Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  On the evening of December 13, 1928, he gave a lecture at the Residencia. It was his third public talk in as many months, and his first ever in Madrid. Friends packed the institution’s small salon and spilled into the adjoining hall. Residencia director Alberto Jiménez Fraud looked on proudly. Lorca’s talk was the culmination of an impressive season of Residencia lectures by such distinguished figures as Filippo Marinetti, Le Corbusier and the famed Egyptologist Howard Carter. But according to Paco García Lorca, who sent home an effusive account of the evening, Jiménez Fraud ranked Lorca’s talk among the best of the lot.

  Lorca spoke on traditional Spanish lullabies. Given the more radical subject matter of his recent lectures, it was a curious choice of subject—yet it allowed him to probe similar aesthetic territory while at the same time invoking the lost world of his childhood. He sat at the Residencia’s grand piano, arms and legs stretched before him, and played, sang, and talked his way through the evening. His listeners were mesmerized. Within three minutes, Paco reported to their parents, Lorca had captured the room.

  He had begun drafting his lecture on lullabies nearly a year earlier but had run into difficulties, for although his knowledge of the subject was vast, his aims were complex. He wanted to illustrate and discuss not only the traditional lullabies of Spain’s many regions—the distinctive origin and style of the songs, as well as the nature of the women who sing them—but also the world of the child itself, a world steeped in poetic feeling, a world of “pure inspiration.” He opened his lecture by placing himself at the heart of the child’s peculiarly charged universe. “I have wanted to go down to the rushy shore. Under the yellow tiles. To the outskirts of villages, where the tiger eats little children,” he told his audience.

  I am far now from the poet who looks at his watch, who struggles with the statue, with dream, and with anatomy. I have fled all my friends and am going off with the little boy who eats green fruit and watches the ants devour the bird run over by the automobile.

  To Lorca, the world of the child embodied the same type of “escape” he sought to achieve as a poet. Filled with gentle descriptions of mother and child, and wistful portraits of childhood itself, his lecture on lullabies offered both a nostalgic look at his own lost youth and a frank appraisal of his current aesthetic. The child, he said, inhabits an “inaccessible poetic world that neither rhetoric nor the pandering imagination nor fantasy can penetrate.” The child, like the poet or painter who courts pure inspiration, is capable of discovering mysterious and indecipherable relations between things. “He understands better than we the ineffable key to poetic substance.”

  As he sat at the Residencia piano, gruffly intoning the lullabies he had heard as a boy, Lorca effected an imaginative return to the simplicity and wonder of his past. The lullaby, he told his audience, is the bridge that links the child’s magical world to the adult’s more rational one. The mother who croons a song to her son carries him “outside himself into the distance and returns him to her lap tired and ready to sleep. It is a little initiation into poetic adventure, the child’s first steps through the world of intellectual representation.” As a boy, hearing his parents and servants sing, Lorca had often taken the same journey. As an adult in search of both inspiration and innocence, he now sought to retrace it.

  Two days after his lecture on lullabies, La Gaceta Literaria published an interview between Lorca and the writer Ernesto Giménez Caballero. In it, Lorca glibly embellished the truth about his past. Asked to reveal the date of his birth, he lied. Instead of 1898, he claimed to have been born “in 1899, June 5th.” This would have made him twenty-nine years old at the time of the interview. Asked to recount his family’s background, he said gaily, “My family went broke during the last century. Now they’re recovering again.”

  “Thanks to you,” said Giménez Caballero.

  “Well, all right, thanks to me.”

  Lorca went on to describe his pastimes as a boy (“saying Masses, making altars, building little theaters”). He listed his friends, who ranged from the sixteenth-century Granadan poet Soto de Rojas to Luis Buñuel. He identified Dalí as a particularly close friend and detailed one of their pranks at the Residencia. It was a flippant, optimistic Lorca who appeared on the pages of the Gaceta, a man unfettered by cares or complaints, a poet able to name at least five books he was then “preparing” for publication—not one of which materialized during his lifetime. “What is your present theoretical position?” Giménez Caballero asked.

