Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Newspapers churned out stories about the poet. One journalist described him lounging in bed in his hotel room in a pair of striped pajamas, conversing with visitors. Another reporter found him standing in front of the mirror in his room, his face lathered in soap. “Come on in,” Lorca cried. “I’m shaving. I’ll be dressed in a minute in my blue coveralls, a cheap and very comfortable piece of clothing.” The reporter carefully noted Lorca’s appearance: his “full moon face,” vibrant eyes, ample mouth, and athletic chest.

  By December, Buenos Aires bookstores had been picked clean of copies of Gypsy Ballads and Poem of the Deep Song. Fans clamored for more books, but Lorca had brought none with him. When asked if he might reissue some of his poetry in Argentina, he politely refused. He would only publish when he no longer had to attend to “reporters, authors, actors, poets, writers,” and others, he said. To the suggestion that he write a series of poems inspired by Buenos Aires, as he had done in New York, he said, “I don’t want to force anything … because then everything comes out wrong.”

  Victoria Ocampo succeeded in bringing out two new editions of Gypsy Ballads during Lorca’s visit. Despite his aversion to publication, Lorca was delighted. “This is a triumph by any measure … because it proves my existence here in South America and my influence over an entire Spanish-speaking continent,” he told his parents. “I don’t think people at home realize just what this means.”

  With fame came money. In addition to lecture fees, Lorca received a percentage of Membrives’s box-office take. He told his parents he intended to put his theater royalties into savings and to use the rest of his earnings for living expenses. He talked incessantly of money in his letters home and on several occasions transferred large sums to his parents. Once, after wiring 10,000 pesetas to his father, he turned to a friend and announced that he had done so in order to needle Don Federico. “And to make him see that writing poems can be more lucrative than selling grain and land,” he laughed. Another friend remembered Lorca’s insisting that he was sending money home so that his father would realize that “the puppeteer, too, is capable of earning money.”

  The scheme worked. In Granada, Don Federico ordered his driver to take him to the post office one day, because “the boy who never earned a cent, who was always coming to me for help—now he’s the one who’s sending me money.” To Lorca himself, the older man was more restrained. In a letter that November, Don Federico thanked his son for the money he had sent home, adding, “Frankly, we don’t need it. But what you send is safer here than it is in your pockets, and since it’s yours, it will always be at your disposal.”

  In a further attempt to please his father, Lorca devoted a portion of his time overseas to looking after a family relative who had left Spain a few years earlier and fallen on hard times. Máximo Delgado, one of Don Federico García Rodriguez’s many cousins, lived nearly two hundred miles north of Buenos Aires, in the town of Rosario. Although he worked whenever he could, he had no stable income. Lorca sent him money shortly after reaching Argentina, and eventually visited the young immigrant in Rosario. He found Máximo selling prints on the streets. Lorca assured his father that he would not leave Argentina until he had helped their cousin find steady employment, and he apparently tried to keep his word.

  He squandered even more money on his mother. His hotel room filled with trinkets purchased expressly for Vicenta Lorca. According to an Argentine acquaintance, Lorca once spent hours prowling the city in search of a cactus to take to his mother. During an interview he confessed that because of Doña Vicenta, he had no plans to marry. “My brother and sisters, yes, they can marry. But I belong to my mother.” He bought Vicenta a costly fox fur in Buenos Aires. “Now don’t go telling me it’s expensive,” he warned her, “because I’m thrilled to have bought it and I’d be terribly upset if you were to object!”

  Delighted with her son’s success, his mother assured Lorca that “no woman will wear a fur around her shoulders with more pride and satisfaction than I’ll feel wearing yours, for it’s a souvenir you’ve purchased with the fruits of your labors.” She cautioned Lorca to be prudent, however, and to earn as much money as he could, for the economic situation in Spain was not promising. She also urged him to be careful. “Watch what you eat, don’t stay up too late, and keep an eye on your health, because we’re awfully far away, and it terrifies me to think that something might happen to you.” Vicenta Lorca was sixty-three years old when she wrote this letter. Her son was thirty-five.

  In interviews Lorca mentioned his family regularly, “because you are the only thing I really care about in the world,” he told his parents. He spoke often about Spain as well. The country’s political situation had again worsened, and reports of trouble appeared almost daily in the Argentine press. Lorca followed the news intently.

