Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (6 page)
Read Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) Online
Authors: Antonio Machado
There was scarcely room for all the passengers in the vehicle. Again personal belongings had to be left behind. When all were boarding, Machado insisted on being the last to find a seat. While his friends and relatives urged him to take a place, he remained in the patio and then insisted on being the last to enter the ambulance, saying, “
Yo tengo tiempo, yo tengo tiempo
”: I have time, I have time.
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At Cervià de Ter each passenger had been allowed to take only one small traveling bag. There are conflicting reports about how Antonio Machado lost his luggage and arrived only with the rain-soaked suit on his back at Collioure, “almost naked like the children of the sea” (“Portrait”). But it is almost certain that his suitcases were taken from him by soldiers as they boarded the truck leaving Cervià, his first stop after Barcelona, and that the soldiers were entrusted to get them to him at the border. At the French crossing, despite his sickness, Machado tried in vain to find his luggage and was profoundly depressed at their loss. It is thought that
among these lost papers in one suitcase was a songbook to Guiomar, which may have been part of a larger manuscript of recent poems. We do not know what writings were in the luggage, and there is little hope that the bags will turn up on some Spanish farm.
The scene of the voyage to the border was further described to me by Navarro Tomás:
Machado sat opposite me in the crowded vehicle. We were all so numbed from the last sleepless nights and the most painful conditions of our traveling that none of us was able to utter a coherent sentence. During the trip, Machado sat with his head lowered, lost in deep reflection and a tremendous sadness. Occasionally, he mumbled a word to his brother José, who sat crammed next to him in the ambulance. When we reached the border at Port Bou, it was already night, cold, and raining heavily. The French police were preventing a crossing of the border between Port Bou and Cerbère. The accumulation of people and vehicles was so great that we had to get down from the ambulance and walk half a mile by foot, in the rain, with hordes of terrified women and children, until we reached the immigration office. There Machado walked with difficulty. I had to help him, supporting his arm.
I spoke to the chief customs officer and explained to him who Machado was, that he was sick, and that if he had to walk any farther he would certainly die on the way.
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Fortunately, the officer remembered his name from a Spanish textbook when he was studying the Spanish language, and was a man of understanding. He offered his private car to take Machado and his family to Cerbère.
I was the only one who had any negotiable money, fifty prewar francs from a recent trip. With this money the writer Corpus Barga and I could go by train from Cerbère to Perpignan in search of financial resources for our immediate needs. Corpus Barga received a sum of money from a friend in Perpignan and returned to
Cebère to share this among his companions. With this same help I was able to go to Paris to seek aid from the Spanish embassy. The ambassador, Dr. Marcelino Pascua, with great urgency, cabled money to Machado at Collioure, so that, contrary to some reports, it can be said that Machado was not in financial straits during the last weeks of his life in France.
In the vehicle for most of the trip Machado held his mother on his lap. She was in her late eighties, frail, and confused. The chaotic moment of reaching the border is also described by Corpus Barga, who had found the Machados at the crossing point: “Antonio, ever resigned and silent, contemplated his mother with her fine white hair stuck to her temples by the rain that slid down her beautiful face like a bright veil of tears,”
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Immediately after the frontier, the road curved high to the slope of Balitres and down to the French coastal village of Cerbère, where the family spent the first night in France in winter cold and rain in an abandoned railroad car left on a dead rail. There Don Antonio, already asthmatic, caught cold, a bronchitis from which he was not to recover. The next morning, the 28th of January, accompanied by Barga, they took the train to Collioure.
“Antonio Machado arrived at Collioure on January 29, 1939, drenched by a torrential rain. He had walked a long way and was so exhausted that he was obliged to take a taxi simply to cross the square and
reach the hotel.”
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José helped his brother make it to the Bougnol-Quintana Hotel, and Corpus Barga carried their mother in his arms. She weighed not more than a little girl. She kept asking, “Will we soon get to Sevilla?”
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They were treated very well in the hotel, given hot food and drinks, and for the first time since they left Barcelona, a week earlier, they slept in a bed.