  “To work purely,” Lorca answered. “A return to inspiration. Inspiration, pure instinct, the poet’s only reason.”

  The following month, January 1929, Luis Buñuel traveled to Catalunya to collaborate with Salvador Dalí on a script for a surrealist film. To Lorca, the visit signaled a shift in his own friendship with Dalí. Despite his boast to Giménez Caballero, Lorca was not close to Buñuel. Months earlier the filmmaker had come back to Spain from Paris with his head shaved and his mind filled with audacious plans. He had heard rumors of Lorca’s homosexuality and was repulsed by them. To their mutual friend Pepín Bello, he announced his dislike of Gypsy Ballads, a collection he said was calculated to please “the faggot poets in Seville.” To Dalí, Buñuel referred to Lorca as a “son of a bitch” whose “pederastic news” bored him.

  Buñuel went swaggering off to Catalunya in January, a walking stick in one hand, a stylish fedora on his head. He and Dalí had their photograph taken one cold day in Figueres. In a show of machismo, Buñuel wore only a single-breasted men’s suit; Dalí stood meekly beside him, bundled in an overcoat, scarf, and leather gloves.

  During Buñuel’s visit, the two men drafted a script for a film they would eventually title Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). The project took them less than a week. They imposed just one guideline on their work: no idea or image could yield a rational explanation. For both men, the collaboration was blissful. They never argued. Buñuel said later that their identification with one another was “complete”—much like the rapport Lorca had enjoyed with Dalí two years earlier in Cadaqués. Culling images from their dreams—including Buñuel’s jarring vision of a moon slicing into a cloud as a razor slashes an eyeball—they pieced together a “stupendous screenplay without precedent in the history of the cinema,” as Buñuel reported afterward to Pepín Bello. “Dalí and I are closer than ever,” he added. In the February 1, 1929, edition of La Gaceta Literaria, the two issued a joint announcement of their impending collaboration. To Lorca, the message could hardly have been plainer. Buñuel had usurped his claim on Dalí.

  In Madrid, Lorca struggled to surmount his growing depression. The days were icy and short. He found it difficult to muster the energy to work. Dalí’s apparent betrayal stunned him. Equally disturbing, his companion of the past year, Emilio Aladrén, had suddenly become involved with a woman. Despite efforts to maintain a friendship, he and Lorca drifted apart. The dissolution of their affair troubled Lorca, who in later years spoke contemptuously of men who veil their true sexual natures in order to feign propriety.

  For a time, he distracted himself with a new undertaking. An old acquaintance, the critic, playwright, and stage director Cipriano Rivas Cherif, had recently founded an experimental theater company and wanted to produce one of Lorca’s plays. Lorca suggested his one-act tale about a middle-aged man’s failed attempt at marriage, The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden, subtitled “An Erotic Aleluya in Four Scenes and A Prologue.” He had begun the play shortly after his first visit to Dalí in 1925 and had finished it months later, but he had never attempted to stage the work. Rivas Cherif was delighted to receive the script. He had known and admired Lorca for years and was one of only four people to review Book of Poems when it appeared in 1921.

  A short, wiry man, possessed by such restless energy that he sometimes seemed to be dancing, Rivas Cherif had devoted much of his life to the creation of a Spanish “art theater,” freed from the control of impresarios and devoted to spiritual ideals. He
believed that theater should be “an art of imagination,” not the tawdry imitation of everyday life usually seen on the Spanish stage. He had studied abroad with theater visionary Gordon Craig and was an ardent fan of Stanislavsky. Like both men, Rivas Cherif hoped to revitalize the theater of his country. In late 1928 he founded an experimental company, El Caracol, housed in a tiny basement in the center of Madrid. Within its first few months of existence, the troupe startled critics and audiences alike by staging a play by Rivas Cherif about lesbianism.

