Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Lorca had previously explored the motif of an old man married to a young woman in his brief and lyrical play Don Perlimplín, a work he described as a “grotesque” tragedy. With The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife he returned to the theme, this time focusing chiefly on its comic ramifications. His play takes place in an Andalusian village, where a spirited eighteen-year-old bride, trapped in an arranged marriage to a fifty-three-year-old shoemaker, struggles to escape her misery. Given no choice as a woman but to be “either a nun or a dishrag,” as she tartly phrases it, and painfully aware that she is unlikely to have children, the Shoemaker’s Wife resorts to fantasy as her only means of escape from a reality she finds unbearable. She taunts her aging husband with extravagant accounts of her former suitors and gleefully informs him that as a wife, she will do just as she pleases. “Fantasizer! Fantasizer! Fantasizer!” he cries in retaliation, as two of his neighbors eavesdrop through a prominent upstage window.

  Lorca had not forgotten the claustrophobic nature of rural life in Andalusia, where village gossips pass judgment on those who flout convention, and “malice and bad will” (as Lorca once expressed it in a letter) permeate everyday life. In The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife he re-creates the cloying atmosphere he had experienced as a boy growing up in small vega towns. Gossiping villagers scrutinize and deride the Shoemaker and his unruly wife throughout the play. According to Lorca, they represent “the voice of conscience, of religion, of remorse.” They are also a quintessential device of the stage, an archetypal chorus whose function is so “indispensable … so profoundly theatrical, that I cannot conceive of its exclusion,” he observed.

  Ultimately, his neighbors’ mockery and his wife’s abuse so torment the Shoemaker that he leaves home. Only then does his young wife discover how deeply she loves him. Her sole source of comfort is a small village boy, whom she calls “my little shepherd of Bethlehem.” An emblem of both the child and the freedom she will never possess, the boy alone elicits true affection from the Shoemaker’s Wife. Christlike in his innocence, the child is a visual and poetic reminder of the boy Lorca himself once was. When the child offers to give the Shoemaker’s Wife “the great sword of my grandfather, the one who went off to war,” Lorca is most likely remembering his own great-grandfather who fought in Spain’s Carlist wars during the late nineteenth century. When the boy reacts ecstatically to the arrival of an itinerant puppeteer, it is his own childhood response to such events that Lorca evokes.

  True to the conventions of its genre, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife culminates in a recognition scene. Unaware that she is talking to the Shoemaker in disguise, the Shoemaker’s Wife tells a wandering puppeteer how deeply she loves her husband. Moved by her confession, he reveals his identity, and for an instant the pair enjoy a blissful reunion. But it does not last. Within moments the Shoemaker’s Wife begins berating her husband, and as their neighbors take up their accustomed post at the window, the couple’s turbulent marriage resumes. Even in this most comic of plays, Lorca could not bring himself to present an unambiguously happy ending. His understanding of human behavior would not warrant it. True love, he knew, is a chimera. There is no escaping the solitude of human existence.

  The original script for The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife did not include a prologue. Lorca added the speech during rehearsals for the play in 1930, perhaps intending it as a defense of the qualities for which his first produced play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, had been lampooned: poetry, fantasy, symbolism. Or perhaps, having resigned himself to the impossibility of producing The Audience, he hoped to commence his theatrical revolution in a more acceptable way. In any case, he made his stand. “Esteemed audience,” he began, then hastily changed his approach. “No, not ‘esteemed audience,’ just ‘audience.’” In an effort to eradicate the false wall of fear and cowardice that traditionally separates an author from his audience, he explained, he would dispense with outmoded words such as “esteemed.”

  Lorca was in fact mocking the urbane crowds who typically filled the stalls at opening-night performances in Madrid. He preferred a less sophisticated audience for his work. The theater, he argued in his prologue, is too often “a financial operation.” As a result, “poetry retreats from the stage in search of other environments where people are not shocked when a tree, for example, turns into a puff of smoke, or when three fishes, through the love of a hand and a word, become three million fishes to feed the hunger of a multitude.”

  The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife—like so much else that he wrote—is Lorca’s response to the need for a genuinely poetic theater in Spain. At the end of the play’s prologue, the Author bids farewell to his audience and doffs his hat. As he does so, a ray of green light emerges from the depths of his hat, followed by a jet of water. “Pardon me,” says the Author, with a touch of irony to his voice. The curtain rises, the lights brighten, and the Shoemaker’s Wife comes raging onto the stage.

