Nightmares and apparitions brought him to the memory of a living man, the one he had seen talking with Ruiz Alonso in the Lyon. (“I dreamed about hell and saw it as an endless spiral along which a carpeted corridor ascended. Some theaters open onto the corridor, and a dead person corresponds to each one. And in precisely one of those theaters, the man you arrested and, according to what they say, also denounced, is awaiting trial … ”) Ruiz Alonso became impassioned then, replying that he wasn’t an informer and did no more than follow other people’s orders in arresting him. Evoking his protests in a parenthesis, he had a presentiment that the truth would never be clarified. He himself, victim of the obscure intrigue, was indifferent to it, not because he had forgotten the arrest and the shooting, even less because he had forgiven them, but because everything on earth, including personal tragedies, was material as distant in eternity as horses, ants, and men on the beach from the far-off perspective of the ocean.
Another distancing of a moral order was imposed by Sandro Vasari with regard to Ruiz Alonso. Though they both sat at the same table, one would say he separated himself from him with an invisible rod, as if his presence were as irritating as it was inevitable. From the beginning of the interview, marked with crosses of Lorraine, Vasari had been his absolute master. He made Ruiz Alonso confess to truths perhaps hidden until then and turned a deaf ear when he assumed he was lying. And yet, toward the end, he didn’t seem as sure of himself. Almost without taking a breath between sentences, he told Ruiz Alonso he had never seen him on the stages of hell when he dreamed them, then immediately said the contrary and admitted that in a nightmare he witnessed the poet’s arrival at the Andalucía express in the company of Rafael Martínez Nadal while Ruiz Alonso, looking out a window in the passageway, pretended to be unaware of his presence. Returning to Sandro Vasari and Ruiz Alonso, he thought he detected a correlation of analogous situations, like those of a single text in various languages on one palimpsest, between the meeting of those two men in a Lyon filled with amorous couples and readers of rustling newspapers, and his own dialogues with his extremely aged doubles in hell. In all three cases an old man apparently at peace with his conscience confronted a young man who turned out to be his hidden, buried truth. Except for all the distances and variants, the coincidence could not help but amaze him. He even asked himself whether that conversation between Ruiz Alonso and Sandro Vasari (“ … What did they do to you, Señor Ruiz Alonso? / Defamed me. Yes, sir, defamed me in writing and in published books”) had ever happened. In other words, the words of a very obvious academic question, wasn’t everything his own dramatic imagination, performed on the stage of the theater that one day would belong to Vasari after his death? He even supposed an unconscious reason for the three phantasmagorias, the one in the Lyon, and the appearances of his ghosts. The three cases were no more and no less than embarrassing versions of the perpetually insoluble dispute between him and his father. Between his pederasty and the old man’s patriarchal virility.
Almost immediately, and with no effort other than letting himself be carried along by the evidence, he found himself obliged to change his mind. The quarrel with his father had been settled since the day of his arrest on Calle de Angulo. In reality, it had never existed (“Son, I’d give everything for you, including your mother and sisters and brother! May God forgive me! Be very careful! You can never fail me, never, never, never!”), even though his brother-in-law had to be shot and I had to fear losing him to find the courage to make that confession. In this way, and emphasizing the evidence, he saw how his entire reasoning or, to be more accurate, his attempt at reasoning, was invalidated by that call to the Rosales family’s house. A few days later, and after suffering as cruel as it was absurd, they killed him like an animal. There was never the slightest doubt, he told himself ironically, about that fact. Everything else, however, seemed debatable and uncertain. From that point on, the questions stopped being academic and were restated in a different context. Was it even possible that death was merely nothingness, plain and simple nothingness, as Luis Buñuel predicted and proclaimed so often in his obsessive atheism? (“Death, my dear, is nothing more or less than deafness and blindness forever and ever, amen. Without sight or hearing, the other senses encyst and petrify.”) Influenced perhaps by those words, he described death as a heap of extinguished dogs in his requiem for Sánchez Mejías. No, though it might be in the briefest of parentheses or a hurried note in the margin, that line in his elegy came from a more complex source. Almost unwillingly, he confessed it to himself. A few summers before the fatal goring, he had been with Alberti and María Teresa at Fernando Villalón’s farm. It made him uneasy when the other three began to talk about spiritualism, and Fernando, as if subdued by sleepiness, boasted of being able to conjure the souls of dead dogs. It was a motionless, silent night, studded with stars like spurs and fragrant with jasmine and mint. Suddenly, and panting heavily, Villa-lón slipped into sleep and the horizon filled with the barking of a furious pack of hounds. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun when that cattle-raising medium and surrealist poet awoke. He remembered nothing and was very surprised to see everyone overcome by fright.
What happened afterward should have been reduced to a collective hallucination. He tried to believe this even knowing he was translating it into the terms of a rationalist club. Dogs and men really ended in a silence of muffled voices and yelps. This was how he had ended forever, yes, forever, when they shattered his back with bullets and he fell into the ravine on the night of the crime. There was no sleepless consciousness, no hell in a spiral, no orchestra seats, no corridor ascending in alabaster light, no prosceniums, no scenery, no memories revived on stage, no apparitions, no gold letters on windows of trains, no trial, no possible redemption. Only death, which was nothingness. And yet, yes, yes, and yet he could not deny the incontrovertible evidence, because the existence of redemption and judgment was obvious to him (WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?), as well as train windows where the process and hearing were announced to him in letters of fused, burning gold, as clear as the ghosts of his two doubles, or the prosceniums and stages where memories were represented for a population of shades invisible to one another in the alabaster light of passageways and orchestra seats. Paradoxically, all that was as undeniable as absolute annihilation in the rectangular, interminable peace of death. After all, Fernando Villalón himself, a man who said he lived among the living and the dead at the same time, once declared that the important thing wasn’t existing or not existing but knowing who one is.