Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

by the wind.

  New preoccupations emerge, most noticeably a growing fascination with the question of identity. Language becomes a prism through which Lorca is able to capture and explore the shifting nature of the self. “The reflected is / the real. / … / The real / is the reflected,” he suggests in “Moments of Song.” In “Confusion,” one of fourteen poems—some as brief as three lines—that constitute “Mirror Suite,” he asks:

  Is my heart

  your heart?

  Who is mirroring my thoughts?

  Who lends me this un-

  rooted passion?

  Why are my clothes

  changing color?

  Everything is a crossroads!

  Why does this slime

  look so starry?

  Brother, are you you

  or am I I?

  And these cold hands,

  are they his?

  I see myself in sunsets

  and a swarm of people

  wanders through my heart.

  In his review of Book of Poems, Salazar had announced that Lorca intended to publish a new collection of verse in the fall of 1921. He was referring to the suites. But although Lorca continued to work on the series for the next two years, he failed to publish the collection in its entirety. He did publish a handful of individual suites in late 1921 and early 1922 in the fledgling literary journal Indice, edited by Juan Ramón Jiménez. Shortly after the poems appeared, Lorca, like all other contributors to the issue, received a letter from the journal’s editorial staff, asking him to help offset the magazine’s printing costs.

  Throughout the hot, dry days of July and August, Lorca’s febrile imagination bolted from one idea to the next. Eager to immerse himself in the popular Spanish tradition, he spent hours learning to play the guitar from two Gypsies who gave him daily lessons in the art of flamenco.

  He also revived his boyhood love of puppetry. By late summer he was “hammering away” at a new interpretation of the “Billy Club Puppets,” Spain’s version of the Punch-and-Judy show. He pumped his elderly neighbors in Asquerosa for information about the itinerant puppet shows they had witnessed at the turn of the century—shows Lorca himself had seen as a child. By 1921 the puppet tradition had all but vanished from the countryside, but, as Lorca told Salazar, the “old people” in the village were full of picturesque memories that “would make you collapse with laughter.” “I’m very much loved by the workers, especially by the young lads, with whom I stroll and talk and everything,” he added, his happiness at being accepted by the people undiminished by the fact that as the son of one of the town’s wealthiest landowners and biggest employers, he was unlikely to be snubbed.

  Fall arrived, and Lorca moved back to Granada with his family. He had hoped to return to Madrid and the Residencia, but his father insisted he remain in Granada to finish his university degree. This time there was no arguing. His father also demanded that Lorca change his major from literature to the far more practical subject of law.

  Lorca surrendered. At twenty-three, he settled despondently into his family’s apartment in Granada and prepared to resume his hapless undergraduate career. It had been two years since he last enrolled in school. He had completed fewer than half the courses necessary for his degree. “I see life is now casting its chains upon me,” he had told Salazar earlier in the summer. “Life has its reason, too much reason, but… my wings, what a pity! My dried-up childhood, what a pity!” In a poem called “The Return,” part of a suite he composed in August, he was more direct:

  I’m coming back

  for my wings.

  O let me come back!

  7

  Falla

  1921-23

  Lorca’s fall semester class list read like a courthouse directory: canonical law, administrative law, public housing, penal law, civil law, judicial proceedings, mercantile law, legal practice. He struggled to make the best of it. His brother, then nineteen and on the verge of completing his own law degree, tutored him.

  Lorca made light of his situation. He told former Rinconcillo colleague Melchor Fernández Almagro that he was “neither sad nor happy; I’m inside autumn; I am …

  … Oh, heart, heart!

  Cupid’s Saint Sebastian! …

  Fernández Almagro encouraged him to leave Granada and return to Madrid. “You’re not doing anything there,” he said. “Let me know what train you take.” Adolfo Salazar teased Lorca about his new vocation and counseled him to do the minimal amount of work necessary in order to pass his exams. “I don’t like to think of you as … serious, or formal,” Salazar said, “because you’re not like that. You’re the bad Residencia student full of sunshine and brimming with songs.”

