Granada

by Steven Nightingale

  The year of 1933 was fateful for Lorca, for Spain, and for Europe. In Germany, Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Reichstag was set on fire, the Third Reich was proclaimed, and the Gestapo was formed. In Spain, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera established the Falangists, the Spanish fascist party, and elections in Spain brought the right wing back to power after two years of Republican government that, based on the country’s new Constitution, had embraced universal suffrage, separation of church and state, the right to divorce, freedom of worship, heavy investment in education, and other progressive themes. To the extent these hopes had been embodied in law, the new government set about repealing them, or dismantling the effort to enforce the laws. Since Spain lacked a neutral, independent, and efficient civil service—a centerpiece of effective government—the national leaders and legislature could begin, delay, or undo national programs. In 1933, this whipsaw worked again. Lorca, always a man of his time, was drawn into political declarations, and in May, he was the first to sign a protest against the “fascist barbarism” of Hitler, as the Führer consolidated power in Germany with laws targeted against Jews and widespread book burnings. Yet Lorca kept up his writing, and in the spring of that same year, his play Blood Wedding opened under his direction in Madrid and took the city by storm. Not only was it received with joy by the audience, who went so far as to interrupt the play twice to salute Lorca personally with their applause, but the critics, one after another, lauded the depth of the work and the beauty of its language. There were immediate plans to move the production across the sea to Buenos Aires; venues were found, dates were set, and Lorca set off for Argentina. Blood Wedding opened in Buenos Aires to widespread public acclamation. A few months later, another play of his, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, opened to more acclaim. Lorca’s life there was hyperactive, a wild variety of theatrical responsibilities, lectures, readings, parties, and interviews. He became, for months, the central phenomenon of the city. The great Chilean poet and future Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, who formed his friendship with Lorca during that visit, called it “the greatest triumph ever achieved by a writer of our race.” Remembering those times years later in his autobiography, Neruda said that Lorca was

  an effervescent child, the young channel of a powerful river. He squandered his imagination, he spoke with enlightenment … he cracked walls with his laughter, he improvised the impossible, in his hands a prank became a work of art. I have never seen such magnetism and constructiveness in a human being.

  Lorca had become, at age 35, one of the most celebrated writers in the Hispanic world. In Spain, he had a rare sense of the complex splendor of his country’s heritage, a sense derived from his homeland in Granada, his study of Arab and Persian poetry, and his immersion in flamenco. Upon his return to Spain in early 1934, he took up with vigor all his projects. He handed out versions of the poems in his unpublished book Diwan of the Tamerit, meant in tribute to the Arab poets in Granada before the coming of Ferdinand and Isabel. He finished his play “Yerma” and wrote the unforgettable elegy “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” after that Andalusian bullfighter—a friend of Lorca and aficionado of flamenco—was gored to death by a bull that summer. He kept up some oversight of La Barraca, which performed in Seville and still toured the country to excellent critical reviews, though it was under attack in the right-wing press as a band of promiscuous youths who perverted the peasants with, among other terrible defects, their “obedience to the dictates of Jewish Marxism.” However absurd these taunts were, they took their toll, and the funds available for La Barraca began to dwindle.

  In 1935, he moved forward with a host of projects. At one point early in the year, he had three plays in Madrid showing at once: Yerma, the imported Buenos Aires production of Blood Wedding, and a revival of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. It was also the year of the first performance of Doña Rosita the Spinster, which is set in our very own Albayzín. Lorca was incorrigibly a man of Granada, and within Granada, of the Albayzín. Not only did he write about the barrio, he visited there often and loved the carmenes. He knew the way their beauty could transform daily life, felt the simmering of paradise in the gardens there, with the radiant presence of the Alhambra on the promontory just above. He wrote to a friend, “I love Granada but only to live there on another plane, in a carmen. The rest is nonsense. In a carmen, close to what one loves and feels. White walls, flowering myrtle, and fountain.”

