The Siren And The Seashell Part 2

Lpez Velarde's style, concentrated and complex, is triumphant in its fixed intensity: that moment when the blood rushes, when thought is suspended or the spirit enraptured. That instant of frenzy that reaches a peak, becomes immobilized, and then is obliterated. Aesthetic of the heart and its beating. And, also, a style of excesses-not exterior, but interior. Its temptation is not external immensity but the infinitesimal; and its danger is not pompous vagueness but tortured affectation. Many of Lpez Velarde's sentences give us the sensation not so much of perfection as of tortured language. One must confess that Lpez Velarde frequently is labored, sometimes even tasteless. In my opinion, a considerable portion of his youthful writing, in prose and in verse, is sentimental, artificial, and, frankly, unbearable. His taste was demanding but not impeccable. The literary atmosphere of those days was contaminated by the death throes of Modernism, whose followers had degraded its rhetoric into a side show of stereotyped curiosities. Even Jimenez did not free himself of that contagion until years later. Lpez Velarde never completely abandoned some of the peculiarities of his earlier poetry. Gorostiza suggests that his provincialism could explain some of his affectations. Whatever the origin of his att.i.tude, the essential newness of his imagination was more powerful than his equivocations in taste.

A concentrated and complex poet with a meager body of work. To this description another quality must be added: he was limited. His themes are few, his spiritual interests narrow. There is no sense of history in his work. When I say history, I am referring to general or universal history. There is no other: what one calls the history of one's homeland is either the mirror of man-and thus also universal-or merely an after-dinner anecdote. Neither was he aware of knowledge and all its drama: Lpez Velarde never questioned the reality of the world or of man, and it would never have occurred to him to write Muerte sin fin [Death without end] or Ifigenia cruel [Cruel Iphigenia]. The relationships between wakefulness and dream, language and thought, consciousness and reality-the constant themes of modern poetry since German Romanticism-seldom figure among his preoccupations. He seated "beauty upon his knee," but did he "find her bitter"? At any rate, he did not d.a.m.n her. He did not blaspheme, did not prophesy. He did not aspire to G.o.dhead, nor did he feel any nostalgia for the animal state. He neither adored the machine nor sought the golden age among the Zulus, the Tarahumaras, or the Tibetans. With the exception of one poem of beautiful violence ("Mi corazn leal, se amerita . . ." [My loyal heart deserves . . .]), he was not moved to rebel. He did not, through his poetry, wish to change man or transform the world. Insensitive to the murmur of the future arising in those years throughout the confines of the planet, insensitive to the great s.p.a.ces opening to the spirit, insensitive to the very planet emerging for the first time in history as a total reality . . . did he suspect that modern man, for more than a hundred years, has been torn between Utopia and nihilism? Worries that kept Marx, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky awake at night did not spoil his sleep. In short, he was removed from almost everything that agitates us today. It is paradoxical that a spirit so impervious to the anguishes, desires, and fears that others feel could have been converted into that equivocal figure designated by the phrase "national poet." I do not know whether he is a national poet; I know he did not wish to be one. The secret of that paradox is found in his language: an inimitable creation, a rare fusion of everyday speech and the unexpected image. Through that language he discovered that everyday life is enigmatic.

In Lpez Velarde's work, prose and verse form a system of communicating vessels. Villaurrutia wrote that the poet "is almost always present in what we can, without hyperbole, call the stanzas of El minutero" Phillips completes this observation-which enables us to read the texts in prose more easily-with another that a.s.sists us in understanding the poems more completely. In his prose, Lpez Velarde gives us certain keys to his aesthetic, though never in the form of statements. Its unity is organic, not intellectual. A simultaneous reading of his prose and his verse permits us to test the lucidity of his ideas about the world and language, as well as the authenticity of his poems. The results, as always happens with all true poets, prove the coherence between the creative instinct and the critical conscience. In Lpez Velarde's vision the world gives itself to us as sensation and emotion: "The orange is not positivist or Aristotelian in the lyric; it is, simply, an orange. We know only one thing: the world is magic." To proclaim that the world is magic means that objects and beings are animated and that one same energy moves man and things. It is the role of the poet to name that energy, to isolate it, and to concentrate it into a poem. Every poem is a diminutive world of attractions and repulsions, a field of magical relationships, and thus a double of the real world. The force that unites and separates things is called Eros: In my happy breast there was no thing of crystal, clay, or wood that in my embrace did not a.s.sume the human movements of a wife.

Things do not order themselves according to the hierarchies of science, philosophy, or morality. The value of objects does not reside in their utility or in their worldly significance (logical or historical), but rather in their vivacity: what unites them to other objects is a kind of universal copulation that transforms them into things never seen before. The metaphor is the agent of change and its mode of action is the embrace. Everyday things-tub, telephone, candlewick, sugar and its slow dissolving, the creaking complaint of an old armoire-contain a greater charge of magical energy than do those things traditionally named by poets. Colloquial expressions, utensils, and everyday situations suffer a happy metamorphosis. Even trash is subject to redemption, as shown in these lines from "El perro de San Roque" [The dog from San Roque]: My flesh is combustible and my conscience dark; my pa.s.sions, ephemeral and sharp, glitter like the shards of bottle gla.s.s that bristled on the henyard wall to keep out cats and thieves.

Lpez Velarde does not propose so much to conquer the marvelous-the creation of another reality-as to discover the true reality of things and of himself. His design is magical: through the medium of the metaphor he wants to compel things to turn back upon themselves to become what they truly are. The world is never fully the world-Lpez Velarde had a very acute awareness of our deficiency in "being"-except in those few privileged moments it is not too much to call electric. Those instants are the sensations, the emotions, the illuminations afforded us by certain infrequent experiences. The metaphor must be the equivalent, that is, the a.n.a.logical double, of those exceptional states: hence its concentration, its apparent obscurity, and its paradoxes. But how can things be themselves if the metaphor-the universal embrace-changes them into other things? Lpez Velarde does not conceive of language as clothing reality. Instead, language is vesture that reveals as it conceals. The function of the metaphor is to delude: "For transcendental acts-sleep, bathing, love-we disrobe." The poetic art is the science of illumination. Its clarity denudes, and sometimes strips away the skin. Its light is unbearable: "Its supreme brilliance obliges good people to stay in the shadows, as if they found Sirius instead of a lamp at their bedsides. Throughout the ages almost everyone who has asked for literary clarity has actually been asking for a moderation of light, in order to protect the retina from shock, within a routine penumbra." Thus, poetry is bedazzlement as well as revelation.