  Bored by the classroom and exasperated by its routines, Lorca renewed his acquaintance with those members of the Rinconcillo who still remained in the area. As a group they were particularly interested in the city of Granada, which they had now seen evolve from a quaint rural outpost into a noisy urban center filled with cars, banks, apartment buildings, and avenues. Lorca feared that “architects and junk dealers” might ultimately change their city into a “population without color or ambience.” He and his friends resolved to preserve Granada’s heritage. They talked excitedly about building a monument to the geniuses of Granada’s Arab past, men whom Lorca called “granadinos of pure stock,” but their plans never crystallized, and Lorca and his friends looked for another project. They found it in traditional Andalusian song.

  At dusk, in a small tavern inside the walls of the Alhambra, they gathered nightly to hear the tavern owner, Polinario, and his guitarist son, Angel Barrios, perform cante jondo, or “deep song,” a form of Andalusian song, most often associated with Gypsies, that had graced Granada’s caves and hillsides for centuries. Convinced that “true” deep song had been supplanted by its nineteenth-century successor, flamenco, played to gawking tourists in gaudy revues, Lorca sought to know cante jondo in its “original” state. Night after night, surrounded by the Alhambra’s ghostly towers, he and his friends sat in Polinario’s tavern, listening to the wails of deep song. Other artists, writers, and singers joined them, including a diminutive, bald-headed musician and composer, Manuel de Falla, who had moved to Granada with his sister in 1920. A gaunt man, with pale, delicate features and dark eyes, Falla lived in a tiny white house, or carmen, on the slopes of the Alhambra. He shared Lorca’s fascination with Gypsy culture and love of Andalusian song. When Lorca’s group talked of founding a musical café, Falla proposed a more ambitious idea: Why not stage a cante jondo festival in Granada, a festival of national scope and importance, one that would illuminate the distinction between “true” deep song and its “vulgar” cousin, flamenco?

  Long before moving to Granada, Manuel de Falla had embraced the city imaginatively. He set his 1905 opera, La vida breve, in Granada, and in 1915 named the first movement of his celebrated Nights in the Gardens of Spain after the Generalife gardens. A native of Cádiz, Falla was a passionate Andalusian whose work sprang directly from the traditions of southern Spain. Like Lorca, he had grown up hearing nursemaids croon folk songs, the words and melodies of which now filled his mind and fueled his music.

  He and Lorca had met briefly in 1919, during one of Falla’s periodic visits to Granada, but their friendship did not take root until 1921, when both found themselves living more or less permanently in the city—Falla by choice, and Lorca by paternal edict. On the face of it they had little in common. Lorca, twenty-three, was impulsive and undisciplined. Falla, in his mid-forties, was a timid, methodical man, who so regulated his life that he timed himself brushing his teeth. He slept in a cell-like white room on a narrow bed with a cross suspended above the headboard. Each morning before starting his day’s work at the piano he attended Mass. He viewed his talent as a God-given gift to be diligently honed, and he scolded Lorca for not doing the same. “When you’re dead, you’ll be sorry you didn’t work,” he warned. Lorca was both amused and awed by the composer’s quest for perfecti
on. He called Falla “a saint”—the same term he had used to describe his former piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa.

  Their friendship, marked by an age difference of more than twenty years, was cordial. Falla remained “Don Manuel” to Lorca. He addressed Federico as “my dear son” and reproached him when he succumbed to childish pranks. More than once, Lorca was forced to board a tram and make the noisy uphill trek to Falla’s carmen to beg the composer’s forgiveness for some misdeed. But each accepted the other’s quirks. Lorca regaled friends with accounts of Falla’s compulsive need for silence (the sound of a fly buzzing could make him stop work entirely), while Falla relished Lorca’s madcap sense of fun. One day the composer looked out his window to see Lorca approaching his house on foot with his stylish friend Emilia Llanos in tow. Lorca walked in front, solemnly holding a lantern in each hand. Llanos, wearing a huge hat, trailed behind. At the sight of their sober procession, Falla burst out laughing.

