Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Written with the freedom and unity of a poem and the fluidity of film, Once Five Years Pass is both a dreamlike meditation on the phenomenon of time and a deliberate obfuscation of conventional theatrical time. The play begins at six in the evening and ends at midnight, but its events span the course of five years. The concept of past and future does not exist; things are merely “now” or “never.” Lorca’s distortion of time reflects both his own fascination with the subject and that of his contemporaries Luigi Pirandello, Jean Cocteau, and even Salvador Dalí, who in 1931 completed The Persistence of Memory.

  As a child Lorca had experienced time “as an elemental, shaping force,” his brother recalled. “To [Federico], the living mystery of a perishable individual flower or the rock beside the water were more vital manifestations of time than the flux of great events.” As an adolescent, Lorca wrote obsessively of decay and decline in the natural world, and of time’s incessant pull on the fabric of human love and life. He was sharply aware of time’s passage—especially so in the summer of 1931, with the birth of his niece and the consequent start of a new generation in his family.

  Images of children and of childhood surface throughout the play. According to Isabel García Lorca, Once Five Years Pass consists “entirely of my brother’s childhood recollections.” The play is in many ways a private elegy, scattered with figures and events from Lorca’s past: a child’s funeral, a dead cat, a boy who used to wear a clown’s costume whenever he came to play with Lorca and his siblings. A sense of loss pervades the play. In Act 1, a Dead Boy, “dressed in white, as though for his First Communion, with a crown of white roses on his head,” comes onstage with a Dead Cat. Both long to be restored to life. “We’ll go from house to house until we reach the place the seahorses call home,” the Boy tells the Cat.

  It isn’t heaven. It’s solid ground,

  with the grass swaying to and fro,

  and a lot of crickets chirping,

  and slingshots for shooting stones,

  and the wind just like a sword,

  and the clouds all floating over.

  I want to be a boy! A boy!

  But Death, in the form of a hand, reaches out and seizes both the Boy and the Cat, and although neither is seen again in the play, each is repeatedly mentioned by other characters, in different contexts, so that together they metamorphose into a poignant emblem of lost innocence.

  Also lost are the offspring of failed attempts at love. Here, as in a number of other works, most conspicuously Suites and his New York poems, Lorca summons the motif of the unborn child. In the second act, after learning that his fiancée has broken their engagement, the Young Man is visited by a Mannequin dressed in a bridal gown. Brandishing a child’s pink suit, the Mannequin torments the Young Man with thoughts of the child he will never beget: “Two streams of white milk flow from me / with a sorrow that soaks my silk robes /… My son! I want to have my son! / … And he is your son!” For the Young Man, the unborn child is both a literal embodiment of the love he has lost and a figurative reminder of the sterility to which his cerebral existence has condemned him.

  A melancholy figure with a pale face and a faintly androgynous nature, the Young Man inhabits a world of books and dreams. He prefers fantasizing about the future, or recalling the past, to living in the present. The noise and vitality of everyday existence frighten him. When Death, in the guise of three Cardplayers, confronts him at the end of the play, he seeks refuge in his memories of childhood. But these cannot save him; he has run out of time. One of the Cardplayers fires a silent arrow from a pistol, and the Young Man’s hands fly to his heart. “One must live!” cries the Cardplayer. “One mustn’t wait!” shouts his companion. Dying, the Young Man murmurs, “I have lost everything.”

  Lorca constructed his play using expressionist techniques, so that each of the drama’s various components reflects some aspect of the protagonist’s state of mind. The play’s settings—a library, a turn-of-the-century bedroom, a forest—underscore the Young Man’s emotional and intellectual turmoil. Secondary characters—an Old Man, a Boy, a Harlequin, a Mask—serve as refracted images of the Young Man’s mind and memory. Lighting and sound suggest changes in his mood. In essence, the play takes place inside its protagonist’s mind. Years earlier Lorca had attempted a similar effect in a brief allegorical play entitled Theater of Souls, a work written in 1919 when Lorca was just twenty-one. He subtitled that play “landscapes of a spiritual life” and noted that its action “occurs in the marvelous theater of our interior world.” With Once Five Years Pass he returned to the idea, this time bringing to it the full weight of his theatrical experience and imagination.

