In the sonnet “Por qué, decísme, hacia los altos llanos” (“You ask me, why my heart flies from the coast”), he tells us that it is not coastal Andalucía and its fertile lands, but the austere north and the starkly clean landscape of Soria where his heart lives. There he found one person—whom he translates into a landscape in order to represent his love:

My heart is living, yes, where it was born,

but not to life—to love, the Duero near,

the whitewashed wall and cypress in the sky.

Machado was writing poems of immaculately bright images of nature. His sonnets are dream games; the lens of time distorts and creates everything, with the emphasis on the thing, in soundless, endless Spanish afternoons where time halts. All this we see, and in Machado, we always see. From the sequence “Los sueños dialogados” (“Dreams in Dialogue”), the sonnet “Como en el alto llano tu figura” (“How suddenly her face on the plateau”) has the dreamed land, the love, the suspension of time:

How suddenly her face on the plateau

appears to me! And then my word evokes

green meadows and the arid plains below,

the flowering blackberries and ashen rocks.

Obedient to my memory, the black oak

bursts on the hill, the poplars then define

the river, and the shepherd climbs the cloak

of knolls while a town balcony shines: mine,

ours. Can you see? Remote, toward Aragón,

the sierra of Moncayo, white and rose.

Look at the bonfire of that cloud, and far

shining against the blue, my wife, a star.

Santana hill, beyond the Duero, shows,

turning violet in soundless afternoon.

Segovia’s Street of Abandoned Children

From Baeza in 1919, Machado went north to take a new teaching position in Segovia, whence he was able to go each weekend, in just a few hours by train, to Madrid; there he collaborated with his brother Manuel on several plays. In Madrid he had more intellectual companionship among his fellow teachers of literature and philosophy, and through his weekend trips had again joined the literary life. The best portrait of Don Antonio in his Segovia days appears in a remembrance by John Dos Passos. As a young man in his early twenties, Dos Passos spent some days and evenings talking with Machado in Segovia. This was 1919. Thirty-nine years later I wrote to him and to Machado’s old friend Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was then near death, asking whether they might write reminiscences of Machado for a publication. Juan Ramón sent an earlier work that he had written shortly after the end of the Spanish civil war (1936-39) in which the drama and dark calamity of the time as well as his affection for Machado throb in his poetic prose. Dos Passos wrote a new piece, and in his memoir time has sharpened memory and its images—as it should in treating Machado. Dos Passos recalls:

Though I never knew Antonio Machado well my recollections of him are so sharp as to be almost painful. I remember him as a large sad fumbling man dressed like an oldfashioned schoolteacher. Stiff wing collar none too clean; spots on his clothes, and the shine of wear on the black broadcloth. He had a handsomely deep voice. Always when I think of him he is wearing the dusty derby he wore the evening we walked around Segovia in the moonlight.

In Segovia in these later years Machado found a new love, Guiomar (Pilar de Valderrama), a poet, a married woman with three children, mostly separated from her diplomat husband at a time when there was no divorce in Spain. They met by chance in Segovia in 1928; she had come with her husband for some days of sojourning. Thereafter they met regularly and inconspicuously in Madrid, usually in an obscure restaurant, until civil war separated them. An element of erotic drama and wild dream, not found in earlier poems, enters Machado’s poems from this period, as in “Your Face Alone”:

Only your face

like white lightning

in my dark night.

*

In the glossy sand

near the sea,

your rose and dark flesh,

suddenly, Guiomar!

*

In the gray of the wall,

prison and bedroom

and in a future landscape

with only your voice and the wind;

*

in the cold mother-of-pearl

of your earring in my mouth,

Guiomar, and in the shivering chill

of a crazy daybreak...

In the last sonnets of the war, he has the vision of Guiomar appearing on a finisterre. He admits, however, “It is a love that came to us in life too late: Our love’s a hopeless blossom on a bough / that now has felt the ax’s frozen blade” (“From Sea to Sea”).

Machado ‘s late love had all the intensity, fantasy, frustration, absence, and separation, of romantic love. If we are to believe Valderrama’s volume of memoirs, the love was always discreet and never consummated, and while she avoided any trysting place that would bring public notice, she also called off any meeting where they would be entirely alone, which circumstance could lead to scandal. She was conservative politically as well, as was Antonio’s brother Manuel, who would side with Franco in that fratricidal war. Antonio, committed as he was to liberal democracy and later to the Republic, never knew Manuel as anything but his closest friend in the world (indistinguishable from himself, he would say); and similarly, despite Valderrama’s politics and “public” prudishness, Antonio would not be deterred from his longing for her, even during the war when she had escaped, definitively, to the haven of Portugal.

Machado’s love letters to Guiomar were published in 1950 by Concha Espina in a book with the flashy title of De Antonio Machado a su grande y secreto amor (From Antonio Machado to His Grand and Secret Love), and although the letters are authentic, published in facsimile, the Spanish press in the Franco era predictably condemned their dissemination as sensationalism. The only “sensational” revelation in the letters is that Machado definitely expresses his enthusiastically adolescent and wearily sad love for an absent woman. Nevertheless, Machado’s mature ambiguities in his love for Guiomar are contained in some of his richest late poems. The ambiguity is the obvious one. He needs Guiomar. He worships her.