Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  In public, Lorca maintained a pretense of well-being. On March 15, at a special performance of La niña boba given for the actors of Buenos Aires, he praised Membrives, calling her a “distinguished actress … a maja with a fan of fire, a somber woman or crazy girl, a true glory of the theater.” That night he also spoke out against the purely commercial theater. He reminded Argentina’s actors that the theater is:

  an art, a great art, an art born with man, one that he carries in the noblest part of his soul. When man wants to express what is most profound about his history and his being, he does so through performance, through the repetition of physical attitudes.

  Ten days later, on March 25, he was still in Buenos Aires. At one-thirty that morning he and designer Manuel Fontanals presented a once-only performance of Lorca’s newly revised puppet play, Don Cristóbal’s Puppet Show, at the Teatro Avenida. The production was intended as a farewell gift to the people of Buenos Aires.

  Lorca stood behind a small, brightly colored stage in the lobby of the theater, and together with actors from Membrives’s company presented three puppet plays: a portion of the Eumenides, by Aeschylus; a Cervantes interlude; and his own Don Cristóbal’s Puppet Show. The performance lasted until dawn. He opened the presentation with a quick exchange between two puppets—an autobiographical “Poet,” with a receding hairline and thick black eyebrows, and Don Cristóbal. The two puppets reminisced about the show they had staged together eleven years earlier, with Manuel de Falla, in Lorca’s living room in Granada.

  “I’m sad,” Cristóbal confessed.

  “What’s this?” the Poet asked.

  “Nothing. I’m going away with Lorca and Fontanals. They’ve told me to say goodbye, because in the end I can’t shed tears, and they can … and they don’t want to become sad.” Cristóbal thanked the audience and praised Lola Membrives. “May she always remember us, and may she remember Federico, who will always love her.”

  In addition to a Poet, Lorca’s new version of Don Cristóbal’s Puppet Show featured a Director, who periodically interrupts the action to rebuke cast members whenever they deviate from the written text, and who at the close of the play pleads for an end to the “boredom and vulgarity to which we have condemned the stage.” Fast-paced, loosely structured, and filled with bawdy language, the new show was both an exploration and a defense of creative freedom. Several women and at least one man in the audience took offense at the play’s salacious dialogue and blatant sexual allusions, and walked out on Lorca’s early-morning performance.

  “If bad words are capable of frightening people, what effect will good words have?” a reporter quipped afterward. Others howled at the ribald exchanges between Cristóbal and Rosita. “What are you going to do to me?” Rosita asks her new husband shortly after their marriage.

  “I’m going to make you moooooo!”

  “And at midnight, what will you do?”

  “I’ll make you aaaaaaah!”

  “And at three in the morning?”

  “I’ll make you piiiiii!”

  Funnier still were Lorca’s deliberate jibes at those who sat in the Avenida that night watching his play: theater reviewers, writers, artists, and actors whom he had come to know during his six-month stay in Argentina, including Pablo Neruda. Early in the play, Don Cristóbal lists several of these people by name and describes the sounds they make while snoring. Lorca also made a fleeting reference to himself. “If you don’t keep quiet, I’ll go up there and split that big cornbread face of yours!” the Director commands the Poet in the play’s opening scene. Scrutinizing his brother’s play years later, Paco García Lorca recognized in the Poet’s “cornbread” looks Lorca’s own “brown face, with its salient cheekbones, a face made fuller by the passage of time.”

  His success in Buenos Aires and Montevideo had proved to Lorca that his work could attract an international audience. He regarded his experience as a “triumph for the Spanish theater.” As he prepared to leave South America, his mind reeled with ideas for new projects. “You can’t imagine how many ideas,” he said later.

