Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  In February 1929, Luis Buñuel, who had once called Lorca’s Don Perlimplín a “piece of shit,” went to Paris to begin filming the screenplay he and Dalí had written. Two months later, Dalí joined Buñuel in the French capital. By June they had finished the film, Un Chien Andalou. Although Buñuel denied it, Lorca interpreted the title as a personal affront. “Buñuel’s made a shit of a film called An Andalusian Dog, and I’m the Andalusian dog,” he said. He perceived a cruel allusion to himself in the film’s protagonist, a dark-haired young man with an effeminate alter ego who is unable to make love to a woman.

  Dalí seemed lost to him. Even before the artist went to Paris, he had snubbed Lorca by revoking his promise to publish one of Lorca’s letters in an “anti-art” issue of the Catalan journal L’Amic de les Arts. The issue featured a full-page interview between Dalí and Buñuel. Later that spring, in Paris, Dalí grew a threadlike mustache, began wearing fashionable French clothes, and became involved with Gala Eluard, the wife of writer Paul Eluard. The following autumn, Dalí formally joined the surrealists. Across a painting of the Sacred Heart he scribbled the words “Sometimes I spit for pleasure on the portrait of my mother.” He then displayed the canvas in a Paris gallery. Informed of the act, Dalí’s father demanded that he withdraw the insult. Dalí refused. His father and sister severed all ties with him. “It was as if Salvador had died,” Ana María recalled. Dalí’s father later wrote to inform Lorca of the artist’s act. “He’s a disgrace, an ignoramus, and an unrivaled pedant, in addition to being a complete scoundrel. He thinks he knows everything, and yet he doesn’t even know how to read and write. In short, you know him better than I… You can imagine the grief this nonsense has caused us.” Decades later Dalí admitted that in the late 1920s, a “self-destructive rage” had possessed him. His fury led him to commit a number of indiscretions and to “test my friendship with Lorca,” he said. “I suffered honest-to-God fits of jealousy that made me flee him for days on end. I was systematically seeking to isolate myself from everything.” In time, Dalí became so strident that even Buñuel stopped associating with him.

  Lorca tried to salvage something from the wreck his life was threatening to become. The humiliating loss of both Dalí and Aladrén, the suppression of his play, and the ongoing claims of celebrity all contributed to a profound sense of futility. No longer able to work effectively, he all but stopped writing and confined his professional activity to sporadic public appearances. Ten days after the cancellation of Don Perlimplín, he delivered his lecture on imagination and inspiration at the Madrid Lyceum Club. Since last giving the talk in November, he had revised its ending and now warned listeners that his current views might change. “As the authentic poet which I am now and will be until my death, I will not stop thrashing myself until one day the inevitable stream of green or yellow blood flows from my body,” he announced dramatically. “Anything but sit quietly by the window watching the same landscape.”

  He began to seek new friends in the capital. Told that he should meet an engaging Chilean diplomat named Carlos Morla Lynch and his wife, Bebé, Lorca made several halfhearted attempts to visit the couple before he finally climbed the stairs to their elegant Madrid apartment and introduced himself. Since coming to Spain, Morla Lynch had read Gypsy Ballads and was eager to meet its author. He opened the door to find a young man of average height with a large head, thick black hair, and “somber but dreamy” eyes. The diplomat took Lorca by both hands and pulled him into the apartment. Lorca let out a childlike laugh and began to talk. He stayed with the couple until three the following morning. Before he left, he insisted on singing them a song.

  Both Morla and Bebé were French-born Chilean aristocrats, taught from birth to prize art and intelligence. Wherever they went, they moved in elite circles. During Morla’s most recent diplomatic posting, to Paris, they had befriended the playwright Jean Cocteau. In Madrid, they quickly opened their home to the city’s most distinguished artists and intellectuals. Lorca became a regular guest. He liked the couple enormously. Morla, a bald, blue-eyed, middle-aged man with a bright pink scalp and laugh lines crisscrossing his face, was an exuberant conversationalist with a lively wit. His more reserved wife, Bebé, had ivory skin, black eyes, and ebony hair. Tall and slim, she dressed only in black, white, or gray, often with a strand of pearls around her neck or a single red flower pinned to her dress. When Jorge Guillén met Bebé Morla Lynch, he thought her both “Very seductive and very worldly.”

