Lorca
Page 50
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon
.
A basketful of lime in readiness
at five in the afternoon
.
Beyond that, death and death alone
at five in the afternoon
.
Although Sánchez Mejías had died at 9:45 in the morning, Lorca chose the more resonant “five in the afternoon” as his friend’s metaphorical hour of death. On the day of the bullfighter’s funeral, the Madrid newspaper ABC had announced in bold type that the burial procession would begin “at five o’clock in the afternoon”; the day after the funeral the same paper reported that the dead man’s coffin had left the chapel “at exactly five o’clock.” Lorca seized on the hour—the “hour of truth,” according to a Castilian proverb—and transformed it into a repetitive sound whose cumulative effect is that of a thudding drum summoning mourners to a funeral. “When I was composing the Lament,” he said later, “the line with the fateful ‘five in the afternoon’ filled my head like the tolling of a bell, and I broke into a cold sweat thinking that such an hour was waiting for me, too. Sharp and precise like a knife. The hour was the awful thing.”
The poem’s second section, “The Spilled Blood,” continues the saga of the bullfighter’s death. Written in a ballad meter that recalls the dead or dying Andalusian heroes of Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads, “The Spilled Blood” recounts the great quantity of blood that filled the sand of the bullring where Sánchez Mejías was gored. Confronted by the awful sight, the poet cries recurrently, “I refuse to see it”—the precise words Lorca had used when informing Jorge Guillén of Sánchez Mejías’s death. Allusions to early Andalusian bull cults and to a set of weathered Iberian sculptures—the so-called “bulls of Guisando”—outside Madrid elevate the bullfighter’s prosaic death in a twentieth-century hospital room to an event of mythical stature:
The cow of this ancient world
was running her dreary tongue
over snoutfuls of blood
spilled across the sand,
and the bulls of Guisando,
almost death and nearly stone,
lowed like two centuries
tired of treading earth.
No.
I refuse to see it!
The man Lorca knew and loved in life becomes an epic hero, a “prince,” a “marble torso,” a vestige of “Rome’s Andalusia”:
What a great fighter in the ring!
What a good mountaineer on the heights!
How gentle toward ears of grain!
How harsh applying the spurs!
How tender toward the dew!
How dazzling at the fair!
How magnificent when he wielded
the last banderillas of the dark.
In section three, “Presence of the Body,” the heroic bullfighter—“Ignacio the wellborn”—metamorphoses into a rotting cadaver surrounded by “fetid silence” and “wet to the bone with tears of snow.” As he contemplates his friend’s body, Lorca moves from anguish toward acceptance, from a private refusal to see Sánchez Mejías’s blood to a public acknowledgment of the inevitability of death:
I don’t want them covering his face with kerchiefs
to break him in to the wearing of death.
Go now, Ignacio. Feel no more the hot bellows.
Sleep, soar, repose. The sea dies too!
“Presence of the Body” leads to “Absence of the Soul,” the last of the Lament’s four sections, a six-stanza reckoning of the ways that death has rendered Sánchez Mejías obsolete. The opening stanza sets the tone for the section and introduces its blunt refrain:
The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,
nor horses, nor the ants on your floors.
The child does not know you, nor the evening,
because your death is forever.
Only the final two stanzas of the section offer a semblance of consolation:
No one knows you. No one. But I sing you—
sing your profile and your grace, for later on.
The signal ripeness of your mastery.
The way you sought death out, savored its taste.
The sadness just beneath your gay valor.
Not soon, if ever, will Andalusia see
so towering a man, so venturesome.
I sing his elegance with words that moan
and remember a sad breeze in the olive groves.
Years earlier, Sánchez Mejías had told Lorca that as a sixteen-year-old, he had once sneaked out of his father’s house and gone to a nearby farm in order to fight bulls from his neighbor’s herd. “I was proud of my passes,” the bullfighter remembered, “but it made me sad that there was no one there to applaud me. So when a breeze rustled the olive trees, I lifted my hand and waved.”
