Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) (5 page)

Once again, with the strategy of Chinese aesthetics, Machado uses the condition of parallel drama in nature to express his own passion. We
see the two faces of Machado the lover, and they are in harmonious contradiction to each other. One spirited and fanciful face appears in his brief, epigrammatic lyrics of love as self-conscious illusion; the other, sensual face appears in fuller poems, where love is total eros, an earthly creation of a real woman with kissable lips and breasts, with whom he longs to share a real bed, in a single, burning night. In the first the lover speaks conceptually, wistfully, without passion. We see the Andalusian laughing proverbially at his self-deceptions. Machado distances himself from this philosopher by creating a third-person narrator to speak his futile generalizations:

When Machado speaks, or as the title of the sequence of poems, “Canciones a Guiomar” (“Songs to Guiomar”) suggests, when he
sings
to his lover, then he is wholly poet and the woman, attainable or not, is wholly woman:

In Segovia, after the publication in 1924 of the first edition of
Nuevas canciones (New Songs),
which are color-patches of memories of other places, largely in succinct, popular-song prosody, Machado assumes the task of two imaginary poet-philosophers: Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena. Independently of Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese inventor of poet-voices with their own names and biographies, Machado created a gallery of fourteen poets—including one named Antonio Machado—to comment on the world and on himself. He continued using these names, principally Abel Martin and Juan de Mairena, for his poetry and prose. Only after 1936, at the outbreak of civil war, did the poet publish poems that were not through the intermediary of his apocryphal poets, but he still used these
heterónimas
for his essays. During that decade, when his poems were only to be found mixed in with prose in the apocryphal songbooks of Martin and Mairena, many of the songs were sonnets.

In the last years of his life, Machado turned to the sonnet form. There was a struggle going on in Machado between his aversion to certain tendencies in Spanish poetry, to superficial Spanish
modernismo
that he links with the sonnets of Pierre de Ronsard, Rubén Darío, and even his brother, the modernist Manuel Machado, and to his attraction to the sonnet form. He is so taken by the sonnet that he even imitates Dante and begins one sonnet with Dante’s
Nel mezzo del cammin,
the first line
oí Inferno.
The sonnet won out, for he was to use the form in diverse ways in all his later collections. Typical of his whimsical dogmatism, in his posthumous
Los complementarios
he denounces the form for modern times as a used-up trinket, conceding that his brother Manuel Machado wrote some good ones. The poet is so elusive (and confounding) that one cannot be sure whether it is Machado or a prefatory resonance of one of his later voices speaking; that is, Abel Martin or Juan de Mairena. Clearly, Machado feasts in this confounding of personae:

This mild diatribe dates from, perhaps, 1916, while he is still in Baeza. Soon he will write the sonnets in which he is “glossing Ronsard,” dreaming of Dante invoking hell, light, nightmare, and vision. In the subsequent sequences, Heracleitus is for Machado what he is for Borges: an obsession. We know that Machado and Borges, both sworn to Heraclitean relativism, will never persuade with absolutes. And when they inch toward a static absolute truth, we note their skeptical grins. Machado tell us absolutely that absolute truth is impossible. Or more plainly, truth is impossible:

We can guess what he really has in mind when he contrasts Pedro Calderón de la Barca with the flow of things and consciousness in Heracleitus, saying, “The whole charm of Calderón’s sonnet—if it has any—rests on its syllogistic correctness. The poetry here does not sing, it reasons, discourses about certain definitions. It is—as all or almost all our baroque literature—left-over scholasticism”
⁸
. So while Don Antonio condemns the baroque sonnet for its plodding, heavy ways, he also disproves his disapproval of the form by writing lyrical sonnets with the power of song. Yes, his sonnets sing. His model is not, however, popular Spanish song but Dante, and Shakespeare, whom he translated. In his later poems, he exchanges the alexandrine of medieval verse and didactic elegy—that dominate
Fields of Castilla
—for the shorter eleven-syllable sonnet line. The sonnet was Machado’s compromise between the alexandrine and the octosyllabic ballad. Endowing it with his epigrammatic simplicity, Machado made of the sonnet a complete vehicle for his final poetic expression, using it in sequences for his fields of Spain, his woman in open-eyed dream, and his fields of war.

On the day the Second Spanish Republic was declared in 1931, Machado and his students in Segovia climbed to the roof of the city hall to raise the tricolor Republican flag. He transferred soon afterward to a newly opened school, El Instituto Calderón de la Barca in Madrid. There must have been some witty god laughing at Machado, to have appointed the poet a professor in a Madrid public high school named after Calderón de la Barca, the masterful Spanish playwright of
La vida es sueño
(
Life Is a Dream
), of the wondrous, allegorical auto-sacramental,
El gran teatro del mundo
(
The Great Theater of the World
), and the aforementioned author of baroque sonnets that Machado considered the epitome of foolish excess.

In the Madrid of 1931 to the war in 1936, Antonio became a more successful man of letters and continued collaborating with Manuel in their not overly significant but very popular plays. He lived with José, his younger brother, the painter, and his family. As for Guiomar, his muse or maybe muses, she too was in Madrid, the secret woman, real, invented, absent, and desired.

