Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  The following day he sent effusive telegrams to friends. “Huge success Mariana Pineda. Hugs. Federico-Dalí,” read the terse wire Melchor Fernández Almagro received in Madrid. In Granada, Lorca’s family waited anxiously for news of the play’s reception. Despite a congratulatory cable from Xirgu that morning, Don Federico was unable to relax until he had received confirmation of the play’s success from Lorca himself. Late in the afternoon the playwright’s telegram arrived, and the family rejoiced.

  In their reviews, critics focused more on Lorca’s potential than on his achievement. Several reviewers noted the humanity of his characters, and many praised his “luminous” verse. But some questioned whether he belonged in the theater. La Vanguardia, one of Barcelona’s leading papers, suggested that although Lorca was a “delicate and sentimental poet,” he was not a serious playwright. La Publicitat’s Doménec Guansi observed that in Mariana Pineda, Lorca seemed to have been concerned “with nothing more than the creation of atmosphere. Characters? … Action?” Critics had raised the same issues with The Butterfly’s Evil Spell.

  A more gratifying appraisal came from the reviewer Francisco Madrid of La Noche, another prominent Barcelona paper, who argued that Lorca could “now join the list of Spanish poets who uphold the tradition of poetic theater.” In his long and favorable review, Madrid heralded Mariana Pineda as a breath of fresh air in an era of mediocre plays, and he praised Lorca and Dalí for their extreme modernity. Lorca clipped the review and sent it to his parents with a note boasting that the article had appeared in “the most important daily in Barcelona, the one with the largest circulation.”

  Fewer than twenty-four hours after the premiere of Mariana Pineda, Lorca opened an exhibition of his drawings in Barcelona’s celebrated Dalmau Galleries, the city’s leading proponent of avant-garde art. With the exception of two private showings of his sketches at a friend’s home in Granada, where the drawings were hung from curtains with pins, he had never publicly shown his work before. Mostly he sketched for pleasure, using whatever was handy—a piece of stationery, a crayon, his sister’s colored pencils. He had no desire to be a painter, he joked, because his parents could not tolerate stains in the house. But Dalí admired his visual intuition (which he described as “aphrodisiac”) and, together with several other Barcelona friends, persuaded the diminutive, white-haired Josep Dalmau to present an exhibition of Lorca’s work in his gallery.

  Dalmau had long championed the avant-garde. He introduced Barcelona audiences to the work of Filippo Marinetti and Marcel Duchamp, and he helped launch the careers of Juan Gris, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso. Dalí had twice shown his paintings in Dalmau’s galleries, and he owed his success in part to the visibility those exhibitions had given him. Lorca’s weeklong exhibit drew less attention than Dalí’s, but it did receive a few flattering reviews from friends, including Dalí, and to Lorca’s astonishment he sold four drawings. He gave the rest away to his Catalan friends.

  An eclectic mix of old and new, traditional and avant-garde, the drawings in the exhibition complemented Lorca’s poetry collection Songs, published one month earlier. Both demonstrated his abiding love of popular Andalusian motifs, his newfound admiration for cubism, and his increasing preoccupation with identity. In a number of his Dalmau sketches Lorca superimposed one dreamlike face on another, as if to offer a graphic interpretation of the ideas he had explored in Songs: “Woodcutter. / Sever me from my shadow.” Years later he described one of his double-faced images as a self-portrait that shows “man’s capacity for crying as well as winning.” The works encapsulate the split that characterized Lorca himself: his profound and deeply personal conviction that without sorrow, joy was inconceivable; without death, life incomprehensible.

  In a somber drawing called “The Kiss,” he sketched a face much like his own, with dense black eyebrows and a wedge of black hair, joined at the lips to a second, featureless face whose oval contour resembles Dalí’s. In his own work Dalí, too, had recently begun pairing Lorca’s face with his. Each man appeared to covet, or fear, losing himself in the other. Aesthetically they had never been closer. Dalí said later that during this phase of his career, “for the duration of an eclipse,” Lorca’s shadow “came to darken the virginal originality of my spirit and of my flesh.”

