nena

Si has visto a cualquier hombre desnudo
me has visto a mi.
Te estoy mirando desde todos los sitios sin que me lloren los ojos
pero toda mi carne apabullada llora sin hacer ruido.
Y todo el dolor de los excluidos, de los vagabundos, de los borrachos,
de los tristes, te está amando, te está pidiendo el próximo baile
desde mis heridas, heridas de puñetazos, navajas y jeringuillas.
En el rincón del olvido crujen los postigos de aquella vieja puerta
por donde la muerte aparece para arrebatarnos lo último
que nos queda, la última pieza de amor pegada al hueso,
el último trozo de beso partido.
Si has visto a cualquier hombre desnudo y sanguinoliento
en una esquina del invierno atroz,
como a cualquier pobre cristo inútil,
me has visto a mi, al luchador caído,
la sombra de Roy Orbison con ojos sin pupílas,
espectral al fondo umbroso de los enormes autobúses que cruzan
la asesina noche de Texas. Si has visto a cualquier hombre desnudo,
carne de cárcel, ahíto de terror y de alcohol,
enamorado como una niña,
pidiendote, Oh dama, Oh dama inexistente, sombra apenas
de aquella con quien realmente soñaba, pobre mujer cuya sangre se ha ido
evaporando del mundo con la lluvia, Oh dama eterna, dama mortal,
que bailes conmigo el último baile, sobre la nieve dura, en el círculo
de luz rota del Boulevard Palmerston, donde los pielesrrojas
asqueados de la realidad vomitan la vida y se alzan como águilas
hacia la luna de los antaños, ,la luna de estaño intemporal...
Oh, dama sin alma de mis amores inmensos,
paloma del miedo, patatita rugosa:
si has visto a un hombre cualquiera de verdad desnudo
partido y terrible, ven a bailar conmigo,
me has visto a mi. Ven a bailar
el último triste baile sobre las hojas de las navajas.

The Prophet

Who whisper in the ears of the vagabond
make him speak in voices not his own,
languages he himself would never comprehend,
words come out from the dead, after so long?

Fool, who from hamlet to hamlet sways along,
for the animal mirth and mockery of the lot,
a stranger always, and despised by all,
yet the words he speaks, though not his own,
make us fear the wrath of our displeased god.

The hot desert sun has burnt spots
of skin on his half bald skull
and he has wrapped his wounded feet
in wetted linen cloth.
He´s come to tell us how we will die
and how the fire will devour our bones,
our houses tumble, and the wind erase
the last trace of our presence from the land-

Laughing children and little barking dogs
folow him down the road across the fields
of late spring, the red poppies among
the golden wheat like sudden drops of blood,
and by late afternoon they reach the sea
which is serene, blue- turquoise tinged with mauve.

And a child puts forh a skin of wine
stolen from his father´s store,
hands it to the old fool, who drinks it up
gleefully as the dry earth swallous up a rain storm.
He dances now, madly, before the waves.
"Your Lord God might consider to spare you now"
he says "Tell this to your parents, but be sure to point out
utter destruction will befall you all
should there be no wine next time I come round"

And the children laugh loud,
and the dogs bark more,
and the sun begins to set
behind the watery horizon
as it always has done.

The christ

A man approached me on the road
and he did not seem a good man-
his face was caked with earth and blood,
so were his long and browny hands,
and the tunic he wore was torn.
I feared him and escaped from him
and cast him fully out my mind:
I am your christ, your lover true,
the man kept calling from behind-
You called and I have come to you.
But I had thought my lord would come
dressed in true silk and gold brocade,
not in the garb of a homeless man,
beaten by life, and dispossessed.
What would you give me were you to stay
inside my house and I your host?
If you woul let me be with you
I ´d give your money and house away
yet you won´t weep for what you lost.
You´d have no country, race or name
and one snow flake picked of the air
would surely feed us and delight us both.

core

I´ve hung my towels out the window to dry.
It´s what they do where the sun is still alive.

I´ve told the assembly what I did not like-
it´s what they do where people don´t lie.

I´ve put forth my chest to the thrust of the knife-
it´s what they do who do not fear to die.

I´ve wiped the tears off the little child´s face-
it´s what they do who can fend off pain.