  From the moment he first heard Lorca play a Debussy prelude on the piano, Falla knew he was in the presence of an artist whose love of music and powers of invention rivaled his own. Lorca became a regular guest in the composer’s home. Falla’s small house sat high on the northwest edge of the Alhambra, overlooking the sand-colored sprawl of Granada and, beyond it, the vega. The composer thought the view from his carmen “the most beautiful panorama in the world.” He and his sister, María del Carmen, who served as his amanuensis, lived here in relative seclusion. The site gave Falla the “silence, above all silence,” he needed in order to work. He found the place so inspiring that each night before drifting off to sleep “new ideas and new projects,” he said, “assault me.”

  Lorca and his Rinconcillo companions frequently joined Falla in the afternoon for a “frugal” meal of tea and toast after the composer had finished his day’s work. While his sister poured tea, Falla would slowly and deliberately light a cigarette—one of the few he allowed himself daily—and ask questions of his guests. He smiled politely as they answered. Occasionally he played the piano for his visitors, but rarely his own work. Modesty forbade it. (He thought it pretentious when people called him “Maestro.”) Although he could have basked in his considerable fame, Falla chose not to. During a seven-year stint in Paris, from 1907 to 1914, he had known and worked with the great musicians of his day: Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Albéniz. Both Picasso and Diaghilev had collaborated on the London premiere of his Three-Cornered Hat in 1919. (Picasso’s costume sketches for the production hung above the piano in the living room where Lorca and his friends sat chatting.) But Falla shrank from celebrity. His only aim, Lorca observed, was “to become better each day and to create works of art. Anyone else who had achieved what he has achieved would take a break … but not Maestro Falla.”

  From Falla, Lorca learned to strive for perfection in his work and to experiment constantly. The composer nurtured Lorca’s growing passion for traditional Spanish song, and through the example of his own work proved to Lorca, at a time when he was struggling to make sense of such issues, that stylization, not direct imitation, was the most persuasive means of interpreting traditional material. One need only look at Debussy and Ravel, Falla maintained, to see how effectively an artist could suggest the sounds of Spain without once setting foot in the country. Falla taught Lorca that in working with traditional material one must seek “truth without authenticity.”

  Years earlier Falla had evoked the Gypsies’ untamed world in El amor brujo (“Love the Magician”) and La vida breve (“Brief Life”), and his understanding of Gypsy music shaped Lorca’s understanding of traditional Andalusian song. In his quest for what he believed to be “authentic” deep song, as opposed to its corrupt descendant, flamenco, Falla took Lorca on exploratory visits to the Gypsy caves that lined Granada’s Sacromonte hill. In fact, neither man was correct to think there was any distinction between “ancient” deep song and “modern” flamenco; the two were intertwined. Nevertheless, both Falla and Lorca clung to the notion that they could unearth and revive cante jondo in a pure, uncontaminated state, and they set out to do so. As they listened to Gypsy singers, Lorca seized on the stunning simplicity of Gypsy song, the concision and imagery of the three- and four-line lyrics or coplas that were the bedrock of cante jondo, gemlike poems that spoke eloquently of love:

  Your eyes and mine

  have become entwined,

  like blackberry bushes

  in the hedges.

  And death:

  The moon has a halo,

  my love has died.

  Struck by the “naked” emotion of deep song, Lorca later said that “all the passions of life” could be found in its abbreviated form, that it “comes from the first sob and the first kiss.” He understood cante jondo intuitively and interpreted it romantically, both as a poet and as an Andalusian whose great-grandmother had been part Gypsy—or so he claimed. Deep song contained the wellsprings of his own writing: love, pain, and death. It embodied the essence of the Andalusian temperament. He admired the pagan tones of the form, the candor of its language, its pantheism, and the fusion of cultures—Indian, Jewish, Byzantine, Islamic—implicit in its sounds. The poems in deep song, he said, “consult the wind, the earth, the sea, the moon, and things as simple as a violet, rosemary, a bird.” Later critics would observe that deep song also spoke of hunger, protest, and complaint.

