Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Shortly after the holidays, Lorca announced to his family that in March he planned to go to Cuba to give a series of lectures. On January 21, at Vassar College, he delivered the first of his long-postponed American lectures. He wrangled with Vassar over his fee. Citing the current economic crisis, the college had dropped its original offer of $100 to $75. Lorca was furious. He told Professor Margarita de Mayo of the Spanish Department that he had expected to be “treated with the proper consideration, but I see that I was wrong.” Nevertheless, he agreed to go through with the lecture. “I’ll make the sacrifice,” he told de Mayo. Afterward, he informed his parents that “three hundred” girls, some of them “very pretty,” had attended his lecture. He dismissed the talk itself, on Spanish folk songs, as “a joke.” But as he explained later, “In America you can say anything you want to, since, with a few exceptions, they’re a little slow.” He intended to use the money he’d earned to buy a pair of shoes and a suit, “because I’m now stark naked. Naked!”

  In February, at Columbia University, he gave his second and final American lecture, a revised version of his talk “Imagination, Inspiration, and Escape.” New York’s Spanish-speaking La Prensa published a glowing account of the occasion. Lorca clipped the review and sent it home to his parents, with an apology for the accompanying photograph. It made him look uglier than he was, he said—when in fact he had recently been told by an elderly New York woman that he was handsome. “And in the picture I’m sending you I look horribly ugly … and I’m not so ugly … perhaps a little … but not that much.”

  Lorca admitted to his parents that he lacked the character to be a professional lecturer. It was “too serious” a business for him, he said, “and it seems useless.” Still, if he was to earn his keep in Cuba by going on the lecture circuit, he must learn to adapt.

  On March 4, 1930, he boarded a train for Florida. To a friend he confessed that he wanted to make this part of the trip by train because the ocean frightened him.

  In Miami, where he spent a day, Lorca basked in the summerlike air and marveled at the number of “umbrellas and cars and naked women” to be found on the beach. By the time he boarded his ship for Cuba, Manhattan was already a distant memory. He later spoke of his trip to Cuba as a journey from night into day, from darkness into sun. As his ship sailed toward the Antilles, New York’s “edges and rhythm, form and anguish” seemed to vanish into a welter of blue sky. “The Chrysler Building defends itself from the sun with its huge silver beak, and bridges, ships, railways, and men seem deafened and chained: chained by a cruel economic system whose throat must soon be cut.”

  And yet New York had given him what he later described as “the most useful experience of my life.” The harsh American city had delivered him from an abyss. He had arrived in Manhattan nine months earlier, unable to write, fearful of love, still shuddering from the effects of fame, and now, in the spring of 1930, he was writing prolifically and dreaming of writing more. He was even able to imagine himself in love. Three weeks before leaving New York, on February 13, the day before Valentine’s Day, he composed a love poem, “Little Viennese Waltz,” his most intensely homoerotic work to date. To the lilting pulse of a waltzlike meter, the poet offers himself—his beautiful self—in the act of love:

  In Vienna I will dance with you

  in a costume with

  a river’s head.

  See how the hyacinths line my banks!

  I will leave my mouth between your legs,

  my soul in photographs and lilies,

  and in the dark wake of your footsteps,

  my love, my love, I will have to leave

  violin and grave, the ribbons of the waltz.

  His friend Angel del Río later said he thought Lorca discovered “new layers of his most private personality” during his stay in New York. Del Río refrained from elaborating on his statement, except to note, with discretion, that Lorca’s “emotional crisis” the previous year had touched on “delicate fibers of his personality, problems which cannot be hastily appraised or dismissed.”

  Lorca’s self-enforced withdrawal from the world as he knew it—from Spain, from the Spanish language, from family and friends—had ultimately led him back to himself, and from there to others. He left the United States with renewed faith in his work, a more compassionate understanding of his sexuality, and a newfound enthusiasm for life. He told his parents he was already planning his next trip abroad—“to Russia.” This time he intended to pay for the journey himself.