  By March 1929, Lorca had virtually joined the couple’s household. “He comes and goes, stays for lunch or supper—or both—naps, sits down at the piano, opens it, sings, closes it, reads us a poem, goes away … comes back,” wrote Morla Lynch in the diary he had kept since childhood. The diplomat’s home became a refuge for the poet. Lorca spent hours sitting beside Morla Lynch on his sunny balcony, talking about art, music, poetry, and theater, while the traffic of Madrid sputtered below them. Sometimes Lorca turned up with no explanation for his presence except that he was feeling despondent. “Even if you say nothing to me, I feel happier with life, and my fear goes away,” he told Morla Lynch. The Chilean was struck by Lorca’s inexplicable terror of things: “Always that deep obsession … lurking beneath his optimism and joy, like a perennial shadow.” Lorca seemed most afraid of some unexpected change that might irreparably alter the course of his life. His Andalusian roots, coupled with the often dramatic twists of fate—illness, accident, the indignities of poverty—that he had witnessed as a boy in rural Spain, had made him superstitious.

  One morning the two men talked about sorrow. Morla and his wife were still mourning the death, seven months earlier, of their ten-year-old daughter, Colomba, a budding child actress who had died of a congenital disorder. She was the second of two daughters the couple had lost; an older son survived. It was to escape Colomba’s memory that Morla and Bebé had left Paris and come to Spain. In Madrid they seldom mentioned their daughter to anyone. Lorca was one of the few people in whom they confided. That morning as he and Morla talked, Lorca patted his chest and confessed that “here, inside,” he too had his sorrows, his “dramones” as he called them. Morla Lynch feigned surprise. “I live in the anguish of the uncertain ‘great beyond,’” Lorca explained. Although he wanted to believe in the immortality of the soul, he was afflicted by doubt. In an ongoing effort to prove the existence of an afterlife, he collected stories of supernatural and near-death experiences: a dying relative who, shortly before his last breath, felt a hand touch his forehead; the simultaneous appearance of a single person in two different locations. Morla suggested that anyone who sought God had already gone halfway toward discovering the “supreme truth.” Lorca considered this. After a long pause, he said, “There always remains, even in the greatest skeptics, a very slight, almost imperceptible tremble of doubt, of suspicion and fear. Absolute atheism is not steadfast.”

  Lorca himself had never wholly abandoned his faith (a friend observed that he “used to get angry at God, to whom he spent his whole life praying”). He attended Mass intermittently, as much for its theatrical splendor as for its meaning. “I’m an aesthetic Catholic,” he sometimes said. Or “I’m an anarchic Catholic.” Still, he had struggled since adolescence with the paradoxes of Christianity, now and again seeking resolutions in Hinduism and ancient Greek philosophy.

  But in the spring of 1929, his belief in himself shaken by the events of the preceding year, he sought a more formal return to Catholicism. The impulse was not without precedent. In an effort to come to grips with their unorthodox sexuality, Oscar Wilde, Jean Cocteau, and Paul Verlaine had each at some time sought the comfort of the Church—in part as a means of reconciling themselves to society. Lorca’s rupture with Dalí and degrading affair with Aladrén had similarly revived his desire for spiritual purity, and he turned to the Church in search of both discipline and salvation—concepts pivotal to his ode on Christ, a work he had begun writing in January 1928 and had continued to expand throughout the year.

&nb
sp; He called the poem “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.” By the end of 1928, he had completed two sections of the work, “Exposition” and “World.” He published these in the December 1928 issue of the Revista de Occidente, where they were described as part of a forthcoming book of poems to be published “with photographs.” Lorca did not complete the remaining two sections of the ode, “Devil” and “Flesh,” until late 1929. At its conclusion, the poem approached two hundred lines.

