Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Lorca began rehearsing the two plays in February 1933, in the midst of preparations for the premiere of Blood Wedding. He was especially enthusiastic about Don Perlimplín, whose only previous production had been blocked by the government. The script still bore the censor’s red pencil marks.

  Because of his busy schedule, he relied on Ucelay to do much of the directorial work for both plays. He generally showed up at the club’s rehearsal space at sundown, often with his brother or a friend. The moment he appeared he took charge. “There was no more discussion or argument,” Ucelay’s daughter Margarita recalled. “He was a hurricane.” As usual, he focused on rhythm, timing, and sound. He treated his plays like operas, making certain that each word received the proper intonation, that each character achieved its unique rhythm. He found his amateur cast less jaded than many professional actors, and he savored the enthusiasm they brought to their work.

  He tinkered compulsively with the script for Don Perlimplín. During rehearsals he dictated cuts and revisions to Pura Ucelay and to his friend Santiago Ontañón, who in addition to designing the production was playing the lead role. Cast members were astounded by the intensity of Lorca’s work on the text. They did not realize that many of the changes he made to the script were modifications he had decided upon years earlier, and that he was feigning spontaneity to impress them. One day, to their amazement, he interrupted a rehearsal of the play’s final scene and crept off by himself to a corner, where he sat with one foot propped on a chair and a piece of paper spread across his knee, hurriedly composing a “new” speech for Don Perlimplín. In fact, he had written the speech three years before.

  On April 5, 1933, one month after the premiere of Blood Wedding, Pura Ucelay’s Theatrical Culture Club gave a single performance of Lorca’s two plays in Madrid’s Teatro Español. Earlier in the day, El Sol had published an interview with Lorca in which the playwright and director talked excitedly about his desire to establish a number of theatrical clubs aimed at combating the “kitsch” theater of the contemporary Spanish stage. He believed that amateur theater clubs could and should present works “that the commercial theaters won’t allow,” and during the next three years he remained committed to helping Ucelay and her club do so.

  Lorca himself played the Author in Ucelay’s April 5 production of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. Although he made minor changes to the text, he staged the production much as Margarita Xirgu had at its premiere in 1930. He even used the same costumes. He devoted far more time and energy to Don Perlimplín, which he likened to a “chamber opera.” “The work is built over music,” he explained. Accordingly, he filled the brief production with musical interludes and background melodies by Scarlatti, one of his favorite composers. To further the effect of eighteenth-century splendor, he called for opulent costumes and sets: pale green curtains, painted backdrops, pastel frock coats and gowns, and powdered wigs.

  Responses to the two productions were mixed. Many reviewers had seen and liked The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife in 1930. But Don Perlimplín was new to them. Because politics determined much of what they thought and wrote, the liberal press by and large praised the work, while right-wing papers attacked it. More than one critic noted that in the role of Perlimplín, the corpulent Santiago Ontañón was all but inaudible. In the future, one reviewer suggested, Ontañón should stick to set design, not acting. The critic M. Núñez de Arenas of La Voz applauded the “admirable discoveries” of Lorca’s witty play, its “maliciously sexual humor … and truly youthful, clever, amusing agility.” But he termed Lorca a “terrible misogynist” for the reductive way he portrayed women in his work. In his three most recent productions—Don Perlimplín, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, and Blood Wedding—Lorca had presented “three different women, three, and not one of them is good,” argued Núñez de Arenas, mindless of his own misogyny. “We men are poor things in their hands.”

  Among a handful of negative reviews, the conservative Hoja Literaria labeled Don Perlimplín “anachronistic” and suggested that Lorca refrain from producing his old work. La Epoca dismissed the play as “an unjustified and unjustifiable caprice by its author.” Right-wing opposition to the work stemmed in part from the play’s notoriety as “pornography.” Even someone so open-minded as Dr. Gregorio Marañón, a physician who had written profusely on human sexuality, and a personal friend of both Lorca and Carlos Morla Lynch, took offense at the play’s eroticism. When Santiago Ontañón came onstage wearing a cuckold’s horns during the Theatrical Culture Club’s single performance of Don Perlimplín, Marañón abruptly rose from his box seat and left the theater. Asked two years later why Don Perlimplín was never again produced, Lorca said, “In Spain no one wants to be cuckolded … Even in the theater, actors don’t want to be cuckolded!”

