Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  More than once, the two men attended a raucous cabaret at the Teatro Alhambra, where performers ridiculed the Cuban government and staged pornographic vignettes before a bellowing, all-male audience. Lorca relished the place. It typified the kind of raw theatrical fare he longed to see in Spain. With Cardoza y Aragón, he began planning his own cabaret sketch, an adaptation of the Book of Genesis, for music hall. But the project, like so many others, came to nothing.

  Knowing Lorca’s penchant for the city’s libertine night life, Cardoza y Aragón took him one night to a gaudy Havana brothel. As they stood together in the brothel’s huge salon, with its mirrored walls and assortment of naked and scantily clad prostitutes, Lorca asked, “Why aren’t there any boys?” To Cardoza y Aragón, his homosexuality was “patent.” At one point, Lorca revealed to Luis that he had gone swimming in Cuba with a group of naked black men who later invited him to a baptism and wedding. That he should have done so was not surprising, but that he should relate the story with such candor—even to a close friend—startled Cardoza y Aragón.

  If New York had nudged Lorca toward an acceptance of his sexuality, Cuba allowed him to celebrate it. During his visit to the island, he was rumored to have had numerous liaisons, and even to have been briefly detained in jail for a sexual indiscretion. He was indisputably involved with a handsome twenty-year-old man of mixed racial origin named Lamadrid, and his friendship with another young man, Juan Ernesto Pérez de la Riva, raised many eyebrows, including those of the young man’s parents, who forbade their son to see Lorca once they realized Lorca’s sexual orientation. In a series of Cuban photographs, Lorca poses happily beside an unidentified young man whose thin, polished face and provocative gaze are reminiscent of Salvador Dalí’s. Another snapshot shows a radiant Lorca at the Havana Yacht Club, wearing a dark pin-striped jacket and light-colored slacks, surrounded by five men in skimpy bathing trunks.

  While in Cuba, Lorca began writing the most audacious play of his career, a complex, multifaceted work that boldly explores the nature of homosexual passion. He told Cardoza y Aragón that he intended to create the sort of theater no one had yet had the courage to create, to write a play that would make Oscar Wilde look insignificant, like “some sort of obese, pusillanimous queen.” In his room in the middle of Havana, Lorca filled seven pages of hotel letterhead with the play’s opening moments. Although he did not finish the script in Cuba, the play was clearly a result of his visit to the New World, a response to the personal as well as aesthetic discoveries Lorca made overseas. In New York, he had witnessed a revolutionary new kind of theater. In Cuba, he learned not only to accept his homosexuality but to rejoice in it. His new play El Público—literally, The Audience—was “unproduceable,” he said later, because it spoke a truth no one wanted to hear. Even in Havana, friends to whom he read fragments of the script found it disturbing.

  Among those to hear parts of the play were members of Havana’s eccentric Loynaz family, two brothers and two sisters who lived in one of the city’s more opulent neighborhoods. Their extravagant home, which Lorca nicknamed “my haunted house,” was crammed with costumes and curios dating back to the sixteenth century. Lorca spent many afternoons there, writing, playing the piano, drinking whiskey and soda, and reciting his work to the Loynaz siblings, who like the Quevedos were a vital part of Cuba’s intellectual and artistic world. To the bewilderment of young Flor Loynaz, Lorca sometimes plucked a manuscript from his pocket after eating a greasy slice of mortadella, then proceeded to read aloud from the page. He didn’t mind soiling his work.

  During his visits to the Loynaz family, Lorca worked on The Audience. The house and its unorthodox inhabitants seem to have inspired parts of his script. He set one scene among Roman ruins reminiscent of the statuary that stood in the Loynaz garden. Throughout the play, actors don masks and disguises, blurring the line between truth and fiction much as the Loynaz siblings did whenever they pulled out their trunks of costumes and masqueraded as Indians or peasants. But when Lorca read segments of the play to the family, they were perplexed by the work and laughed at parts of it. Unperturbed, he went on reading.

