"The last tears of Miguel Hernández"

The last tears of Miguel Hernández

On March 21, 1942, an order arrives saying to move the patient to the Porta-Coeli Hospital in Valencia. Maybe, after the wedding, Almarcha had finally decided to intervene. But it’s already too late and the doctors decide that it’s pointless to move the poet. Josefina, Miguel’s wife, accompanied by Elvira, Miguel’s sister, makes her last visit. On seeing she had arrived without their child, the poet cried bitterly. “You should’ve brought him”, he murmurs. “He had the hoarseness of death”, Josefina would write in her memoirs, “I touched his feet and they were cold and had black sores on them”. After the departure of his wife and Elvira, with his whole body covered in pus, only the presence of Joaquín Ramón Rocamora could console him. Rocamora remembers one of his last remarks, an exclamation: “Oh, darling, Josefina, how unfortunate you are!”.

He dies at 5:30 in the morning on Saturday, March 28th, 1942. His eyes are open, just like his late first-born son, and no one would be able to close them (owing to an acutely overactive thyroid gland). They prohibit a death mask. Fortunately, prisoner José María Torregrosa, who is a sculptor, outwits the guard and is able to make two pencil drawings of the body, with its eyes wide open. You could almost smell the stench. Friends of the poet are able to save his writings, which were tucked away in two bags.

In the end there was a little Christian charity when the prison warden allowed the prisoners to march past the poet, who had been prepared for viewing and placed in the courtyard by his friends. The prison band even played Chopin’s Funeral March. Josefina and some relatives waited at the door to take possession of the coffin and bring it to the cemetery. The poet’s father was not among them; until the end he had refused to see him. “Having arrived at Nuestra Señora de los Remedios Cemetery in Alicante”, Ferris writes, “no one could watch over Hernández’ body that night, because it was the place where they were still bringing the convicted soldiers to be executed”. They buried him the next morning.

A few days later, when offered condolences, which he neither needed nor deserved, Miguel’s father declared about his son: “He asked for it”.

Pablo Neruda experienced it a different way, over in México. “Another murder added to the many other terrible ones”, he wrote to Juan Ramón Jiménez, perhaps thinking of Lorca. “But, maybe I never felt more hurt and I think that the same will happen to you”. Yes, the same happened with Juan Ramón. In 1948, in Argentina, after criticizing León Felipe’s actions during the war and after praising the Cuban poet Pablo de la Torriente (Miguel’s communist friend) and the musician Gustavo Furán, the Republican Army general, he wrote: “Of the Spanish poets who died during the war, the most important were Miguel de Unamuno, Antonio Machado, Federico García Lorca, and Miguel Hernández. Of them, the one who saw battle and refused to leave his prison, where he died of consumption and sang of his loves, while other companions continued detained, was Miguel Hernández, a war hero. To say what I am saying is just and precise”.

Yes, just and precise. With the death of Miguel Hernández, the new regime, now strengthened thanks to the betrayal of the so-called European democracies, showed its true colors once more.