Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  On Thursday, August 6, a Falange squad drove up to the Huerta de San Vicente. Without explanation they searched the Lorca home. They appeared to be seeking a secret radio which Lorca was said to be using to contact Russia. The squad found nothing and left. Both Lorca and his family now realized they were at risk.

  A day later, at lunchtime, the architect Alfredo Rodríguez Orgaz, an old friend of Lorca’s, showed up at the Huerta. A radical socialist, Rodriguez Orgaz had been inside Granada’s city hall on the afternoon of July 20 when Nationalist troops seized the building and arrested most of its occupants. He had fled for his life and spent the ensuing two weeks in hiding. He told Lorca and his family about the executions that were occurring daily in Granada. Despite the grim news, Lorca seemed optimistic. He was convinced that the situation was temporary, and talked about a recent radio broadcast from the socialist leader Indalecio Prieto, who had predicted a quick end to the Granada siege. “Granada is surrounded by republicans, and the revolt will soon fail,” Lorca said.

  Rodríguez Orgaz was less confident. He asked Lorca’s father to help him escape that night to republican territory. In the midst of their conversation, a neighbor informed the family that cars were approaching the Huerta. Rodríguez Orgaz bolted out the back door and hid under a clump of bushes. A squad of Falangists pulled up at the front door, in pursuit of the architect. For the second time in two days, uniformed men searched the Lorca house, but found nothing and left. That night Rodríguez Orgaz escaped to the republican town of Santa Fe, halfway between Granada and Fuente Vaqueros. From there he went to Málaga, also in republican hands. Lorca turned down the chance to go with him.

  A third Falange squad turned up at the Huerta de San Vicente three days later, on August 9. This time they came to interrogate the Huerta’s caretaker, Gabriel Perea Ruiz, whose brothers had been accused of murder. Perea Ruiz and his sister, Carmen, had worked for the Lorca family since the mid-19 20s, and lived in a guesthouse adjoining the Huerta. The squad searched the Perea home, and with the butts of their rifles assaulted both Gabriel and his mother, Isabel. The victims fell to their knees. From his bedroom window next door, Concha García Lorca’s four-year-old son, Manolo, woke from a nap to see Gabriel Perea strapped to a tree in the front yard. Falangists in blue shirts were beating him.

  The squad then entered the Huerta. They threw Lorca down the stairs and hit him. “Queer!” they taunted. “Here we have the friend of Fernando de los Ríos,” one officer cried. Lorca replied that he was indeed a friend to the socialist leader, but that he was also a friend to many others, and that political allegiances meant nothing to him. The Falangists ignored him. They forced everyone inside the Huerta to line up on the front terrace, as if to be shot. Isabel Perea begged the men not to harm anyone. Moments later a second Falange squad pulled into the driveway and ordered the first squad to cease its inquest; evidently they lacked a proper search warrant. Both squads eventually left, taking Gabriel Perea Ruiz with them. Later that night Perea Ruiz returned to the Huerta, visibly undone. He had been brutally interrogated by officials in the Civil Government building. The following day, Ideal noted Perea’s “detention” on the charge that he had deliberately concealed information concerning his brothers’ whereabouts.

  Within hours of the episode, Lorca telephoned his friend Luis Rosales in downtown Granada. Rosales was a poet and philosophy student whose three brothers were ardent members of the Falange. At their insistence, Luis too had joined the party on July 20, although he considered himself apolitical. He now worked as a secretary in a Falange barracks. Twelve years younger than Lorca, slender and blond, he had admired the poet for years and thought of himself as his disciple. The two had often met at cafés in Granada, or on the terrace of the Huerta, to read and discuss poetry. In 1935 Rosales had published his first volume of poems.

  The moment Lorca told Rosales about the Falange visit, Rosales hurried out to the Huerta. He talked at length with Lorca and his family about the situation and its implications. No one, not even Rosales, thought matters so dire as to be a question of life and death. But Lorca’s family feared for his safety. He was famous and rich, and his liberal views were well known to granadinos. He had offended the city’s more conservative residents in 1934 with Yerma, and in April 1936 had risked further insult to the city’s Catholic constituents with his outspoken comments on the Reconquest of 1492. Many Granadans assumed he was a communist. Others hated him for his homosexuality. Behind his back they called him “the queer with the bow tie.”

