Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

ders. These hideous and terrifying monsters threw us into an inexplicablepanic; but given our Bufiuelesque penchant for morbidity,they were often the main topic of conversation. And our stories aboutthem are outrageous, like the one about Luis seeing an eight-eyed,jagged-toothed monster and fainting away in the middle of dinnerat an inn in Toledo and coming to only after he was back in Madrid.Then there was my oldest sister, who could never find a sheet ofpaper large enough to draw even the head of the spider she said wasspying on her in a hotel. I remember her sobbing while she describedthe four pairs of eyes that stared at her, and the impassive waiterwho picked it up by one leg and removed it from the room. Withher hand, she imitated the ghastly wavering crawl of old, dusty,hairy, one-legged spiders that trailed their filthy webs behind themand which still haunt the memories of our childhood. (My latestspider adventure occurred as I was coming downstairs and heard thefamiliar nauseating, squishy sound behind me. I knew immediatelythat it was our hideous hereditary enemy, and I thought I wouldfaint when I heard the hellish crunch it made as my savior, the paperboy, crushed it with his foot.) Spiders! Scorpions! Tarantulas! Ournightmares, like our dinner-table conversations, were filled withthem.Most of our pets belonged to Luis, and I never saw any who werebetter cared for, each according to the needs of its species. In fact,he still loves animals; sometimes I even suspect he tries not to hatespiders. In Vindiana, there's a scene where a tired dog is attachedby a rope to the underside of a cart as it rumbles along the road. Luissuffered when he shot this scene because in real life it was so verycommon. The habit was so ingrained in the Spanish peasant that totry to break it would have been like Don Quixote tilting at windmills.When we were on location, Luis had me buy a kilo of meatfor the dog, or for any other animal who happened to wander in.The Great Adventure of our childhood, however, occurred duringa summer in Calanda when Luis must have been in his early teens.We'd decided to sneak away to the neighboring town with some