  On the eve of his departure from Buenos Aires, he visited Pablo Neruda. Even then, Lorca remained captive to his celebrity. A journalist recorded and subsequently published the poets’ conversation that night. “It’s hard for me to leave Buenos Aires!” Lorca exclaimed, deliberately tailoring his remarks to a wider public. “I spent months roaming New York, and when I left, I did so almost happily … But now, although I’m anxious to join my loved ones, I feel as if I’m leaving a part of myself behind in this magical city.” He praised Neruda. Then he began to weep. After a moment, Neruda broke the silence and talked about something else. Later, Lorca confessed that he detested goodbyes. “They break my heart. Please, tomorrow at the ship, be happy, all of you,” he urged. “Let’s pretend that I’m going to the Tigris, and that we’ll see each other again some day.”

  The following day, March 27, Lorca boarded a transatlantic liner bound for Spain. With him were the designer Manuel Fontanals and his daughter, Rosa María. Friends assembled on the pier to see them off. “This is so that the party can continue,” Lorca told the group, and he handed them a small package. When they later opened the box, his friends found a “fabulous wad” of money inside. They spent the sum on one exuberant party after another.

  Laden with memories and gifts—more than a dozen autographed books and an assortment of colonial silver pieces, including an ornate soup tureen from Uruguay—Lorca set sail. Weeks earlier he had told a reporter, “To myself, I still feel like a child. The emotions of childhood are still with me.” An immigrant woman from Fuente Vaqueros had approached him during his last weeks in Buenos Aires and shown him an old, yellowing photograph of a baby. “Do you know him, Federico?” she had asked.

  “No.”

  “It’s you, when you were a year old. I was present at your birth.” She pointed to a spot on the photograph where the cardboard was torn. “Your little hands did that when the picture was new. You ripped it … the rip in this photograph is such a wonderful souvenir for me.” Lorca wanted to hug the woman, to kiss the photograph. But instead he simply stared at it. “There it was, my first work,” he told the reporter. “I don’t know whether it was good or bad. But it was mine.”

  His ship, the Conte Biancamano, docked briefly in Río de Janeiro on March 30, the day before Easter. Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican ambassador to Brazil and a writer whom Lorca knew casually, presented Lorca with a glass case containing the preserved remains of half a dozen brightly colored Brazilian butterflies.

  Five days later, in the midst of the Atlantic, Lorca drafted a series of five new poems. He later included the works in a larger collection based loosely on traditional Arabic and Persian verse forms. In each of the five poems, he alludes to his circumstances at the moment of composition. “As I am lost in the heart of certain children,” he writes in “Ghazal of the Flight,”

  I have often been lost on the sea.

  Not knowing water, I keep looking

  to be consumed in luminous death.

  In “Ghazal of Dark Death,” he longs to “sleep the sleep of that child / who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.” He speaks of a drowned child in “Qasida of One Wounded by Water,” and of the wind in “Qasida of the Weeping” and “Qasida of the Impossible Hand.” The boundaries between childhood, love, and death blur in all five of the poems Lorca wrote during his journey home, but nowhere is the distinction between life and death more obscure than in “Ghazal of the Flight”:

  There is no one who can kiss

  without feeling the smile of those without faces;

  there is no one who can touch

  an infant and forget the immobile skulls of horses.

  From the start of his career, Lorca had grounded his work in the belief that life, death, and beauty are intertwined, that neither love nor children can deliver human beings from the fundamental sorrow of existence. As he sailed east toward Spain, toward those he loved most in the wor
ld, he pondered the evanescence of life and imagined both the comfort and the anguish of oblivion:

  I want to sleep just a moment,

  a moment, a minute, a century.

  But let it be known that I have not died:

  that there is a stable of gold in my lips,

  that I am the West Wind’s little friend,

  that I am the enormous shadow of my tears.

  During his last weeks in Buenos Aires, Lorca had talked at length to journalist José Luna about death. “Death begins when we are resting,” Lorca had said.

