Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  They settled into a spacious flat on the seventh floor of an apartment house on Calle Alcalá, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. Soon after their arrival, Lorca abandoned the studio apartment he and Paco had shared since 1931 and moved in with his parents and sister. Although thirty-four, he still coveted the financial and emotional security of family life. His parents’ airy apartment had tall ceilings and polished wood floors, and its windows looked out on a distant panorama of hills and fields. “No house is more joyful than this one,” Lorca told a journalist. “Everywhere you look there is light, lots of light … So much wonderful light!”

  He furnished his small bedroom with a studio couch and a work table whose cluttered surface held, among other belongings, colored pencils and India ink for sketching. On the walls he hung copies of paintings by Zurburán and Picasso. Because his room stood near the apartment’s main entrance, Lorca was able to hear who came and went through the front door. When unwanted guests arrived to see him, he ordered the maid to send them away. Once, in mid-February, he instructed her to tell a pair of visitors that he was in Toledo celebrating Corpus Christi—a summer holiday. His callers were incensed. As they left, Lorca heard one mutter to the other, “No one treats me like that. No one.”

  On December 19, 1932, La Barraca gave a special performance at Madrid’s opulent Teatro Español. Members of the invited audience that night included the president of the Spanish Republic, several cabinet ministers, various representatives from the Cortes, and other prominent politicians and government officials.

  Keen to impress such an august crowd, Lorca revised his usual introductory remarks. Reading, as always, from a sheaf of handwritten notes, he spoke of the novelty of La Barraca’s work and stressed the as yet imperfect state of the company’s productions. He reminded his listeners, many of whom were directly responsible for funding La Barraca, that in carrying out their modest work, he and the other members of his company were acting not from self-interest but for the “joy of being able to collaborate, as best we can, in this beautiful hour of a new Spain.”

  The following day, in his review of the performance, critic Enrique Díez-Canedo of El Sol noted the uneven quality of the ensemble’s work—a fact he attributed both to scant rehearsal time and to the amateur status of its student actors. But he urged theater professionals to pay attention to the young group, for La Barraca’s unorthodox choice of repertory and novel staging indicated a genuine quest for a new theatrical style. Similar praise came from La Libertad, where it was suggested that La Barraca might pave the way for a national Spanish theater company. Meanwhile the right-wing press renewed its assault on Lorca’s troupe. One week after La Barraca’s appearance at the Teatro Español, Gracia y Justicia published a derisive account of the event, noting that the house that evening had been filled with “socialist tuxedos that seemed cut to order.”

  Lorca ignored such attacks. He was proud of his company’s achievement and optimistic about its future. In its first year of existence, La Barraca had given over sixty performances to nearly 125,000 Spaniards. Lorca had begun speaking openly to the press about taking his company abroad—to Paris, London, even Mexico—so that foreign audiences could appreciate the “spirit of the youth” in the “new Spain.” There was talk, as well, of tours to Berlin and possibly Moscow. In the meantime, Lorca was offered the directorship of the National Lyric Theater, a post he ultimately declined.

  Over the Christmas holidays he traveled with La Barraca to the southern coast of Spain for a brief series of performances. On the beach at Alicante, he had his picture taken. Beneath his baggy coveralls he wore a white shirt and a pullover sweater. Except for the Barraca emblem on his chest, with its theatrical masks, he looked like an ordinary laborer. His hair was combed straight back from his face, revealing a tiny widow’s peak; deep lines had begun to crease his jowls. He was stout, and, as one acquaintance observed, while not handsome, he glowed. His stocky frame cast a long, thin shadow onto the ground. Behind him the glistening waters of the Mediterranean lapped at the sand.

  Rehearsals for Blood Wedding began early in the new year. Eduardo Marquina, the director of Josefina Diaz’s company and a long-time admirer of Lorca’s work, assumed responsibility for staging the play, with Lorca’s assistance. Marquina told reporters he hoped this would be the first García Lorca production to strike the theatergoing public with “full force and efficacy.”

