Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (4 page)

Although after Leonor’s death Machado immediately requested and obtained a new post and so left Soria forever, the obsessive memory and
conscious daydream of Leonor and Castilla stayed with him throughout his life. The impact of Soria is recorded in
Campos de Castilla
(
Fields of Castilla
), and especially in its expanded edition five years later (1917) when Machado had left the region. It is a volume of solitude, bare Castilian landscapes, memories of Leonor, and Spain as seen through the critical, reforming eyes of a poet of the Generation of ’98. The language is spare, exact, yet sonorous, with a grave emotion. Machado (unlike Lorca, who learned from Machado’s popularism) was never fond of the baroque or for that matter of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), Spanish greats whom he considered excellent examples of late-Golden Age excess. Machado’s poems could be any village of Castilla or Andalucía, and his presence that of the accurate lone observer.

After Leonor’s death and his departure from Soria, Machado spent seven years in Baeza, teaching in another rural Spanish
instituto.
He wrote abundantly, but the forms and tone were different. He expressed himself now in verses that, like later Lorca, were based on prosody of popular Spanish song. He wrote brief, aphoristic philosophical poems, and he wrote sonnets, the latter for the first time. Castilian gravity gives way to Andalusian irony and humor in the philosophical and allegorical verses of this period.

In Baeza, Machado managed to obtain an advanced university degree in philosophy in 1919 by commuting to Madrid. At the time, the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was a member of the examining board. Machado’s interest in the degree was not to enhance his modest, high school teaching career. Rather, he had become addicted to philosophy and, he claimed, gave himself to reading only philosophy during these years. He writes long series of proverbial verse in the manner of one of his preferred poets, the medieval Spanish rabbi Sem Tob (Shem Tov):

His poems of this period are on the way to epiphany, always secular, with Heraclitean skepticism for absolute truths, yet always seeking.

Also in Baeza he perfects the special dream focus in which landscape provided the poet with the symbols to express nearly all ideas and emotions. This simple Chinese device of using the outer landscape to describe the inner landscape of the spirit is among the oldest techniques used by poets. Antonio Machado, however, prefaces a step to the usual procedure, because even his outer landscapes have had their origin in open-eyed memory dream. The poetic mechanism is, in its three steps:

1. The poet dreams of a remembered landscape,
   
2. which he describes as an
   outer landscape
   , and
   
3. which he transforms into a symbol of his
   inner landscape
   .
   

Steps 1 and 3 are inner landscapes, with step 2 a mirror in the outer world of steps 1 and 3. And at times Machado bypasses the second step and proceeds directly from first to third. The strange beauty of Machado’s best poems may be followed logically if we remember his method: the poet dreams a remembered landscape, he then presents a temporal reflection of his dream—an outer landscape—to the reader, who in turn reads back into it the original dreamed landscape. Occasionally, as mentioned, the poet moves directly from step 1 to 3, omitting step 2. Then the poet dreams of his own inner landscape.

Precisely this poetic process, made explicit in his later philosophical reflections on time and abstraction, permits Machado his most mature work, poems of a secular mystical character. The mystical nature of these poems lies in Machado’s dream vision and follows the familiar
vías
of the
mystical process. The poet, as it were, is blind before the world about him, blinded in an afternoon of tedium in which sun and consequently time both seem to stop; in this darkness the poet opens his eyes in dream to a world of light. Through dream, his mind takes flight, he awakens, the world is revealed in images of startling clarity, and the outer and inner worlds of symbolized nature conjoin.

In one typical poem, “Desgarrada la nube; el arco iris” (“The torn cloud, the rainbow”), we have an analogue of San Juan de la Cruz’s awakenings. Here dream, landscape, and a metaphysical equivalent to the instant of mystical astonishment (
asombro
) in the Spanish saint are all present:

After citing a landscape that is emerging from a sky of rain, the poet himself awakes, emerging from dream. It is stated abruptly: “I woke.” The dream was a preparation, as was the stormy landscape with its beach of sun. His awakening leaves him astonished and dumb. After the darkness of the former dream, he is barely capable of speech and is given to exclamation. No verbs, and each thing of nature carries the force of great clarity and importance. It is enough merely to cite the existence of these things of nature, quickly, without qualification or explanation.

