Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

things are happening. You can't go down there now; it's safer to stayright here."He paid no attention to any of us, and left, tense and frightened,the following day. The news of his death was a terrific shock. Of allthe human beings I've ever known, Federico was the finest. I don'tmean his plays or his poetry; I mean him personally. He was his ownmasterpiece. Whether sitting at the piano imitating Chopin, improvisinga pantomime, or acting out a scene from a play, he wasirresistible. He read beautifully, and he had passion, youth, and joy.When I first met him, at the Residencia, I was an unpolished rustic,interested primarily in sports. He transformed me, introduced meto a wholly different world. He was like a flame.His body was never found. Rumors about his death circulatedfreely, and Dali even made the ignoble suggestion that there'd beensome homosexual foul play involved. The truth is that Lorca diedbecause he was a poet. "Death to the intelligentsia" was a favoritewartime slogan. When he got to Granada, he apparently stayed withthe poet Rosales, a Falangist whose family was friendly with Lorca's.I guess he thought he was safe with Rosales, but a group of men (noone knows who they were, and it doesn't really matter, anyway) ledby someone called Alonso appeared one night, arrested him, anddrove him away in a truck with some workers. Federico was terrifiedof suffering and death. I can imagine what he must have felt, in themiddle of the night in a truck that was taking him to an olive groveto be shot. I think about it often.At the end of September, the Republican minister of foreignaffairs, Alvarez del Vayo, asked to see me. Curious, I went to hisoffice and was told only that I'd find out everything I wanted toknow when I got to Geneva. I left Madrid in an overcrowded trainand found myself sitting next to a POUM commander, who keptshouting that the Republican government was garbage and had tobe wiped out at any cost. (Ironically, I was to use this commanderlater, as a spy, when I worked in Paris.) When I changed trains inBarcelona, I ran into Jose Bergamin and Muiioz Sua'i, who were