Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Aladrén mocked Lorca’s efforts at discretion. In letters to friends, he chattered freely about his friendship with Federico, rendering the poet’s private life a matter of public gossip. “Isn’t it true that it’s like a desecration?” he whimpered to Lorca, who subsequently reprimanded Aladrén but forgave him. Lorca’s close friends perceived the danger of the situation. Dalí, who had known Aladrén briefly in Madrid and thought poorly of him, urged Lorca to come to his senses: “You’re a Christian tempest and you need my paganism. This past season in Madrid you gave yourself to something you should never have given yourself to. I’ll come looking for you to give you a sea cure. It will be winter and we’ll light a fire. The poor beasts will be stiff with cold. You will remember that you’re an inventor of marvels and we’ll live together with a camera.”

  On June 5, 1928, Lorca turned thirty. There was little to celebrate. His childhood was over. Adulthood loomed, with its surfeit of troubles and grief. His dreams of marriage, of a “tranquil and sweet life,” had evaporated. His literary career, though flourishing, was an ongoing source of frustration. He remained financially dependent on his parents and emotionally reliant on men like Aladrén, whose careless behavior and talk exposed Lorca to rumor and innuendo. Increasingly, he felt that his life was a sham.

  In early July, he traveled north to the Castilian town of Zamora to give a lecture. Afterward he spent several days visiting his former roommate José Antonio Rubio Sacristán. Sacristán saw at once that something was wrong. Lorca seemed more preoccupied than usual. Although he mustered a good show—playing the piano, reciting poetry, inventing nicknames for Sacristán’s younger sister—he fell prey to long periods of silence during which he appeared to withdraw, “like a flower that folds its petals when it comes into contact with something sorrowful,” Sacristán recalled. This was not the Lorca Sacristán had known at the Residencia, a “volcano of joy and exuberance,” a man who liked to exclaim repeatedly as he walked along a street, “Look! Look, what a marvel! Look, what beauty!”

  Although Lorca expressed admiration for the Zamoran landscape during automobile excursions into the province, he was plainly distressed. Sometime after his visit he tried to explain his melancholy to Sacristán. “You know that in Zamora I was upset, and with reason. I’ve been through (I’m going through) one of the most profound crises of my life,” he wrote.

  It’s my poetic destiny. We cannot gamble with what life and blood give us, because we become enchained when we least desire it. I now realize what it is that the erotic poets mean by the fire of love, and I have come to this realization precisely when I need to cut it from my life in order not to go under. It’s stronger than I suspected. If I had continued to nourish it, it would have done away with my heart. You had never seen me so bitter, and it’s true. Now I am full of despair, with no wish for anything, crippled. This makes me feel extraordinarily humble. We’ll see if I can achieve what I desire with my poetry, we’ll see if I can finally cut these terrible bonds and return to my happiness, to my old happiness, a breastplate against bitterness.

  Lorca declined to name the source of his despair, but Sacristán had few doubts. He knew of Lorca’s involvement with Aladrén. Clearly the sculptor had “reached [Federico’s] heart” and threatened to drown him in the turbulent waters of passion. For Lorca, the affair was a bittersweet awakening.

  Throughout the spring and early summer of 1928, in the midst of his entanglement with Aladrén, Lorca worked on his Gypsy ballad collection. The Revista de Occidente, under the direction of editor José Ortega y Gasset, had agreed to publish the poems in book form. Lorca found the publication process harrowing, as always. At one point Ortega y Gasset stopped work on the book and demanded that Lorca supply him with three more ballads. Horrified, Lorca convinced him to back down. Only when the book reached the bindery in July did he brighten. “I think it will be beautiful,” he told his parents.

  Visually, the volume reflected Lorca’s dramatic sense of color and pattern. Splashed across the top of the book’s white cover, in red ink that reminded one reviewer of “congealed blood,” were the words Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads). Below, a sketch by Lorca showed a vase of sunflowers inked in black against a red map of Spain. The poet’s signature, embellished with dainty curlicues, appeared at the bottom of the cover. The whole was a design so guileless a child might have conceived it.

