Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  His soul was weeping, wounded and small,

  under needles of pine and of grasses.

  Water descended, flung down from the moon,

  and covered the naked mountain with violets.

  In the “Nocturne” Lorca mentions Galicia’s Sil river as the site of the young man’s drowning. As it happened, Ernesto Pérez Guerra had been born near the shores of the Sil river, and during their first encounter Lorca told him, “Someday I’ll write a poem with the Sil in it.”

  The two men worked together to draft Lorca’s Six Galician Poems. Pérez Guerra later characterized his role in the process as that of a “living dictionary … a poetic and discriminating dictionary.” It appears that Lorca first drafted each poem in Spanish or a defective Galician, then read or showed it to Pérez Guerra, who in turn translated the work into a sophisticated Galician. The extent to which the younger man was responsible for the syntax of the final poems is unclear. Lorca responded “intuitively” to his suggestions for Galician vocabulary, Pérez Guerra said later, selecting from a range of possibilities the one word that “sprang from his lyrical balls.” Afterward the two friends took turns copying out Lorca’s poems in Galician on scraps of paper from Lorca’s desk. Drafts of the six poems found their way onto an invitation to tea, a royalties statement, and the back of an envelope.

  Lorca finished the last of his lectures in late May. By then rehearsals for La Barraca’s debut performance were in high gear. According to Lorca, the company went through “eighty rehearsals” for Life Is a Dream. Friends and invited guests sometimes sat in on the sessions. The poet Vicente Aleixandre attended one Barraca rehearsal, as did the actress Margarita Xirgu. Even Prime Minister Manuel Azaña found time to drop in on the company. Observers were struck by Lorca’s tenacity as a director. After watching a rehearsal one guest exclaimed, “What a slave driver García Lorca is! What a slave driver!”

  He had seldom been busier. In late May, he accompanied Fernando de los Ríos and several other government officials on a trip to select the site of La Barraca’s premiere performance; they chose the tiny Castilian village of Burgo de Osma. On May 29 Lorca gave his final lecture in Salamanca. On June 1, in Madrid, he delivered a brief eulogy for a painter who had recently died. On June 5, 1932, his thirty-fourth birthday, Lorca attended the Madrid wedding of his childhood friend Manolo Altolaguirre and the poet Concha Méndez. Méndez had wanted the ceremony to be unconventional. Altolaguirre planned to wear a green suit, and Méndez to carry a bouquet of parsley. After the ceremony, as the wedding guests filed out of the church, Juan Ramón Jiménez began tossing coins at a crowd of street urchins and shouting, “Repeat after me: Long live poetry! Long live art!” Vividly aware of his own new status as a celebrity, Lorca made his way from one group of wedding guests to another, chatting expansively with friends and acquaintances. To Carlos Morla Lynch, he seemed to possess “the elegance of a revolutionary genius.”

  But as much as he enjoyed this sort of occasion, Lorca disliked a great deal of what passed for social life in Madrid. He particularly loathed the idle chitchat of the city’s literati. He became so bored by the conversation inside the editorial offices of Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente that on one occasion he fled the building. “The impression I get from these ‘men of letters’ is that they live outside nature,” he wrote afterward to Carlos Martínez Barbeito.

  I imagine them in some long, airtight corridor, banging their heads against the walls in an effort to discover something, while I… dear Carlos, want only to breakfast on the sound of the sea, and like the good poet I am, to take communion with a great millwheel every morning of my life.

  He found Ortega y Gasset himself especially grating. The two frequently ran into each other at the Revista de Occidente. To Lorca’s annoyance, the philosopher invariably tried to talk to him about politics and to ask his opinion of current affairs. “I have no opinion other than to give them all a good drubbing,” Lorca told Martínez Barbeito. Privately he spoofed Ortega y Gasset. At dinners he would point to the oil and vinegar cruets and ask to be passed “the Ortega” and then “the Gasset.” He told a friend once that he had seen Ortega “peeling off layers of intelligence.” To demonstrate what he meant, Lorca put his hand to his forehead and with a “fffuazz!” sound pretended to tear bark from a tree.

