He was a foreigner, a South American, and he came from Paris. “But
these Christs!--Good God!” he said to me, as we stood before one of the
bloodiest of those that are to be found in our cathedrals, “this thing
repels, revolts----”
“It revolts him who knows nothing of the cult of suffering,” I said.
And he replied: “But suffering is not blood. There is bloodless
suffering, serene suffering.” ...
And we began to talk about it.
I confessed to him that I have the soul of my people, and that I like
these livid Christs, emaciated, purple, bloody, these Christs that
someone has called ferocious. Lacking in art? Barbarous? I don’t know.
And I like these harsh Marias Dolorosas, rigid with grief.
The Spanish Christ--so Guerra Junqueiro has often said to me--was born
in Tangiers. Perhaps. Perhaps He is an African Christ. Would He be more
Christ if He were an Attic or a Parisian or an English Christ? For
the other Christ, the Galilean, the historical, we must bid farewell
to. And as for history as applied to Christianity.... This history is
the history of the last twenty centuries, and here, in Spain, history
is Spanish. He was born then, perhaps, in Tangiers. Not very far from
Tangiers was born St. Augustine.
Bloodless, serene, purified suffering.... Yes, yes, “stylistic”--or
shall we say, artistic?--suffering. The cry of suffering breathed into
a flute and become a dirge. Very good. All that the Laocoön inspired in
Lessing was just that.
Very good. But it is the same with this kind of suffering as with
irony. Usually ironists are people who are never angry. He who is
angry is insulting. The ironist forgives everything and says that it
is because he understands everything. And what if it is because he
understands nothing? I don’t know.
This harsh, raw manner of ours--I said to my friend, the South
American--not everyone can bear it. It has been said that hate is rife
in Spain. Perhaps. Perhaps we begin by hating ourselves. You will
find many here, a great many, who dislike themselves. We follow the
precept of “love thy neighbour as thyself,” and since, in spite of
inevitable egoism, we do not love ourselves, so neither do we love our
neighbours. The ascetic and the egoist are made in the same way. Not
that the ascetic is not an egoist; egoistic he may indeed be, and with
a vengeance. But even when an egoist, he does not know how to love
himself.
When you see a bull-fight, I continued, you will understand these
Christs. The poor bull is also a kind of irrational Christ, a
propitiatory victim, whose blood cleanses us from not a few of the sins
of barbarism. And leads us, nevertheless, to others. But is it not true
that forgiveness leads us--unhappy humans!--to sin again?
My friend saw a bull-fight in Madrid and wrote to me as follows;
“You are right. The Spanish people likes violent spectacles, which
beget the emotion of tragedy, or rather of ferocity. I had no
difficulty in understanding this at the bull-fight last Sunday. I
understood it also when I conversed with various people, and in
particular with literary people, who tear one another to pieces
with unparalleled ferocity. Poor Christ, pierced and bathed with
blood! There is no hope that His wounds will ever heal in these
Spanish cathedrals or that the grimace of His frenzied pain will
ever relax--for here there is no knowledge of the return of Jesus
to heaven, after His martyrdom.”
Perhaps--who knows?--our heaven is martyrdom itself.
Not a few foreigners who have learnt to know us have been struck with
this ferocity with which, here in Spain, men of letters destroy one
another. Yes, here all men, but particularly artists and writers,
destroy one another with the ferocity of bull-fighters--or it may be
with the Christian ferocity of our Tangerine Christianity.
And I, who do not like bull-fights and never go to see them, I, who
do not like flaying my fellow writers (for the office of executioner
dirties the hands), I like these Tangerine Christs, purple, livid,
blood-stained and blood-drained. Yes, I like these bleeding and
exsanguious Christs.
And the smell of tragedy! Above all, the smell of tragedy!
* * * * *
You should read the great Sarmiento’s comparison between bull-fights
and tragedy, in his account of his journey in Spain about the middle of
the last century. In the bull-fight there is none of the insupportable
unities of the pseudo-classical tragedy, and there is, moreover, real
dying. Real dying, and, above all, real killing. The bull is killed
just as an infidel dog was killed by a good Spanish Christian in the
good old days--really killed.
For many people, perhaps for my friend the American, all this creates
an atmosphere difficult to breathe, an acrid atmosphere. But if you
take away the taste, other atmospheres too become insipid. It is like
the austere beauty of our bleak upland deserts. He who tempers his
soul, or distempers it--I know not which--in the contemplation of
these blood-stained and blood-drained Christs, never accustoms himself
afterwards to others.
And this hate, this same hate that circulates everywhere here, like a
subterranean stream of lava, this same hate ...
It has its source in what is deepest in ourselves; we hate ourselves
and not one another only, but each one his own self.
“But you people have no real love of life, although you are tenacious
of it,” another foreigner said to me once, a Frenchman, as one who
makes a discovery. And I replied: “Perhaps!” He exclaimed again: “But
this is a veritable cult of death!” And I answered: “Of death, no--of
immortality!” The fear that if we die, we die utterly and altogether,
makes us cling to life, and the hope of living another life makes us
hate this one.
_La joie de vivre._ It has been translated _la alegría de vivir_. But
it is only a translation. This _alegría de vivir_--let them say what
they like--is a gallicism. It is not an authentic Spanish phrase. I
do not remember to have met with it in any of our classics. For man’s
greatest crime is that of having been born.[1] Indeed it is!
And this same literary ferocity with which our men of letters bite
and tear and flay and quarter one another is not without its sharp
voluptuousness for the spectator. And it is in this strife that our
masterminds are tempered. Many of their ripest have been produced
in the atmosphere of defamatory coteries. And they carry with them,
naturally enough, the acrid flavour of their origin. They smell of
hate. And the public, scenting hate, becomes excited and applauds.
Applauds as it does at the bull-fight when it smells blood. Blood of
the body or blood of the soul, what is there else?
Is this cultured? is this civilized? is this European? I don’t know.
But it is Spanish.
Ought we to be ashamed of it? Why? Better to probe into it, scrutinize
it, stir up the depths of it, make ourselves fully conscious of this
hatred of our own selves. The evil lies in our being unconscious of it,
for once it is revealed to us for what it is, a hatred and abhorrence
of our own selves, it is already in the way of becoming ennobling and
strengthening and redeeming. Do you not remember that terrible paradox
of the Gospels about having to hate father and mother and wife and
children in order to take up the cross, the blood-stained cross, and
follow the Redeemer? Hatred of ourselves, when it is unconscious,
obscure, purely instinctive, almost animal, engenders egoism; but when
it becomes conscious, clear, rational, it is able to engender heroism.
And there is a rational hatred, yes, there is.
Yes, there is a triumphant, heavenly, glorious Christ, He of the
Transfiguration, He of the Ascension, He who sits at the right hand
of the Father; but He is for when we shall have triumphed, for when
we shall have been transfigured, for when we shall have ascended. But
for here and now, in this bull-ring of the world, in this life which
is nothing but tragic bull-fighting, the other Christ, the livid, the
purple, the bleeding and exsanguious.