Lorca dedicated Lament to Ignacio Sánchez Mejías to his “dear friend Encarnación López Júlvez,” La Argentinita, the dancer who had been the married bullfighter’s lover for the past several years. He published the poem in its entirety in the spring of 1935, in a twenty-two-page edition illustrated by José Caballero. The volume included a formal obituary portrait of Sánchez Mejías—a traditional taurine image, with a border, a crown, a list of the places where the bullfighter had enjoyed his greatest successes, and the name of the bull that had killed him. Lorca refused, however, to let Caballero print the bull’s real name, Granadino. Its linguistic proximity to “Granada” unnerved him. He told the painter to put instead, “A bull from the stable of Ayala killed him.”
Both friends and reviewers praised the poem. Miguel Pérez Ferrero of the Heraldo de Madrid observed that for “those who want to know him in the future,” Sánchez Mejías, “and what he implied,” is alive in the Lament. In the southern town of Huelva, a reviewer for La Provincia hailed Lorca’s “clear and strong” silhouette of the bullfighter, but questioned the poet’s decision to dedicate the work to Sánchez Mejías’s lover. “It’s unpleasant, this sort of bad taste.”
Lorca ignored all commentary. “What I’ve written will never rival four lines sung by a weeping Gypsy woman in Seville,” he told friends. “Little night stars,” the Gypsy had intoned,
let me cross over the bridge,
for I want to see my Ignacio
whose body lives on the other shore.
23
Revolution
1934-35
More than ever, Lorca wanted to create theater. He relished the impermanence of the stage. Plays “last as long as the performance lasts, and nothing more,” he said. The beauty of the theater is that, “scarcely created, it vanishes. It is the art of the moment. It is built upon sand.” He felt an “enormous sense of laziness and dismay” at the thought of selecting and preparing his poetry for publication. The theater, on the other hand, posed no such threat. “I go on with my life, and with my life, my theater,” he announced in late 1934, “to which I intend from this day on to dedicate the most deeply felt of my poetic urges.”
His work with La Barraca, in particular, had led Lorca to see himself as a man of the stage: a playwright, a director, a designer, a participant in the renovation of the Spanish theater. Miguel de Unamuno attended a performance by La Barraca at the International University in Santander in the summer of 1934, and afterward published an article about the group’s inspired educational work. La Barraca, he stressed, is a “profound movement, one that is not only pedagogical, but in the strictest sense of the word is demagogic—that is, political.”
Frenchman Jean Prévost also saw the company perform in Santander in 1934 and told Lorca he had not seen a better university theater anywhere in Europe. “Come to Paris,” he urged. The Spanish poet Dámaso Alonso talked of founding a similar troupe in Barcelona. The Italian journalist Ezio Levi published an account of La Barraca’s work in a 1934 issue of the Milan journal Scenario. Levi tried to arrange for the company
to visit Italy, and he persuaded Luigi Pirandello to invite Lorca to attend an international theater congress in Rome as a representative of Spain. Lorca asked Levi if he could bring Rafael Rapún with him. “The Congress invites me to bring along my wife, but since I don’t have one, could I bring along the secretary of La Barraca, who is also my private secretary?” Lorca confessed his ambivalence about the congress. “You know that I’m intense and not very sociable, and I’m a little frightened by all official things. I have a childish character, and it will be good to be with so many brilliant people.”
Ultimately he declined Pirandello’s invitation. By late September the producers of Yerma had decided to stage the work during the fall theater season, and Lorca did not want to miss any rehearsals. He told Pirandello that domestic obligations prevented him from leaving Spain.
The Spanish Cortes reconvened in Madrid on October 1, 1934. At the opening session of the parliamentary body, José María Gil Robles, the Catholic spokesman for the Spanish Right and leader of CEDA, the right-wing Catholic alliance—the largest single party in the Cortes—withdrew both his and CEDA’s support from the foundering government of Prime Minister Ricardo Samper. Samper’s cabinet dissolved, as did the tenuous coalition between the country’s right- and left-wing parties.