After two stanzas of darkness and illumination, Machado’s third stanza of vision is not an instant of ineffable revelation—the poem with
its words does exist—yet it is limited in these four lines to nouns, to things, except for “green,” which as a quality inherent in the meadow is more substantive than adjectival in function. Then in the poem’s last lines, the memory of the vision is lost, and he wakes a second time to the world
without
vision or memory:

With one word—”hair” in “the water in your hair!”—the poet equates his vision with love. When Machado begins to write sonnets, poems to Guiomar, and his aphoristic mountain songs, we find a fluent and intensely clear vision of love and nature. In the sonnet “Por qué, decísme, hacia los altos llanos” (“You ask me, why my heart flies from the coast”), he tells us that it is not coastal Andalucía and its fertile lands, but the austere north and the starkly clean landscape of Soria where his heart lives. There he found one person—whom he translates into a landscape in order to represent his love:

Machado was writing poems of immaculately bright images of nature. His sonnets are dream games; the lens of time distorts and creates everything, with the emphasis on the
thing,
in soundless, endless Spanish afternoons where time halts. All this we
see,
and in Machado, we always see. From the sequence “Los sueños dialogados” (“Dreams in Dialogue”), the sonnet “Como en el alto llano tu figura” (“How suddenly her face on the plateau”) has the dreamed land, the love, the suspension of time:

From Baeza in 1919, Machado went north to take a new teaching position in Segovia, whence he was able to go each weekend, in just a few hours by train, to Madrid; there he collaborated with his brother Manuel on several plays. In Madrid he had more intellectual companionship among his fellow teachers of literature and philosophy, and through his weekend trips had again joined the literary life. The best portrait of Don Antonio in his Segovia days appears in a remembrance by John Dos Passos. As a young man in his early twenties, Dos Passos spent some days and evenings talking with Machado in Segovia. This was 1919. Thirty-nine years later I wrote to him and to Machado’s old friend Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was then near death, asking whether they might write reminiscences of Machado for a publication. Juan Ramón sent an earlier work that he had written shortly after the end of the Spanish civil war (1936-39) in which the drama and dark calamity of the time as well as his affection for Machado throb in his poetic prose. Dos Passos wrote a new piece, and in his memoir time has sharpened memory and its images—as it should in treating Machado. Dos Passos recalls:

In Segovia in these later years Machado found a new love, Guiomar (Pilar de Valderrama), a poet, a married woman with three children, mostly separated from her diplomat husband at a time when there was no divorce in Spain. They met by chance in Segovia in 1928; she had come
with her husband for some days of sojourning. Thereafter they met regularly and inconspicuously in Madrid, usually in an obscure restaurant, until civil war separated them. An element of erotic drama and wild dream, not found in earlier poems, enters Machado’s poems from this period, as in “Your Face Alone”:

In the last sonnets of the war, he has the vision of Guiomar appearing on a
finisterre.
He admits, however, “It is a love that came to us in life too late: Our love’s a hopeless blossom on a bough / that now has felt the ax’s frozen blade” (“From Sea to Sea”).

Machado ‘s late love had all the intensity, fantasy, frustration, absence, and separation, of romantic love. If we are to believe Valderrama’s volume of memoirs, the love was always discreet and never consummated, and while she avoided any trysting place that would bring public notice, she also called off any meeting where they would be entirely alone, which circumstance could lead to scandal. She was conservative politically as well, as was Antonio’s brother Manuel, who would side with Franco in that fratricidal war. Antonio, committed as he was to liberal democracy and
later to the Republic, never knew Manuel as anything but his closest friend in the world (indistinguishable from himself, he would say); and similarly, despite Valderrama’s politics and “public” prudishness, Antonio would not be deterred from his longing for her, even during the war when she had escaped, definitively, to the haven of Portugal.

Machado’s love letters to Guiomar were published in 1950 by Concha Espina in a book with the flashy title of
De Antonio Machado a su grande y secreto amor (From Antonio Machado to His Grand and Secret Love),
and although the letters are authentic, published in facsimile, the Spanish press in the Franco era predictably condemned their dissemination as sensationalism. The only “sensational” revelation in the letters is that Machado definitely expresses his enthusiastically adolescent and wearily sad love for an absent woman. Nevertheless, Machado’s mature ambiguities in his love for Guiomar are contained in some of his richest late poems. The ambiguity is the obvious one. He needs Guiomar. He worships her. She is real and unreal. And her fantasy self, he recognizes perfectly well, is a result of his need, deriving from Guio mar’s unattainability and absence. He needs to dream in peace his genuine false dreams where historical truth, or any similar aberration, does not disturb the truth of the passion. And the poems, uneven like a journal, without the tenderness, nostalgia, and melancholy of those poems written after the death of his child bride, are immediate, fanciful, have a compelling flow and the youthful courtliness of a medieval troubadour. They are never sentimental; they are always tempered with his measures of irony and humor. They tell us that Guiomar really exists in the present time, and is also hopelessly, desperately far away. Resigned to this knowledge, Antonio is joyfully, futilely inventing her: