Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

er reading somewhere that it could boast of having forty-five thousandpainters, a truly prodigious number. Many of them, includinga number of Spaniards, lived in Montparnasse, having abandonedMontmartre after World War I. Les Cabters d'Art, probably the mostprestigious art journal, devoted an entire issue to Spanish paintersin Paris. They were the artists I saw every day-Ismael de la Serna,an Andalusian just slightly older than I; Castanyer, a Catalonian whoopened a restaurant called Le Catalan just opposite Picasso's studioon the rue des Grands-Augustins; Juan Gris, whom I visited onceat his home in the suburbs and who died shortly afterward; Cossio,who was short, lame, and blind in one eye, and who harbored abitter resentment against strong healthy men. (He later joined theFalange and acquired a certain artistic reputation before his death inMadrid.) Finally, there was Bores, a well-known Ultraist painter,who once went with Hernando Viiies and me to Bruges and whomanaged to visit every museum in the city.These painters met regularly in a peiia that also included Huidobro,the well-known Chilean poet, and Miliena, a small, thinwriter from the Basque country. A short time after L'Age dw wasreleased, several members~Huidobro, Castanyer, and Cossio in particular-wroteme a letter full of criticism and insults. Our relationshipwas strained for a while, but eventually we had a reconciliation.Of all these artists, my closest friends were Joaquin Peinado andVines. The latter was originally from Catalonia; he married a marvelouswoman named Loulou, the daughter of the writer FrancisJourdain, a good friend of Huysmans and closely connected to theimpressionists.At the end of the nineteenth century, when Loulou's grandmotherpresided over a literary salon, she'd given Loulou an extraordinaryfan on which many of the greatest writers and musicians ofthe age had scribbled a few words or notes. Side by side on thisfrivolous article were inscriptions from Massenet, Gounod, Mistral,Alphonse Daudet, Heredia, Banville, Mallarme, Zola, Octave Mirbeau,Pierre Loti, Huysmans, and Rodin; together, they summed