  He made few public remarks about his new play, except to observe somewhat offhandedly that it is “a mystery play, written in prose and verse, whose theme is the passage of time.” But the work obviously meant a great deal to him. His brother said later that Once Five Years Pass contains a “personal vision and personal emotions, objectified by art.” Lorca undoubtedly saw parts of himself in the play’s protagonist, a man whose fear of death and tendency to dwell in the past lead him to shun the visceral life of the present. For the Young Man, as for most Lorca protagonists, desire remains unsatisfied. He can experience neither the joy of love nor the consolation of children. His past is lost to him; his future is cut short by death.

  Throughout the play Lorca invokes the fifteenth-century poet Jorge Manrique’s classic image of life as a river flowing into the sea of death—an image to which Lorca had been drawn for years. “Who’ll wear my wedding dress?” the Mannequin asks, after the Young Man’s fiancée has left him and it becomes clear that her bridal gown will go unused. The Mannequin answers her own question: “The river’s mouth will wear it, to marry the sea.”

  By late summer, republican fervor gripped the vega. Shortly after the proclamation of the Republic in April, residents of Fuente Vaqueros had called for the abolition of the death penalty and the creation of a public library. In the spirit of a new and secular Spain, they had also renamed one of the village’s streets. The former Calle Iglesias (Church Street) became Calle Federico García Lorca, in honor of the town’s most famous son.

  Lorca did not comment publicly on the street’s new name. But he did agree to speak at the dedication of the new village library late that summer. For the occasion he drafted one of the longest, most explicitly political talks of his career—although his politics were in the service of what he perceived to be a greater good, culture. Scribbled in pencil, with ink corrections, the talk filled thirty small sheets of paper.

  On a hot, sunny day in early September 1931, he stood beneath an awning in the center of Fuente Vaqueros and gave the speech to a throng of listeners who pressed close to hear him. He talked about books, libraries, and the significance of “culture” in the Spanish Republic. Without culture or books, Lorca said, the people of Spain could not begin to claim their basic rights and liberties. Nor could they grasp the meaning of life. “If I were hungry and destitute on the street, I wouldn’t ask for a loaf of bread, I would ask for half a loaf of bread and one book,” he said. He gave an extended history of the book, beginning with its origins in cave inscriptions and ending in his own day, with newspapers, “the great book of the daily press.” He hailed the power of books to change governments, and he decried those governments that dared to censor books. Books, Lorca declared, are the seeds of political revolution. “The French Revolution comes from the Encyclopedia and all of Rousseau’s books, and every socialist and communist movement today springs from one great book, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.”

  Lorca praised the people of Fuente Vaqueros for their progressive instincts and their love of art. As he gazed out into the village square, with its crowd of familiar faces, he thanked the town for the formative role it had played in his life. He promised his audience that wherever he went he would acknowledge his birthplace, “so that whatever glory or fame I might achieve will also belong to this friendly, this modern, this tantalizin
g liberal village, Fuente Vaqueros.”

  From his spot on the speaker’s platform, he could see the small white house where he had been born thirty-three years earlier, and also the street that now bore his name. He must have been tempted that day “to escape into lost corners of his childhood”—or so his brother later surmised, recalling the event. “But what a sense of duty and of loyalty kept him at his post as an orator!” The past, as Lorca knew from the play he had just completed, was irretrievable. He had no choice but to leap into the tumult of the present, into the whirling river of time.

  18

  A People’s Theater

  1931-32

  At the end of September Lorca returned to Madrid, radiant after his long summer holiday in the vega. To Carlos Morla Lynch he seemed “more granadino than ever.” After supper one night in Morla’s apartment, Lorca spontaneously pulled a sheaf of papers from his pocket and began reading Once Five Years Pass to Morla, Bebé, and their friends. Morla sat beside Lorca on the floor; Bebé reclined on the couch. Some in the room sipped whiskey. One man smoked a cigar.

