‘It is necessary to create an atmosphere of terror,’ General Mola, the organizer of the coup, had made clear to his followers in the run-up to the uprising. ‘We have to create the impression of mastery. Anyone who is overtly or secretly a supporter of the Popular Front must be shot.’5
In the weeks to come, Ruiz Alonso would make sure he followed Mola’s instructions to the letter.
Lorca’s arrival in Granada did not go unnoticed. The local papers carried the news, El Defensor even placing the story at the centre of its front page. And during the few remaining days of peace the poet was often seen out and about, ever garrulous and sociable. Granada was a town he loved, yet which exasperated him. Granadan society was dominated by a largely conservative, frowning Catholic elite that seemed at odds with the essential magic of the place: the last stronghold of the Moors, home to the Alhambra and infused with the romance of Spain’s oriental past. Lorca’s family had often felt out of step with Granadan society, being well-read and musical – they were well-to-do country folk more suited to a spontaneity and creativity which was lacking in many of those around them. There were notable exceptions – the composer Manuel de Falla, who lived on the Alhambra hill, was a friend of Lorca – but many had been annoyed at Lorca’s attack on Granadan conservatism in a piece in a Madrid newspaper only a few months before. As far as the poet was concerned, Ferdinand and Isabella’s conquest of Granada in 1492 and the end of the Moorish kingdom there had been the greatest disaster to befall the city, a place he now saw as being in the hands of the ‘worst bourgeoisie in Spain’. This kind of thing didn’t go down well among the Granadan grandees.
There was a party at the Lorca family’s house as usual on St Frederick’s Day, 18 July, Federico and his father celebrating their saint’s day together, but the mood was changed from other years. News had just come in of a military uprising in Spanish Morocco; there were rumours that Seville had fallen too and that General Franco was on the side of the rebels. The situation was unclear and panic set in, despite claims from the city authorities that matters were under control. No one imagined how bad things would get.
On 20 July the plotters in Granada made their move. Conspirators inside the military garrison joined with the Falangists, and within hours of taking to the streets during the heat of the siesta, the city was theirs; the police quickly joined the uprising once they knew what was happening. Only the Albaicín, the old Moorish quarter on the hill opposite the Alhambra and a largely working-class district, put up any resistance. It held out for three days with hardly any weaponry, but was eventually crushed. The city’s military and civil governors were both relatively new to their posts and were easily overwhelmed. Granada fell quickly to the rebels. But there was a problem: the city was isolated – the countryside around remained loyal to the government. The conspirators would have to wait for troops from Seville to link the town up with other Nationalist-held territory. In the meantime, the besieged city would have to deal with threats from within.
One of the first to be arrested was Manuel Fernández Montesinos, the socialist mayor and husband of Lorca’s sister, Concha. The news caused consternation in the Lorca household, where Manuel and Concha had been living with their three children. Lorca went to visit his brother-in-law in prison, but was so affected by the state in which he found him that he had to take to his bed in shock.6 The torture suffered at the hands of the Nationalists led many to suicide.
Amid fears for Manuel and a growing sense of helplessness, the Lorca family was becoming increasingly worried that the gunmen would soon come for Federico as well. Falangists had arrived at the house to conduct a ‘search’, presumably for a secret radio which, according to a rumour running at the time, Lorca was using to contact ‘the Russians’; but they had left, unsurprisingly, without finding anything. The message was clear, though – the poet was in their sights. Lorca himself had a nightmare during this fraught time where he dreamed of being threatened with crucifixes by a group of women dressed in black. He told a friend he felt certain it was a bad omen.
On the night of 7 August an architect friend, Alfredo Rodríguez Orgaz, arrived at the house looking for a place to hide. The Falangists were after him and he was trying to escape to Republican territory. As the Lorca house was on the edge of the city, sanctuary was only a couple of miles away down the road. But Lorca refused to go with him, convinced that the coup would soon be crushed. It was his second mistake. Hours later Alfredo would be safe, while his enemies were closing in on Lorca.
A few days later the Falangists returned to the Lorca house, this time to look for the caretaker, Gabriel. His brothers were wanted and the Falangists thought they might find them there. When Gabriel refused to give them any information, they dragged him out into the garden, tied him to a tree and, in front of his mother and the horrified Lorca family, began whipping him. Lorca, never a violent man and greatly fearful of physical pain, stepped in to try to stop them, but the Falangists simply knocked him to the ground and began kicking him instead.
‘We know very well who you are, Federico García Lorca,’ they said.7 And before leaving, they informed him that he was now under house arrest.
Lorca was becoming alive to the danger he was in and decided to act. If he stayed where he was he would almost certainly be arrested, perhaps worse. He would have to move, but where? He decided to call a friend of his among the local Falangists – Luis Rosales, a fellow poet – to ask for help. Luis went to the Lorca home and discussed the options with the family. There were three choices: smuggle Lorca over the lines into Republican territory; take him to the house of Manuel de Falla – no one would touch him in the home of such a respected figure; or take him to live at the Rosales household itself. Luis’s brothers were also Falangists and powerful in the city now – as Lorca’s friends they would be able to protect him. It was decided that he should take the third option. It was his third and final mistake.