  Lorca showed up for every rehearsal and relentlessly pushed the cast to adapt their performances to the play’s unconventional style. Actor Manuel Collado, who played the Bridegroom, later contended that “no play in the Spanish theater has ever been rehearsed so thoroughly.” Lorca treated his script like a musical score. He staged the play’s massive wedding scene as if it were a concert. “You, no!” he would sometimes cry out while rehearsing the scene. “Your voice is too sharp! You over there—you try it! I need a heavier voice … I need a fresh voice.” He continuously interrupted the action of another scene to shout, “It has to be mathematical!”

  For the most part he reveled in his combined role of author and director. “Tell me I’m great. Tell me!” he cried with childlike joy to one actress. But occasionally his contentment gave way to rage. One day he exploded at Josefina Díaz. When the pretty brunette persistently failed to achieve the result he desired in a particular scene, he screamed, “No!! Any one of my actresses in La Barraca could do it better!” Díaz burst into tears. “Crying is easy,” Lorca snarled. “Any woman could do it better than you.”

  He was frustrated by the shortcomings of his cast, whom he later described as “secondhand artists.” Neither Diaz nor the other members of her company knew how to cope with the poetic and dramatic complexities of Lorca’s tragedy, a play whose heightened language and broad theatricality could easily, in the wrong hands, slip into melodrama. Diaz and her colleagues were comic actors. Their work in the play’s critical and difficult final scene, where a chorus of women keens for the dead, so disappointed Lorca that he eventually silenced the chorus and ordered the Bride alone to speak. He grew exasperated with the actress who played the Moon because she insisted on reciting her speech with excessive histrionics. “Don’t pull that Lorca business on me!” he cried, referring to the way his own imitators often tried to replicate his recitals of poetry—with a broad Andalusian accent and the singsong chant of a Gypsy. He lumbered onto the stage and commanded the young actress to pronounce her speech with a correct Castilian accent. “The work is written in pure Castilian,” he reminded her.

  By March, Madrid buzzed with talk of Lorca’s play. El Imparcial observed on March 3 that it would be nice “if Blood Wedding were to open at last.” Earlier, in response to a survey in which leading playwrights were asked their opinion of the contemporary Spanish stage, Lorca had bluntly told the same newspaper, “The Spanish theater of the day doesn’t interest me.” The gossip column wondered aloud if with Blood Wedding Lorca might not “launch the theatrical revolution he so desires.”

  The play opened on March 8, 1933, in Madrid’s Teatro Beatriz, seven months after Lorca had finished writing the work. Luminaries packed the opening night house, among them Miguel de Unamuno. Jacinto Benavente and the Quintero brothers—pillars of the bourgeois stage Lorca loathed—were also present, as were a number of Lorca’s friends and fellow poets.

  The curtain rose on a simple room painted in yellow hues. Lorca’s friend and sometime Barraca colleague, the artist Santiago Ontañón, had designed the sets and costumes in collaboration with another designer and with the close involvement of Lorca himself. Listeners found the play instantly riveting. By the time the wedding scene took place in Act 2, the audience could not suppress its enthusiasm. In the midst of the scene, as actors poured onstage singing “Awaken, Bride, awaken!” the opening night crowd erupted in applause and Lorca was forced to come onstage, interrupting the action of the play, to acknowledge his admirers. He emerged trembling, pale, and disheveled, and took his place beside his actors. With a dazed look o
n his face, he bowed to the house.

  The action resumed. At the end of each act Lorca was called onstage to salute the crowd. When the final curtain fell on the churchlike white enclosure Ontañón had designed for the play’s last scene, no one moved. Seconds later the theater burst into applause. Carlos Morla Lynch, who had fretted about the play all evening, hurried backstage to congratulate Lorca. He found the playwright looking “radiant and newly calm.”

  Reviews were ecstatic. Critic after critic wrote that with Blood Wedding Lorca had finally proven himself as good a playwright as he was a poet. They lauded his keen dramatic sense, his “balance” and “eclecticism” as a writer. They praised the manner in which he had fused the lyrical with the dramatic. The play’s “sensuality” and “rural perfume” earned high marks, as did its unique blend of classical, popular, and contemporary elements. Several critics remarked on the similarity between Blood Wedding and Gypsy Ballads.

