commedia dell’arte. It reduced him to its own image by bouncing him against polished stones. Then to the shade of its shade. Afterward to nothingness. Solemn chords made Don Antonio Machado pass across the sky, his lapels sprinkled with cigarette ash, his green thermos pressed to his chest. (“I like poetry and music.”) Machado disappeared and the water stopped at a beach of golden sand. His other self in his delirium, the one who stayed in Madrid when he said he had left for Granada and then passed through France to the United States at the end of a war he considered lost, stood on the shore with his arms crossed behind him. He was the strongest of the three, as the music stated while the river was lost in its bed as if it had never existed. He assumed his latent manhood with the woman whose gaze resembled Melibea’s; he turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature because he thought it the vanity of vanities, and acknowledged that his life as a university professor in America was a hell to which he submitted willingly and not without lucid irony. Yet he was as much an impostor as the old man hiding on Calle de Angulo. Implacably, the music alluded to his skeptical competence and sarcastic disdain in contrast to the fragile condition of the true poet, in whom something of the boy he had been persisted, until they decided to murder him in his own Granada. If he had lived a hundred years, the same innocence would have endured inside him and in that no-man’s-land that distanced him at times from the man of flesh. The third movement ran into the fourth, joining in something like parallel whirlpools, where as soon as he dreamed any of his three ghosts they were the three dreamed by Sandro Vasari. Then the last part of the sonata opened with a trial, in part solemn and in part almost festive, as if Antoñito el Camborio and Ignacio Sánchez Mejías accused him of considering them dead in two of his poems. Characterized in broad strokes, Valdés, Ruiz Alonso, Trescastro, and the Assault Guards appeared. He didn’t acquit them or tell himself to forgive them. In the voice he had learned to recognize as his in the sonata, he simply stated that he pitied them since he, or the innocent with whom he had always lived, couldn’t have endured the death of another person in his heart or his gut. Immediately all his executioners disappeared because, after all, as the music was not afraid to affirm, the immortality of those poor souls was part of his own. Just as his memory among men was due in part to the arrest and death of Antonio el Camborio. As if the memory of that character in two of his poems could determine Marina’s music retrospectively and transfix eternity itself on a slant, the sonata repeated phrases and allusions from many other poems of his, poured like a rain of gold over a limitless area. A horseman rode toward Córdoba, knowing he’d never reach the promised city because death would come out to meet him. From the towers of Córdoba, identifying at the same time the man’s end and his purpose, death watched him like a lover who would then come down to wait for him at the gates and along the inaccessible walls. The amputated hands of Saint Eulalia still clasped each other, like decapitated prayers. Narrow streams, rushing like water buffalo, charged with silver horns the naked boys swimming. The prematurely aged silence of his dead profile foretold during a summer filled with red fish, flushed like a crocodile. In the absence of another dead man, the clock and the wind sounded together, as in a line of Machado’s that perhaps had inspired his though he couldn’t remember it now, the bell in the tribunal building struck one above sleeping Soria. The moon descended to the forge looking for a boy and her fragrant skirt was made of illuminated tuberoses in the summer night. Death transformed Ignacio Sánchez Mejías on the bier and turned him into a dark minotaur. His coffin borne by a carriage descended slowly along the streets of Madrid on the way to Atocha Station. A landscape of nascent America, with sibilant railroads, fences covered by advertisements, and land gutted by coal mines contemplated the passing of Walt Whitman, dressed in corduroy, his beard covered by butterflies. Not far away, in another landscape of a cubist stage prepared for a ritual or a ballet, Amnon raped his half-sister Tamar, and their father, King David, cut the strings of his harp. The rain of gold having fallen to earth, the music seemed to become quiet and recede toward silence along the path of the first solitudes, those that populated only his lonely grave. The gold poured from the heavens dimmed gradually, as fire beetles and lightning bugs disappear at dawn. A single light, gold like a flame at its very center, began to burn on his grave. At that point he expected the end of the sonata, unwilling to confess to himself his disenchantment with a rather conventional ending. That is to say, a few chords tapering off until they disappear, in the way a bright, sonorous stream empties its last threads of water into a shoreless lake never discovered by man. But Marina surprised him again, sustaining this movement of the sonata until she had elevated it to a new dimension. The golden light in the silent solitudes stopped being the one on his grave and became his alert consciousness burning in hell. He was surrounded now not by the spiral and infinite eternity (assuming the spiral wasn’t infinite eternity patiently awaiting the last dead person for the last theater) but by his own unfathomable, interminable unconscious that held every reference alluded to in Sandro Vasari’s book. There, inhabiting him and redeeming himself in the poet, Sandro himself, his nameless visitor, his executioners, his parents, his friends whom he always loved, his lovers whom he never loved, the landscapes of his soul and his childhood, the vertical perspectives of Madrid and New York (“Gas in every apartment,” Brother, can you spare a dime), Dalí’s Cadaqués and Maqueda Castle with Alberti and María Teresa, La Gare Saint Lazare and the South Station, Machaquito and Vicente Pastor, the flashy young men and women on the platforms, la Argentinita and Esperancita Rosales, the dogs summoned by Villalón and Dióscoro Galindo González, Galadí and Cabezas, Martínez Nadal and the Morla Lynches, The Public and Lament, his ghosts in hell and his midmorning visitors, the old unemployed actor, Isidro Máiquez and Medioculo, swift-footed Achilles and José Antonio Primo de Rivera laughing at Ruiz Alonso, his dreams and all the dreams of the living and the dead, the gold slipper and the house shoes of Doña Juana the Mad. There, finally, Marina herself sharing with him that entire world with no bottom and no shores, as a queen would with the king, her husband.