  The book came out in July 1928, and to Lorca’s bewilderment was an immediate sensation. A second edition appeared within a year; six more followed during the next decade. Ordinary Spaniards so warmed to the collection that they began memorizing and singing Lorca’s Gypsy ballads. Friends toasted him at banquets and sent lavish congratulatory notes. “I believe in your authentic poetry, in your inimitable poetry. I believe that you are magnificent,” wrote the poet and future Nobel laureate Vicente Aleixandre. Madrid’s El Sol published not one but two long reviews of the book. Critics hailed Lorca as the greatest Spanish poet since Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez. By August 1928, copies of the book had become so scarce that magazines like the Gaceta Literaria satirized the phenomenon:

  READER: Yes,

  Gypsy Ballads

  . Do you have

  Gypsy Ballads?

  BOOKSELLER: I’ve sold the only two copies the publisher sent me. But more are on order.

  READER: Well, when they get here, save one for me. Put it under your table—underneath a rock.

  Lorca trumpeted news of his success to his parents. “Although the book won’t earn millions, it will cement my reputation as a poet, and I am nothing if not that,” he said. He described the sudden and overwhelming frenzy of his days in Madrid—the banquets and accolades, the press reports, the countless books to inscribe.

  But his initial delight in his good fortune quickly gave way to irritation at such an abrupt invasion of his privacy. By late summer Lorca was miserable. The discrepancy between his public and private selves had never been more glaring. Fame had struck him when he least desired it, in the midst of his torment over Aladrén and his concurrent fear of being identified as a homosexual. Celebrity burlesqued his despair. It exposed him to meddlesome eyes and wagging tongues. “I want and rewant my privacy,” he wrote mournfully to a friend. “If I’m afraid of stupid fame it’s precisely because of this. The famous man has the bitter burden of wearing a cold breast, pierced by deaf spotlights that direct the others to him.”

  He had published Gypsy Ballads chiefly to please friends who had clamored for its release. But even after agreeing to issue the book he had dawdled over the collection, refusing to type the manuscript because he did not know how to use a typewriter and he trusted no one else with the task. His friend Martínez Nadal had finally extracted the eighteen handwritten ballads from Lorca, typed them, and, with his permission, delivered them to the Revista de Occidente.

  Once the poems were published, he lost interest in them. After July 1928, Lorca continued to recite his ballads when asked, but with far less zest and spontaneity than before. He even grew to detest one ballad, his melodramatic poem about an adulterous liaison, “The Unfaithful Wife.” The poem took on a life of its own after it appeared in print. Eventually Lorca received so many requests to perform the work—most from “well-educated” ladies, he said—that he talked of pulling his Gypsy Ballads altogether from bookshops in order to rid himself of the poem. In time, a friend observed, the “greatest proof of friendship” Lorca could give was to recite “The Unfaithful Wife” in one’s presence.

  Gypsy Ballads embodies the sensual world of the Andalusian Gypsy, a world that permitted Lorca to meld his theatrical and lyrical instincts as never before. In each of the collection’s eighteen ballads, he bound dramatic story to lyric form, dialogue to metaphor, and in doing so produced a ballad collection unlike any other. The effort was not without precedent: Andalusian poets—among them Góngora and Jiménez—had for centuries explored and exploited the ballad form, and in the nineteenth century a virtual epidemic of Andalusian ballad
s had emerged, most of them cliché-ridden portraits of life in the south. But Lorca avoided the mannerisms of his predecessors, combining lyrical and narrative modes in fresh ways to form a tragic “poem” of Andalusia—as he repeatedly described the collection—a poem whose only protagonist, he said, is pena, or “sorrow.” Reviewing the book for El Sol, Ricardo Baeza wrote that each of its poems “is a drama in brief, where everything lives and breathes in harmony, and where even seemingly inanimate things participate in the action.”

  Lorca’s ballads draw on popular superstition and classical myth, Christian symbolism and real-life Gypsy lore, childhood memory and Freudian motifs. Formally, they embrace the conventions of medieval Spanish balladry: a non-stanzaic construction, in medias res openings, abrupt endings. But Lorca’s reliance on tradition is erratic. He was less interested in presenting a picturesque imitation of existing forms than in forging his own tradition, one whose tone and structure recall the popular Spanish ballad, but whose spirit is sharp, objective, and playful—in short, contemporary.

