Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Shortly before dawn the four prisoners were removed from La Colonia and driven by truck along the ravine to an empty stretch of hillside flecked with olive trees. Miles below them in the distance lay the vega. A few hundred feet beyond them, near the village of Alfacar, stood an eleventh-century Arab reservoir, Fuente Grande—in Arabic, Ainadamar, “The Fountain of Tears.” For centuries its waters had supplied the city of Granada.

  The sun had not yet risen when Lorca and his three companions heard the click of rifles. They were shot beside a stand of olive trees. As daylight broke, gravediggers sunk their shovels into the earth and began their morning’s work.

  Epilogue

  On August 18 or 19—the precise date is uncertain—Angelina Cordobilla went again to the Civil Government building in Granada to deliver food to Lorca. Guards told her Lorca was gone, and sent her home. On or about the same day Manuel de Falla went to the Civil Government building to plead for his friend’s release. He was curtly informed that his petition was useless, for Lorca had died that morning. Falla immediately took the news to Lorca’s family.

  Concha García Lorca was sitting in her room, still in shock over her husband’s death, when her father appeared in the doorway, white as chalk. “Federico?” she asked.

  “Federico,” he said.

  Don Federico clung to hope for the next three months. But Concha knew at once that her brother was gone. Within days of Lorca’s death, his father received a note written in Lorca’s hand. “Dear Father, please give the bearer of this letter 2,000 pesetas,” it read. Don Federico carried the note with him for years. It was Lorca’s last manuscript.

  Margarita Xirgu was in Havana, performing in Yerma, when she learned of Lorca’s death. That night she changed the ending of his play so that Yerma’s final cry—“I myself have murdered my own child”—became a heart-stricken wail: “They have murdered my child.”

  “If one had searched diligently, scouring every corner of the land for someone to sacrifice, to sacrifice as a symbol,” Pablo Neruda wrote one year after Lorca’s death, “one could not have found in anyone or in anything, to the degree it existed in this man who was chosen, the essence of Spain, its vitality and its profundity.” Lorca’s murder pushed Neruda into a political activism he had long resisted. “We will never be able to forget this crime nor forgive it,” he told a Paris audience in early 1937. “We will never put it out of our minds, never will we excuse it. Never.”

  Pedro Salinas mourned Lorca’s sudden disappearance, “in the full flush of his youth, leaving in our hands a sheaf of marvelous poems.” Juan Ramón Jiménez spoke of “this unwanted death.” Antonio Machado urged those who knew Lorca to

  carve a monument

  out of dream stone

  for the poet in the Alhambra,

  over a fountain where the grieving water

  shall say forever:

  The crime was in Granada, his Granada.

  Machado died in 1939, during the last months of the Spanish Civil War, having succumbed to pneumonia while attempting to flee Spain. Miguel de Unamuno died in the fifth month of the war, in 1936, in Salamanca, his heart shattered by the “stupid regime of terror” that had split his country. “There is nothing worse than the marriage of the barracks mentality with that of the sacristy,” he wrote bitterly to a friend shortly after the war began. “And then, the spiritual leprosy of Spain: resentment, envy, hatred for intelligence.”

  The Spanish Civil War lasted nearly three years, from July 1936 until the end of March 1939, and claimed more than 500,000 lives, 130,000 of those by execution. In Granada alone, as many as five thousand people were killed by firing squads.

  Impassioned volunteers from some fifty-four countries—including 3,000 American partisans with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, their passports stamped “Not Valid For Travel In Spain”—“presented their lives,” in W. H. Auden’s eloquent phrase, for the republican cause. Stalin contributed a thousand pilots, planes, tanks, and over two thousand “advisers.” To Franco’s Nationalist movimiento, Hitler sent a complete air force, with nearly ten thousand pilots and weapons specialists. Mussolini volunteered 75,000 Italian troops so that Fascism might prevail.

  Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, André Malraux each fought in and wrote about the war. Picasso immortalized its savagery in his immense gray-and-white canvas Guernica. For an entire generation, the conflict in Spain became a crusade of good against evil, a prelude to World War II, the concentration camps, air raids against defenseless civilians. “We left our hearts there,” said Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times, recalling the brutal war. “Treacherous generals: look at my dead house, look at my Broken Spain,” wrote Neruda.

  Among those who perished in battle was Lorca’s companion Rafael Rodriguez Rapún, who died near Santander on August 18, 1937, the first anniversary of Lorca’s death, from wounds suffered while fighting for the Republic.

  Franco’s triumphant Nationalist soldiers marched into Madrid on the morning of March 27, 1939. The capital had remained in republican hands until then. For the first time, red-and-yellow Nationalist flags hung from windows and balconies; men and women in makeshift Fascist uniforms—black shirts and trousers—raced through the streets, hands lifted in the Fascist salute, shouting “Franco, Franco!” Three days later the last remaining republican strongholds—Cartagena, Albacete, Guadalajara—fell to the Nationalists. On March 31, Franco wrote his final communiqué: “Having captured and disarmed the red army, Nationalist troops today took their last objectives. The war is finished.”

  Four decades of dictatorship followed. The arrest and execution of alleged republican sympathizers continued. In July 1939, four months after the ceasefire, a visitor to Spain reported between 200 and 250 shootings a day in Madrid, 150 in Barcelona.

  Franco’s government never accepted responsibility for Lorca’s murder. But officials in the Nationalist movement—specifically General Queipo de Llano of Seville—had clearly sanctioned the killing. Within two days of Lorca’s death in 1936, Queipo announced by radio that the 1922 Nobel laureate, Jacinto Benavente, “who never meddled in politics,” had been murdered by “Marxist mobs” in Madrid. Queipo also claimed that Marxist assassins had killed at least five additional Spanish playwrights. The reports were patently false. Authorities had concocted them in an attempt to diminish the impact of Lorca’s disappearance.

  The government’s lone acknowledgment of Lorca’s death was a certificate, issued in 1940, stating that Lorca “died in the month of August 1936 from war wounds, his body having been found on the 20th day of the same month on the road from Víznar to Alfacar.”

  Lorca’s body has in fact never been found. For decades the precise spot near Víznar, where he and hundreds of others were shot and buried in shallow graves, remained an official secret, a pockmarked landscape few dared to visit, much less inspect, for fear of arrest by the Civil Guard.

  In 1986, eleven years after Franco’s death and the restitution of democracy to Spain, the socialist government of Prime Minister Felipe González constructed a monument on the site of Lorca’s execution, “in memory of Federico García Lorca and all the victims of the Civil War.”

  The surviving members of Lorca’s immediate family—his parents, brother, two sisters, nephew, and two nieces—left Spain at various points during and shortly after the war, and were reunited in 1940 in New York City. Francisco García Lorca married the daughter of Fernando de los Ríos, Laura, in 1942. He taught Spanish literature at Columbia University and Queens College, and gave classes at Hunter College, Harvard University, and New York University. For nine years he directed the Spanish program at Middlebury Summer School in Vermont, where his colleagues included fellow exiles Fernando de los Ríos, Pedro Salinas, and Jorge Guillén.

  Lorca’s brother longed for an early end to Franco’s dictatorship, and a prompt return to Spain. It was not to be. His mother and sisters went back to Madrid in 1951. Paco remained in America until his retirement from Columbia in 1966.

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bsp; Don Federico García Rodríguez never returned home. Lorca’s father died in America in 1945, nine years after his oldest son’s death in Granada. The landowner had abandoned all hope of seeing Spain again. He never learned English; his young grandson, Manolo, translated the daily paper into Spanish for him.

  All but a handful of writers in Lorca’s generation left Spain after the war, condemned by politics and their abhorrence of Franco’s regime to “rot in accursed exile,” as Pedro Salinas put it. “Are we reaching the end of the end or is something new beginning?” Rafael Alberti wondered as the Civil War drew to a close. Alberti viewed the future as “frozen”; in poetry and prose he mourned Lorca’s death.

  Jiménez, Machado, Guillén, Salinas, Alberti, Cernuda, Altolaguirre, Prados, Méndez: “They all left,” wrote Vicente Aleixandre, one of the few poets of the Generation of ’27 to stay behind, “all together at one moment, on very different paths.”

  Manuel de Falla went to Argentina, Luis Buñuel to the United States and eventually Mexico. Salvador Dalí spent the first ten years after the war in the United States, then he returned to Cadaqués with his wife. Ever the sensationalist, he embraced franquismo and brashly applauded Lorca’s murder. “The moment I learned of his death … I cried ‘Olé!’ That’s what a Spaniard says in the presence of a bullfighter who has just executed a particularly successful move before a bleeding beast. I thought that for Federico García Lorca, it was the most beautiful way of dying: killed by the Civil War.” In a more sober moment Dalí spoke of Lorca’s death as “ignoble … Lorca was in essence the most apolitical person on earth.”

  At his death, Lorca left behind at least three unproduced, full-length plays—The Audience, Once Five Years Pass, and The House of Bernarda Alba. He left several unpublished poetry collections—Suites, The Divan at Tamarit, Poet in New York, The Garden of Sonnets—and nearly four hundred unpublished drawings, as well as letters, fragments of plays and poems, and lists of projected works.

  The state of his manuscripts demonstrates the extent to which the act and art of creation were a part of his everyday life. He wrote poems on invitations to tea, royalty statements, envelopes, and drawings. He sketched drawings in the margins of letters and plays, and wrote plays on the backs of poems. He was “an extraordinary creature,” said Jorge Guillén, “a creature of Creation, the crossroads of Creation, a man immersed in Creation who partook of deep creative currents.”

  Lorca drew no distinction between art and life. The piano was as much a part of his existence as food and drink. He could turn an ordinary party into a performance, a restaurant outing into a one-man recital. His letters—some of them festooned with sketches, most of them intimate revelations of himself—were works of art, cherished by their recipients. His very conversation was cause for awe.

  He was a poet—more precisely a “poet of the people”—who viewed poetry as “something that walks along the streets,” that exists everywhere: in men, in women, in the “unpredictable path of a dog.” “Poetry has no limits,” he said four months before his death.

  It can be waiting for us in the doorway in the cold early hours before dawn when you come home with tired feet and the collar of your coat turned up. It can be waiting for us in the water of a fountain, perched on the flower of an olive tree, set out to dry on a piece of white fabric on a terrace roof. What you cannot do is set out to write poetry with the mathematical rigor of one who goes out to buy a liter-and-a-half of oil.

  In a career that spanned only nineteen years, Lorca exhausted the origins of Spanish poetry and theater, and in nine books of verse and thirteen plays resurrected and renewed its most basic strains: ballad, song, sonnet, puppet show, tragedy, farce. He sought, and found, provocative new ways of melding poetry and stagecraft, and in doing so anticipated the plays of Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett. Through his work with La Barraca, and his collaborations with Xirgu and Cipriano Rivas Cherif, he helped inaugurate a second Golden Age of the Spanish theater. Through his poems he continues to speak to readers worldwide of all that is most central to the human condition: the capriciousness of time, the impossibility of love, the phantoms of identity, art, childhood, sex, and death.

  In life, Lorca was best known for his Andalusian works: Gypsy Ballads, Poem of the Deep Song, Blood Wedding, Yerma, Doña Rosita the Spinster, and Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, his epic portrait of a beloved friend and towering Andalusian “prince,” who “sought death out, savored its taste.” Lorca never entirely shook the image he had earned as a result of Gypsy Ballads—the poet as bronzed Gypsy with black hair and soulful eyes, whose work depicts a tragic south steeped in dark sounds and blood. His friends knew otherwise and, in memoirs, essays, poems, letters, and interviews, have recalled a more genuine Lorca—a playful, irreverent, opinionated, utterly contemporary man and artist, who in the last years of his life wrote such provocative works as Poet in New York, The Audience, Once Five Years Pass, Sonnets of Dark Love, and the first act of The Dream of Life.

  That none of these plays or poetry collections was published or produced during Lorca’s life is testament both to his abiding belief in the vitality of the living word, and to the audacity of the works themselves. As a writer, Lorca craved confrontation. When his 1930 play The Audience at last made its Spanish stage debut in the late 1980s, the work’s volatile content and radical form still sparked debate. The discovery and publication of additional manuscripts left behind at Lorca’s death—The Divan at Tamarit, Suites, Trip to the Moon, The House of Bernarda Alba, the unfinished “Ode and Mockery of Sesostris and Sardanapalus,”, the first act of The Dreams of My Cousin Amelia, incidental poems to and about friends, lectures, essays, interviews, hundreds of drawings, reams of juvenilia, and a heartbreakingly beautiful collection of letters to family and friends—have further defined the range and depth of a man who in the spring of 1936 told Adolfo Salazar that he was just embarking on his “true career as a dramatic poet.”