The province is one of Lpez Velarde's themes. Or, more accurately, it is a magnetic field toward which he turns time and time again, never returning completely. He is not moved by its sentiments alone; the province is one dimension of his aesthetic. Life in the cities and towns of the interior-"cruel sky and red earth"-offers him a world of situations, beings, and things untouched by the Modernist poets. Certainly, the Mexican Revolution, despoiling some places, repopulating others, dispersing and reuniting people, and revealing to all of them an unknown land, contributed to the discovery of the province. In Lpez Velarde's hands this raw material suffers the same transformation undergone by objects in everyday use and by everyday language. Subjected to the double pressure of verbal alchemy and irony, country simplicity is converted into a rare condiment, one more oddity encrusted upon the discourse of traditional poetry. The most notable example of this metamorphosis is found in "El retorno malefico" [The malefic return]. Confronting the prodigal son who has returned to the paternal home, the plaster medallions on the door half-close their "narcotized eyelids," look at each other, and say, "What is this?" In the patio there is "a brooding curbstone of a well, with a leather pail dripping its categorical drop." In the garden there is "the loving love of the paired pairs." The art of contrasts: the eruption of "the policeman blowing his whistle" and the warbling of the old maid singing an aria no longer in style accentuate the somnambulistic character of the evocation. The girls who appear some verses later, "fresh and humble as humble cabbages," could be as simple as one wants (soon we will see they are not so simple), but the image the poet has chosen for exhibiting them, "by the light of dramatic streetlights," is one of devilish simplicity.

"Humildemente" [Humbly] offers a series of "slides" of village streets at the hour of the Most Holy Sacrament. Beings and things are immobilized, like "mechanical toys that have run down."

My cousin, with her needle poised, behind her window, immobile, like a statue . . .

Genovevds damp bra.s.siere, set out to dry, no longer dances above the tile roof . . .

The viatic.u.m and the bra.s.siere. Not two symbols: two realities. From a picturesque and ironic scene the poem pa.s.ses to veneration: the oranges "cease to grow," everything is "on its knees, foreheads in the dust . . ." Not with a leap, but with an imperceptible movement, the description becomes song, and the song, silence. This vision of the province is not local-colorist but magical. Lpez Velarde's aesthetic descends from baroque art-need one recall the Gngora of "Hermana Marica" [Little sister Mara] ?-and tends toward a very Spanish kind of expressionism. (Lpez Velarde would correct me, saying "and Latin American.") His nationalism springs from his aesthetic-not the reverse. It is a part of his love of the reality that we observe unattentively every day, reality awaiting eyes that will recover it. Lpez Velarde's nationalism is a discovery, while that of his imitators is a complacent repet.i.tion of what has already been said. In a much-quoted article he speaks of the "newness of the fatherland." A common or ordinary nationalist would have written "the ancientness (or the eternity or the greatness) of the fatherland." What he calls "criollismo" ("native to the New World") is an aesthetic att.i.tude: we should use the words we all say because they are new words, words never said in poetry.

Furthermore, the province has spiritual significance. If one thinks in spatial terms, it is what is distant and closed. If one pa.s.ses from the physical to the moral, it is what is intact and untouchable: feminine virginity, masculine wholeness. Its town, mutilated by the grapeshot of civil war, is a "subverted Eden," a razed paradise to which "it would be better not to return." But the war and the dispersion that have disfigured the town have also made an exile and a cripple of Lpez Velarde. On his spirit, and on his body, too, are the "melancholy maps": the wounds of loves, doubts, angers, resignations, all the acts and omissions of an unsheltered consciousness. He knows the cities; he is the prodigal who enters the house of his infancy on "newcomer's feet" to find that n.o.body recognizes him. A child's paradise or a reign of adolescent pa.s.sion, the province is not so much a point in s.p.a.ce as it is nostalgia for unrecoverable well-being. Lpez Velarde knows that, and as a defense he uses irony: through the alleyways of Zacatecas-so uneven in footing they are a "bad joke"-file "Catholics from the age of Peter the Hermit and Jacobins from the Tertiary Age." And, nevertheless, the enchantment persists. His natal town "tempts with an alluring combination of fossil and miniature." He sees himself wandering through the streets: "I am nothing more than an abandoned beast pa.s.sing through a fict.i.tious town. Once I am in bed, lying as if in a sarcophagus, the clock in the sanctuary sounds twelve. Thunder rolls, and everything becomes futile." A bitter vision: has the province died or is it Lpez Velarde who is dead? A symbol of physical distance and lost innocence, the province belongs to the before and the after. It is a temporal dimension: it embodies the past, but at the same time it pre-figures what will again be. That future is identified with death: Eden will open only to the dying. The relationship between Lpez Velarde and the province is the same as that joining him with Fuensanta, his symbol of spiritual woman. Both represent distance that only death can abolish: When, at the end, exhaustion overcomes me, I shall go, like the crane in the proverb, to my town . . .

It is difficult to talk about La suave patria [Gentle fatherland]. This beautiful and luckless poem does not deserve to have been treated so badly. (Or is its fate at the hands of the public the sort experienced by all provocative and too-evident beauty?) I shall begin by saying that La suave patria tolerates sentimental but not ideological complicities. Whatever his political opinions may have been, and they were never very ardent, Lpez Velarde did not confuse art with preachment or the poem with the harangue. He had a natural aversion to systems and preferred beings and things to ideas: "The fatherland is not a historical or political reality but an intimate one." With this declaration, contemporary with the publication of the poem, Lpez Velarde, without proposing to do so, places himself at the opposite pole from the Mexican mural painting that was beginning in precisely those years. So, for semantic convenience or out of adherence to historical cla.s.sifications, he can be called a poet of the Revolution-but never a revolutionary poet. His att.i.tude, furthermore, has been almost constantly that of all modern Mexican poetry. Although today the pressures, insults, and flattery have ceased-our own dangers are different-it is good to recall this tradition of moral integrity.

La suave patria is not a poem concerned with national glories or disasters. As he begins, Lpez Velarde informs us: "I shall navigate through civil waves with weightless oars . . ." And he fulfills that notice: there are scarcely any allusions to the political or social history of Mexico or to its heroes, political bosses, tyrants, or saviors. The only historical episode he considers worthy of separate mention intrigues him by its legendary nature. The ten lines that evoke Cuauhtemoc's crossing the lake in his pirogue to give himself up to Cortes contain memorable images: the "sobbing of mythologies"; the king who tears himself away from the "curved bosom" of the queen "as from the breast of a partridge"; and those "swimming idols" in which I see the whole catastrophe-water and fire-of Tenocht.i.tln. The remainder of the poem is a portrait of the countryside and of life during that epoch in Mexico. Realism? Yes, on the condition that one call realistic our anonymous nineteenth-century painters and those who, since Le Douanier Rousseau, have been rather inappropriately called "modern primitives." The poem is a succession of colors, tastes, perfumes, and sensations; it is not a fres...o...b..t a doc.u.mentary, in the cinematic sense, of poetic images.