  On July 6, La Barraca held its final dress rehearsal for Life Is a Dream. Morla Lynch noted the vigor and authority with which Lorca strode from one end of the room to the other, barking orders and waving his hands. At home, Morla’s apartment was festooned with posters bearing the company’s new logo: an actor’s mask superimposed over a blue carriage wheel, with the words “La Barraca, University Theater, Federal Union of Hispanic Students” printed in red above and below it.

  The company was scheduled to make its debut performance on July 10, 1932, in Burgo de Osma. The twenty-nine-member troupe set out from Madrid in two government vans and a Chevrolet truck. The few women in La Barraca wore blue skirts and blouses; the men wore one-piece blue workmen’s coveralls chosen to show the company’s solidarity with “the people,” as Lorca phrased it. Both outfits featured the troupe’s colorful logo. But because the uniforms were unorthodox, misunderstandings sometimes arose. The residents of one town mistook La Barraca for a band of communists and refused to sell them food. More frequently, Lorca and his young actors were assumed to be ordinary laborers. “You look like a mechanic, sir,” a reporter said to Lorca one day.

  “Well, at the moment I’m just a stage director,” Lorca replied brightly.

  At Burgo de Osma, local dignitaries ceremoniously greeted the company. As the troupe began unpacking costumes and setting up scenery in the main square, a town crier marched through the village, spreading word of La Barraca’s presence. At ten o’clock that evening the company gave its first public performance. People crowded into the square to watch. Lorca gave a brief speech outlining La Barraca’s goals (“to bring poetry and art to the Spanish people”) and describing the company’s aesthetic principles (freedom from “sentimentality”; “noble purity”). Then the performance—in this case, three Cervantes interludes—began. The crowd was thrilled, reviewers were laudatory, and Lorca’s friend Jorge Guillén, who had traveled from Madrid to witness the premiere, thought the production full of “charm,” “levity,” and “radiance.”

  During the next two days La Barraca gave two additional performances in neighboring towns, where the response was much the same. But on Wednesday, July 13, during an appearance in the provincial capital of Soria, local authorities inadvertently charged admission for La Barraca’s performance, and the public protested. Although not the company’s fault, the error sullied the young troupe’s image.

  Matters worsened on July 15, when poor weather forced a planned outdoor performance in the village of San Juan de Duero to be moved inside a church. The last-minute change rankled La Barraca’s actors, who proceeded to give a distracted and unintentionally comic rendition of Life Is a Dream. Midway through the performance a group of right-wing hecklers, who had apparently come from Madrid expressly for this purpose, surrounded the small stage and threatened to attack the performers. The lights went out, the production came to an abrupt halt, and in the ensuing confusion members of the audience began hurling insults and even pebbles at the stage. Draped in the voluminous black folds of his Shadow costume, Lorca appeared before the crowd to plead for calm and to warn them against the danger of trampling on electrical cables. People mistook him for a priest and obeyed him. Eventually the police arrived and escorted the actors safely back to their hotel, although they had to follow a circuitous route to avoid being ambushed by their detractors.

  Both right- and left-wing newspapers published copious accounts of the melee in San Juan de Duero. The conservative Voz de Soria blamed La Barraca for the disturbances and accused its thirty-four-year-old director of allowing himself to be guided by political fantasy. Although distraught, Lorca took comfort a few days later from a Barraca performan
ce in the small town of Almazán. There, the audience was so mesmerized by the production that when a sudden downpour took place in the midst of the play, no one so much as opened an umbrella. By the end of the evening cast and audience alike were soaked, but few minded. In years to come Lorca loved to tell the story of this performance, when the only thing audible was “the murmur of rain falling on the stage, Calderón’s lines, and the music that accompanied them.” He was perhaps especially gratified because Fernando de los Ríos was in the audience that evening, catching his first glimpse of La Barraca in action.

  On the way back to Madrid later that week, one of the company’s trucks skidded on a curb and overturned. Several students received minor injuries, and at least one was seriously hurt. Though shaken by the accident, Lorca’s actors managed to give an outdoor performance in Madrid a few days later. On July 23, Gracia y Justicia published another of its attacks on the company. Noting the mishaps that had plagued La Barraca on its first outing—the admission fiasco in Soria, the disturbances in San Juan de Duero, and even the truck accident on the way home—the newspaper’s editorial staff denounced the troupe and questioned the sanity of its director, whom they called Federico García “Loca” (Crazy). There were deliberate references to Lorca’s sexuality. His actors were described as “niños simpaticones”—a snide reference to maricón (queer)—and Lorca himself was described as the “flower of the Andalusian ballad.” Lorca had not been hurt in the truck accident, the paper reported, because at the time he was traveling in another van, the one “carrying all the girls.”