  The director planned to offer Lorca’s “erotic” fable as his company’s second production. A cast of six began rehearsing Don Perlimplín in January. Despite his low spirits, Lorca made his way through Madrid’s chilly streets to oversee the production and to help design the play’s fanciful sets. He felt a particular tenderness toward this script, perhaps because he identified with its loveless protagonist. He later claimed that of all the plays he had written, Don Perlimplín was his favorite. As he sat in the dim confines of El Caracol’s underground theater and watched the tragic love story of Don Perlimplín unfold, he surely sensed the play’s relevance to his own life.

  As its subtitle suggests, Don Perlimplín is openly erotic. Lorca wrote the brief prose play in the radiant aftermath of his first visit to Cadaqués, during the same period he first began composing what he called “erotic” poetry. The play is short, and its story straightforward. Perlimplín, a timid, bookish bachelor, decides late in life to marry a spirited, beautiful woman named Belisa, who is half his age. Despite his fears about marriage—“Will she be capable of strangling me?”—Perlimplín hears Belisa singing offstage and is unable to resist the pleasures she represents:

  Love, love.

  Between my locked thighs

  the sun swims like a fish.

  Warm water in the rushes;

  love.

  The two marry, and on their wedding night—played out on a huge canopy bed topped with plumes—Perlimplín is unable to consummate the marriage. While he sleeps, Belisa betrays him with a procession of men who slip in through the room’s six balcony doors. The following day, at dawn, Perlimplín awakes, wearing a set of gilt horns on his head. Although he suspects that his wife has deceived him, he is strangely happy. For the first time in his life, he perceives the world’s sensual delights. Sitting on the bed beside his dozing bride, he marvels at the sunrise. “It is a spectacle which … it seems untrue … which thrills me! Don’t you like it?” he asks. “Yes,” Belisa murmurs dreamily. Gently, Perlimplín covers her with a red cape—the red of love, of sex, of death—and as he does so, flocks of paper birds cross the balconies, and light floods the room.

  Lorca himself understood that up to this point his play had all the makings of farce. Based on a stock theme in the Spanish theater, the story of a young woman unhappily wed to an impotent old man, Don Perlimplín could have ended comically. Lorca described it as a “human puppet play that begins in fun.” But he chose to turn his script into something more, into a “grotesque tragedy” with a pathetic, love-struck protagonist—an “anti-hero,” he said—who resolves to redeem his deceitful wife by endowing her with a soul. In order to do this, Perlimplín must die. Disguising himself as a mysterious young lover in a red cape, he seduces Belisa. When he is sure of her passion for the caped suitor, he vanishes offstage and returns moments later, bleeding from a dagger wound. Belisa removes the cape and recognizes Perlimplín. “Your husband has just killed me with this emerald dagger,” he says. “… As he was wounding me, he cried, ‘Belisa now has a soul!’”

  The girl is at once horrified and confused. She does not realize that the aged Perlimplín and her caped lover are the same man. As Perlimplín dies in her arms, she cries, “Yes … but, and the youth? … Why have you deceived me?” As Perlimplín’s maid begins preparing his body for burial, she tells Belisa, “You are another woman now. You are dressed in the most glorious blood of my master.” Like Christ, Perlimplín has sacrificed himself for a greater good. Only with the passage of time will Belisa see that she has murdered her true love, and then she will acquire a soul. Her conversion, according to Lorca, will be the “triumph” of Perlimplín’s imagination.

  Lorca later claimed to have had “a lot of fun” writing Don Perlimplín. He based the play, in part, on the notion of the aleluya, a series of brightly tinted vignettes, akin to comic strips, printed on large sheets of colored paper, whose popularity in Spain dates back to the late eighteenth century. The exaggerated style of the cheap broadsides inspired Lorca to give Don Perlimplín a vibrant, overstated look, much as his fascination with old engravings had led him to construct Mariana Pineda as a nineteenth-century print.

