Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

plagiarism." Something about this paradox always seemed to meprofoundly true. D'Ors taught in a working-class school in Barcelona,so he always felt somewhat of a provincial when he came toMadrid. He liked to visit the Residencia and mingle with the students,and from time to time he participated in the pefia at the CafeGijon.There was a cemetery in Madrid called the San Martin, whereour great romantic poet Iarra is buried. It hadn't been in use forseveral decades, but it had a hundred of the most beautiful cypresstrees I've ever seen. One evening the entire peiia, ~ncluding d'Ors,decided to pay it a midnight visit; we'd given the guardian ten pesetasthat afternoon, so we were free to do as we pleased. The cemeterywas deserted, abandoned to the moonlight and the silence. I remembergoing down several steps into an open tomb where a coffin layin a beam of moonlight. The top was ajar, and I could see a woman'sdry, dirty hair, which had grown out through the opening. Nervousand excited, I called out, and the others immed~ately rushed down.That dead hair in the moonlight was one of the most striking imagesI've ever encountered; I used it in The Phantom ~Liberty*Another close friend was Jose Bergamin, a great friend of Picassoand, later, Malraux. As the son of a former government minister, hewas a s&wito; he was married to one of the daughters of the playwrightArniches (whose other daughter married my friend Ugarte), Slim,witty, and perceptive, Bergamin was already well known as a poetand essayist. His penchant for preciosity, puns, paradoxes, and wordgames led him to cultivate several old Spanish chimeras, such as DonJuan and bullfighting. We saw a great deal of each other during theCivil War; and later, after I returned to Spain in 1961 to makeViridiana, he wrote me a magnificent letter in which he comparedme to Antaeus because, he claimed, I seemed to be reborn wheneverI touched my native soil. Like so many others, he too lived througha long exile, but during the past few years we've seen each otherfrequently; he's still struggling, and writing, in Madrid.And finally there was Unamuno, a phdosophy professor in Salamanca.Like Eugenio d90rs, he used to visit us often in Madrid,