Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

gafe under the pretext that certain actors who had worked with mehad died soon afterward! (I categorically deny their accusations, butshould you still have your doubts, I do have other friends who wouldbe glad to testify on my behalf.)Those of us who grew up in the early teens were profoundlyinfluenced by the extraordinary writers Spain produced at the turnof the century. I was lucky enough to know most of themÑOnegy Gasset, Unamuno, Valle Inclan, d'Ors, and Galdos, whose Nazannand Tristana I later adapted for the screen. Galdos was older thanthe others and had remained somewhat solitary. I met him onlyonce, at his home, when he was already very old and almost blind,wrapped in a blanket in front of the stove. And there was Pio Baroja,an important novelist not very much to my liking, Antonio Machado,the poet Juan Ramon Jimenez, Jorge Guillen, and Salinas.After these famous artists, whose frozen faces you can see todayin every wax museum in Spain, came my infamous "generation of192f"'Federico Garcia Lorca, Alberti, the poet Altolaguirre, Cernuda,Jose Bergamin, and Pedro Garfias. Between these two generationswere two men of whom I was very fond-Moreno Villa andRamon Gomez de la Serna. Although fifteen years older than I,Moreno Villa, an Andalusian from Mhlaga (like Picasso and Bergamin),was very much a part of our group. Because of special connections,he lived at the Residencia; we all went out together frequently.During the devastating flu epidemic of 1919, we werepractically the only boarders. Villa, a talented painter and writer,used to loan me his boob1 especially remember Stendhal's Le Rougeet Ie noir and Apoilinaire's L'Enchanteurpourrissant, which I devouredduring that particular plague.When the Republic was declared in 1931, Moreno Villa wasmade director of the Royal Library. Later, during the Civil War, hewent to Valencia, from which, like so many other prominent intellectuals,he was.eventually exiled. I came across him again in Paris,then later in Mexico, where I saw him frequently until he died inthe middle fifties. I still have a portrait he painted of me in 1948, ayear during which I could get no work at all.