The Spanish president, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, promptly asked former prime minister Alejandro Lerroux to form a new coalition government. Lerroux did so, and for the first time included three members of CEDA in the nation’s cabinet. Many Spaniards—even some conservative republicans—were appalled. Because of its strict pro-Catholic stance, the party had never sworn allegiance to the Republic. Leftists, in particular, feared that Lerroux’s endorsement of CEDA marked the country’s first step toward a fascist regime. While not officially a fascist, the party’s power-hungry leader, Gil Robles, had visited Germany in 1933 to meet with Hitler and study Nazi propaganda. In Spain, he encouraged his followers to greet him as Jefe, as though he were the Führer or Duce, and to mouth anti-Semitic slogans. He and his right-wing CEDA colleagues mounted rallies similar to the one Hitler had staged at Nuremberg. In April 1934, Gil Robles had braved a cold rain in El Escorial—the site of Philip II’s imposing sixteenth-century monastery, and the burial ground for all of Spain’s kings—to tell some thirty thousand Catholic youths from Madrid that if the republican revolution “descended into the streets,” they would be there to meet it heroically. The crowd cheered. In early September 1934, Gil Robles had staged a similar youth rally at Covadonga, in Asturias, the site of an eighth-century battle traditionally considered the start of the long Christian Reconquest of Arab Spain. Through his shrewdly symbolic act, the Catholic leader tapped into the central epic of Spanish history and, to those willing to see it, established a clear link between the Muslim invaders of medieval Spain and the left-wing working classes of the twentieth century.
In protest against CEDA’s presence in the Spanish cabinet, several republican leaders, among them former prime minister Manuel Azaña, resigned. The country’s leading trade union called for a nationwide general strike; workers in Madrid, Barcelona, and the northern province of Asturias complied. Strikes in Madrid and Barcelona, where Catalan nationalists proclaimed a short-lived, independent Catalan state, were quickly put down; in Barcelona, approximately twenty citizens died in skirmishes with the Spanish military. At a rally in Madrid, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, head of the Spanish Falange and the de facto leader of the country’s fascist movement, spoke out against the Moscow-based “Marxist-Jewish” conspiracy that threatened to destroy Spain.
In Asturias, a stretch of rugged green land along the country’s northern coast, Spanish miners launched a full-scale working-class revolution in opposition to what they regarded as the “fascist conquest of power in Madrid.” The Asturian revolt began on the morning of October 5. Within three days, striking miners controlled much of the region. Revolutionary committees dedicated to a “new society” run by “comrades” took over the administration of towns and villages. Makeshift recruitment offices summoned workers between the ages of eighteen and forty to join the “Red Army.” By mid-October, thirty thousand workers were mobilized for battle, and the Spanish military had imposed martial law. The miners’ strike had become an undeclared civil war.
Francisco Franco, a short, pallid, forty-two-year-old general in the Spanish army known for his right-wing views and icy demeanor, was put in charge of all military operations in Asturias. As a young cadet in the Toledo Infantry Academy, and later as a twenty-eight-year-old major stationed in Spanish Morocco, Franco had honed his combat skills and earned a reputation for brutality. His troops routinely decapitated Moroccan prisoners and displayed their severed heads as trophies; Franco himself condoned the killing and mutilation of prisoners, and once ordered one of his own men shot by a firing squad after the soldier refused to eat his rations.
A vehement nationalist who in time saw himself as a contemporary El Cid come to vanquish the heathen communist hordes, Franco reveled in his powerful new role as military, and, by virtue of martial law, political commander of Asturias. From his command room in the Ministry of War in Madrid, he directed the movement of troops, ships, and trains to be used in crushing the miners’ revolution. He shipped Arab mercenaries from Morocco to Asturias, ordered the bombing and shelling of working-class districts in Asturian mining towns, and instructed army units to fire on civilians. “This is a frontier war against socialism, communism, and whatever attacks civilization in order to replace it with barbarism,” he told a reporter.
