I’m referring to the physical, for he very well might have felt moral fear. Two or three years before his death, he and La Argentinita had been lovers for almost ten. I was very fond of La Argentinita, who played the Butterfly in my first, very booed piece for the theater in two acts and a prologue. And I would have to dedicate my elegy for Ignacio to her, although at the time none of us could have foretold that. La Argentinita always had the unequivocal affection for me, like a mother’s or a sister’s, that some women feel for men like me. A dancer acclaimed throughout Europe, she agreed to appear in that distant play by a kid barely twenty years old and never blamed me for its failure. I was never forgetful about gratitude, though I was about rancor, and I always remembered her courtesy. Afterward, when my poems and other plays of mine made me well known, she celebrated them and told me she had always believed in my talent and the success that fate would bring me. From the beginning she confided to me her affair with Sánchez Mejías, to whom she held on immediately and irrevocably, though she had loved and enjoyed other men before him. She knew Ignacio would not leave his Gypsy wife, sister of the Gallos, who was both resigned and jealous, or his farm in Pino Montano, or his son, who, to the consternation of his father, insisted on being a bullfighter. (“If a broken body has to come into my house, let it be mine and not my son’s,” Argentinita confessed that Ignacio had said to her.) Only now, in this spiral of hell, do I understand how those words of his were transformed into other lines in my elegy, without my being able to see it, when I state in the poem that no one knows his body, not the stone where he lies, not the black satin where he is destroyed. Even if he left his wife, his son, and his country house, Argentinita went on, shaking her head, Ignacio would go back to them, just as he returned to the bullring after his retirements. “It’s his destiny, you know? He can’t avoid it, and perhaps it’s also written that he’ll die in the arena.”
If there were an invisible book of his life that would precede it point by point before it was lived, it would also have a footnote about other loves, this time incidental. Ignacio had an affair with a foreign woman, married and with children, whose name I forgot even though I introduced them myself. La Argentinita, who was never jealous of Ignacio’s wife, was carried away now by resentment, suspicions, and rancor. She called or came to see me almost every day to tell me, in almost identical words, her desperation. I ran from Madrid to Granada, to my parents’ house, to avoid her. Or rather, I imposed a truce and escaped the city for the same reasons I didn’t want to go to Ignacio in his agony: because I could never bear my own impotence in the face of other people’s sorrow. When I returned, on a very quiet Sunday morning, I was with some friends in a café on the Gran Vía when Ignacio happened to come in. He stopped at our table, spreading his legs wide and planting his feet firmly on the floor, his overcoat open and his arms crossed behind his back beneath his Herculean shoulders, his hat pushed back on his bald head of quartz and feldspar, and no one asked him to sit down. He looked contemptuously at my companions, young Gypsies and unripe flamenco singers, very affected and not rich in talent.
“When did you get back from Granada?” he asked me.
“About ten days ago,” I lied, because it was only five.
“Why are you so hard to see? You promised to let me know when you got back.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“What reason do you have for avoiding me?”
“You know better than anyone.” I lowered my voice without taking away its coldness or severity. “You acted like a thug with someone I’ve always loved. This foreigner has her husband and you had La Argentinita.”
“That’s no reason for you to avoid me as if I were a leper. Can we talk in private?”
“I have nothing to say to you, Ignacio, and it would be better if we didn’t see each other again.”
He had been recognized in the café and people were looking at us. He knew he was being observed by the curiosity and evil-minded gossip of strangers, as if he were a circus clown, but he couldn’t move. Incapable of leaving or of taking a seat when one wasn’t offered, the man who kneeled in front of bulls and slapped them to incite them to attack was rooted to the floor and submitted to that contempt in the presence of strangers and my Gypsy adolescents. I looked straight into his eyes. He lowered his, and his shoulders seemed to collapse beneath the coat tailored in London. My attendants, the flamenco boys, began to smile and exchange poisonous whispers.
“Where are you going now?” he asked in a thin voice, biting his lips.
“I was going to have lunch.”
“With your friends?”
“With them, in the usual restaurant.”
“I’ll go with you,” he murmured.
“Nobody invited you.”
Ignacio slowly began to stoop as if he were looking for a crack in the floor to hide his vanquished eyes. He knew how much I had always admired him and respected his valor in the ring and his talent in the theater. He met the bulls from the base of the barrier, as they left the bullpen, and wrote mad short pieces for the stage. For some time and without ever asking him about it, I had been convinced that his surrealist works and his bullfighting were part of a single magnificent, almost suicidal effort to give meaning to his life and make himself known to the universe. In a kind of symmetrical irony, when I saw him subjugated in that way, I detested my unexpected strength and absurd cruelty. And yet I couldn’t renounce either one, once they had been revealed, without ceasing to be myself.
“The restaurant is a public place,” he finally muttered. “I can go there to have coffee, if I want to.”
I refrained from answering and he left, dragging his feet, not looking at me. He left the way he came, though now his shoulders were bent, his hands still clasped behind his back beneath his open overcoat. I had almost forgotten about La Argentinita and my indignation at her suffering, but I thought about the many women Ignacio had loved. He wasn’t drawn to them by lust, pride, or even love, though he thought he was in love with all of them at the same time. The bed, the bullring, and the theater were stage sets or benchmarks where he tried to augment and play the part of the authentic Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. An Ignacio Sánchez Mejías who constantly overflowed the person the universe condemned him to be. I would think about Ignacio and the synthesis of his biographical sketch that I was doing then, when on the eve of the war and my own death, Don José Ortega y Gasset came to talk to me during an intermission at the Club Anfistora. “The man is always more than the man,” he said about I don’t know who, his long ivory cigarette holder that looked as if it belonged to Marlene Dietrich, the Pall Mall lit at the end, held between those teeth of his that were so incredibly young for his age. “No,” I replied. “But some men make the effort. Ignacio Sánchez Mejías was one, and soon it will be two years since his deadly goring in the Manzanares arena.”
As soon as I sat down in the restaurant with my two apprentice flamenco singers, Ignacio came in alone. He went to a corner table and sat with his back to the wall. He stayed there for eternities, bending over a glass of sherry or manzanilla as if waiting for the wall to split and fall on his back. From time to time he glanced at me surreptitiously and then became lost in thought again, contemplating the tablecloth. They hadn’t finished their garlic soup when I rudely dismissed the Gypsies. They left without embarrassment or surprise because my lavishness made them servile. They were my version of the dark vice as opposed to the love that could not say its name, which in those days I didn’t feel for anyone. I had met them in my only period of plenty and squandered the rights to my theater pieces on them so they would kiss me on the sly. Afterward I hated myself for hating them.