Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Jiménez’s presence lingered long after his departure from Granada and the Lorca family’s annual retreat to Asquerosa. In his letter to Isabel, the poet had urged the girl to persuade her brother to work hard that summer, and as it happened, Lorca did. He began a new play, a farce about an Andalusian shoemaker’s wife. Its cast list so pleased him that he sent it to Fernández Almagro, “since I believe you can tell if a play is good or bad by simply reading the cast list.”

  He also wrote a sonnet in memory of a twenty-year-old friend, José de Ciria y Escalante, who had died on June 4, 1924, the day before Lorca’s twenty-sixth birthday. For ten days Lorca tried but failed to summon the poem. His “fountain,” he confessed to Fernández Almagro, was uncustomarily dry. But at last, one August afternoon as he stood in the midst of a poplar grove trying to commune with his dead friend, inspiration had arrived. “I was able to give birth in an instant to the sonnet I am mailing you,” he told the critic. He explained that he had chosen this difficult form because in its austerity the sonnet “preserves an eternal feeling, one that does not fit into any other flask than this apparently cold one.”

  The rigor of the form allowed Lorca to confront emotions that might otherwise have overwhelmed him, and although not by nature disciplined, he found the act of yielding to the sonnet’s constraints both gratifying and safe. The poem led him beyond grief:

  And you above, so high, so green and cold

  forget me! And forget the foolish world,

  my sad, sad Giocondo, my sweet friend.

  After completing the sonnet Lorca told Fernández Almagro, “From time to time I’m seized by a strange happiness that I had never felt before. The very sad happiness of being a poet! And nothing matters to me. Not even death!”

  Newly infatuated with his craft, he turned to another traditional meter, that of the ballad, a form whose narrative thrust and eight-syllable line Lorca judged “the vessel best shaped to my sensibility.” In a much-quoted phrase, Juan Ramón Jiménez once decreed the ballad the “river of the Spanish language,” because of its significance to the nation’s literature. Its practitioners included medieval minstrels and Golden Age poets, anonymous balladeers and some of Lorca’s more famous contemporaries, among them Antonio Machado and Jiménez himself, both of whom sought through their work to revive and revitalize the form.

  On July 29,1924, scarcely a month after Jiménez’s visit to Granada, Lorca penciled the words “Gypsy Ballads” on a sheet of notepaper and beneath them jotted the text to a poem he later titled “Ballad of the Moon, Moon.” A sensual tribute to a longtime obsession, the poem told of a seductive moon with “breasts of tin, / shiny and pure and hard,” whose pale light illuminates a scene of death and mourning among a band of Gypsies.

  In writing the poem, Lorca sought to fuse the ballad form with the mystical world of the Andalusian Gypsy, and in doing so to convey the essence of southern Spain, much as Machado had used the ballad to evoke central Spain in The Castilian Country. Lorca hoped to render Andalusia as myth, and the Gypsy as the region’s archetypal hero. He viewed the Gypsy not with scorn or disgust, as many of his compatriots did, but romantically, as the “truest and purest thing in Andalusia”—and because Andalusia exemplified life, the gypsies, with their nomadic, impassioned, violent existence, were a paradigm for all humanity, the embodiment of raw human instinct.

  Visually, his new poem was a departure from Lorca’s most recent work. The ballad’s long, slender silhouette bore little resemblance to the haikulike stanzas of his suites and deep-song poems. Years of casual contact with the form had taught Lorca to relish the ballad’s traits: its shortened line and elliptical style, its abrupt beginnings and ends. At home, his multivolume copy of Pedrell’s Cancionero musical popular español, which abounds with traditional Spanish ballads, was worn with use. Many of the ballads he knew best were anonymous songs that had been worked and whittled from one century to the next until, in Lorca’s words, they were “worn away by time.” Palimpsests, they aroused in him the same sense of wonder he had felt as a boy, combing through his father’s fields in search of relics.