  Sometime after the debut of Don Perlimplín, Lorca composed a long letter to Eduardo Valdivieso in Granada. He wrote the letter at two in the morning, in bed, shortly before slipping into what he called “the divine, boatless sea of Dreaming.” Silence enveloped him, and in the stillness of the moment his mind turned to Valdivieso. “I want to tell you how much I love you and how much I think about you.”

  Recently Valdivieso had confessed to Lorca that he was alone and unhappy, and grateful for the friendship of so exalted a man as Lorca. “Your letter moved me immensely and made me love you more,” Lorca wrote.

  I see you alone, filled with love and spirit and beauty, and I feel your solitude like a beautiful landscape where I could sleep forever. I too am alone, even though you think I’m not because I’m successful and receive crowns of glory. But I lack the divine crown of love.

  He begged Valdivieso to send him at least two letters. “Will you do that? Now we must stay together always.” He ached to be with his young friend in Granada, to bask in the region’s warm spring air, to take in “the pagan smell of the temples, the tender green shoots the vega sends up when she’s dressed like a bride.” But he was plagued by the thought that Valdivieso did not share the intensity of his devotion, “that you don’t love me as I love you. I don’t know. In any case tell me. My friendship soars like an eagle and you are capable of killing it with one rifle shot.”

  He asked Valdivieso to treat his letter kindly, for it contained the “truth” of his feelings. “If you reject them, they will come like frightened little ducks to find the bitter waters of my reality.” Lorca waited for a reply, but Valdivieso did not write back. Decades later he said that Lorca was mistaken to have thought him capable of reciprocating such passion.

  In April, municipal elections took place throughout Spain. Citizens voted overwhelmingly for right-wing candidates. The opposition called for the resignation of Prime Minister Manuel Azaña. But the republican leader clung to power, his popularity in decline, his credibility strained. At last, in September 1933, Azaña stepped down from office. New elections were scheduled for November.

  Prior to Azaña’s resignation, controversy had continued to plague the Republic. The previous year, army rebels had attempted a coup d’état in both Seville and Madrid; from his window at the Ministry of War, Azaña had witnessed fighting in the streets of the nation’s capital. The government had survived the coup attempt and gone on to enjoy a short-lived period of prestige. But in early 1933 new trouble erupted. On January 11, extreme-left anarchists in Cádiz province briefly took control of the village of Casas Viejas and proclaimed communist rule. The following day, the government dispatched both Civil and Assault Guard troops to quash the rebellion. In their effort to flush out the rebels, guards set fire to a shack where several anarchists had taken refuge. The only two anarchists who managed to escape the flames were shot as they fled the building. The next day, troops executed another dozen suspected anarchists. Spaniards everywhere decried the incident. Right-wing leaders accused Azaña and his administration of “murdering the people,” and although a parliamentary investigation failed to prove the charges, the public remained convinced of the government’s complicity in the dea
ths. José Ortega y Gasset openly proclaimed his disappointment in Azaña’s regime.

  On January 30, 1933, two weeks after the Casas Viejas debacle, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In Spain, interest in the fascist movement grew. By mid-March the country had its first fascist magazine, El Fascio. Its editor was the same man who edited Gracia y Justicia, the satirical review that regularly mocked Lorca and La Barraca. Alarmed by the appearance of El Fascio, the government quickly confiscated the magazine’s inaugural issue and banned further publication. But enthusiasm for the movement spread. In a March 22 letter to ABC, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the thirty-year-old son of the dictator who had ruled Spain in the 1920s, voiced his support for fascism. He spoke of the movement’s potential to restore unity to Spain, to the “Fatherland.”

