Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

mocracies, who still treated the Soviet Union with contempt andrefused all meaningful contact with its leaders, that we saw Stalin'sgesture as a way of gaining time, of strengthening our forces, which,no matter what happened in Spain, were sure to be thrown intoWorld War 11. Most of the French Communist party also approvedof the pact; Aragon made that clear more than once. One of the rarevoices raised in protest within the party was that of the brilliantMarxist intellectual Paul Nizan. Yet we all knew that the pact wouldn'tlast, that, like everything else, it too would fall apart.I remained sympathetic to the Communist party until the endof the 1950S, when I finally had to confront my revulsion. Fanaticismof any kind has always repelled me, and Marxism was no exception;it was like any other religion that claims to have found the truth. Inthe 193os, for instance, Marxist doctrine permitted no mention ofthe unconscious mind or of the numerous and profound psychologicalforces in the individual. Everything could be explained, they said,by socioeconomic mechanisms, a notion that seemed perfectly derisoryto me. A doctrine like that leaves out at least half of the humanbeing.I know I'm digressing; but, as with all Spanish picaresques,digression seems to be my natural way of telling a story. Now thatI'm old and my memory is weaker, I have to be very careful, but Ican't seem to resist beginning a story, then abandoning it suddenlyfor a seductive parenthesis, and by the time I finish, I've forgottenwhere I began. I'm always asking my friends: "Why am I tellingyou this?" And now I'm afraid I'll have to give in to one last digression..There were all kinds of missions I had to carry out, one beingthat of Negrin's bodyguard from time to time. Armed to the teethand backed up by the Socialist painter Quintanilla, I used to watchover Negrin at the Gare d'Orsay without his being aware of it. I alsooften slipped across the border into Spain, carrying "special" documents.It was on one of those occasions that I took a plane for thefirst time in my life, along with Juanito Negrin, the prime minister'sson. We'd just flown over the Pyrenees when we saw a Fascist fighter