The real equivalent to La suave patria can be found in the theater rather than in painting or film. Neither lyric nor heroic-its tone is the "muted epic"-it is a drama/poem divided into two acts, with an introduction and an entr'acte. The introduction functions like the prologue of a romantic comedy or like an orchestral overture at the opera: it serves as a declaration of the author's intentions, not discounting self-irony, and as the entrance of the instruments, with a predominance of strings and percussion. The entr'acte is a solo in which the vocalist, occasionally accompanied by a distant murmur of flageolets, recites the torture of a hero. The two acts, performed by the whole company, are composed of a series of theater scenes: there is no dialogue. Dialogue is supplanted, to the poem's advantage, by pantomime and dance. There is no action: the ending of a fiesta, the appearance of the "allegorical straw cart," the rustic throne of Pomona-Guadalupe-Tonantzin. A spectacle for the eye and the ear, La suave patria more closely resembles the music of Silvestre Revueltas than mural painting. In its genre, the poem is perfect. There are fragments one will not easily forget: the thunder of the tempest that maddens our women and "cures the lunatic"; a mestizo girl's gaze that places "immensity over their hearts"; "opaque Lent"; "birds of the carpentry profession" [woodp.e.c.k.e.rs]; and many others. No one but Lpez Velarde could have written those lines. The poem is, in a certain way, the noonday of his style. I am saying the noonday of his style, not of his poetry. Mastery frequently defeats inspiration, formula subst.i.tutes for invention, mere cleverness supplants the true discovery. The poet's gaze does not penetrate either his own reality or that of his people. It is an external poem.

Lpez Velarde is a difficult poet and he proclaims a difficult aesthetic. His hatred for the "coa.r.s.e speech of the ma.s.ses" is the obverse of his love for the expression that dazzles us with its Tightness. Thus, it is the genuine he seeks, more than the surprising. His originality lies in his penetrating toward origins, toward what is most ancient: in his search for roots. To him a poem is not a recently manufactured object, it is a recently unearthed talisman. Novelty and surprise are the two wings of a poem, and without them there is no poetry; but the body of a poem is the discovery of a timeless reality. For Lpez Velarde, expression is synonymous with exploration of self, and both are synonymous with self-creation. He does not wish to say what he feels; he wishes to discover who he is and what he feels in order to feel it more fully, to be what he is with greater freedom. That quest for himself leads to the quest for the "other reality," because man is never entirely himself; always unfinished, he completes himself only when he goes outside himself and invents himself. Lpez Velarde's artistic pa.s.sion has a spiritual meaning. His critical conscience is not merely aesthetic. Or perhaps it is so rigorously aesthetic that it blends with life itself. He polishes-not as an artificer, but as a lover-each noun and each verb infinitely, because in each one of them he gambles with his ident.i.ty. To lose the game is to forget oneself, not know oneself, lose something more than glory or fame: life's reason for being. In the spiritual history of our poetry, Lpez Velarde is the scrupulous balance. He cares about adjectives because he cares about his soul.

2. THE PURPLE STAIN.

In his breast a magnet shaped like a clover and of the pa.s.sionate hue of a poppy . . .

Ramn Lpez Velarde Love is his theme. In this, too, he is exceptional, because, in spite of what is generally believed, this pa.s.sion is not present in modern Mexican poetry to the same extent that it is in the work of Lpez Velarde.4 The two moments into which his work is divided, La sangre devota and Zozobra, are ruled by two different woman figures. His amorous experience is so closely bound to his verbal adventure that for the majority of his critics Fuensanta, the love of his youth, and the unidentified women of Zozobra and El son del corazn symbolize two styles of versification as well as two kinds of love. This opinion, although essentially accurate, is too divisive. La sangre devota is not an entirely ingenuous book (the ambiguity of the t.i.tle suggests that), nor is Fuensanta a metaphysical shade. Other disquieting figures appear in addition to Fuensanta, such as that cousin Agueda-green eyes and ceremonious mourning-who is contemplated by the poet with the fixed and at the same time giddy gaze of adolescent desire. On the other hand, I am not sure whether the word "love" correctly expresses the contradictory sentiments that Fuensanta inspired in him. Perhaps, at the beginning, Lpez Velarde was not actually aware of that complexity, but it is certain that later he fully realized the singular nature of their relationship. In a poem inspired by that first love he says: "You give me . . . something that is a mixture of cordial consolation and the glacial forlornness of a maiden's bed." The opposition between "cordial" and "glacial" hinders the consummation of that love, and at the same time that mixture keeps it alive through the years. Since that love formed of contradictory elements is a confusion, the consolation and the for-lornness, the glacial and the cordial, do not blend together, but neither are they separate. The ambiguity does not reside only in the object of Lpez Velarde's adoration but also in his emotions: to love Fuensanta as a woman is to betray the devotion he professes for her; to venerate her as a spirit is to forget that she is also, and first of all, flesh and blood. So that this love may endure, the confusion must be preserved, but at the same time its contradictions must be avoided. His love is constant fluctuation between the two poles that define it. Thus he cannot expose his love to the proof of reality without exposing it to extinction: blood and devotion will finally blend together, or one will annihilate the other. The only recourse is to transform it. Fuensanta becomes an inaccessible body and his love for her something that will never be embodied in the here and now. He is not confronted by an impossible love; his love is impossible because its essence is a permanent but never consummated possibility.

Lpez Velarde was too lucid not to know that by evading the alternatives, consummation or disillusion, he was sacrificing the real Fuensanta and the reality of her love. His att.i.tude condemns his beloved to a kind of perpetual limbo, wandering between the before and the after. She is what could have been, so she appears always as a remote creature, in other time and other s.p.a.ce. She embodies the provinces and the ingenuous, but not innocent, pleasures of adolescence: she is what was, and she will again be in "apocalyptic time," in the afterworld. Fuen-santa, a real woman, becomes a shadow. While the other women of his poems are an immediate presence, whether fierce or merry, Fuensanta is the image of distance. She is the lost, the soul in pain, the absent one with whom one maintains an imaginary dialogue. She is that which is about to leave us and which for an instant we still retain: you are, he says to her, "an epistle written in moribund strokes of the pen, replete with dramatic adieus." Although not the best of Lpez Velarde, these lines express very well what that love was: an interminable farewell.

