Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  The real discovery of the spring, however, was not Lorca but a nineteen-year-old artist who had come to Madrid the previous fall from Catalunya and taken a room at the Residencia. Tall and slender, with pale, almost feminine features and long hair, he was an enigma to most. He wore knee-length velvet coats, silk cravats, and leather leggings. He spent most of his time shut away in his room, painting. He seldom spoke to anyone except when he needed help with some practical matter, such as buying stamps at the post office, and then he got confused and managed to deposit both his change and his letter in the post box.

  Residents called him the “Czechoslovak painter” and gossiped about him. But one day a maid accidentally left the door to his room ajar, and Pepín Bello glanced inside. Bello saw enough of the artist’s work to realize that it was exceptional. Word of the discovery spread quickly, and Buñuel, Lorca, and others offered the young man their friendship at once. The painter accepted. Years later he remarked that at the time he thought Lorca and his crowd were nothing more than a group of “intellectual snobs.”

  He thought of himself as a prodigy. His name, Salvador Dalí Domenech, meant that he was destined, he said, to be the “savior” of contemporary painting. Born May 13,1904, exactly nine months and nine days after the death of his two-year-old brother, Salvador, for whom he was named, Dalí produced his first oil painting at the age of six. At fourteen he took part in his first official art exhibition, for which he received glowing reviews in the local press and the more lucrative financial encouragement of a rich family friend who bought two of his paintings. At sixteen he wrote his first novel. By the time he moved to Madrid in 1922 at age eighteen, Salvador Dalí was known in his native Catalunya as an artist of formidable potential.

  In Madrid he settled into the Residencia and began taking classes at the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. Although his father expected him to receive a teaching degree from the institution and then become a drawing instructor, Dalí had other ideas. Two years earlier he had confided to his diary that he planned to work “like mad” at the Academy for three years and then, “by sacrificing myself and submitting to truth, I will win the prize to study for four years in Rome; and coming back from Rome, I’ll be a genius, and the world will admire me. Perhaps I’ll be despised and misunderstood, but I’ll be a genius, a great genius, I am sure of it.”

  At the Residencia, Dalí sketched and painted incessantly. Drawings littered the floor of his room—sheets of paper covered with bold images inspired by futurism and fauvism, and above all by cubism, whose clean geometrical lines and objectivity Dalí sought to emulate. He revered his compatriot Pablo Picasso.

  He said later that during this period of his life freedom mattered less to him than his work, to such an extent that he would have welcomed confinement in a prison cell. But although content to renounce the world, he did not want the world to renounce him. One of his chief aims in life was to be found fascinating, and he was willing to do almost anything to succeed. To attract attention to himself in high school he had leapt from tall staircases in front of classmates and had feigned affection for a young woman who was in love with him. He enjoyed deluding her. “In a short time I’ve made great advances along the path of farce and deceit,” he wrote in his diary, noting his pleasure at being “a great actor in the even greater comedy that is life, the farcical life of our society.” In truth, Salvador Dalí was devoted to one person alone. “I am madly in love with myself,” he said.

  Everything Dalí did and said—his velvet coats and broad-brimmed hats, his manic pursuit of solitude, his brashly avant-garde work—was calculated to provoke admiration. When Lorca first set eyes on the painter, he had to disguise his amazement at Dalí’s attire. The artist, in turn, was captivated by Lorca. He sensed at once that the olive-skinned Andalusian was somehow distinct from others at the Residencia. During his first meeting with Lorca, Dalí later recalled, “the poetic phenomenon in its entirety and ‘in the raw’ suddenly appeared before me in flesh and blood.” As their friendship grew, Dalí became so smitten by Lorca’s poetic “fires” that he had to work consciously to “extinguish” them with his own prosaic talk so as not to fall under the poet’s sway.

