Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Wherever Lorca went in Madrid, he took center stage with his music-making, poetry recitals, and stories, both real and invented, which he told with laughter and joyous slaps of the hand on his listeners’ backs. He cultivated friends and admirers with the instincts of an impresario compelled to fill an empty theater night after night. His daily life was a performance. He constantly sought new audiences to mirror his thoughts, to provoke and encourage his creativity, to fuel his sense of importance, to stave off loneliness.

  Lorca was a mixture of “strength and weakness, country boy and decadent youth,” a friend remembered. He wore his black hair combed back from his forehead, revealing a tiny widow’s peak, and he dressed in pseudo-bohemian attire: dark suits, carelessly knotted ties, and gauche, broad-brimmed hats. He sometimes wore high-cut trousers and spats. At night he often gathered with others in the Residencia salon to talk, read, recite poetry, or play the piano. He astonished his fellow residents with impromptu recitals of Chopin, Mozart, Debussy, and Ravel. His fingers were “electric.” He “gave the impression that music flowed from him,” that music “was the source of his power, his fascinating secret,” an admirer recalled.

  “Play Schumann!” someone would shout, and Lorca would instantly invent a Schumann-like passage. Someone else might request a popular song, and Lorca would lift his head, lean back, extend his arms, grin, and begin to play and sing. He had a coarse, earthy voice. He once remarked that he sang the way a “farmboy sings while nudging his oxen along.” One song followed another. Between pieces he bantered and wisecracked and dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief. In the mornings he sometimes sat by himself in the salon to practice the piano. Down the hall, Residencia director Alberto Jiménez Fraud would prop his office door open so that visitors could hear the talented musician.

  He soon enjoyed a circle of devoted friends at the Residencia. One of these was Luis Buñuel, then nineteen, a brawny student from Aragón who spent more time with a punching bag and a pole vault than he did with books. By his own account Buñuel was an “uncouth, provincial athlete” when he met Lorca in early 1920. Besides sports, he devoted himself to practical jokes, women, and jazz. He cared nothing about either literature or film, his eventual métier. But Lorca’s “dark, shining gaze” and prodigious creativity intrigued him, and Buñuel spent hours listening to him recite his poetry. Lorca “made me know another world,” he recalled. Before long the athlete was writing verse of his own. He and Lorca drank brandy and wine together, listened to jazz, and roamed Madrid in search of eccentric places and personalities.

  Another young resident, Emilio Prados, an aspiring poet, was so smitten by Lorca that he confessed to his diary in early 1920, “My one great joy has been to find in Federico the friend I so desired. I opened my heart to him, and he knew how to understand it.” A bashful science student from Málaga, Prados had met Lorca briefly in his teens during one of Lorca’s holiday visits to his hometown, but the two did not become close friends until Lorca moved into the Residencia.

  An introvert with a long face and round spectacles who suffered from chronic poor health, Prados spent much of his time alone, reading, listening to music, and writing poetry. Hopelessly in love with a woman in Málaga who spurned his attentions, he confided in Lorca, “with whom I can discuss my most private affairs without his laughing at them,” Prados told his diary. “His way of being and thinking is very similar to my own, his same manly childishness, his eagerness to reach the summit of glory. Not that he fully understands it, but he desires it because he desires the new and the revolutionary: in everything he is like me. His political ideals, which undermine his own well-being, are the same as mine. This makes me love him all the more.”

  Fueled by a mutual love of poetry and disappointment in women, their friendship deepened. Prados became obsessed with Lorca. The following year Prados left Madrid to seek treatment for tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Switzerland. From there he sent Lorca a poem, one he pointedly described as his “farewell”:

  Federico

  you go along your road

  a cold road

  Federico you go along your road

  and I along a river

  A deep

  and turbid river

  Will I be left alone … ?

  By then their friendship had begun to wane, but Lorca nevertheless preserved the poem. He also kept a handful of subsequent letters in which Prados again professed his love. At one point Prados suggested the two live together, “ridding ourselves of people, emotions, bonds, and breaking the ties of responsibility … Do you have the nerve?” Lorca left no record of his response to the proposal.

