Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  That evening the two stopped to eat in a small town where death bells were tolling. “It’s for a local girl who threw herself into a well. A love affair,” a villager explained. Lorca abruptly stood up. “Let’s go back to Madrid,” he said.

  Sometime later he described the episode in even more mythical terms to Pablo Neruda, transforming the “flock of lambs” in Ucelay’s version of the story into a “single lamb” of archetypal dimension. His voice quivering, Lorca told how one morning while traveling with Ucelay he had awakened at dawn and gone outside to watch the sunrise. A thick mist shrouded the landscape. As he sat waiting for the sky to brighten, a tiny lamb appeared. The animal had apparently strayed from its flock. Moments later a half-dozen black swine emerged from the gloom, crossed the road, and to Lorca’s horror fell on the lamb. “Federico, prey to an inexpressible fear, immobilized by horror, watched as the black swine killed and devoured the lamb,” Neruda would remember. “When he told me about it on his return to Madrid, his voice still trembled. Because of his childlike sensitivity, the tragedy of the death obsessed him to the point of delirium.”

  At the end of January, the actors and actresses of Madrid petitioned Margarita Xirgu to present a special after-hours performance of Yerma so that they could see the celebrated show. Xirgu agreed, and gave an “actors-only” performance of the production at one-thirty in the morning on February 1. Thunderous applause erupted the moment the curtain rose, and Xirgu had to wait for the noise to die down before starting the play. The crowd clapped strenuously at the end of each act and gave the cast a standing ovation at the final curtain. Xirgu wept with gratitude as bouquets of flowers from her colleagues fell at her feet.

  Moments later Lorca spoke to the audience from the stage. He wore a double-breasted, pin-striped suit with a white shirt and black bow tie. His hair was slicked back, and his face showed deepening lines. He told the crowd that for some time he had rejected homages, tributes, and testimonial dinners in his honor, for each such event signaled “another brick on our literary tomb,” and brought bad luck to its recipient. But he had agreed to accept this tribute because it came from his peers.

  He stated his case for a “theater of social action.” “I’m not talking tonight as an author, or as a poet, or as a simple student of the rich panorama of human life, but as an ardent, impassioned devotee of the theater and its social action. The theater is one of the most expressive and useful instruments for the edification of a country, and the barometer that measures its greatness or decline.” His speech was a further refinement of his lifelong attempt to articulate a theatrical aesthetic. He had always regarded the stage as a temple of art, not of commerce; as a place where spectator and performer confront one another with sometimes violent consequences. In his prologue to The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, in the opening exchange of his Cristobal plays, throughout The Audience, he had denounced the bourgeois theater of the day and called for a theater of magic, one that shocks viewers by revealing the unexpected.

  A decadent theater, he told his listeners that evening, “can cheapen and lull to sleep an entire nation.”

  A people that does not cherish and support its theater is either dead or dying, just as a theater that does not use laughter and tears to take the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people and the genuine color of its landscape and spirit, has no right to call itself a theater, but should be thought of instead as a game hall or a place for doing that dreadful thing known as “killing time.”

  Lorca vowed to continue fighting for artistic freedom as long as he lived—“if I live.” He promised that his “burning love for the theater” would not wane. He swore that he would go on seeking the truth, working to replace the worn-out conventions of the commercial stage with the nobility of genuine art. “I know,” he said in closing,

  that it is not those people who say, “Now, now, now,” with their eyes fixed on the small jaws of the box office, who are right, but rather those who say, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow,” and feel the approach of the new life which is hovering over the world.

  Yerma continued to enthrall the public and to prompt debate. In late February, the controversial republican leader Manuel Azaña attended a performance of the play. Released from jail just two months earlier, Azaña was newly determined to revive both his reputation and the republican left wing. The former prime minister sat prominently in a box seat, and at intermission formally presented Xirgu with a diamond-studded insignia of the left wing of the Republican Party. Others from the republican left gave her flowers. During the final curtain call, audience members showered the stage with bouquets, and cries of “Viva la República!” rang out.

