Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  In the aftermath of the competition and his public triumph as both a lecturer and a poet, Lorca found himself feeling “very happy, but terribly emotional.” He did not know why. By early July he and his family had moved to Asquerosa for the summer. To his loyal correspondent Melchor Fernández Almagro, he confessed that he felt an irresistible urge to weep every morning. He described the impulse in melodramatic terms:

  Anything moves me (the emotion of dawn) … It seems to me as though I am recuperating from some illness and I’m as weary as if I had crossed deserts blurred with fever. I’m thinking now of doing a lot of work beneath my eternal poplars and beneath “the pianissimo of gold.”

  The last phrase came from a suite he had written the previous year. He resumed work on his suite series that July, completing what he described as several “little plaintive poems that I feel inside, in the deepest part of my unhappy heart.”

  He was vague about the source of his unhappiness. Although he longed to write, to produce a “calm and serene work this summer,” his attempts at poetry disappointed him. In the wake of Poem of the Deep Song, the confessional verse he had once turned out with alacrity had become an embarrassment. “You have no idea how much I suffer when I see myself portrayed in these poems,” he told Fernández Almagro shortly after completing a handful of new suites. “Stitch and stitch … like a shoemaker, stitch, stitching away, and nothing to show! These days I feel pregnant.”

  Midway through the summer he was gripped with passion for a new project, an “admirable book” that he intended to call “The Meditations and Allegories of Water.” He envisioned the work as a vast “Life of Water” in both verse and prose, with many chapters, a poem at once Eastern and Western, in which water’s “impassioned life,” water’s “martyrdoms” would be sung. If he attacked the project boldly he felt he could achieve something. “And if I were a great poet, what one calls a great poet, I might find myself face to face with my great poem.”

  Water had “penetrated” him. The great rivers and waterways of Andalusia “flow into Federico García Lorca, modest dreamer and son of the water,” he said. His childhood worship of the vega’s streams and canals, together with his enduring awe of the sea and fear of drowning, had led him at last, he thought, to his magnum opus. “Oh what a water obsession I suffer!” But for unspecified reasons, Lorca set aside his “Meditations and Allegories of Water” after a few brief attempts at composing parts of the book. He never returned to the project, although his preoccupation with its subject continued to nourish his imagination and to pervade his poetry.

  The cante jondo festival had given Lorca a chance to collaborate with other artists, to experience the excitement of live performance. He had spent most of the previous year consumed with preparations for the event. Now that it was over, he missed it more than he realized. Toward the end of the summer of 1922 he conceived a new project, one that would gratify his need for theatrical performance: he and Falla would create a traveling Andalusian puppet show. “Enough of Castile!” he exclaimed. His immediate literary forebears, notably Antonio Machado and Miguel de Unamuno, had already championed that arid part of Spain. It was time to exalt Andalusia.

  Falla endorsed the idea at once and agreed to collaborate with Lorca on the project. The composer was so excited by the notion that he could scarcely sleep. As a child growing up in Cádiz he had thrilled to the raucous fun of the puppeteers who periodically set up shop in that city’s streets and squares, and like Lorca he longed to revive the magic of those occasions. Falla had recently been at work on an operatic interpretation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which he called Master Peter’s Puppet Show, he hoped to premiere the composition within the year. By collaborating with Lorca on a traveling puppet company he could try out some of his ideas and techniques for the opera. Falla envisioned a company of international standing, one that would tour not only Granada but Europe and South America. He told Lorca that both Stravinsky and Ravel could be counted on to take part in the endeavor.

  While Falla considered the logistics of the operation, Lorca turned to the question of repertoire. Drawing on memories of the puppet shows he had seen in childhood, as well as the conversations he had held in 1921 with his neighbors in Asquerosa, he concluded that the troupe should offer a tragedy from the popular tradition as well as several farces of “our own invention,” a series of crime ballads and holy miracles, and “the savage idyll of Don Cristóbal and Miss Rosita,” Andalusia’s Punch-and-Judy show. “If we put a little love into this matter, we’ll be able to produce a clean and faultless art,” he remarked to Falla.