  Reports from Germany told of growing Nazi persecution of Jews. In Madrid, Carlos Morla Lynch noticed an influx of German Jewish refugees. On May 1—May Day—the poet Rafael Alberti and his wife, Maria Teresa León, launched a pro-communist, anti-fascist magazine called Octubre. Escritores y Artistas Revolucionarios. A few months earlier Alberti and León had visited Berlin and experienced at firsthand the “climate of violence” in Germany. On February 27, they witnessed the burning of the Reichstag. They returned to Spain determined to expose the evils of fascism. The first issue of their magazine contained a manifesto condemning Hitler’s regime and its savage disregard for the “principles of humanity.” Lorca’s name topped the list of signatories.

  But although he believed in the social mission of art, and from time to time allowed himself to be swept up in the issues of the day, Lorca remained ambivalent about organized politics. Neither its language nor its routines held much appeal for him. An artist, not an activist, he clung to the belief that literature could, and should, contribute to the betterment of society, but must be stripped of political rhetoric in order to do so effectively. Unlike Alberti, he was at best a selective, at times naive, participant in his country’s political life—a follower, not a leader. In 1932 he told a group of students, “Politics is the ugliest, most disagreeable thing I know.” In April 1933 he signed a manifesto endorsing the Bolshevik Revolution—he was one of a hundred or so prominent Spaniards to do so—but he never joined the Communist Party, and in interviews he showed little understanding of its aims and activities. Once, after being asked his opinion on the possibility of a communist revolution in Chile, he remarked that such an event would mark a “pathetic end to civilization and aristocracy!” Ordinary Chileans, he predicted, would end up “like the Russian nobility, ruined and forced to work in order to eat.”

  While he sympathized with Alberti’s political views, he scorned the poet’s activism, which he felt diminished his power as a writer. Alberti had become a card-carrying Communist in the early 1930s, and as the decade progressed, both he and his verse grew increasingly more politicized. He regularly declaimed his revolutionary poems at political meetings in workers’ libraries and in town squares. In his most radical writings, notably the 1933 volume Un fantasma recorre Europa (A Specter Is Haunting Europe), Alberti espoused a Marxist transformation of the social system. Lorca felt the intensity of Alberti’s political commitment weakened the aesthetic quality of his work, and he made no effort to veil his disapproval. It was yet another means of jousting with his fellow Andalusian in their ongoing contest to supplant Juan Ramón Jiménez as “the” poet of the south. Alberti “has turned communist and is no longer writing poetry, even though he thinks he is,” Lorca told a journalist in the summer of 1933.

  He’s writing bad journalism. Proletarian art, proletarian theater! What is

  that?

  The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love, and the voice of art.

  Despite his quarrel with Alberti’s politics Lorca agreed in early May to collaborate with his friend in an evening of Andalusian song and dance. In Germany, Alberti had given a lecture on “Popular Poetry in the Spanish Lyric.” He was asked to repeat the talk in Madrid at the Teatro Español, and he invited Lorca to accompany him on the piano. They were joined by Lorca’s close friend Encarnación López, La Argentinita.

  The evening was a success. Alberti spoke, Lorca played the piano and—at Alberti’s insistence—recited a poem from his collection Songs. La Argentinita dazzled the crowd with her swirling skirts and clattering castanets. At the curtain call, Lorca delayed joining his colleagues onstage until someone in the audience shouted, “Federico, Federico, Federico!” Hesitantly, he stepped forward. Although some of his friends claimed that he had demeaned himself by accepting a “secondary role” to Alberti, Lorca seemed pleased with the collaboration. He and Rafael were both Andalusians, he reminded a reporter. “We’ve each scoured Spain inch by inch in search of her immortal popular essences.”

