A life deplored, a day explored: Antonio Machado's «Llanto» for Don Guido and his «Poema de un día»

C. Brian Morris

Antonio Machado was well known for his laconic, reserved, and measured demeanor. He displayed no such reticence in his writings: between his labeling of the train that took him at weekends from Segovia to Madrid as «el tren de las Euménides» and his reviling of Alejandro Lerroux as «un verdadero monstruo de vileza, mixto de Judas Iscariote y caballo de Troya» (Gibson 365, 703 n. 31) there exists a common thread of inventiveness, but with a difference of intention, the first inspired by the physical unattractiveness of the female colleagues who took the same train, the second by the actions of a politician whom Machado held responsible for the plight of the Spanish Republic. Machado could be harsh in his indictments and merciless in his judgments; the enduring image of the solitary figure contemplating the landscape or absorbed in his own life, whether sedentary or peripatetic, is belied by the number of times he places figures in a setting and then records their conduct with the same penetrating gaze he applies to landscape and to himself. Campos de Castilla presents some memorable characters: the loco, yelling «a solas con su sombra y su quimera» (Poesías completas 163), appears as a kinsman of the poet, who presents himself «a solas con mi sombra y con mi pena» (Poesías completas 211). The criminal, whose eyes radiate «una fosca lumbre», confirms with his murderous use of an axe on his parents (Poesías completas 164) what the poet had declared as a truth in the third poem of the collection, «Por tierras de España»: «Abunda el hombre malo del campo y de la aldea, / capaz de insanos vicios y crímenes bestiales» (Poesías completas 154). Although Machado may have partly mollified his local critics who were incensed by the original title «Por tierras de Soria», his censure is no less stringent when applied to the whole of Spain. In «Del pasado efímero» he is equally implacable in his portrayal of «Este hombre del casino provinciano», who, «taciturno, hipocondríaco, / prisionero en la Arcadia del presente», is «una fruta vana / de aquella España que pasó y no ha sido, / esa que hoy tiene la cabeza cana» (Poesías completas 224-225).

«Del pasado efímero» is one of the most sternly critical poems of Campos de Castilla, one stage of Machado's uncompromising diagnosis of the type of person who blocks change, impedes Spain's progress, who lives in the past and refuses to confront the future. José-Carlos Mainer has shown the importance in Machado's work of literary portraits, pointing to Verlaine's fondness for the «poème-hommage», perpetuated in Juan Ramón Jiménez's «caricaturas líricas» (Mainer 36). The section «Elogios» contains some splendid tributes: to José María Palacio, to Francisco Giner de los Ríos, to José Ortega y Gasset, to Xavier Valcarce, and to Rubén Darío. Some of them are elegies, and his poems to Giner de los Ríos and Darío are fine examples of a genre that clearly fascinated Machado, as can be seen by the constancy with which echoes of Jorge Manrique's «Coplas por la muerte de su padre» reverberate in his writings. To find that famous title integrated into «Llanto de las virtudes y coplas por la muerte de Don Guido» is to see how Machado fused elegy and satire to create a poem that is less a sad panegyric in the manner of Manrique than an exposé in the style of Quevedo, who penned pitiless sonnets supposedly standing before the tomb of some miserable sinner, as in the one beginning «La mayor puta de las dos Castillas / yace en este sepulcro...» (Quevedo 623).

Machado's participation in the magazine La Caricatura signals an interest in a mode of writing -and of judging- that allowed him to invent names as outlandish as Estanislao Matacán del Parnaso, Eduvigis Ripioalcanto, and Canuto García Estrambote (Gibson 78-79). Later, in his Cancionero apócrifo of the nineteenth century, he would coin for his apocryphal poets names as bizarre as Manuel Cifuentes Fandanguillo and Tiburcio Rodrigálvez; while such names may demonstrate, as Gibson claims, Machado's «gran sentido del humor» (Gibson 371), it is a humor with a sharp edge which finds its most appropriate articulation in caricature. Devoid of a surname, Don Guido does not at first sight belong in their company; he would if he were called, for example, Don Guido Jaranero. Bereft of a defining last name, he is left to define himself through his actions; and Machado begins to shape our responses to them and to him from the title, which, unlike elegies beginning simply «A...», is long, overloaded, marked by the excess that characterized the life of his protagonist. As we shall see, Machado disposes of the latter's entire life in sixty-eight lines while he will devote over two hundred to one day of his own in «Poema de un día», thus demonstrating in his change from broad strokes to fastidious detail the gulf between an existence lacking in values and one marked by humility, authenticity, meditation, and the awareness of time and mortality.

The echo of Jorge Manrique's elegy becomes muted by the more dominant initial phrase -«Llanto de las virtudes...»- and necessarily modulated by the name of a saint -St. Vitus-, who, according to legend, performed miracles, effected conversions, and was ultimately tortured. It is an uncommon name, a strange choice which draws attention to itself as it becomes, in the critical thrust of the poem, a weapon more subtle than Quevedo's choice of Dómine Cabra or Dickens's extensive cast of characters with names like Volumnia Dedlock, Dick Datchery, and Jane Dibabs. A quick look at the poem leads us to question Don Guido's virtues and the tears the poet sheds for them: he was a high liver, expert in skills as complementary in his social milieu as training horses and cooling manzanilla to the right temperature -something that, in my experience, can be taken very seriously in Andalusia. He was a womanizer in the mold of another famous sevillano, Don Juan; he was an opportunist, marrying a rich woman after he had squandered his wealth; and he was a hypocrite, becoming in his old age a «gran rezador». The clap of thunder which accompanies and comments on his participation in the Maundy Thursday procession «vestido de nazareno» is Machado's way of suggesting that the heavens -or heaven- is no more convinced of Don Guido's conversion than the poet, who devotes the last six stanzas -twenty-eight lines out of sixty-eight- to his protagonist's death, its significance, and his appearance on his deathbed. The focus on his «rostro marchito», «enjutas mejillas», «párpados de cera», and «fina calavera» brings to the artistic tradition of the deathbed scene -as in medieval handbooks on the Ars moriendi- graphic details that, while confirming the fragility of human flesh so often stressed by Quevedo, are consistent with Machado's judgment on the «cero, cero» he saw in Don Guido's dead face. These details are, significantly, absent from the poem penned by the apocryphal Juan de Mairena to the equally apocryphal Abel Martín, «Mairena a Martín, muerto»; this is the first section:

Maestro, en tu lecho yaces,

en paz con Ella o con Él...

(¿Quién sabe de últimas paces,

don Abel?)

Si con Ella, bien colmada

la medida,

dice, quieta, en la almohada

tu noble cabeza hundida.

Si con Él, que todo sea

-donde sea- quieto y vivo,

el ojo en superlativo,

que mire, admire y se vea.

What makes the death of Don Guido so significant is not so much the passing of one more hedonistic hypocrite, but the demise of the class to which he, the prototypical «caballero andaluz», belongs. «¡Oh fin de una aristocracia!» declares Machado in the last stanza, an announcement that responded more to wishful thinking than to reality, and his celebration in 1936 of the disappearance from Madrid of the señorito would prove to be premature (Machado, La guerra 78). Eleven years later, in January 1947, the conversion of Don Guido would be matched by that of his brother Manuel, whose body -clad in Franciscan habit, a «tosco sayal» like that of the reformed philanderer- would lie in the Real Academia Española (Calvo; cited in Gibson 639). One can only wonder what Quevedo would have written about the turncoat whose eulogies of Franco and his regime demonstrate an acrobatic volte-face from the plays he wrote with his brother, for example, La Lola se va a los puertos, whose cast includes a licentious cacique Don Diego and a character, José Luis, who utters the following assault:

Me cargan los señoritos

de nuestra tierra. Son vanos,

fríos de cuello... Confunden

la ligereza de cascos

con la gracia; la indolencia

con la elegancia. Esos gansos

que desprecian cuanto ignoran

-y son el Espasa en blanco-

no me interesan.

I suspect that we are listening here to the voice of Antonio rather than to that of Manuel, who fueled his reputation as a bohemian philanderer with the boasts resounding throughout the «Retrato» he penned in 1909:

Bebo, por no negar mi tierra de Sevilla,

media docena de cañas de manzanilla.

Las mujeres..., sin ser un Tenorio -¡eso, no!-,

tengo una que me quiere, y otra a quien quiero yo.

.......................................................................

Medio gitano y medio parisién -dice el vulgo-,

con Montmartre y con la Macarena comulgo.

Y, antes que un tal poeta, mi deseo primero

hubiera sido ser un buen banderillero.

The counterpoint to such a display of bravado is, of course, Antonio Machado's celebrated «Retrato», that model of self-effacing, self-deprecating self-affirmation as he presents himself in all his «torpe aliño indumentario», the opposite of such rakes as Juan de Mañara or the Marqués de Bradomín. As Luis Buñuel showed repeatedly with his insertion into his films of priests, monks, and nuns, types one abhors can exercise a fascination as potent as that of Juan de Mañara on the two brothers, one of whom comes close to that figure's characterization of himself in their play as

buen bebedor y maestro

en el arte de pasar

la vida y matar el tiempo,

mimado de la fortuna

como estos campos me hicieron.

Again, the economic pungency of the diction is more true to Antonio than to Manuel, and the definition of Don Juan as «maestro en el arte de pasar la vida en matar el tiempo» will remind us of «Este hombre del casino provinciano», of Don Guido -«maestro en refrescar manzanilla»-, and of the detested señorito. The Civil War would intensify the revulsion Antonio Machado felt for the señorito and strengthen the need he felt to name him and to define him, through the teachings of Juan de Mairena to his students, as «hombres que eludan el trabajo con que se gana el pan» (Machado, La guerra 86). Through the allusion to work and bread, Machado has drawn a calculated distinction between those idlers and those who sustain themselves, as he proudly declares in «Retrato»:

A mi trabajo acudo, con mi dinero pago

el traje que me cubre y la mansión que habito,

el pan que me alimenta y el lecho en donde yago.

In other words, Machado is offering himself as an example of the Castilian saying -«Nadie es más que nadie»- he was fond of quoting, invariably in the context of his discussions of señoritismo, which he defines trenchantly in a passage of Abel Martín:

Entre nosotros, españoles, nada señoritos por naturaleza, el señoritismo es una enfermedad epidérmica, cuyo origen puede encontrarse, acaso, en la educación jesuítica, profundamente anticristiana y -digámoslo con orgullo- perfectamente antiespañola. Porque el señoritismo lleva implícita una estimativa errónea y servil, que antepone los hechos sociales más de superficie -signos de clase, hábitos e indumentos- a los valores propiamente dichos, religiosos y humanos. El señoritismo ignora, se complace en ignorar -jesuíticamente- la insuperable dignidad del hombre.

In its ignorance of man's fundamental dignity and in its stress on external manifestations of class and physical appearance, señoritismo licenses the conduct of types like Don Guido, whose life, as told by Machado, caused much amusement in the Residencia de Estudiantes. Its residents, according to Gibson, could not fail to detect «el intenso sarcasmo que impregnaba el divertidísimo retrato del hipócrita sevillano, retrato tan perfilado, tan malicioso, que hacía pensar en un modelo concreto» (Gibson 338). To ask «¿Pero quién?» is to miss the point: men like Don Guido were so pervasive that Machado was clearly portraying a type rather than an individual, and the broad strokes applied by him outline patterns of behavior that could be validated by simple observation, have been authenticated by sociological studies, and have been enshrined in literature and art. The main features of Don Guido's life have been illustrated by many representations of juergas, women, horses, bulls, and processions.

«Poema de un día» is a perfect counterpoint to the «llanto» for Don Guido: their protagonists are polar opposites. While the former lives a life that is dull in its routine and simple in its lack of pretensions, Don Guido is the stuff of caricature, eligible, like Lorca's Don Perlimplín, for consecration in an aleluya, which I have composed, with the help of the poet's own rhymes, and which I entitle, in acknowledgement of the saints whose lives were often recorded in aleluyas, «La vida y muerte de Don Guido»:

De joven, era jaranero,

galán, jinete y torero.

Gran amigo del caballo,

también tenía su serrallo.

Cuando su fortuna se disipó,

con una doncella rica se casó.

De una cofradía se hizo hermano,

aunque siempre era gran pagano.

Al verle vestido de nazareno,

el cielo respondió con un gran trueno.

Una pulmonía mató a don Guido.

Buen don Guido, ya eres ido, ido.

Buen don Guido, tan quieto, tan yerto,

en tu sayal yaces muerto, muerto.