  Both Flor Loynaz and her sister, Dulce María, a writer, remembered Lorca as a charming but unattractive man whose dark, beautiful eyes were his best feature. “He was very open and always very happy,” Loynaz recalled. “I think that for him it was a sin to be sad.” Nevertheless, Lorca fell prey to strange fears in Cuba. For the first and only time in his life, he became obsessed by the possibility that he might have cancer, and he underwent surgery to have several moles removed. When Dulce María Loynaz visited him in the hospital, she discovered Lorca lying in bed with tiny burns and incisions scattered across his skin. Brightly, he told Dulce María that he had “plugged up all the cracks where the dreaded disease could sneak in.” He entertained other visitors by singing Cuban songs. To Adolfo Salazar he revealed that he had been told he might someday contract stomach cancer. “But just think! To die of cancer!” he exclaimed. “It must be such a beautiful disease. Cancer is an astronomical name. So it would be rather like suffering from a lovely constellation.”

  Lorca spent his final day in Cuba, June 12, with Adolfo Salazar and Flor Loynaz. Over lunch in his hotel, he talked calmly and read poems to his friends. He seemed content to linger for hours. After a while, Salazar, who was to accompany Lorca on the long journey home to Spain, began to fret about missing their ship. Finally he spoke up. “Federico, it’s getting late. You’ll miss the boat. Send someone to bring down your luggage.”

  “I haven’t packed yet,” Lorca said. Dumbfounded, Salazar and Loynaz rushed upstairs to his room, filled what little luggage Lorca had, tossed it into Loynaz’s car, and hurried to the pier.

  From the deck of his ship, the Manuel Arnus, Lorca posed for a photograph. His suit was rumpled, and he held a pipe in his hand as he gazed soberly at the camera. A week earlier he had turned thirty-two. He had been away from Spain for one year. As his ship pulled slowly away from its berth, he remained on deck, waving to Flor Loynaz. She watched until he vanished.

  At sea, Lorca resumed work on his “Ode to Walt Whitman.” He finished the poem on June 15. Together with The Audience, the ode would stand as a testament to the emotional and sexual metamorphosis he had undergone in America. He remained deeply protective of both works, reading each only to trusted friends. He never published his ode to Whitman in Spain. He knew the sort of climate to which he was returning.

  On June 19, the Manuel Arnus docked briefly in New York City before crossing the Atlantic to Spain. While his fellow passengers went sightseeing in New York, Lorca stayed onboard, having neglected to secure the proper documents for entering the United States. Instead, he sent a telegram to his friends in the city, begging them to “come see me.” When the other passengers returned to the Manuel Arnus later that afternoon, they found the ship’s salon packed with Lorca’s friends, including a number of Columbia University students who had known the poet through his work as Director of the Mixed Choruses the Spanish Institute. Lorca sat at the piano, singing.

  At least one friend who came to see him that day was horrified by the change she perceived since his visit to Cuba. “It’s just as well you couldn’t come,” Norma Brickell wrote afterward to another of Lorca’s New York acquaintances. “He’s not our Federico any more, but a very different person. Wholly male, and very vulgar.”

  16

  Audience

  1930-31

  The moment he returned to Granada, Lorca began plotting his next visit to America. He found it all but impossible to describe the “long and splendid trip” he had just concluded. “Ay Ay Ay Ay Ay!! I’m dying!” he complained by letter to Rafael Martínez Nadal as he sat one day beneath a fig tree in the vega, struggling to find words to express himself. “My flesh is shattered from the beauty of America and above all the beauty of Havana.”

  Abroad, he told Nadal, he had written a number of “scandalous poems and scandalous theater, too,” and he intended to return
to the United States in January. “That will tell you everything. It’s easy to get produced in New York.” In the meantime he desperately wanted to read his new drama, which possessed a “frankly homosexual theme,” to certain friends in Madrid. “I think it’s my best poem,” he said, adding mischievously, “Here in Granada I’m having fun with some delicious things as well. There’s a little bullfighter …”

  A Granadan priest who had known Lorca in his university days spotted him on the street one day after his return from America, and was surprised by the change in Lorca’s appearance. Instead of the simple ties and slim black suits he had worn in the 1920s, Lorca sported a brightly colored shirt and baggy jacket and pants. The priest asked if New York had wrought the same change to his personality. “No,” Lorca answered happily. “I’m still the same. New York’s asphalt and petroleum weren’t able to change me.”