  As his ship sailed into Havana’s bottle-shaped bay, the colors of the warm Caribbean island gradually came into view: yellows, pinks, phosphorescent greens, and the relentless blue of the sky. Lorca was reminded of his native Andalusia. Palm trees were dancing in the wind. Rising like a mirage from the azure water of the bay, Havana itself stood before him: white, sun-struck, shimmering.

  15

  Spanish America

  1930

  Lorca’s first impulse on arriving in Cuba was to fling his coat and gloves to the ground in joy. Suddenly the world was familiar. Cries of Oye, chico! rang out from the quayside. On Havana’s cobblestoned streets, the smell of cigars mingled with the aroma of coffee and magnolias. There were cafés and fountains, tiled patios and tall windows with balconies.

  Nearly everything reminded him of home. The sky was the blue of the sky over Málaga; the sea was as beautiful as the Mediterranean—except that its hues seemed more “violent.” In downtown Havana, Lorca heard people singing the same slow, sad habaneras that his aunt Isabel and cousin Aurelia used to sing in Fuente Vaqueros. Cuba was much as Lorca had imagined it as a boy, peering into the pungent cigar boxes his father received regularly from the faraway island. Inside, each cigar box had contained a vibrant picture of palm-lined roads and dark tobacco leaves, a profusion of gold medallions, and a portrait of Romeo and Juliet locked in an embrace. Somehow this incongruous assortment of images struck Lorca as apt, and in one of his first letters home to his family, he described Cuba as “caressing, smooth, terribly sensual.”

  A small gathering of Cuban writers and journalists greeted Lorca’s ship when it docked in Havana on March 7, 1930. The city’s leading newspaper, the Diario de Marina, published a front-page article heralding the arrival of Spain’s “most prestigious” contemporary poet. Lorca attributed such attention to the “exaggerated” nature of Havanans. But he welcomed the fuss. In Cuba, adoration burned as brightly as the sun. Lorca shed the solitude of his New York days as eagerly as he shed his winter coat. He donned a white linen suit, turned his face toward the light, and settled into the relaxed rhythms of island existence.

  What was to have been a brief visit to Cuba—a short lecture tour sponsored by the Hispanic-Cuban Institute of Culture—quickly turned into a three-month stay. Even then, Lorca found it difficult to leave. “I’ve spent the happiest days of my life here,” he said gratefully. Within five days of his arrival he gave two lectures in Havana’s Teatro Principal de la Comedia. He promptly became the toast of the town. Unlike other lecturers, who wore sober suits and stood stiffly behind podiums, Lorca strode onstage in brightly colored sweaters and ties, and struck up a jovial rapport with his listeners. During his first talk, he announced that as a student in Madrid he had often parodied the boring speakers he had been forced to hear at the Residencia. In Cuba, he said, “I’ll parody myself.” Audiences loved him. At the ticket booth, long lines formed for his next lectures.

  He had boundless energy. On the night before his third Havana lecture, he stayed up until dawn, drinking rum and reciting poetry with several Cuban acquaintances. The next morning Lorca briskly took the stage at the Teatro Principal, sat down at a piano, and with “lightness and ease” launched into his musical lecture on Spanish lullabies. His exhausted companions from the previous evening looked on with amazement.

  Lorca “doesn’t lend himself, he gives himself,” wrote the author of a long tribute in the monthly avant-garde journal Revista de Avance, one of Cuba’s more
prominent literary publications. “He is bursting with answers as well as questions. He knows everything and knows nothing. He has a hollow in the palm of each hand for the golden orb of his beliefs, and his curiosity is like that of Adam.” During his stay in Cuba, the Revista published a number of Lorca’s works, including two New York poems, and issued flattering accounts of his lectures. Other magazines followed suit. Lorca could not have gone unnoticed if he had tried.

  Through the auspices of the Revista, he met most of the country’s young poets, essayists, and journalists, men who shared his enthusiasm for the avant-garde and his passion for verse. During their first encounter, over lunch, Lorca lifted a glass of rum to his eyes and after a long pause said to poet Nicolás Guillen, “This is called seeing life rum-colored.” Guillén was entranced. Everything about Lorca, he thought, inspired one to love life and to revere art.

