Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

Games. I was seized with an embarrassingly naive but very Machiavellian(or so I thought) idea about how to seduce these women. Acavalry officer in Saragossa once told me about a powerful aphrodisiac,some kind of chloride, that he swore was strong enough to overcomethe resistance of even the most obstinate. I told Peinado and Viiiesthat we should invite the women again, offer them champagne, andpour a few drops of the magic potion into their drinks. Frankly, Itruly believed it would work; but Viiies, a devout Catholic, refusedto participate in such satanic enterprises. In the end, nothing happened,of courseÑexcep that I must have seen Jeanne Rucar manytimes, since she became my wife, and is still.It was during that time that I wrote and directed my first short play,called Hamlet, which a group of us staged in the basement of theSelect. Toward the end of 1926, however, a more serious projectappeared. Hernando Viiies was the nephew of the famous pianistRicardo Viiies, the first to recognize the genius of Erik Satie. At thistime, there were two famous orchestras in the city of Amsterdam:the first had just staged a production of Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat,while the second, led by the great Mengelberg, was considering aproduction of Falla's El retablo de m e Pedro, a short work based onan episode from Don Quixote. What was more interesting was thefact that they were looking for a director.Viiies knew Mengelberg, and thanks to my Hamlet I had a "reference,"albeit a rather flimsy one. Regardless, they offered me thejob, and suddenly I found myself working with a world-famousconductor and a group of remarkable singers. We had two weeks ofrehearsals at Hernando's in Paris. It was a curious work; the retablorefers to a small puppet theatre, and all the characters are marionetteswhose voices are provided by the singers. I introduced some newtwists by adding four real characters to the puppets; they were masked,and their role was to attend the puppeteer's, Maese Pedro's, performanceand interrupt from time to time. Their voices too were providedby singers hidden in the orchestra pit. Of course, I got my friends