  In many ballads the juxtaposition between old and new is jarring. “Preciosa and the Wind” chronicles the plight of a Gypsy named Preciosa, a figure plucked from a Cervantes novella, as she is chased across the Granadan landscape by a phallus-wielding, pantheistic “wind-man.” When Preciosa arrives, at last, at the English consul’s home, she is offered “a cup of warm milk, / and a bracer of gin.” The “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard” features another archetypal character cloaked in contemporary imagery: the Virgin, “dressed / just like a mayor’s wife, / in silver chocolate foil / with necklaces of almonds.”

  Lorca viewed his collection as a single entity, and he insisted that readers do the same. He described Gypsy Ballads as an “Andalusian altarpiece” adorned with Gypsies, horses, archangels, rivers, and crimes. Together his ballads constitute an epic Andalusia, born of a landscape he had known, and to some degree worshiped, all his life. Fragments of the region’s layered past—allusions to its Roman, Carthaginian, and Arab inhabitants—surface in many of the poems, as do poignant references to twentieth-century Andalusia. Lorca was determined to imbue his vision of the region with historical depth and antecedent, as well as personal anecdote. The book recalls the countryside of his childhood: the olive trees and poplar groves where he first discovered his voice, the ominous Civil Guardsmen he frequently glimpsed on vega roads, the desolate Spanish moon.

  At the center of the book are three poems dedicated to the “three great Andalusias”—the cities of Granada, Córdoba, and Seville—each personified as an archangel whose masculine beauty is at once ethereal and erotic. Lorca had learned to give voice to his reverence for the male form. Seville’s Saint Gabriel is “a beautiful reed of a child, / shoulders wide, slim at the hip, / skin of an apple at night.” Granada’s lace-covered Saint Michael, the object of a yearly pilgrimage, is “a pretty boy, / fragrant with cologne.” Córdoba’s Saint Rafael, the city’s patron, is a “nude Roman torso” on the shores of the Guadalquivir, where “young boys weave and sing / the truth about the world.” Collectively the three archangels—the same figures who rule heaven in Goethe’s Faust—reign over a pagan Andalusia steeped in Gypsy blood.

  In remarks to the press and public, Lorca claimed that the Gypsy was merely a peripheral part of Gypsy Ballads, a “refrain” to a much larger “song.” But it was primarily this feature of the collection that made the book so novel. Although Andalusian poets such as Salvador Rueda and Manuel María de Santa Ana had previously depicted Gypsy life in ballads, they had done so through stereotypes: the Gypsy as impudent thief, with “wild unruly hair” and “big eyes lost / in immense horizons.” Lorca shunned such banalities and sought to ennoble his protagonists. While many, if not most, Spaniards scorned the country’s Gypsies, Lorca viewed them romantically. (He once remarked contemptuously that the true Gypsy does not go around villages “ragged and dirty. Those are Hungarians.”)

  He had grown up near Gypsies and knew their music by heart. His most fundamental interests and instincts found resonance in the Gypsies’ ancient and tangled roots, in their sensual embrace of life, in their innately religious existence, and in their status as a persecuted minority. By noting their oppression, yet identifying them as a chosen people, Lorca both verified and amended history. He described the Gypsy as the “truest and purest thing in Andalusia”—in deliberate contrast to the sober Castilian peasants whom his immediate forebears, the Generation of ’98, and in particular Antonio Machado, had chosen as emblems of their Spain. Through his ballad collection Lorca hoped, in part, to “harmonize the mythological Gypsy with the purely ordinary one of the present day.”

  He later identified the book’s archetypal Gypsy as Antoñito el Camborio, a man whose epic encounter with death is the subject of two ballads. Camborio is the only character “who calls me by name at the moment of his death,” Lorca said. The Gypsy’s cry, an ironic plea to the author for help, underscores the fundamental artifice of the book:

  “Ay, Federico García,

  call out the Civil Guard!

  My body has been broken

  like a stalk of corn.”