I´ve learnt the languages of various birds
it´s what they do, who free themselves.

Eyeless the forest, the river and the sea
and I, alone with eyes to see,
my name, my eyes , my memory
have given all those thing to keep-
that´s what they do, who search to find
infinity.

cathedral

Temples were built
so that a man could walk in them
like an unimposing shadow,
scarcely visible in the dim light of God.
A god of stone, not of water or wind:
a pensive, melancholic, forever alone god.
Temples were built in the image
of the mind of men, full of cold,
secret recesses where the dead rot
eternally inside marble sepulchres.
By the cold god of men were temples built
so that a man could walk through them
in the shadow of his own god´s sorrow.

But a different god sings in the river
and ITS laughter is heard in the woods,
one against another the crystal leaves tinkle
with its wild laughter,
with the cold silks of the snow it descends
and engulfs all in its deathless dream.
This god has made the earth so a creature
could walk through it fully visible in the light,
so all shapes could be seen as they move
knowing freedom, and the spirit
which moves them is the same
that moves the sea and the night around the planet.
This is the god of glee who made the forests
an painted them a myriad hues
for the endless delight of the bird and the child.

element

I have lost my fear.
The sea can take me.
The wet earth can have me.
The desert can burn me and swallow me.
That is what the world is made for,
to destroy and bury
´till, of our having been
and having loved
nothing shall be remembered.
With me will sink
the voices and the gazes
and the beautiful faces
broken in pieces
by the very fury
from which they were created.
And all that will remain:
the sadness of my mind
at not knowing why
I never unsertood them,
their reason for being with me
there.
The sea is vast and sullen.
All that has shape is by the water taken
and in due time only the water rises
to the sun, and nothing is remembered.
A silence such as Noah perceived
after the darkness broke
spirals through the newborn light
and everything outside the corpse
is glad with life.
And clings to breathing.
And to the nearness of another form:
a crazy wish for infinity.
But I am not infinite
and the vast sea can take me,
and the wet earth can have me,
the desert can burn me and swallow me.
I have lost my respect for the might of Death.
The hot wind can paly flute
in the holes of my maggot- cleansed dead bones.

el salto

Como quien desde alta atalaya
mira hacia el vasto mar, escucha su rugido
y siente el embíte del viento
que de su seno turbio se levanta
y de súbito comprende
qué es la libertad
y no tiene miedo,
y se deja caer
y unos instántes
vuela,
y otro instante despúes
ha pagado su ansia
de flotar en el aire
con su vida.

Allá en el mareante y ruidoso torbellino
de los rompientes, su cuerpo sin alma ya,
maltrecho, el cadáver sanguinoliento
de un raro pez brillando
palidamente entre los negros farallones,
pleno de sal, ahíto de liquido frío,
el mar hace por hundirle
y él con la sorpresa de un ahogado
que reconoce continuar con el deseo
de los ojos abiertos,
ha oído los gritos
de alguien que le descubre,
horrorizado, desde la arena de la playa cercana.

rumor

Entiendo, pero con sentido
no del cuerpo,
lo que intímas, mezclándo
tu vocecilla al aire
en la hojarasca de oro
del otoñal bosque nuestro .
Nadie la oye,
pero yo la entiendo:
es un sonido músical,
de cristal tintineando lento.
No con carne o memoria
escucho ni recuerdo.
Pero recuerdo como escuché algo
con sentido que hiere, más adentro.
Crée,si precisas, que el fragor de en torno,
la rabia que crépita y rasga el pecho,
es todo lo que hay. Aún verás luego
que de tu ausencia viene llena el agua
lpialazúli, y el medroso oro
de los juncos inquietos
vera el agua tardía.
Yo nada que hacer tengo, pues que nada es verdad
sino que escucho
tu allegarte en la luz,inevitable:
el nebuloso avance de tu aliento.
Criatura mága, apenas a éste lado
de la invisible linea que separa
sueño y vida, la vida ya sin cuerpo.
Ven.

Pensé que sería exacto

librarte del ensueño de tus ojos

que no te dejan ver, y de mis manos

te arrojé al viento, sobre el mar salobre

y tus ojos se unieron a las ondas,

de golpe, y se expandieron

espumosos, saltando, como niños,

a un horizonte azul, risueño, incierto...

