I
New York. A city of film, literature, art, and music: the city of Manhattan, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Apartment, West Side Story, and I Am Legend; the city of Lorca’s Poet in New York, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. The city of 1950s abstract expressionism, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. The city of the Harlem Renaissance… The city of Broadway. The city of Madonna’s I Love New York, of New York, New York, sung by Minnelli and then by Sinatra…
New York. The city of robberies, murders, and racism in the 1960s. The city of Central Park; the influential business district of Midtown Manhattan; the Empire State Building and other distinctive skyscraper silhouettes. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, which were destroyed on September 11, more than twenty years ago.
New York. A cultural city if ever there was one, but first and foremost a multi-ethnic city that protected immigrants, a status it has had since its origins when there were suspicious purchases and sales. New Angoulême, which was later called New Amsterdam until it finally settled on its current name.
New York. A port city. Cotton, flour, and meat were shipped to Europe. Coffee, tea, alcohol, and fabrics were unloaded at the docks in the bay. The port facilities reached 70th Street in Manhattan. A land of English, Germans, French, Latinos… who, upon arrival, could see in the distance the symbolic and physically imposing gift from France to the United States for the centennial of its independence. The Statue of Liberty would soon become, for the 19th-century emigrant, the first impulse that, from the island of liberty, encouraged the newcomer. In 1887, after living in New York for seven years, José Martí wrote about heroes and the jubilation of the crowds in Fiestas de la Estatua de la Libertad (Celebrations of the Statue of Liberty).
II
In 1891, he published his Versos Sencillos (Simple Verses). Some researchers give October 6 as the probable date. He had then published the essay Nuestra América (Our America) and was known for his participation in more than one monetary conference commission. He gave speeches and continued to write his wonderful epistolary essays. In 1890, he mentions Carmencita Dauset Moreno from Seville, who has been visiting New York since February and has been thrilling French, Spanish, German, and American audiences with her fandango and cachucha performances. It would appear that Martí does not write about Dauset Moreno. It has been repeated for years that the dancer in his poem X from Versos sencillos (Simple Verses) is La Bella Otero (Agustina Otero Iglesias or Carolina Otero), who also made her debut in the United States in 1890. Martí saw her dance at the El Edén Museé Theater on 23rd Street in New York. We know of his letter to the editor of the newspaper La Nación dated November 13, 1890. Who was this woman about whom many biographies would be written in the 20th century?
Inventing a past with the help of businessman Ernest Jurgens, Otero gave her imaginary life the effectiveness of her talent for dance and singing. With a very sad past, having been raped at the age of ten and forced to survive by prostituting herself, she had reemerged as an unparalleled artist who never mentioned her unfortunate childhood. As she advanced in her training in flamenco dance and singing, she added her histrionic abilities. And so it was that a distinctive Spanish art form was enriched by this woman’s very personal gifts. She never abandoned her status as a courtesan and, whether true or not, she claimed to have slept with great figures of royalty such as Albert I of Monaco and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. There is even talk of seven suicides by men who could not possess her. La Bella Otero was painted, photographed, and served as a muse to Gabriele D’Annunzio, among others. María Félix played her in the movies, and Ángela Molina played her on Italian television.
But if the impact of seeing La Bella Otero was great, the art of Carmencita Dauset Moreno surprised him even more. As María Julia Guerra Ávila[1] has revealed, there is a fragment about Carmencita—the first woman to be recorded by a movie camera in the United States—where she writes “sinuous Carmencita” and even a chronicle written by Martí in New York, but published in the Mexican newspaper El Partido Liberal on July 16, 1890. It reads: “The women bite their lips; the men lean on their neighbors’ shoulders; you can hear the tapping, the sweeping, the pointing of that swan-like foot embroidering the stage. And when she leaves, listless and lazy, it seems as if a ray of sunshine has gone away.” This chronicle resembles in admiration what is said in poem X of Versos sencillos (“Simple Verses”), “El alma trémula y sola” (“The Trembling and Lonely Soul”), which almost all of us know as “La bailarina española” (“The Spanish Dancer”).
Carmencita Dauset Moreno was born in 1868 in Almería. When she was hired in New York, she was preceded by a more notable career than that of La Bella Otero. Guerra Ávila assures us:
Her followers held parties in her honor (the “Carmencita Ball”), she attended and performed at charity galas, gave dance lessons to the aristocracy, danced at private parties in the city’s wealthiest residential areas, was the muse of intellectual circles, posed for Sarony’s photographs and for Sweet Caporal cigarette advertisements, and is sought after as a model by the famous painters John S. Sargent and William M. Chase. Her resounding success leads her to tour the interior and west coast of the United States, as far as San Francisco.