Most of the days that followed, Machado spent in his room, writing letters and gazing out of the window. As for meals downstairs, the family sat alone in a corner, almost hidden; in the first days the two brothers never came to eat at the same time. When questioned it came out they had only one clean shirt between them and they were taking turns wearing it for meals. They had arrived with no French money, only worthless Spanish currency. Later funds were to come from the Republican embassy, permitting them to buy cigarettes and writing material, and to take care of the hotel. Antonio’s French friends also worried about Antonio’s clothes, which were torn and shabby after the escape from Spain. If he died, how could he be buried in a decent suit?
Antonio was able to go out on one occasion for a longer walk down to the beach of this Mediterranean village. Three decades earlier in Collioure, in the winter of 1909-10, George Braque and his compatriot Picasso invented cubism, and much later Matisse went there to paint and find his cutout sun. Most of Antonio’s short walks were up the narrow alley by the hotel, around the cemetery, and back to the Hotel Quintana, sometimes stopping at a store to chat in his good French with new acquaintances. In his memoirs José draws a sensitive and lovely picture of Machado and the sea:
A few days before his death and in his infinite love for nature, he told me before the mirror, while he tried in vain to straighten out his unruly hair, “Let’s look at the sea.”
This was his first and last outing. We set out for the beach. There we sat down on one of the boats that was resting on the sand.
The noon sun gave almost no heat. It was at that unique moment when one might say that his body buried its shadow under his feet.
It was windy, but he took off his hat that he fastened with one hand to his knee while his other hand rested, in its own way, on his cane. So he remained absorbed, silent, before the constant coming and going of the waves, untiring, stirring as under a curse that would never let it rest. After a long while of contemplation, he told me, pointing to one of the small humble houses of the fishermen, “If I could only live there behind one of those windows, freed at last from worry.” Then he got up with a great effort and, walking laboriously over the slipping sand in which his feet were almost completely sinking, we went back in the most profound silence.
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In addition to the desolation of many losses—of Spain, his last manuscripts, and his health—Antonio spoke often of missing his two young nieces who had been evacuated, like many children, to parts of Russia. It was impossible to contact them. He called them
las rosas del jardín
—the roses of the garden.
The poet’s health did not improve. Very early one morning on the 18th of February, his sister-in-law Matea Machado noticed that Antonio had taken a turn for the worse. His chest was completely congested. They called for the doctor, who came, gave him medicines, but could not help him.
The poet was gravely sick. He agonized for four days. At times he was saying, “
Adiós, madre; adiós, madre!
” Next to him on her cot his mother had fallen into a coma. On the evening of February 21, Matea used a bottle of champagne, given to them by the hotel landlady, Madame Quintana, to wet their lips. Antonio was still conscious and thanked her with a smile. He fell into a coma, and in his last moments he was saying in a low, monotonous voice, “
Merci, madame; merci madame.
” He died on February 22 at half-past three in the afternoon. In the deathbed
photograph taken of the poet in his iron-frame bed in his room at Hotel Bougnol-Quintana, Machado is covered with the Republican flag. The eyes are not closed. They are gazing as they always were.
Antonio Machado was buried the next day in the local Collioure cemetery. Madame Quintana provided the plot. The morning of the funeral, José sent a telegram to the Spanish Embassy in Paris announcing the death of the poet. The funeral was simple. A great many Spaniards in Collioure came. The coffin, covered with the tricolor flag of the Republic, was carried by officers of the Spanish army to the grave.
On February 25, his mother died. Antonio Machado and his mother, Ana Ruiz Hernández, remain at Collioure today, in the same tomb.
And when the day for my final trip arrives,
and the ship, never to return, is set to leave,
you will find me on board with scant supplies,
and almost naked like the children of the sea.
(“Portrait”)
The last lines from Machado’s pen were found by his brother José, a few days after the poet’s death, scrawled on a scrap of paper in his overcoat.
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These blue days and this sun of childhood.