  Lorca viewed himself in grandiose terms, like the “Marvel of Nature” that Cervantes saw in Lope de Vega. He dreamt of being as prolific as Lope, and as influential.

  A year or two before his death, Lorca told a reporter that he was then at work on approximately “four thousand five hundred and fifty-nine” projects. “Now of those,” he teased, “I’ll write only four at the most.”

  In 1935 a journalist asked him which of his plays he liked best. “Among the works I’ve already produced I don’t have any favorites,” Lorca answered. “I’m in love with the ones I haven’t written yet.”

  Acknowledgements

  Without the encouragement of Stephen B. Oates and the late Sumner M. Greenfield, I would not have embarked on this biography. Exemplary teachers both, they showed me, as Martín Domínguez Berrueta showed Lorca, that writing books is a sublime pursuit.

  I am also grateful to Glenn Banner, Gordon Wickstrom, Doris Abramson, Ed Golden, Virginia Scott, and Richard Trousdell, who, together and separately, taught me to respect the demands of language and scholarship.

  Manuel Fernández-Montesinos and the staff at the Fundación Federico García Lorca in Madrid expertly answered my many requests and inquiries, and granted me unrestricted access to the Lorca archive. Without their support, this biography would not exist. I am especially thankful to Araceli Gasso, Sonia González García, and Rosa María Illande Haro for their prompt and cheerful help. Isabel García Lorca has been unfailingly cordial and cooperative. Additional members of the Lorca family, especially Manolo Montesinos’s wife, Ana, have made my task easier through their friendship.

  Critical support from a Fulbright research grant enabled me to live in Spain from 1984 to 1986, and to consult archives, conduct interviews, and retrace Lorca’s steps through the country he knew and loved best. I am particularly indebted to Tony Chillura of the United States Information Agency and to Patricia Zahnisser and Thomas Middleton of the Fulbright Commission in Madrid for their perceptive advice and thoughtful assistance throughout my stay in Spain.
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  I am also grateful to the United States-Spanish Joint Committee for Cultural and Educational Cooperation for a grant that allowed me to complete a key phase of research on the biography in 1992.

  From the start of my work, Christopher Maurer has been a model of scholarship and collegiality. He readily shared his time, knowledge, and insight. For their friendship and hospitality, my profound thanks to both Christopher and his wife, Estrella. I am similarly indebted to Mario Hernández, who provided generous counsel throughout my two years in Spain, and who valiantly gave me his out-of-print copy of Mora Guarnido’s Federico García Lorca y su mundo in exchange for “my” Lorca. My thanks as well to Mario’s wife, Alicia, for her many kindnesses. Andrew Anderson lent his support to this biography during much of its development; his contribution to the whole is inestimable.

  Spud Baldwin, Laurie Benton, Manuel Camarero, Dru Dougherty, Daniel Eisenberg, Marie Laffranque, Francisco Martín, Jacinto Martin Martin, David Maves, Ricardo Pereira, Antonina Rodrigo, José Salobreña García, Andrés Soria Olmedo, Bob Spires, and Ed Stanton provided help in the early stages of my research. Frank Casa assisted with translations. Ian Gibson graciously offered his advice and assistance at critical junctures; his books on Lorca are an indispensable reference, and his courageous investigation of Lorca’s murder—at a time when it was extraordinarily dangerous to do so—has been an inspiration.

  For their willingness to answer my questions and share their memories, my deep-felt thanks go to Amelia Agostini del Río, José Alemán Marín, Conchita Burgmann, José Caballero, José Luis Cano, Alvaro Custodio, Philip Cummings, Ana María Dalí, Angel Flores, Antonio Gallego Morell, María del Carmen García Lasgoity, Eulalia Dolores de la Higuera, Paz Jiménez de Marquina, Houston Kenyon Jr., Enrique Lanz Durán, Vicente López, José Martín Campos, Rafael Martínez Nadal, Gonzalo Menéndez Pidal, Veronica Moría, Santiago Ontañón, Henry Rickard, José Antonio Rubio Sacristán, Arturo Saenz de la Calzada, Margarita Ucelay Maórtua, Antonio Velázquez, and Dionysio and María Venegas Heredía. I am abidingly grateful to Tomás Rodríguez Rapún and his wife, Margarita Bernis, for their friendship.