III
As the years go by, some Cubans, dispelling the myth a little, learn about the historical figure. The figure who inspired José Martí to write the poem X, whether it was Otero or Carmencita, is an idealization. Although he recognized her as flirtatious, she nevertheless represents a mysterious woman. So it is not so much a matter of revealing her image as it is of recognizing her effect on him. The poem relies on testimony, more sensitive than historical, of what it intends and can refer to. But there is the first and last reference, which is to its author. The dancer in the poem is both presentation and discovery. Martí invites the reader to join him, restless, in wonder and delight.
IV
When Tulio Raggi reads Martí’s poem, he is motivated by an interpretation that supposedly goes against the grain of traditional analyses. In El alma trémula y sola (1983), Raggi distances himself from conceiving a scenographic design that, at first glance, seems comfortable because it comes from a text that is clearly very cinematic. Following the emotional opening of the poem, the film director establishes and recreates, through cultural icons (The Statue of Liberty, the tall buildings of the city that has grown…), the power of New York’s urban landscape. Raggi’s Martí, seated, is not presented completely from behind. Is he conceived in the writing process? Rather, it is as if he were examining what has already been written. The camera zooms in. Martí is leaning over in a still image: now he is writing. The background of the dark room is interspersed with Martí’s face, although it is placed in the middle ground between the workspace and the complete view of a clock and its gears. The successive dissolves to suggest the illusion of movement respond to an aestheticization of the image that also favors the narrative. The visual effect is an allegory of how a creator interacts in the midst of the industrial civilization of capitalism.
Martí’s painful past is resolved through a series of flashbacks, in which he recalls his time in prison and the execution of the medical students. He is now a respected art critic who first trained in Spain and then wrote in Mexico and the United States. It is fitting that the director associates the details of the execution of the students with Goya’s The Third of May 1808. This is the figure of the man that Raggi presents before titling his short film El alma trémula y sola (The Trembling and Lonely Soul).
As in Martí’s reference, the flâneur or stroller is hinted at, who, having emigrated, may be a spit of the city: unsociable in appearance, a victim of moonlighting, few like the writer understand the harshness and advantage of solitude. However, at the right moment, he departs from his work in search of entertainment. The writer needs to stop at times to focus his gaze: There is dancing; let’s go and see/ The Spanish dancer.
In almost all the verses of El alma trémula y sola, Martí takes care to describe the dancer in detail. He portrays the representation of an attractive and provocative woman. Raggi takes advantage of the plasticity of the poem and, in the first instance, conceives the cinematographic nature of a dance in performance. Based on a verbal description, the filmmaker pretends to be affected only by how he will represent a thematic ensemble that goes beyond the spell of the dance and its performer. Raggi suspects and becomes convinced that what the lyrical subject experiences is an unforeseen emotional situation that cannot be prolonged. It is more than just an activation of memory. The verses: “They did well to remove/ The flag from the sidewalk;/ Because if the flag is there,/ I don’t know, I can’t go in,” differ from what he longs for and will see in the dancer. The Spanish representation is ambivalent. Understanding the nature of the issue, the filmmaker takes action when he opts for a reflective Martí. From the center of a Spanish flag bursts fire, focus, home, with its violent connotation and at the same time as a provocative element of the fiery company that, channeled, fights for independence. Hence the mambisa representations before the exile is paralyzed by the dancer’s striking face.
If we consider the main document, it is true that Raggi has a certain facility for, for example, visualizing a kind of intercalated shots in which we can even see possible angles of what he could (and in fact does) show. This beautiful and disturbing piece—disturbing and even terrifying, as in a dreamlike passage, is a constant in his films—obeys the apprehension of what is perhaps most important and, of course, subtly appears in Martí’s poem. The scales of detailed shots need to be harmonized in the editing. Because if Raggi has already managed to standardize the eroticism of the verses, he seeks and succeeds in contrasting the expression of the images with what beats in the written text, surpassing the dance and its performer. On this detail, in conversation with Antonio Enrique González Rojas, he seconds the previous criterion when he expresses this subtlety: “The dancer is a ghost, a placebo, an almost guilty moment of rest that Martí takes.”
The ephemeral delight in the Spanish dancer replaces the condition of a conscious state of mind. It embodies two qualities at first: the trembling and lonely soul: the soul of Martí… and also of the dancer. Tulio Raggi is well aware of this. The ending of the poem-life could not be more ambiguous.
[1] María Julia Guerra Ávila: “La verdadera bailarina española de Martí”, en https:// www.ahora.cu/es/opinión/, 25 de agosto de 2020.