  Lorca admired the puppet theater precisely because it ruptured so thoroughly the deadly conventions of the bourgeois stage: its invisible fourth wall, decorous manners, and polite language. Filled with coarse talk and violent action, the puppet theater epitomized the kind of directly confrontational, vigorous spectacle Lorca longed both to see and to create onstage. So keenly did he revere this homely form that he later described it as the very “backbone” of the theater. If the theater is to be saved, he argued, it must return to its puppet roots.

  In the summer of 1922 he began drafting a farce for the “Billy Club Puppets of Granada,” as Falla proposed to call their troupe. The name came from the protagonist of the classic Andalusian guignol, Don Cristóbal, a billy-club wielding brute who takes a reluctant bride. The character of Cristóbal was so well known that throughout southern Spain puppets were known generically as “cristobalitos” or “cristobicas”—billy-club puppets.

  By August Lorca had completed three scenes of his play. Although he failed to finish the farce that summer, he returned to it the following year and eventually completed several different versions of the work. He described the endeavor as “the dream of my youth.” Two decades earlier, in the same tract of vega land, he had persuaded an aunt to make him a set of cardboard puppets so that he could put on plays. Hints of that vanished era surfaced both in the plot for Lorca’s “Billy Club Puppets,” a variation on the traditional Cristóbal story, and in its details, many of which Lorca drew from childhood recollections of Fuente Vaqueros.

  He titled his short play The Billy Club Puppets. The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Miss Rosita. A Guignolesque Farce in Six Scenes and an Announcement. The vigor of the puppet theater and the bawdy content of the classic Cristóbal story freed Lorca to explore his lewder, more comic side. The play opens with a high-spirited prologue in which a puppet named Mosquito, who “represents the joy of free living, the grace and poetry of the Andalusian people,” bluntly commands his audience to pay attention. “Son, shut your little mouth. And you, little girl, sit down at once.”

  Although not the only Spanish playwright of his day to embrace the rough-hewn world of the puppet stage, Lorca’s interest in the form was nonetheless unusual. Most Spanish audiences preferred the drawing-room dramas of Jacinto Benavente to the rustic antics of the puppeteer, an attitude Lorca found incomprehensible. He favored the true art of the puppet stage over the more pretentious theater of Benavente, and in his prologue to The Billy Club Puppets he said as much. Lorca’s Mosquito describes the bourgeois stage as a “theater of counts and marquises, a gold and crystal theater where men … and ladies … go to fall asleep.”

  The ensuing farce incorporates stock lines, characters, and situations from the puppet theater, as well as popular Andalusian lyrics, and the grunts, groans, and salacious dialogue typical of the Cristóbal tradition. As he sets out to woo his reluctant bride, Rosita, a drunken Cristóbal drools, “She’s a juicy little woman! What a pair of little hams she has!” Later he brags about the number of men he has killed with his billy club. Still later, distraught by his discovery that Rosita loves another man, Cristóbal ruptures his grotesque belly and dies. At his funeral a priest intones, “Whether or not we sing, / we’ll earn our five pesetas.”

  The puppet tradition had led Lorca to see that action, not words, is the theater’s principal medium, and in The Billy Club Puppets he demonstrates his
new appreciation for theatrical technique. Rudely comic scenes are punctuated by moments of startling visual and aural beauty. As a snoring Don Cristóbal is being shaved for his wedding, a young girl dressed in yellow, with a crimson rose in her hair, sings a wistful love song, accompanying herself on castanets while an elderly beggar plays an accordion. At the close of this lyrical scene a ravishing Spanish maja appears at a tavern window and silently fans herself.

  But Lorca’s farce is not without the more conventional poetry of words. Midway through the play a character named Hour counsels the distressed Rosita to “be patient … How can you know what winds will spin the weather vane on your little roof tomorrow? Since I come here every day, I will remind you of this when you are old and have forgotten this moment.” Elsewhere, a young man who once loved Rosita is shocked to hear of her impending marriage to Cristóbal. In an exchange reminiscent of Hugo’s “Legend of Pécopin and Baldour,” he reflects, “It isn’t possible. She loved me so much, and that was only …” His voice trails off. “Five years ago,” a village boy reminds him. Lorca’s implication is clear. Love—true and abiding love between two individuals—is merely a chimera. The true steward of human destiny is time.