  Lorca read—impetuously, and with a sustained rhythm—until three in the morning. Morla thought the play “magnificent, lavish, opulent… audacious and daring.” But he did not understand it. His wife found the work “quite explicit and clear … [It] concentrates the past in a fixed and static present that doesn’t progress,” she said. Morla disagreed. “It’s madness, come on!” he jotted in his diary.

  Not far from Morla’s apartment, in an imposing nineteenth-century building flanked by two sculpted lions, Spain’s newly elected Constituent Cortes had begun drafting a constitution. Debate raged throughout the fall of 1931. Liberal representatives sparred with conservatives over almost every article in the document. In the end, the Left prevailed. The new constitution declared Spain “a democratic republic of workers of all classes.” It granted the vote to both men and women, legalized divorce, abolished the death penalty, nullified all titles of nobility, and renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Most controversial were the document’s restrictions on the Catholic Church. The constitution effectively abolished religious education and imposed formidable constraints on clerical activities and organizations.

  Passage of the constitution came at a price. In the midst of the debates, moderate Catholic republicans split from the government, and the leader of the party’s left wing, Manuel Azaña, became the new prime minister. Azaña quickly forged a coalition with the party’s socialist constituency. To men such as José Ortega y Gasset and Miguel de Unamuno, both of whom participated in the fractious constitutional debates, these were alarming developments. Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno had each envisioned a tolerant republic run by enlightened intellectuals—not the small-minded, anticlerical regime that emerged on the floor of the parliament building. Both men came away from the debates deeply disillusioned with the government they had helped elect.

  In early October, Lorca attended a session of the Cortes. Packed into a gallery with dozens of other spectators, he watched as his old friend and teacher Fernando de los Ríos, now republican minister of justice, gave an inflammatory speech calling for the complete separation of church and state. De los Ríos assailed the Catholic Church for its stranglehold on the country’s intellectual life, and spoke with regret of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain by the Catholic monarchs in 1492. Liberals applauded the speech; conservatives blasted it. Lorca left the Cortes overcome by emotion.

  To friends, he expressed intense enthusiasm for the young republic and its leaders, particularly de los Ríos, whom he had known for nearly twenty years. He was also acquainted with the new prime minister, Manuel Azaña, who was married to the sister of Lorca’s friend and theater colleague, Cipriano Rivas Cherif. A writer, translator, and critic as well as a politician, Azaña had helped publish some of Lorca’s earliest poems in the early 1920s and had attended the Madrid premiere of Mariana Pineda in 1927. A dramatist in his own right, Azaña maintained a close friendship with the actress Margarita Xirgu. Several months after he became prime minister, Xirgu premiered one of Azaña’s plays in Madrid.

  Lorca had never known any Spanish government to be so integrally linked to the nation’s cultural life. Nor, for that matter, had he known any government he could admire. The regime espoused the same liberal ideals his parents had always championed, and its leaders shared Lorca’s belief that art was a viable means of promoting social justice. He became swept up in the reforming spirit of the Second Republic. Late one November night he burst into Morla Lynch’s apartment, brimming with news. In collaboration with a group of university students, he said, he intended to help found and direct a national stage company aimed at “saving the Spanish theater and bringing it within reach of the people.” They planned to call their company “La Barraca”—the name of the makeshift wooden stalls that typically housed puppet shows and other performances at village fairs. “We’ll take La Barraca to every region in Spain. We’ll go to Paris, to America … to Japan …”

  Morla interrupted him. “How do you plan to fund this fascinating project?”

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Lorca replied. “Those are just details.”