  On March 12, Xirgu and her company celebrated the hundredth performance of Yerma. Ultimately the play ran for an impressive 150 performances before closing on April 20, 1935. Asked if he was satisfied with the success of his drama, Lorca remarked:

  Success never satisfies me. Success is almost always a momentary stroke of luck that has nothing to do with a given work’s intrinsic value. Many glorious men who left behind great works for humanity never knew the flatteries of success during their lifetime. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who have gone through life leaping and dancing from one triumph to the next, and whose works have sunk into the grave with them—or sometimes before. Believe me, I’d prefer to belong to the first category.

  He survived his own bout with failure in February 1935, when Irene Lewisohn, co-founder and director of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City, premiered the first English version of Blood Wedding. Lewisohn had approached Lorca two years earlier for permission to produce the tragedy. The playwright had worked closely with translator José Weissberger to create a plausible rendering of his play in English, and he had sung songs to Lewisohn so that she could set her American production of the work to appropriate music.

  Under the title Bitter Oleander, the play opened in New York on February 11. Reviews were caustic. In a city whose theater scene was dominated by such works of political and social realism as Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, which opened in a Group Theater production one month before Bitter Oleander, Lorca’s lyrical Andalusian drama fell on uncomprehending ears. Both audiences and critics found Weissberger’s stilted translation laughable. Robert Benchley of The New Yorker, a critic known for his plainspoken wit, ridiculed the play, despite what he conceded were “moments of considerable poetic virtuosity.” Benchley described the stage set as a theatrical interpretation “of an old Spanish intestinal tract” and suggested that any discussion of Bitter Oleander be turned over to “our Better Relations with Spain Department.”

  A handful of American critics perceived the work’s merits. The New York Sun’s Richard Lockridge called it an “intense and moving drama.” Stark Young of the New Republic hailed Lorca’s “bold and poetic mind” and his “deceiving simplicity,” but warned that “racially the play is hopelessly far from us.” It was a complaint English-speaking audiences of Lorca’s plays would continue to register. In Spain, newspapers noted the play’s poor reception overseas. Lorca acknowledged the “beastly things” the New York press had said about his play, but insisted his work had not failed totally with the public. “I’ve already said I don’t pay any attention to critics.”

  In early 1935 the Argentine actress Lola Membrives came to Spain to present a Madrid season with her company. She immediately announced plans to premiere Lorca’s newest play, Doña Rosita the Spinster. A reporter for La Voz advised her to be careful. “You’re going to find yourself up against a mass of people worn out by politics. For a lot of them, the name ‘Lorca’ is equivalent to ‘the devil.’” The journalist then explained that this was due primarily to Lorca’s affiliation with Xirgu, whose friendship with Manuel Azaña continued to irritate conservatives. The reporter suggested that because Membrives herself possessed no such “political tarnish,” the country’s right-wing “cretins” might leave her alone.

  Membrives was undaunted. Alth
ough Lorca did not offer her Doña Rosita, as she had hoped, the actress did present revivals of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and Blood Wedding. Audiences responded exuberantly to both productions, and reviews were good. For a period of approximately one month, Lorca had three plays running simultaneously in the Spanish capital. Critics traced his evolution as a playwright from one work to the next. Following her Madrid run, Membrives took both The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and Blood Wedding on the road to Zaragoza and then to Barcelona. In Madrid, Lorca’s name remained in the news. He issued a fifth edition of his Gypsy Ballads. He also attended a public reading by Margarita Xirgu of Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, oversaw two amateur productions of Don Cristóbal’s Puppet Show, and delivered the first in a series of three radio broadcasts to Argentina, in which he reminisced about his stay in Buenos Aires and described the unique cultural and topographical traits of Spain. His broadcasts the previous year in Buenos Aires had shown him the power of radio, and he embraced the medium as a new means of disseminating his vision.

  He was earning more money than ever. Reporters speculated, correctly, that he was one of the season’s most financially prosperous playwrights. To friends, Lorca talked fancifully of building a seaside home on the Mediterranean. “Because now it’s my turn to be earning money,” he joked. He did not know what to do with his wealth—only how to spend it. He was careless about his funds, leaving coins and peseta notes heaped on his desk, giving large amounts of cash to the household servants so that they could go shopping, but neglecting to ask for change. Old friends such as Morla Lynch began turning to him for loans. “I realize you must be giving money to half the world, and that I’m not the only one who’s pestering you,” Morla wrote in a letter asking to borrow a thousand pesetas. Jorge Guillén ran into Lorca’s father one day and asked the older man if he had finally stopped worrying about his son’s fortunes. Don Federico grinned. “Now, yes.”

  Lorca himself was indifferent to his earnings and insisted that success would not “shackle” him. After all, he had grown up wealthy. “I’ll always work as I have up until now, disinterestedly, with no aim but that of my own satisfaction. One should remember Saint Francis: ‘Don’t work for the love of money; distill sensuality into sensitivity; be obedient’—in other words, be true to yourself.” He claimed that each morning he forgot what he had written the day before. “That’s the secret of being modest and working courageously.” He wrote plays not for money or glory, he said, but because “if I don’t, I’ll rot inside. If glory and money come, welcome! And if not, fine. Money is sometimes useful, but not always. Glory, here on earth, is a vague thing that a lot of deluded people dream of having, and it usually brings nothing but bitterness and sorrow.”

  Despite his new riches, Lorca continued to work, live, and dress much as he always had. Morla Lynch noticed at a cocktail party in the late spring of 1935 that Lorca was still wearing the same unfashionable pair of shoes he had worn for years. The shoes buckled clumsily on one side and were so unsightly his friends nicknamed them “Juana La Loca’s slippers,” because they resembled the shoes worn in a painting by the “mad” daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. Lorca found the epithet amusing and went on wearing the shoes.

  On May 23, El Sol announced that Lorca had completed a new play, Doña Rosita the Spinster, and intended to give a private reading of the work to friends. Morla Lynch heard the play in June and was enchanted; it reminded him of a waltz he had known in childhood, one that invariably filled him with “romantic tenderness.” Lorca also read the work to Margarita Xirgu, and told the actress the play was hers to premiere.

  Although he had begun work on Doña Rosita in the summer of 1934, he had first conceived the play in 1924, when he sketched a yellow arch spanning a garden, and beneath the arch wrote “Doña Rosita the Spinster,” followed by a list of characters. He returned to the play in the mid-19 30s in order to “rest” from his tragedies Blood Wedding and Yerma. “I wanted to create a simple, friendly comedy,” he explained. “But that’s not what emerged. What emerged is a poem that seems to me to have more tears than my two previous productions. As far as I can tell, fortune has tapped me for the serious side of the theater, chiefly because of my poetic temperament.”

  The play’s full title is Doña Rosita the Spinster, or The Language of the Flowers. Its subtitle—“Poem of Granada, at the Turn of the Century, Divided into Various Gardens, with Scenes of Song and Dance”—is one of the rare instances when Lorca specified the locale and time period of a given play. The work is intensely of and about Granada, with abundant references to local streets, buildings, and foods, as well as local phrases and songs and even the proper names of real-life granadinos. Rosita herself, a woman who ages thirty years during the course of the action, and who never marries, despite her engagement to a beloved cousin, is emblematic of the city she inhabits, a city Lorca had long regarded as a forgotten backwater, beautiful and passionate but doomed to neglect.

  He based much of the play on the notion of a rose that blossoms, withers, and dies in a single day. In the mid-1920s, the poet José Moreno Villa, whom Lorca knew from the Residencia, had introduced Lorca to a nineteenth-century French book listing all known varieties of the rose, together with their Latin and modern names. Among the varieties was the rosa mutabilis, or “mutable rose,” a flower whose color fades as it ages. Lorca immediately seized on the image and began drafting a short play, Mutable Rose, which he subsequently abandoned. Years later he returned to the idea in Doña Rosita. The play is steeped in floral motifs and lore, from its opening line (“And my seeds?” asks Rosita’s uncle, an amateur gardener) to its final passage, a poetic account of the last moments in the life of the rosa mutabilis: “And when the night arrives / her petals begin to fall.”