  Next time you’re at a party, talking serenely, take a look at everyone’s shoes. You’ll see them resting, horribly resting. You’ll see that they are dumb, somber, expressionless things, utterly useless and already about to die. Boots and feet, when they are resting, obsess me with their deathliness. I look at a pair of resting feet—resting in that tragic way that only feet can learn—and I think, “Ten, twenty, forty years more and their repose will be absolute. Or maybe in a few minutes. Maybe in an hour. Death is already in them.”

  For that reason, Lorca explained, he never took naps with his shoes on. If he so much as glanced at his feet while lying in bed, he was reminded of the corpses he had seen as a boy in the

  vega

  . “Their feet were always like that, close together, resting, in their new shoes … And that,” he told his interviewer, “is death.”

  22

  Sad Breeze in the Olive Groves

  1934

  After a journey of sixteen days, the Conte Biancamano docked in Barcelona on April 11, 1934. Lorca immediately caught the train for Madrid, and arrived in the capital grinning “with satisfaction,” remembered Pedro Salinas, and giddy with pride at the enormous amount of money he had made overseas. Pulling handfuls of pesetas from his pockets, he treated friends to drinks and dinner. When members of La Barraca tried to give him a banquet, Lorca surreptitiously contrived to pay the bill.

  Dressed in a white linen suit, suntanned, jubilant, he looked and behaved like the celebrity he had become. At home and abroad, people proclaimed him an “ambassador” of Spanish literature. There was talk of sending him to the Philippines as a representative of the “new Spanish poetry.” Schools in Spain now taught his poems; theater companies vied for his work. The Defensor de Granada noted that overseas Lorca had been “definitively consecrated the Man of the Stage.” During a brief visit to Granada later that month, Lorca told a friend, “The sky is weighing me down. What success! You can’t ask for more.” He said that in Argentina he had been paid “for the nonsense I used to do over here. Lots of money. The theater was full every day. They want me to go back.” He boasted that the experience had made him believe in God. “I have no choice but to believe!”

  Under the heading “Our Embassy Returns,” the Heraldo de Madrid published an interview with him on April 14. In it, a beaming Lorca ushered journalist Miguel Pérez Ferrero into his parents’ apartment in Madrid, pointed to a table, and said, “Look.” Pérez Ferrero beheld an “astonishing” display of clippings from Lorca’s Argentine visit: editorials, reviews, stories, photographs. Of the trip itself, Lorca said briskly:

  I’ll give you a few facts. One hundred and seventy performances of

  Blood Wedding

  , a hundred of

  The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife

  , and most recently

  Mariana Pineda

  , which is heading toward its fortieth performance … As for the Buenos Aires public, they’re extremely respectful. If they like a work, they go to see it. If not, the company stops offering it after the third performance. Fortunately, that hasn’t happened in my case.

  He discussed the state of the contemporary Spanish stage: “In Spain, the bourgeoisie and the middle class, who have prostituted our theater, will soon learn how to fix it.” He reviewed his accomplishments as a lecturer in both Buenos Aires and Montevideo, and he talked of the quantity of his work that had been published in South America. Pérez Ferrero asked his thoughts on the current political situation in Spain. “But isn’t this politics?” Lorca cried. “I believe it is. Great politics, effective politics, marvelous politics!”

  The Second Spanish Republic marked its third anniversary on April 14, 1934. Despite celebrations throughout Madrid, the mood on the streets was somber. At one point, authorities discovered a republican flag, fringed in black, flying over the post office building. It was quickly removed.

  Since the November 1933 elections, the Spanish government had undergone a number of drastic changes. In the first months of 1934, the coalition government of Prime Minister Alejandro Lerroux had repealed a variety of legislative acts imposed by earlier republican leaders. Lerroux’s administration had restored religious education and government payment of priests’ salaries, granted clemency to all political prisoners, and abandoned efforts to reform the country’s corrupt agrarian system. His right-wing cabinet had also tried, unsuccessfully, to restore capital punishment.