  On July 30, one day after drafting “Ballad of the Moon, Moon,” Lorca wrote a second Gypsy poem, “Romance de la pena negra,” or “Ballad of the Black Sorrow.” The work’s primary focus is pena, a term Lorca found difficult to define. “Pena is not anguish,” he observed, “because with pena one can smile, nor is it a blinding ache, since it never produces weeping; it is a longing without object, a keen love for nothing, with the certainty that death (the eternal preoccupation of Andalusia) is breathing behind the door.” As such, the word coursed through Lorca’s work like an underground stream.

  Three days later he composed a third poem in the series, “Sleepwalking Ballad,” a chronicle of the love and death of a Gypsy smuggler and his girlfriend. In the poem’s refrain, a phrase inspired by a popular lyric, Lorca produced one of his most celebrated lines of verse: “Green oh how I love you green, / green wind, green boughs.”

  His initial spree of ballad-making ended with “Sleepwalking Ballad.” But Lorca soon resumed work on the series. Within three years he had drafted nearly two dozen Gypsy ballads. To Fernández Almagro he confessed that he had written the first three ballads “completely for my own enjoyment.” There was more to it, however. In their novel blend of form and content, traditional motifs and stark metaphors, lyrical and narrative voice, the poems were his most ingenious work to date, and Lorca sensed it. Although he had practiced writing ballads in his teens, and had published a handful of ballads in Book of Poems, nothing he had previously written could rival the power and innovation of these new works. Years later, looking back on his Gypsy ballad collection, Lorca noted that it was here, with these poems, that his poetic countenance appeared “for the first time with its own personality, a virgin untouched by any other poet.”

  9

  Dalí

  1924-25

  Hours after returning to Madrid that fall, Lorca read his ballads to a group of friends and admirers who crowded into his Residencia room to welcome him back to the capital. His face darkened by the summer sun, a stray lock of black hair on his forehead, Lorca leaned back on his bed and joyfully declaimed his Gypsy poems. Among his listeners was Rafael Alberti, a twenty-one-year-old painter and poet from the Andalusian city of Cádiz, who thought Lorca looked like a peasant from the south.

  That evening Lorca and Alberti dined together and afterward strolled through the Residencia gardens. There, Lorca launched into a second, impromptu recital of his new poems. “Green, how I love you green,” he intoned dramatically in the darkness. Alberti was struck by his warmth and spontaneity. At one point Lorca turned to Alberti and impulsively asked the handsome young poet to create a painting, one with a likeness of the Virgin beside a stream, and the legend “Apparition of Our Lady of Beautiful Love to the poet Federico García Lorca.” Alberti was flattered. By the time the two parted, well after midnight, a soft rain had begun to fall. “Goodbye, cousin,” Lorca said.

  A few days later Alberti returned to the Residencia bearing the painting Lorca had requested, as well as a sonnet, “To Federico García Lorca, Poet of Granada.” Lorca waved his hands effusively and told Alberti, “You’ve got two things going for you as a poet: a great memory and the fact that you’re Andalusian.”

  Within a year of meeting Lorca, Alberti admitted to him that he felt like his “younger brother,” and he suggested they stay in close touch with each other by letter. He became a regular visitor at the Residencia—one of dozens of young men pulled irresistibly into Lorca’s orbit.

  In Madrid, Lorca continued to work on his ballad series. His new roommate at the Residencia, José Antonio Rubio Sacristán, a law student, remembered that one winter night Lorca lay in bed with the covers pulled up to his neck and his fingers poking out from the blankets, scribbling onto a sheet of paper. The window was open—it was thought admirable at the Residencia to endure extremes of cold and heat—but despite the chill, Lorca pushe
d on, scratching out lines, turning the paper sideways to add stanzas, placing wavy marks beside passages he intended to revise. Occasionally he paused to recite a line of verse to Sacristán, who thought Lorca read with “an ardor capable of melting the snows.” When at last he had completed a draft that satisfied him, Lorca stopped writing.

  Drawn from the Old Testament story of Thamar and Amnon, the poem told of a brother who rapes his sister. Because the Gypsies of Andalusia themselves sang the story of Thamar and Amnon, Lorca considered his ballad “Gypsy-Jewish.” But his version of the story owed less to the Bible than to traditional Spanish ballads and to plays by Tirso de Molina and Calderón. In contrast to the straightforward narrative of the Old Testament, Lorca imbued his “Thamar and Amnon” with powerful erotic imagery, relying on metaphor to convey the story’s darkest truths:

  Now he takes her by the hair,

  now he tears her under things.

