Dead man laughing
Luis Buñuel's ashes are missing. Is a Dominican priest to blame? Jo Tuckman on what could be the surrealist's final joke
Where are the ashes of Luis Buñuel? It sounds like the title of a surrealist film. In fact, this has been a mystery for the past 21 years. The director died, on July 29 1983, as he had hoped: fully conscious of what was happening. "I am dying," he said to his wife, Jeanne Rucar, who was sitting beside his hospital bed. Seconds later she felt his pulse fade away and stop.
Only family and friends were allowed into the traditional night-long vigil around the coffin. It was held at a funeral parlour a few blocks from the family's red brick home in Mexico City, the Spanish-born director's base for the better part of the previous four decades. Those who did attend say there were no religious rites or rituals. After all, Buñuel had written in his memoirs: "There isn't a lot to say about death when you are an atheist like me."
What happened next, however, remains unclear. After the cremation, Rucar refused to reveal what she had done with her husband's ashes. "It's a secret," she said, and kept it until she died. Buñuel's eldest son, Juan Luis, says that Rucar gave the urn to his younger brother Rafael, who took it to his home in Los Angeles. But Rafael refuses to say more. Now a Dominican priest, Julian Pablo Fernandez, claims the widow gave him the remains, to put in a specially renovated corner of the baroque Mexico City church where he officiates.
The friendship between the director and the priest began in the early 1960s, after Father Julian saw Viridiana. One of Buñuel's most celebrated anti-religious films, Viridiana is the story of a novice nun who, after a series of misfortunes, pours charity on some beggars who then throw a wild party and enact a grotesque parody of the last supper. "I was amazed by the genius, poetry, sensuality, and the daring," Father Julian remembers. "I said to myself: I have to meet the man who made that."
In his memoirs, Buñuel describes Father Julian as "a modern Dominican, an excellent painter and author of two singular films". Buñuel, apparently, loved to discuss religion with Fernandez over dry martinis in a small side room where he received guests. At one of their last encounters, in hospital, Buñuel, lying with outstretched arms and tubes sticking into his wrists, joked that he was being "crucified for surrealism".
Fernandez talks vividly of his meetings with Buñuel. But one thing he refuses to discuss is his claim to have his friend's ashes, hidden in the private chapel of a Mexico City cultural centre run by his order. According to Father Miguel Concha, the centre's prior, this has been kept in a rectangular wooden pedestal beside the altar, adapted to hold Buñuel's ashes locked inside. "Julian asked the community if he could keep them here temporarily until he'd arranged a more dignified public place where people could pray to Buñuel," says the prior. "It was a big secret and we never said a word about it until now."
Both Father Miguel and Father Julian insist they saw no problem in venerating the ashes of an atheist - but then both also suggest that Buñuel, in his heart, remained true to the faith. Father Julian even describes the director's hereticism as "a bit of a pose".
Buñuel's eldest son, Juan Luis, vehemently disagrees. He finds the idea of "a Disneyland chapel with the ashes of Luis Buñuel" outrageous, and is infuriated by the suggestion that his father's atheism was skin-deep. "Who is Julian to judge a man whose whole philosophy of life can be very simply interpreted by seeing his films?" asks Juan Luis. "But what can you expect from a priest whose life revolves around social success?"
Juan Luis isn't the only person to express doubts about the priest, who also boasts relationships with other important figures among Mexico's artistic and movie elite. Father Julian admits he was unpopular among Buñuel's other friends. In her auto biography, Rucar noted that "mean things" were said about the priest, which she didn't print, but which surviving friends suspect she shared. "All the family had something against Father Julian," says Marisol Martin del Campo, the co-writer of Rucar's book. "They just didn't like him very much, somehow didn't trust him. It would be very odd if Jeanne had given him the ashes."
And yet, many of Buñuel's friends do believe Fernandez's story. Silvia Pinal, the actress who played Viridiana, told me: "Everybody has always said that Father Julian has the ashes tucked away somewhere ... The rumours started after Luis' death because nobody knew where they were." The patriarch of Mexican art cinema, Arturo Ripstein, says with finality: "Father Julian's got 'em."
There is one more twist to the tale. According to Andrea Valeria, a long-time family friend, when Rucar heard the rumours, she said: "Julian thinks he has the ashes, but he doesn't." Rucar had a reputation for being open-hearted, vivacious and totally dedicated to, if somewhat squashed by, her life-long partner. She also shared his mischievous streak.
Buñuel was famous for his pranks from childhood, all through the university days that he shared with Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca, and through the rest of his life. "As I approach my final sigh I often imagine a last joke," he wrote in his memoirs. "I call together all my old friends who are committed atheists like myself and who gather sadly around my deathbed. I call in a priest and to the horror of my friends I confess, seek absolution for my sins and receive extreme unction. Then I roll over and die."
Buñuel may not have carried out that threat, but perhaps with this mystery surrounding his ashes he did play one final prank. Only this time, no one knows who the target is.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2004/dec/29/art/print
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