  National elections were scheduled to take place in Spain on November 19,1933. At least two new political parties were grappling for power: CEDA (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas, or Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups), a right-wing Catholic alliance, and the Spanish Falange, founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the former dictator. Although “not a fascist movement,” according to its leader, the Falange nevertheless shared goals similar to those of Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s Fascists. At the party’s inaugural meeting in Madrid in late October, José Antonio vowed that if the Spanish fatherland were to be maligned, “no dialect but the dialect of fists and pistols would suffice.”

  Argentine reporters questioned Lorca repeatedly about the situation in Spain. Although he tried to appear impartial, he occasionally voiced an opinion. A month before the Spanish elections he told a writer for Crítica that although Spain had a powerful right-wing faction, those “who love and enjoy freedom are on the Left.” Privately he fretted about his country. During the weeks leading up to the Spanish election, violent confrontations took place throughout the nation. In late October, his friend Pura Ucelay informed Lorca that Assault Guards were stationed throughout Madrid, and people spoke of nothing but politics. “There is great anticipation for the female vote,” she added. For the first time in history, Spanish women had been granted the right to cast a ballot.

  Lorca urged his family, and in particular his brother, “not to get involved in political arguments.” He grew so visibly upset about the situation that his Argentine friends refrained from discussing the subject in his presence. One night at a party in his honor, Lorca heard someone praise the Spanish monarchy, and by implication the right wing. The remark so incensed Lorca that he left the gathering. As election day drew near, his worries deepened. “God willing, things will turn out well,” he told his parents. But they did not. Incidents of violence marred the balloting in several Spanish cities, including Seville, where left-wing activists murdered a member of the right wing. At the end of the day, right-wing Catholic and centrist candidates had won a majority of seats in parliament. Republican nominees lagged far behind.

  During the next weeks, a new coalition government, led by centrist Alejandro Lerroux, promptly began dismantling the more progressive programs implemented by former Prime Minister Manuel Azaña and his left-wing colleagues. The political situation in Spain deteriorated. Vicenta Lorca informed Lorca that matters were “more shameful” than ever. In early December a series of anarchist strikes rocked the nation. Sporadic gunfire rattled the streets of Zaragoza, and soldiers with machine guns patrolled the city. In both Madrid and Barcelona bombs exploded. Bombs also went off in Granada, where leftist extremists tried to set fire to a convent. Six thousand miles away, Lorca feared for his family’s safety. A few weeks after the election he declared that Spain was “a volcano that could erupt” at any minute.

  To his mother’s dismay, Lorca decided to remain in Argentina through Christmas. Lola Membrives planned to present The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and Mariana Pineda during the holiday season, and he wanted to be on hand for those productions. From Spain, Pura Ucelay wrote to express her
disappointment. She had been counting on Lorca to help her with the Anfistora Club’s next theatrical presentation. Eduardo Ugarte, co-director of La Barraca, also wanted him to return. Under the country’s new government, he warned Lorca, the company was in danger of losing its funding. Meanwhile, the troupe had recently added a production of Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville to its repertory. Cast in the minor role of Corydon, a fisherman, was Rafael Rodriguez Rapún.

  Rapún, then twenty-one, wrote to Lorca at least once that fall, the only surviving fragment of correspondence between the two men. In a long, affectionate letter, he talked about friends, activities, and La Barraca, and thanked Lorca for the postcard he had sent during his journey to Argentina. Rapún alluded slyly to the nature of his relationship with Lorca. “Of course I’m playing the role of Corydon fairly well,” he teased, “even though, as Ugarte says, I may be a ‘corydon’ in the real sense of the word.” The term, a traditional name for an Arcadian shepherd, had long been used to signify homosexual love. In 1924, André Gide had published a Socratic dialogue in defense of same-sex love, which he called Corydon. Subtitled “A Novel about the Love That Cannot Speak Its Name,” Gide’s book appeared in Spanish translation in 1929, and by 1931 had gone through two subsequent editions.