  Still, he found Lorca difficult to resist. Soon after their first encounter, the painter cut his hair, clipped his sideburns, and bought a sports suit so that he could better fit into Lorca’s crowd. He gave Lorca one of his paintings and sketched his portrait sitting in a café. The two engaged in long discussions about literature, art, and aesthetics, often talking until dawn. At times they disagreed violently. But they always treated each other with sincerity, and Dalí came to rely on Lorca’s superior knowledge of such matters as music. Once, at a concert, he inquired, “Should I be liking this?” Yes, Lorca said, and Dalí promptly burst into wild applause.

  In many ways Lorca’s antithesis, Dalí was so shy—despite his flamboyant appearance—as to be “almost mute,” while Lorca was vigorous and outgoing, a font of laughter and music. Whenever he took Dalí to a tertulia, the painter refrained from talking. Lorca reproached him for his reserve and devised a scheme for breaking the ice at such gatherings. “I’ll say you’re a great painter and that you’re here working,” he told Dalí.

  But when silence descended in the midst of the next tertulia, Dalí panicked. Before Lorca could say anything, he blurted, “I’m also a very interesting painter.”

  On several occasions Lorca took Dalí to dinner at the home of the Residencia director, Alberto Jiménez Fraud. As usual, Lorca talked and laughed through the evening, while Dalí kept to himself. When he did speak, it was with a deep, nervous voice and a heavy Catalan accent. He smiled rather than laughed, a furtive smile that exposed a row of tiny, sharp teeth. Jiménez Fraud’s wife, Natalia, thought the artist “nothing more than Lorca’s echo.”

  As the months wore on, Dalí shed his inhibitions. Shortly before the end of the spring 1923 term, he took part in a student protest at the Academy of Fine Arts and was expelled from school. Unrepentant, he went home to Catalunya, where he immediately took part in an illegal political demonstration and was sent to jail for a month. In prison, he bragged, “We drank lousy local champagne every evening.”

  With the approach of summer, Lorca prepared to go home for his yearly stay in the vega. He commanded his family to see to it that someone whitewash his bedroom in Asquerosa, paint the ceiling blue, hang white curtains, and deliver a piano “that plays” to his father’s country house, “even if we’re only there for fifteen days.” He had hoped to join Falla in Italy for a brief vacation before returning to Granada, but his parents wouldn’t allow it. Nor was he able to attend a performance in June of Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show in Paris, despite the composer’s repeated insistence that both Lorca and his brother be there.

  Falla was eager to see Lorca again. Earlier in the year, while rehearsing their holiday puppet show, the two had begun work on a comic operetta featuring elements of Italian opera and Andalusian folk song. Lorca had immediately started drafting the libretto, but he had become distracted from the project in Madrid and neglected to finish the script. His mother caught wind of the situation and sent Lorca a chastening note. “Even if you don’t need the money because you have a father who supports you,” she reminded him, “this gentleman”—Falla—“must earn his own living, and I would be extremely sorry if you were to hinder his plans instead of helping him.”

  During the summer of 1923 the two men resumed work on the operetta, “Lola the Stage Actress,” a bittersweet love story set in rural Andalusia. At his father’s country home in Asquerosa, Lorca pored over the libretto. He confessed to being “in love” with his protagonist, a clever actress who enjoys outwitting others with her feminine wiles and wardrobe of disguises. But despite his desire to finish the script so that Falla could “put his hands on my operetta” and begin composing the score, Lorca failed to finish, and the following year he and Falla abandoned the project.

  It was the last time the two were to collabor
ate. The older, more disciplined composer could not tolerate Lorca’s haphazard approach to work, nor his utter inability to meet a deadline—either his own or one imposed by someone else. Lorca’s friends shared Falla’s frustration. Privately, Adolfo Salazar suggested to Falla that Lorca lacked the necessary “control” to succeed in his career. He writes poetry, Salazar observed, “as one heaves a deep, emotional sigh. It’s charming, of course, but it frightens me because I don’t think it’s enough to ‘make him into’ a real artist.”