  As a child, Lorca had known of a real-life Gypsy named Camborio, a hard-drinking horseman from a nearby village in the vega, who one day, in an alcohol stupor, fell from his horse onto his knife and died. In his two Camborio ballads, he transforms the clumsy drunk of his youth into a quintessentially elegant Andalusian male, a tragic figure—“brown from green moon, / voice of a virile carnation”—who is mortally stabbed on the road to Seville and dies “in a fine silhouette: / live coin that will never / be matched by another.”

  Similar acts of metamorphosis occur throughout Gypsy Ballads. Time and again Lorca depicts ordinary Gypsy men and women as preternatural gods. The embodiment of pure human instinct, and as such the antithesis of conservative Spanish society, the Gypsies in Lorca’s ballads clash repeatedly with the country’s rural police force—the blunt, unimaginative Civil Guard, with its black horses, black horseshoes, black tricorns, and skulls “cast in lead.” In the “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard,” the collection’s longest work, and one that most approximates the melodrama of nineteenth-century Andalusian ballads, Lorca describes the Guard’s brutal assault on a slumbering Gypsy town:

  Rosa, the Camborio,

  sits moaning at her door

  with her severed breasts

  before her on a tray.

  Other girls were running

  chased by their braids,

  in a wind exploding

  with roses of black powder.

  Some readers took offense at Lorca’s ruthless portrayal of the Civil Guard. But others, who perhaps, like Lorca, had grown up hearing tales of the Guard’s cruelty, applauded it. For years Lorca had been haunted by images of the notorious police force, first in childhood, listening to stories of their barbarism, and later in 1919, as a young man in Granada, watching in horror as a regiment of Guardsmen led a band of Gypsy prisoners through the city. The prisoners had been shackled together, their feet torn and bodies bloodied. Lorca could neither forget nor forgive such savagery. He perceived the Guard as an enemy of everything he—and by extension, the Gypsy—stood for: poetry, song, art, life. While writing his ballads Lorca talked frequently about the Civil Guard in letters to friends and family. “The cathedral is pealing and the airplanes dance their afternoon dance,” he told the artist Benjamín Palencia in 1925. “The Civil Guard kills one Gypsy a day and adds his name to a list as long and undulating as a Chinese dragon.”

  Readers of Gypsy Ballads were moved by the collection’s tragic tales of life and death, by its sensual language and baroque delight in the human body. The book appealed to scholars and poets as well as to untutored field hands. Lorca was not surprised to learn that common people liked his work. Years later he told a journalist, “Molière was right to read his works to his cook.”

  It dismayed him, though, to find that many readers thought him an untutored, spontaneous, “p
opular” poet. “How can that be?” he asked. “I have as much culture as anyone else, if not more. I spend hours reading and studying.” Worse, people believed he was a Gypsy. His dark looks and impassioned recitals of his ballad collection only heightened the misconception. Lorca resented any such classification. “The Gypsies are a theme. And nothing more,” he wrote angrily to Jorge Guillén. “I could just as well be a poet of sewing needles and hydraulic landscapes … I don’t want to be typecast.” He vowed never to touch the Gypsy theme again. To a reporter who asked him late in 1928 to explain his background, he said, “I am not a Gypsy.”

  “What are you?” the reporter asked.

  “Andalusian, which isn’t the same thing.”

  Fame not only destroyed Lorca’s privacy, it corrupted his work and invited envy. Before the year was out, naysayers had begun predicting his demise. A work like Gypsy Ballads, some argued, could only signal the “glory and end of a poet.” Others maintained that Lorca was “washed up,” “passé,” that Rafael Alberti was now the writer to watch—a rising star, a “pure” poet “full of unpublished possibilities.” As comparisons of the two mounted, their rivalry intensified. Later in the year, Lorca refused to attend a poetry reading by Alberti.

  In an attempt to recover some semblance of peace, Lorca went home to Granada shortly after the publication of his book. He arrived in early August 1928, and for the next three months remained cloistered at his family’s Huerta de San Vicente. The place was a sanctuary, “a vision of trees and clear water,” he said. By day, Granada had rarely seemed more beautiful. At night, Lorca stood for hours on the balcony outside his bedroom and stared into the black landscape. He was inconsolable. “I am tormented and beaten by passions which I must conquer,” he told Sebastian Gasch. To another friend he described himself as “beset by love, by filthiness, by ugly things.”