  But he was mistaken to believe the experience had left him unmarked. Lorca returned to Spain a brasher, more sardonic man. Shortly after his arrival he wrote to Salvador Dalí—their first correspondence in nearly two years—urging the artist to join him in New York the following January. “You could stay there for six months and then return to Paris or you could travel to Moscow with me,” Lorca suggested. “I am going to have an exhibition in New York as I already have a gallery and an enormous quantity of idiot friends, millionaire pansies and ladies who buy new paintings and will make our winter a pleasant one. You know how I can turn on the charm.”

  His family rejoiced to have Lorca home again. He settled easily back into the routines of country life at the Huerta de San Vicente: the daily trek into town to retrieve his mail, the late nights reading or writing in his room, the timeworn methods of preserving food and laundering clothes (no more “terrible washing machines” to destroy his socks, as in New York). He padded about the house in his pajamas, content to play the piano or indulge in childlike games, even at thirty-two, while the rest of his family went about their business. Neighbors later recalled the time Lorca substituted cornflowers for roses in his mother’s table arrangement, and the day he delivered an impromptu sermon from the balcony of his room.

  From America, Lorca had followed his family’s activities closely during the previous year. He had gently encouraged his brother to “keep up his spirits” while preparing to take a set of qualifying exams, and he had sent effusive congratulations to his sister Concha upon her marriage to Manolo Montesinos. The couple were now expecting their first child. But it was his mother he had missed the most. Jubilant to be back in her presence, he told a friend that summer that he loved to put his arms around his gray-haired mother, hoist her in the air, and rock her like a little girl. She was so tiny, he said, that lifting her was easy. “Federico, by God, you’re killing me!” Vicenta Lorca would squeal as her son whirled her about in his arms. When his mother lay down to take a nap, Lorca would softly wave a fan over her until she fell asleep, so that the flies didn’t bother her.

  Throughout the summer the entire family kept a close watch on the country’s unfolding political crisis. In the wake of Primo de Rivera’s resignation and death earlier in the year, King Alfonso XIII had clung to power despite cries for his removal. Recently the king had appointed a new military dictator, but neither man enjoyed the support of the Spanish people. Even the Church and the army opposed the arrangement. Daily the situation grew more unstable. At the Huerta de San Vicente, the Lorca family pored over each edition of the liberal Defensor de Granada, whose editor, Constantino Ruiz Carnero, a former member of the Rinconcillo, had been one of Lorca’s good friends in adolescence. The paper consistently expressed its disapproval of the monarchy and its support for a Spanish republic—a position that Lorca’s family, and in particular his seventy-one-year-old father, embraced. Close family friend Fernando de los Ríos was a leading advocate of the republican cause.

  Lorca himself remained more absorbed by work than by politics, however. Within weeks of arriving home he resumed work on his play The Audience. By August 22 he had finished a first draft of the script. In early October he returned to Madrid, glowing with enthusiasm, and announced to journalist Miguel Pérez Ferrero of the Heraldo de Madrid that he had written a new drama. “It consists,” he said, “of six acts and a murder.”

  “For whom is it intended—not the murder, but the work itself?” Pérez Ferrero inquired.

  “I don’t know if it can actually be produced. The main characters in the play are horses.”

  “Marvelous, Federico,” said the journalist.

  In Madrid, friends noticed a change in Lorca. The poet Luis Cernuda met him by chance at the home of a mutual acquaintance and thought he perceived a “greater decisiveness” in Lorca’s manner. “It was as if something once intimate and secret in him had been affirmed.” As always, Lorca played the piano that afternoon, but to Cernuda he seemed more sensual, less melancholy, than before. His thick face and plain features somehow “ennobled themselves” as he performed. When he finished, he folded his hands as if in prayer. “The rite had ended,” Cernuda wrote eight years later, recalling the magic of Lorca’s presence.

  Even Lorca’s former roommate José Antonio Rubio Sacristán, whose own journey to New York earlier in the year had coincided with Lorca’s, thought him altered since his return. Sacristán became convinced that Lorca’s flight to America was precipitated by a need “to recognize his nature and accept it.” Following the trip, Lorca seemed less secretive about his sexuality. To Sacristán, the difference could be summarized in one word. Lorca was more “cynical.”