_______

I thought it might be exact

to let you out of the revery

of your eyes

which do not let you see:

and I threw you from my hands

to the wind flying over the water

where they met with the waves

suddenly, expanding, foaming,

jumping like children

into an uncertain, smiling, and blue horizon.

A lament for a hat and the female usurper.

To adequately undestand some of the latest and most bothersome changes and regressions in History, it behooves us to comprehend the, it must be said, melancholic, evolution of the hat, and to what extent that which was a symbol for a kind of intrinsically male nostalgia, as well as for a male´s subterranean current of urban violence, lost all respectability and prestige at the hands of the females who, with typical cheekyness and lack of tact, are appropriating it for themselves.
Farewell dear fedoras and borsalinos. You will no longer cast a shadow over the eyes of the wrong-doer, nor of the tough silent guy with a brioken heart.
There is nothing more absurd (the connotation being: sad, pathetic) than a man chasing after his hat. Some Irishman said that, as it seemed to him that it was so highly, or deeply, philosophical that it must be said.
To have lost one´s hat is, clearly to have been defeated in love, to have lost your manhood, to have been made a wreck of a guy. More concretely: to have been emasculated by the female. In which case, a man turns maudlin, cynical, sentimental, and is tortured therafter by the most inexact recollections

the wind

He was dying. He dindn´t care. That he could be saved or helped to live longer, was a notion which only very vaguely came to him. But he wasn´t going to waste one bit of energy trying to hold on to life. On the contrary, he was going to build up inner strength: courage, that is, to cross the pale divide into the other world.
His name was Hiroshige Ando . As a little boy, his father had taking him to the shore of a wide river. It was almost like the sea, that river, since its waves showed an array of colours only the ocean can make. The boy understood that it wasn´t the river who made those colours, but the wind, flying on the water, invisible but adamant. The child wondered if his father could answer the question.
"Is the wind a painter, father?" He asked
"Yes" said his father. "The wind is the painter who paints the water"
"That is why" thought the boy "we can see the water, with all the colours"
He thought about his father: how the dark eyes were beginning to flow away with the the river, into a distance of light and mist.
The boy remembered for the rest of his life the next thing his father said: "The wind paints the river, so we can see its beauty. But Ando, who will paint the wind, which is still invisible to us?" And so Hiroshige Ando spent the rest of his life trying to depict the wind. Although he succeded, his father could not see it, for he had been long dead by the time the wind flowed with the inks out of Ando´s brushes.
So, Hiroshige thought:"who will paint the sorrow of man?"
And, ready to sleep, he threw his brushes into the darkness, and let his old head rest on the snow.