  Because The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife had been advertised as an “experimental” production, many critics chose to ignore the play’s debut in 1930. Of those who did review the Christmas Eve premiere, several pointed out that it was far less experimental than Lorca’s previous plays. But they admitted that in its simplicity, brevity, and mirth, the farce was nevertheless unconventional.

  The critic Enrique Diez-Canedo of El Sol, one of Lorca’s most ardent fans, gave The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife its most generous review. Hailing Lorca as “a true poet,” Diez-Canedo praised the work’s charm, vigor, and humanity, and noted its popular tone. He was particularly struck by the play’s unsentimental denouement, which he described as “more purely definitive” than the “happy-ever-after” endings usually given to comedies.

  A number of reviewers focused on the play’s simplicity and lack of pretension. Some used words such as “ingenuous” and “childlike.” Others were more severe. Luis Paris, of El Imparcial, attacked the play as “a banal, insubstantial … little work.” Juan Olmedilla, of the Heraldo de Madrid, dismissed it as a “torpid and clumsy parody” of Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s more probing experiments with comedy and the puppet tradition. Lorca’s farce lacked “charm, interest, and depth of character,” wrote Olmedilla. This was all the more disappointing, he added, because Lorca showed such promise as an author. Even his good friend Pedro Salinas took exception to Lorca’s play. Privately, Salinas called it a “simple, entertaining little thing, with lots of local color, charming bits, etc. But without stature. A childish prank.”

  Few who saw the farce seemed willing or able to acknowledge its more serious implications. As Lorca later took pains to emphasize, the character of the Shoemaker’s Wife, in her persistent, sometimes violent confrontation with reality, embodies a fundamental human longing. She epitomizes “the struggle between reality and fantasy (and by fantasy I mean all that is unattainable) which exists deep within every human being.” In her quest for the impossible—a quest that surfaces time and again in Lorca’s poetic cosmos—the Shoemaker’s Wife has a single ally: a little boy. He is “a compendium of tenderness,” Lorca explained, “and a symbol of things that are still just seedlings.” Only children, Lorca believed, are oblivious to the pain of empty, unmitigated desire.

  Xirgu and her company performed The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife thirty-three times in Madrid before closing the farce on April 17, 1931. The play’s modest success in the capital earned Lorca favorable notices from as far away as Barcelona, where Salvador Dalí’s father one day spotted an enthusiastic review. He clipped the article and sent it to Lorca with a note of congratulations.

  “I don’t know if you’re aware that I had to evict my son from the house,” the older man wrote. Not only had Dalí defiled his mother’s memory by spitting on her portrait, but he had recently taken up with a married woman, Gala Eluard, and was now living openly and shamelessly with her. More shocking still, the woman’s husband approved of the affair. Upon hearing this last bit of news, Lorca burst out laughing.

  17

&nb
sp; Republic

  1931

  From jail, Fernando de los Ríos and his colleagues in the republican movement continued to agitate for a new government. Shortly after their imprisonment in December 1930, they issued a manifesto to the people of Spain, demanding a “republic based on national sovereignty and represented by a Constituent Assembly.”

  In Madrid rumors swirled and revolutionary tracts littered the sidewalks. The country’s leading intellectuals held secret meetings in bars, took covert trips, and issued pro-republican pamphlets. At the Café Granja del Henar, playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s nightly tertulia became a political forum. In early February 1931, writer José Ortega y Gasset and two pro-republican colleagues published a manifesto in the Spanish press. The document called for “writers and artists, doctors, engineers, architects,” and especially the young, to form an association “in support of the republic.”

  Few could ignore the turmoil. Pedro Salinas wrote of the “rumors, the passionate conversations, the retorts, the obligatory hell” that enveloped Madrid during the first months of 1931. Virtually everyone Salinas knew had joined the fray. “Only the children, only Alberti and Lorca, go on worrying exclusively about themselves and about each other,” he told Jorge Guillén. But Salinas was wrong to deem Rafael Alberti apolitical. In early March, at the final performance of his new play The Uninhabited Man, Alberti had the names of the jailed republican leaders read aloud from the stage. A telegram from Unamuno, declaring his support for the republican movement, followed. Alberti’s liberal audience applauded the readings, then poured into the streets of Madrid in a boisterous show of enthusiasm for a new government. By the time the police arrived, the theater was empty, and no arrests could be made.

