Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  We two, the night ahead, the full moon looming:

  I began to weep while you laughed.

  Your scorn became a god, and my complaints

  were little doves and moments in a chain.

  We two, the night behind, crystal of pain,

  and you wept over deep and distant things.

  My sorrow was a clump of agony

  resting on your fragile heart of sand.

  The dawn drew us together on the bed.

  Our mouths were waiting near the frozen spout

  of blood that spilled forth in an endless flow.

  The sun came through the shuttered balcony

  and the coral of life opened its branch,

  and settled here upon my shrouded heart.

  The wound of love is always preferable to nothing at all. “Never let me lose the marvel / of your statue-like eyes, or the accent / the solitary rose of your breath / places on my cheek at night,” Lorca writes in “Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint.” In “The Poet Tells the Truth,” a work whose title, subject, and syntax recall the autobiographical “Double Poem of Lake Eden” of 1929, the poet demands to “cry his grief” so that his beloved will come to him “in a dusk of nightingales / with a dagger, with kisses, and with you.” The poet seeks “no end … to the unwinding / of ‘I love you, you love me.’”

  The phrase “dark love” appears in just one sonnet, the only untitled poem in the sequence, a work in which Lorca addresses both his beloved and the invisible “voice” that stalks them:

  O secret voice of dark love!

  O bleating without fleece! O wound!

  O needle of gall, sunken camellia!

  O current without sea, city without walls!

  Lorca’s “voice of dark love” is sterile, secretive, tragic, and by implication illicit—a “dog in the heart,” a voice “persecuted” or “beleaguered,” a “borderless silence” the poet yearns to escape:

  Away from me, simmering voice of ice,

  and lose me not among the weeds

  where flesh and heaven moan, leaving no fruit.

  Forsake the hard ivory of my head,

  take pity on me, break my pain!

  For I am love, for I am nature!

  In each of his eleven sonnets Lorca combines literary traditions and styles. Petrarchan attitudes, form, and idioms (“sweet complaint,” “simmering voice of ice,” “wound of love”) alternate with contemporary images. Profane love blends with divine in sometimes bewildering ways; the poet repeatedly compares his suffering to the Passion of Christ. Strains of courtly love mingle with echoes of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics, Golden Age sonneteers, and Shakespeare, whose sonnets, like Lorca’s, recount the author’s painful attachment to a mysterious, “dark” other. At times Lorca’s compulsive use of cultural and literary allusions obscures the emotional content of his poems; some images are so densely encoded they are impossible to decipher. Others are unexpectedly simple. In “The Poet Speaks with His Beloved on the Telephone,” the author invokes an everyday icon to describe an encounter with his lover:

  Your voice watered the dune of my breast

  in the sweet wooden booth.

  South of my feet, it was spring,

  and north of my brow, a fern blossomed.

  Within that narrow space a pine of light

  sang out, but with no dawn, no seed to sow;

  and my lament for the first time

  hung coronets of hope upon the roof.

  Although other events—his recent reunion with Dalí, his introduction to Gil-Albert’s sonnet collection—helped to inspire the series, Lorca seems to have written his sonnets of dark love with one person in mind: Rafael Rodríguez Rapún. In the poem “The Poet Asks His Love for the Enchanted City of Cuenca,” Lorca alludes to a trip the two made together to the city of Cuenca in 1935. He and Rapún had been close friends, and by all appearances lovers, since 1933. Their involvement, like the affair chronicled in the sonnets, was to Lorca both gratifying and fraught with disappointment. And yet he could not imagine forsaking it. More so than any other poetry sequence or play, his sonnets of dark love reveal Lorca in the grip of passion: greedy, blind, obsessive, a man so consumed by desire that he will forgive his companion anything, even pain, so long as their love endures.

  Lorca returned to Barcelona in mid-November to help Margarita Xirgu stage a revival of Blood Wedding. He composed new music for several scenes, and accompanied the production himself on the piano. He promised Barcelona audiences that in contrast to Josefina Diaz’s lackluster premiere of the work in Madrid in 1933, Xirgu’s 1935 production would constitute the “true premiere” of Blood Wedding. Spanish theatergoers would at last see the “tragedy” he had intended, not the mere “drama” Díaz had staged.