By October 10, Franco’s campaign of repression had quelled the revolution in the region’s two largest cities, Oviedo and Gijón. Summary executions of workers took place in both towns. Terrorized by the ferocity of Franco’s tactics and the cruelty of his troops—particularly his Moroccan units, who committed untold atrocities—and demoralized by the high number of civilian losses, especially among women and children, the remaining Asturian rebels surrendered by October 20. Right-wing Spaniards proclaimed Franco the “savior of the country.” Prime Minister Lerroux subsequently awarded him the Gran Cruz de Mérito Militar and appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Spanish Armed Forces in Morocco, a post Franco considered “the most important military command.”
The republican government promptly violated the terms of the workers’ surrender. Inside temporary jails, soldiers committed rape, torture, and murder. All told, more than a thousand Asturian civilians, most of them miners, died during the three-week revolution. Another 3,000 citizens were injured. Between 30,000 and 40,000 were arrested, possibly more.
In a blatant propaganda campaign, the far-right press circulated false stories of atrocities carried out by striking workers against their military opponents, and against children and nuns; at least one left-wing reporter who tried to set the record straight was shot dead. Until 1935, the government censored all accounts of the Asturian revolution; consequently, Spanish citizens knew little about what had actually happened. A parliamentary committee eventually investigated the rebellion and its aftermath, and disclosed evidence of torture inside Asturian jails. But many Spaniards so feared a recurrence of the violence that shook Asturias in 1934 that they began to favor a military dictatorship over the chaos of the current republican administration. Despite efforts to steer his government toward a more moderate path, Prime Minister Lerroux was unable to contain the quarreling factions of his coalition administration. By March 1935, Lerroux had formed a new cabinet. Five of its members belonged to CEDA.
Lorca remained in Madrid throughout the Asturian crisis. The episode horrified him. “My God,” he said to a friend, “why are these things happening?” Like others, he became accustomed to the sight of soldiers patrolling the capital’s streets and rooftops with rifles. One day he heard gunfire outside his family’s apartment; he was certain it was machine-gun fire. Suddenly a random bullet struck near, or in, the apartment, and Lorca panicked. He telephoned Rafael Rapún in hysterics. Rapún reminded Lorca that it was jus
t a stray bullet and, urging him to remain calm, hurried to the apartment to console him.
To members of Lorca’s generation, the Asturian rebellion was a “culminating moment,” in the words of poet Juan Gil-Albert, a call to action, an urgent signal, wrote Manolo Altolaguirre, “to adapt our work, our lives, to the liberation of Spain.” The battle lines were clear: Spain had plunged into a bitter struggle between republican and nationalist, Left and Right, communist and fascist. In the wake of the Asturian revolt, new left-wing literary reviews and journals appeared, as did proletarian books and poems, ranging from autobiographical works such as Blood of October, by an Asturian miner, to political verse by Rafael Alberti and Emilio Prados. In a newspaper article, poet José Moreno Villa warned that a “cruel poison is pulsing through our blood, a mad toxin.”
Seventeen years earlier, in his adolescent essay “Patriotism,” written in October 1917, at the height of the First World War, Lorca had railed against war and the attitudes that provoked it. He had decried Spain’s bellicose past, its legacy of inquisition and extermination, its “political crimes.” He had mourned the kindhearted men—“Martyrs! Christs! Quixotes!”—who sacrificed their lives to the cause of peace. “Where are the poets so that they can weep?” he asked. The Asturian revolt and its savage aftermath refueled his indignation. Although he neither belonged to nor backed any political party, Lorca voluntarily spoke out against the bloodshed that had occurred in northern Spain. Asked in the fall of 1934 why La Barraca did not plan to give any performances that season, he answered dramatically, “How are we going to perform when there are so many widows in Spain!” He knew at least two people who were imprisoned as a result of the Asturian revolution; one was Manuel Azaña, the former republican prime minister, who despite having played no role in the rebellion, was arrested by government authorities in Barcelona on October 7, subjected to a vicious smear campaign, and imprisoned for three months. Azaña became a vivid symbol for all victims of the repression. In November, Lorca signed a collective letter of protest demanding Azaña’s release from jail. In late December, Azaña was freed. Lorca told a journalist that at times he wondered why, given what was happening in the world, he continued to write. “But one must work,” he said. “Work and help those who deserve it. Work even though sometimes you think the effort is useless. Work as a form of protest.”