My recasting of the poem into an aleluya is more a comment on Don Guido and on Machado's vision of him than on the poem itself, which surpasses my doggerel version through the variations of tone and the tongue-in-cheek ambiguities absent from the earnest style of the aleluya. The «din dan» literally sounds a warning that all is not quite as it appears: the use of «monomanía» and the repetition in «pensar que pensar debía» denote a critical attitude which Machado develops in the phrase «de una manera española» and in the forceful rhyme «pagano/hermano». And the triple repetition of «Buen don Guido» is as discomfiting as the line of «Retrato» -«soy, en el buen sentido de la palabra, bueno»- and the last chapter of Lazarillo de Tormes, in which the protagonist tries to convince us through his multiple use of «bueno» that he is at «la cumbre de toda buena fortuna». The exultant cry «¡Oh fin de una aristocracia!» confirms, as if we had any doubts by this stage, that this poem is a false elegy, as suspect as its protagonist's conversion to a «gran rezador» and as the spectacle of him clad as a nazareno holding a cirio. The things he loved -«alamares», «sedas», «oros», the blood of bulls, and the incense on the altars- show that life for Don Guido was lived through the senses, and we know that sensations are as fleeting as the smoke that is found in the last line of some celebrated Golden Age sonnets. Without an inner life, Don Guido was no more than a hollow man, a captive of his class and of the social expectations that are embedded in it, a robot seen in all its shallowness if we compare him with the poet's self-projection in «Retrato» and, more specifically, «Poema de un día. Meditaciones rurales».

In the latter poem Machado does not offer us anything other than what his title announces: a day in his life punctuated less by actions than by meditations, which are, moreover, «rural»: that is, located in the countryside and, like it, homespun and unsophisticated. The poem is what it says it is, unlike the «Llanto de las virtudes y coplas por la muerte de Don Guido», which is not a lament at all. The two poems could not be more different -nor could the men who are featured in them. Machado romps through Don Guido's life, yet slows down to document a single day of his own, a day when time seems to drag. The title, along with its distinctly unappealing subtitle, or gloss, promises only the record of a day and the musings generated by living that day; and the poem is true to its title because the poet is true to himself. The first words «Heme aquí ya» draw attention to the poet as the subject and center of his poem, which begins to fulfill the essential definition of autobiography, in which, according to Philippe Lejeune, «the author, the narrator, and the protagonist must be identical» (Lejeune 5). Machado's peremptory start to his poem certainly justifies John Sturrock's definition of autobiography as «an authoritarian mode of writing»; and the latter's provocative suggestions that «autobiography may only be the acceptable face of megalomania», that «it is the story of a singularization», are as relevant to «Poema de un día» as to the prose works he studies, for example, St Augustine's Confessions, or St Teresa's Life (Sturrock 15, 13, 14).

The first eight lines of the poem are a model of concision and density:

Heme aquí ya, profesor

de lenguas vivas (ayer

maestro de gay-saber,

aprendiz de ruiseñor),

en un pueblo húmedo y frío,

destartalado y sombrío,

entre andaluz y manchego.

Invierno. Cerca del fuego.

While «ya» and «ayer» indicate a chronological progression, the profundity of the change implicit in it is marked by the contrast -rather than congruity- between the erstwhile «maestro de gay-saber» and the «profesor de lenguas vivas» who is obliged to live, as if he were exiled, in a town that is damp, cold, decrepit, gloomy, a hybrid town «entre andaluz y manchego», which he would later call in letters to Unamuno and Juan Ramón Jiménez, «este poblachón moruno» (Correspondencia 21) and a «poblaco» (Cartas 39). To describe it as «entre andaluz y manchego» is to comment less on its location than on its lack of identity, undermined even more by the common allusions to it as «Salamanca andaluza», a phrase he quotes in a letter to Unamuno in which he vents his profound contempt for and aversion to a place in which he felt trapped and stunted. His diatribe is indispensable to an understanding of Machado's state of mind in Baeza in the year in which he wrote «Poema de un día»:

Tengo motivos que V. conoce para un gran amor a la tierra de Soria; pero tampoco me faltan para amar a esta Andalucía donde he nacido. Sin embargo, reconozco la superioridad espiritual de las tierras pobres del alto Duero. En lo bueno y en lo malo supera aquella gente. Esta Baeza, que llaman Salamanca andaluza, tiene un Instituto, un Seminario, una Escuela de Artes, varios colegios de segunda enseñanza, y apenas sabe leer un 30 por ciento de la población. No hay más que una librería donde se venden tarjetas postales, devocionarios y periódicos clericales y pornográficos. Es la comarca más rica de Jaén y la ciudad está poblada de mendigos y de señoritos arruinados en la ruleta. La profesión de jugador de monte se considera muy honrosa. Es infinitamente más levítica y no hay un átomo de religiosidad. Hasta los mendigos son hermanos de alguna cofradía...

