“In any case, perhaps there’s only myth, and history doesn’t exist.”
“Precisely, precisely. Perhaps you’re not as foolish as I thought. In the same way, my book ceases to exist as soon as Marina transforms it into a sonata. She worked on her composition for an entire year, and you have to judge the result for yourself. Are you ready, or do you prefer to wait until tomorrow?”
“You can begin whenever you like.”
Neither one bothered to consult Marina. From his orchestra seat he told himself that she seemed to have vanished from the minds of both men, as if unavoidable forces had sacrificed her to her own unpublished music. At the same time he thought that only a dead pederast could notice that kind of negligence. Immediately all that there was of man in him, even in hell, led him to forget about Marina while Sandro turned on the tape recorder (“ … defamed me in writing and in printed books. That Englishman or Irishman, the same one who surreptitiously collected everything I said on a … What did he say it was called? … Yes, that’s it, on a tape recorder”). The first chords did not fail to disconcert him. For reasons he could not explain, contemplating the woman who resembled those of Piero, he did not expect music as descriptive as the sounds that took him by surprise. The sonata opened with the evocation of a noman’s land covering the entire world, as if the planet, empty or abandoned by life, turned silently in infinite space. Suddenly that aboriginal time, initiated in so vast and desolate a manner, was concretized into a sign isolated in the midst of solitudes. A grave as lost as a tomb in Antarctica. A grave, however, that was his, in the unpopulated land of ice and wilderness. The theme of that music confused him as much as the mode. It would have suited the ending of an elegy and reminded him of the last part of his lament for Sánchez Mejías, perhaps his best poem, conceived precisely as a sonata in four movements, but he felt it was too obvious and solemn for the start of a piano piece. He opened and closed an oblique parenthesis to recall the phrase he had once written to Gerardo Diego: “ … we’re mad about bad music.” But this was not reprehensible music from any more or less social, historical concept of the arts, and therefore he was not obliged to praise it to himself. Only to follow it with complete interest, though its execution was fairly poor. Deficient, typical of someone in whom ideas raced faster than hands and whose fingers had been away from the keyboard for a long time. The elegy transformed suddenly into a sustained shout of hope and counteracted his own weeping for the death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, where only his voice and a gentle wind in the olive trees sounded to recall the bullfighter, his present body, his absent soul. Here, on the other hand, existence was affirmed in all its vigor, repeating and defining itself by means of interminable death, in terms very similar to his. (“Any instant of my fleeting, impetuous life, any of these moments, present now and impossible on the stage of the theater, is preferable to immortality in hell.”) The spiral, which according to Sandro Vasari was the title of the sonata’s first movement, shattered into fragments before the burning experience of all memory. His in the restaurant in Madrid, reconciling with Ignacio. (“Come on, man, tell me what you’ll have and how the bulls will be this summer.”) An imagined Julius Caesar’s in the radiance of the aurora borealis, reciting arrogant blank couplets like: “Better first in a village / than second in Rome.” Martínez Nadal’s saying goodbye to him on the step of the Andalucía express and then walking away along the platform, unaware that their last encounter on earth had concluded there. The man of flesh inside him, asking Valdés whether both of them would set aside everything that had been arranged, whether they weren’t insisting in vain on improvising an impossible outcome. If Sandro Vasari said he had divided the book he wrote about him, or the dream that inspired him, into four parts: THE SPIRAL, THE ARREST, DESTINY, THE TRIAL, the music cut across everything the words divided and Marina expounded almost from the first her entire purpose: to reduce to an irreducible unity the history of a poet. The first movement ended in a kind of fugue, a rapid declaration of principles with his name as counterpoint. The story, the music affirmed, would embrace not only existence but death. The other face of life as a function of eternity and even the irrevocable destiny that preceded the birth of man on earth. An academic question, perhaps unnecessary because it was so obvious, underscored the purpose of the entire sonata in its formal aspect. Would it be possible to incorporate into his immortality and mortal biography presentiments like the one he had in the South Station when, like a good Andalusian, he believed his steps measured and prescribed since a time before all times? Almost without transition the sonata entered its second part with an analogous theme and different counterpoint. While the second established constant references to lines and citations from his dramatic work, the first returned his calvary in Granada and the Rosales family’s house to the present. Its execution was also cleaner and perhaps excessively skilled for someone accustomed to the labored awkwardness of the first part. He thought of two Marinas existing together, and created the image of Piero della Francesca’s women, the one who conceived the unnamed sonata and the one the music demanded for its realization and performance. Between the two of them, and in another no-man’s land like the one he sometimes thought separated him from the man of flesh, a third Marina wandered: the plaintive, fragile creature who looked at the heavens as if they were a mirror and apparently had seen the characters of Goya’s
