last, his impending death. The bell, then, is an omen, but also a reminder: The itinerary of Tristana is that of her own life, which, in a rapid finale to the movie, passes before us like an oneiric dream turned nightmare in the identity of the head-bell of Don Lope signifying the unchangeable ringing of a stagnant society…However, underlying that static world, mummified and without exit, Buñuel exposes the turbulent movement of the subconscious. That which is real is arrested, but that which is imaginary seethes in desire and vengeance.In his own Toledan explorations, Buñuel returned frequently to the bell tower, considering it a compulsory stop in the nocturnal activities of the Order. In the film, this reverence is evident, as the bell's metronomic tolls, both conscious and unconscious, evoke the memory of the Order in its surrealist wanderings between waking and dreaming. Tristana is based on a novel of the same name published by Benito Pérez Galdós in 1892. The setting of the novel was late-19th century Madrid. By translating the story to early-20th century Toledo, Buñuel makes not only a spatial return to that sacred city, but also a spiritual and temporal return to the Toledo that the Order knew. This return, however, is not explicit, nor is it complete. The Toledo of the era of the Order had changed irrevocably in the succession of wars, Franco, and modernity. Buñuel had changed too, and the fact was that in his lifetime he would never make a complete return; his time in Spain lasted only as long as it took to shoot his films. In 2001, Carlos Saura, who knew and worked with Buñuel, resumed the ellipsis of Buñuel in Toledo with his film Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón. The plot follows an older Buñuel returning to Spain after exile to work on a movie about the legend of the Table of King Solomon, a mirror imbued with the power of absolute knowledge of past, present, and future and rumored to be hidden somewhere in Toledo. In flashbacks, Buñuel reunites with fellow Order members Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca to search for the Table in 1920s Toledo. Finally, in a cinematic fusion of memory and fantasy, Buñuel makes a full return to his beloved city to “face his own ghosts, interwoven in an inseparable fashion with those of the history and country to which that city