  When he published the first two parts of the ode in the Revista de Occidente, Lorca dedicated them to Manuel de Falla, evidently hoping to honor his old friend by linking the composer’s name to a poem Lorca viewed as a solemn exaltation of the Eucharist. He failed to consider that his unorthodox approach to his subject might offend Falla. When Jorge Guillén first heard Lorca’s ode, he was struck by its “decorative bad taste.” But Guillén admired the “grandeur” and inventiveness of the poem.

  Identical in form and tone to the “Ode to Salvador Dalí,” the “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament” is both an idiosyncratic interpretation of traditional Catholic theology and a deeply felt tribute to the qualities Christ embodies: purity, compassion, self-sacrifice. Although he admired the rites of Catholicism, Lorca had never embraced the more doctrinaire aspects of his faith; it was the human side of Christ’s life and Passion that engaged him. Throughout the poem he couples radical new images—hechos poéticos—with authentic details of the Eucharist, drawn, in all likelihood, from his own recollection of Granada’s Corpus Christi celebrations, or from even earlier memories of his days as an acolyte in the village church, dressing the altar for Mass. In “Exposition,” the opening section of the ode, Lorca presents the Host, the opaque wafer representing Christ’s body, as it is seen throughout Spain at Corpus Christi, borne through the streets in a huge golden receptacle by lace-clad priests:

  You, my God, alive inside the monstrance.

  Pierced by your Father’s needles of fire.

  Beating like the poor heart of a frog

  kept in a glass container by the doctors.

  It was precisely this sort of incongruous imagery—Christ as the impaled heart of a frog—as well as Lorca’s implicit condemnation of a father who would willingly murder his son, that prompted Guillén to comment on the poem’s “bad taste” and led others, including Falla, to question the author’s piety. But Lorca meant to praise, not to mock. He identified keenly with the sacrificed Christ, whom he depicts as the only hope for a dying world. In the poem’s three remaining sections, “World,” “Devil,” and “Flesh,” he juxtaposes the innocent Christ with each of the Christian soul’s three traditional enemies. In every instance, Christ—“Oh, captive Lamb of three equal voices! / Changeless Sacrament of love and discipline!”—prevails. He calms a bleak urban world threatened by serpents and razors. He vanquishes the Devil, with His “sad beauty” and “shameless faith in no tomorrow,” and He redeems original sin. Within this cosmos, temptations such as greed, materialism, and sexual love fail to satisfy; it is only the pure body of Christ, “your vanquished flesh, broken, trampled / that defeats and dazzles our own flesh.”

  The poem shares with the “Ode to Salvador Dalí” both a strict alexandrine meter and a thematic preoccupation with purity as a means of transcending fleeting, everyday sensation. In both poems the images are audacious and depersonalized. In a private letter to Pepín Bello, Luis Buñuel accused Lorca of trying to create “surrealistic things” in the “Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament”—“but false ones,” he said. Buñuel hated the poem. He told Bello it was “a stinking ode, one that will give Falla’s weak member an erection, along with a lot of other artists.”

  Despite Buñuel’s claim, Lorca was not aiming at a surrealist poem, but was instead expressing, in a highly reasoned way, certain deeply held spiritual truths. A friend who read the ode later commented that Lorca was “tormented by God” and hoped to “reap the harvest of his concerns.” His dedication to Falla, a man whose life exemplified Christian faith and charity, signaled the seriousness of Lorca’s intent. But Lorca misunderstood the nature of Falla’s devotion. Stunned to see his name beneath the title of the ode, the composer gently advised Lorca, “Were I to write on the same theme, I would do so with my spirit on its knees… And then I would make my offering: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Pure and unalloyed.” Although he admitted to being “very honored” by Lorca’s tribute, Falla respected the poet too much to hide his disappointment in the ode. “I shall place my hope in the definitive version and in the rest of the poem,” he said. Lorca’s response to Falla, if he sent one, is lost. But in a later draft of the poem he included an epigraph that reads: “Gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

  During the last week of March 1929, Easter week, Lorca quietly left Madrid and went home. Makeshift altars dotted Granada’s streets and squares. At night, in the city’s dramatic Holy Week processions, long columns of hooded penitents filed through town, carrying poly-chromed tableaux of the Passion of Christ and bejeweled statues of the Virgin in voluminous robes. Night after night, onlookers lined the streets to watch the doleful parades. Outside the cathedral, saetas— austere passages of Gypsy song performed at Easter week—pierced the dark spring air.