  He saw much of La Argentinita in the months that followed, often in the company of her companion, Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. The vivacious brunette danced at a lecture on Granada that Lorca gave at the Residencia de Estudiantes that spring, and, in June, when she and her company presented Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo in Cádiz and Madrid, Lorca was in the audience. To many Spaniards, the poet and the dancer were inextricably linked because of the five-disc, 78-rpm recording of folk songs they had made the previous year. Sometime later they collaborated on a pair of theatrical spectacles blending dance, music, and story drawn from the popular Spanish tradition. The second of these, a ballet entitled The Cuckolds’ Pilgrimage, was partially inspired by a yearly pilgrimage in the Andalusian village of Moclín, located some twenty miles from Lorca’s birthplace. For years Lorca had toyed with the notion of a theatrical spectacle based on the pilgrimage. In the mid-1920s he had worked with the director Cipriano Rivas Cherif and the composer Gustavo Pittaluga to create a rudimentary version of the ballet. The work was performed in a concert version in 1930, but it did not receive a full-scale theatrical production until 1933, when La Argentinita and her Spanish Dance Company presented it in Madrid.

  To what extent Lorca contributed to the spectacle is uncertain. But his familiarity with the Moclín pilgrimage helped provide the impetus for the work. Although neither he nor his family had ever witnessed the annual rite, they were well aware of it each October as dozens of pilgrims wound their way through the vega toward the sun-bleached town of Moclín. From there the pilgrims ascended a spiral path to the Sanctuary of Moclín, where they petitioned Christ to cure them of their woes. Chief among the supplicants were childless women, who made the long journey in the hope of achieving fertility. Lorca was fascinated by the ritual. Its mix of pagan cult and Christian belief reaffirmed his sense of the primitive nature of faith.

  He empathized above all with the women who sought release from their childless state. He had never forgotten the fact that his father’s first wife, Matilde Palacios, had remained childless throughout her fourteen-year marriage to Don Federico. As Lorca grew older he made repeated allusions to childlessness in his poems and plays: “My unborn children pursue me” (Suites); “The Shoemaker’s Wife will never have children” (The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife); “My child. I want my child!” (Once Five Years Pass). Imaginatively the concept of infertility fueled his vision of human love as an innately bleak enterprise. Desire yields only a void; passion leads to nothing but the ghostly cry of an unborn infant.

  He was acutely conscious of his own inability to engender a child. The topic was both a poetic conceit and a private preoccupation. Lorca worshiped his nieces and nephew and lavished attention on his friends’ children, and while his own childless condition freed him to live and work impulsively, indeed sometimes carelessly, it also removed him from the most basic of human cycles, and this was a fact to which he never entirely reconciled himself.

  The issue became especially poignant to him in the spring of 1933, when his friend Concha Méndez, who
had married Manolo Altolaguirre the previous year, went into labor. Friends streamed into the couple’s tiny Madrid apartment throughout the afternoon and evening as Méndez struggled to give birth. When Lorca approached her bedside, his friend murmured, “I’m dying.”

  “Nonsense,” he told her. “You’re creating life.”

  Méndez’s labor went on for hours, while friends bided their time in the room next door. Once, after she let out a scream, Lorca interrupted a story to cry, “Shout more, Conchita, shout hard … it will help!” Eventually Méndez had to be taken by ambulance to the hospital, where she lost her child. To Lorca, the infant’s death was a shock.

  A few months later, he began writing a new play, one he described as a “drama of barrenness.” As he explained it to Morla Lynch, the work was about childless women whose frustrated maternal instincts ultimately lead to tragedy. Central to the play would be a theatrical reenactment of the annual Moclín rite which had also inspired The Cuckolds’ Pilgrimage. Lorca had apparently been thinking about the work for years and needed only to write it. “It’s finished in here,” he told Morla, tapping his forehead. He seems to have begun drafting the play in June 1933, perhaps during a hasty visit home to Granada. (“Get my room ready, thoroughly whitewashed,” he ordered his parents before leaving Madrid.) By mid-July he was able to tell the Heraldo de Madrid that he was at work on the second play of a “dramatic trilogy of the Spanish land.” Blood Wedding was the first component of the trilogy, and part three was “taking shape in my heart right now. It will be called The Destruction of Sodom.” Part two, the tragedy he was currently writing, was as yet untitled. But its theme was “the sterile woman.” By early August Lorca had settled on a title for the work: Yerma. The word, in Spanish, means “barren.”