  He was ill-prepared for the intensity of Prados’s pursuit and uncertain of his own feelings toward men. He continued to fear sex. Two years before moving into the Residencia, he had described himself to another young poet as “a poor, impassioned, and silent fellow who, very nearly like the marvelous Verlaine, bears within himself a white lily impossible to water, while to the foolish eyes of those who look upon me I seem to be a very red rose with the sexual tint of an April peony, which is not my heart’s truth.” It is unclear if by invoking Verlaine he was making a veiled allusion to homosexuality, and thus hinting at his own sexual ambiguity, or merely restating his discomfort with the notion of physical love. What is clear is that Lorca found the subject of sex disturbing, and he longed to settle it. He spoke wistfully of his desire to unravel “the enigma of myself.”

  At the Residencia young men like Prados and Lorca, both of whom had spent years convincing themselves they were in love with women, had ample opportunity to forge passionate, sometimes volatile friendships. Residents did everything together: lived, ate, bathed, studied, socialized. Luis Buñuel later characterized it as a hothouse atmosphere, where a certain homoerotic promiscuity evolved, “although it never amounted to more than kisses or the like.” Freed from the social and religious strictures that elsewhere constrained Spaniards, the young men who lived at the Residencia were at leisure to explore the emotional, intellectual, and physical breadth of human existence. Twice in the 1920s, the eminent Spanish physician Gregorio Marañón, author of Essays on Sexual Life (1926), lectured at the Residencia on human emotion and sexuality. As one resident said later, the institution and its liberal outlook “freed us forever from the mental severity and the moral indecency of sectarianism.” For Lorca, life at the Residencia was both an emancipation and a revelation.

  Madrid itself inspired Lorca. In verse, he described the Spanish capital as a “strange and modern, / almost cubist, Madrid.” Inside the city’s cafés, people met nightly to exchange gossip and ideas, hear jazz, and discuss current events: the Treaty of Versailles, the Russian Revolution, the Socialist Republican movement in Spain. A new aesthetic was taking hold. Hispanic modernismo, with its extravagant images and ponderous approach to reality, was in decline; writers and artists now talked of playful new movements: ultraism, creationism, cubism, futurism, Dada.

  Lorca showed up regularly at Madrid’s more popular literary gatherings, known as tertulias. He met the eccentric Galician playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán, renowned as much for his foot-long beard as for his innovative theater. He met the doyen of the city’s tertulia scene, the loquacious Ramón Gómez de la Serna, whose brisk aphorisms taught Lorca to prize concision of language. He befriended the young Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, the chief proponent of creationism, a short-lived literary movement whose adherents championed an extreme form of art-for-art’s sake, with an emphasis on nonfigurative images and a contempt for verisimilitude. Lorca also befriended Rafael Pérez Barradas, a painter and leading advocate of ultraism, a more durable, image-based movement that held sway in Spain’s avant-garde circles through 1923. Barradas and his ultraist followers viewed art as a game without rules, and experimented with free verse, scant punctuation, and unorthodox typography. They scorned Hispanic modernismo and, in their attempt to forge a uniquely Spanish “ism” akin to other European movements, such as futurism, sought to
rid poetry of anecdote and romantic sentiment by audaciously juxtaposing natural and man-made images, and adding a heavy dose of humor. Lorca often dropped in on Barradas’s tertulia at the Café del Prado. But although intrigued by ultraism and drawn to its avant-garde sensibilities and machine-age metaphors, he refrained from joining this or any other movement.

  His exposure to the avant-garde strengthened Lorca’s growing determination to rejuvenate his writing. Even before coming to Madrid, he had begun to distance himself from the florid excesses of his earliest work. But he found it hard to do any actual writing in the capital. At the Residencia he worked intermittently, distractedly. Propped in bed or hunched over a table, he scribbled lines of verse on pieces of paper, which he then carried in his pockets and subsequently lost.