  Rosales outlined three options available to Lorca. He could escape to the republican zone, an idea Lorca’s father embraced but Lorca rejected. “He was terrified at the thought of being all alone in a no-man’s-land between the two zones,” Rosales recalled. He could move in temporarily with Manuel de Falla, whose fervent Catholicism was well known to the Falange, and would by association guarantee Lorca some measure of protection. Or he could stay with the Rosales family at their home in the center of Granada, assuming Rosales’s father perceived no danger in the arrangement. It was a quiet house, loyal to the Falange, where Lorca would be able to live and work undisturbed until the immediate crisis had passed. Lorca and his family agreed that, under the circumstances, the last choice seemed wisest, and they accepted the invitation. Lorca would remain within easy distance of home, in the company of a good friend and fellow writer, whose family affiliations would protect him from danger.

  Don Federico asked his chauffeur, Francisco Murillo, to come to the Huerta on the evening of August 10 to pick up “the young man.” Lorca was waiting when Murillo arrived shortly after 11 p.m. He wore a navy suit with a white shirt and black tie, and he held a bundle of clothes in his hand with a pair of blue-and-white striped pajamas wrapped around them. He climbed into the car, a seven-seat blue Nash, and Murillo drove him the short distance through town to the Rosales home. The streets were empty. They pulled up at a three-story townhouse on Calle Angulo, a few blocks from the Civil Government building where Perea Ruiz had been interrogated the previous evening. Murillo opened the door for Lorca. “Goodbye, Paco, goodbye!” Lorca said to the chauffeur, and stepped out of the car. Murillo drove off quickly. He did not wait to see who let Lorca in.

  Not long after his departure, another unit of the Falange went to the Huerta and found that Lorca had gone. They searched the house in pursuit of items that might implicate the poet in the “red” cause. They even dismantled his piano to see if it held the clandestine radio with which he was rumored to have been in communication with Russia. They continued their hunt a few hundred yards down the road, at his cousins’ Huerta del Tamarit. There, they looked inside a large earthenware jug—hoping to find Lorca hidden in its shadows.

  The Rosales home was a typical Granadan townhouse with an interior patio and a marble staircase leading to its upper floors. Lorca was given a bedroom on the third floor of the house, in what was essentially a private apartment where the family’s Aunt Luisa, then sixty-one, lived. Additional family members—Luis, one brother, their mother, father, and a sister, Esperanza—lived downstairs.

  At first Lorca seemed apprehensive about the family. But after a day or two he relaxed and slipped into a routine of reading, piano playing, writing, and conversation. He talked to his family by phone, and he smoked incessantly. Because the Rosales men were seldom home, he spent most of his time alone or with the women in the household. He played popular songs on Aunt Luisa’s piano and listened compulsively to her radio. “What false reports have you heard today?” he sometimes teased Esperanza Rosales, then twenty-seven. Every morning Esperanza brought him the paper. Lorca read reports of bomb damage in Granada and executions of alleged “communists” and “reds.” On the morning after his arrival, Ideal announced that thirty people had been shot in the previous twenty-four hours, many because they had promoted “Marxist propaganda.” Two days later the paper published a tribute to the late monarchist leader Calvo Sotelo, “Martyr of Spain,” one month after his death.

  T
emperatures reached the nineties each day. Late in the afternoon, Lorca would join the Rosales women in the shade of the patio downstairs for coffee and conversation. They talked about the weather, the progress of the war, news of the day. Lorca told stories about his travels and discussed the work he planned to do when he returned to Madrid. He was filled with ideas for the theater. He told Esperanza Rosales, who worried about her boyfriend in Madrid, that once the fighting had ended “the three of us will go together to the opening of my next play.” He nicknamed Esperanza “my divine jailer.”