  Midway through rehearsals, Rapún joined Lorca in Barcelona. The younger man’s presence quickly proved a source of frustration. One night, while out with Lorca and a group of friends, Rapún disappeared with a Gypsy woman. By the next day, when he had not returned to the hotel room he and Lorca shared, Lorca was so distraught he skipped that afternoon’s Blood Wedding rehearsal. The play’s director, Cipriano Rivas Cherif, a gaunt man in his mid-forties went off in search of the playwright and found him sitting by himself in a café, his head resting gloomily in his hands. Lorca scarcely recognized the director. Rivas Cherif asked what had happened. Lorca hesitated, then burst out, “He hasn’t been home all morning. He’s left me. It’s not possible!”

  Rivas Cherif pressed for details. Lorca mentioned the Gypsy woman. He then produced a packet of letters Rapún had sent him during the course of their two-and-a-half-year involvement. Lorca leafed through the pile, pulling out letter after letter in an attempt to prove to Rivas Cherif the depth of Rapún’s feelings for him. The first note, written before the two men had even met, expressed admiration for Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads. Subsequent letters indicated Rapún’s surprise at Lorca’s interest in him; at one point Rafael wondered if Lorca was playing a joke on him by professing such intense devotion. Rapún’s final letters bore witness to a full-fledged love affair.

  “I’m not sad. I’m heartbroken,” Lorca told Rivas Cherif, adding dramatically, “My flesh, my blood, my entire body and soul have been betrayed.” Although he had known the director since the early 1920s, and at one point had hoped Rivas Cherif would premiere The Audience, it was the first time Lorca had spoken so frankly to the older man about his homosexuality. He explained that he had been attracted to men since childhood. “I have never known a woman.” He attributed his sexual preference to the deep respect he had for his mother, a notion Rivas Cherif dismissed as second-rate Freudianism. Lorca managed to laugh.

  The director demanded to know how anyone so intrigued by the world as Lorca was could cut himself off from half the human race. “Haven’t you deprived yourself of the other half?” Lorca asked. “Normality is neither your way of knowing only women, nor mine. What’s normal is love without limits.” Although he acknowledged his contempt for “the effeminate homosexual, the pansy,” Lorca defended same-sex love as emblematic of a “new morality, a morality of complete freedom.” Love, he argued, transcends the morality of Catholic dogma; it is not simply about having children, or about hierarchical family roles. “With my way, there is no misrepresentation. Both partners remain as they are, without bartering. No one gives orders; no one dominates; there is no submission. There is no assigning of roles…. There is only abandon and mutual enjoyment.”

  He had rarely been more candid. The events of his own life had in recent months combined so strikingly with world events—the Asturian revolution, the invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism—that Lorca had little choice but to view the two as linked, and to speak out in defense of both social and sexual freedom. His recent work bore testament to his claim a few weeks earlier that only two kinds of problems were of interest in art: “social and sexual.” Both Blood Wedding and Yerma directly challenge the sexual politics of traditional Spanish society. Even a
play so apparently genteel as Doña Rosita the Spinster questions the value of conventional gender roles and mocks the tyranny of bourgeois taste. Though more personal and therefore subtle, Lorca’s sonnets likewise proclaim the legitimacy of a new kind of love, one unfettered by orthodox notions of courtship and marriage. His statements to Rivas Cherif merely underscored such thinking.

  Rivas Cherif waited a discreet twenty-two years before publicly disclosing the content of his conversation with Lorca that November afternoon. He recalled just one other time when Lorca touched on the topic. While discussing his work one day, Lorca told the director he intended to write a “realist drama” about homosexuality, in which a strait-laced older man—not unlike Lorca’s father—demands to know why his son has been refused membership in the town casino. “Because I’m homosexual,” the son replies.

  “What do you think of that for an opening?” Lorca asked.