  The play’s spectacle drew the most attention. Arturo Mori of El Liberal observed that while the story of Blood Wedding was familiar, the play’s form, style, and overt poetic symbolism were not, and these made the play “new.” To many viewers, Blood Wedding represented a leap forward in the evolution of the Spanish theater. But a number of critics quibbled about the forest scene. ABC called it “inferior” to the rest of the play, claiming that in this instance Lorca had carried the “device of the poetic symbol” too far. The politically conservative El Debate and Informaciones both charged that Lorca’s personification of the Moon and Death diminished the mounting tension of the drama and was “unjustified” and “puerile.” Some critics insisted that in this scene alone, the playwright in Lorca had yielded to the poet, with unfortunate consequences.

  Lorca defended his choice. A few months after the play’s premiere, he explained in an interview that although he’d been accused—by “a member of the bourgeoisie”—of having exceeded the bounds of reality with his forest scene, “I could say to him: ‘You, good sir, are going to die and you’ll be carried out in a coffin with your hands crossed on your chest. And you, too, will transcend reality. That is reality.’” In at least one subsequent production of Blood Wedding, Lorca resisted pressure from the play’s director to eliminate the character of the Moon from the text. He was convinced that if he could succeed in making his human Moon work, the device would triumph.

  Josefina Díaz gave thirty-eight additional performances of Blood Wedding before closing her 1933 season in Madrid. She then took the work on tour in the Spanish provinces. Throughout the country critics responded favorably to the play. In a personal letter to Lorca, poet Antonio Machado called Blood Wedding a “magnificent tragedy.” Lola Membrives, the famed Argentine actress who had brusquely rejected the script the previous fall, asked if she could produce the play in Buenos Aires. Lorca said yes.

  “I feel calm and content, because I’ve had the first great triumph of my life,” he remarked to Eduardo Valdivieso shortly after the play’s premiere. Blood Wedding had confirmed Lorca’s potential as a playwright and proved to him that his work could attract an audience. It had also made him money. For the first time in his life he approached true financial independence.

  Eventually the incessant flow of congratulatory visits, reviews, and letters fatigued him. Sometime that spring Lorca confessed to Valdivieso that his only preoccupation “these days” was Valdivieso himself, “my distant friend, whom I love and have not been able to write to.” Lorca brooded about the young man. “Why haven’t you written me?” he asked shortly after the opening of Blood Wedding. “Everyone but you has written to congratulate me. Are you annoyed with me?”

  The trappings of celebrity—the adulation and applause—merely intensified his isolation and made Lorca yearn for a genuine companion, someone in whom he could trust, someone to love. “I’m hemmed in by people who pretend to love me, and I know what they say can’t be half true,” he told Valdivieso. “And that’s why I look back to Granada, where you are and where I know you’ll remember me tenderly and faithfully.” He dreamt of spending summer afternoons with Valdivieso in Granada, reading books together, making new discoveries, strengthening their friendship. Although surrounded by “applause and glory,” he felt bitterly alone. As it had in 1928, with the publication of Gypsy Ballads, fame rang hollow.

  20

  Voice of Love

  1933

  At home with his parents in Madrid, Lorca came and went as he pleased. He ate when it suited him, entertained friends at random, and shut himself away in his room whenever he wished to be undisturbed. He sometimes wrote late at night or in the early hours of the morning. He slept until lunchtime. To a reporter he admitted, “I sleep a lot… That way my nerves are calm.” Often he was just getting up, still dressed in his bathrobe, when people arrived to see him. Late morning was practically the only time friends could count on finding him at home.

  He generally ate lunch with his parents, then left the apartment for the day. He spent his afternoons and evenings meandering through Madrid with friends. He toured the café circuit, dropped in on Morla Lynch’s salon, and late at night could often be found strolling along the streets, “like an island surrounded by friends,” recalled the stage designer and artist Santiago Ontañón. “From a distance you could hear his frank, luminous laughter.” A cousin of Lorca’s once accused him of being a “true noctambulist,” and suggested that Lorca would adore the festival of Ramadan, because he could sleep all day and stay up all night.

