“And the desert?”
“I call my dream the desert and you say it’s hell. Perhaps we’re both right.”
The old man was becoming blurred, as if someone were erasing him with a fingertip, taking away volume, outlines, and profile. Eventually he disappeared without leaving a trace or vestige in the theater or his seat. Alone again, he looked around him. The stage became a dark emptiness, the proscenium open to infinity, like the mouth of a tunnel excavated in the middle of the firmament. He heard or thought he had imagined the sound of footsteps in the vicinity of the corridor and the alabaster lights. Immediately he became aware that he was isolated and abandoned or abandoned and isolated on that spiral, where the dead were blind or invisible to one another. His doubles, the phantoms, having disappeared, the notion of his insignificance oppressed him. Eternity was the greatest of sarcasms, an illogicality more absurd than perishable life. In this untransferable theater before his trial, he was nothing but a spectator of his past in an endless succession of shades condemned to the same wakefulness. Perhaps the first of them, his most distant ancestor, saw on the stage memories of a recent time he had experienced when still a gorilla or an amphibious fish, with the eyes of a man, in the dark jungles of the beginning of the world.
The last of his aged replicas, the one living in the United States with the woman in whose eyes and behind the gates of Gomorrah Melibea and Albertine had met, told him his martyrdom in Granada was only a dream of his, as were Ruiz Alonso, the Rosales family’s house, the yellow bedspread, the piano, the Sacred Heart, the translations by Salinas, the window facing Calle de Angulo, the Rosales family themselves, and Valdés’s interrogation. Of the two nonsensical grotesques in their hypothetical old ages, the one with white hair and dark traces seemed more hateful. He imagined him in an America very different from the one he had known. The one of the unemployed, the beggars, the supplicants in lines for watered soup, the one of despair, of prostitutes, of suicides. The America that he predicted would be devoured one day by hissing cobras climbing like lianas to the highest terraces. (Brother, can you spare a dime? The one of the multitude that urinates, of the multitude that vomits, of the blacks disguised as janitors, the one of the king of Harlem tearing out the eyes of crocodiles and banging the hindquarters of monkeys with a spoon, of narrow defiles of masonry and brick under an empty sky, of the moon buried in the Jewish cemetery.) All of that America at the edge of the apocalypse, waiting for a resurrected Bosch to paint it before the fall. (“ … and Dalí still very young, not dressed as a janitor like the king of Harlem, whom he would take many years to meet, but as a soldier, the newest replacement, when his brush was still imperfect and he struggled to imitate everybody, from Picasso, naturally, to Chagall, passing through Matisse, telling me in his deep voice and Ampurdanese accent: Each painter responds to his environment, just as each child is nourished by the juices and salts and potash and will-o’-the-wisps and lotteries and cellos that constitute the maternal womb. Here in Cadaqués, I can’t paint like Bosch in Flanders. And I, giving him almost inadvertently the advice that would transform the little soldier and amateurish dauber into one of the most original painters of this insane, suicidal century: That’s precisely why you should keep painting like Bosch. You could spend your whole life in the undertaking, but you’ll end up discovering the great artist you have hidden under your blood, in your unconscious.) That America, yes, indelible and magnificent in its vast tragedy, stretching from coast to coast and from ocean to ocean with its pus and its ringworm, its lice and its scabs, transformed into the other America of gardens with laurels, bedrooms with pale ironed curtains, and the Swedish cultural attaché announcing the granting of the Dynamiter’s Prize in Literature.