The Rosales’ home was a large townhouse near the centre of the city. The brothers themselves spent little time there during that period as they were busy at the front, but their mother and sister were at home, along with an aunt who lived in a flat at the top of the building. Lorca was to move in with her.
For eight days he lived at Number One, Angulo Street, never venturing out, reading books from Luis’s library and playing a piano that had been brought specially for him. But the violence outside was increasing by the day. The city’s new masters had put in place their system of control through fear, and lorry-loads of their enemies were being driven up the Alhambra hill every night, beyond the Moorish castle, to the cemetery. There they were shot outside the walls and later dumped in unmarked pits. So many were being killed that they had to expand the graveyard, and the grave-digger was rumoured to have gone mad from having to bury so many people. Everyone from left-wing politicians to union leaders was being hauled away to be shot – either at the cemetery, or outside the little village of Víznar near the front lines. For daring to hold out against the Nationalists, the Albaicín quarter suffered heavily: men were dragged from their homes to be shot in retribution. It didn’t take long for those wanting to save their own skins to point out who their left-wing neighbours were.
Some of the executions were reported in the newspapers and Lorca sensed what was going on. ‘I’ve never been involved in politics,’ he lamented one day at the Rosales’ house. ‘I’m too afraid for that. To take sides you need a kind of courage I lack.’
The Rosales brothers’ positions in the local Falange party might have offered Lorca some protection, but there were other forces at work in Granada at that time. On 15 August, gunmen went to the Lorca family home looking for Federico. In a moment of panic his sister let slip that he was staying with Falangist friends in the centre of town, perhaps mentioning the Rosales by name.
At dawn the next day, Lorca’s brother-in-law, the mayor, Manuel Fernández Montesinos, was shot along with a group of other prisoners outside the walls of the city cemetery. By five o’clock
that afternoon some forty men had encircled the Rosales’ house in a large-scale operation to arrest Lorca. The man at the head of the group, driving a requisitioned Oakland convertible, was the former CEDA parliamentarian Ruiz Alonso, acting on the orders of the new civil governor. It seems that Ruiz Alonso, or someone backing him, had a grudge against the Rosales and wanted to discredit them – perhaps one of the squabbles between the various factions that made up the Nationalist movement now controlling the city. Whatever the details, it would explain at least how the Rosales were able to do so little to help their friend once he was arrested.
None of the brothers was at home when they came for Federico, and at first Señora Rosales stood up to Ruiz Alonso, refusing to let him take her guest away. Finally one of her sons, Miguel, was located and he came to the house immediately. Lorca was officially – if ludicrously – accused of being a Soviet spy. Convinced there was nothing else he could do, Miguel persuaded his mother to let Lorca go, promising to accompany him in order to sort everything out. Lorca came down from his attic flat to be taken away, horrified at what was happening and close to breaking down.
But once they had driven the short distance to the civil government building where Lorca was then imprisoned, Miguel was able to do very little. He tried in vain to contact his brothers, particularly José, who had the most authority in the Falange. Miguel became very concerned – a policeman had beaten Lorca with his rifle butt during the journey and he was worried that one of the sadists then operating in the civil government might subject him to an interrogation session. He did manage, at least, to ensure that Lorca was locked up in an office rather than a cell, and to extract a promise not to do anything to him until the civil governor arrived. Meanwhile, Señora Rosales contacted Lorca’s family to tell them what had happened. Already in mourning for his son-in-law, shot earlier that day, his father felt helpless: the authorities had frozen his assets and he was only allowed to withdraw small amounts for living expenses. They sent a housekeeper round to where Lorca was being held, taking him some food and cigarettes. Frightened for their own safety, it was all they could do.
That night, when the Rosales brothers returned to the city from the front, they were outraged to discover what had happened. Gathering some friends, they stormed round to the civil government building and confronted Ruiz Alonso, but were unable to have their friend released. José Rosales even spoke to José Valdés Guzmán, the civil governor, but was stonewalled and warned that if he wasn’t careful he would have to watch out for his brother Luis as well, for having taken Lorca in in the first place. Other friends tried to secure his release, including Manuel de Falla, but to no avail. Although no one knew for sure at this point, the order had been given to have him shot; the green light was probably given by the Nationalist general in charge of Seville, Queipo de Llano, with whom Valdés Guzmán was in nightly contact by radio.
Some days later, Lorca was taken from his cell in the middle of the night and handcuffed to a primary-school teacher with a false leg called Dióscoro Galindo, who was accused of being a communist by the Falangists. The two were pushed into a car and then driven out of town towards the village of Víznar. They were taken to a country house on the outskirts of the village that the local authorities were using as a holding centre before prisoners were dragged out to be shot. A group of Freemasons and university professors was forced to act as grave-diggers, many of them later meeting the same fate. Lorca was held there overnight, he and Galindo sharing a cell with two anarchist bullfighters who had demanded arms for the people during the early days of the uprising. When they were called out in the early hours of the next morning a priest was on hand to give them the last sacrament. At first Lorca, never particularly religious, was reluctant, but he eventually asked to be confessed. The priest, however, had left by this point, and a young police assistant at hand had to help him through prayers barely remembered from childhood.