Now at last truly back in Madrid and its literary life, Machado retained qualities of the loner, keeping to his own older
tertulia
(a café literary group), which had its own café, the Várela on calle Preciados, where he might chat with Ricardo Baroja or the actor Ricardo Calvo. Sometimes Miguel de Unamuno would stop by. His
tertulia
was separate from that of the younger poets associated with the popular Generation of 1927. But Machado was not aloof. Indeed, more than being simply friendly to these wonderful poets—to Jorge Guillen, Pedro Salinas, Vicente Aleixandre, Rafael Alberti, and Lorca—Machado was warm and supportive in every way. But in his poetry, he did not share their avant-garde premises and prosodies. He didn’t care for the baroque, or for the cold metals and obscure and semi-surreal imagery of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora, whom the poets of the ’27 movement held in great favor. In this regard, four years before Machado ‘s return to Madrid, Federico García Lorca gave a seminal lecture in Granada on Góngora, in 1927, at a symposium to celebrate the tricentennial of Góngora’s death in 1627. That gathering of scholars and poets in Granada in 1927 was the symbolic genesis of the Generation of 1927.

In the end, what was there between Antonio Machado and the younger poets? A porous boundary. Literary categories and influences are never as neat and simple as the academy might wish them to be. Indeed, there was abundant crossover of friendship and aesthetic within that extraordinary grouping of Spanish poets who were to dominate the
poetry of Spain in the twentieth century. The instance of Machado and Lorca is telling and complex. In “A Summer Night” Antonio writes:

which recalls Lorca making the moon into a musical instrument, a tambourine for his gypsy girl to play:

Whether influence, affinity, or mere coincidence, Machado and Lorca shared a fantastic playfulness in domesticating the moon and bringing her down to earth for a girl to use as a fan or Castanet. Both poets equally esteemed popular Andalusian song and its mischievous joy in paradox. But beyond these possibilities of common sources, national or foreign, there were deeper labyrinths of transfer. Lorca adored Machado’s poetry. He would recite Machado’s short-story-length ballad, “The Land of Alvargonzález” at gatherings, and surely Machado’s revolutionary use of the ballad to capture the Castilian peasant affected the form and violent scene of Lorca’s
Gypsy Ballads.
And we may also recall that in Lorca’s last poetic drama,
The House of Bernalda Alba,
the setting is no longer the gypsy south but, for whatever reason, peasant Castilla, the precincts of Machado’s rebirth.

But the thread of confidence and art went both ways. The older poet found in the poetry of his fellow Andalusian a colorful surrealism and sensuality. Using elements of the surreal, Machado took his own fantastic dream imagery one step further. Lorcan imagery and intense eroticism glow in Machado’s many love poems to Guiomar. In fact, Lorca’s mark cuts even deeper in the poems to Guiomar than in “The Crime Was in Granada,” Antonio Machado’s later elegy to the assassinated poet, where he consciously uses Lorca’s gypsy images to honor and mourn the death of the fabled poet of Granada.

When the Spanish Civil War began on July 18, 1936, Machado was in Madrid. He tried to enlist in the Republican army, but he was too old
and, moreover, not in very good health. Friends, particularly the poet Rafael Alberti, persuaded him to be evacuated to Valencia, and in November 1936 he went together with his mother, his brother José, and José’s wife and children to Rocafort, a small village twenty minutes from the city of Valencia. There he wrote poems about the luxuriant nature, about the orchards and fields, which provoked other scenes of childhood in Andalucía. There he also wrote his “Poesías de la guerra” (“Poems of the War”).

In April 1938 Machado followed the government from Valencia to Barcelona. Louis MacNeice relates that he saw Machado during those last days in Barcelona, at a time when the Spanish poet was expending all his energy toward trying to save the remnants of the tormented Spanish Republic. He wrote regularly for
Hora de España
and
La Vanguardia
of Barcelona. Ever since the exodus from Madrid, he had suffered from arterial sclerosis and a heart ailment, which now caused a swelling in his feet and compelled him to walk with a cane. Though in frail health, he was chain-smoking and, as MacNeice notes in his
Autumn Journal
(1939), he was scarcely aware that his clothes were covered with ashes fallen from his cigarettes. But his health problems and the gloom of war only made him write more intensively in essays and war journalism. (We do not know how much unpublished poetry was lost.) And he was in close touch with many dear literary friends who had taken refuge in this part of Spain, which had not yet been overrun by the Nationalist troops.

On January 22, three days ahead of the incoming Franco army, Machado and his family left Barcelona for the border in a government vehicle that carried other writers and scholars. His close friend Tomás
Navarro Tomás, the Spanish linguist and director of the National Library, had been with him in those days, but Navarro Tomás delayed his flight, finally leaving with his wife on the day that Barcelona fell. Machado’s vehicle, with his mother, his brother, and his brother’s wife, Matea Mondero de Machado, left Barcelona near eleven in the evening. On a slow, painful trip they reached Cervià de Ter, ten kilometers north of Gerona, where they remained until the 26th, exhausted, with little food, sleeping on a winter floor. It was in leaving Cervià that Antonio was obliged to leave behind most of their luggage, including the suitcase that contained his unpublished writings of the last years. The convoy went on, stopping at a farmhouse at Mas Faixà, outside Figueras, twenty miles from the frontier. There, eighteen or twenty well-known Spanish intellectuals—including Navarro Tomás who had by now caught up with the Machados— spent their last night in Spain. On January 27, in the rain they boarded a military truck-ambulance and headed for the French border. Another passenger in the crowded vehicle was Juan Roura-Parella, who related that in the cold and rain of that January evening, he witnessed the noblest action he remembered in his life: