Dalí himself was entranced by his sister’s beauty and repeatedly asked her to pose for him. Eventually this phase of his career became known by Ana María’s presence in his canvases. She spent hours standing patiently beside windows in Cadaqués and Figueres, studying the landscape while her brother painted her. They were unusually close—a situation owing to their mother’s death four years earlier, when Dalí was nearly seventeen and Ana María twelve. At the time they had turned to one another in grief and bewilderment, and now, four years later, at twenty-two and seventeen, they continued to dote on each other. They played infantile games together, as if by doing so they could somehow re-create the childhood they had so abruptly lost to death. Ana María had a teddy bear named “Little Bear,” which she dressed in toy clothes and carried with her wherever she went. When she, her brother, and Lorca were together in a room, the bear often sat near them on a chair. Dalí sometimes placed a philosophy book between its paws, “so that it can learn,” he said. He and Lorca adopted the bear as a mascot, and long after leaving Cadaqués, Lorca sent messages to the animal. “Give plenty of kisses to the little bear,” he once instructed Ana María. “Four days ago I found him smoking a cigar.”
In Cadaqués, Lorca behaved as childishly as the two Dalí siblings. He and Salvador had their photograph taken wearing white beach robes and top hats, and posing rakishly beside a table where Ana María stood with a watering can, pretending to sprinkle them. Like a small boy, Lorca frequently taunted his friends. Pouting, he would cry, “You don’t love me! Well, then, I’m going away!” He would then run off and hide until Dalí and Ana María dutifully began hunting for him, at which point Lorca would reappear, giggling. He drew immense pleasure from these episodes, Ana María remembered, “because then he felt loved.”
At the same time he fell prey to sudden and frequent bouts of gloom. His smile would vanish, and a hard, expressionless look would grip his face. Both Ana María and her brother were startled by Lorca’s brusque mood changes and by his apparent obsession with death. At the Residencia, Dalí had often heard Lorca refer to his own death—sometimes more than once in a given day. On a number of occasions the painter witnessed a bizarre ritual in which Lorca imagined himself dead. The rite always began late at night, with Lorca calling out to a group of friends, “Hey everyone, this is how I’ll look when I die!” He would then throw himself across the bed, feign rigor mortis, and direct his companions in a boisterous enactment of his funeral procession through the streets of Granada. The performance invariably ended with Lorca’s burial. Afterward he would leap up, laughing, and herd his friends through the door so that he could sleep in peace. Death thus became a familiar presence in his life, an event to be viewed with calm, to be milked for inspiration.
In Cadaqués, Lorca once stretched out on the floor in Dalí’s studio and closed his eyes in a death pose. Ana María took his picture while her brother sketched him. Two years later Dalí incorporated Lorca’s lifeless face into his painting Honey Is Sweeter than Blood.
Both men worked during the Easter holiday. Lorca began a new play, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia. Dalí painted from sunrise to dusk in his cluttered gray studio. As he worked, the artist sang to himself through closed lips. To Lorca, the sound resembled “a hive of golden bees.” He loved to watch his slender young friend at work.
At night, he and the two Dalís took walks through Cadaqués. Ever in search of new details for his paintings, Dalí scrutinized the light, clouds, and sea. Lorca talked of the work he had done that day, and later, as moonlight danced across the Mediterranean, recited his poems. His voice mingled with the sound of waves lapping against fishing boats. It was then, recalled Ana María, that the poet entered “his element” and became “perfectly elegant.” His husky voice softened into a thing of beauty. “Everything around him was transformed.” Language had purified him.
In Cadaqués, as elsewhere, Lorca craved the limelight. In addition to reciting poetry he read his new three-act play about Mariana Pineda to the Dalí family one afternoon as they sat around the dining room table. He had finished a draft of the work in January. Ana María was so moved by the drama that she wept. Her father let out a triumphant cry and proclaimed Lorca the greatest poet of the century. From that moment on, the plump attorney treated Lorca like a second son.
At the end of Easter week the Dalí family returned to their winter home in Figueres, where Dalí’s father arranged for Lorca to give a second reading of Mariana Pineda before a group of his friends; they included the editor of one of Barcelona’s daily newspapers. Lorca was grateful for the chance to read his drama before such a distinguished audience. To his parents he described the crowd as “the cream of the progressive and intellectual set of Figueres.”
In recent months he had made several unsuccessful attempts to find a producer for Mariana Pineda. No one seemed willing to commit to a production of the work, in part because the drama’s political content made it read like a tract against Primo de Rivera’s regressive dictatorship, and censorship was likely. Lorca tried to be optimistic. He vowed to remain a pure artist, despite the current political climate. But he quaintly acknowledged the difficulty of doing so. “It requires as much effort as young ladies need in order to preserve their honor,” he told his parents.
He wanted his play to be judged on its poetic merits, not its political subtext. From the outset he had resolved to treat the saga of Mariana Pineda as a love story, and he fervently defended his use of romantic “clichés and devices” throughout the play. Both the tone and language of Mariana Pineda are romantic, often excessively so, and its drawing-room settings and sentimental plot are conventional. Lorca was unapologetic. “My play is naive, like the soul of Mariana Pineda,” he declared.
But even this most conventional of dramas bears signs of Lorca’s ingenuity. His enduring interest in hybrid genres had led him to subtitle the work “A Popular Ballad in Three Engravings.” The concept allowed Lorca to define a unique visual and aural approach to his otherwise simple story line, and ultimately gave the play its novelty. He sought to endow each of its three acts with the look of a nineteenth-century engraving by painstakingly composing its setting to resemble an old print. He also sought to link the play to the popular musical tradition by framing it with the folk ballad he had learned as a boy. At both the beginning and the end of Mariana Pineda, a chorus of children chants:
Oh, what a sad day in Granada,
when even the stones were made to cry,
for on the scaffold stood Marianita
who would not talk and therefore must die!
In effect, Lorca was forcing his audience to receive the story of Mariana in much the same way he first had, through a child’s eyes and ears. He later said that in writing the drama he had followed his own vision, “a nocturnal, lunar, childlike vision.”
Written in verse, the play recounts the events for which Mariana Pineda had become famous: her involvement in a plot to overthrow the king, her subsequent arrest, her refusal to betray her co-conspirators, her conviction and execution. Lorca deliberately altered the historical record, exaggerating his protagonist’s bravery in order to shape a clear-cut tale of heroism and villainy, set among the streets and monuments of his native Granada. As such, the work is another elegy to his hometown. The particular twist he gave to the story—about which a number of obscure nineteenth-century poets had also written—was to have Mariana discover in the end that her lover, the dashing young revolutionary who lured her into abetting his cause, had in fact deceived her, so that Mariana’s life and death are but another illustration of the futility of human desire. The heroine’s final words, uttered as she makes her way to the scaffold, confirm this bleak understanding:
I am Freedom itself, wounded by mankind!
Love, love, love, and eternal solitude!
Don Salvador Dalí Cusí’s friends were astounded by Mariana Pineda and by its talented twenty-six-year-old author. A few days after the reading they honored him with a lavish banqu
et in a Figueres hotel. There, too, Lorca dazzled his audience with a reading of his poems. A local journalist noted the “intense maturity” Lorca had achieved, despite his relative youth.
Shortly after the banquet Lorca left Figueres with Dalí, and the two went to Barcelona. They spent a few blissful days in the city, listening to jazz and visiting friends. Lorca gave a private poetry recital at the Atheneum. He then said goodbye to Dalí and boarded a train for Madrid. His stay with the Dalí family had lasted just over two weeks, but its effect was abiding. Nearly ten years later he would list Cadaqués among the four places in the world where he had “loved the most.”
He returned home to Granada in June. He missed Catalunya desperately and sent letters to both Salvador and Ana María Dalí, urging them to visit him. Neither came. Dalí insisted that he could not leave his work.
With Ana María, Lorca struck up a flirtatious correspondence. “I have a portfolio of memories of you and of your laughter that is unforgettable,” he confessed to her soon after leaving Catalunya. He remarked on her sun-burnished beauty and called her a “little daughter of the olive trees and niece of the sea!”