He began to pity the simpleton who attempted to represent him in an old age snatched away by bullets. He imagined living in another unspeakable hell where he would be incapable of writing because he had lost his identity. A hell that ironically, paradoxically, was not the real one, the spiral of wakefulness, but the one he had feared so much in life: the renunciation of all he had been on earth. As on so many other occasions, he thought again about the conversation with Alberti and María Teresa León, at the foot of the Maqueda Castle, while the three of them in their incredible, vulnerable youth, appeared on stage where they again experienced the teasel and the merlons. Alberti confessed his uncertainty when it was time to choose between two horrors, ignorance of his own fate in death or its unending eternity. He immediately replied that his panic had another name: the loss of his self, the being who had never been, in no-man’s land. If the destiny of the second apparition had been realized, a very conceivable fate beginning with a fact that only seemed insignificant, his giving up the trip to Granada in time, he would still be living in an America different from the one in his Poet in New York, but at the same time he would be totally distinct from the one who had written that book or, in fact, any other of his more typical works. Stripped of his identity, as you divest yourself of an old, shoddily made suit, he would dream occasionally and always in vain of death at the hands of other men, which in Granada had fulfilled the doom anticipated in some of his plays and poems: in one of the two songs of the horseman, in “Ballad of the One Summoned,” in “Sleepwalking Ballad,” in “Surprise,” in The Public, and in Blood Wedding. An execution that confirmed not only the fate written and described in his own hand but also the universal dimension of his renown as poet, prophet, and martyr.
Old, incapable of writing, and exiled to the American hell of gardens with pruned laurels (Les Lauriers sont Coupés), he could still go on dreaming his destiny, his arrest, and the endless spiral itself. He could dream himself murdered in the fullness of his creative talent. Lost afterward in his orchestra seat or in the curving corridor, until he became aware that the strange construction, a Tower of Babel where shades witnessed their memories without seeing one another, was nothing more or less than eternity. Always in dreams with a woman whose eyes combine Melibea and Albertine, he would feel nostalgia for any lived moment no matter how often memory obliged its representation on the stage, and a desperate desire for nothingness to put an end to insomnia. From the darkened theater and in those nightmares, he would deduce the trial and acquittal of certain of the dead, while Sandro Vasari’s orchestra seats and stage made him infer the anticipatory staging of the memories of the living. Finally, dreaming beneath the window with Venetian blinds, he would see himself in the third theater along the corridor: the addition to the theater that would be Vasari’s one day and where now, without his guessing it on earth, his future dead man’s memories were holding a general rehearsal. Occasionally he walked the distance that would take him to the damn theater, knowing the terror it held. In that theater, identical to the others but frosted with cemetery cold, he would witness the appearance of a gigantic cross above the Risco de la Nava, between Portera del Cura and Cerro de San Juan, crowning the basilica that housed the tapestries of the Apocalypse. “And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy … ”
The recollection of one apparition restored to him the memory of the other: the irascible, myopic one with the bald head, pink and polished like rare porphyry. The one who stated with certainty that after almost half a century he still lived hidden on Calle de Angulo, first because of fear of losing his life and now because of disgust with the present world and its vanities. (“If in addition to remembering who we were you maintained the dignity that belongs to us, you too would turn your back on that jungle and shut yourself in with me here in hell.”) According to that ill-tempered phantom, hell was the upper floor of the Rosales family’s house, where they hid him in a long-ago summer to protect him from the fury of crime unleashed. The world considered him dead and disappeared, to his moderate satisfaction, since his extreme passions were reduced to rage and rancor. His protector and jailer who, believing he was saving him, shut him away in a refuge that resembled him, was no freer now to resuscitate him than he was before to betray him. Furthermore, the old man thought himself eternal and also said he dreamed of him on the spiral to the precise extent he needed him in order not to lose his reason. (“You’re chained to my sleep, as he is to my waking, and you’ll continue to appear on nights like this so I can speak with someone other than Luis and solitude does not eventually drive me mad.”) Seized with the fear of having really lost his mind, as he must have felt at other times in his dialogues with phantoms (WHY DON’t YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?), he began to ask himself whether that old man, half demented and driven wild by loneliness, wasn’t correct when he called him one of his dreams and for good measure would not dream of the second ghost, the one who thought he lived on the other side of the world with an ambiguous woman and a garden of laurels.