  “Don’t write it,” Rivas Cherif advised.

  Blood Wedding opened in Barcelona on November 22. The production, starring Margarita Xirgu as the Bride’s Mother, received both critical and public acclaim and played to full houses. Three weeks later, on December 12, Xirgu premiered Doña Rosita the Spinster in Barcelona’s Principal Palace Theater. Lorca missed several rehearsals in order to go to Madrid in mid-December to attend the opening of a new Barraca production of his own version of Lope de Vega’s The Knight of Olmedo; the work was the final installment in the company’s yearlong tribute to the Golden Age playwright. Lorca returned to Barcelona in time to direct the last rehearsals for Doña Rosita. Posters advertised the play as a “poem for families.”

  Spectators jammed the entrances to the theater and formed long lines at the box office windows shortly before the ten o’clock curtain on December 12. Red and white lights—colors emblematic of Rosita—bathed the outside of the theater; inside, the packed auditorium hummed with anticipation. Earlier that month, a Madrid reporter had noted the unprecedented air of “expectation” surrounding the premiere of Lorca’s newest play. Lorca’s brother, Paco, and sister Isabel flew in from Madrid for the opening.

  As the curtain rose on the gauche interior of Rosita’s bourgeois Granada home, Lorca, watching from offstage, muttered, “What magnificent bad taste!” At the end of the second act, the audience gave the cast a standing ovation. Lorca and his actors had to go onstage eight times before the crowd quieted down. At the interval a theater critic remarked that even the appearance of a stagehand who stumbled while crossing the set appeared to him as “marvelous.” During the play’s third and final act, the mood in the theater shifted abruptly as Xirgu, in the role of Rosita, changed from a lovestruck young woman, dressed gaily in pink clothes and blond ringlets, into an aging spinster in a plain white gown. “An intense emotion invades us,” wrote one reviewer, describing the effect of the transformation.

  Nearly a dozen critics had flown to Barcelona from Madrid for the play’s premiere, and within a week Doña Rosita had received more than twenty-five reviews. Although some critics questioned the work’s genre (was it a comedy, a tragedy, or both?) and style (were its characters “realistic” or not?), nearly everyone praised the originality and power of Lorca’s script. “No one can say that García Lorca repeats himself,” wrote Antonio de Obregón of the Diario de Madrid. Barcelona’s La Noche termed Rosita a “Christmas present, a beautiful romantic miniature” from Lorca to the people of Barcelona. Critic Antonio Espina ranked Doña Rosita among “the greatest works of both the modern Spanish theater and theaters beyond Spain.” La Vanguardia’s María Luz Morales, one of the few female critics in Spain, wrote that Rosita “equals” the finest productions of the contemporary European stage. In contrast to the “tragic rawness” of Blood Wedding and the “profound humanity” of Yerma, said Morales, Rosita was all “delicacy and shading,” and as such epitomized the era it sought to represent.

  A number of reviewers called attention to Lorca’s constant experimentation as a playwright. “He is faithful to only one thing: his poetic temperament,” one said. Another noted the “Franciscan” compassion toward “small things” that permeated Rosita. Others mentioned the resemblance between Lorca’s play and Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The play’s only negative review came from Ignacio Agustí of L’Instant, who felt that Lorca had not effectively resolved the dichotomy between the drama’s picturesque exterior and its tragic interior. Agustí called Rosita a “disoriented work” that was neither a drama nor a caricature but an uncomfortable hybrid of the two. Lorca later told Agustí he agreed with the critic’s appraisal of his script and was revising it accordingly. “I don’t do anything well except tragedy,” he confided. Despite his celebrity, he considered himself “a real novice. I’m learning how to handle my craft,” he told another acquaintance. “One must climb the ladder step by step … My work has scarcely begun. I see it off in the future, like a dense orb.”

  By Christmas Eve, Doña Rosita was the most successful play in Barcelona. The drama’s first act was broadcast over Radio Barcelona. Thrilled by the play’s floral theme, the city’s florists sent daily bouquets to Xirgu. Lorca talked giddily of his achievement, which he thought the most well-deserved triumph of his career. He called Rosita his “youngest and dearest daughter.”

