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You, who have given lyrical category to Gil Robles' pumpkin and have seen Unamuno's owl and Baroja's masterless dog, do you want to tell me the meaning that the snail has in the pure landscape of your drawings?

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You ask me why this predilection for snails in my drawings. Very simple: for me, the snail has a sentimental memory of my life. Once, while drawing, my mother approached, and looking at my doodles she said: "My son: I will die without being able to understand how you can earn a living by making snails." Since then, I baptized my drawings like this. Here you have satiated your curiosity.

Poet García Lorca, subtle and deep, because your verse is tenuous and beautiful, verse with wings of well tempered steel, pierced through the bowels of the earth: Do you believe, poet, in art for art's sake, or art should be put at the service of people to cry with them when cries and laugh when this people laugh?

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To your question, great and cute Bagaría, I have to say that this concept of art is something that would be cruel if it were not fortunately cheesy. No true man believes in this mess of pure art, art for art's sake. In this dramatic moment in the world, the artist must cry and laugh with his people. You have to leave the bouquet of lilies and get into the mud up to your waist to help those who are looking for the lilies. Particularly, I have a real desire to communicate with others. That is why I knocked on the doors of the theater and consecrate to it all my sensitivity.

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Do you think that creating poetry there is an approach towards beyond, or on the contrary, it makes the dreams of the afterlife move further away?

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This unusual and difficult question of the acute metaphysical concern, fills your life and only those who know you understand it. Poetic creation is an indecipherable mystery, like the mystery of the birth of man. Voices are heard, no one knows where, and it is useless to worry about where they come from. Since I have not worried about being born, I do not worry about dying. I listen to Nature and man in amazement, and I copy what they teach me without pedantry and without giving things a meaning that I don't know if they have. Neither the poet nor anyone has the key and the secret of the world. I want to be good, I know that poetry elevates, and being good with the donkey and the philosopher, I firmly believe that if there is a beyond I will have the pleasant surprise of finding myself in it. But the pain in men and the constant injustice that flows from the world, and my own body and my own thoughts, prevent me from moving my house to the stars.

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Don't you think, poet, that happiness only lies in the fog of a drunken, drunken woman's lips, of wine, of beautiful scenery, and that being a collector of moments of intensity creates moments of eternity, although eternity does not existed and had to learn from us?

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I don't know, Bagaría, what happiness consists of. If I am to believe the text I studied at the Institute, by the ineffable professor Ortí and Lara, happiness can only be found in heaven; But if man has invented eternity, I believe that there are facts and things in the world that are worthy of it, and due to their beauty and transcendence, absolute models for a permanent order. Why are you asking me these things? What you want is for us to meet in the other world and continue our conversation under the roof of a prodigious music café with wings, laughter and eternal ineffable beer. Bagaría: do not fear ... rest assured that we will meet .

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You will be surprised, poet, of the questions of this wild cartoonist. I am, as you know, a being with many feathers and few beliefs, savage with painful matter; and think, poet, that all this tragic baggage of living flourished in a verse that my parents' lips stammered. Don't you think that Calderón de la Barca was more right when he said "Well, the greatest crime of man is being born" than Muñoz Seca's optimism?

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Your questions don't surprise me at all. You are a true poet, who at all times puts the sore on your finger. I answer you with true sincerity, with simplicity, and if I do not succeed and stammer, it is only out of ignorance. The feathers of your savagery are angel feathers, and behind the drum that beats the rhythm of your macabre dance is a pink lyre of those that the primitive Italians painted. Optimism is characteristic of souls that have only one dimension; those who do not see the torrent of tears that surrounds us, produced by things that have a remedy.

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Sensible and human poet Lorca: we continue talking about things from beyond. I am a repeater of the same theme, because the theme also repeats itself. Can believers who believe in a future life be glad to find themselves in a land of souls who do not have carnal lips to kiss? Isn't silence better than nothing?

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Beautiful and tormented Bagaría: Don't you know that the Church speaks of the resurrection of the flesh as the great prize to her faithful? The prophet Isaiah says it in a tremendous verse: "The broken bones will rejoice in the Lord." And I saw in the San Martín cemetery a tombstone in an already empty tomb, a tombstone that hung like an old woman's tooth from the smashed wall, which read: "Here awaits the resurrection of the flesh, Micaela Gómez." An idea is expressed and is possible because we have head and hands. Creatures don't want to be shadows.

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Do you think it was a great moment to return the keys to your land, Granada? it refers about christians and arabs

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It was a very bad moment even if they say otherwise in schools. They lost an admirable civilization, a poetry, an astronomy, an architecture and a delicacy unique in the world to make way for a poor, cowed city; to a “land of the chavico”, where the worst bourgeoisie in Spain is currently stirring.