The men were taken from the country house further along the road towards the next village of Alfacar, the view stretching out northwards over the sierra where, just a mile or two away in Republican territory, the four of them would have been welcomed as heroes. It was a favourite spot for the Nationalist assassins. The exact date of the execution is still uncertain, but it was about 19 August 1936. Lorca was thirty-eight years old.
Some hours later a young communist was forced to dig a large grave, and the four corpses were thrown in one on top of the other: four among thousands of Granadans whose remains lie to this day on that mournful mountainside.
Despite Spain’s official silence over what had happened, the international community continued to call on the Franco government to release Lorca from prison well into the 1940s. Some clung to the legend that grew up which said he had somehow managed to escape the death squads, hitting his head as he ran away and forgetting who he was.
Si muero
dejad el balcón abierto.
El niño come naranjas.
(Desde mi balcón lo veo.)
El segador siega el trigo.
(Desde mi balcón lo siento.)
¡Si muero,
dejad el balcón abierto!
If I die,
Leave the window open.
The child eating oranges.
(From my window I see him.)
The reaper harvesting the wheat.
(From my window I sense him.)
If I die,
leave the window open!
7
Víznar
The taxi-driver mumbled as we stuttered our way through the late-afternoon traffic and out of the city. Everyone in Granada seemed to have got into their cars at that very moment, pressing against one another in their steel boxes in the crushing, choking heat as they struggled in vain to move around the city. Stressed and frustrated, the taxista shunted and braked his way through, hurling me from side to side and poisoning me with a venomous cloud of halitosis whenever he opened his mouth to curse the other drivers. ‘¡Me cago en tu puta madre!’ In the rear-view mirror I caught his fat-swollen eyes scanning me suspiciously. Beads of sweat were coagulating in the creases in the back of his neck.
‘There’s a bus out to Víznar, you know. Be easier than going by taxi.’
He might have been right, but I was convinced he was lying, preferring to dump me on the outskirts of town than to take what he assumed to be a maricón out to the site of Lorca’s murder. I’d be paying him well, but it seemed he wanted the security of a quick batch of fares in town rather than a lengthy ride out into the country. Besides, I’d sensed him bristling when I’d told him I wanted to go to Lorca’s gravesite.
‘Another fucking queer. They’re all obsessed with him.’
I knew it was somewhere between the villages of Víznar and Alfacar, just a few miles northeast of the city. Taking the bus would mean a long ride, with no guarantee of finding the spot when I got there. And at this point in the day there were only a couple of hours of sunlight left. I didn’t want to have to wait till tomorrow. A taxi it would have to be, whatever the man’s prejudices.
The road out to the site of Lorca’s murder was a slow winding trail hugging the contours of the hillside, brushing past pine forests, meadows of dry wild grass and occasional fields cut into the slope – countrymen’s allotments yielding tomatoes, courgettes, with some beans and a patch of parsley in the corner. It was a quiet spot, over the valley on the northern side of the Granadan horticultural plain, the vega: a place to take a Sunday stroll, perhaps, pick wild flowers, and bring children to play in a safe yet still semi-wild landscape. As we rolled on in silence, the driver sulking in the front, the chattering of birds blew soothingly through my open window, my eyes captured by the view as I stared out towards the horizon.
In the first few months of the Civil War this area had been close to the front line: Víznar and Alfacar, about five miles out from Granada, were among the last villages under Nationalist control before Republican-held territory. Granada had been encircled in those early days, an
island of fascism in a sea of red. Every morning fighters from the city – policemen, soldiers, Falangists – would ride out to do battle with the enemy before returning to rest. It was a time for heroism and courage. The coup had not met with the success its leaders had hoped for, being neither crippled nor delivering a knock-out blow against the government in Madrid. A civil war, perhaps a long one, was looking inevitable. And Granada was on its own.
The gentle hills around the villages had become an arena of conflict. In the past, Moorish poets had written eulogies to the beauty of these surroundings, particularly the Ain al-Damar spring close by – a teardrop-shaped well of spring water whose name, an Arabic play on words, translated both as ‘spring of tears’ and ‘eye of tears’. It was an apt name for so melancholy a place. For the Nationalists in Granada were not only concerned with defending their oasis against assaults from the outside; they were also keen to cleanse the area under their control. And they did so with a fervour and energy unusual even in those bloodthirsty days. The Víznar–Alfacar road, peaceful, secluded, ironically undisturbed through its proximity to the front lines, was the ideal spot for the systematic slaughter of the enemy – unionists, workers, left-wingers, even school teachers: anyone deemed ‘liberal’ and therefore seen to be a threat to the new authoritarian dawn. Hundreds, possibly thousands, met their deaths at the hands of firing squads here, many given a coup de grâce in the back of the head as they lay bleeding on the ground. A beautiful location for a violent end.
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