Teresa in her turn describes
Valle in chapter XXIII as a «mago fakir antes de Cristo»
and refers to his Lámpara maravillosa: «Sobre
mi mesa se
abrieron como brazos en la sombra las páginas de la
lámpara maravillosa de Don Ramón María del
Valle-Inclán» (apud Hormigón, Biografía:
757 ). (On my
table the pages of La lámpara maravillosa of
Don Ramón
María del Valle-Inclán opened like arms in the shadows").
She mentions his
cape. «Pasó, su luenga barba
hacía
compás al vuelo de su capa inflada.» (He
passed by, his
long beard keeping rhythm with his inflated cape). Teresa herself wore
a black
"capelina” or small shoulder cape which her daughter Sylvia describes
her wearing
in her memoirs. (Schiavo"mujeres":255)
González
Vergara tells us that Valle accompanied Teresa on a trip to Avila and
Toledo
without specifying a date other than in June of 1918. Edwards claims
that
Teresa was very moved by seeing the city of her namesake and said she
wanted to
spend her last days there (Schiavo «mujeres»:253).
The
collection of poems that make up El
pasajero was first published the 15th of February, 1920, one year
before
Teresa's suicide in Paris on December 24, 1921.
Teresa
was displaying self-destructive tendencies during her first visit to
Madrid
according to Edwards, who said to Cansinos Assens in his tertulia in El
Café
Colonial: «Esta Teresa se está arruinando la salud, bebe,
toma coca, se pincha.
¡Es un dolor! (apud Hormigón
Biografía: 757) (Teresa is
ruining her health, she drinks,
she takes cocaine, she injects herself[with drugs].
It's dreadful!) Teresa had attempted suicide once before while
confined to the convent in Santiago in 1916. That
time she took an overdose of morphine. In
Paris she took veronal which according to
Cela's Mrs. Caldwell Speaks with Her Son)
is a suicide "de buen tono" : "siempre fue de buen tono, hijo,
debe tomarse con champán y por la noche. " (apud. Muñoz Coloma «La
Patrona») (“[Veronal] was always in good taste, son.
It should be taken at night with
champagne")
The
1920 edition of El Pasajero is the
only one which is divided into sections which include Tentaciones."
(Temptations).
Several of the poems there appeared in June coinciding with the time
that Valle
and Teresa were on their trip through Castilla. One of them titled
«Rosa del
caminante», was first published in El
Imparcial, as «Ciudad de Castilla: rosa del camino»
(June 3, 1918) Besides
the cities mentioned in the last verse: Astorga, Zamora and
León, the poem
seems to refer to Toledo, the Castilian city, emblematic of death and
the
ravages of time in La lámpara. Just
as in that work, the 1920 edition of El
Pasajero presents Galicia as the contrary of Castilla.(for the
importance
of "contrarios" or contraries), see Garlitz, Andanzas
) «Rosa matinal», originally titled “del Celta es la
Victoria," (dated 13 August 1918) contrasts the "parda tierra
castellana"(the brown Castilian earth ), "with the freshness and
vitality of Galicia. "el verde
milagro de una tierra cristalina"
(the green miracle of a crystalline land).
"Rosa del paraíso...,"
also published in June (El Sol, June
9th) under the title of "Rosa del
mito solar," seems to continue the description of Galicia.: "El campo
verde de una tinta tierna,/Los montes mitos de amatista opaca." (the
earth a tender
tint of green/the mountains, myths of opaque amethyst").
In La
lámpara, the narrator connects himself with Toledo by
describing the
portrait that El Greco painted of Cardenal Tavera based on his death
mask and
implying that his own true face will be revealed in the "último
gesto" or last gesture, that death will make visible beneath his
mask. One of Valle's first mentions of
a similar mask appears in his lecture "Los Excitantes," which he gave
only once during his 1910 South American tour probably because his
revelations
of personal experience with hashish were considered so scandalous (for
the
complete review of the lecture, which does not appear in Joaquín
and Javier del
Valle-Inclán's collection of Entrevistas
conferencias y cartas, see Garlitz, Andanzas). In that lecture,
Valle describes the feeling,
induced by hashish, of a wax mask formed
on his face ("en su rostro sintió algo que era la
sensación exacta de una
máscara de cera puesta en él") ( "he
felt the exact sensation of a mask of wax [being] placed over his
face").
In
1918 Valle was only 52 but he must have felt like a very old man, close
to the
revelation of his "último gesto," in the presence of the 25 year
old
"tentadora," Teresa.