  By the fall of 1922, Lorca had spent an entire year in Granada, chipping away at his long-postponed university degree. That autumn his twenty-year-old brother graduated from the University of Granada with honors. In early October, Lorca informed a friend that he had passed ten courses himself and planned to graduate in January. “Then my Señor Papá will let me travel. I’m thinking about going to Italy.” He later changed his mind and settled on Paris. Either way, he was confident his first trip abroad would be “brilliant.”

  Confined once more to his parents’ apartment in Granada, his puppet play momentarily set aside and college again the focus of his attention, Lorca amused himself by playing the piano in the evening for friends or sipping anisette with them in local bars. He missed Madrid—“that dandyish and absurd Madrid,” he called it—but Don Federico insisted that he stay in Granada, and Lorca capitulated. Despite their differences, he admired his father. One night while playing the piano at home for friends, he glanced out the window and saw the stout, balding landowner below him in the distance, running pell-mell through the streets of Granada on his way home. As Don Federico reached the square in front of his apartment, he stopped, composed himself, and resumed walking at a measured pace. Lorca roared with laughter. “My father’s so funny!” he cried. “He’s such an Andalusian, such a poet, so wonderful!”

  By December, Lorca had devised a new project: a private puppet show, to be staged at home during the holidays as a gift for his sister Isabel and her young friends. Falla was jubilant. As Lorca reported to Melchor Fernández Almagro in mid-December, they were both “terribly happy”—Lorca because the show would delight his sister, distract him from school, and advance his theatrical career, and Falla because it would allow him to try out some of the ideas he hoped to implement in Master Peter’s Puppet Show. “Falla is like a little boy, saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to be something unique!’ Last night he stayed up until all hours working and copying out the instrumental parts with a child’s enthusiasm.”

  While Falla pored over his score for the production—a sophisticated blend of traditional songs and carols, Latin chant, and his own arrangements of music by Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy, and others—Lorca prepared to direct the show. It was the first time since childhood that he had staged anything on his own. Now, as then, he drew his friends and family into the effort, enlisting both his brother and sister Concha as amateur puppeteers. The family apartment soon resembled the backstage of a busy theater, with Falla pounding away at the piano nearly every morning, and Hermenegildo Lanz, a lanky young artist who had agreed to design the production, tearing up and down the stairs, making adjustments to the stage and set. Lanz was thrilled to be part of such a distinguished undertaking, and informed his parents that he and his two colleagues hoped to perfect their “Andalusian Puppet Theater” and take it abroad.

  On Saturday afternoon, January 6,1923, the Feast of the Epiphany, a small crowd assembled in the Lorca family drawing room for the company’s debut performance. Scattered among the “curls and ribbons of the rich children” were a handful of newsboys whom Lorca had spotted on the street outside his home and spontaneously asked inside. He was to remember their “smiling faces” for years.

  Brightly colored souvenir programs announced the day’s fare: an interlude attributed to Cervantes, a thirteenth-century mystery play, and a short script by Lorca himself, The Girl Who Waters the Basil Plant and the Inquisitive Prince, a poetic retelling of an old Andalusian folktale. As the curtains parted on the first act and Lanz’s wooden-headed puppets began to speak, it seemed to Paco García Lorca that the spirit of Cervantes himself was smiling “upon that roomful of giggling children.” When he wasn’t backstage working puppets, Paco took photographs of the spectacle with a black-and-white camera. In a calculated attempt to publicize their achievement, Lorca and Falla subsequently sent copies of these pictures to their friends in the press.

  By all accounts, the production was exquisite. From Lanz’s vibrant cardboard sets to Lorca’s poetic text and Falla’s elaborate score, each of its components had been meticulously crafted. Intent on perfection, Falla covered the strings of Lorca’s piano with tissue paper so that the instrument would sound like a harpsichord. For Lorca, the spectacle was a boyhood dream come true. Between acts he poked his puppet-clad hand through the curtains of the stage and, in the role of his favorite puppet character, the boorish Don Cristóbal, bantered with his audience. To their glee, he called out to children by name. His brisk exchanges were the highlight of the day.