  Lorca undoubtedly saw the article in Gratia y Justicia but chose to ignore it. In an interview with the Heraldo de Madrid a few days later, he announced that La Barraca would embark on its second excursion in late August. He had been pleased by their first outing. People had responded enthusiastically to the company, despite the “daring” nature of its stagecraft. As for those who chose to view La Barraca in a “political light,” they were “wrong! The University Theater has no political bent of any sort. It is simply theater.”

  But he was tilting at windmills. As his colleague Eduardo Ugarte had observed earlier in the year, these were “fundamentally political” times, and no art—even one that aspired to a “noble” purity—could long remain outside the fray.

  19

  Applause and Glory

  1932-33

  Before setting out on a second Barraca expedition, Lorca returned home to Granada for a short rest. Lullabies again drifted through the Huerta de San Vicente. Earlier in the year, Concha Garcia Lorca had given birth to a son, Manolo. Lorca lavished so much attention on the infant and his sister that a friend accused him of spending all of his time playing with the children. Soon the older of the two, Tica, was big enough for Lorca to sit her on top of the piano and teach her to sing folk songs.

  To the strains of lullabies he added the sounds of two records, which he played incessantly on the gramophone that August: a Bach cantata and a collection of songs by the cante jondo singer Tomás Pavón. Lorca played the recordings so often that his family became “profoundly” fed up with the monotony of the sound. But he persisted. He needed the music as inspiration for a new play he wished to complete that month. As a writer he had found that music delivers “what you’re hoping to capture. It brings it to you. There are voices that say: come here, write this, say that … Wherever I work there must be music.”

  His new play was a departure from the two scripts Lorca had most recently finished. Unlike The Audience and Once Five Years Pass, the new work, Blood Wedding, a three-act tragedy, had strong ties to both the classical and popular traditions. He had first conceived of the play in 1928, but it was only in 1932, in the flush of his achievement with La Barraca and his renewed exposure to the classics of the Spanish Golden Age, that he brought himself to compose the work. The experience of producing theater had taught him, as it did Shakespeare and Molière, how to write plays. He drafted Blood Wedding in less than a month.

  The work stemmed from an incident Lorca had read about in the newspaper four years earlier. The moment he’d seen the story he had exclaimed to a friend, “It’s amazing! Read this. It’s a drama you’d be hard-pressed to invent.” A bride in the southern Spanish province of Almería had disappeared with her cousin on the morning of her wedding, and her bridegroom had gone in search of the couple. Some time later the cousin’s dead body had been found, and near it the bride, in disarray. She told authorities she had been in love with her cousin and had planned to run away with him. The bridegroom was arrested for the cousin’s murder; it later turned out the bridegroom’s brother had committed the crime.

  The press gave the incident sensational coverage. For days the Heraldo de Madrid issued up-to-the-minute reports on the story. At one point the paper even printed a fictional dialogue between the bride and her lover. ABC titled its account of the case “Tragic Conclusion to a Wedding.” In Almería province, a popular ballad chronicling the affair quickly materialized. By 1931, at least one Spanish writer had used the incident as the basis for a novel.

  Lorca talked off and on to friends about the story. It touched on themes central to his work: illicit love, death, revenge, the force of human instinct. The facts of the murder mingled with his memories of Almería province, where he had briefly gone to school at the age of eight or nine. He could remember the region’s moonlike aura, the pale sweep of its unwatered land and the ferocity of its light. As a playwright he generally allowed such details to percolate in his imagination, sometimes for years, before they fused into a solid theatrical vision. He described his approach as “a long, constant, exhaustive thought process. And then, finally, the definitive move from the mind to the stage.” Often he began with “notes, observations taken from life itself, or sometimes from the newspaper.” Even his most stylized plays—Don Perlimplín, Mariana Pineda—sprang from reality, if only from the aesthetic reality of a cartoon or a ballad. The act of writing itself went briskly: “I spend three or four years thinking about a play, and then I write it in fifteen days.”

