Spanish Dreams from a French Cemetery

...At the start of the Civil War Machado left Madrid, besieged by Franco's troops, for Valencia, then the Nationalists' advance drove him north to Barcelona...

...Mass education, he believed, was the only way of" awakening slumbering souls," of rousing the "yawning" and "leaden" Spain, whose worst enemy is itself: "We must protect the Spain that is rising from the Dead Sea, from the inert and crushing Spain that threatens to swallow everything up...

...After his death, his brother found in his pocket the last line of poetry he ever wrote, "Those blue days and that sun of childhood...

...Among the notes left on the tomb, I read: "You are more than a poet...

...Whenever I deal with country people,' Machado wrote, "I think how much they know and we ignore, and how little they care to know what we know...

...Genius and goodness rarely go together," the late poet Jorge Guillen observed, but he considered Machado an exception to that rule...

...Aboveall, Machado feared "the blood of Cain" in Spanish veins—ametaphor that pulsed through his poetry long before the Civil War, which he saw as "the shadow of Cain...

...His support of the Republican government, though, was consistent with his lifelong liberal outlook...

...Since 1939, every February 22 sprigs of both are laid on a tomb in this French fishing harbor a seagull's short flight from Spain...

...The record has now been set straight...

...The Antonio Machado Foundation, which has its international headquarters in Collioure and the Madrid pubusher Espasa Calpe have just released an exhaustive two-volume collection of his prose writings and poetry that includes a biography, Antonio Machado: ObraCompleta, edited by Oreste Macri...

...We miss you...

...Understanding for the poor and the humble did not, however, mean empathy with them...

...Of course, the poet produced the largest and most impressive part of his work, and was already much admired, long before the Civil War erupted...

...One of his war poems trails a poignant scent of rosemary, so typical of the Spanish countryside, and he insists he can smell it despite the stench of gunpowder hanging over the land...

...He died on February 22,1939, "barely three steps out of Spain," as the French poet Louis Aragon wrote, and less than a month after crossing the frontier...

...Machado's Tierra de A Ivargonzalez, a narrative poem telling of peasant greed and parricide in the style of popular romances, drew enthusiastic audiences when Lorca and his theater group staged it in small towns and villages...

...Letters published in the new collection show him to have been fully aware of his own literary stature and somewhat contemptuous of Spanish poetry, which he unfairly reduces to "50 lines that are perhaps worth reading...

...In an untypically subtle and moving speech, Guerra described Machado's tomb as a "place of secular pilgrimage...

...So does Guerra, who called him "a good and modest man more concerned about the future of his country than about himself...

...He pitted his pen and hopes against fanaticism...

...Even so, time has not diminished Machado's discrete public image...

...Thank you for helping us...

...all are addressed to "Don Antonio Machado, Collioure Cemetery, France...

...Several were written in a child's hand...

...This year over 1,000 people, the vast majority of them Spaniards, gathered in Collioure to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Machado's death...

...In 1975 Joaquin Gomez Burón, the author of a biography intended to mark the centenary of the poet's birth, sought to discredit his wartime writings by attributing them to mental "alienation" and to "early senility...

...Most come from Spain...

...In 1986, the daily HeraIdo de Aragon found that Machado is the most widely read poet in Spanish prisons...

...About 500 letters a year reach the mailbox affixed to the tombstone...

...The Collioure exhibition recalled the harsh treatment the refugees experienced on crossing the frontier...

...He recalled his and other Spanish democrats' clandestine visits here during Generalissimo Francisco Franco's dictatorship...

...Machado mistrusted the city dandies and pedants...

...They included old Republicans, schoolchildren, French officiais, and Spain's Deputy Prime Minister Alfonso Guerra...

...A shy teacher of French in small-town schools, his lapels spattered with tobacco ash, Machado seemed more at ease in provincial Castile than in the elegant cafés of Madrid...

...The almond and mimosa trees should continue to blossom every February for Machado and his friends...

...With the returnofdemocracytoSpain, Guerra observed, Machado's resting place has become, by extension, an unofficial memorial for all those Spaniards who died in exile as a result of the 1936-39 Civil War...

...There, behind high barbed-wire fences surrounding makeshift shelters and with little food, Spaniards were for a time herded like cattle and frequently treated as such by their Senegalese guards...

...Conferences and seminars on Machado were frowned upon by the authorities...

...Throughout Franco's dictatorship, Spanish democrats could slip into the cemetery over the border and daydream about the kind of Spain they and Machado wanted...

...In 1917, he published this harrowingly prophetic lullaby: Little Spanish child soon born, May God have pity on you...

...Although born in Seville, his personal austerity made him feel attuned to Castile, At the heart of Spain, Poor land, sad land, So sad it has a soul...

...Poems he had written during the fighting were not included in editions of his work published in Franco'sSpain...

...In contrast, he felt sympathy for the peasants who, stoically, Where there is wine, drink wine, If no wine, running water...

...The struggle was bracketed by the deaths of two poets who admired one another: Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered in 1936, and his "Maestro," Machado, one of the 500,000 or so Spaniards who fled into France before Franco's advancing troops...

...Most of the pilgrims, however, are anonymous admirers of Machado's work and of his support for the Spanish Republic in the 1930s...

...Today in the blue morning of democracy, Machado continues to be, Guerra said, the "daylight of future generations...

...Pablo Neruda saw in Machado "an old tree of Spain," with roots in both the literary and the popular cultures of his country, hence an appeal that cuts across educational and cultural barriers...

...If Machado had lived a few years longer," said Gomez Burón, "hewould have publicly retracted his war hymns...

...To the end, Machado clung to a gossamer thread of optimism...

...One of the two Spains Will chill your heart to death...

...Haunting the handsome land of Spain...

...Janice Valls-Russell writes about French and Spanish affairs for the NL...

...Yet the same man wrote "We must dream awake...

...Banishment from Spain continued after his death...

...Some 12,000-15,000 people annually seek out that grave in its otherwise quiet surroundings to leave flowers, postcards, poems, or other tokens...

...In his eyes they were Evil people who poison Everyplace they travel to...

...His main collections of poems, Soledades and Campos de Castillo, are steeped in the rhythms and landscapes of Castile...

...When, on his moving to the capital, his mother fretted about the oversized boots he insisted on wearing for comfort, the poet replied: "There are two kinds of people, those who look at your boots and those who look at your face...

...The flow of visitors and the letters— dozens of which were on display in a Machado exhibition here last month— are an indication of how very much alive the Spanish poet's appeal remains...

...But officials attending the commemoration preferred to remember the hospitality the 64-year-old poet and his relatives found once they slipped through thegendarmes' fingers...

...Educated in the prestigious secular Instituto Libre de Ensenanza, Machado was an influential member of the Generation del '98, an informal group of intellectuals that included the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno...

...Gendarmesche rural police) intercepted them and, separating men from women, sent them to internment camps further up the coast...

...It was also in Collioure, in 1959, that Spanish intellectuals living in exile first met those working in Spain in quiet opposition to the regime...

...He remains attractive and unusual in a country where social panache often accompanies success...

...It sought to inject Spanish thinking and politics with rational enlightenment in an attempt to counter the nationalistic mood following the loss of Cuba, the last morsel of Spain's American empire, in 1898...

...From "these old cities of my exile," as he called them, he wrote actively in behalf of the Republican cause...