Analiisa

High up in the mountains, there are hundreds of forsaken hamlets where only some old people live. They are made up of small stone houses huddled together under the rocks. These are primitive constructions of scarce beauty, except for their rusticity and density, built as they were to withstand harsh weather through the centuries. Nowadays very few people visit the villages in the mountains, except those who, like myself, have inherited a house from their parents in one of them, and turned it into an inhabitable summer home. In the winter, when the snow engulfs them in cold, impassable whiteness, only the wolves roam around at night, fooled into thinking that there may be food there to steal. These are, in fact, the so called mountains of the wolves, notorious for being the habitat to an exhuberant number of those wild animals. As one descends lower into the valleys, it is frequent to find long stretches of mountain roads lined by wooden fences on whose pointed stakes the skin and heads of dead wolves are hung to dry. Every winter the peasents carry out raids to decimate the clans of predators that sneak into the stables to kill domestic beasts and eat them. It must be said thatt in the old days those raids were not legal, as the wolves begun to become extinct, yet something happened which no one could explain convincingly: suddenly the wolf population grew out of all proportion, as though the animals had decided it was time to make a come back in spite of humans. And so, the raids were legalized, due to the terrible losses inflicted by the hungry wolves on the cattle.
In such remote places, where people feel exposed to the very real dangers of nature, and ecroached upon by a lonelines and a darkness teeming with phantoms, a natural fear invades the dremas of humans and creates monsters which become real and influence day to day life. No one in such lands entirely doubts the reality of the lycanthrope, the bloodsucker, or the so called guaxa, an old vampire who madly seeks to regain her youth by drinking and bathing in the blood of maidens, afer putting them to sleep with a broth made from the deadly berries of the purple nightshade. Moreover, in the great ancient tree trunks found deep in the woods, all kinds of evidence may be found of the presence of witches, the godless creatures who have a whole array of magical ways of achieving whatever they wish, from the seduction of the young, to the revival of the dead, to the preserving of beautiful skin by applying paste manufactured from the mixing of plants full of power. Very few people know that throughout the so called middle ages, it was common for the noble ladies of Europe to keep a priest close by to ensure the safety of the spirit, but also old hags tried in the secrets of witchery, to preserve the paleness of their skin and the vigour of their blood. In the seclusion of their castles, overloking fields and villages from high promontories, the she-wolves clad in Venetian brocade and silken Spanish embroidery around the beautiful lean necks, sometimes commited crimes of blood which makes us modern people shudder. In the mountain country of my ancestors, the tales of cruelties perpetrated by the noble women of old have been trasmitted from mouth to mouth, and are the subject of myriad songs. They are the origin of the myth of the vampire. From the haze of historic memory, their crystaline, tinkling voices charm us and drag us into a sweet stupor, the only outcome of which is death for us, and an engorgement with blood for them.
Of course, the village where my mother´s family was from had the proverbial ruined castle on the top of a windy height, with its very own phantom: a lady who could not rest inside her monumental grave in some undefined dungeon of the once imposing, and now rather ruined, medieval structure. Now, too late indeed, I know that I should never have let my curiosity for the arcane take me there. But my wife also wanted to see the place, fascinated perhaps by its legends The truth is, that behind the desire to travel to such mythical enclaves, there always is a slightly shaming wish to be seduced by the supernatural, to be possessed by the sensuous creatures of nightmare.
The years have passed. I have lived them out in solitude, but often thinking about what happened to us there. I still cannot quite define the thing that destroyed us as a married couple and as individuals. I truly cannot say that it was a natural, perfectly normal distraction that spiritually took me away from my beloved wife, nor can I assert that it was a supernatural force. It seemed like a mixture of the two. It often does when love between two people is attacked from the outside. To this day, I have to say that Analissa was not the beautiful woman she appeared to be when I became fascinated by her, but a kind of age old monster in the form of a desirable woman. This I should have noticed that evening when, entertaining my wife and I with a haunting rendition of an old country song, she smiled at me sweetly, and I saw, in that smile, a million years of earthly evil, and was frightened as well as hypnotized by the force which seemed to draw me to her swarthy, fertile belly, a force which commanded me to create a child inside her, to make the gorgeous female give birth to a creature from my own insides. When the song was finished, she laughed, and it was a laugh as archaic as lust, a primeval sound that arose, gravelly, from the guts of the earth. My wife had met her on one of her walks by the little wood surrounding the local cemetery, and, happy to have encountered a young