  Although he had nothing more than a preliminary draft of the script with which to work, Gregorio Martínez Sierra began rehearsals for Lorca’s unfinished play in early March 1920. The untitled work was a full-length poetic drama about a young male cockroach who dreams of an “impossible” love and dies when he finds it in the guise of a wounded white butterfly. Aesthetically the subject was both out-moded and preposterous. Lorca was sensitive to its shortcomings, but hoped nonetheless to profit from the work. “According to Martínez Sierra’s calculations, if the cockroaches succeed, I’ll earn a respectable sum of money,” he told his parents.

  Once rehearsals were underway, Lorca took an active role in the play’s production and made a concerted effort to finish his script. He paid close attention to Martínez Sierra’s work each night, offered frequent suggestions, and submitted fresh revisions of the script by day. He found the business of staging a play compelling work. After years of watching puppet shows and pageants, of attending plays and Mass, and then staging his own versions of these activities at home, he had a sharp, if untutored, sense of the theater and its power to move an audience. He had never forgotten the effect his mother had achieved in his childhood with her dramatic reading of Victor Hugo’s Hernani to the family servants. At the end of Doña Vicenta’s recital the maids had wept, much as Martínez Sierra’s actors had cried after hearing Lorca read his play to them for the first time—or so Lorca boasted. He described his reading as “the greatest success I have had in my short literary life.” To a friend he later confessed, “I have to do theater. In the theater passions are expressed with a strength one cannot find in lyric poetry.”

  Victor Hugo was both an indirect and a direct influence on Lorca’s play about cockroaches. Lorca had long subscribed to Hugo’s Franciscan belief in the spiritual superiority of animals and, like the French novelist, wrote movingly of small animals, plants, and insects in his work. In one of his earliest plays, an unfinished “dramatic poem” called “On Love. Animal Theater,” he composed a long dialogue between a dove and a pig.

  But if Hugo, and by extension Saint Francis, inspired the subject matter of Lorca’s play for Martínez Sierra, its principal argument—“that love springs forth with equal intensity on all planes of life”—came from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play Lorca once claimed had “poisoned” his soul. In fact, Shakespeare’s comedy nourished his imagination, for it prompted him to see love as a haphazard phenomenon, a conceit that in turn bolstered his dawning suspicion that all kinds of love are valid.

  Lorca acknowledged his debt to Shakespeare in the prologue to his play, a long exposition by the work’s “author,” a poet, on the drama’s origins and significance. The “poet” explains to his audience that even the most repulsive of nature’s creatures can experience love—hence the appearance of an ungainly cockroach, Curianito, in the play’s leading role. Curianito displays many of the qualities that marked Lorca as a teenager. He possesses a “yellow mole” on his leg and “a poet’s dreamy eyes.” His fellow cockroaches taunt him. A poet and a visionary, Curianito dreams of love but fails to attain it. He struggles to comprehend the cruelty of a God (“St. Cockroach”) who deliberately wills his creatures to suffer. He longs to return to childhood, to “call my mother as I did when a boy.”

  The object of Curianito’s passion is a beautiful white butterfly with a broken wing, whose true identity is revealed during an eerie moonlight soliloquy. “For I am death / and beauty,” she says, plaintively moving her wings. The butterfly’s words confirm what the poet has suggested in the prologue, that “Death disguises itself as Love!”—a concept central both to the play and to Lorca’s vision. By the end of the drama both Curianito and his beloved butterfly have died, proving that love brings only suffering, never joy.

  Little actually happens in the play. Written in verse, the work is a protracted investigation of the same themes that dominate Lorca’s adolescent poetry and prose. Occasionally a musical or dance interlude interrupts the dialogue, and the insects’ lavish costumes offer some visual distraction. But the characters speak in one voice, Lorca’s, and there is virtually no conflict, merely suffering. Despite his ripe theatrical imagination, Lorca did not yet know how to compose for the stage. He drew many of his ideas for plot and stagecraft from Maeterlinck, whose lyrical style, use of allegory, and preoccupation with death appealed to his sensibility. But Lorca lacked the means to invoke these devices in any but the most plodding of ways. His trite use of symbolist iconography—moonlight, dusk, stars, dawn, flowers—only heightened the play’s unintentional humor. Although he meant his fable about insect life to express profound human truths, Lorca failed to see how funny it was.