Distance is not enough. Even when distant, Fuensanta's reality is a menace to his devotion. Death is the most perfect form of farewell. Dead, Fuensanta will be more fully "what could have been" and, since both believed in resurrection, "what must one day be." Antic.i.p.ating the reality, Lpez Velarde imagines her death agony. There are two revealing texts: one a poem, one written in prose. As surprising as the fact that in both Lpez Velarde presents himself as the angel of death is the cruel precision of the invented details. In the poem, Fuensanta will see, "in the mirror of her armoire," the writing of a skeletal hand, and she "will cry out the five letters of [the poet's] name"; but he "will not be present at the final anguish." Is this a vision of pain or of revenge? Perhaps both. It is a sacrifice in which one of the two partic.i.p.ants, and not precisely the victim, is a phantom. In the second instance, Lpez Velarde repeats the scene with greater realism: "The shadow of your death agony will darken beneath your eyes, and you will think of me and find it more difficult to breathe . . ."In the poem Lpez Velarde's absence made the dying girl's final agony more total; in the prose fragment his absence contributes physically to her death: it suffocates her, asphyxiates her. Something more than fear of losing the beloved leads him to imagine this atrocious death. It is an invoked, a desired death. There will be someone, of course, who says that this is the typical extravagant expression of all lovers. Others will say that destroying what we most love, even in dreams, is one of the strangest and most powerful components of pa.s.sion. But it would be wiser to ask oneself whether Lpez Velarde truly loved Fuensanta. I think that, more than love, he experienced that combination of emotions that he calls devotion. Pa.s.sion would have led him to profane his devotion; the eroticism of his imagination, not without its aggressiveness, moves him to sacrifice symbolically the object he venerates.

Hope for a new meeting throbs implicitly in every farewell. No one, saying good-by, dares to say that it is forever. Fuensanta's death, the real and the imaginary, has a paradoxical consequence: it has become a symbol more of encounter than of farewell. In an intense poem he never finished, "El sueo de los guantes negros" [The dream of the black gloves], Lpez Velarde tells of the lovers' reunion. In the first line he tells us the poem is a dream. Its hallucinatory clarity, its pure colors and strict design, the preciseness of that end-of-the-world landscape and the sensations that overwhelm us as we delve into those strophes of concentric resonances, the apparition of the two phantasmal figures in the center of the great salt basin, and, finally, even the two or three blank lines-all this makes the poem a true vision in the religious sense of the word: a waking dream. As with many of his poems-the first to notice it was Tablada, who called the elegy he dedicated to Lpez Velarde's memory an "altarpiece"-this composition is a painting, a small canvas. It reminds me of the fantastical realism of some of the Flemish painters. The strangeness of the world Lpez Velarde paints does not reside in its forms but in the atmosphere in which they are bathed. It is the everyday world-seen beneath a new light. The same is true of the female apparition: nothing denotes her extraterrestrial condition except the fact that she appears wearing "black gloves." Those funereal gloves recall the luxurious hats of Cranach's nudes. The poet asks himself: "Does your flesh still cling to every bone?" He himself does not know: The enigma of love was entirely veiled beneath the prudence of your black gloves . . .

Reunited finally, their hands clasped as if they held together the "edifice of the universe," the lovers whirled in "an eternal circuit." The separation has ended, but true union is impossible, as is suggested by the prudence of the black gloves. The poem seems to be less the consecration of a consummated love than the presentiment of an eternal d.a.m.nation. And the reader is tempted to ask Nerval's question: "Is she dead or is she Death?"

All of Lpez Velarde's erotic life occurred between the time of Fuen-santa's symbolic death and the time of her imaginary resurrection. All his life, and all his work, too, since he wrote his two princ.i.p.al books during those years (Zozobra and El minutero). It would not be accurate to say that this period broke with the preceding one. In reality it prolonged it, it exacerbated it, and it made it more lucid (always considering that one already foresees the tone of his mature poetry in several poems from La sangre devota, for example, "A Sara" [To Sara]). His new loves, including his second great pa.s.sion, more sensual but no less complex than the first, are the cruel continuation of the experience of his youth. Distance and death render Fuensanta inaccessible; proximity and death make the others so. The embrace is a metaphor for the skeleton and the skull. The glacial and the cordial are now definitively one. That mystery fascinates him to such a degree that it accompanies him everywhere; it is inseparable from his vision of the world and of life. One might say that it is the mystery tattooed on the body of woman: the organs of gestation are those of our destruction. If the male is the extravagance and self-indulgence of the species, the female is its continuity: she perpetuates herself by devouring us. Although the idea is not new, it is more than a commonplace to Lpez Velarde: it is a revelation that guides him in his exploration of reality and of himself. Through it he penetrates certain forbidden zones. There, in vaster and more inclement s.p.a.ces, truth opens like a cruel double flower.

Woman is the most complete and perfect image of the universe because in her are united the two halves of being; she is also the sensitive mirror in which for an instant man may see himself in all his dolorous unreality. But woman is something more than a world image and something more than a mirror for man. She also shares our universal lack of "being," a deprivation that expresses itself as a rabid, destructive hunger for death. The vision of a reclining body as a landscape of signs wherein we read the obverse and reverse of reality is replaced by another, active vision that invites us not to contemplation but to the embrace. That embrace, the poet emphasizes many times, is b.l.o.o.d.y: it is "the purple stain." Does the monologue cease, the solitary conversation with the always absent one? Lpez Velarde never found a partner for his dialogue, except perhaps at some instant in his second pa.s.sion; on the other hand, he knew amorous adversaries. The feminine body is no longer fruit, a guitar to be caressed or wounded; it acquires will and soul and stands opposing the male. Eroticism does not reveal woman to him, it reveals her terrible freedom-something very different from feminine emanc.i.p.ation, a theme that most certainly would not have interested him. When he discovers in woman that active element he thought to be man's privilege and condemnation, the word "pleasure" and the abysmal reality it designates, those qualities immediately change in coloration and meaning.

In woman's erotic freedom he recognizes his own, and on these two hostile freedoms he founds a brotherhood. It is a vertiginous fraternity because it is founded on the instant: a foundation resting on an abyss. A secret society in which neither name nor rank nor morality matter, it shelters alike the girl whose name he cannot recall, Sara, that "cl.u.s.ter of ripe grapes," the married woman, and the "woman without either cunning or disguises." This is not a society of libertines, but solitary beings united in private rituals. Provincial virgins are also part of that clandestine fraternity. They are symbols of rebellion and submission and thus doubly his sisters, and he watches them come out on their balconies in the early evenings so that their s.e.xual parts may drink the breeze like maddened scorpions.

Once again Lpez Velarde surprises us with an image that is a cruel and precise sketch. Reading these lines, one is forcibly reminded of Julio Ruelas, that small great artist still awaiting recognition from our critics. It is a dry point whose lines turn back upon themselves in order to concentrate all the more the blood's exasperation: there is no pity in that clear view of woman, rather something that might be called complicity. Sisters or accomplices, Lpez Velarde is united to them by a bond stronger than blood or baptism. In the solitude of a room closed to the external world, an urban cavern or the "lost bedchamber of the necromancer," they have shared with him a few hours outside chronological time: l.u.s.t, weariness, the savor of crime and of innocence, abandon, and concentration. Together they have crossed, eyes closed, that "bridge across abysses" that love extends from one body to another.

