He collaborates in newly founded periodicals, works briefly as an actor, and takes several trips to France where he meets Rubén Darío and also Oscar Wilde after his release from English prison. On Machado’s last trip to Paris, his crucial encounter is with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher of time, la durée (duration), and of mystical experience determined by the evasion of every day’s external, mechanical clocktime. No one person in life so piercingly affects the active thought of Machado as does the French philosopher.

Antonio finishes his first book, Soledades, in 1903. This book has disappeared as such. He drastically cut and revised it before including it in Soledades, galerías y otros poemas in 1907. It does not appear separately in any of the editions of Complete Poems published during his lifetime. The “galleries” in the new book are, like Borges’s labyrinths, symbolic passageways of his interior vision. His first books reveal the temptation, acceptance, and at the same time, discomfort with modernismo5. Machado is struggling to suppress or go beyond the modernismo that he recognizes in those early poems, whose fullest incarnation is Rubén Darío’s life and art. Both friends recognize their common ground and their disharmonies. So in a series of mutual literary-assassination poems, they each write elegies to the other, very much alive, poet.

Darío fixes Machado in a splendidly sensitive poem that reveals a profound and luminous figure, and at the same time a timid and quiet man of good faith. Darío sends his young friend “off to the impossible” on a strange mythological steed. To be certain he will stay there and not alter his way of being, even in death or limbo, Darío puts Machado in the elegiac past, prays to his own gods, presumably those spirited décadent French poets who had nurtured the Nicaraguan poet; and to be absolutely sure that Antonio will not return or reform, he asks his gods to save him forever, and to preserve him as he is then. In his “Oración por Antonio Machado” (“Prayer for Antonio Machado”), he portrays the poet:

Mysterious and silent

he came and he left us.

You could hardly meet his gaze,

it was so profound.

He spoke with a touch

of timidity and loftiness,

and you could almost see the light

of his thoughts, burning.

He was luminous and deep

as a man of good faith.

He might have been a pastor of lions

and, at the same time, of lambs.

He scattered thunderstorms

or carried a honeycomb.

The wonders of life,

of love and pleasures

he sang in deepest poems

whose secret was his own.

Mounted on a rare Pegasus

one day he went off to the impossible.

I pray to my gods for Antonio.

May they always save him. Amen.6

Soria and hills of blue ash

By 1907, Machado wanted a regular job and became a schoolmaster in Soria, in an instituto (a public high school) where he taught French. His life’s profession was the lowly schoolteacher in rural institutes (in the poem “Rural Meditation” he called himself “this humble teacher / in a country school”). There in Soria he met Leonor when she was thirteen and married her two years later, July 30, 1909; he was almost thirty-four. In 1910 Antonio obtained a fellowship to study in France, and the couple went happily to Paris. Machado attended the lecture course with Henri Bergson in January 1911. But by July, Leonor revealed strong symptoms of tuberculosis. On their return to Castilla la Nueva in September, he nursed her as her health failed. She was only eighteen in 1912 when she died. In 1962 in Soria, I spoke at length to an old gentleman who fifty-three years earlier had been at their wedding and who described how Antonio used to push Leonor in a wheelchair up into the hills during her last summer. Machado remembers those hills in a series of poems of self-deceptive memory and depressing awakening:

Leonor, do you see the river poplars

with their firm branches?

Look at the Moncayo blue and white. Give me

your hand and let us stroll.

Through these fields of my countryside,

embroidered with dusty olive groves,

I go walking alone,

sad, tired, pensive, old.

Although after Leonor’s death Machado immediately requested and obtained a new post and so left Soria forever, the obsessive memory and conscious daydream of Leonor and Castilla stayed with him throughout his life. The impact of Soria is recorded in Campos de Castilla (Fields of Castilla), and especially in its expanded edition five years later (1917) when Machado had left the region. It is a volume of solitude, bare Castilian landscapes, memories of Leonor, and Spain as seen through the critical, reforming eyes of a poet of the Generation of ’98. The language is spare, exact, yet sonorous, with a grave emotion. Machado (unlike Lorca, who learned from Machado’s popularism) was never fond of the baroque or for that matter of Luis de Góngora (1561–1627) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), Spanish greats whom he considered excellent examples of late-Golden Age excess. Machado’s poems could be any village of Castilla or Andalucía, and his presence that of the accurate lone observer.

Baeza and dreaming elsewhere

Walker, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.

—”Proverbs and Songs”

After Leonor’s death and his departure from Soria, Machado spent seven years in Baeza, teaching in another rural Spanish instituto.