  Shortly after midnight on Holy Thursday, Lorca took his place at the Alhambra among the men of the Confraternity of Santa María de la Alhambra, a small Catholic church tucked inside the walls of the former Arab stronghold. The Confraternity was one of several local guilds charged with organizing Granada’s Holy Week processions. Earlier, Lorca had approached the leaders of the Confraternity and asked, as a non-member of the guild, if he might be allowed to march anonymously with the group that night. The Church provides ritual observances for every psychological need, and Lorca’s need was extreme. Struck both by the urgency of his request and by his insistence on secrecy, the leaders assented. Only three men in the guild knew of his presence. Gravely, Lorca donned a borrowed tunic and a tall, cone-shaped hood, and knelt before the tableau he would help to parade through the city that night: the weeping figure of Granada’s patroness, the Virgin of the Agonies, holding the slain body of Christ on her lap.

  At half past midnight a bell tolled. The eerie procession began to move. The Alhambra’s gates opened, a saeta sounded, and the crowd that had gathered outside the ancient walls of the fortress fell silent. Lorca was among the first marchers to emerge. His face—all but his eyes—was masked. He carried a heavy cross. By choice he had removed his shoes and socks in order to walk barefoot along Granada’s cold stone streets. Behind him a squadron of men carried the massive tableau of the Virgin and her Son. Slowly the candlelit parade inched its way down the forested slopes of the Alhambra, onto the streets of the city, past the shadowy facade of the cathedral, and finally back up the steep hill to the Alhambra. The procession lasted four hours. As the marchers returned home to the church of Santa María de la Alhambra, dawn was starting to break. Throughout the night, Lorca held on to his cross.

  Afterward, José Martín Campos, one of the few who knew of Lorca’s presence in the march, went to thank him for his participation. But the poet had vanished. Martin Campos found only his tunic and hood, heaped at the foot of the cross, with a note: “May God reward you.” The next day Lorca returned to Madrid. Two months later, he enrolled officially in the Confraternity.

  In Madrid, his gloom deepened. He made vague stabs at work, but his heart was not in it. He was battling a constant cold. In mid-April, he gave a short poetry reading in Madrid and another in Bilbao. He had to get permission from his parents to make the trip. They were worried about him, and Lorca attempted to reassure them. “I’m not to blame for a lot of the things that have happened to me,” he said. “The blame lies with life, and with the moral struggles, crises, and conflicts I’m going through. I’ve always been a child, and I’ve lived because of you. At the moment I’m quite eager for work, and I’m also eager for spiritual rest.” In Bilbao, a photographer snapped his picture. He looked somber, his fea
tures uncharacteristically harsh and angular.

  He needed a change. Earlier in the year, he had been approached about giving a lecture tour in the United States and Cuba. Although plans for the trip were tentative, Lorca was intrigued. “It could earn me lots of money,” he told his parents. His father quickly perceived the utility of the tour. During a business trip to Madrid, Don Federico spoke confidentially to Lorca’s friend Rafael Martínez Nadal. Did Nadal think a little time away from Spain might do Lorca some good? he asked. Beneath his dense gray eyebrows, the older man’s eyes blazed.

  “As a matter of fact, yes, Don Federico,” Nadal answered. “I think it wouldn’t be at all bad for him.”

  While his father weighed the potential merits of the journey, Lorca talked glibly about the tour in letters home. He would have to purchase an “elegant lecturer’s outfit,” he said, and would need to rid himself of his chronic cold, “because if I’m not careful I could lose the very voice that’s going to earn me money as a lecturer.” By late April, the matter was settled. He would travel to America in June in the company of his former professor and trusted family friend, Fernando de los Ríos, who planned to give a short seminar in New York City that summer. De los Ríos, then forty-nine, had lectured before in the United States and promised to introduce Lorca to friends in Manhattan and to enroll him in classes at Columbia University. Lorca welcomed the news. He later told a friend that in the spring of 1929, before going to New York, he had been on the verge of suicide.