person in that hamlet where only a few old people seemed to live, had invited her for dinner that day. And Analissa had come, with her strange musical instrument, which truly sounded like the voices of angels. She had eaten our food, and drunk wine without restrain, and then sat down on the floor, legs crossed, the wooden Kantele on her knees, and sung an old sad song from the mountains. It was about a mother who lost her little son as she walked through the snow, pursued by warriors wanting to kill her boy, who in truth was a king. My wife had her eyes fixded on Analiisa, whose head seemed to be resting on her chest now. We had lit a fire in the hearth and its reflections run down along the girl´s amber coloured her, and defined her beautiful profile in the dark of the room. I was mad with love for her. I had noticed, too, that, under her short skirt, she wasn´t wearing anything, and that her legs, bent at the knees, were pointed exactly at me, so I could perceive the shadowy, exposed warmth of her flesh. That night my wife slept well, but I was kept awake by a painful longing, by a dark expectation which made me exceedingly nervous. And it must have been later than four o´clock in the morning when finally what I had been waiting for, appeared. Analiisa was there, in the darkness of the room, standing against the wall in front of me. She was resting on her shoulders, her belly and things, smooth and dark, projected towards me. There was a light in her greenish eyes. It was a wet, mindless, lusty shimmer, which, again , seeemed to have something to do with the earth. I knew then that the young woman had a mostly animal nature, if not somehow demonic. She was entirely, brutally naked. She had flown through the shadows of the night and appeared in the room where my wife innocently slept next to me, in order to seduce me and separate us. I felt I had no power to resist, and truly sad for my wife. But Analiisa´s perfect breasts, filled with sweet warm milk, were savagely magnetic and my mouth was thirsting after them.
When Analiisa did not visit us for a few days, both my wife and I fell into a quiet despair. We would not talk to each other about the coldness that had grown like a poisonous plant between us. In a few days, by the intervention of Analiisa, a perfect stranger, our former love had turned to nothing, and even being near each other felt uncomfortable, as if we had never been intimate. My wife, moreover, was suffering now from a fever which was the direct result of depression, and I thought she would need pills. Yet the idea of getting out of that mountain village and taking her to a doctor was unbearable to me. I didn´t want to be away from the vivinity of Analiisa for a minute, if I could help it.
" The trouble is, I love her" my wife said" I think of her as the best friend I have ever had"
"You are crazy" I said "She has appeared naked in our room more than once, and I could swear I made love to her"
"Did you?"
"I don´t know, I really don´t know"
Who was Analiisa? Where did she live? I asked some old villagers what they knew about her. Predictably, I was told she seemed to live in the castle, in one of the towers that was not in ruins.
I climbed up a steep road overgrown with all kinds of weeds. As I approached the castle I could hear a delicate music that flowed with the wind, again the sound of crystals tinkling against one another. Suddenly I realized that it was the folliage of the woods making that lovely sound, and I felt as if I were walking in my sleep. Now, when she met me in the grea castle hall, Analiisa was fully dressed as the aristocrat she was. Gold, red and turqoise were the coulours of her opulent dress, in the fashion of hundreds of years before, but her long hair flowed over the high, delcately threaded, castillian collar of her dress, with a low cleavage which showed her breasts, which were now very pale in the silvery light which came in through the broken castle walls. "You look much paler than usual, my lady" I must have been dreaming, to speak to her like that.
"Yes, I have not eaten yet today, and hunger makes me look sickly"
When I had sex with her that day, in a large chill chamber, on a cold wide bed, I literally thought I was entangled in the leaves of a behemoth mandrake, whose pulp had the form of a woman, and when I entered her vagina a vegetable shriek came out of her mouth, a shriek more than a thousand years old. Oh, I left her side in horror, and in love, always in love...I knew even then that I couldn´t really escape from her. Her laughter flew after me, that SOUND which seemed to rise out of the deep earth.
But as I run toward the house, worried about my wife, whom I had left alone, I was actually wondering if I had in fact been in bed with anyone at all. The sense that Analiisa wasn´t real after all was beginning to take hold in my befuddled mind. I looked behind me for a second. I saw the ruins of the castle on the hill. Had I really been up there,in those ruins, in a completely furnished chamber, with a woman who had turned into a mandrake as I loved her? I could not say...
But now I looked toward the house, and something much worse met my eye: a great white wolf
had just come out of the buliding. Its snout was soaked in dripping blood. I stood there frozen, looking at it. The animal returned my gaze. And I recognized those eyes. Greenish, sleepy, hypnotic eyes. I smiled at the wolf, could have sworn thait it returned the smile, and it kept trotting toward the woods. Somewhere on the narrow pathway, with a horrific thud, my wife´s heart fell out from betwen its fangs.