  Rapún closed his letter to Lorca with a declaration of love:

  I remember you constantly. It’s impossible to forget someone with whom you’ve spent every hour of the day for months. Especially if you feel as powerfully drawn to that person as I do to you. But I console myself with the fact that when you return, we can repeat those hours. And it’s a consolation to know that you’ve gone off to fulfill a mission … Now that I’ve written you a little something, I’ll stop, although you deserve more. I’ll continue to write to you often. A huge embrace from one who never stops thinking of you, Rafael.

  In Buenos Aires, Lorca reportedly became infatuated with at least two young men, one of whom is said to have spurned his advances. For decades after his visit, rumors about his supposed liaisons in Argentina persisted. In a book inscription for fellow poet Ricardo Molinari, Lorca hinted at some sort of passionate involvement in the Argentine capital, “LOVE BUENOS AIRES GRANADA CADAQUÉS MADRID,” he wrote. Molinari asked him what he meant. “They are the places where I have loved the most,” Lorca said, without further explanation.

  Publicly, he sought to remain discreet during his stay in Buenos Aires. Evidently he turned down an invitation to meet Alberto Nin Frías, an Argentine author whose chief area of interest was the link between homosexuality and creativity. Lorca was, nevertheless, intrigued to know that Nin Frías had cited him in his recent study of homosexuality and literature, Alexis, or the Significance of the Uranian Temperament. When he returned to Spain the following year, he told a friend to be sure to read the work, “because among other things it mentions me.”

  As the Argentine spring blossomed into summer, Lorca began wearing a white linen suit, and frequently a white cotton sailor’s shirt with a V-shaped neck and a dark sash. He took childlike delight in donning the shirt and going to the beach to “awaken” the seashells by calling out to them. He sent his parents a photograph of himself dressed head to toe in a sailor’s uniform—including bell-bottomed trousers. Beside him were three unidentified men in similar attire. “I’m a little drunk here,” Lorca scrawled on the back of the picture. “But that’s as far as I went.” Imaginatively, he became captivated by the image of the sailor and began sketching sailors compulsively, occasionally depicting them in a composition with a bottle of rum or the word “beer” or “wine.” Sometimes he showed flowers sprouting from their eyes. Frequently he wrote the word “love” on the brim of their caps.

  For nearly a decade he had been fascinated by the figure of the sailor. In the mid-1920s he had sketched a sailor holding a red rose in his hand, with the word “love” printed on his hatband. He was drawn to the archetype of the sailor as a man who has forsworn conventional life, and the companionship of women, in order to roam the seas in the company of other men. The erotic connotations are clear. But Lorca’s interest in the sailor motif transcended the merely sexual. Because he regarded the sea itself as the embodiment of love, life, and ultimately death—Jorge Manrique’s fathomless tomb—he viewed the sailor as an emblem of human striving. “We’re all like the sailor,” he once said to a friend. “From the ports comes the murmur of accordions and the turbid, soapy noise of the piers, from the mountains comes the plate of silence that shepherds eat, but we hear only our distances.” At the bottom of one of the sailor sketches he produced in Buenos Aires, Lorca wrote, “Only mystery keeps us alive, only mystery.”

  In late December, in a public address from the stage of the Teatro Avenida, he welcomed the crew of a Spanish frigate to Argentina. “People use a white handkerchief to say goodbye and a warm hand to say hello,” he told the sailors.

  Hands and handkerchiefs form a trembling garland along the shore of every port in the world … Between the handkerchief that sends him off and the hand that welcomes him home lies the sailor’s true greeting: arrival and departure, happiness and sadness, in the dark, dead waves that push against the stone of the pier.

  He made dozens of drawings in Buenos Aires. Lacking the time and inclination to write, he poured himself into art. He had not sketched so prolifically since New York. On loose sheets of paper, inside books, as an embellishment to his autograph, he drew trailing vines, lemons, flowers, arrows, faces, and harlequins. He turned his signature into a work of art, elongating the letters of his name, twining them around one another, embroidering them with images.

  He illustrated poems by his Argentine friends. He produced four drawings of sailors to accompany the Mexican writer Salvador Novo’s bilingual Seamen Rhymes. Lorca made the sketches as a surprise and presented them to Novo, who was in hospital at the time. During his visit, Lorca insisted that he could relieve the symptoms of Novo’s ailment through Gypsy remedies, one of which entailed tossing water out of the window. Moments later, a hospital administrator appeared and briskly informed the two that a pedestrian had just been splashed by water from Novo’s room.