  When Luis Rosales returned home late at night, still clad in his blue Falange uniform, he and Lorca often talked about poetry, with particular emphasis on Lorca’s forthcoming collection of sonnets. Lorca wanted the volume to include his eleven sonnets of dark love and at least four elegiac sonnets composed at various points in his career. He planned to call the book The Garden of Sonnets. He sometimes read poems to Rosales. The two also talked of composing an anthem to the Spaniards who had perished in the fighting that summer. Lorca volunteered to write the music if Rosales would draft the lyrics.

  He did not think of himself as “in hiding,” nor did the family attempt to conceal his presence. Lorca assured Esperanza Rosales that he had “never been involved with politics. I’m too afraid … To take sides you need a level of courage that I lack … What a shame that wasn’t the case with my brother-in-law!” He said repeatedly that politics did not interest him. Despite the extraordinary nature of his situation he remained buoyant. He called the family’s wine cellar “el bombario” because he and the Rosales women used it as a bomb shelter whenever republican planes attacked the city. As they crouched among the family’s earthenware jugs of wine, Lorca joked that no bomb could possibly fall on such a “hospitable house.”

  The republican air raids ended on August 15. That day a unit of the Falange appeared at the Huerta de San Vicente with a warrant for Lorca’s arrest. After a hasty search of the house, they threatened to seize the poet’s father if his family did not disclose Lorca’s whereabouts. Concha Garcia Lorca broke down and told them where to find her brother.

  At dawn on Sunday, August 16, Manuel Montesinos was shot by a firing squad. The priest who took his final confession went in person to the Lorca family to inform them of his death. Concha, who had turned thirty-three two days earlier, was sitting in a corner of her parents’ home when Vicenta Lorca came to tell her the news. The instant she saw her mother’s face Concha knew what had happened.

  Lorca learned by telephone of his brother-in-law’s death. He was devastated, and feared for his sister and her three children. The Rosales family had begun to worry about Lorca himself. A Falangist friend had warned them that a number of new arrests were taking place, and that Lorca might be in danger. The family talked of moving him to a safer location, perhaps to Manuel de Falla’s carmen.

  At approximately one o’clock that afternoon, a car with three uniformed officers in it pulled up to the Rosales house. Soldiers armed with machine guns stationed themselves along the street and on neighboring rooftops. Additional troops cordoned off the surrounding streets. The three officers presented themselves at the front door of the Rosales home and announced that they had come to arrest Lorca. Of the three, one was obviously in charge: Ramón Ruiz Alonso, a loud, belligerent man dressed in blue coveralls emblazoned with the Falangist insignia. A former parliament member from CEDA, and recent convert to the Falange, Ruiz Alonso detested the Left and hated Lorca, whom he had referred to earlier in the year as “the one with the swollen head.” Despite his membership in the organization, Ruiz Alonso was also contemptuous of the Falange leadership, who had apparently refused his request for financial compensation upon joining the party. His complex and strained relationship with the Falange may have led to Ruiz Alonso’s critical role in Lorca’s arrest, for by removing a presumed “red” from the home of loyal Falangists in broad daylight, he could embarrass the organization, and thus reap his petty revenge.

  The Rosales men were not home that afternoon. Alone, Mrs. Rosales bravely confronted Ruiz Alonso and his two companions. She refused to let the men take Lorca from her house and demanded to know the reason for his arrest.

  “His works,” one of them answered.

  Mrs. Rosales persisted. She reminded the officers of her family’s allegiance to the Falange, and insisted that she be allowed to telephone her husband and sons. Ruiz Alonso consented. For the next half-hour, Mrs. Rosales tried frantically to reach one of the men in her family. Finally she located her son Miguel at the Falange barracks. Ruiz Alonso drove off to get him. The two returned to the house shortly afterward, accompanied by several additional men.

  Miguel Rosales had been unable to dissuade Ruiz Alonso from his mission. When asked what crime Lorca had committed, Ruiz Alonso said, “He’s done more damage with a pen than others have with a pistol.”

  Lorca was upstairs and heard the commotion below him. When it became clear that he was to be arrested, he knelt with Aunt Luisa before an image of the Sacred Heart and prayed. He was in a state of near collapse, trembling and weeping. As he left the house he said goodbye to Aunt Luisa and Mrs. Rosales. To Esperanza he murmured, “I won’t give you my hand because I don’t want you to think we’re not going to see each other again.” He wore dark gray pants and a white shirt with a tie hung loosely around its collar. Ruiz Alonso led him out the door and around the corner to the waiting car.