Imagination is active desire. We desire the forms we imagine, but those images adopt the form our desire has imposed upon them. Finally, we return to ourselves: we have pursued our own shadow, without ever touching it. Eroticism is a discharge of imagination and thus has no limits except those our nature defines (that is, each person's power of invention and his psychical conformation as much as, or more than, his body). Or to say it another way: eroticism is infinitude at the service of our finitude. Thus its combinations, practically uncountable, finally seem monotonous to us. They are: their diversity is repet.i.tion. The libertine proposes the abolition of the other and so converts that person into an "erotic object." Each body he touches evaporates into smoke, and each of his experiences is annulled as it is fulfilled. His action is a pilgrimage toward an always imminent point that perpetually fades, reappears, and again disappears. The solitary imagination is circular, boredom as well as disenchantment await us at the end of each circuit. One may be vicious because of weakness, foolishness, lack of imagination, or any other defect of body or soul. One is a libertine only by reason of asceticism, as is revealed in The Story of O and other guides of initiation, or because of philosophical conviction, as is abundantly ill.u.s.trated by the Marquis de Sade. In each and every case the reward is not pleasure, knowledge, or power but insensibility. A state of indifference already described by the ancient Stoics and by the philosophers of India, except that the road of libertinism is longer and more painful and its results are more uncertain. Love, on the other hand, is born not of the imagination but of vision. The lover does not invent, he recognizes. His imagination is not free: he must confront this mystery, the loved one. The lover is condemned to guessing, although he knows beforehand that both the question and the answer are illusory, what is going on behind that brow and what attracts those eyes: "What are you thinking, at whom are you looking?" Happy or unhappy, satisfied or disdained, he who loves must reckon with the other; her presence imposes a limitation upon the lover and thus leads him to the recognition of his finitude. This limitation opens another realm, this one truly unlimited, to his imagination. Eroticism is an infinite multiplication of finite bodies; love is the discovery of infinitude in one single being.

Lpez Velarde sought love all his life. It does not matter whether he found it or whether, as is more probable, he did not wish to find it because he was more enamored of love itself than of any woman. In a poem from his earliest writing he confesses that he suffers from an "infinite thirst for love." He does not say his love is infinite: he says his thirst is. His work lives on that fragile frontier separating eroticism from love, and in this, perhaps, resides the secret of its seduction. His beloved ones are his sisters because with them he has shared the mystery. He recognizes himself in them and they in him. This fraternity is a constant presence in his spirit and, like obsessions, it a.s.sumes two forms: the harem and the hospital. The time that binds him to all those women is that of their common destiny: "runaway time." Although he would have wished to arrest their "dark fall" with his own hands, he can only watch as they hurl themselves into the abyss. Their fall is his fall. To Lpez Velarde the metaphor of pa.s.sion, the embrace, means that together they hurl themselves from the precipice. Woman reveals to him the true face of death as she shows him, with such abandon, the true face of life-but, as she embraces his body, she too glimpses the truth that what she clasps to her bosom is a heap of bones. Even though its root is erotic this experience goes beyond eroticism. Nor is it love. I would not call it pa.s.sion, but compa.s.sion.

It has been stated too often that Lpez Velarde is "the poet of eroticism and death." This formula is too vague. If his love is funereal and if in every body he embraces a skeleton, the opposite is also true. Death is erotic. Facing death he feels the same excitement he feels before a woman. Although he fears it, he cannot take his eyes from it. To contend that he is in love with death would be foolish, as well as excessive. Also, in a certain sense, we are all in love with death, aware of the same unconscious attraction we feel toward the mother and the earth. Death is one of man's centers of gravity. But that is not the case here. Lpez Velarde's feeling is more violent and more contradictory. Death terrifies him, but he cannot reduce the sensation he is experiencing either to terror or to subconscious attraction. His mouth "is placed upon the skeleton's femininity with a diamond cutter's scrupulous care." These expressions are not part of the vocabulary of fear or of adoration, but of pleasure. Death seems desirable to him and there is a moment when he confuses it with the vertigo of pa.s.sion: My kisses travel across you in devout files above a sacrilegious stratum of skulls as if over an erotic domino.

Kisses, devotion, sacrilege, skulls: this enumeration, evoking a kind of cheap symbolism, is suddenly redeemed in that disconcerting and marvelous last line. In another poem, "La ltima odalisca," Lpez Velarde reveals what that fascination consists of: on the waist of "voluptuous melancholy"-always that union of oppositions-pleasure writes its "calligraphy" and death its "scrawl." Pleasure and death are two faces of the same coin. This idea, also, is not original, but the intensity with which he lives it and the forms it adopts in his poetry and his life are original. Death terrifies him as the end or extinction of man; and, simultaneously, it seduces him because it is the abysmal element of the embrace. In many poems he reiterates his terror of the inevitable putrefaction of the body; at the same time he a.s.serts that the presence of death in the midst of the embrace transforms a more or less instinctual act into a spiritual experience. The intensity of desire makes that instant of union a union beyond the instant; the awareness of death introduces time into this frenzy; that instant is a mortal instant, and, precisely because of that, it separates itself from chronology and becomes an instant that is unique and absolute. Lovers walk above the void. Consciousness of their mortality is the force that launches them beyond time and retains them in time. There is a kind of metaphysical intoxication in that floating upon an instant that rests on nothing except itself, with nothing to grasp except another body equally detached from its name and its moorings. Lpez Velarde says it in a few unforgettable lines: . . . the blessing of love is an unbridled heart galloping along the cliff road of death . . .

At a distance halfway between libertinism and permanent union, Lpez Velarde decided to inhabit the instant. There is no hedonism in his choice. To select the instant is to choose not pleasure, but lucidity. In reality, it is a refusal to choose at all, it is to accept everything. Lpez Velarde's "capacity for feeling shelters beneath the insignia of the lubricous barometer" that reflects all changes, all situations, and all beings: . . . woman, a star, the anguish of thunder, the staff of old age, a griffin vomiting his hydraulic complaint, and a lamp, the blinking eye of the tabernacle.

Lpez Velarde's att.i.tude is not inspired by desire for domination, will for power, vanity, or cynicism. Perpetually bewildered by "quarrelsome eyes and peaceful brows," he believes in surrender. He is never the seducer, his "soul is a worshiper." No, Lpez Velarde chose love and, at the same time, solitude. All his life he was loyal to this contradictory decision. His work is the emblem of his loyalty. And one must add that he thought he had engraved the signs of human existence on that emblem.

