Border of a Dream: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Spanish Edition) by Antonio Machado Read Free Book Online Page A

his wife on the day that Barcelona fell. Machado’s vehicle, with his mother, his brother, and his brother’s wife, Matea Mondero de Machado, left Barcelona near eleven in the evening. On a slow, painful trip they reached Cervià de Ter, ten kilometers north of Gerona, where they remained until the 26th, exhausted, with little food, sleeping on a winter floor. It was in leaving Cervià that Antonio was obliged to leave behind most of their luggage, including the suitcase that contained his unpublished writings of the last years. The convoy went on, stopping at a farmhouse at Mas Faixà, outside Figueras, twenty miles from the frontier. There, eighteen or twenty well-known Spanish intellectuals—including Navarro Tomás who had by now caught up with the Machados— spent their last night in Spain. On January 27, in the rain they boarded a military truck-ambulance and headed for the French border. Another passenger in the crowded vehicle was Juan Roura-Parella, who related that in the cold and rain of that January evening, he witnessed the noblest action he remembered in his life:

    There was scarcely room for all the passengers in the vehicle. Again personal belongings had to be left behind. When all were boarding, Machado insisted on being the last to find a seat. While his friends and relatives urged him to take a place, he remained in the patio and then insisted on being the last to enter the ambulance, saying, “
Yo tengo tiempo, yo tengo tiempo
”: I have time, I have time. 11

    At Cervià de Ter each passenger had been allowed to take only one small traveling bag. There are conflicting reports about how Antonio Machado lost his luggage and arrived only with the rain-soaked suit on his back at Collioure, “almost naked like the children of the sea” (“Portrait”). But it is almost certain that his suitcases were taken from him by soldiers as they boarded the truck leaving Cervià, his first stop after Barcelona, and that the soldiers were entrusted to get them to him at the border. At the French crossing, despite his sickness, Machado tried in vain to find his luggage and was profoundly depressed at their loss. It is thought thatamong these lost papers in one suitcase was a songbook to Guiomar, which may have been part of a larger manuscript of recent poems. We do not know what writings were in the luggage, and there is little hope that the bags will turn up on some Spanish farm.
    The scene of the voyage to the border was further described to me by Navarro Tomás:

    Machado sat opposite me in the crowded vehicle. We were all so numbed from the last sleepless nights and the most painful conditions of our traveling that none of us was able to utter a coherent sentence. During the trip, Machado sat with his head lowered, lost in deep reflection and a tremendous sadness. Occasionally, he mumbled a word to his brother José, who sat crammed next to him in the ambulance. When we reached the border at Port Bou, it was already night, cold, and raining heavily. The French police were preventing a crossing of the border between Port Bou and Cerbère. The accumulation of people and vehicles was so great that we had to get down from the ambulance and walk half a mile by foot, in the rain, with hordes of terrified women and children, until we reached the immigration office. There Machado walked with difficulty. I had to help him, supporting his arm.

    I spoke to the chief customs officer and explained to him who Machado was, that he was sick, and that if he had to walk any farther he would certainly die on the way. 12 Fortunately, the officer remembered his name from a Spanish textbook when he was studying the Spanish language, and was a man of understanding. He offered his private car to take Machado and his family to Cerbère.

    I was the only one who had any negotiable money, fifty prewar francs from a recent trip. With this money the writer Corpus Barga and I could go by train from Cerbère to Perpignan in search of