  The production received three reviews, two by Lorca’s close friend José Mora Guarnido, who after witnessing the event termed it “the first sophisticated attempt to recover the ‘billy-club’ theater.” Mora compared the novelty of the undertaking to a “cubist poem,” and suggested that the future of the Spanish theater depended upon this sort of experimental work. Mora’s two accounts appeared in consecutive weeks in the prominent Madrid daily La Voz. After learning of the first of Mora’s reviews, an ecstatic Hermenegildo Lanz begged his parents to buy “six, eight, or ten” copies of the paper.

  In February 1923 Lorca took the last examinations in his long and lackluster university career. As usual, he relied on charm to carry him through. During an oral exam in political law, his friend and teacher Fernando de los Ríos asked him to define “the State.” Lorca replied that it was a “great spider.” Shrewdly, de los Ríos steered the exam away from politics. He suggested that Lorca discuss ancient mythology. The Greek myths, Lorca told him, were dreams. De los Ríos gave him a passing grade.

  Lorca’s final examination was in mercantile law, a topic about which he knew nothing. At the appointed hour for the test, he failed to appear. His professor, an older man on the verge of retirement, did not wish to end his career on such a sour note, and offered Lorca a second chance. In a private session, the professor asked him a few rudimentary questions about the subject. Lorca answered in generalities and passed.

  He celebrated the end of his academic career by dining with friends at a cheap seafood restaurant in Granada. It had taken him nine years to complete his university degree. He was three months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday. For the first time in his life, he was free to do as he pleased.

  8

  Garden of Possibilities

  1923-24

  Within weeks Lorca set off for Madrid. He was accompanied by his handsome younger brother, Paco, who had never been to the capital. As the two traveled north by train through the olive groves of Jaén and the blood-red fields of La Mancha, they talked about the future. Paco intended to pursue a doctorate in law; Federico had no specific plans, other than to resume his old life in Madrid and to continue writing.

  A crowd of friends stood waiting for them on the platform at Madrid’s Atocha Station. Lorca was overwhe
lmed. During the next few weeks he found himself “feted and pursued by everyone.” Adolfo Salazar published a discreet tribute to him in El Sol. Declining to name the object of his praise, Salazar spoke coyly of a “little poet” who had recently returned to the capital, bringing with him a profusion of vitality and “exquisite good taste” with which to counter the “decadence” and “torpor” of metropolitan life.

  Lorca carefully informed his parents that each day he felt “happier to have followed my own path, for I believe I will reach the goal I have set for myself.” Aware of his father’s continued misgivings about his career choice, he told his mother, “I think he’ll be convinced when he sees how many things I’ve done, and how well I’ve done them.”

  The two brothers moved into a sunny room in the Residencia, where, despite a full house, Lorca’s friends had managed to find a spot for them. Paco adapted quickly to city life. In the mornings before breakfast he exercised outdoors with Luis Buñuel, who, according to Lorca, was “unbelievably kind” to both brothers. Later in the day Paco often toured Madrid with his brother. The two were such inseparable companions that friends referred to them as “Paco” and “Pico” García Lorca, an allusion to an old children’s rhyme about a rich boy (chico rico) named “Paco Peco.” Lorca smilingly signed some of his own letters as “Pico.”

  In time Paco settled down to work and began studying for his doctorate, while Lorca resumed his usual desultory existence, drifting from one social event to the next. He met a number of new friends during his first weeks in Madrid, among them Pedro Salinas, a lanky young poet and literature professor, who at their first encounter was astounded by Lorca and his poems. He described the latter to fellow poet Jorge Guillén as “lively, fresh, and spontaneous, even those that are recherché. Like nothing else. He has a way of treating popular Andalusian themes that at times reminds one of Góngora … He’s a boy who still lacks severity and refinement, but the basic material is splendid and most abundant. In short, a discovery of this spring.”