Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

The Civil War (1936-1939,) 153but that the director had always acted perfectly correctly. The delegatesfrom the studio also spoke in his favor, and eventually he wasreleased, only to slip away to France and later join the Falange. Afterthe war, he went back to directing movies, and even made a filmglorifying Franco! The last I saw of him was at a long, nostalgiclunch we had together in the 1950s at the Cannes Festival.During this time, I was very friendly with Santiago Carrillo, thesecretary of the United Socialist Youth. Finding myself unarmed ina city where people were firing on each other from all sides, I wentto see Carrillo and asked for a gun."There are no mote," he replied, opening his empty drawer.After a prodigious search, I finally got someone to give me arifle. I remember one day when I was with some friends on the Plazade la Independencia and the shooting began. People were firing fromrooftops, from windows, from behind parked cars. It was bedlam,and there I was, behind a tree with my rifle, not knowing where tofire. Why bother having a gun, I wondered, and rushed off to giveit back.The first three months were the worst, mostly because of thetotal absence of control. I, who had been such an ardent subversive,who had so desired the overthrow of the established order, now foundmyself in the middle of a volcano, and I was afraid. If certain exploitsseemed to me both absurd and glorious~like the workers who climbedinto a truck one day and drove out to the monument to the SacredHeart of Jesus about twenty kilometers south of the city, formed afiring squad, and executed the statue of Christ-I nonetheless couldn'tstomach the summary executions, the looting, the criminal acts. Nosooner had the people risen and seized power than they split intofactions and began tearing one another to pieces. This insane andindiscriminate settling of accounts made everyone forget the essentialreasons for the war.I went to nightly meetings of the Association of Writers andArtists for the Revolution, where I saw most of my friends-Albert!,Bergamin, the journalist Corpus Varga, and the poet Altolaguirre,