  Lorca was equally swayed by Dalí. His Barcelona drawings revealed the degree to which he had absorbed the painter’s cubist aesthetic and shared Dalí’s enthusiasm for surrealism. The exhibition included a formal portrait of Dalí, one of several Lorca made during this period. He had developed his own icon for the artist’s face: a Modigliani-like ovoid with almond-shaped eyes, black eyebrows, and full lips. In one of Lorca’s portraits of the artist, Dalí appears as a kind of fecund priest wearing a bishop’s miter, with fish nibbling at each of the fingers on his right hand. Rife with Freudian overtones, this intensely private work referred to a world only Lorca and Dalí fully understood. Lorca gave the drawing to the painter, who kept it for decades. By way of explaining the image, Dalí said only, “Lorca saw me as an incarnation of life, graced like a dark god.”

  Days after the closing of both Mariana Pineda and his Dalmau exhibition, Lorca boarded a bus with Salvador and Ana María Dalí, and the three took off for Cadaqués. They sat side by side on a rooftop bench. The instant Lorca caught his first glimpse of the village in the distance, he shrieked: “Cadaquéééés! Cadaquéééés!” The Dalís quickly chimed in.

  At nineteen, Ana María was leaner and more graceful than she had been during Lorca’s first visit to the town, in 1925. Her long, angelic curls were gone, replaced by a stylish 1920s bob. Lorca adored her. At dusk the two took walks together, ambling hand in hand through groves of olive trees while church bells pealed and the sun sank beneath the mountains, casting its pink light on the small white town. Lorca often wore a fisherman’s shirt Ana María had made for him. Asked years afterward whether Lorca had been in love with her, Ana María merely blushed. That he loved her was certain—but in ways neither seemed able to articulate.

  On Sundays the two attended Mass together. Dalí refused to join them. “I’ve seen it before,” he quipped. But Lorca found the ritual soothing. As he stood beside Ana María in the small sanctuary, immersed in gestures and phrases he had known since boyhood, he seemed “in ecstasy.” He continued to identify not with the authoritarian Father of Old Testament doctrine but with the New Testament Christ: symbol of goodness and love, proof that human charity might transcend evil and offset the capriciousness of fate. Only in church, thought Ana María, was Lorca unafraid of death. Elsewhere it obsessed him. Like a frightened child, he insisted on taking their hands whenever he went for a walk with the two Dalís. “He was afraid of dying,” Ana María believed, “and it seemed to him that by holding our hands he could remain anchored to life.” At the beach he swam only in shallow water, and even then he clung to Ana María’s hand. When she and Dalí ventured farther out to the sea, Lorca remained on shore. He was terrified of drowning.

  Even small things alarmed him. At the slightest hint of a sore throat, he insisted that Ana María and Dalí take his temperature and prepare inhalations of eucalyptus leaves. Because they loved him they indulged him. (Later, he apologized to Ana María for his “grave throat illness, which caused you so much trouble.”) The three spent whole days playing games together. Dalí and Lorca took turns pretending to be a capricious child, a “babouet” who refused to walk or eat. When Lorca played the babouet he demanded to be told terrifying stories with unexpectedly comforting endings.

  They went sailing together, took part in local festivals, played records all day long, and at night, with the guitarist Regino Sáinz—who was visiting Cadaqués—sat on the beach, while Lorca sang folk songs or recited poems. In dozens of artfully arranged photographs they immortalized their fun: Ana María, holding a phonograph and a stack of records on her lap; Dalí, standing alone in a white terry-cloth robe, bronzed and sultry, his hair damp from the sea; Lorca, clowning on the beach in bathing
trunks and a robe, his chunky legs draped in a showgirl’s pose, an impish grin on his face. In one snapshot he and Dalí sit across from each other at a table with Lorca’s bathrobe cord stretched between their foreheads, as though they are transmitting thoughts back and forth. In another picture, each displays an emblem of his artistic temperament. Dalí, who fancied himself a rational Apollonian, holds a triangle, while Lorca, his hair smoothed back, one hand resting on Salvador’s knee, clasps a wine glass.

  Lorca’s stay in Cadaqués, though brief, was rapturous. He subsequently told a friend that Dalí inspired in him “the same pure emotion” he felt in the presence of the baby Jesus, “abandoned in the Portico of Bethlehem, with the whole germ of the crucifixion already latent beneath the straws of the cradle.” Incapable of resisting the painter, he helped Dalí draft and sign a strident “Anti-Artistic Manifesto” exalting the machine age and condemning much of the very literature and art Lorca had once admired. Other friends were alarmed by Dalí’s increasingly rigid views on art and his newly “materialistic, irreligious, and objective” behavior. But Lorca maintained that nothing was more dramatic than Dalí’s objectivity, and he allowed himself to be swept up in the painter’s escalating quest for radical new images and ideas—one of which, paradoxically, was Saint Sebastian, who became for Dalí a paradigm of the emotional control he sought.