  Equally unsettling was the change in his writing. As soon as he returned to Madrid, he began pulling copies of his New York poems from his pockets and reading them to friends. He bragged about his achievement abroad. To an acquaintance who asked what he had accomplished overseas, Lorca responded, “I’ve done the most difficult thing. I’ve been a poet in New York.”

  With earlier works, he had relied primarily on his voice to convey the essence of a given poem. With his American poetry Lorca furrowed his brow, lifted his head, and gestured vigorously with one hand. When he finished, he sat back quietly and took a sip of whiskey or cognac, as if the effort of reciting his work had completely fatigued him. One evening a listener commented on the enormous physical effort the readings seemed to require. “I have to defend these poems against incomprehension, dilettantism, and benevolent smiles,” Lorca explained.

  Late one night he read The Audience to Carlos and Bebé Morla Lynch and a group of friends who were gathered in their elegant Madrid apartment. When Lorca finished, the room fell silent. One man confessed that he had understood nothing of the play. Bebé Morla Lynch cried out in dismay, “Federico! You don’t honestly intend for that to be staged! It’s impossible! Aside from the scandal it would provoke, it can’t be staged!” Her husband said nothing. The play so disturbed Carlos Morla Lynch that when he eventually published a revised version of the diary he had kept during these years, he eliminated any mention of The Audience.

  Later that evening, Lorca strolled along Madrid’s darkened streets with his friend Rafael Martínez Nadal. “They haven’t understood anything, or else they were shocked, and I can understand it,” Lorca said. “The work is very difficult and at the moment unproduceable, they’re right. But in ten or twenty years it will be a great success. You’ll see.” In fact, more than fifty years passed before The Audience premiered in Madrid—and even then, many who saw the play found it baffling.

  Because The Audience remained unproduced in his lifetime, Lorca was unable to revise the script in rehearsal, as he did with other plays. Nor did he leave precise instructions as to the arrangement of the drama’s various parts. The existing manuscript, which remained for years in Martínez Nadal’s possession, lacks at least one scene, and the placement of another scene—the short, masquelike “Song of the Idiot Shepherd”—is uncertain. Lorca may have meant this interlude to serve as a Shakespearean prologue to the play itself, a witty summation of the work’s central pr
eoccupation: the role of artifice in both theater and society.

  At first glance, The Audience appears to be scarcely more than a miscellany of loosely connected images and ideas. The dialogue often seems arbitrary, and the play’s visual elements incongruous. In one stage direction, Lorca calls for an office to have “a great hand printed on the wall” and X rays for windows. The play’s coherence and meaning come not from its narrative structure but from a quasi-expressionistic accumulation of concepts and symbols. Throughout the script Lorca repeats lines, actions, and images, so that characters echo one another in voice and appearance. The sense of metamorphosis, of one thing mystically becoming another, is continual.

  Spectacle outweighs dialogue to such an extent that at times The Audience is more like cinema than theater. Characters change costume instantly by passing behind screens; empty masks bleat like lambs; a “slow shower of rigid white gloves” falls from the sky. For years Lorca had been moving in the direction of a more spectacle-based theater, but only Don Perlimplín had approached the level of visual splendor called for in The Audience. How Lorca intended for some of the play’s more preposterous stage effects to be carried out is unclear. Even he declared the script to be unproduceable.

  But by placing such emphasis on scenic illusion, he was able to question the very nature of theater. The issue had obsessed him for years. In a brief dramatic sketch undertaken in adolescence, he had explored the inherent conflict between stage and audience. “The drama,” he wrote in a stage direction to the earlier sketch, “ought to take place within the audience, not the characters.”

  In The Audience he expands on this idea. It is Lorca’s most radical play, his most daring departure from conventional dramaturgy. Born, in part, of his exposure to New York’s dynamic theater scene, The Audience constitutes Lorca’s fiercest challenge to the bourgeois crowds who filled Spain’s theaters with their hidebound taste and polite expectations. “One must destroy the theater or live in the theater!” cries a character in the play. The line echoes what Lorca himself said to his parents from New York: “Either the theater changes radically, or it dies away forever.”