His love, as he knew better than we, was not total love. Knew? At least he guessed. Phillips cites various poems, dedicated to the woman who was his second love, in which he reiterates that he is indebted to her for revealing "life's perfect savor." Perhaps for a while love was no longer that mixture of the glacial and the cordial or that anguish of feeling himself "hanging in the ceaseless agility of the ether," represented, respectively, by Fuensanta and his pa.s.sing love affairs. His poetry, a true barometer of the alterations in his sensitivity, changed radically. This was the highest point of his amorous fever and also the moment of the greatest concentration of his creative gifts. He wrote his best poems in those months: on the one hand, through Lugones he had discovered his own style; on the other, his new love revealed to him the true temper of his soul. His eroticism is exacerbated and flows more deeply, turned upon itself like water working upon a stone the signs of its destruction. Intoxication and lucidity. Fuensanta had been a pa.s.sive figure, more idol than reality; the second woman is simultaneously body and spirit: an untouchable body that bewitches him, a spirit that frightens him and opens unknown worlds to him. She is a "pale vehemence," and in order to accentuate even more the contradiction of that figure he adds: "Did you do penance wallowing in the wilderness?" For the first and last time Lpez Velarde recognizes in a woman a spiritual complexity similar to his own. For an instant, woman is no longer an object of veneration or pleasure: "The conflagration has touched your face, and lava has flowed over it." He owes to her the revelation of his "own zodiac: the Lion and the Virgin." The discovery of himself is also that of one woman who is all women, "total and partial, peripheral and central"; that is, a woman who is able to be a lover without abdicating her own will. Freedom. In spite of the exasperated sensuality of his expressions, always oscillating between the cruelty and the vision of death, his pa.s.sion is spiritual-if one understands by that a love that does not deny the body but rather scourges and consumes it. The road of his pa.s.sion is a "ruby road" sprinkled with his own blood. Possession is impossible; but, even if it were not, it would be no different: what is there besides the body? Something, perhaps, that is neither life nor death. All love, even though it be for a fraction of a second, is contemplation of the abyss: Did you lie sleeping on the slope of a volcano? Did lava pour across your lips and calcine your brow?

Lpez Velarde's second love revealed to him the soul's dialogue and the body's monologue-not plenitude. That woman, the one who loved him with a more active, complex, and lucid love than Fuensanta (but did Fuensanta ever love him, ever glimpse the real man?), that woman who was his true mate, the one to whom he owed the discovery of his most secret self, rejected him. Whatever the external reasons for her refusal, by acting in this way she was faithful, perhaps without knowing it, to the temper of their mutual pa.s.sion. A combustible pa.s.sion, not an embodied one. We have lost the ancient secret of reconciliation, and our loves humiliate the body or degrade the spirit. Plenitude, for Lpez Velarde, would from that time be "beyond": either poetry or death. With bitterness, but without rancor, he settled definitively into his solitude. Again he became "the cosmic beggar." It will be said by some that he did not choose to be a bachelor, but that it was imposed on him by circ.u.mstances, as it had been, similarly, by Fuensanta. I do not agree. I need scarcely dwell on our individual responsibility in what we call our failures, whether it be in love or in other areas of life. Unconscious or unconfessed, that responsibility is still ours. Do we not almost always seek what harms us; are we not the secret authors of our ruin? If man is not the master of his destiny, neither is he entirely its victim. We are accomplices of our circ.u.mstances: Lpez Velarde knew beforehand that their love was unrealizable, although he would never have admitted it to himself. Furthermore, two facts prove that his choice was voluntary: throughout his life he professed an aversion to matrimony and, what is more momentous and more definitive, he never hid his repugnance of fatherhood.

Perhaps scandalized by the frankness of his statements, the majority of his critics have not paused long enough to examine Lpez Velarde's ideas on procreation, or they have preferred to hide them behind a curtain of sentimental explanations. Nevertheless, the poet could not have been more explicit: the family is "a factory of suffering, a source of disgrace, a seed bed of misfortune." In the same text-a short story with an autobiographical flavor-he compares the family hearth to a beast's den and the cries and laughter of the young to the moans and curses of the d.a.m.ned: ". . . in the somber and asphyxiating hub of fecundity, where Rosario, like all the other women, would multiply the groans and blasphemies of the stock of Cain." The violence of this language could lead us to believe that we are dealing with a momentary catharsis. But no: we are confronting something more profound: Lpez Velarde made a vow not to have children-and he fulfilled it. His decision was meditated, and, in spite of what critics think, it is not in contradiction to the other aspects of his character. (He was a complex, not a contradictory, spirit.) Without fear or reticence, the devotee of the roundabout, of the oblique allusion, confides his thoughts to us: "It is more worthy to lead a sterile life than to prolong the corruption beyond ourselves. . . . Why populate the cemetery? I shall live this hour of melody, of calm and light, for myself and my offspring. Thus I shall live it with an incisive intensity, the intensity of one who wishes in his lifetime to live the life of his race." His misanthropy is not, at least not exclusively, the result of his character or his misfortunes, but of his reflections. He loves life; he affirms that he will enjoy the hour that has been given him with lucid fullness because he knows it will be his last. All this, which is a great deal, seems nothing to him. In the same paragraph in which he exalts life-light, melody, calm-he condemns it. And he goes further: life seems admirable to him because it will not be repeated: the hour is beautiful because it is the last. His condemnation is definitive. In fact, he exalts death. And he exalts it as an absolute reality: only death liberates us from corruption, only death can give us the sensation of totality that time perpetually denies us. In the light of this confidence the image of life as a harem and a hospital finally appears in all its gravity. It is something more than a psychological anomaly, something different from the fantasy of a flayed sensitivity: it is a judgment about the world and about the value of existence. Life suffers from an invisible and incurable infection. Although we call that illness Time, its true name is Evil. To propagate life is to serve the devil.

3. THE SOUND OF THE HEART.

Soul, inseparable sibyl, I no longer know where you end and where I begin; we are two turns of the same refulgent knot, of the same knot of love.

Ramn Lpez Velarde We lack a truly complete study of Lpez Velarde's beliefs. I say beliefs, not ideas, because except in exceptional cases, like that of his denial of the value of existence, his convictions were more felt than thought. As he frequently observed, his Catholicism was not without its doubts and vacillations. He never lived out those doubts as a drama of the intellect. In moments of crisis he resorted to the power of grace, not to the consolation of theology. He founds his orthodoxy on the purity of his feelings; his sins are sins of love and only love can pardon them. His childhood religion forms his vital base; it is nourishment for his spiritual life: its rites are a kind of superior aesthetic, a ceremonial for souls; its mysteries are a theater without time whose symbols represent the pa.s.sion of truth. But Lpez Velarde is his own audience; his fervor seems to him lightly comic, and he treats his beliefs with a certain ironic tenderness. He does not believe, but he cannot stop believing. He scorns the fanatics of the new cult, the "measly journalists" who clutch in their fists "the torch of progress" and rail against the "hydra of obscurantism." He a.s.serts: "My heart is retrograde." The adjective is double-edged: he is Catholic to the rationalists, idolater to the Christians. It does not embarra.s.s him to confess that he is superst.i.tious-and as he makes his confession a skeptical smile touches his lips.