  Warm corals drawing little creeks

  across a map of blonde.

  The poem’s subject matter betrayed Lorca’s growing fascination with sexual instinct. Among those who later praised the work was Salvador Dalí, who told Lorca it was “the best” of his Gypsy ballads. The painter especially admired the poem’s “chunks of incest.”

  Dalí was back at the Residencia that year. In the wake of his expulsion from Madrid’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1923, and his subsequent imprisonment in Catalunya, he had shed his timorous ways and embraced the avant-garde with maniacal zeal. He dared others to dispute his passion for the new.

  Lorca and fellow residents rallied to Dalí’s cause. They proclaimed anything modern good—automobiles, telephones, airplanes, radio. Luis Buñuel bought a gramophone and a stack of American records. Lorca, Dalí, and others spent hours in Buñuel’s room listening to jazz while sipping rum grog, a drink strictly against house rules. They attended films by such new stars as Buster Keaton, and at the Residencia they practiced their own brand of goofball humor.

  Late in the afternoon they often spilled into Lorca’s room to drink tea, read, talk, and smoke. Lorca dubbed these improvised gatherings “meetings of the desperation of tea.” The evenings typically lasted until midnight and culminated in a reading from some book. As a rule, Lorca reserved the final passage for himself; when he spotted a line that moved him, he stopped to repeat it. Once, after reading a scene in which a character rolled about on the floor, he and former roommate Pepín Bello suddenly dropped to the floor, laughing, and began to roll around together.

  Dozens of pranks, jokes, antics, and games evolved. Lorca hosted mass poetry-writing sessions in his room, during which he and his friends invented four-line nonsense poems called “anaglyphs.” “Tea, / tea, / hen / and Teotocópuli,” read one. Someone came up with the idea of a “fart meter”: a wooden box with a hole, a candle, and a piece of string. Lorca and his friends held private tournaments to see who could expel the most wind. According to Rafael Alberti, who sometimes participated in these competitions, “It took a very strong fart to make the flame swell high enough to light the string.”

  With Luis Buñuel, Lorca staged innumerable practical jokes. They once coated their faces with rice powder, donned bogus nuns’ habits, and boarded a city tram, where they cast lascivious glances at their neighbors and rubbed obscenely against male passengers. One drunken evening Buñuel inaugurated the “Order of Toledo,” an informal fraternity whose primary purpose was to make inebriated excursions to the city of Toledo, two hours south of Madrid by train. Lorca was among the founding members; Dalí, Bello, and Alberti eventually joined the Order. In Toledo, the group’s ritual activities included kissing the ground and climbing the cathedral bell tower, then wrapping themselves in bedsheets and wandering the streets, drunk, all night long.

  As perpetrators of the outlandish, Lorca, Buñuel, Dalí, and Bello became the nominal leaders of the Residencia avant-garde. Of the four, Bello was often the most ingenious. Buñuel called him a “surrealist at heart”; Lorca compared him to El Greco. Lifting a phrase from his medical studies, Bello coined the term “putrefaction” to refer to anything outmoded, sacred, or anachronistic—anything, in short, that blocked the onset of modernity. He and his friends immediately began using the word as a label for people and things that offended them. Dalí told Bello that at heart “putrefaction” meant “EMOTION. And therefore it’s inseparable from human nature.” In Dalí’s hierarchy, the pope was a “putrefaction”; so was the current Spanish king, the artist Henri Rousseau, and a whole raft of critics, books, paintings, and fashions.

  Together with Lorca, Dalí began planning a book of putrefactions, to which Lorca was to contribute prose entries and Dalí illustrations. The artist turned out a number of sketches for the book—whimsical drawings of buffoons reminiscent of the grotesque caricatures Lorca had begun producing two years earlier in Granada. But Lorca reneged on his end of the bargain and never drafted so much as a prologue. To Dalí’s annoyance, the project died. Yet the friendship prospered.