  Rehearsals did not go smoothly. Despite the play’s flaws, Lorca’s father had agreed to pay Martínez Sierra’s costs, and the director was keen to rush the script into production. Lorca himself was now ambivalent about the work. Well into rehearsals, he was still unable to come up with a title for the play. The company’s producers complained that without a title they could not advertise the drama.

  There were further problems. The first set designs, by Rafael Barradas, were unacceptable, and new ones had to be substituted. Lorca watched with increasing alarm as Martínez Sierra forged ahead with the production, the director’s faith in the troubled play intact. As opening night drew near, Lorca felt what he later described as a “mute anguish” at the thought of his name being plastered across town on posters advertising the work. Eventually he lost all confidence and convened a meeting of his Rinconcillo colleagues to appraise the situation. He told his friends he intended to withdraw the work from production. He had already drafted a letter to his father, asking Don Federico to reimburse Martínez Sierra’s expenses to date. His friends argued against it. If he were to back out now, they advised, he would be hard put to find another producer in the future. Reluctantly, Lorca agreed to persevere. But he declined an offer from Madrid’s La Tribuna to contribute a self-critique of his play to the paper’s theater section.

  Confusion surrounded the work up to its premiere. On March 11, 1920, the Heraldo de Madrid announced the opening of “The Star of the Meadow, the first dramatic work by a new and most interesting poet, Federico García Lorca.” The same day, a rival daily, El Sol, said that The Star of the Meadow would open the following week. The next day, the Heraldo de Madrid informed readers that the premiere of Lorca’s new play had been postponed. Meanwhile, Martínez Sierra telephoned Federico at the Residencia with a last-minute suggestion for a new title. In exasperation, Lorca told the director to call the play “anything you like, whatever you think best.”

  The following day the Heraldo de Madrid announced a new opening date for the work, March 18, as well as a new title: The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. Martínez Sierra’s sentimental tastes had prevailed; the title would endure. But the play’s opening date continued to change. In the end, Lorca’s dramatic fable made its debut in the Teatro Eslava on March 22, 1920, at ten-thirty in the evening.

  Little about the theater in Madrid in the early 1920s was innovative. Companies routinely gave two performances nightly, often of different plays. Audiences demanded a steady menu of realistic bourgeois comedies, performed by medio
cre actors in unimaginative settings. Works were formulaic and predictable. “Any comedy that’s a tiny bit risqué is considered pornographic,” observed one disgruntled theatergoer in the mid-1920s. “Any drama where two ideas are presented in succession without a cup of tea between them is regarded as a play to be read at home.” The era’s reigning playwrights were the prolific Jacinto Benavente, known for his bourgeois melodramas, and a pair of equally productive brothers, Alvarez and Serafín Quintero, renowned for their jovial, cliché-ridden scripts set in Andalusia. Even Gregorio Martínez Sierra had a decided penchant for morally uplifting, light comedies. “The public today comes to the theater to forget the worries with which real life … crushes the spirit,” he said in 1921, a year after premiering The Butterfly’s Evil Spell.

  In an effort to shore up support, Lorca booked a large number of seats in the Eslava for his friends on opening night. As curtain time approached they began filing into the theater’s upper stalls—new friends from Madrid as well as old ones from Granada, including María Luisa Egea, Lorca’s adolescent passion, who now lived in Madrid. Backstage, Lorca waited nervously. Most of the city’s theater critics were in the audience, pens poised. The crowd around them was lively, even obstreperous, as was often the case with opening night audiences in Madrid. Earlier in the evening Martínez Sierra’s company had presented a French farce; following Lorca’s play, they were to premiere a new Spanish comedy.

  At ten-thirty the house lights dimmed, and Lorca’s “poet” took the stage. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began. “The play you are about to hear is humble yet disturbing, a failed comedy about one who wished to scratch the moon but whose heart was scratched instead.” A moment later the curtain rose on a green “meadow” peopled by actors wearing dark capes meant to resemble cockroaches’ shells. The audience started to murmur. When Catalina Bárcena, in the role of Doña Cockroach, came onstage sporting a round helmet with two antennaelike feathers, a spectator muttered something about her “little horns.”