  His parents indulged his cavalier existence. They welcomed his friends at meals and did not object when Lorca turned their home into a base of operations for his theatrical projects. Paco García Lorca once came home to find the apartment strewn with metallic wigs for a Barraca production. Lorca knew that he owed his privileged existence to his parents, and was unashamed of it. When asked during an interview whether he was able to support himself with his writing, he replied blithely, “No, fortunately I don’t have to make a living from my pen. If I did, I wouldn’t be so happy. Thank heavens I have parents—parents who sometimes scold me, but who are very good and who always pay in the end.”

  His mother’s hair was now fully gray, and her pretty face gently etched by the passage of time. When Lorca talked about her to others, “it was as if he was talking about his daughter, a very young daughter whom he must watch over with great care,” a friend observed. “She formed me poetically,” Lorca had said of Vicenta Lorca in 1932. “I owe her everything I am and everything I become.”

  His father had also aged. At seventy-three, Don Federico García’s body was thick and his face deeply scored, but beneath burly gray eyebrows, his dark eyes sparkled. He wore three-piece suits with a gold watch chain pulled across his abdomen, and he sucked on cigars. “One feels that he is the ‘boss,’ that he’s the one who gives the orders,” Morla Lynch jotted in his diary after meeting Lorca’s father. Don Federico looked like what he was: a rich property owner from the countryside. He exuded “Andalusian eloquence,” Morla thought. Lorca described him in print as “a gentleman from Granada,” adding, “My father is delightful.”

  Blood Wedding was still in rehearsal in early 1933 when Lorca agreed to let the newly established Women’s Civic Culture Club of Madrid produce two of his plays, Don Perlimplín and The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. The club—whose cumbersome name Lorca insisted on shortening to “Theatrical Culture Club,” and eventually to “Anfistora Club,” a made-up name—was an amateur group dedicated to the intellectual betterment of women. Its founder, Pura Ucelay, a tall, stylish woman in her fifties, had, like many Spanish women, been denied a university education, and was determined to give females a chance to participate in the nation’s cultural life. She was part of a growing cadre of Spanish women who in the 1920s and early ’30s endured contempt and often ridicule in their efforts to promote female independence and education. Married, with four daughters, Ucelay insisted that her children’s dowries be spent on education, not husbands. Her daughter Margarita, w
ho took part in Ucelay’s Theatrical Culture Club, described her mother as a “bourgeois feminist.”

  Although she lacked formal stage training, Ucelay was a self-professed “devotee of the theater” whose refined sense of the art derived, in part, from years of travel abroad with both her uncle and her husband. With her Theatrical Culture Club, Ucelay hoped to combat what she saw as the “decadence” of the Spanish stage. She aimed to present one meticulously prepared show a year, and she wanted the club’s first production to be Lorca’s The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. She had seen the play at its premiere in 1930 and admired the work, and although she had never met Lorca, she sought him out one day in a Madrid café and boldly asked if she might be allowed to produce his play.

  “For a charity event?” he inquired.

  “Yes, absolutely! We’re a dramatic arts club.”

  Lorca was charmed. When Ucelay offered to pay him to direct the work, he laughed and named a preposterously high price. He then suggested that since the play was short, Ucelay should combine it with a second offering, Don Perlimplín. He could foresee just one problem: he had lost his only copy of the work. But if Ucelay could locate a script for Don Perlimplín, he would direct both plays.

  The next day, an elegantly attired Pura Ucelay turned up at the State Security Office in Madrid, where the manuscript for Don Perlimplín had been deposited in 1929 after its confiscation by government authorities. With the advent of the Spanish Republic, Ucelay assumed she could retrieve the document without any problem. When officials located the work, however, and spotted its subtitle—“erotic aleluya”—they balked. Ucelay was forced to return several times before the authorities would relinquish the script. Each time she appeared, she heard someone mutter, “That crazy woman is here again, the one who’s looking for pornography.”