  The two men roamed Madrid together. They gazed at paintings by Velázquez and Raphael in the Prado and listened to jazz in cafés. At the Residencia they once leaned out of a bedroom window and waved white handkerchiefs to passersby while shouting “Heeeelp! Lost at sea!” Forever low on cash, they schemed for ways to supplement their allowances from home. According to Lorca, who may have been lying (he “lied a lot and with pleasure,” recalled Pepín Bello), he and Dalí once sold a mediocre painting to an unsuspecting couple from South America. The two friends celebrated the deed by hiring a pair of taxis to take them home to the Residencia. As they sat together in the first taxi, puffing on Havana cigars, the second car followed behind, empty. Lorca later explained that the second taxi was a taxi de respeto—a car hired exclusively for the sake of “respect.” The idea, he added, quickly became a fad among rich young men in Madrid.

  By the spring of 1925, he and Dalí were near-constant companions. They made several weekend excursions to Toledo, and in March they took a trip to the mountains north of Madrid. Each found in the other a reflection of his own beliefs and ambition and, most of all, talent. There was an element of idolatry to their friendship, of mutual awe, but also, increasingly, of love. They understood each other in ways no one else did or could, and as time wore on, they came to need one another with growing urgency.

  That spring Dalí invited Lorca to spend Easter week in Catalunya with his family. Lorca begged his parents to let him make the trip. He outlined the various reasons why he had to go: the distinction and wealth of the Dalí family, the fact that Dalí’s sister, Ana María, was “one of those girls who is so beautiful she drives you crazy.” Clearly, he thought that his parents might relent if they detected a love interest. Furthermore, the visit would give him time to work on at least two new plays. “You know how the countryside and its silence give me all the ideas I have.”

  His final, and most compelling, justification for the trip was financial. He told his parents that the Barcelona Atheneum had asked him to give a reading during his stay in Catalunya and had agreed to pay his travel expenses. Given both the money and prestige he stood to gain from the event, he would be foolish to refuse. He did not mention the fact that the Atheneum invitation came from one of Dalí’s friends, nor that he and Dalí had apparently persuaded the friend to issue the offer in order to bolster Lorca’s case with his parents. The scheme worked: Lorca received permission to go to Catalunya.

  The village of Cadaqués lies a hundred miles north of Barcelona, in a rocky cove beside the Mediterranean. Traveling by taxi with Dalí from the nearby town of Figueres, Lorca first glimpsed the town from the hills above it and was struck by the purity of what he saw: a crescent of bright white buildings hugging the sea. He later described the setting as “both eternal and actual, but perfect.”

  As a boy Dalí had spent summers and holidays here with his family. He loved Cadaqués. The town’s angular contours and brilliant Mediterranean light filled his canvases in much the same way that th
e Granadan vega filled Lorca’s poems. Lorca instinctively understood Dalí’s attachment to the place, and within days of his arrival he, too, felt as though he were treading on sacred ground when he walked among the olive trees that skirted the tiny village.

  More than anything it was the warmth of the welcome Lorca received from the Dalí family that made him fall in love with Cadaqués. He and Salvador arrived in time for lunch and immediately sat down at the table with Dalí’s father, stepmother, and sister. “My friend Federico, whom I’ve told you about,” Dalí announced. By dessert Lorca was on such good terms with the family that it seemed to seventeen-year-old Ana María Dalí “as if we had always known one another.”

  To his astonishment, Lorca learned that Dalí’s father, Salvador Dalí Cusí, a stout, cigar-smoking lawyer, knew a number of his poems by heart. Lorca was even more astonished by Dalí’s sister, Ana María, whom he pronounced “without doubt, the most beautiful girl I have seen in my life.” Her long, dark hair fell to her shoulders in such a cascade of curls that he was reminded of the angel Gabriel. She had a cherubic face, limpid brown eyes, and a soft, coquettish smile. There was both a girlishness to her and a budding sensuality to which Lorca was not immune. One day, as he watched her nap in the sun, he turned to Dalí and exclaimed, “What pretty breasts Ana María has!”

  Dalí grabbed Lorca’s hands. “Well, touch them, man. Touch them!”