a mountain boy and the master visionary

Rabrindanath knew the mountains. Their everchanging moods and the old words whispered by the forest trees and sung by the myriad brooks of his valley in the spring.But it was through the language of birds, which he so naturally understood, that he had learnt the mystery of the beginning. Yet he thought that what he knew was also known by everyone else. So he lived, he told himself, in a world where no one was wrong. When he left the village in the remote mountain valley where he had been born, he undesrstood how mistaken he had been, for he came across people who thought quite unlike him, engaged in violent argumentes about the truth, and even killed or were killed to prove themselves right. The cities of the world, he saw, were full of terror and madness. He remembered the peace of his mountains, and realized that it had been a reflection of the peace within him. Having gone out into the world and experienced its fury, he could no loger hope to regain that peace anywhere. Even if he could go back to his valley, he would not find it. He felt it very dsiturbing that the world was filled with writers, each of them expounding on their own spiritual or political truth with sauh rage that it was as if they were engaged in a race against each other. And each of them had millions of worshippers, followers who would have killed to be able to kiss the feet of the great intellectuals they so admired. This made the human quite different from any other species: a terrible need to follow, a thirsty want for leadership- mixed with a will to lead, in return. But when Rabrindanath read the works of the famous writers he found in them not much more than tiresome platitudes, pages and pages of interpreted history, and of stories that were obviously mere lies designed to make their authors seem enlightened. So, aside from the fact that there had been wonder and truth in his mountain childhood, what else was there to be said for the sad, sad world where he now lived?
One night in winter, in a dark and filthy bar in some unnamed neigbourhood of a huge city, when he was already not so young, but still driven by an anguish to find something inside himself to connect him in a harmonious way to the outside, he met(he instinctively knew it right way) the greatest visionary, artist, writer, in the world: a midget wrapped in a thick winter coat, drunk on cheap whiskey, tootless except for a couple of green shards of bone that shone in the grim light of the pub everytime he spoke. He wore a bowler hat full of stains and holes, and there was caked blood under his fingernails. " I have scratched so much to find truth that my fingers bleed. Don´t kid yourself, but the pain is so bothersome I must drink all day to numb it"
It is known that people in general waste their time idolizing mediocre imbeciles who have become popular, but totally ignore the truly great ones among them, possibly out of unhealthy envy, or even because they do not really want to contemplate the reality exposed to them by the true geniuses, lest they, in their narrow mindedness, should be driven mad by a superior idea. The reaction of the pedant to real artistry is always the same: a sort of guilty, lame agressiveness. The result of animal jealousy. The genius midget was fully aware of that and spoke at length about it: "that is, essentially, why I have no fans, and no one reads what I write. Aside from the fact that I never really write anything on paper: it´s all in my head."
Rabrindanath was hoping for the prophet, artist, genius midget to finally give him a piece of his wisdom, but the creature(we will have to call him that because as time went on he began to look only quasi-human)had climbed high into some sort of alcoholic heaven and now his speech was thoroughly incomprehensible. But finally he muttered: "but now I have a follower, a true admirerer: you. And I will initiate you into the rites required to cross the line separating the world as you see it and the world as it is. You will be the first person to be delivered by me from the idiocy that affects the rest of humanity"
"What idiocy is that, exactly?" asked Rabrindanath.
"The inability to discern whom you must worship. There is a multitude of idiots out there worsipping the works of tricky writers who say nothing but lies. They befuddle History"
"But how do I know you have the truth?"
"Because I have never felt the need to write it down on paper. I told you already that it is all in my head. I am the only one you should believe, therefore."
Rabrindanath awoke, pleased in the extreme to realize that he had never really left his town in the mountains. As a kind of benign omen, he saw through the little window of his room that it was beginning to snow. The silvery lights of morning rose from behind imposing heights in the distance. He had been changed by his dream. He had been shown something, although he could not yet define waht it was. He dressed quickly. As he left the little stone house, he heard his mother making breakfast in the kitchen. She also must have heard him going out, because she told him: "Rabrindanath...where are you going? come and eat something"
But in his zeal, Rabrindanath had no time for her.
He walked on the snow, arrived at the base of a mountain and, using hammer and chisel, begun to carve something, with a religious fervour. Hours later, he had finished. He was exausted but felt accomplished, happy that he had delivered a clear message to whomever wanted to pay attention. Whe he left for home, the moon had risen over the mountain crests, and lit with a silvery shimmer the sculpture Rabrindanath had carved into the hard cold rock. It was the exact image of the midget he had seen in dreams: the only creator, the one who never left any evidence of his immense knowledge in any book. "