Her
friend, Edwards, who observed the two
in a late night session in the Gato Negro café, smoking hash and
writing at the
same table and later at a unsuccessful dinner party [Teresa ruined the
food],
at the home of either Anselmo Miguel Nieto or of Romero de Torres, both
of whom
painted portraits of Teresa, said they were more like father and
daughter than
lovers (Schiavo «mujeres»). The portrait by Romero de
Torres shown in
Hormigón's Biografía (754) is the one
that the artist exhibited in his 1922 exhibition in Buenos Aires (see
Santos
Zas «De puño»). I have
not been able to
locate Nieto's portrait.
Ortega Pareda ("Patrona")
notes the existence of another oil portrait of Teresa by the renowned
Hispanic-French
portraitist, Antonio de la Gándara (1862-1917) in the Museo
histórico
Palmera Romano in Limache, Chile.
There is a mystery
surrounding the date of the painting. It is given as 1918, but when
Teresa was
in Spain that year, Gandara had already died. Could
it have been done before Teresa left South America? She
does not
look like a femme fatale here.
Although
Edwards describes Valle's
relationship with Teresa as that of a father and daughter, both
Hormigón and
Schiavo are convinced that something more serious was going on. In fact, Schiavo makes a good case for reading
Clave 1 of Pipa as a love poem to
Teresa.
I
would go so far as to say that the whole group of poems published
during
Teresa's first stay in Madrid (Feb to
Nov. 1918) could be read as a love story
or at least a record of Teresa's inspiration in Valle's work. In his
typical
fashion, don Ramón uses his writing dedicated to another person
as an
opportunity to present some of his personal ideas on aesthetics. (For
example,
in his essays on the National Expositions of Fine Art in 1908 and 1912. See Garlitz, El centro).
If
we see Clave I of Pipa as the
culmination of the group we can then trace the images and ideas
expressed there
in the poems leading up to it. Several of the poems are also connected
to
images and concepts from La lámpara,
published in book form two years earlier. They are a celebration of
Teresa's
youth and her effect on the speaker in the poem: In
"Clave 1", his muse is "la
niña primavera" (the Spring girl), the "Princesa,"
corazón de
abril". (Princess, Heart of April ) who takes him back to the days of
his
childhood when the world had the grace of morning. She
makes his senses sing in the heart of
crystal blue. She moved the "rose
of his heart."
A possible allusion to Teresa as
Princess
April can be seen in «Rosa de mi abril», published in El Imparcial, August 19th 1918. It describes a long ago
love of
the speaker's youth found in a blue garden in April who guides him now
on a new
path. We note that «Rosa de abril» is the title
given to
the Virgin of Montserrat in Jacinto Verdeguer's(1845-1902)
art song «Virolai». (1880).
«Rosa
de furias», later published as «Rosa del destino» (El Imparcial, 24 February, 1919) seems
to elaborate on the line in Clave I: «Y jamás le nieguen
tus cabellos de
oro, jarcias a mi barca, toda de cristal» (And your golden hair
never refuses
[to be] the rigging on my crystal boat"). It describes his ivory boat sailing
under a full moon in April. The speaker might
refer to the impact of Teresa in his life in the line: «Y era
abril cuando
ululante /Por mi vida pasó un ciclón» ("and it was
April when a howling
cyclone passed through my life").
In Clave
I, the speaker calls his muse his
“spirtu gentil". This reference to Donizetti's most famous aria from La favorita (1894) reflects Teresa's
passion for opera (a passion which first
attracted her to her husband according to González, Canto).
The title of the aria which means “Spirit of Light"
could refer to a shared interest of Valle and Teresa in the importance
of light
and especially the sun in its esoteric associations(see
Fernández Ripoll for
the importance of light in Valle-Inclán). This association is
repeated in the
line "En la risa joven del Numen Solar". ("In the young smile of
the solar diety").
In Valle's prologue to Anuarí, he repeats a Gnostic theme from La lámpara that it is this sacred light that
inspires fallen man to
return to it: «El barro recuerda la hora en que salió del
caos ...Con el dolor
de la caída se junta el anhelo por volver a la luz.» ("The
clay [man's earthly form] remembers the hour when it came out of chaos. The sorrow of the Fall is joined with the
desire to return to the light [the divine center of the Great All]).
«Rosa del sol» first published in El
Sol October 13th, 1918 as «Rito juliano» is a hymn to
the sun in its
esoteric meaning as the light which illuminates Eternal Ideas in the
mortal
vessel, or man, through the song of his mouth, that is poetry. In its form as poetry this light redeems the
earthly rock by causing it to transcend into crystal, meaning it
transforms
crass physical form into crystal, or pure substance. «Sacro Verbo
métrico
redime a la Roca del Mundo. Su estrella
transciende al Cristal» (holy metrical word[that] redeems the
rock of the world
and makes it transcend into crystal")
The reference to the Emperor Julian in the original title of
this poem
is elaborated on in the very complex, «Rosas astrales» (I
don't have a date of a
previous publication; 1920 may be its first). There,
the Emperor as the Apostate who denied Christ by
returning to the
pagan worship of the sun is seen as the first to perceive the power of
the
stars(astros) in the creation of poetry. The
poem calls stars or small suns the keys to the Great All.