  In collaboration with Neruda, Lorca created ten pen-and-ink drawings to illustrate a short series of poems and phrases by the Chilean. The two men produced a single handmade copy of the work, which they later gave to a friend. Lorca’s illustrations recall the disturbing drawings generated by his visit to New York four years earlier. Coupled with such phrases as “Only Death,” “Nuptial Material,” and “Severity,” individual sketches show skeletons, drops of blood, and abstracted features of the human anatomy. In a drawing called “Sexual Water,” Lorca depicts a nude female torso, with blood and handlike tentacles spilling from her vagina, and the words “Moon” and “Love” trailing from her mouth.

  The final sketch of the series shows two decapitated, eyeless, bleeding heads—one of which is clearly Lorca’s, the other Neruda’s—displayed side by side on a table beneath a crescent moon with a single eye. Like the mock deaths Lorca had staged at the Residencia, the drawing seems an attempt to stare death in the face and, by so doing, to diminish the terrible power of its grip. Underneath the image Lorca wrote, “Severed heads of Federico García Lorca and Pablo Neruda, authors of this book of poems. This pathetic drawing was made on the afternoon of Tuesday the 13th of [March] 1934 in the city of Santa María de los Buenos Aires, as were all the other drawings.”

  Neruda attended the opening night performance of Lola Membrives’s new production of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife on December 1, 1933. According to one audience member, “all of Buenos Aires” was present that evening, and sat waving to one another in the theater before the curtain rose.

  Lorca revised his farce substantially for Membrives, who was older, plumper, and more brunette than the lithe young blonde called for in the original script. Membrives was also a gifted singer and dancer, and Lorca accordingly added five music and dance sequences to his play, so that it now resembled a comic opera more
than a conventional farce. He told a reporter that he preferred the newer, more musical rendition of his play. Margarita Xirgu’s 1930 performance of the work had been merely a “chamber version,” he said. “Its true premiere is in Buenos Aires.”

  Lorca spent the afternoon of December 1 vigorously rehearsing the cast of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. He praised those actors who had done well and reprimanded those who had strayed from his concept of the play. He seemed apprehensive about the production, and in interviews tried repeatedly to prepare Argentine audiences for the play by reminding them that with its “light and lively rhythm” it differed vastly from Blood Wedding. “I’d be tempted to call the work a ‘pantocomedy,’ if the word didn’t sound so pharmaceutical to me,” he said. “… The work is almost a ballet. It’s both a pantomime and a play.”

  He performed the opening night prologue himself. Dressed in a tuxedo and carrying a top hat in his hand, he spoke to the huge crowd about the magic of the theater. He then released a live dove from his hat. As the bird flew through the house, the audience clapped. Critics and theatergoers were charmed by the vibrancy of the production’s music, dance, and scenery, but less enthusiastic about the script, which many thought too brief. Well-wishers crowded into Lorca’s flower-filled dressing room after the performance. Beaming, he hugged them. “Membrives is crazy about me!” he gushed afterward in a letter to his parents.

  Of course! I’m a lottery that she’s just won! … I get the impression that I can produce anything here, no matter how daring it is, because the public has tremendous respect for its authors, unlike the uncouth Madrid crowds that

  stomp their feet

  the moment you give them something they don’t understand.

  Two weeks later he premiered another work, a half-hour review of popular Spanish songs called Fin de Fiesta, performed by Membrives and several actresses from her company. The short spectacle was designed to supplement The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, and included many of Lorca’s favorite songs. “One certainly sees the spirit of Garcia Lorca in it,” a reviewer said of the show. A reporter who stopped in to watch a rehearsal found Lorca striding energetically through an empty theater as Membrives and her colleagues rehearsed. “Don’t lose the rhythm!” Lorca cried, and waved his arms to mark the beat. “Just a minute. Those rhythms are like this,” he said, and sat down at a piano to illustrate his point. “Girls, hold your arms up! Very good. That’s better.” Lorca turned to his visitor and said, “I could go on staging these ‘fin de fiestas’ for years.”