In the Night of Time (6 page)

 

But Moreno Villa didn't like his own sarcasm, his inclination toward bitterness; he distrusted lucidity that was born of resentment. As for his own integrity, what merit did it have if it had never been tested by temptation? No diva of the theater had asked him to write a play to the measure of her own success, as Lola Membrives or Margarita Xirgú had done with Lorca; not one of them had ever been interested in reciting his poems, like that irritating Berta Singermann, who filled theaters by grimacing and shouting in a Buenos Aires accent the verses of Antonio Machado, or Lorca, or Juan Ramón Jiménez. And he never would be in a position to turn down a government job offer and dedicate himself body and soul to his writing. No one was going to consider him for the post of general secretary of the Summer University in Santander, as they had with Pedro Salinas, who complained so much about the lack of quiet and time but looked so pleased with himself in photographs of official engagements. It isn't at all difficult for me to imagine him, José Moreno Villa, used to the benevolent hospitality of the Student Residence, a man close to fifty, often no more than a secondary guest in photographs of other, more important people, always discreet, elusive, formal, at times not even identified by name, unrecognized, without the open smile or arrogant pose the others display as if their place in posterity could be taken for granted. He isn't young and doesn't dress as if he were, doesn't have the air of a literary figure or professor but rather of what he actually does for a living: a functionary in a certain position, not a clerk but not a high-ranking employee either, perhaps an attorney or a person of some means in a provincial capital who doesn't attend Mass or hide his Republican sympathies but would never go out without a tie and hat; a man who looked older than he was long before his hair turned gray, who at the age of forty-eight supposes with a mixture of melancholy and relief that no great changes in his life await him.

 

The footsteps had taken him out of his self-absorption—profound and at the same time bare of reflection and almost of memory, filled above all with indolence and something else not very different from it, the attentive contemplation of a small canvas where he'd sketched a few tenuous lines in charcoal, and a bowl of seasonal fruit brought up at midday from the Residence dining room: a quince, a pomegranate, an apple, a bunch of grapes. He'd cleared away some papers and books from the table so the clean forms would stand out. He'd been observing the slow descent of light from the window as it made the volumes look denser, their shadows accentuated, every color slightly muted. The red of the pomegranate turned the color of polished leather; the dusty gold of the quince shone with greater intensity as the twilight enveloped the space, no longer reflecting light but radiating it; light slid over the apple as if it were a ball of oiled wood, yet it acquired a degree of moist density when it touched the skin of the grapes. Perhaps the grapes were too sensual, too tactile for the purpose he'd just begun to anticipate, half closing his eyes. They'd have to be ascetic grapes like those of Juan Gris or Sánchez Cotán, carved in a single visual volume, without that slightly sticky suggestion accentuated by the ripe afternoon sun, a Sorolla sun, sifted with the same soft dust that the rough surface of the quince left on his fingers, in his nostrils.

Under the fruit bowl was a page from the magazine
Estampa:
AN ENCHANTER FROM CAIRO WHO BEWITCHES WOMEN AND PREDICTS THE FUTURE COMES TO MADRID.
The words “Madrid” and “future” were as spellbinding as the forms of the fruits. Each time he prepared to paint something, there was a moment of revelation and another of discouragement, just as when the first line of a poem appeared unexpectedly in his mind. How can one take the next step in the empty space that is a blank sheet of paper or canvas? Perhaps the very texture, the resistance or softness of the paper, could indicate a way. He could go on and realize he'd ruined the attempt: the second verse was forced, not worthy of the sudden illumination of the first, a useless blot on that grand expanse of paper. The revelation seemed to be lost without his knowing how to recapture it; the feeling of failure stayed with him, and to begin work it was necessary, if not to conquer it, at least to resist it, to take the first steps as if he didn't feel its leaden weight. But in everything he'd undertaken, the same thing occurred: an easy enthusiasm, then the start of fatigue, and finally a reluctance he couldn't always overcome. In the long run, he was a Sunday painter. And if painting demanded such great mental effort and skill, why, instead of putting all his heart and talent into it, did he dissipate his already limited energies writing poetry, where he was not even granted the absolution of manual labor, the certainty of an acceptable degree of technical command? In the heat of the work his unwillingness dissipated, but the next day he had to begin again, and nothing guaranteed that the enthusiasm of the day before would still be there. Work he'd already completed was useless: each beginning was a new point of departure, and the canvas or sheet of paper before which he was transfixed and disheartened remained emptier than ever. A first line, promising but very uncertain, a horizontal that could be a table on which the fruit bowl rested or an imagined distant ocean beyond his Madrid window. An imminent insight disappeared without a trace into pure dejection.

