When I remember Luis Cernuda, over the past 40 years we were together in the same land, as I recall we met no more than six or seven times. Perhaps there were more, but so many vital things were separating us and erasing his image, even inadvertently…

He was always a distant man who seemed not to want to blemish himself with anything that might leave a trace. He was stylish, elegant, detached. (I speak for myself, of course. How different he must have been with others! But I cannot imagine.) Do I remember him at Manolo Altolaguirre’s wedding? Probably. He always dressed in gray, even when he wore other colors. Later in the war, I do not remember where. In Paris? Then, I caught a glimpse of him at Manolo’s place on Sullivan, at Moreno Villa’s burial: with Rosa Chacel; at Emilio’s wake? I don’t think so: he was firm on everything, particularly on his absurdities. At Tomás Segovia’s house. We spoke by phone a month ago (we communicated that way, sometimes). He told me he would not return to California because the college forced him to take a check-up and he will not take it. I attributed it to a fad; surely it was something else: he did not want to know. He also refused to know in his work, his burden was enough.

“Besides, I have enough money for the time being.”

He died suddenly, as he surely would have chosen: on the threshold of a bathroom in pajamas and robe, pipe in hand, at sunrise. In Coyoacán, at the house that was Manolito’s. He had no family left, perhaps a nephew.

For a long time he did not want to know about Spain: nothing hurt him that much. He loved passionately what he hated it, his solitude first. He lived entrenched, surrounded by imaginary enemies. He knew his worth and believed to know what the rest were worth. He destroyed around him, just for destruction’s sake and to feel alone, but he didn’t succeed, building steadily by dint of rigor "la forma antes dormida en el sueño de lo inexistente."

When he lost faith in God he also lost it in men. He never recovered it; the only thing he always had in mind, made by him, was his belief in beauty. Like the day he ruled Spain “is dead,” only to give it more life.

He felt exiled even in Spain thirty years ago, so he lived mostly abroad, trying to find his homeland. "Nada se ha perdido,” having lost everything since he was able to reasoning. "Apenas si se volvía al séquito blasfemo para lanzar tal pulla ingeniosa." His contempt was real. Elegant, a real gentleman: arbitrary; a poet as good as the best of his generation.

Shy, lonely, he had to write what did not say; he killed the word that was alive. Condemned "a gozar y a sufrir en silencio la amarga y divina embriaguez, incomunicable e inefable..." he expressed that malady better than anyone of his time because for him there was no difference between life and death. How alone are those left alive! He could have written.

(We were just a few: Paloma Altolaguirre, Carlos Pellicer, pale and bald, Alí Chumacero, Francisco Giner; 100 meters behind, two meters underground Emilio Prados; an scholar; Joaquín Díez-Canedo. Seville! So far away!)

Cernuda, alone and distant or —as I said, I meant to say—"Everywhere man himself is the worse hindrance to his destiny." Luis Cernuda himself was the worst hindrance to his destiny. Unhappy and lonely along the shores of time, withering while beauty was being renewed.

He always dreamed of having a house and was unable or unwilling to have it; a stranger among strangers, he died in a friendly house, but not his, in a foreign land, a foreigner.

("Después de todo, el tiempo que te queda es poco, y quién sabe si no vale más vivir así, desnudo de toda posesión, dispuesto siempre para la partida." He brings to memory Antonio Machado’s almost identical verses)

"Modesty" is the word he most used.

He was the only Romantic poet among us.

November 6, 1963.

University of Mexico (Mexico DF), XVIII, Vol. 5 (January 1964), pp. 31.