  While drafting Doña Rosita Lorca consulted turn-of-the-century almanacs, magazines, and books in an effort to verify the historical and horticultural details of his play. He tore out pages of particular interest, including a glossary of the “language of flowers,” and kept these on his desk for reference as he worked. From a list of thirty-one flowers and their meanings, he incorporated fourteen into his script, adding five more of his own invention. Rosita herself, whose name means “little rose,” identifies powerfully with the rosa mutabilis, which “opens in the morning / red as blood,” and in the afternoon “turns white, with the pallor / of a cheek of salt,” before succumbing at nightfall to death. In act one, Rosita dresses in rose pink; by the start of Act 3, thirty years later, she has taken to wearing pale pink; in the play’s final moments she dons a floor-length white gown. Each of her costumes reflects the prevailing fashion of its day—proof of the extent to which Rosita is a prisoner of taste and time.

  The play traces her demise from an optimistic twenty-year-old girl, betrothed to a cousin she adores, to a mournful fifty-year-old spinster, abandoned by her fiancé and resigned to an existence without the companionship of either husband or children. “I am as I am. And I cannot change. The only thing left to me now is my dignity,” Rosita tells her aunt. Tormented by the realization that the hope which sustained her for decades has died, she confides, “I want to run away, not to be able to see, to be calm, empty … (Doesn’t a poor woman have the right to breathe freely?) And yet hope pursues me, stalks me, gnaws at me, like a dying wolf trying to sink his teeth in for the last time.”

  Lorca described Doña Rosita as a “profound drama of the Andalusian spinster, and of the Spanish spinster in general.” He believed that in Spain unmarried women were routinely sacrificed on the altar of social convention, and went from being “maidens” like Rosita, “meek on the outside and scorched within,” to “that grotesque and disturbing thing known as a Spanish spinster,” whose traits he described with clinical detachment: “flaccid breasts, spreading thighs, pupils with a distant gleam.” “How long will the Doña Rositas in Spain go on like this?” he asked. He had confronted the same issue in some of his earliest work, most pointedly in the 1918 poem “Elegy,” where
he compares an unmarried woman to a “magnolia” fated to “wither.” At one point Lorca labeled Rosita an “elegy” for spinsters and a sorrowful drama “for families.” Most Spanish families, he observed, possess one spinster, and “where there isn’t one, there are two. It has always grieved me to see that in Spain, in order for one girl to get married, twenty virgins must be sacrificed.” Rosita herself acknowledges the poignancy of her condition: “I know my eyes will always be young, and that my back will become more bent with every passing day. After all, what’s happened to me has happened to thousands of women.” She refers to herself as an “old maid.”

  In writing the play Lorca drew on a variety of memories and figures from his youth, among them a first cousin, Clotilde García Picossi, whose fiancé had abandoned her in order to go to Argentina, where he eventually married another woman and fell into destitution. One of Lorca’s more eccentric grade school teachers in Granada, Don Martin Sheroff y Aví, a failed poet with red hair and unkempt clothes, served as a model for the fictive Don Martin, a teacher and failed poet with red hair and a disheveled appearance, who tries unsuccessfully to woo Rosita in the play’s final act. Among the neglected works the fictional Martin has written is a drama, The Daughter of Jefté, whose title is that of the opera Lorca’s boyhood piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, wrote but never produced. Lorca also drew inspiration from his childhood maid Dolores, whose earthy humor and unstinting generosity are replicated in the character of the Housekeeper who cares for Rosita and her aunt and uncle.

  Other characters are quintessential granadino “types.” There is Señor X, a pompous professor of political economy who is loosely based on an economics professor Lorca knew, and detested, at the University of Granada; there are three cursilonas—“pretentious old maids”—whose tasteless saint’s day gift to Rosita is a figurine of a “little girl dressed in pink who’s also a barometer”; there are also three “Manolas,” pretty coquettes of the sort that Goya once painted, who heighten their charms through the skillful use of fans, mantillas, and tall tortoiseshell combs.