  Plans for a cante jondo festival soon dominated Lorca’s life. His university work forgotten, he spent the last months of 1921 and first weeks of 1922 helping Falla and others circulate a petition throughout Granada requesting local funding for the event. In Madrid, Adolfo Salazar circulated a similar petition among the city’s writers and intellectuals; Juan Ramón Jiménez signed the document, as did the composer Joaquín Turina, Fernando de los Ríos, and the Mexican writer Alfonso Reyes. Organizers envisioned the festival as a matter of national as well as international significance, an occasion whereby Spain could pay formal tribute to the country’s rich musical heritage. Falla planned to bring both Stravinsky and Ravel to Granada for the event.

  Their work on the festival drew Lorca and Falla closer. On New Year’s Eve 1921, Falla’s saint’s day, Lorca hired a quartet of street musicians to serenade the composer. Late at night the revelers crept on tiptoe to Falla’s carmen, positioned themselves under his window, and, with Lorca conducting, burst into a noisy rendition of El amor brujo. Falla laughed so hard he could scarcely open the door to let them in. Later that night he asked the ensemble to repeat their performance four separate times while he accompanied them on the piano. He remarked to Lorca that “not even the great Don Igor” Stravinsky could have devised such an ingenious instrumentation.

  To his family and companions, Lorca spoke possessively of his friendship with “Manuelito.” Years later he boasted that in 1922 he and Falla had single-handedly organized Granada’s first cante jondo festival. He described how one night, as he and Falla were walking along a Granada street, discussing the “degeneration, neglect, and discredit that surrounded our old songs,” they had suddenly heard the “pure” strains of an ancient Andalusian song wafting from an open window. They approached the window and inside glimpsed two men, a guitarist and a singer. The “liturgical” simplicity of this private performance so moved them that, according to Lorca, Falla decided on the spot to found a deep song festival. Casting their work in an epic light, Lorca later declared that no two people were better equipped for the task “than a musician like Falla … and a poet like Lorca, a Gypsy, a granadino, black and green like a thoroughbred pharaoh.”

  In truth, dozens of other people took part in planning the festival, as Lorca knew. In early 1922, after receiving funding for the project, its organizers began preparing in earnest for the event. One of their most crucial tasks was to find cante singers to perform at the festival, which was to be a competition. The job fell largely to Lorca, who was only too willing to exchange his law books for long forays into the countryside in search of performers.

  Although Fa
lla and others occasionally joined him in his hunt for Gypsy singers, Lorca’s most frequent companion on these expeditions was his childhood friend Manolo Angeles Ortiz, who, like Lorca, had grown up in the vega and knew the region intimately. For weeks the two crisscrossed Granada province in search of performers. They scoured taverns, neighborhoods, towns, and farms. Arriving in a village where singers were said to reside, the two friends would first wander the streets, then sit in a public square in the fading afternoon light and wait. As Lorca later described it, two elderly men might be seated on a bench across from them, talking, when suddenly one or both would start to sing. Lorca could recognize what he called the “bloodcurdling” sound of pure cante jondo instantly.

  His search for singers and song carried him back to his roots, to the distant nights of his vega boyhood when he used to sit by the fire in Fuente Vaqueros and listen to villagers sing while his father played the guitar. His innate fondness for popular song had gradually evolved into a sophisticated understanding of the art. At twenty-two, he had helped the renowned Spanish historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal collect ballads in Granada’s Gypsy quarters. Lorca knew dozens of popular Spanish songs by heart. He once claimed to have collected more than three hundred songs in the province of Granada alone. Seated at a piano, his head thrown back, hands stretched wide on the keyboard, he was capable of spending a whole evening playing and singing songs from each region of the country without repeating a single example. He owned several ballad books, and like many of his contemporaries, including Falla, he was an aficionado of composer Felipe Pedrell’s Cancionero musical popular español, a massive compendium of traditional Spanish song published in four volumes between 1918 and 1922. For many in Lorca’s generation, Pedrell’s Cancionero served as a secular “book of hours.”