Antonio Machado’s life ended dramatically. But while his exile, suffering, and extinction represented the body and entombed spirit of Spain perfectly and clearly, his end—alone in Collioure, the sick wet man, almost naked as he disappeared from his Spanish life—was not the whole Machado. His last close Spanish companion, Tomás Navarro Tomás, told me memorably, “
La verdadera biografía de Antonio Machado queda en su
poesía”: The true biography of Antonio Machado resides in his
poetry
.”
We cannot know what poems Machado wrote between 1937 and his death in February 1939; they have disappeared in the rain. Among his best poems are those last sonnets and
coplas
of succinct pathos, with colors of stone and flower, which he composed at the start of the civil war. They are
a simple culmination of his poetic life. Yet having said this, one might also say that his poetic life is contained in the first poem with which he chose to begin his
Solitudes,
“The Voyager,” an extraordinary biography of foretelling, one projected on a disappeared brother or himself, which ends,
The grave portrait on the wall is still
flashing light. We are rambling.
In the gloom of the den pounds
the clock’s ticktock. None of us talks.
In the end Don Antonio is always and never the paradoxical philosopher; meaning, he alternates between being the poet who speaks through images, eschewing philosophical abstractions, and the philosopher who loves to play with contradictory ideas in cunning wisdom-verse. He can justify his blatant contradictions, just as Whitman did, when he asserts, “I am never closer to thinking one thing than when I have written the opposite.”
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It is strange, the Andalusian garden of whimsy and contradictions that was Machado. He was famous for his public silences, for being a man of a few plain, deep words, as the early Darío elegy paints him and as do countless pious portraits of the poet; yet there are even more personal reminiscences that reveal a talkative, humorous Sevillano, a grand raconteur, who exalted conversation second only to poetry, which often, from Machado, seems to be overheard thought or conversation. Yet Machado’s is the quieter verse of solitudes, for he knows that words are just subjective sounds bound in letters, and cannot be counted on for what they seem to record. Certainly, truth like the lover is absent. In fact his poems aspire to wordlessness, to “silent paintings” as the Chinese call Wang Wei’s poems—or to
la música callada
(the music of a silence), a phrase from San Juan de la Cruz.
Antonio Machado was a philosopher who spoofed, who was grave, who laughed at the failure of his speech, used words to prove that the events of the mind are always beyond the frailty of language and that attempts to impose absolutes of truth upon elusive consciousness are laughable, pompous nonsense. He loved to make rich, insightful points of linguistic failure. Machado’s gods—among them Cervantes—always saved him from truth and other falsehoods.
A relativist sworn to eternal movement, he grins melancholically at conceptual phrases (including his own) that others would endow with fixed attributes. It is enough for him to give you, at an indeterminate hour of an endless afternoon, a stork on a tower, or a violet mountain with perhaps its geographical name—but no verb or event.
He is satisfied with speaking through landscape or saying a few tart aphorisms.
Like the Prague poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who shared with him his year of birth in 1875, Machado was a poet of solitude and landscape. He described in stark color planes (never in the saturated colors of the early Stevens) the landscapes of monastic Castilla and fertile Andalucía. Like the Chinese, he was a poet of fantastic and acute observation, of departure and absent love seen through objects and the places he knew. He saw them through a metaphysical lens of open-eyed dream. What he saw, by extension, was also the soul of Spain made personal and particular. More important, those outer landscapes of Spain’s soul were also the silent fiery lands of his solitude.
He communicated an image of his being with minimum means and minimum loss. Like Frost’s genius of a few monosyllabic sentences to say the land, Machado used few words, with extraordinary subtlety in their plain utterance. There is a huge gallery of possibility in the right placement of words in a line, and in each case he labored until no labor showed and the word was sonorously invisible. To his willing reader he bequeathed with unlimited generosity and modesty an intimate picture of an interior landscape. And
Antonio el Bueno
remains a lucent world. He inhabits a sky below the earth where the poet, filled with solitary sky, walks alone amid his remembered streets and far mountains.