  The martyred saint had been an intimate point of contact between the two friends for at least a year. In March 1927, Dalí signed a letter to Lorca, “Your Saint Sebastian.” Even Ana María was in on the secret. On the back of a postcard to Lorca she wrote, “I’m sending you this card because you might like it; but don’t show it to Saint Sebastian. It would be improper.” Both men were intrigued by the iconography of the saint: his manly beauty and his passive, at times ecstatic, response to the arrows piercing his flesh. Lorca came to believe that “one of man’s most beautiful postures is that of Saint Sebastian.” He meant the posture of defeat, willingly accepted.

  Dalí persisted in calling Sebastian “Saint Objectivity.” In late July he published an exhaustive prose poem on the martyr in the Catalan journal L’Amic de les Arts. Dedicated “To F. García Lorca,” Dalí’s meandering poem extols Sebastian as an exemplar of the modern age. In Sebastian’s pose of “exquisite agony,” the saint embodies an aesthetic of objectivity that offers a foil to the sentimentality and “putrefaction” Dalí despised. On a more personal level, Sebastian reminded the painter of Lorca. He told Lorca that while at work on the poem, it had often seemed to him that the saint “is you … We’ll see if Saint Sebastian turns out to be you.”

  Through the image of Sebastian the two made sly allusions to the intense emotional—and conceivably physical—nature of their involvement. Dalí spoke bluntly of the saint’s “unwounded ass.” Lorca was more oblique. “Saint Sebastian’s arrows are made of steel,” he wrote to Dalí later that summer, “but the difference between you and me is that you see them as firmly fixed and robust, short arrows that don’t come undone, and I see them as long … at the moment of the wound. Your Saint Sebastian of ivory contrasts with mine of flesh who is dying all the time, and that’s how it must be.”

  To what degree the martyr reflected Lorca’s private relationship with the artist remains unclear. Years later Dalí claimed to have spurned Lorca’s sexual advances. But others who knew the artist—Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel, Rafael Martínez Nadal—suspected Dalí of distorting the truth in order to shock or amuse his admirers, much as he had once feigned love for an adolescent girl because he enjoyed deluding her. Bello and Buñuel both believed Dalí was “asexual,” a chaste Apollo to Lorca’s earthbound Dionysus.

  Dalí’s paintings imply otherwise. By 1927 he had replaced the neoclassical lines of his earlier canvases with the stark landscapes of a Freudian world. His sensual portraits of Ana María had given way to cryptic representations of Lorca—often shown as a decapitated head with closed eyes—surrounded by jarring manifestations of Dalí’s subconscious: nude female torsos, severed hands, rotting animals, airplanes, fish, phallic gadgets, genitalia. His ambiguous, at times misogynist, depictions of women, together with the prevalence of both homo- and autoerotic images, signal the depth of Dalí’s sexual malaise and suggest that in all likelihood he and Lorca engaged in a short-lived physical affair.

  Dalí was obsessed by Lorca, and troubled by his obsession. In several paintings he layered Lorca’s features over his own or placed one man’s face in the other’s shadow. At times he simply fused the two faces. Their lives were similarly intertwined. Dalí was beginning to write poetry, while Lorca spent more and more time drawing. In their work, they spoke the same metaphorical language. Each heaped praise on the other. “Federico is better than ever,” Dalí wrote to Luis Buñuel in Paris that summer. “He’s the great man. His drawings are brilliant.”

  Buñuel was appalled by the intensity of Dalí’s attachment to Lorca. Perhaps because he resented Lorca’s refusal to collaborate with him on a film the previous year, or more probably because he detected Lorca’s homosexuality and objected to it, Buñuel had come to loathe what he described as Lorca’s “extreme narcissism” and “terrible aestheticism.” He told Pepín Bello that unless Dalí escaped to Paris, the painter would amount to nothing. Only in Paris, Buñuel said, could Dalí “remake himself, away from García’s ill-fated influence.”

  By early August, Lorca had turned “black” from the sun. He told his brother, now home from his studies abroad, he had begun writing “a new kind of poetry.” But although happy, he missed his family. He asked Paco to kiss everyone for him: “I long more than ever, do you understand me?” He did not explain what he meant by the remark.