A primera vista parece esta ciudad mucho más culta que Soria, porque la gente acomodada es infinitamente discreta, amante del orden, de la moralidad administrativa y no faltan gentes leídas y coleccionistas de monedas antiguas. En el fondo no hay nada. Cuando se vive en estos páramos espirituales, no se puede escribir nada suave, porque necesita uno la indignación para no helarse también.

This, then, is the location of «Poema de un día», a town where «no se puede escribir nada suave», a town that licenses stringency, that forces on the poet a re-assessment of himself in tandem with «Retrato». In both poems Machado crafts an image of himself as ordinary but special, dull but distinctive. While in «Retrato» he declares «Converso con el hombre que siempre va conmigo», in «Poema de un día» he turns that conversation into the fabric of his poem, making his private thoughts public and converting contemplation into action, thereby reducing the narrative to a fine thread capable of sustaining the scant physical motion and the abundant mental activity. The actions recounted are not exempt from play-acting: his groping for his spectacles amid «librotes, / revistas y papelotes», his donning of his coat and hat, and his urging «Vámonos, pues» are as calculated as his introductory «Heme aquí ya».

«Poema de un día» is, of course, a monologue, and to sustain the reader's interest through two hundred and four lines Machado explores variations of tone and tempo, which show him to be a masterful performer. In his «Apuntes» he counsels the reader never to read his poems aloud, explaining that «No están hechos para recitados, sino para que las palabras creen representaciones» (Complementarios 15). This is a strange entreaty from a teacher of literature who would read French poems aloud to his pupils and have them memorize them. To take heed of his counsel would miss the very obvious effects of the onomatopoetic «tic-tac» (l. 42 and passim), and of the alliterative phrases «Clarea / el reloj arrinconado» (ll. 38-39), «clamoreo de campanas» (ll. 59-60), and «Arrrecia el repiqueteo» (l. 61). In the same passage from «Apuntes» Machado affirmed that «Las aliteraciones de que mis versos están llenos son inconscientes». Conscious or unwitting, they stand out, creating precisely the «efecto musical... negativo» he deems possible; they demonstrate that Machado has a good ear, whether he is reproducing, and gently deriding, the Andalusian accent in «reló» (l. 50) and «usté» (l. 161), or recording in all its banality the conversation of fellow members of the tertulia, who resort to proverbs and platitudes which are, nonetheless, as essential to the poem as the poet's own reflections. Between the latter's observation that «si vamos / a la mar / lo mismo ha de dar» (ll. 141-143) and the comment of one member that «Todo llega y todo pasa» (l. 139), there is a bond of basic truth which underlines flux as the law from which nothing and no one can escape:

-Tras estos tiempos vendrán

otros tiempos y otros y otros,

y lo mismo que nosotros

otros se jorobarán.

Así es la vida, don Juan.

-Es verdad, así es la vida.

-La cebada está crecida.

At this stage of the poem we have become attuned to this instantaneous rhyme, which Machado has used repeatedly to alter the crossed rhymes of the initial quatrain. This alternation of rhyme patterns becomes an essential feature of the poem, creating the phonic variety needed to obviate the monotony that would result from a single scheme. Machado has found a way to surprise us, to keep our attention, and perhaps even to bring an occasional smile to our lips as he rhymes «no sé» with «José», «librotes» with «papelotes», and, in a passage remarkable for its ingenuity, «es» with «francés», «tuno» with «Unamuno», and «aquel» with «Immanuel». Several critics have alluded to the «tono humorístico» (Ortega 977) and «andadura juguetona» (Gutiérrez Hernández 325) of the poem without explaining how they are achieved. Gibson comes close when he praises Machado's «dominio magistral de la rima burlona» and his use of «la rima consciente de sí misma como elemento significativo» (Gibson 23). The poem is studded with self-conscious rhymes drawn close together to create a jingle as graceless as «dilecto/predilecto» (ll. 100-101) and as grating as «librotes/papelotes» (ll. 95-96). Notwithstanding his entreaty not to read his poetry aloud, Machado knew that such rhymes were neither neutral nor fortuitous. In Juan de Mairena he insisted that «Es la rima un buen artificio, aunque no el único, para poner la palabra en el tiempo», that its «primitiva misión de conjugar sensación y recuerdo» allows it to create «la emoción del tiempo» (Juan de Mairena 45-46). The idea that rhyme creates an interplay of sensation and recollection is intriguing, and becomes even more suggestive if that interplay is matched by another interplay of rhyme schemes. If we look at the passage beginning «Agua del buen manantial» (l. 113), we see that eight lines linked by crossed rhymes are followed by a passage in which the rhymes, arranged in couplets, draw attention to themselves:

