But Moreno Villa didn’t like his own sarcasm, his inclination toward bitterness; he distrusted lucidity that was born of resentment. As for his own integrity, what merit did it have if it had never been tested by temptation? No diva of the theater had asked him to write a play to the measure of her own success, as Lola Membrives or Margarita Xirgú had done with Lorca; not one of them had ever been interested in reciting his poems, like that irritating Berta Singermann, who filled theaters by grimacing and shouting in a Buenos Aires accent the verses of Antonio Machado, or Lorca, or Juan Ramón Jiménez. And he never would be in a position to turn down a government job offer and dedicate himself body and soul to his writing. No one was going to consider him for the post of general secretary of the Summer University in Santander, as they had with Pedro Salinas, who complained so much about the lack of quiet and time but looked so pleased with himself in photographs of official engagements. It isn’t at all difficult for me to imagine him, José Moreno Villa, used to the benevolent hospitality of the Student Residence, a man close to fifty, often no more than a secondary guest in photographs of other, more important people, always discreet, elusive, formal, at times not even identified by name, unrecognized, without the open smile or arrogant pose the others display as if their place in posterity could be taken for granted. He isn’t young and doesn’t dress as if he were, doesn’t have the air of a literary figure or professor but rather of what he actually does for a living: a functionary in a certain position, not a clerk but not a high-ranking employee either, perhaps an attorney or a person of some means in a provincial capital who doesn’t attend Mass or hide his Republican sympathies but would never go out without a tie and hat; a man who looked older than he was long before his hair turned gray, who at the age of forty-eight supposes with a mixture of melancholy and relief that no great changes in his life await him.
The footsteps had taken him out of his self-absorption — profound and at the same time bare of reflection and almost of memory, filled above all with indolence and something else not very different from it, the attentive contemplation of a small canvas where he’d sketched a few tenuous lines in charcoal, and a bowl of seasonal fruit brought up at midday from the Residence dining room: a quince, a pomegranate, an apple, a bunch of grapes. He’d cleared away some papers and books from the table so the clean forms would stand out. He’d been observing the slow descent of light from the window as it made the volumes look denser, their shadows accentuated, every color slightly muted. The red of the pomegranate turned the color of polished leather; the dusty gold of the quince shone with greater intensity as the twilight enveloped the space, no longer reflecting light but radiating it; light slid over the apple as if it were a ball of oiled wood, yet it acquired a degree of moist density when it touched the skin of the grapes. Perhaps the grapes were too sensual, too tactile for the purpose he’d just begun to anticipate, half closing his eyes. They’d have to be ascetic grapes like those of Juan Gris or Sánchez Cotán, carved in a single visual volume, without that slightly sticky suggestion accentuated by the ripe afternoon sun, a Sorolla sun, sifted with the same soft dust that the rough surface of the quince left on his fingers, in his nostrils.
Under the fruit bowl was a page from the magazine Estampa: AN ENCHANTER FROM CAIRO WHO BEWITCHES WOMEN AND PREDICTS THE FUTURE COMES TO MADRID. The words “Madrid” and “future” were as spellbinding as the forms of the fruits. Each time he prepared to paint something, there was a moment of revelation and another of discouragement, just as when the first line of a poem appeared unexpectedly in his mind. How can one take the next step in the empty space that is a blank sheet of paper or canvas? Perhaps the very texture, the resistance or softness of the paper, could indicate a way. He could go on and realize he’d ruined the attempt: the second verse was forced, not worthy of the sudden illumination of the first, a useless blot on that grand expanse of paper. The revelation seemed to be lost without his knowing how to recapture it; the feeling of failure stayed with him, and to begin work it was necessary, if not to conquer it, at least to resist it, to take the first steps as if he didn’t feel its leaden weight. But in everything he’d undertaken, the same thing occurred: an easy enthusiasm, then the start of fatigue, and finally a reluctance he couldn’t always overcome. In the long run, he was a Sunday painter. And if painting demanded such great mental effort and skill, why, instead of putting all his heart and talent into it, did he dissipate his already limited energies writing poetry, where he was not even granted the absolution of manual labor, the certainty of an acceptable degree of technical command? In the heat of the work his unwillingness dissipated, but the next day he had to begin again, and nothing guaranteed that the enthusiasm of the day before would still be there. Work he’d already completed was useless: each beginning was a new point of departure, and the canvas or sheet of paper before which he was transfixed and disheartened remained emptier than ever. A first line, promising but very uncertain, a horizontal that could be a table on which the fruit bowl rested or an imagined distant ocean beyond his Madrid window. An imminent insight disappeared without a trace into pure dejection.
He saw himself as a man without ambition who’d desired too many disparate things. Ambition is needed to fulfill desires; one can’t allow incredulity and reluctance to gnaw inside. Others knew how to concentrate their energies. He dissipated his, going from one task to another like a traveler who spends no more than a few days in any city and eventually grows tired of wandering. Others younger than he had approached him, wanting to learn from his experience, and not long afterward left him behind with no thanks for what they owed him: the example of his painting, his knowledge of modern art, and his poetry, innovative before anyone else’s, whose unacknowledged imprint was so evident in those who now shone much brighter than he. He’d have preferred none of that to matter to him: his own resentment irritated him more than the success of others, slightly bitter to him even when he considered it deserved. It saddened him not to be on a level with the best in himself, not to be content with the noble stoicism of the personage he imagined, another Moreno Villa, just as disillusioned but with a much more serene heart, an obscure poet, a painter as removed from fame as Sánchez Cotán, whom he admired so much and who had spent his life completing recondite masterpieces in his Carthusian cell, or like Juan Gris, persisting in his rigorous art in spite of poverty, in spite of the clamor of Picasso’s obscene triumph.