 

He saw himself as a man without ambition who'd desired too many disparate things. Ambition is needed to fulfill desires; one can't allow incredulity and reluctance to gnaw inside. Others knew how to concentrate their energies. He dissipated his, going from one task to another like a traveler who spends no more than a few days in any city and eventually grows tired of wandering. Others younger than he had approached him, wanting to learn from his experience, and not long afterward left him behind with no thanks for what they owed him: the example of his painting, his knowledge of modern art, and his poetry, innovative before anyone else's, whose unacknowledged imprint was so evident in those who now shone much brighter than he. He'd have preferred none of that to matter to him: his own resentment irritated him more than the success of others, slightly bitter to him even when he considered it deserved. It saddened him not to be on a level with the best in himself, not to be content with the noble stoicism of the personage he imagined, another Moreno Villa, just as disillusioned but with a much more serene heart, an obscure poet, a painter as removed from fame as Sánchez Cotán, whom he admired so much and who had spent his life completing recondite masterpieces in his Carthusian cell, or like Juan Gris, persisting in his rigorous art in spite of poverty, in spite of the clamor of Picasso's obscene triumph.

Without intending to, he'd remained alone. Continuing to live in the Residence, in spite of his age and long after his old friends had moved on, accentuated his sense of anachronism, of dislocation. On the other hand, it was all he desired, and he couldn't imagine himself living anywhere else. In one room he had his studio, in another his bedroom, with the few pieces of furniture, family heirlooms, he'd brought from Málaga. He'd given his share of the family inheritance to his unmarried sisters, who needed it more than he did. He thought it immoral to accumulate more than was necessary, which for him was like talking or gesticulating too much, or showing signs of excessive enthusiasm or suffering, or dressing in a way that would attract attention. A line of Antonio Machado's came to mind:
He who lets go keeps the most, and he who has lived, lives.
Nothing belonged to him more than the things he detached himself from; living was a suspended state in which distant things and lost presences counted most (the loud laughter of the young American woman he called Jacinta in the poems he dedicated to her, poems in which her name is repeated like a spell; her tumultuous red hair). He liked the position of archivist that earned him a living: the work schedule was in no way oppressive, and it gave a solid form to his days, saving him from the certain dangers of boredom and insecurity. He frequented the common areas of the Residence very little, and the duties assigned him were limited. Organizing some conferences, escorting illustrious visitors. He could spend entire afternoons in his room, with all the luxury of solitude and time stretching before him, and the absolution of having worked with dedication and profit, reading, ensconced in the leather armchair already worn by the friction of the nape of his father's neck, his father's arms, or imagining or sketching a still life, or simply looking out the window at the courtyard with its brick walls and the oleander Juan Ramón Jiménez had planted—the green of the leaves as ascetic as the faded red of the bricks—or listening with an attentive ear and half-closed eyes to the sounds of the city, muffled, like sfumato in a drawing, by their distance from the hill where the Residence was located, and lacking the wounding indifference of the streets. Car horns, streetcar bells, the shouts of street vendors, the monotonous chants of blind beggars, paso dobles at bullfights, drums and trumpets at military parades, the rabble's music at festivals and circuses, church bells, the uproar of workers' demonstrations, gunshots at riots, train whistles, all ascended to his open window, confused as in the polychromatic haze of a Ravel orchestration, against which the close, sharp sound of the soccer players' shouts and the referees' whistles on the athletic fields and the bleating of a flock of sheep grazing in a nearby meadow stood out clearly. If he paid a great deal of attention he could hear the wind in the poplars and almost make out the flow of water in the irrigation ditch that ran beside the Residence and on to the orchards on the other side of the Castellana. He was in Madrid and in the countryside, on the boundary where the city ended. He couldn't imagine living anywhere else (little did he know that in less than a year he'd leave Madrid and Spain, never to return). His immobility accentuated the diaspora of the others, those who'd known how to concentrate on a single purpose, desire it with an intensity that perhaps was enough to make its achievement inevitable. Now Lorca was a successful author who had multiple premieres in Barcelona and Buenos Aires and with no misgivings told everyone he was earning a great deal of money, pleased with a rather puerile shamelessness at the magnitude of his triumph, as if he were still a boy, as if he weren't close to forty, wearing those loud shirts that made so strong a contrast with his flat, no-necked peasant's head, as if he didn't notice how other people looked at him, the physical displeasure with which they moved away from him. Buñuel had turned into a film producer; he had an ostentatious automobile and received visitors smoking a cigar, his feet crossed on the enormous desk in his office on the highest floor of a new building on the Gran Vía. Success favored or forgave poor memory: seeing posters on the façades of movie houses for the films made by Buñuel about Andalusian flamenco dancers or Aragonese rustics with tight sashes and painted eyes, Moreno Villa recalled the malevolence with which, not long ago, he'd heard Buñuel ridicule Lorca for his Gypsy ballads. Salinas accumulated professorships, positions, conferences, official posts, even mistresses, according to the talk in Madrid; Alberti and María Teresa León took a trip to Russia, paid for with money from the Republic, and on their return had their pictures taken on the deck of their ship like two film stars on a world tour, each raising a clenched fist, she wrapped in furs, blond, wearing a good deal of lipstick, like a Soviet Jean Harlow with the face of a big Spanish doll. Bergamín, once so ascetic, had obtained his own official car immediately, before anyone else. One morning during the first month of the Republic—which, after a little more than four years now, seemed so distant—Moreno Villa was walking absent-mindedly under the trees on the Paseo de Recoletos when an enormous black car stopped beside him, the horn sounding hoarsely. The back door opened and inside sat Bergamín, sporting a tailcoat, puffing a cigarette, inviting him in with a big smile. Dalí would soon be as rich and despotic as Picasso: never again would he send him, Moreno Villa, a postcard filled with declarations of admiration and gratitude and spelling mistakes, and Dalí would never say his name when he mentioned the teachers from whom he'd learned, or tell who'd been the first to show him photographs of the new German portraits that with astonishing technique and in a fully modern manner recaptured the realism of Holbein. Lorca would never recognize his debt to him either, but he'd been the first to juxtapose avant-garde poetic expression and the meter of popular ballads, he who had long ago traveled to New York and conceived of a poetry and prose that corresponded to the city's agitation, the noise of elevated trains and the discordant sounds of jazz bands. In fact, Lorca had the nerve to give a reading in the Residence of poems and prose impressions of New York, illustrating it with musical recordings and slides, and not to mention Moreno Villa, sitting in the first row, once as an early pioneer.