  As is the case so often in Lorca’s work, the dream of love in a place of beauty turns into a nightmare of grief and betrayal. Though Doña Rosita the Spinster is full of flowers, they come to signify not the trustworthy unfolding of mind and senses, an intimation of paradise, but instead the withering away of the life of a beautiful young woman. Doña Rosita is caged by the social and religious conventions of the time and by the rigor of her own self-deception. It was a common theme of Lorca’s: the way, even among the most promising and powerful beauties, human dishonesty, treachery, and self-delusion can corrupt love, so that the living die within before dying in the body. Doña Rosita’s fiancé is called to Argentina to work with his father on the land. She waits for him to return, to take up the only life in the society of the day open to her: as a Catholic wife. The years pass; Rosita works on her wedding clothes, a nightdress, sheets. More years pass as she awaits the man who called her his “nightingale on the mountain,” who pledged to return to her “in a boat all of gold” with “sails of jubilation.” His arrival, he has told her, will be marked by the “bright dove of my faith.” He promises “by the diamonds of God” to return to her.

  He does not return. He observes the convention of letter writing, and he marries someone else, a rich woman he courted in Argentina. Rosita is left with nothing, since women, by the Catholic and cultural standards of late-nineteenth-century Granada, had no other options left. The carmen is sold to pay debts incurred to pay for flowers in the garden. Rosita, her aunt, and a housekeeper leave the house at night, in the rain, glad that no one will see their destitution and shame. It is the Albayzín of futility and social oppression, and it strikes a theme common in Lorca’s plays: women destroyed by the society of their times and paralyzed within a delusion encouraged by that society. Rosita has so many virtues: she is brave, loyal, devoted, and holds virtuously to the one chance given her. But she is imprisoned in a definition of virtue that limits her chances at life and at love. It might be called lethal virtue.

  The analogy, of course, is with the way Lorca, as a homosexual, had to live in a society that forbid him an honest life and the love he sought. Catholic Spain was violently contemptuous of same-sex love. Those rare periods in his life when we see Lorca happy are in places such as distant and sensual Havana, where it seems the poet was more at liberty to love as he chose. In Spain, whatever his liaisons in any other country, he was passionate about the young and handsome Rafael Rodriquez Rapún, and one of the few open conversations Lorca had with anyone about his sexuality was in Barcelona, when he thought Rapún might have left him for a gypsy woman. He failed to appear at a rehearsal of Blood Wedding. The director of the play found him, shattered, alone in a café. He told the director, Rivas Cherif, that “My flesh, my blood, my entire body and soul have been betrayed.” Saying that he had been attracted to men since childhood, he tells Cherif that he has “never known a woman.” And when challenged by the heterosexual Cherif, Lorca cries out for liberty: “Normality is neither your way of knowing only women, nor mine. What’s normal is love without limits.” Lorca says he seeks “a new morality, a morality of complete freedom.” A society that values love as defined by Catholic tradition of dominant males, with procreation the primary duty of females, he turns away from: “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.”

  It was a conversation concealed by Rivas Cherif for more than twenty years. But Lorca�
��s poetry cries out against tyranny of every kind, whether it be the suffocation of women in gender roles or a brutish morality bound to power and social control. Lorca warns us of the suffering fated for any society that denies its own history and our common need for the freedom to learn, to love, and to live by bonds of respect, honesty, and goodwill.

  Granada, by Lorca’s reckoning, had known its share of tyranny. And yet Granada and the Albayzín, with their deep art and Moorish glamor, their flamenco and their brilliant history of Arabic and Jewish poetry, were the places Lorca loved most on earth. In his poetry and letters and in his conversation, he identified himself, his poetry, and his sense of beauty with Granada. Yet this was the city of the triumph of Ferdinand and Isabel, their conscripted Catholic church, and the power of the Inquisition. What must Lorca have thought of all this? In the years of 1935 and 1936, he said clearly what he thought. In a famous, and at the time infamous, newspaper interview with El Sol, in Madrid, on June 10, 1936, he spoke of the fall of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabel as:

  … a disastrous event, even though they say just the opposite in schools. An admirable civilization was lost, and a poetry, astronomy, architecture, and sensitivity unique in the world—all were lost, to give way to an impoverished, cowed city …

  It was a brave, accurate, and desperate statement, this bitter criticism of popular opinion and assumption. Yet it was true to his work and his experience. Lorca was Granada’s most celebrated native son. His family had deep roots there, and Lorca had many cherished friends and colleagues in the city. In the newspapers there, his words and actions, and even his travels, were closely followed. And yet, among some in the city, he was known as “el maricón con la pajarita”—“the fag with the bow tie.”

  In the months before the interview, Spain had been in torment. The narrow victory of the Popular Front, a coalition of leftist parties, had in February of 1936 given them, because of the way the votes translated into parliamentary seats, a strong majority of 267 to 132 in the Cortes—the sole governing legislative body in Spain. This in turn strengthened the power of Primo de Rivera’s Falange, which gained support throughout the country, increasing in membership and organizing violent confrontations where possible. The country began to slide toward the agony of civil war, with the population urged in melodramatic and inflammatory terms to choose between communism and fascism, as if those were the only two ways forward. In the meantime, Lorca continued to write and told a friend he had another five books of poetry now ready for publication—an astonishing total. He gave a reading to the Madrid Worker’s Club and joined organizations that fought against dictatorships in the Americas and in Portugal. His ideals were equality and personal freedom, informed by the blessed power and consolations of art. He would say in his last interview:

  I am totally Spanish, and it would be impossible for me to live outside my geographical boundaries … I am a brother to all men, and I detest the person who sacrifices himself to an abstract, nationalist ideal just because he loves his country with a blindfold over his eyes … I express Spain in my work and feel her in the very marrow of my bones; but first and foremost I am a cosmopolitan and a brother to all.

  As the months of 1936 unrolled, there were anarchist and communist strikes, resurgent violence and provocations on the right and left, and ominous rumors of a military uprising against the Republic, which after all was the elected government of the Spanish people. Lorca was depressed, confused, erratic, moody. And even all these years later, we have, in July of 1936, the sense of a fuse being lit and burning down to one fateful decision after another, burning down to darkness.

  Lorca had promised Margarita Xirgu that he would go to Mexico for the staging of his plays. Early in July, Lorca had a ticket in his pocket and made plans to say goodbye to his family in Granada. On July 11, 1936, he dined with Pablo Neruda and other friends at Neruda’s flat. A rightist there, Augustín de Foxá, told him flatly not to go to Granada. Luis Buñuel was there. He, as well, urged Lorca not to go to Granada. On July 13, Lorca boarded the train for Granada. All three newspapers in the city announced his arrival. The presumption was that he was still bound for Mexico. On July 14, he was with his family in the family compound he loved, the Huerta de San Vicente, just west of Granada. In the next few days, he was already back in his cherished Albayzín, in a carmen, reading a new play to his friends. The Civil War began on July 17 with the fascist rebel announcement from Morocco by General Franco. Seville fell to the fascists almost immediately, and the military in Granada declared for the rebels and took control of the city on July 20; took control, that is, except for the Albayzín, which held out for three days. There were widespread arrests in the city, beatings, torture, and summary executions. The executions took place every day directly behind the Alhambra. Granada was coiling with violence. The mayor of the city, Lorca’s brother-in-law, was arrested.

  Two and a half weeks passed. The repression intensified, and the summer turned to blood sport. On August 7, the city’s chief architect arrived at the Huerta. His name was Alfredo Rodriquez Orgaz, and he was a hunted man. Lorca’s father, a prosperous landowner sympathetic to the Republic, offered him passage to safety behind Republican lines. Lorca could easily have accompanied him. He would have been guided by farm workers loyal to his family. Orgaz escaped that night. Lorca chose not to go.