  In early April, Lerroux abruptly resigned in protest after the Spanish president, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, delayed ratifying the new act granting clemency to political prisoners. Months of ineffective rule by a new prime minister, Ricardo Samper, followed. Violent confrontations took place in villages throughout the Spanish countryside. In several places, military drills by both right- and left-wing groups became a regular Sunday afternoon event. For many citizens, the specter of Hitler’s Germany—where a legally elected, constitutional government was being systematically dismantled—loomed large. Spaniards worried in particular about the role the Catholic Church had played in Hitler’s rise to power. In 1933 the Vatican had signed a Concordat with the German Führer. During the week that Lorca returned to Spain, speakers at a gathering of right-wing Catholic youth in Granada openly voiced their admiration for both Hitler and Mussolini.

  Blissfully immersed in the commotion surrounding his triumphant return, Lorca overlooked the more troubling implications of his country’s political turmoil and settled comfortably into his old routines: nightly soirées at Morla Lynch’s home, daily rehearsals with La Barraca. The company had just returned from an excursion to Morocco. Lorca hoped to take them to Argentina, and talked excitedly about the prospect. During his absence the troupe had come under attack by right-wing journalists, who accused the company of taking jobs away from Madrid’s unemployed professional actors. The left-wing press had defended the company, noting that it consisted exclusively of student actors who received no salary. For a time, members of the troupe feared they might lose their government subsidy. Although the debate eventually slackened, the company’s status remained tenuous.

  In mid-May, the troupe staged the first of several private shows using a set of puppets Lorca had brought back with him from his Buenos Aires production of Don Cristóbal’s Puppet Show. Lorca himself took part in the spectacle, playing the role of the Poet in a sanitized version of the bawdy Cristóbal he had presented in Argentina. (For the Barraca performance, he instructed one of his student actresses to cut a sequence of lines in which Rosita applies rice powder so that Don Cristóbal’s “cock hurts her better.”) That month Lorca also helped direct a production of Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom for Pura Ucelay’s Anfistora Club; the show opened at Madrid’s Teatro Español in late spring.

  On June 1, Pablo Neruda arrived in Madrid with his wife, Maruca. The two were on their way to the Chilean consulate in Barcelona, where the thirty-year-old Neruda had been assigned a diplomatic post. Lorca went to the train station with his companion Rafael Rodríguez Rapún and others to greet the couple. Neruda emerged tall and pale from the car, his pockets stuffed with newspapers. The group immediately took off for a tavern, where they drank wine, talked, and recited poetry.

  It soon became clear that Neruda had no intention of settling in Barcelona. For the first several months of his appointment, he shuttled back and forth between the Catalan capital and Madrid; early the following year he transferred permanently to the Chilean consul
ate in Madrid. His home became the site of boisterous gatherings that lasted for days, fueled by Neruda’s lethal “punch concoctions” and his indifference to time. Guests would pack crosswise into beds so that everyone had room to sleep; people often woke to find the party still in full swing. The festivities frequently culminated in the “inauguration” of a public monument, a rite invented by Lorca and Neruda. Posing as civic authorities, the two poets would stand beside some monument in the capital and deliver grandiloquent speeches while their friends imitated a ceremonial band. At a formal presentation later in the year, Lorca introduced Neruda as one of the great Latin American poets of his day, a writer “closer to death than philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink.” Neruda “lacks the two elements with which so many false poets have lived: hatred and irony,” he said. For his part, Neruda thought Lorca “the guiding spirit of this moment in our language.”

  The Chilean dropped in regularly on Lorca’s Barraca rehearsals. Lorca devoted much of June and July 1934 to the troupe, preparing his actors for their weeklong residency that August at the International University in Santander. Controversy continued to plague the company. On July 5, the Falangist paper FE accused La Barraca of moving “in the turbid waters of Jewish Marxism.” The paper addressed Lorca’s student performers directly: “Your duty to this hungry nation … is to present an example of sacrifice. An example of sacrifice, students, not of licentiousness. Nor should you be wasting money that doesn’t belong to you.”