  Critics had attacked Mariana Pineda for its emphasis on poetry, to the near exclusion of dramatic action. But Lorca’s theatrical sensibility had evolved since that play. In Don Perlimplín he pushed theatrical spectacle to new heights, setting his play in lavish, eighteenth-century splendor and costuming his characters in ornate wigs, headdresses, coats, and bedclothes. He brought to the task a painter’s instinct for color and pattern. His stage directions call for Perlimplín’s house to have green walls and black furniture, for the perspectives of the dining room to be “deliciously wrong,” and for the dining-room table itself to resemble a “primitive ‘Last Supper.’” In Don Perlimplín, more so than in previous plays, Lorca explores the very idea of theater. In the midst of the wedding-night scene, the action of the play is broken by the arrival of two childlike sprites, or duendes, who hurriedly draw a gray curtain across the stage and then sit, facing the audience, on the prompter’s box. Briefly, the two discuss the nature of theatrical illusion. “It’s always nice to cover other people’s failings,” says one, referring to the curtain that now masks Perlimplín’s bed.

  “And then the audience can take it upon themselves to uncover them,” says the other.

  “Because if things are not carefully hidden …”

  “They will never be revealed.” Only through artifice, Lorca suggests, can the truth about human existence be exposed.

  On the afternoon of February 6, 1929, Lorca sat in Rivas Cherif’s dark little theater watching one of the last rehearsals of Don Perlimplín. Things were going poorly. The play had been scheduled to open that evening, but earlier in the day, the Queen Mother of Spain, María Cristina, had died, and the country had gone into mourning. The opening of Don Perlimplín, like other events slated to occur that day, was postponed.

  Lorca sat in the shadows, fretting over the rehearsal. Onstage, Perlimplín and Belisa were arrayed on their canopied bed on the morning after their wedding night. For some reason the actor playing Perlimplín had removed his headdress. Lorca muttered angrily, “Now you’ve gone and taken off the horns again!” Absorbed in his play, he failed to realize that the chief of Madrid’s police force had quietly entered the theater and was now standing beside him. The police chief announced that he had come to shut down the production. By government order, Lorca’s lyrical play about love and death had been deemed unfit for the Spanish public. The ostensible reason for its suppression was that Rivas Cherif had broken the law by holding a rehearsal during the mourning period for the Queen Mother. The real reason appeared to be that a retired army officer was playing the role of Perlimplín, and under the dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, it was not seemly for such a man to appear in public with horns on his head.

  Years later, Lorca speculated that his play was shut down because no Spanish citizen, man or woman, wished to be cuckolded. “And this,” he cried, “when we’re all cuckolded by someone, male or female.” He laughed to recall how, on the afternoon of February 6, one of the officers who accompanied the police chief to the theater denounced Don Perlimplín, shouting, “This is a mockery! This is an insult to the army!”

  But on the actual day his play was suppressed, Lorca was hardly so amused. That afternoon the police chief seized all three copies of his script and took them to the State Security Office in Madrid, where they we
re stamped with the date of their confiscation and examined by a government censor, who dutifully scratched red pencil lines through such words as “erotic.” The scripts were left to molder for years in the Security Office, along with tens of thousands of other such “pornographic” documents confiscated during Primo de Rivera’s six-year regime.

  Two months after the cancellation of his play, Lorca signed an open letter drafted by José Ortega y Gasset, calling for the formation of a new political party composed of liberal intellectuals and the establishment of a new—and liberal—government. Discontent with Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship had reached an all-time high. For years the general had been promising an early end to military rule and a return of government power to civilian hands, but he had repeatedly reneged on his commitment, and instead sought to perpetuate his rule by restructuring the country’s political institutions along nationalist, Catholic, and authoritarian lines. His blatant disregard for democratic ideals and his failure to produce a legitimate Spanish constitution angered not only the growing republican opposition—comprised of both the liberal intelligentsia and an organized working class—but many of Spain’s liberal monarchists as well. Despite the dictator’s claims that his regime represented the interests of all Spaniards, it was clear that his economic policies favored corporate industrialists and, to a lesser extent, large landholding entities, while his social policies appeared to discriminate against employers and landowners. By 1928, increased taxation and mounting deficits and inflation had further eroded support for the general, particularly from Spain’s middle class. It was discontent among the army’s officer corps, however, many of whom objected to Primo de Rivera’s efforts at military reform, that dealt the final blow to his rule. By early 1929, even his closest aides had begun to question the legitimacy and wisdom of Primo de Rivera’s government.