Enrique Bergson: Los datos

inmediatos

de la conciencia. ¿Esto es

otro embeleco francés?

Este Bergson es un tuno;

¿verdad, maestro Unamuno?

Bergson no da como aquel

Immanuel...

In his study of Machado's versification, Tomás Navarro Tomás comments on alexandrine and sixteen-syllable couplets but not, curiously, on those composed of shorter fines, which are, in «Poema de un día», irregular. Between the long couplets of «A orillas del Duero» and the concise couplets of «Llanto...» and «Poema de un día» there is a gulf created by two very different styles of writing: the former acknowledge their French and modernista heritage, the latter the broader manner of comic verse, which resorts with extraordinary constancy to the sing-song register resulting from rhymes as instantaneous as:

Es de noche. Se platica

al fondo de una botica.

-Yo no sé,

don José,

cómo son los liberales

tan perros, tan inmorales.

Through their sound alone such lines create a comic effect inviting comparison with Byron's couplet in his poem «On My Thirty-Third Birthday»:

Through life's dull road, so dim and dirty,

I have dragg'd to three-and-thirty.

Or to Robert Louis Stevenson's quatrain:

The angler rose, he took his rod,

He kneeled and made his prayers to God.

The living God sat overhead:

The angler tripped, the eels were fed.

Or to Cyril Connolly's couplet:

At Eton with Orwell, at Oxford with Waugh,

He was nobody afterwards and nothing before.

The last two examples may be found in The Oxford Book of Comic Verse, which offers many more cases of outrageous rhymes, such as «insouciance» and «nouciance» (coined by Ogden Nash; Gross 313), «bodicey» and «odyssey» (coined by Kit Wright; Gross 460), and «tentacle» and «identical». The last pair belongs to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's riposte to a critic -Arthur Guiterman- who upbraided him, in a verse comprising twenty-five rhyming couplets, for allowing Sherlock Holmes to denigrate Edgar Allen Poe's detective Dupin as «very inferior». Conan Doyle's reply, couched, like his critic's assault, in rhyming couplets, makes a telling point:

Have you not learned, my esteemed commentator,

That the creation is not the creator?

...................................................................

So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle,

The doll and its maker are never identical.

Conan Doyle and Machado are on common ground: they make serious points in lines that, however flippant they seem or sound, are pungent and demand attention. And so, in the end, does Machado's conclusion, which, with its mixture of rhymes, displays a stoic acceptance of life: despite its transitory nature, life offers the individual the chance to be creative and original, the freedom to fill «papelotes» with writings and to find in «librotes» food for meditation and even comfort. Whether alluding to Bergson, Kant, Jorge Manrique, or Unamuno, Machado offers the same message to the reader: cultivate your inner life, nurture your mind and not your body, be true to yourself -a singular virtue and a difficult task when the world is populated by farceurs like Don Guido who truly demonstrate those words of Ecclesiastes that our poet liked to quote about «vanidad de vanidades». Through his poem on Don Guido and his «Poema de un día» Machado presents a choice: between life as lived by that «gran pagano» or by «este humilde profesor / de un instituto rural» (ll. 106-107). There is little doubt that life with Don Guido would be more entertaining: one would get an expertly chilled class of manzanilla, learn a lot about bulls and bullfighting and about the inner workings of a cofradía, but I would not be prepared to leave my wife or daughter alone with him. As a companion, Machado would be civil but taciturn, an observer and listener as in the tertulia he records, where the only words attributable to him are «Hasta mañana, señores». Life goes on; and while that implacable clock keeps relaying its timeless message -«Tic-tic, tic-tic... Ya pasó / un día como otro día»-, we are urged to use the one feature that is ours, private, sacrosanct, and full of potential: our creativity. We should feel thankful that Machado heeded his own message.

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