  Minutes after his departure Mrs. Rosales telephoned the Lorca family. Later in the day her husband went in person to see Lorca’s father. The two men paid a hurried visit to the Lorca family lawyer, hoping to prepare a legal defense of Lorca’s case in the event that the rebels granted him a trial.

  Lorca was driven to the Civil Government building on Calle Duquesa, directly next door to the University of Granada’s botanical gardens, a few blocks from the Rosales home. He was searched and confined to an office. Miguel Rosales, who had accompanied him on the brief journey, assured him that he would not be harmed.

  Later that day, Luis Rosales and his brother José, a long-standing member of the Falange, went to the Civil Government building to demand an explanation for Lorca’s arrest. They were told to leave. Luis subsequently filed an official document clarifying his decision to allow Lorca to stay at his house and emphasizing that at no point had he or anyone else considered Lorca “in hiding,” that the poet’s presence had in fact been known to several members of the Falange. Rosales defended his actions and swore his devotion to “the defense of my Religion, my Flag, and my Fatherland.” He and his family were clearly at risk for their role in the episode. Within two days of Lorca’s arrest, Luis Rosales donated a ring to the Falange, and his father made a sizable gift of gold jewelry and coins “for the Fatherland.”

  José Rosales was allowed to see Lorca on the evening of August 16. He gave him a carton of Camel cigarettes. Lorca asked José to donate money to the Falange in his name. A neighbor of the Rosales family was also permitted to see Lorca and apparently gave him some blankets from Mrs. Rosales. A third witness who saw Lorca during his confinement in the Civil Government building remembered him as silent and plainly dismayed.

  On the morning of Monday, August 17, Concha García Lorca’s nursemaid, Angelina Cordobilla, entered the long, sparsely furnished room where Lorca was kept under armed guard. “Angelina, Angelina, why have you come?” Lorca said.

  “Your mother sends me.” She gave Lorca a basket containing an egg-and-potato omelette, a thermos of coffee, and tobacco. A guard checked the food to see that it concealed nothing. But Lorca had no appetite, and Angelina quickly left.

  Temperatures climbed high into the nineties that afternoon. Lorca remained locked inside the Civil Government building.

  According to a neighbor who happened to be on the street early the following morning, Lorca was taken from the building at around 3 a.m., Tuesday, August 18, handcuffed to another man, Dióscoro Galindo González, a lame schoolteacher who had been arrested one hour ear
lier. The two prisoners were placed in a car, with a driver, two guards, and two members of the Falange.

  The seven men drove through Granada in the dark, to the northwest edge of the city, and turned onto a pitted road that snaked sharply up into the parched foothills of the Sierra Nevada. There was no moonlight. Six miles from Granada, three thousand feet above sea level, in the tiny whitewashed village of Víznar, the car stopped before an eighteenth-century palace that had been turned into a Nationalist command post. After a short wait—apparently for the exchange of papers—Lorca and his companion were driven to a red stone building just below Víznar, at the edge of a sudden ravine. Until that month the building, La Colonia, had been used as a summer play space for children. Since August 1 it had served as a holding cell for condemned prisoners.

  Soldiers, guards, grave diggers, and a pair of housekeepers occupied the upper floor of La Colonia. Lorca was held downstairs. With him were the schoolteacher Galindo González, and two bullfighters known for their left-wing politics. A young guard, José Jover Tripaldi, was on duty that night. In an effort to calm his prisoners, Tripaldi at first told them they would be sent out the following day to help build a road. Lorca offered him a cigarette and tried to make conversation. He asked if he might have a newspaper and more tobacco the next morning. Tripaldi said yes. Sometime later, Tripaldi revealed the truth to the four men. A devout Catholic, he believed it his Christian duty to tell them they were about to be killed, and to offer them the chance to make a final confession. Lorca was dazed. “I haven’t done anything!” he cried. He tried to recite a prayer. “My mother taught it all to me, you know? And now I’ve forgotten it,” he said, weeping. “Will I be damned?” Tripaldi told him he would not.