Ever since Villaurrutia used it to define Lpez Velarde's poetry, all possible meanings have been wrung from the following celebrated sentence: "The synthesis of my zodiac is the Lion and the Virgin." It is amazing that no one has remarked on the first and most obvious meaning of this declaration. Instead of rushing to psychology manuals, commentators might have leafed through any astrology tract. Phillips touches on this theme, commenting that astronomical motifs are frequent in Lpez Velarde's poetry and prose, "especially those of the signs of the zodiac." It would have been more accurate to say astrological motifs. It cannot be denied that Lpez Velarde was interested in the occult sciences, an inclination shared with several modern poets. It is his second love, teaching him to breathe in this atmosphere of exalted spiritualism mixed with apocalyptic visions-as we glimpse in El don de febrero-to whom he owes this vision of his being ruled by the dual and contradictory influences of the sun and Mercury. Symbols of the cabala, astrology, and alchemy also appear in his poems. One of the most perfect compositions, from a certain point of view perhaps the most accomplished, in Zozobra is t.i.tled "Da trece" [The thirteenth day] and ends with an invocation to the dark powers: "Superst.i.tion: help me hold the radiant vertigo of the everlasting moment . . ." He does not see superst.i.tion as an error on the part of the ancients but rather as the remnants of a lost wisdom not entirely incompatible with modern beliefs: "I respect equally the physicist who sees in his shadow the propagation of light . . . and the savage who venerates his own shadow. Astrology, when it pleases her, enters my bed with her chilly feet. I depend on chiromancy as I do on vaccine. I confuse the laws of Newton with those of fate. My cabala credo. My amulet art." All this is difficult to reconcile with Catholic dogma, but it does not harm what I would call Lpez Velarde's emotional orthodoxy. His pessimism is a more serious matter.

To deny oneself procreation because existence is evil is a heresy the church has never pardoned. I do not know what readings inspired this idea in him. Although identification of sources is very important, it is not indispensable. I will simply mention that at that time certain Oriental concepts were beginning to be known among us. In those years Tablada was interested in Buddhism and Vasconcelos in Indian philosophy. Critics consider "La ltima odalisca" to be one of the central poems of Zozobra and judge it, and rightly so, to be a true key to his poetry. Even so, as far as I am aware no one has remarked on the Oriental flavor of its first two stanzas. The first follows: My flesh is heavy and resigned because its fabulous weight is the shuddering chain of the universal bodies that have united themselves with my life.

One scarcely need comment on these five lines: pantheism and, not entirely explicit, reincarnation and karma. It would not be difficult to find other scattered examples. But Lpez Velarde's contact with Oriental thought must not have been either very intimate or very prolonged. He did not need to go so far afield to identify procreation with evil. He received this idea from a more direct, though never wholly visible, tradition that has been a secret and perpetual current circulating throughout the history of the West.

However indifferent he may have been to theology, it is impossible to believe that Lpez Velarde was unaware that his condemnation of existence coincided with an ancient heresy combated by the church from the time of its origin, one that still possesses us today, although we at times do not know it: Manichaeism.5 Do not adduce against this a lack of reading: if we forget that he studied in a seminary we forget a great deal. Neither is it probable, no matter how insecure his knowledge of history, that he did not know about the extermination of the Albigenses at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Middle Ages interested Lpez Velarde. Alongside allusions to the Scriptures, sacred history, and ecclesiastical liturgy in his work, we find saints, emperors, virgins, crusades, and medieval legends. No less significant is the utilization in his poems of certain symbols from Provencal poetry and the early Renaissance. The enumeration of all these elements would be tiresome. Furthermore, what concerns us is not his erudition or his information but the direction of his poetry.

The duality of matter and spirit, body and soul, sensual and spiritual love can be Christian if the opposition is not definitive; by that I mean, if the two principles are not irreconcilable. The church does not condemn the flesh, rather the confusion that causes us to attribute to the body the virtues of the spirit: the deification of a mortal creature. It judges deviations of the spirit with the same severity, and this explains the mistrust, not to mention hostility, with which it regards mystics. In every lover and in every mystic lies the seed of heresy. But nature is not evil: it is the fallen world. The earth and all living things share with man banishment from "being," contingency. This separation is infinite (the abyss between G.o.d and man being insurmountable), not eternal: although redemption will not make us G.o.ds, it does extend a bridge between fallen beings and a full state of being. On the other hand, for Lpez Velarde the two halves never become one. The spirit is invulnerable, incorruptible, untouchable. Matter, subject to time, borne down by its own weight, falls; matter is vulnerable and its weight is affliction and corruption. Lpez Velarde's dualism is radical, and it is there that we must find the basis of his pessimism. His prose and poetry contain innumerable allusions to this central theme, which at times becomes an obsession. In "La ltima odalisca," as a prime example, bodies are "shipwrecked cl.u.s.ters of fruit riding the crest of the Flood," and their weight is "fabulous" because it acc.u.mulates all the weightiness of matter and time throughout the centuries. Time is not only multiplicity but also continuity, the proliferation of evil. For that reason the soul, in the following stanza, also is "heavy and afflicted"; its weight is its sorrow, and it consists of having known-being of spiritual essence-"the red grove and the surgeon's knife": love that is time and death. That knowledge is an "arcane distress."

The soul is not the spirit: it is one of its sparks fallen into matter, lost in the labyrinths of time. The soul's salvation cannot consist of the redemption of the natural world postulated by Christianity, but rather of the definitive separation of matter and spirit. Or to put it another way: the annihilation of the body is the condition for the soul's return to its origin. Thus death is a dual potentiality. It is illness, decomposition, extinction, and rebirth: the succession of instants and centuries, the agony of the "cruel logarithmic rush"; but it is also liberation of the soul, the fire that purifies, the breath that annuls the body. Material death is a plurality and pullulation of forms, some atrocious and others enchanting; its essence is to have no essence: it is multiplicity. The death that liberates is unity and has only one form: it is the angel, the beloved, the wife beyond the tomb, Fuensanta. It is Death. The horror of death and the fascination with death that seemed to us to be an aberration and a contradiction are no longer obsessions: they have meaning, they form the axis of a spiritual vision considerably more coherent than the poor disconnected explanations of the psychology of our time. Lpez Velarde is afraid of dying because, like Quevedo, "the world has bewitched" him; and he loves death because he is in love with an incorruptible being, that spirit of which the soul is a fragment. Only love of the death that is Death will save him from the corruption of mortal life.