mad queen jane and the beauty of the runaway horse

A long time ago, when I was still a child, my father took me to a country which no longer exists. He took me to that country for one reason alone: there, next to a great palace which was a museum containing thousands of masterpieces of painting an sculpture, was a small building, a house, rather, which contained only a single painting. It hung on the wall of a dark room, so dark the painting was almost invisible. I had to look for a long time into the darkenss to discern its large frame, the life size figures portrayed in it, which seemed to move in a haze of fine ash. At last, I could half see the image on the canvas, and it made me fell a sort of cold sadness, a sense of desolation such as one feels when one weeps inconsolably and there is no one to hear.
A woman witn very pale features, perhaps beautiful, dressed in absolute black, stood by a long, heavily carved coffin resting on the ground, surrounded by long burning torches whose flames the wind made to waver madly. In the coffin there was a man. His dead face emerged from a black shrowd, and it was a face of angelic beauty. The black rings around the eyes of the lady standing by the coffin made it clear that she was suffering deeply because the death of that man.
That lady, my father whispered to me (it was so dark I could barely see him by my side) was mad Jane, queen of Castile. She married Phillip, called The Beautiful. He died during a campaing in Flanders. She continued fighting for his cause after his death, and took his coffin with her wherever she went, exposing the corpse all the time the battle lasted.
I was impressed by the story of the mad queen who loved her husband even long after he was dead. Later on in life I learnt that Phillip the Beautiful had been a very cruel man and an unfaithful husband, that being the reason why his wife had gone mad in the first place. Mad with a terrible jealousy.
Queen Jane had put the rage consuming her into war, and had been a great warrior. But the thing that really excited my curiosity had nothing to do with all that. It was, rather, that in that large painting, far away from the main figures, distant even from the battelfields depicted in the middle ground with miniature brush strokes and stunning accuracy, there was a pale horse, hardly visible, running, running madly, toward a distant, somber range of mountains whose summits were white with snow against the black sky.
I asked my father about that horse. And he told me that horses often run away to the valleys in the high gray hills looking for a mare to mate with. God had made them beautiful to the point that they were crazy, and had to be constantly watched or they would escape.
Why had the painter painted that horse running to the hills?
It was because the queen had requested it.
We shall never understand what she meant by it.