But his true passion was for her brother. Within weeks of his visit to Cadaqués, Lorca began drafting an “Ode to Salvador Dalí,” in which he revealed his affection for the painter:
I sing a common belief
that unites us in the dark and golden hours.
It is not Art, this light that blinds our eyes.
It is first love, friendship, or fencing.
As he worked on the ode, Lorca sent passages of the poem to Dalí, who praised its brilliance and begged to see more. “AH, MY ODE!” he scrawled exuberantly across the top of a letter hailing Lorca as “the only genius of our time.” He signed the document, “Dalí Salvador, painter of certain talent and friend (close) of a great POET who is VERY handsome. Goodbye. Oh, your recently shaved face. WET! Your shoehorn, your SUITCASE … ! Your socks.”
Already the two shared a private vocabulary that soon evolved into an encoded language all but indecipherable to outsiders. Week after week letters went back and forth between Catalunya and Granada, and later Madrid. “What are you doing? Are you working?” Dalí asked Lorca in November 1925. “Don’t fail to write to me—you, the only interesting man I’ve ever known.” He referred to himself repeatedly as Lorca’s “little son” and sent him drawings, collages, photographs, postcards, and even a florid valentine—the essence of putrefaction—stamped “My Beloved Darling.”
By January 1926, Lorca could boast to Melchor Fernández Almagro that he enjoyed “an abundant correspondence [with] my friend and inseparable companion Salvador Dalí.” Elsewhere he spoke reverently of “the ineffable Dalí.” He had not been so intoxicated by another human being since adolescence, when he had pined after María Luisa Egea. She had spurned his love; Dalí did not.
To Lorca, the painter’s extravagant, adoring letters were a godsend. But Lorca wanted more. In the summer of 1925, in the weeks following his visit to Cadaqués, he talked anxiously of his desire to see Dalí, and in letters to their mutual friend Benjamín Palencia, a painter, he hinted at the depth of his attachment to “Salvadorcito.” Through Palencia, Dalí had promised to send him a pair of his paintings. “They will live in my house and next to my heart,” Lorca said.
To admit to himself that he loved Dalí as much as he did was to confront matters Lorca had long sought to suppress. It was a troubling summer. Frustrated by his stalled theatrical career and increasingly mesmerized by Dalí’s radical ideas, he questioned the direction of his work. At home, his parents had once more begun lamenting his apparent unwillingness to make something of himself. Lorca mourned his absent friends. Each evening at dusk he watched the sun cast its golden light across the vega. He saw birds glisten like bits of metal in the sky, and he felt as though he had died. “I’m going through one of the toughest crises I’ve ever experienced,” he told Palencia. “Both my literary and emotional work are failing me. I don’t believe in anyone. I don’t like anyone. I dream of a constant dawn, as cold as a spikenard, full of cold smells and exact emotions. An exact tenderness and a hard, intelligent light. We’ll see how I escape!”
Lorca knew the perils of homosexual love. He knew about Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, and he had read De Profundis; his copy of the book was heavily marked. He could scarcely have been ignorant of his own country’s attitude toward same-sex love. The Arabs who settled Andalusia had sanctioned it. But the Inquisition had persecuted homosexuals, and the Catholic Church continued to regard them as deviants of the worst sort. Lorca knew how people gossiped; as a teenager he had been ridiculed for his peculiar dress and effeminate ways. At twenty-one he had gone weeping to a friend’s house after learning that someone was spreading a rumor that he, Lorca, was homosexual.
For years he had tried to convince both himself and his friends that he was “normal.” Although he lacked his brother’s polish with women, he made a show of desiring. While vacationing with his family in Málaga in 1918, he complained to an acquaintance, “The hotel is lively but there are no girls.” In truth, Lorca was intimidated by the notion of physical intimacy with women. His closest friends and confidants had almost always been men. He loved the frank badinage of the all-male tertulia, the high jinks of masculine camaraderie at the Residencia. His poetry revealed his growing fascination with the beauty of the male form.
He would later admit that since boyhood an “impassioned force” had driven him toward men, not women. He claimed to have idolized a particular village boy during his childhood, a younger neighbor whose friendship Lorca sought to monopolize. “I wanted him to play only with me.” Decades later Lorca still remembered that early love with an acute sense of joy as well as privation. “When I eventually realized my preference,” he recalled, “I came to understand that what I liked, others thought perverse.”
He learned to veil the truth, to flaunt a socially acceptable façade. Even in the summer of 1925, in the midst of his turbulent awakening to a new emotional, sexual, and aesthetic self, he understood intuitively that he must dissemble. To his lifelong friend Melchor Fernández Almagro he said only, “I’m getting into problems I should have addressed long ago.” Newly consumed by the notion of masquerade, he began sketching clowns and harlequins whose sad faces belied the merriment of their dress.
He turned to metaphor as a means of both veiling and articulating the truth. To Ana María Dalí he confessed that he’d had a difficult summer and longed to be near the sea. More than ever, landlocked Granada epitomized his repressed desires, and the sea his longing for emotional and sexual freedom. “The young ladies of Granada go up to their whitewashed terraces to see the mountains and not see the ocean,” he wrote delicately to Dalí’s sister. “In the afternoon they dress in gauze and vaporous satiny things and go down to the promenade where the fountains flow like diamonds and there is an old anguish of roses and amorous melancholy … The young ladies of Granada have no love for the sea. They have enormous nacre shells with painted sailors and that is the way they see it; and great conch shells in their salons, and that is the way they hear it.” A trip to Málaga with his family toward the end of the summer “saved” his life. There, as in Cadaqués, Lorca basked in the life-giving force of the Mediterranean. The moment one reaches Málaga, he told Benjamin Palencia, “Dionysus rubs your head with his sacred horns and your soul turns the color of wine.”
By late September, he had begun writing what he called “erotic poetry.” The effort invigorated him. He wrote eight poems in all, each a brief, ironic work depicting a particular woman and the sexual trait by which she is known. The poems suggest Lorca’s deepening aversion to the female anatomy. He describes the breasts of a spinster as “black melons.” Of another woman he writes, “Beneath the moon-dark rosebay / you looked ugly naked.” In the short poem “Lucía Martínez” he assumes the voice of a predatory Don Juan:
Here I am, Lucía Martínez.
I’ve come to devour you
r mouth
and drag you off by the hair
into the seashells of daybreak.
Because I want to and I can.
The poems were a departure for Lorca, his first foray into what he called “a distinguished field.” They made him feel young again. “Am I backward?” he asked Fernández Almagro. “What is this? It seems as though I’ve only just come into my youth. That’s why when I’m sixty I won’t be old … I’m never going to be old.”
Age frightened him nearly as much as heterosexual sex. Both were the subject of a new play he began that summer, The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belisa in Their Garden, the story of a marriage between an elderly man and a beautiful young woman whose seductive appearance on their wedding night so intimidates her husband that he is unable to consummate the marriage. Lorca subtitled the work an “Erotic Aleluya”—a reference to the popular Spanish broadsheets, or aleluyas, printed with colorful vignettes of stock characters, which he and his brother had read as children. Again Lorca was mixing genres. The plot of Perlimplín enabled him both to revisit an art form he had loved in boyhood, and to explore a favorite and familiar theme, the conflict between spiritual and sensual love. Perhaps for that reason the short play flowed quickly from his pen. Lorca finished a first draft by January 1926.
He remained restless. In the midst of his work on Perlimplín he began writing a series of short, highly experimental dialogues. “Pure poetry. Naked,” he said of them. Terse and unorthodox, the miniature works sketched an amusing portrait of the life Lorca had known the previous year in Madrid with Dalí and their friends. He titled one work “Dialogue of the Residencia.” Others included “Dialogue with Luis Buñuel,” a conversation over tea at the Residencia; “Buster Keaton’s Stroll,” a short homage to Keaton and the silent films Lorca had grown to love; and “Mute Dialogue of the Carthusians,” a wordless conversation—expressed principally through punctuation marks—between two Carthusian monks. Dalí’s presence in the dialogues, explicit as well as implicit, was pervasive. On the manuscript of “Buster Keaton’s Stroll,” Lorca wrote, “Goodbye Dalilaitita / Daliminita / Dalipiruta / Damitira / Demeter / Dalí.” And then: “Write to me at once. / At once. / At once. At once.”
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