  On August 9, a group of conservative local landowners came to the Huerta in search of the brothers of the caretaker of the Lorca family property, a man named Gabriel Perea. The brothers were wanted on trumped-up charges. Gabriel was tied to a tree and whipped. Lorca went to intervene and was knocked to the ground. The intruder knew the poet, kicked him, and called out: “It’s the little fag …” And they told him he was under house arrest.

  Lorca was now terrified. He telephoned the young poet Luis Rosales, whom he had seen often in Madrid. Luis had joined the Falangists, more out of convenience than conviction. And he had two older brothers who were key players in the fascist cabal who now ruled Granada. The whole family admired Lorca, including the father, Miguel, a prosperous merchant whose stores were in the heart of the city. Luis came straight to the Huerta to help decide how to keep Lorca safe. Luis suggested immediate flight to the Republican zone. It would have been straightforward. Luis himself had arranged for the escape of other men from the city. Lorca refused. Luis suggested refuge in the carmen of Manuel de Falla, a devout Catholic, the most celebrated composer in Spain and an international figure. It was hard to imagine anyone violating Falla’s house. And the composer had felt a close bond with Lorca, since their work together on the Concurso de Cante Jondo fifteen years earlier. Lorca was unwilling to ask such a favor of Falla. Instead, he chose for refuge the Rosaleses’ house, in the center of Granada, a few blocks away from the command center of the fascist military that now controlled the city. And there he went, the same night.

  The next day, August 10, Lorca settled in nervously at the house of the Rosaleses. Every day, he read notices in Ideal, a local newspaper, of more executions behind the Alhambra. He took time to study in the library, finding a medieval Spanish poet who enchanted him and whose verses he read aloud to the family. He thought of a poem to be composed with Luis, in honor of all those fallen in the Civil War. On August 15, men arrived at the Huerta with a warrant for his arrest. They forced from the poet’s family his place of refuge. It was only a matter of hours before they would come for him. The Rosaleses immediately suggested, again, refuge with Manuel Falla. It seemed Lorca was considering it.

  On the morning of August 16, a fascist firing squad executed Lorca’s brother-in-law, whose only crime was being mayor of the city. Lorca was informed immediately. That afternoon, police and military forces swarmed around the Rosaleses’ house, occupying the block, watching from rooftops, taking up positions in the Plaza de la Trinidad. Esperanza Rosales, the matriarch of the family, refused to surrender him. She was told that Lorca was to be arrested “for what he had written.” After further confrontation, two of the Rosales
brothers, Miguel and Luis, walked outside with the poet and went with him to the civil government building. There, Lorca was locked up. But Miguel assured Lorca nothing would happen to him.

  José Rosales, one of the leading fascists in Granada, now arrived back in the city from his military duties in the Vega. He was furious that Lorca had been taken. He entered by force into the office of the military governor, Commandant Valdés Guzman, to confront him. Valdés had a written accusation against Lorca, full of idiotic and fraudulent charges, among them that Lorca was in contact with the Russians via a secret radio transmitter at the Huerta de San Vincente. So far as is known, only one fact in the accusation was true: that Lorca was homosexual. Rosales, determined to free Lorca, went to see him in his cell and assured him he would be back in the morning to take him to safety. With the help of a lawyer who was the head of the Granada Falange, Rosales wrote a statement explaining why they thought Lorca should be protected and why they had sheltered him in their own house. For they knew, now, that they were themselves in danger. The statement was distributed among rebel command posts, and the next morning, August 17, Jose Rosales had in his hands an order from the military command for Lorca’s release. He went straight back to Guzman. Guzman told him that Lorca had already been taken away. But he had not. He was still in his cell that morning, and the whole day of the 17. On that same day, if not the day before, Lorca’s mother went to see Emilia Llanos, who lived at the base of the Albayzín. She begged Emilia to intercede with Manuel de Falla so that Lorca could be set free. Emilia set off at once to the Fallas’ carmen, but on the ascent was told by someone in the street that Lorca had already been killed. In despair, she abandoned her effort to see Falla.