  Shortly afterward, Lorca abruptly departed from Cadaqués. For reasons left unclear—except to say that his family had urgently called him home—he felt compelled to return to Granada. Something had happened to cloud his relationship with Dalí. From Barcelona, where he stopped overnight on his way home, Lorca sent an impassioned letter to the artist. In it he recalled his distress at leaving Dalí’s home. “I was on the verge of throwing myself out of the car in order to stay with you (with little you) in Cadaqués.” At a bend in the road leading away from the village he had suddenly experienced a vision of a “tiny” Dalí, “eating a little red hand with oil and using a small plaster fork which you pulled from your eyes. All with the tenderness of a recently hatched chicken.”

  The heat in Barcelona was oppressive. As he labored to convey his feelings, Lorca thought about Dalí’s new paintings, with their logical, keenly proportioned, provocative images. “I get excited thinking of the things you’re going to discover about Cadaqués, and I remember a neophyte Salvador Dalí licking the shell of dusk without yet going inside, the palest pink shell of a crab turned on its back.” Having now left Cadaqués, Lorca realized what he had lost. In Dalí’s absence, Barcelona seemed confused, rushed, “unclear and unhinged”—unlike diaphanous Cadaqués, where Lorca had felt “the blood’s circulation” in his shoulders for the first time in his life. Cadaqués was real; in Barcelona, people seemed merely to be “playing and sweating with a concern for forgetting.”

  He crowded his thoughts onto a sheet of stationery from a Barcelona café. “I want to weep,” he wrote. “I’ve behaved like an indecent donkey’s ass with you, you who are the best thing in the world for me. As the minutes go by I see it clearly and I am truly sorry. But this only increases my affection for you and my attachment to your way of thinking and your human quality.” Lorca avoided saying more about what had taken place between the two men. He begged Dalí to remember him in his latest work: “Put my name in the painting so that [my name] might amount to something in the world.”

  Dalí acquiesced. In the foreground of a work he eventually titled Honey Is Sweeter than Blood, he placed a likeness of Lorca’s head, with its neck severed, eyes wide open, and a trickle of blood seeping from its mouth. Positioned near the head, as though the two had once been attached, Dalí painted the headles
s torso of a nude woman. Around both he arranged an assortment of rotting carcasses, flies, drops of blood, and sharp geometrical objects that Lorca called “apparatuses.” Lorca admired the painting. “The bisected woman is the most beautiful poem one can make from blood,” he told Dalí. But he refrained from commenting on the work’s more unsettling implications: that his beloved friend seemed to associate him not only with androgyny but with a decaying aesthetic.

  Lorca returned to Granada in early August, full of talk about Dalí’s genius and their month together in Cadaqués. Virtually everything he saw, did, and thought reminded him of the painter. With its lush trees and aura of “historic melancholy,” his family’s Huerta de San Vicente recalled the terrace of Dalí’s home by the sea.

  “I think about you and your little house,” he told the artist. “I’ve never thought more intensely than now. This is the summit. I hope you’ll write to me … And that you’ll tell me if you resent me or if you’ve erased me from among your friends.”

  When he and his family traveled to a resort in the Alpujarras later that month, Lorca yearned for his distant friend. He felt isolated in his hotel, where there was “not one decent curvaceous thigh,” he told Dalí by letter, “… and I don’t like talking to anyone unless it’s the waiters who are handsome and I know what they’re going to say to me. I think of you all the time. I think of you too much. I feel as though I am holding a hot gold coin in my hand and I cannot let go of it. But I don’t want to let go of it either, little son. I must imagine that you are hideously ugly in order to love you more.”

  In the same letter Lorca stressed his esteem for Saint Sebastian and the martyr’s “grace in the midst of torture… We are all capable of being like Saint Sebastian in the face of rumors and gossip.” Inspired by Dalí’s prose poem on the saint, Lorca embarked on his own series of prose poems, the first of which, “Saint Lucy and Saint Lazarus,” he published in November. A fantastic account of a trip to a Spanish city much like Barcelona, the work recalls Louis Aragon’s 1926 surrealist text, Le Paysan de Paris, a dreamlike examination of a modern metropolis. But while Lorca’s poem indicates his growing interest in surrealism, the work stems more immediately from Dalí’s “Saint Sebastian,” with its clipped syntax and circuitous design. In “Saint Lucy” as well as his other prose poems—“Suicide in Alexandria,” “Beheading of the Baptist,” and “Lovers Murdered by a Partridge”—Lorca unveils a cruel, antiseptic, coldly ironic vision of reality. Motifs from Dalí’s paintings—decapitated heads, modern machines, ants, mules, the skeletal remains of fish—fill the poems.