They
contain the power of the Demiurge, or the Gnostic god of creation, who
like Valle’s
Alexandrine rose in La lámpara represents
the type of art in which the artist views the world from a distant and
dispassionate perspective. I see the poem «Rosa
gnóstica», first published as
"Credo" in El Liberal,
November 11, 1912 as a condensation of that artistic "creed"
expressed in La lámpara. (see Garlitz
«La peregrinación»).
A poem first published in El Sol on
June 9th 1918 under the title of «Rosa del mito solar»
carries as its epigraph a
verse from Darío which is repeated later in the poem: "era el
cielo
cristal", canto y sonrisa" ("the sky was crystal, song and
smile")
This poem becomes «Rosa del paraíso» in
1920. It might refer to an earlier
excursion of
Valle and Teresa, maybe in April. It
refers to Palm Sunday and we know that in 1918 Easter fell in April:
«Esta
emoción divina es de la infancia cuando felices el camino
andamos. /Y todo se
disuelve en la fragancia de un Domingo de Ramos» ("This divine
emotion is
that of our childhood when we walked happily along the road And
everything
dissolves in the fragrance of Palm Sunday")
González
Vergara knows of a letter from Valle to Teresa in which he addresses
her as «preciosa
cristal».
Crystal is a very important
element in Valle's
aesthetic theory which he works out in La
lámpara( see Garlitz el centro,
Schiavo"cristal", and LoDato, All
that Glitters")). In that work, the narrator connects the crystal
with
another of Valle's essential symbols: the rose.(see Garlitz El
centro and Hormigón, Biografía:762)
Could it be that Teresa,
the precious crystal is also the rose? In Clave 1 of Pipa,
"she" is the rose and "he" is the
bull. Maybe that would mean that Teresa
could be the main muse for the «Poemas de las rosas» which
is the first title
that Valle gives to the collection that was to become El
pasajero.
That
title applied to his poetry first appears in El Imparcial
in the series «Las rosas pánicas», on June 10th of
1918.
In
1915 Valle published an essay titled "Las tres rosas estéticas"
which
he later integrated into La lámpara (see
Garlitz «La evolución») .There, the third rose is
the rosa "alejandrina”,
the same adjective that Valle uses to describe Teresa's voice in his
prologue
to her Anuarí which I think helps
prove that Teresa is the «cortesana of Alejandría»
as we will see below. The
Alexandrine rose in La lámpara refers
to Valle's 3rd artistic path or “Gnostic" art in which the artist
observes
the world from above in a dispassionate distanced way as
we saw above in «Rosa gnóstica» (see
Garlitz "El centro and "El
ocultismo") This will be the perspective of what some consider to be
Valle's most important contribution to Spanish literature, that is the esperpento.
Crystal
is also connected to another image, which is key in all of Valle's
work, that
is the mirror. (see, for example Zahareas and Cardona
El esperpento)
In
the poem «Asterisco», originally called «La
Gata» (El Imparcial,October 9,1918 ), a woman conjures the devil, in his guise as Belial,
in a magic mirror."
Instead of Belial ,the mirror reveals,
as in Plato's cave (another of Valle's key
images, (see Esteve "Aproximación"), the real world
behind
the illusory one of the physical senses. The
woman-cat who invokes the devil with her fingers in
"circumflex" is reminiscent of the mother in «Mi hermana
Antonia» whose hand missing the two middle fingers is in a
permanent
"circumflex", that is the sign of the devil's horns. Valle
republished that story on February
21st, 1918. And we remember that Teresa wrote her own poem addressed to
"Beelzebuth, the "Lord of the flies" [a fly appears in Valle's
poem.: «La mosca que vuela busca en el reflejo del cristal, la
mano puesta en
circunflejo»:-("The fly in flight searches, for the hand formed
in circumflex
in the reflection of the mirror.") In 1920
This poem is followed by «Rosa de
Belial», published much earlier as «El íncubo»
(El Imparcial, April 20, 1914), probably because it
refers to the
same form of the devil as Belial, here the incubus who ravishes a young
woman
in her sleep. In her diary, Teresa describes her own mirrors, which
appear in
the magic number of nine: «cuando iba a entregarme al
sueño,me di cuenta que
estaba rodeada de espejos. Encendí
la lámpara y los conté. Son nueve. El hondo silencio
extiende su cristal opaco
dentro del alma» .(Páginas de mi diario
Londres 16 octubre, 1919: 22).