  Lorca carried scraps of paper in his pockets for jotting down ideas and observations, the seeds of poems. He seized any opportunity to recite his verse to new friends. He was especially eager to present his American poems. Listeners in Cuba responded much as they had in New York, with astonishment and awe. One month after his arrival, word of the startling new collection appeared in Havana’s Diario de Marina. The paper reported that Lorca had worked “like a Benedictine” on the poems, revising key words four and five times until the ensemble achieved its quality of “naked and solitary beauty.” Each manuscript erasure represented a “long, internal struggle.”

  Midway through his stay in Havana, Lorca’s old friend Adolfo Salazar, the musician and critic, arrived in Cuba from Spain to give a lecture series. Salazar immediately went in search of Lorca and found him in his room at the Union Hotel, reclining on the bed in a yellow bathrobe while reciting verse to a dozen or so young men. “What in the hell are you reading?” Salazar asked.

  “They’re my New York poems,” Lorca said. “Sit down. Listen.”

  Salazar was stunned. The radical nature of Lorca’s new poems took him utterly by surprise. And yet Lorca himself appeared unchanged. He was a bit older, perhaps (his hairline had begun to recede), but, to Salazar, he seemed “more Andalusian” than ever. He obviously felt at home in Cuba.

  Lorca’s room at the Union Hotel, like his rooms at the Residencia in Madrid, fast became one of the most popular spots in Havana. Often, by the time Lorca woke late in the morning, visitors—most, if not all, of them young male writers—were waiting for him in the hallway outside his door. If the guests were to his liking, Lorca invited them in to talk while he washed and dressed. He welcomed their attention and clearly enjoyed the promiscuous nature of the setting; Havana had rid him of the inhibitions that constrained his behavior in Spain. One observer described the ritual as a “scene from an Athenian gymnasium.”

  Lorca relished his sudden status as an international celebrity. To a young man from rural Cuba who introduced himself as a “poet,” Lorca smiled indulgently and said, “Local, I take it?” He flirted openly with the young women who begged him to sign their autograph books. “If you write to me in Spain, your mother won’t find out,” he told one girl. His social invitations were so numerous he could not keep track of them. Once, on his way home from an event, someone asked him where he had just been. Lorca shrugged and replied, “I’ve forgotten.” He told his parents it would take “three or four hours” simply to clip all the newspaper articles that had been written about him. “I am going to give more lectures than I thought,” he added, “and that is the proof of my success here.” Ultimately he gave seven talks in Cuba, all of them versions of lectures he had first delivered in Spain.

  But even Lorca grew tired of the incessant attention. Scarcely able to take a walk without attracting a crowd, he sometimes simply disappeared. Rumor had it he occasionally slipped off to the black barrios near the docks. He was fascinated by black life in Havana and later declared that Cuban blacks, unlike those he had seen in New York, were “without tragedy.” He attached little importance to the island’s existing racial tensions and depicted himself as a hero for having insisted on one occasion that blacks be allowed to attend one of his lectures—a privilege normally denied them. Whether or not he was telling the truth, Lorca seemed eager to impress others with the degree of his racial tolerance. He sent his family a photograph of himself with his arms draped affectionately around three black children, and in letters home he talked avidly about black culture.

  But he could be condescending. He told his parents that Cuban women were the most beautiful women in the world because they all bore a “drop of Negro blood,” and the “blacker” they were, the “better.” In a gesture more revealing of his ambivalence toward women, he sent Rafael Martínez Nadal a crude sketch of a black woman with coiled hair, thick lips, and hoop earrings. Beneath the drawing he wrote, “Oh, Cuba! Oh rhythm of dry seeds! / Oh, hot waist and drop of wood! / The blacks are coming to adore this goddess, this Saint Barbara of the tremulous cunt. That’s why I am sending her to you. Perhaps she’ll serve as an amulet.”