  With Blood Wedding Lorca sought both to reimagine the events that had taken place in Almería in 1928 and to revive the classical theater. He later boasted that Blood Wedding was the first tragedy “to be written in Spain for many, many decades.” He had long viewed rural Spanish life, with its stark blend of Catholic dogma and pagan superstition, as innately tragic. Noting the quantity of macabre crucifixions to be found in Spanish villages, he had argued in Impressions and Landscapes that “the tragic, the real, is what speaks to people’s hearts, and that’s why artists who seek popular success always create Christ figures full of purple sores.” Lorca’s experience with La Barraca had reinforced his belief in the theater’s ancient ties to the people. More than ever he was convinced that if the twentieth-century Spanish theater was to be saved it must return both to the people and to its earliest forms. “Without a tragic sense there is no theater,” he insisted. The Spanish theater “must return to tragedy.” Lorca also knew that a more traditional work such as Blood Wedding would be far easier to sell than the experimental plays he had recently been writing.

  There were contemporary precedents for the undertaking. As a young man Lorca had read in translation John Millington Synge’s one-act tragedy of rural Irish life, Riders to the Sea, and been impressed by the work and by Synge’s achievement. Although he never publicly acknowledged his debt to Synge’s play, it clearly served as a model for Blood Wedding, for it showed Lorca how effectively one could translate into tragedy the harsh circumstances of contemporary life in an isolated, agrarian community—where men work the fields or fish the seas, and women remain at home, awaiting the inevitable deaths of their husbands and sons. In Synge’s Maurya, whose lamentation for her dead sons provides a welcome coda to the harrowing events of Riders to the Sea, Lorca found a prototype for the Bride’s Mother in Blood Wedding. In the final scene of the play, she, like Maurya, keens the dead.

  Lorca may also have been familiar with
Gabriele d’Annunzio’s turn-of-the-century “pastoral tragedy,” The Daughter of Jorio, which had been translated into Spanish and produced in Madrid in the mid-1920s. In Spain, Lorca’s colleague Eduardo Marquina had written a series of rural dramas, and these too may have served as inspiration. But Lorca was equally influenced by older sources: Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and the Greek tragedians. Within two years of completing Blood Wedding he remarked that because he had grown up with both the land and the sea (perhaps he was thinking of Almería), he was at once Iberian and Hellenic. And yet as always, he refused to adhere strictly to the rules. In drafting his first tragedy, he aimed to invoke the classical forms “with freedom,” he said. He wanted to meld the past and the present, to create a theater that like the great dramas of antiquity “breathes with titanic force and seeks its soul, its action, its vigor in what is popular, in the people.”

  Blood Wedding preserves a number of elements from the original story Lorca read about in the newspaper. The play takes place in an arid, inhospitable landscape much like Almería province. The drama itself tells of a bride who elopes with her cousin on her wedding day. Her bridegroom pursues them, and his hunt ends in death.

  To this fact-based framework Lorca added details meant to darken the story’s Freudian undertones and to heighten its power as myth. His bride and her lover flee not into desert terrain—as their real-life counterparts did—but into a dank forest where death waits. It is not the bride’s cousin alone who dies in Lorca’s play, but both the cousin and the bridegroom who kill one another with knives. (The actual bride’s cousin was shot—a far more prosaic death.) The cousin in Blood Wedding is married and has an infant son, unlike his real-life source, who was a bachelor.

  To readers of Gypsy Ballads and Poem of the Deep Song, this was familiar ground. Blood Wedding re-creates the archetypal Spain of those collections—a region steeped in passion and blood, in popular Andalusian imagery and song, a world where nature reigns. “The fault is not mine,” the bride’s adulterous lover states. “The fault belongs to the land.” Nature itself is a protagonist, most provocatively in the forest scene, where the Moon—a “young woodcutter with a white face”—appears, seeking blood to warm his icy flesh. Characters throughout the play recall the cycles of nature: the planting and harvesting of crops, the earth’s rotation from day to night, and from birth to death. Had his most distant childhood memories not borne the “flavor of the earth,” Lorca reflected, “I could not have written Blood Wedding.” The play allowed him to capture the details of the Andalusian countryside “with the same spirit I felt in my boyhood years.”