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Don't you think, Federico, that the homeland is nothing, that the borders are called to disappear? Why does a bad Spaniard have to be more our brother than a good Chinese?

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I am a complete Spanish, and it would be impossible for me to live outside my geographical limits; but I hate the one who is Spanish for being Spanish nothing else. I am everyone's brother and execrate the man who sacrifices himself for an abstract nationalist idea for the sole fact that he loves his country with a blindfold. Good Chinese is closer to me than bad Spanish. I sing to Spain and I feel it to the core; but before this I am a man of the world and brother of all. Of course I do not believe in political borders.

 

Amigo Bagaría: The interviewers are not always going to ask. I think the interviuvados also have the right. What does this craving, this thirst from beyond that haunts you respond to? Do you really want to survive? Don't you think that this is already solved and that man cannot do anything, with or without faith?

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Conform, unfortunately, conforming. Deep down I am a disbelief hungry to believe. It is so tragically painful to disappear forever. Cheers, woman's lips, glass of good wine that you knew how to make forget the tragic truth: landscape, light that made you forget the shadow! In the tragic end, I only wish for an endurance: that my body was buried in an orchard: that at least my afterlife was a beyond of compost.

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Do you want to tell me why all the politicians you caricature have frog meat?

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Because most of them live in ponds.

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In what meadow does Romanones cut the unspeakable daisies from his nose?

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Dear poet: you allude to one of the things that reach the bottom of my soul. Romanones nose, excellent nose! Cyrano's was a missing nose next to the nose of my loves. Rostand enjoyed less than me with mine. Oh "paneaux" for my decorative visions! My daisies left when they were delivered to a lonely station, on the way to Fontainebleau. You will never have been asked, because it is no longer fashion, what is your favorite flower. As I have now studied the language of flowers, I ask you: What flower do you prefer? Have you ever put it on the lapel?

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Dear friend: Is it that you plan to give conferences like García Sanchíz to ask those questions?

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God save me! I do not aspire to play the cello badly.

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To what, dear Bagaría, does the human feeling that you print to the animals you paint respond?

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Dear Lorca: According to Catholics, animals have no soul; only a few animal pluggers, such as the dog of San Roque, the pig of San Antón, the rooster of San Pedro and the pigeon of the divine carpentry; And I have looked to give humanity to animals without godparents, dignify them with my pencil, so that they serve as a contrast with men of pure animality.

 

Dear Lorca: I am going to ask you about the two things that I think have more value in Spain: gypsy singing and bullfighting. In gypsy singing, the only flaw I find is that in his verses he only remembers the mother; and the father, to be struck by lightning. And that seems to me an injustice. Jokes aside, I think this song is the great value of our land.

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Very few people know gypsy singing, because what is frequently given in tablados is the so-called flamenco, which is a degeneration of it. It is not possible to say anything in this dialogue, because it would be too extensive and not very journalistic. As for what you say with grace that the gypsies only remember their mother, you are right, since they live a regime of matriarchy, and the parents are not such parents, they are always and live as children of your mothers. In any case, there are admirable poems in gypsy popular poetry dedicated to parental sentiment; but they are the least.

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The other great topic because you ask me, bullfighting, is probably the greatest poetic and vital wealth of Spain, incredibly wasted by writers and artists, mainly due to a false pedagogical education that we have been given and that we have been the men of my generation the first to reject. I think bullfighting is the most cultured party in the world today. It is the pure drama, in which the Spanish shed his best tears and his best bile. It is the only place where one goes with the security of seeing death surrounded by the most dazzling beauty. What would become of the Spanish spring, of our blood and our language if the dramatic bugles of the bullfight ceased to sound? By temperament and poetic taste I am a deep admirer of Belmonte.

What poets do you like the most about Spanish news?

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There are two teachers: Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez. The first, on a pure plane of serenity and poetic perfection, a human and celestial poet, already evaded from all struggle, absolute owner of his prodigious inner world. The second, a great poet disturbed by a terrible exaltation of his self, lacerated by the reality that surrounds him, incredibly bitten by insignificant things, with his ears set on the world, true enemy of his wonderful and unique poet's soul.

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Goodbye, Bagaría. When you go back to your huts with the flowers, the wild beasts and the streams, tell your wild companions not to trust trips to and from our cities; to the beasts that you have painted with Franciscan tenderness, that they do not have a moment of madness and become domestic animals, and to the flowers, that they do not decorate their beauty too much, because they will put handcuffs on them and make them live on the corrupted bellies of the dead .

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You are right, poet. I return to my jungle, to roar with my roars, kinder than the beautiful words of friends, which are sometimes blasphemies in low voices.