The resurrection of the flesh signifies, among other things, the redemption of the body. Lpez Velarde pa.s.sionately believed in that dogma. It will be said that it is impossible to reconcile this belief with the idea that existence is evil. True. But I shall simply repeat that Lpez Velarde did not concern himself with imposing an intellectual system on his work and that I am not looking for such severe order. My intention is different: to discover the relationships and the meaning of his poetic experiment. So, then, did he believe in the resurrection of the flesh, or did he believe he believed? Perhaps "El sueo de los guantes negros," the poem about resurrection, could respond to this question. The nucleus of that composition, its princ.i.p.al line, is not a response but an interrogation: "Does your flesh still cling to every bone?" Lpez Velarde asks himself the same question we ask. And he cannot answer: "The enigma of love was entirely veiled . . ." The response is an indecipherable mystery. One will not perceive the meaning of that terrible doubt unless one knows what and who Fuensanta was in the mythology of the poet.

In an insignificant but revealing poem from his youth, "El adis" [The farewell], Lpez Velarde calls himself "the idolater": and she is his idol, "the white, light woman." Fuensanta rejects this deification and states that "the cadaver of her love" from that day forward "will preside over his hearth's mourning." Thus, at the moment that she is moving away from him in reality, Fuensanta is joining him in the after world. In another composition from those years, even less felicitous ("El campanero" [The bell ringer]), the poet declares that his betrothed is Death. This is a commonplace, but poetry is made of commonplaces that turn into images and unheard-of realities. In the case of Lpez Velarde the sentimental reality of Fuensanta is transfigured, as time pa.s.ses, into a metaphysical reality. The transformation is ascendant and progresses from the provincial sweetheart to impossible love and from this love to death, "my blood's harmonious elect." In order for the idolatry of youth to be converted into the religion of maturity it is necessary that she pa.s.s through the purgatories of eroticism and death. Only dead, now a pure spirit, can the beloved truly be Fuensanta. The question posed in "El sueo de los guantes negros" has an ambiguous resonance. Is Fuensanta not yet a spirit because the poet is still bewitched by time and its pitfalls? What is the significance of those black gloves, whose prudence accentuates even more their funereal eroticism? They are an obstacle, a prohibition, but what do they prohibit? The union of their souls or of their bodies? The lovers whirl in an eternal circuit-an image that recalls a celebrated pa.s.sage from the Divine Comedy- without ever joining together, without ever being either wholly dead or wholly alive, in a landscape of-heaven or h.e.l.l? And that love, is it love of life or love of death? It is not easy to answer these questions. They all come together in another question: who is Fuensanta?

In a book that is both irritating and enticing in its bristling richness of questions and hypotheses, Denis de Rougemont posits an idea that at first view seems extreme: "The pa.s.sion of love, glorified by myth, was really at the date of its appearance in the twelfth century a religion, in the broad sense of that term, and, specifically, a Christian heresy.6 I confess, not before overcoming considerable resistance and reservation, that I have become almost completely an adherent to this idea. The heresy to which de Rougement refers is the Manichaeism of the Cathari. The pa.s.sion of love (or, as the French say, love-pa.s.sion, something not at all the same as either pa.s.sionate love or erotic pa.s.sion) was the archetype of the Provencal poets, and since then it has continued to inspire almost all the imaginative works of the West, the loftiest as well as the most vulgar. To the troubadours we owe not only the invention of the basic forms of European lyricism, but also the concept of courtly love, the origin of our image of woman and of pa.s.sion. De Rougemont contends that the metaphysic implicit in the rhetoric of the troubadours is none other than that of Manichaeism. In fact, both these spiritual movements appeared in the same place sometime in the eleventh century. I do not see how one could dissociate them without breaking the historical unity of a civilization.

It would be excessive to enlarge upon the similarities that the Swiss writer finds between the poems of the Provencals and the beliefs of the Cathari. It is sufficient to point out the most notable: the condemnation of matrimony (the "union of bodies") and the exaltation of a love other than conjugal love, a love that is chaste pa.s.sion and the promise of reunion beyond this life: woman, the ally of Lucifer and also perpetual temptation to fall into and reproduce matter, is also, as the Lady of courtly love, the immaterial site of spiritual union. The feminine principle, the Lady, is the image of our own soul or, to make use of modern vocabulary, the projection of our own psyche, our anima. A particle of G.o.d fallen into the world, a prisoner of the flesh, the soul struggles to free itself from the body and return to the spirit. The soul wishes to be reunited with its anima, that is, with itself. What the lover seeks in the beloved is his lost ident.i.ty. Sufism, a form of Persian mysticism that is almost surely one of the Oriental roots of courtly love, calls this glorious particle of the soul "angel." In the Mazdean tradition, on the third day of a man's death his angel comes forth to meet him "as a maiden of resplendent beauty and says to him, 'I am you yourself.' "7But if the man has sinned against his soul, if he has stained his image, he confronts a "monstrous or disfigured apparition, a reflection of his fall."

This little digression responds, albeit indirectly, to the questions provoked by the question of "El sueo de los guantes negros." Lpez Velarde's two loves correspond exactly with the Lady of the Provengal poems. Both real loves blend-or rather dissolve-into the figure of the dead and resuscitated beloved, "the prisoner of the Valley of Mexico." But this Fuensanta is no longer the provincial love; rather, she is Lpez Velarde's image. She is not an archetype in the sense that the Lady was for the Provencal poets or Beatrice for Dante. The image of a divided and stained conscience, Fuensanta is everything the poet wished and did not wish to be. If she is the Death that conquers death, she is also one who hides her true ident.i.ty in the prudence of those black gloves.

Lpez Velarde seeks his true being in her image, but when he finds that image he does not recognize himself in it. There is an insuperable distance between Fuensanta and himself. That distance is not physical but moral. The enigma is made more clear if one sees that those gloves conceal an imperfection. It is precisely that imperfection that tempts and seduces the poet. And it is possible to know what that tempting imperfection consists of. Lpez Velarde discovered it early in his youth, before his full realization of carnal pa.s.sions. That poem I cited earlier, "El adis," describes a scene that is a burlesque allegory: at the moment of separation, Fuensanta leads the poet toward the door; she carries in "her fragile hands" a light that is a "replica of the gospel": but scarcely have they reached the threshold when-be it the sigh of a soul in torment or a breath from the spirit of evil- a gust of air snuffs out the candle.

Irony alters the image. The intrusion of the critical consciousness undermines Fuensanta's psychic realit