 

The celebrity of others made him invisible; better to erase his existence so his shadow would not be projected in a revealing way onto the triumphal faces of those who owed him so much. If not greatness, then retirement. Writing verses with a passion that was sabotaged by his own apathy to things, knowing that for some reason they would repel success. Investigating things in archives no one had visited for centuries, the lives of dwarves and buffoons in the gloomy courts of Felipe IV and Carlos II. Not thinking about all the work completed, or the dubious future of his painting, or its probable distance from a style he didn't care about but that pained him like an insult to all the years he'd devoted to painting with no recognition. Not imagining oneself a painter: limiting one's expectations, the field of vision. Concentrating on the relatively simple but still inexhaustible problem of representing on a small canvas that bowl with a few pieces of fruit. But what if he really deserved the mediocre place where he'd been relegated? Perhaps, after all, it wasn't that Lorca had silenced the debt he owed him but simply hadn't read his poems about New York and the book of prose pieces about the city written on his return trip and then published serially in
El Sol,
to unanimous indifference. (In Madrid there didn't seem to be much interest in the outside world: he went to the café the day following his return from New York, excited by all the stories he had to tell, and his friends received him as if he hadn't been away and didn't ask a single question.) What if he'd become old and was being poisoned by what he'd always disliked most, resentment? Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was actually more accomplished, was infected by an ignoble bitterness, an obsessive mean-spiritedness fed by any small slight, imagined or real, by each scintilla of recognition not dedicated to him, muddied water that debased his luminous talent. How sordid it would be if one lacked not only talent but nobility as well and allowed oneself to be hopelessly intoxicated by an aging man's rancor toward those who are younger, by the affront of feeling offended by the jealously observed good fortune of others who didn't even notice him, who insulted him by achieving with no apparent effort what had been denied to him, when he was the more deserving. But did he really want to be like Lorca, his success hovering between folklore and bullfights, his fondness for the parties of diplomats and duchesses? Hadn't he told himself at some point that his secret models were Antonio Machado and Juan Gris? He didn't imagine Juan Gris as resentful over Picasso's triumph, aggrieved by his obscene energy, his simian histrionics, filling canvases as quickly as he seduced and abandoned women. But Juan Gris, alone in Paris, not merely overshadowed but erased by the other and ill with tuberculosis, probably had possessed a certainty in the depths of his soul that he, Moreno Villa, was lacking, had obeyed a single passion, had known how, like an ascetic or a mystic, to strip away all the worldly comforts he'd never be able to renounce no matter how modest: his functionary's secure salary, his two adjoining rooms in the Residence, his well-cut suits, his English cigarettes. It wasn't true—he hadn't withdrawn from the world. The insight he'd been so close to having while looking at the bowl of autumn fruit and the seductive, vulgar typography of the illustrated magazine would never come simply because he couldn't sustain the required intensity of observation, the state of alertness that would have sharpened his eye and guided his hand on the blank sheet of paper. Someone was coming down the hall, walking with an almost violent determination, then knocking on his door. No matter how short the anticipated visit, he knew he wouldn't be able to recapture that moment of being on the verge of enlightenment.