  On November 25, Fernando de los Ríos publicly declared his support of La Barraca. Five days later, the Spanish Students’ Union formally requested government funding for the company. On December 2, 1931, Lorca spoke to the press about the project. With evangelical zeal, he outlined La Barraca’s mission: “To give back to the people what is rightfully theirs.” By this he meant the theater itself, for he believed the roots of the art lay with ordinary Spanish citizens. With La Barraca, as with his deep-song poems, puppet plays, and Gypsy ballads, Lorca sought to revive the popular Spanish tradition and reestablish his childhood bond with “the people.” He later rephrased his objective: “We will remove plays from the libraries, take them away from scholars, and restore them to the sunlight and fresh air of the village square.” He told a journalist, “It has to be us, the ‘istas,’ the ‘snobs,’ who dust off the old gold buried in the sepulchers.”

  On December 15, in a reshuffling of the republican cabinet, Fernando de los Ríos was made minister of education. His appointment virtually assured funding for La Barraca. De los Ríos had visited Russia in 1920 and had seen at first hand the work of Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater. He believed wholeheartedly in the power of theater to strengthen national unity by reminding citizens of their shared heritage. He also believed in Lorca’s talent, as he had from the moment he first heard him play the piano in the Granada Arts Center in 1916.

  Official confirmation of funding came through early the following year. Although he claimed the title did not suit him, Lorca was named artistic director of La Barraca. By that time he had already begun organizing the company and planning its repertoire. The project enthralled him. La Barraca, his brother said later, “was like a dazzling toy that a generous government had placed in his hands.”

  Political controversy dogged the company from the outset. In January 1932, the satirical right-wing newspaper Gracia y justicia published a “Ballad of Federico” ridiculing the troupe and its director. The long poem mocked both Lorca and his chief government patron, calling Lorca a “Gypsy” and de los Ríos “Sephardic.” In a pointed reference to Lorca’s “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard,” the poem’s anonymous author suggested that the Civil Guard be warned of the two men’s theatrical activities. In March, Gratia y Justicia again lampooned La Barraca. This time the paper attacked the “leftist,” “socialist,” “heterodox” politics of the company. Neither Lorca nor de los Ríos acknowledged the affront. Two weeks later, de los Ríos told members of the Cortes that La Barraca signaled the start of a “new spiritual world” in Spain, a world of “collaboration between the classes, of fraternity among men.” Lorca went on running the company as if nothing had happened.

  His chief assistant in the endeavor was Eduardo Ugarte, a balding, bespectacled playwright and producer in his mid-twent
ies, who had recently returned to Spain from a short stint as a Hollywood screenwriter. Shy and soft-spoken, he shared Lorca’s contempt for the commercial stage, which Ugarte called “recipe theater.” He was both awkward and absentminded—he sometimes went out onto the street with a dinner napkin still tucked into his shirt—and Lorca laughed at his eccentricities. But he admired Ugarte’s gentle manner, and came to depend on his acute theatrical sensibility. At auditions and rehearsals the two sat side by side. “I do everything the way I see fit,” Lorca told a reporter. “[Ugarte] watches it and tells me if it’s good or bad. I always follow his advice, because it’s always sound. He’s the critic every artist needs.” When Ugarte remarked that one of Lorca’s costume designs was “a piece of shit,” Lorca merely agreed with him.

  They auditioned dozens of candidates, most of them university students, for La Barraca’s acting company. Applicants were asked to read passages of poetry or prose and sometimes to sing a song. Lorca took notes. “Small—nervous—will do,” he scribbled beside the name of one candidate. “Cold but will do,” he jotted beside another. In time he amassed a file of more than one hundred actors classified according to type: “Male lead,” “Seducer,” “Unhappy man,” “Traitor,” and so on.

  He and Ugarte selected approximately two dozen students for their company. Lorca wanted the troupe to be egalitarian, and he insisted that “a democratic and cordial camaraderie governs all of us.” No one in the ensemble received a salary; most joined the company for idealistic reasons. One actor later recalled that he signed up for La Barraca so that he could do something “effective,” something “positive” with his life by helping to revitalize Spain.