  Others expressed similar qualms. In Madrid, Gregorio Martínez Sierra, who had premiered The Butterfly’s Evil Spell in 1920, wanted to stage a second Lorca work and was considering the still-unfinished puppet play The Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Miss Rosita. But although convinced of Lorca’s talent and eager to present his work, Martínez Sierra remembered the difficulties he had endured while preparing The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, and told Lorca, “My fear is that … you’ll never finish the puppet play.” Lorca continued to putter with the script, and eventually managed to complete the work, but he failed to do so in time to meet Martínez Sierra’s needs, and the director gave up on the play.

  Lorca spent the summer of 1923 much as he had the two previous summers, flitting from one idea to the next. He tinkered with his puppet farce and operetta; he talked of writing a new play and of finishing his suites, some of which were now three years old. For the third consecutive year he attempted to master the guitar. In desperation, his mother tried to hide the instrument from him.

  “I’m going through a feverish and bitter summer, pursued by a crowd of poems that make my life impossible,” Lorca wrote to a friend in Madrid. Nothing resolved itself. For twenty days and nights he worked “feverishly” on a new suite, “In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits,” a dreamlike account of a poet’s journey into the “garden” of his own creative psyche. But in spite of his efforts to perfect the poem, Lorca managed only to “pin it down.” Words came to him filled with “mysterious sounds and meanings.” Lines of verse eluded him. His poetry seemed both “fugitive and alive” He found himself in a desperate struggle against his “two secular enemies (and those of all poets), Eloquence and Common Sense.” He felt “penetrated by everything. At times I imagine that I’ve got a small crown of glow-worms, and that I am something other than what I am. I believe we’ll never be pure because we’re able to distinguish and judge … but no matter how much I try, the wind doesn’t want to instruct me … and I must remain here until I’m an old man, seeking the true and ineffable little card of the breeze.” Even his name bothered him: he could not endure it when people called him “Lorca! I am Federico but I’m not Lorca.”

  For the third year in a row he completed nothing. His work confounded him. “I feel a real panic when it comes to writing!” he told José de Ciria y Escalante, a friend and fellow poet in Madrid. The notion of possibility, of potential, consumed him. In “Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits” he acknowledged the “garden / of all I am not, all / I could and should have been!” His “garden,” he said, “is the garden of possibilities … the garden of the theories that went away without being seen and of the children who have not been born.” He was haunted by the specter of what he had failed to create: “My unborn children / pursue me.”

  Unable to publish or even finish his suite collection as he had hoped, frustrated by the mystery of his work and the impossibility of charting its future, he waited for some sort of revelation. It may have been during this, his twenty-fifth summer, that Lorca told the guitarist Regino Sáinz de la Maza: “Now I’ve discovered something terrible (don’t tell this to anyone). I haven’t been born yet.” A few days earlier, while sitting in his grandfather’s easy chair brooding about his past, he had come to the sudden realization, as he told Sáinz, that

  none of the dead hours belonged to me because it wasn’t I who had lived them, neither the hours of love, nor the hours of hate, nor the hours of inspiration. There were a thousand Federico García Lorcas, stretched out forever in the attic of time and in the storehouse of the future; I contemplated another thousand Federico García Lorcas, very tightly pressed, one on top of the other, waiting to be filled with gas in order to fly off without direction. This moment was a terribly fearful moment, my mother Lady Death had given me the key of time and for a second I understood everything. I’m living on borrowed time, what I have within is not mine; let’s see if I’m going to be born.

  He drifted from project to project. Everything attracted him: old and new, somber and comic. As he worked on the “In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits” he immersed himself in the poetry of the Spanish Golden Age (“and what great pleasure our old poets give me!”). Spurred by his deepening zeal for the avant-garde, he sat in cafés with friends in Granada and mocked the vulgar tastes of the local bourgeoisie.

