A room with a view

When our teacher in Spanish 4 asked us if we knew any poems in Castilian, many of my classmates mentioned Jose Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adiós.” Having just bought a paperback of the Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, I brought up his “Despedida.”

Si muero,

dejad el balcón abierto.

El niño come naranjas.

(Desde mi balcón lo veo).

El segador siega el trigo.

(Desde mi balcón lo siento).

Si muero,

dejad el balcón abierto!

(If I die, / leave the balcony open. // The little boy is eating oranges. / (From my balcony I can see him). // The reaper is harvesting the wheat. / (From my balcony I can hear him). // If I die, / leave the balcony open!)

In the poem, aware of his impending death—either because of illness or age—the speaker looks outside through the open balcony.  At midmorning (or mid-afternoon), the world is full of zip, and the man sees a little boy eating oranges, the wheat being harvested, images of insuperable life, of which, for the moment at least, he misses nothing, and which in death, which seems imminent, he will leave behind.  Hence, he gives instructions that the balcony should remain wide open when he is gone, just as when he was still alive, gazing at the bustle outside his room.

One day the same scene must have met Jesus and the disciples, of fields abundant with harvest. Which, Mark writes, prompted him to say, “This is how it is with the kingdom of God; it is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.”

Mark adds that Jesus spoke mostly in this manner, in parables, which, however, he explained to his disciples when they were by themselves.

To speak in parables, that’s what the poet does, to convey what he means through indirection, using images.  Those to whom the speaker in Lorca’s poem gave his instructions, if they were not too thick to catch on, knew that it was not the balcony as much as their memory of the man that they were to leave open. The orders were just the poet’s convention, his method of bringing his point home.

I thought of the poem during the months of my illness, when I spent my time, much of it, looking at the garden and the road beyond it through the balcony next to our room.  I kept it open even when I was asleep so I could hear the sounds outside—the bark of dogs, a neighbor’s carpentry work, the rain.

If Jesus compared the fields teeming with harvest to the kingdom of heaven, is it not probable that the dying man in the room, instead of grieving that he would soon leave the blossoming world beyond the balcony, was quietly rejoicing that he would have even more of it after death, since, as St. Paul said,  Creation would likewise find liberation together with the freedom of the children of God?  And, therefore, the midsummer that he saw unfolding—with its images of youth and fruitfulness—was just, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it, “a strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning / In Eden garden.”

Why then not leave the balcony ever open?