  By the end of his stay, at least one local newspaper reported that Lorca had “gone native” for Cuban culture, and Lorca agreed. He regarded the island as a paradise. He loved its orchids and sugarcane stalks, the tropical-fruit flavors of its ice cream and the exotic names of its desserts. In a restaurant he once wrapped a napkin around his head like a turban and clapped his hands to summon a waiter. He then slowly intoned the name of a dish he wished to order: “Cham-po-la de gua-ná-ba-ná!” He had never heard of a more euphonic refreshment, he said.

  During his three-month visit, Lorca took part in Havana’s Easter week celebrations and went on a crocodile hunt in the countryside, a spectacle he described as “a bit scary, and very dangerous.” But he claimed to have acquitted himself with “cold-bloodedness.” He sought opportunities to meet ordinary Cuban citizens: fishermen, busboys, poverty-stricken villagers struggling to survive under dictator Gerardo Machado’s corrupt regime. While in Havana, Lorca openly voiced his support for members of the Cuban opposition and proclaimed his hatred of all dictatorships. In a token show of childlike enthusiasm for the cause of social reform, he even took part in a local telephone strike.

  His remarks on dictatorships had as much, if not more, to do with Spain than with Cuba. In the wake of the international economic crisis triggered by the Crash of 1929, disgruntled Spaniards had taken to the streets of Madrid the previous fall—while Lorca was still in New York—demanding an end to General Primo de Rivera’s six-year dictatorship. “What will become of Spain?” Lorca had asked his parents in December. In January, Primo de Rivera had stepped down and fled to Paris. He died two months later of diabetic complications, during Lorca’s first weeks in Havana. Spain itself remained in a state of unrest, and Lorca worried about his country’s future. Although the king, Alfonso XIII, retained control of the government, there were renewed calls for an end to the monarchy and growing appeals for the establishment of a Spanish republic. “What’s happening over there is a volcano!” Lorca told his family.

  He ended most of his days in Havana in a café or bar, listening to Cuban music. He especially liked the Cuban son, a sinuous, rumbalike dance accompanied by marimbas, bongo drums, and maracas. At once African and Spanish, the son possessed a lush, tropical sound that Lorca found mesmerizing. Occasionally he sat down at a piano and tried to replicate the music.

  The son inspired the only poem Lorca is known to have written in Cuba, the “Son de negros en Cuba,” or “Blacks Dancing to Cuban Rhythms.” Fusing childhood impressions of Cuba and contemporary images of the island, he produced a songlike poem in which figures from his father’s cigar boxes combine with tobacco plants, crocodiles, palm trees, and rum to create a moving tribute to a country Lorca had come to love. With its incantatory refrain—“I’m going to Santiago”—the work evokes the hypnotic throb of the son. Lorca evidently carried a copy of the poem with him in his pocket when he visited the city of Santiago, on Cuba’s southeastern coast, to give a reading in early
April.

  He published the work that spring in the Cuban journal Musicalia, whose editors, Antonio and María Muñoz de Quevedo, befriended Lorca during his stay in Havana. He spent long hours in the Quevedo home, playing the couple’s piano and socializing with their musical and artistic friends and acquaintances. Although residents of Cuba, the Quevedos were Spanish by birth, and counted Manuel de Falla among their close friends. Like others entranced by Lorca’s talent and charm, Antonio Quevedo kept a diary in which he recorded Lorca’s activities and moods. Later, Quevedo published an account of Lorca’s stay in Cuba—much as Philip Cummings and Herschel Brickell would each publish their recollections of Lorca’s visit to America. The older and more famous he became, the more Lorca resented this sort of scrutiny. In Havana, Quevedo’s devotion to him became so suffocating that on occasion Lorca fled the man’s presence.

  Late at night, as moonlit figures strolled the waterfront in linen suits and satin pumps, and sea breezes washed the city, an air of what one visitor described as “invitation and surrender” gripped Havana. With twenty-six-year-old Luis Cardoza y Aragón, a Guatemalan diplomat whom Lorca had met in Havana, and with whom he appeared to enjoy a platonic friendship, Lorca frequently shared a late dinner over wine, followed by a tour of the city’s exuberant night life. According to Cardoza y Aragón, Lorca reveled in Havana’s “magnificent sensuality.”