  Once more he became the toast of Barcelona. He attended banquets, gave poetry readings, took part in a homage to the late composer Isaac Albéniz, for which he composed a sonnet. Later in the month he wrote a second commemorative sonnet for a special issue of Pablo Neruda’s new literary magazine, Caballo Verde para la poesía; the new sonnet paid tribute to a little-known Uruguayan poet and translator, Julio Herrera y Reissig, who had died in 1910. Despite his more visible life as a celebrated man of the theater, and his oft-stated desire to write plays, Lorca continued to view poetry as a critical part of his being, both private and public. In the weeks after Rosita’s premiere he resumed work on his sonnets of dark love, revising and expanding the series for publication in 1936. That the collection dealt with material of an extraordinarily personal nature did not frighten him; he was determined to publish the sequence. He believed that poetry was above all indispensable in times of political and social stress, for it restored a sense of order and proportion to the world. “I’m now writing a book of sonnets,” he told a friend. “We must return to this.”

  On December 22, Margarita Xirgu gave a special performance of Rosita for the local florists’ union. At the end of the evening Lorca thanked the florists for the support they had shown his play by sending floral arrangements to its star. “This is the revolution,” he remarked afterward. “The florists’ unions bring bouquets of flowers to me, to the poet. Do you realize what this means?”

  The following day, December 23, the city of Barcelona honored Lorca at a banquet in a central hotel. Distinguished Catalan personalities and Lorca’s close friends toasted the playwright with champagne. Lorca gave an extemporaneous speech—one of the few times in his career he did not read from a prepared text. He thanked his hosts and, intent on proving his ties to ordinary, working-class people, recalled the childhood maids and housekeepers who had proved such an inspiration to him as a writer. He told journalist Luis Góngora of La Noche that the mayor of Granada ought to see his remarks, so that the latter could know “how I feel about my home. And I’ll say to him: I’m more mayor of Granada than you are.” He was confident that he had done more for his hometown than any of the city’s elected officials and upstanding middle-class citizens.

  Góngora asked Lorca if he was happy. “Happy isn’t the word. I’d like to premiere all my theater work here,” Lorca replied.

  The journalist then asked if the people of Granada were as supportive of his work as the Barcelona public. “Granada is a closed city,” Lorca answered carefully. “Wonderful, but closed. And it should be that way.” He had long regarded his hometown as a provincial backwater, concealed from the sea by mountains, cut off from the world by hidebound attitudes, and yet, because of its isolation, uniquely beautif
ul. “Angel Ganivet, the most illustrious granadino of the nineteenth century, used to say, ‘When I go to Granada, only the air greets me.’ But it doesn’t matter,” Lorca went on. “Granada is Granada, and it’s fine as it is.”

  26

  The Dream of Life

  1936

  The town of Fuente Vaqueros sent New Year’s greetings to Lorca on January 1, 1936. Nearly fifty residents of the village, including the mayor, signed the short note applauding his achievements and acknowledging him as “the true poet of the people. You, better than anyone, know how to fill your profoundly beautiful dramas with all of the pain, the immense tragedy of those who suffer, who endure lives saturated with injustice.”

  Lorca returned to Madrid in January, “gushing” with talk of his recent triumphs in Catalunya and future plans for both travel and work. He had promised to accompany Margarita Xirgu on an extended tour to Cuba, Mexico, and South America that year. The actress intended to leave Spain on January 30 and head first to Cuba, where she would present both Yerma and Lorca’s version of La dama boba. Lorca intended to meet up with her overseas. Meanwhile immersed himself in work. In late December he brought out his Six Galician Poems. In January he issued Blood Wedding and First Songs, a small compilation of early suites. He inscribed a copy of First Songs for Rafael Rodríguez Rapún; near his signature he sketched two weeping faces—one with heavy eyebrows much like his own—whose lips almost meet in a kiss.