Blind Man’s Bluff dancing on the snows of yesteryear. He forgot about Marina, or her three images disappeared, in the counter-point’s literary evocations. Antoñito el Camborio, “Camborio with the strong mane,” was arrested by five Civil Guards, leaving behind him a river of lemons. The same Camborio was knifed to death, murmuring words lost in a gush of blood. A dead Ignacio Sánchez Mejías climbed the steps in an empty bullring, searching in vain for his lost body. Invisible bells tolled each afternoon in Granada for a child. The moon went across the sky holding another child by the hand like his mother, sleepwalking, rescued him from the water where he sank, asleep. A hyacinth light illuminated the keyboard and his right hand, while his father contemplated him in the semi-darkness of the Huerta de San Vicente. From the top of railings bathed in the brilliance of the stars, the shadow of a girl inclined over a cistern, while he repeated in silence the words he said to himself so often on the spiral of helclass="underline" “I thought the dead were blind, like the ghost of the Gypsy girl in one of my poems who, poured into the reservoir in the garden, did not see things when they were looking at her.” Another woman ran through her house as if mad, pursued by a grief that would be black if it were visible. An identical sorrow assailed a horseman riding through magnetic mountains, on a sea crossed by thirteen ships. A lover declared he hadn’t wanted to fall in love, as if love were the result of will and not passion. To fulfill his obligation to himself and not the woman who had given herself to him, to behave like the man he was, he gave her a satin sewing basket before he left her. An ironic note, some rhythms that changed when repeated, revealed his own mordancy toward that poem. Universally known for its piercing eroticism, it had been written by someone who perhaps had never gone to bed with or desired a woman. (“Then like now it was impossible for you to reply because the words burned like embers before turning into dust into nothing and your heart seemed to crack open at each beat or turn into porous, worn stone like those birds trapped in amber before man walked the earth … ”) The third movement altered the brilliant tonalities of the second. At least at first one might say it was painted entirely in sepia and gold, like the murals by Sert in the Vic Cathedral that Dalí had forced him to admire against his will. So sudden a change confounded him again, even though by then he thought himself accustomed to the sonata’s variations. The visitor murmured something about how interconnected he judged the music and the third part of the unpublished book to be. Sandro obliged him to be quiet with an impatient gesture. At that instant he understood that the composition did not refer precisely to him, alive or dead, but to one of his hypothetical phantoms or hallucinations. In other words, to the first of his doubles who had appeared in hell. (“Boy, this isn’t hell and we’re not dead. I know hell very well to my misfortune and I can assure you it’s on earth. Do you know where we really are?”) The ill-tempered old man said he dreamed him in a sepia nightmare on the top floor on Calle de Angulo, where he had spent close to half a century in hiding. He had taken refuge there to avoid being arrested, but then the hiding place turned into a voluntary prison made to the measure of his pride. In his judgment, very well expressed in the somewhat mocking rhetoric of the music, the real penitentiary or authentic cemetery was his unfortunate country that in vain thought itself free after the death of a dictator and the attempted metamorphosis of one regime into another. (“ … reconsider and recall the time when I taught you what an hendecasyllable was. Now it’s up to me to show you who and where we are.”) In spite of a repeated note like the dripping of a fountain in spring onto the ice of the past winter, the old man continued his derisive denial. “You’re not me but my imprisoned dream,” the dialoguing water sang softly, as in some of Machado’s poems. “You’re merely my delirium because in so many years, constantly hidden in the Rosales family’s house, you didn’t write a single line; you didn’t outline one piece for the theater. I, so fearful, would not have renounced being who I am only to save my hidden life.” With the thaw, the fountain transformed into a stream and then a river that pulled the ghost underwater. The current carried away the flailing and shouting of a Punchinello in the