federico garcia lorca and the poem of the four mule drivers

Spain is a country of contradictions which can wear out the mind that chooses to dilucidate upon its history and identity. It is, to begin with, the one Spanish- speaking country in the world where that language is least spoken. It actually has five official tongues different enough from each other to be considered separate languages. These are Castilian (European Spanish), Galician, Basque, Catalonian and Andalousian. Also, the different regions where these five languages are spoken, alongside with some two hundred dialects, are geographically and culturally extremely distinct from each other. In broad strokes, the North is primarily Celtic, and even weather wise it resembles other places in the so called Atlantic Arch, especially Ireland and Wales. The folklore of these lands is almost indistinguishable from that of any other Celtic realm. It must be said that it is a rather simple folklore which never developed into a great art form, lovely as it may be. The center (Castile) is the notorious, nowadays nefarious, land of the conquistadors who invaded most of America from Argentina to California, and wiped out numerous indigenous cultures along the way, . The Castilians, whose famous king and queen, Ferdinand and Isabel, known as the Catholic Queen, are the direct descendants of Teutonic tribes, and were a part of the Holy Western Roman Empire, so called, ruled by the visigoths and the house of Hapsburg. The Catalonians are closer in culture and geography to the French and the Italians. The Basques are unfathomable, in spite of thousands of genetic and ethnological studies carried out to find out where they came from. The results vary from Finland, to Japan, to Africa. The probability is they come from all those three backgrounds put togehter. And finally, Andalousia,whose name in old arabic means the land of the vandals, because the Moorish conquerors encountered there a concentrated population of hostile Nordic people who were in fact the dregs of the demolished Roman Empire. These people, in comparison with the Islamic arrivals, whose culture was at the time the most sophisticated on earth, from science to architecture and military might, were living in perfectly savage conditions. Andalousia became an extension of mighty Islam, and it has to be said for the fierce conquerors that they were liberal enough to allow freedom of religion in that land to Jews and Christians alike. The result of their long dominion was a centuries- long period of conviviality and culture which affected the development of European knowledge in all ways in a very positive manner. When the visigothic Spaniards managed to move against the MOORS, most of which had no longer any real reason to think of themselves as anything but citizens of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), there ensued a period of fanaticism, coinciding with the conquest of the new world, which gave birth to the so called Inquisition, the expulsion from Europe of non Christians, and the dismantling of what had been one on the most wonderful and artistic periods of history the world has ever known. In the caliphate of Granada, Islam left some of its most outstanding masterpieces of architecture and art. and a wealth of prose and poetry, as well as thousands of songs of arabic background wich later came to create flamenco music and influece very intensely the arts and letters of Spain. It is in the city of Granada, close to the hills of sacromonte, in whose caves the gypsy people still gather for long haunting feasts of drinking and dancing around the fire, that Federico Garcia lorca was born and grew up. He was a delicate child from a middle class Spanish family,but he was soon fully versed in the lore of the Moors, and fascinated by their great culture. He sought to intertwine words in the same harmonious way in which they had crafted their delicate and powerful symbols on the walls of the temples of the South. And he was to be possessed by what he called the gypsy "duende", or "magical spirit", which allowed the work af an initiated artist to bewitch the public. He was to become one of the greatest poets of all times. And the most beloved poet of the gypsies themselves.
Spain, responsible for a large amount of the atrocities commited agaist humanity throught time, is also, ironically enough, the homeland of some of the most antiestablishment artists of all times, critical of all sorts of opression to the point that they were sacrificed in the name of freedom. Goya, Picasso, Bunuel, to name a few who are world renown. There are many others who never achieved such fame. Also, it was in Spain where fascism began and where it was first fought against in one of the bloodiest civil wars in history. Lorca, when he had not yet reached the age of forty, was killed for his supposed political views by the henchmen of the dictator, Franco. Yet Lorca was notoriuolsy apolitical. The charge which lead to his execution at night in some obscure cemetery was actually having published a poem about a bloody raid carried out by the Spanish Civil Guard (rural police) against a gypsy village. It is a terrifying and beautiful poem, where opression and death are treated through an almost cabalistic symbology. Yet there is no direct blame placed on anybody. Like Goya, Lorca was a universalist, and felt that evil was to be blamed on all, and even on nature, and that it changed its position in history at different times. He was, moreover, not interested in what the powerful might or might not understand, and wrote to move the soul of the people to love through imagery that usually came from their own folklore. His book, poet in New York, affords us, through symbols as dark as have ever been penned, an interpretation of the misunderstanding among the races, of the blind opression that is suffered by those without power, the hatred which discrimination and lack of compassion bring about, and a prophecy, an undecipherable warning of what price we will pay for our stupidity, an apocalypse, but without redemption, without any coming kingdom. As he said, racism is more than a crime against individuals, but it is a brutal agression against the soul of humanity. And it would ultimately be the reason for the undoing of the human breed. So he wouldn´t work on literature to enlighted the mind, but on imagery and music to move the soul. The idea is simple: intellect, devoid of passion and compassion, is as dead as a doorknob. His most wonderful book of poetry is possibly "Gypsy Romance", a collection of poems wich move us through their music and surrealistic imagery which, non the less are very simple in expression and manage to reach the remotest part of the human unconscious. Lorca seems to know how to use historical memory very naturally, in order to allow us to understand
our own hidden selves and that part of us which belong to others. He is always bittersweet, and electric, melancholy and vibrant, never violent...With the voice of the most delicate guitar, he conveys the most desperate message: that beauty and innocence are the daily sacrificial lamb of a world full of prejudice and idiocy. Lorca, as those of you who know him well know, writes like a child whose innocence occassionally turns into dreamscape, and often into a sort of whispered rage.
He is the gypsy and the moor of old, a nomad impelled by dreams, and an oriental aristocrat who sees the world with a loving sensuality, and speaks in parables so his people can love his visions. His people were the opressed gypsies, the blacks, the poor, and women. The homosexual, the broken hearted lover, and those dead by the guns of totalitarianism. Yet he never uttered a word that could be considere essentially political.
He wrote many beautiful songs.One of them, "a little Vienna waltz, has recently been translate into English, and interpreted, by Leonard Cohen, with the title Take this Waltz.
I have posted another very famous song by Lorca, sang by the beautiful Estrella Morente, on facebook. It was used by the antifascist side in the civil war. People love this song as if it were a lullaby their mothers had sung to them in childhood.
Ye all it says, rally, is:
Of the four mule drivers, mother, whom you see coming down the hills
the one I love is the dark one who drives an unruly mule.
Oh, mother of mine, my soul aches with love for him.