(When I was about to fall asleep, I realized I
was surrounded by mirrors I turned on the lamp and I counted them.
There are
nine of them. The deep silence extends its opaque crystal into my
soul") We
note that there are exactly nine poems in each of the four sections of El Pasajero, (for the importance of
symbolic numbers in La lámpara and
other of Valle's works, see, Garlitz El
centro)
In
his prologue to Anuarí Valle calls
Teresa a «druidesa» and her
voice «alejandrina». The poem titled «Cortesana de
Alejandría» in El Pasajero
(1920) echoes that association. I don't
have the date of its first publication; this may be its first.
Cortesana
de Alejandria is the subtitle of Anatole France's scandalous
(1890) novel,Thaís. It tells the story of a
devout
Anchorite hermit, living in the desert who converts a
young, beautiful, blond, and light -eyed
courtesan to Christianity, only to be seduced by her
in his turn. (It is interesting to note that
one of the critics who commented on his work while Valle was in
Asunción in
1910 compared the morality of don Ramón' s work to that of
France's novel.( see
Garlitz, Andanzas)
Might
the reserved older author, now "exiled" from Madrid in the
"desert" of Galicia who had hitherto, as far as we know, been
faithful to his wife and his life as a father, see a parallel in his
relationship with the seductress Teresa who is blond and light-eyed
like Taís?
The last line of the poem is telling in this regard:"Antonio el
anacoreta
huyó de tu sombra por Alejandría. ¡Antonio
era Santo! Si fuese poeta?..". ("Antonio the
Anchorite fled from your shadow through Alexandria. Antonio
was a saint. [what] If he had been a poet...? "
In
the poem, the cortesana is described as being «docta en los
secretos de la
abracadabra» and the speaker associates her with the serpent, the
rose and
fire, a reference to a reading of Tarot cards inferred by the line:
«dispersó
en el aire tus letras, mi mano». (my hand dispersed your letters
in the
air") The serpent, of course, refers
to the evil tempter in the Garden of Eden. which is constantly
represented as a
woman in the art of the 1890s for example Flaubert's Salammbo
and the paintings of Pre Raphaelites, Waterhouse and
Rossetti,(see Edwards). We have already commented on the importance of
the rose
and we note here that in Clave I, the rose is "encendida"(on fire),
Another
poem published during Teresa's first visit in 1918 as «Rosa de
luz» (September
1st in. El Sol) becomes «Rosa de
Turbulus» in 1920, Clave II of the “Tentaciones"or Temptations
section. At first glance, it seems to echo
Valle's Sonata de estío in its description of a
Mayan princess in a tropical setting. Maybe
this is yet another allusion to Teresa who is exotic
since she is
from South America and is as unattainable as a princess by being a much
younger
woman, more like a daughter than a lover .(Cansinos Assens describes
her as
being aloof even though Lasso de la Vega calls her a nymphomaniac) We can connect her to Teresa by the fact that
she fans herself with a rose and that
she recites April verses from her
hammock which has "cadenciosa curva de opio"(the cadenced curve of
opium") The poem also refers to the
red of her lips as being painted with the red flame of temptation
(which
recalls her painted lips noted
by Cansinos Assens) and her hips are the anagram
of the
serpent (see photo ffor a possible inspiration for this image).
According
to González Vergara (El canto),another of
Valle's letters to
Teresa refers to her as "Niña Chole" the young woman in Sonata de estío who is seduced by her
father.
Another
novel of the Sonata series which involves an incestuous relationship, Sonata de invierno was re published on
July 7th, 1918.
The
last poem published in 1918 that might be connected to Valle's
relationship
with Teresa was published the 4th of November of
1918 (that is after Teresa had left Madrid the first time)
in El Imparcial as
«Rosa de bronce», and
becomes «Rosa del rebelde» in 1920. Could the last line «La casa profané con mi lascivia»
(I
besmirched my house with my lasciviousness") express
don Ramón's repentance for his relationship with Teresa?
Of course all this is pure conjecture at this
point. We will have to wait for González
Vergara to find and publish the two letters from Valle to Teresa she
refers to
as well as another of Teresa's diaries she claims to know of. (Hormigón thinks the letters might have
been sent during Teresa's second stay in Madrid, when she and Valle
were unable
to see each other since he was in Galicia at the time.Biografía:791).
As well as for further research on a woman who may
be well be the last muse of the Marqués
de Bradomín, that is Teresa Wilms Montt.
©
Virginia Milner Garlitz
2010
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I
wonder if more of the poems in that collection might have been inspired
by
other "tentadoras" or temptresses. I am
thinking particularly of Teresa Wilms
Montt. 