  In particular, Lorca and his friends ridiculed the claptrap bourgeois verse that permeated the local press: rhapsodic poems celebrating the beauty of the Alhambra and the quaint charms of the Albaicín. Although many Granadans adored this sort of sentimental drivel, Lorca and his companions loathed it. In their scorn they invented an apocryphal poet of their own, a fictitious balladeer named “Isidoro Capdepón Fernández,” whose pedestrian verse sang praises to “Granada, Granada … / oh, beautiful Granada!” The group concocted Capdepón’s poems in unison while sitting at café tables, then surreptitiously submitted them to the local press. In 1923, Capdepón’s flowery verse began appearing in the Defensor de Granada. That same year one of Lorca’s friends nominated the nonexistent poet to the prestigious Royal Spanish Academy in Madrid, where, according to a bogus newspaper article, the distinguished Don Isidoro gave a talk on “Rhetorical Menopause, or The Decadence of Civic Poetry in Contemporary Spain.” On his own, Lorca scribbled and circulated innumerable poems “by Capdepón;” he even compiled a page-long biography of the poet. The game went on for years.

  While sitting in cafés with his friends, Lorca also began doodling on scraps of paper—an impulse evidently due in part to his new friendship with Dalí. Lorca made dozens of drawings in 1923: comic portraits, grotesque caricatures prompted by funny names (“Troplong,” a Frenchman with a long, phallic nose) or peculiar professions (archbishops’ hairdresser, cornucopia salesman). His big hands were remarkably agile. On the backs of calling cards, magazine subscription forms, pages torn from books, Lorca turned out sketch after sketch in pencil and pen. At home, he began keeping a set of colored pencils on his desk. His drawings were deliberately provocative. He sketched bearded women and big-breasted men, spotted monsters, an orator crying “Shit!” and an androgynous figure with tentaclelike growths on its face, which he titled “The Demon of Masturbation.” Although he’d had no formal training except for a few drawing classes in secondary school, his sketches possessed a naive charm and were clearly the work of an astounding visual imagination. Lorca drew as spontaneously as he wrote.

  By the fall of 1923, he had established enough of a reputation as a draftsman for his friend Melchor Fernández Almagro to make reference to his new avocation in a tribute to Lorca in the Madrid press. The article, “The Lyrical World of García Lorca,” appeared in the magazine España and was the first of its kind to offer an overview of the young writer’s literary output. Lorca was profoundly touched. “I know that you love me, and most of all you encourage me in a way for which I cannot thank you enough,” he told Fernández Almagro. For years the portly critic had been one of Lorca’s closest friends and advisers. Born and raised in Granada, and now a respected figure in Madrid’s most important literary circles, Fernández Almagro had successfully bridged the cultural abyss separating provincial Granada from metropolitan Madrid, and as such was to Lorca an ideal reader. Lorca deliberately sought his reaction to projects and ideas, and the two exchanged frequent letters—a testament to the depth of their friendship, for Lorca was at best a selective correspondent and once told Fernández Almagro, “When I’m not on close terms with the person I’m writing to, I don’
t know what to say!”

  In September, Lorca sent word to “Melchorito” of yet another new literary undertaking. In addition to his other activities, he had recently become obsessed with the figure of a woman who had “strolled through the secret little road of my childhood” and later haunted his adolescence. She was Mariana Pineda, a real-life resident of early nineteenth-century Granada, who had borne two children by her husband and a third, illegitimate child by a lover, seven years after her husband’s death, before taking part in a conspiracy to overthrow Spain’s despotic King Fernando VII. For her role in the conspiracy Mariana was condemned to death and hanged in a public square in Granada on May 26, 1831, at the age of twenty-seven.

  Legend had subsequently transformed this complex and worldly woman into a beautiful widow who had embraced freedom and died for it. To Lorca, Mariana Pineda epitomized both the romantic age and the romantic spirit he claimed as his own. A statue of Mariana, a perfect “symbol of a revolutionary ideal,” stood in a square directly below his bedroom in Granada. As a young man he had stared so often at her gray stone presence that he felt compelled to “exalt” her. She stirred his most distant memories. In childhood he had heard maids and old-timers “very close to the event” sing ballads and tell stories about Mariana Pineda, and he had later thumbed a leather-bound edition of her biography in his family’s library. He confessed to having loved her “at the age of nine.” He told Fernández Almagro, “If I’m afraid of doing this play, it’s precisely because I am disturbing my most delicate memories of this martyred blond widow.” That he risked creating hagiography rather than biography did not occur to him.