We can see this bedroom now. Of course, it is no longer inhabited; it has become a museum, a place of pilgrimage. It is bare, with a crucifix hung over the headboard of a nineteenth-century bed, of old wood, noble and severe. At its foot, on the floor, is a large vase of flowers. But what most catches the eye is the window in this photo I am now examining. The curtains, solemn and translucent – suspended in the immobile clarity of air – open onto a vivid splendor which we can only intuit – something compact, vague, and powerful. It is the brightness of day in the landscape outside, just as the poetess saw it, with eyes already frail, in this bedroom where she died, with a savor of light in the silence of the courtyard, prolonged in the verdant stillness of the olive trees.
Rosalía de Castro was already dying on 15 July 1885, when she asked to be brought a bouquet of pansies, the flowers she loved most. She held them close to her lips, and felt breathless; eyes clouded, she told her eldest daughter, ‘Open the window. I want to see the sea’. Yes, the same window we are looking at now, this window whose curtains hint at the insurrection of light; but this window doesn’t open onto the sea. Did she see it, perhaps, with other eyes, with inward eyes, purer and more serene? Perhaps, in her interior, this gaze of mind and spirit, at the moment of transit toward death – for these were her final words – she opened herself to life with another intensity, with a different sort of duration. The dimension of memory, perhaps, and even of a particular memory, still precise and vital – because we know when Rosalía had last seen the sea. It was on a journey of leavetaking, a goodbye to the salt and foam and waves; and on the last day, as they were soon to leave the port, her husband – how much we know of this husband, and at the same time, how little! – recalls Rosalía standing up in her compartment, the window cracked, waiting from second to second for the train to set in motion. The sun, the same sun that shines on the beach we have just left, the life-giving sun on the bright and saline murmurs of the shore, lights up her face: a face weary, not beautiful, but with a firm and tranquil inner tension that recaptured a shadow of fleeting peace amid that seaside brilliance.
The train has left; Rosalía will venture, shadow among shadows, into the garden, the courtyard, where, sullen and serene, the olive trees fall silent. Did Rosalía see the sea? The room is empty now, but in the curtains, in the day, the light carries reverberations from the water on a faraway shore. If you close your eyes, do you not hear, very soft, in the lustrous air, in the rustle of the leaves, the lapping of waves in this abandoned bedroom?
11 March 1980