasn’t come to be aware of that.”
“What happened to Don Antonio Machado?” he was surprised to find himself asking the apparition, as if admitting his reality without noticing it.
“A better question is what happened to me and how did I come to dream you in the image and likeness of my youth. It’s curious; perhaps, even if it’s paradoxical, I ought to speak now of my old youth. We think of age as the accumulation of years at the present moment. But we also refer to it when we evoke times lost in the past: our adolescence and even our childhood,” his ghost continued, between reflective and pretentious.
“For example that Sunday in another era, when my parents, my brother and sisters and I saw Machaquito and Vicente Pastor cross the Buen Retiro in an open calash in front of The Fallen Angel,” he interrupted almost in spite of himself, as if wanting to put to the test this shade that, being the ghost of a man who never was, also tried to be the phantom of himself.
“Precisely!” the old man agreed. “That same morning I saw Monet’s La Gare Saint Lazare. My father ridiculed the painting, which he even called a blotch. Our mother told us that Monet, like Velázquez himself in another century, tried to capture the lights, air, and chiaroscuro of a fleeting instant: the moment the locomotive enters the station. Notice that it all fits together. Individual life and collective history are merely the sum of impressionistic moments subject to the law of chance, which is the negation of all laws.”
He stopped before he could reply. With a gesture in which there was a touch of the effeminate and another touch of the authoritarian, he pointed at the theater, where the scene was quickly changing again. Once more he was seen on the stage, though now and at the front of the proscenium one would call him considerably older. His age oscillated between how old he was when they killed him (“ … shot in the back, calling me queer”), how old he thought he looked in hell, though there were no mirrors on the spiral, and the age of either of the ghosts transformed into two versions of his supposed advanced years. The setting represented a semicircle, very similar to certain classrooms at Columbia University when he was there as a hypothetical student, recovering from the sorrows of dark love following a failed suicide attempt during the ruinous days of the Depression in America. (“Dazzling streams at the feet of the line of unemployed workers waiting for Al Capone’s charity soup at the refectory of Saint Patrick’s.”) At the front of the classroom, facing the desks of boys and girls arranged in tiers, he was speaking in English about Don Antonio Machado. Now he had white hair and was visibly thinner. With the weight he had lost, and bent over by half a century, beneath a head widened by white temples, he looked almost as broad-shouldered as his father had been. His English was that of a calash driver from Gibraltar, and he was convinced that his American students, who seemed to be scribbling notes, did not understand a word of anything he said. Only a girl with green eyes, like the Melibea, perhaps Jewish, of Rojas, or Proust’s Albertine, who may have been an adolescent boy in Sodom though she was also a lesbian in Gomorrah, watched him, smiling, with no pretensions of writing down absolutely anything. “In the Spanish Civil War” (perhaps without knowing why he made an effort to say it with capital letters), “I had to lose two cities, Madrid and Barcelona, with Don Antonio Machado … We were evacuated from Madrid in the fall of 1936, and from Barcelona to France in January 1939. I’ve never felt closer to him, a sick, dying man at the time, than in those circumstances of a mass exodus. I couldn’t say the same about his work, which I always admired, though at a distance, never identifying with his poetry. In ‘A Young Spain,’ Machado attempts to summon in extremely solemn terms a future redemptive youth. He calls it divine, clear, pure, transparent, and even clear-sighted. He compares it to fire and to a diamond. Forgetting the relationship between cause and effect, though strangely conscious of the depraved decadence of his own time, he delegates to the youth of the near future a regenerative task, as they liked to call it at the time, born of spontaneous generation and parthenogenesis. As he says in ‘Portrait,’ an autobiographical poem, in his veins there are drops of Jacobin blood, though his verses do not necessarily correspond to his political convictions. However, in another poetic portrait, this time a sonnet dedicated to Azorín, the old anarchist who shifted to the right, he calls him an admirable reactionary precisely for his disgust with Jacobin squabbling. The Spain that dawns in ‘Ephemeral Tomorrow,’ after a polar night filled with yawns, will be the Spain of rage, of ideas demanding vengeance with torch in hand, according to Machado’s rhetorical prophecy. To this kind of retributive utopia, forged, he says, in the solid past of the race, forgetting that from the same quarry comes the other Spain, which he always denounced, the Spain of bullfighters, flamenco dancers, and church bells, the Spain of philosophers nourished by monastery soup, the devout Spain of Frascuelo and Carancha … ” Strident bells rang and he ended the class. The students picked up their notebooks and went out in groups. Only the girl with green eyes, like the possibly Jewish Melibea of Rojas, or Proust’s Albertine, who perhaps was an adolescent boy in Sodom though she was also a lesbian in Gomorrah, slowly approached the dais to speak to him.