  Lorca undoubtedly knew about—and almost certainly envied—the attention Alberti received for his defiant act. The two men continued to be wary of one another. The previous year, Alberti had married the young writer María Teresa León, and the couple seemed destined for a productive life devoted to their shared passions: politics and literature. Since 1929, Alberti’s work had become increasingly strident. He aligned himself with the working classes—an affiliation he, unlike Lorca, claimed as a legitimate birthright—and sought, through writing, to be both politically effective and artistically pure, a goal not easily achieved. Lorca objected to Alberti’s partisan verse, which he thought a corruption of true art. Their mutual friend, the diplomat Carlos Morla Lynch, observed in his diary at about this time: “They’re preoccupied, those two—the one with the other—and they keep an eye on each other.”

  Aside from an obvious and unavoidable interest in the outcome of the current political situation, Lorca himself kept aloof from politics. At Morla Lynch’s home, where he now spent most of his evenings, guests seldom discussed political developments. They argued instead about literature or gossiped about everyday events. The ambience inside the apartment, unlike the “volcano” brewing on the streets outside, was calm. Visitors arranged themselves on velvet chairs surrounded by Persian rugs, lacquer tables, and reproductions of French and Asian paintings. In the dining room, where Bebé Morla Lynch served informal suppers, guests drank from green and white crystal glasses. Over dinner Lorca performed his usual antics. “Your mother must be very interesting, for she managed to give you such a talented imagination,” Morla Lynch taunted Lorca later that year. “But, my God, she’s brought you up badly! … The hours you keep … or don’t keep. Your habit of sitting down at the table and then going off to have a pee when the second course has already started.”

  Morla was especially struck by the difference between Lorca and his younger brother, Paco. Earlier in the year the two siblings had taken a studio apartment together in Madrid. The small flat, which overlooked a garage and a convent school, was Lorca’s first permanent residence in the capital and was to remain his home in Madrid for the next two years. Inside the sunny apartment, Lorca spent hours playing the piano and singing for friends while his brother sat in the adjoining room, trying to study for his diplomatic exams.

  Morla Lynch thought both brothers intelligent and charming. But while Lorca exuded vigor and energy, Paco, leaner and more conventionally handsome than his brother, was all “serenity and balance.” Lorca’s black eyes sparkled, and his laughter was as “turbulent” as a geyser. Paco possessed a “limpid, tranquil” gaze, and laughed with the “freshness” of a breeze. Sensible and studious, he avoided the “fits of ecstasy” and the “imaginative impertinence” to which his older brother was prone.

  To some, the brothers seemed more distant this year than previously. A number of friends believed this was due to Lorca’s growing sexual candor. In the wake of his visit to the United States and Cuba, he had become far less circumspect. A theater colleague who arranged to meet him in his apartment in Madrid one day showed up at the appointed time and was met at the door by Lorca, who was dressed in nothing but a pair of underpants. Inside the apartment stood fellow poet Luis Cernuda, who was naked. “We were doing tumbling exercises,” Lorca remarked dryly. Without dressing, he and Cernuda sat down and began to converse with their visitor.

  In early 1931, in a letter to Jorge Guillén, Pedro Salinas mentioned that Lorca was “always off somewhere, among those friends du côté de Charlus”—a play on Proust’s Du Côté de chez Swann. Salinas was probably referring to Carlos Morla Lynch and his circle. A few years later, when Guillén himself finally met Morla Lynch, he pronounced the diplomat “an absurd Charlus,” who, though enjoyable, had a “pederastic” demeanor. “Might he not be a corruptor of minors?” Guillén worried.

  There is no proof that Guillén’s allegations were correct. But it was clear that Morla Lynch enjoyed the company of homosexual men, and that he encouraged the frank discussion of sex and sexuality at his nightly soirees. When Lorca teased him by suggesting that their mutual friend Adolfo Salazar, a homosexual, was infatuated with Morla, the diplomat gleefully went along with the joke. Spotting Salazar in a room one day, Morla poked his head in the door and said, “I’m just crazy about you!” Salazar reacted with a gesture of disgust.

  Lorca himself came and went as he pleased from Morla’s apartment. He had his customary seat on the corner sofa, and he kept his guitar stored behind a living room door. He helped himself to food and drink from the refrigerator, played the piano, worked in Morla’s office, and occasionally soaked in the diplomat’s bathtub while Morla and his son combed their hair. “I … have a great affection for your bathroom,” Lorca told the Chilean. After coming down with a sore throat, Lorca once spent an entire day lying on the sofa while Morla and his wife nursed him. Whenever they sought to paint his throat with medication, Lorca stuck his tongue out as far as he could, grabbed it with both hands, and, with his eyes bulging, allowed the couple to perform the procedure.

  He felt free to bring friends to the diplomat’s home at any hour of the day or night, without telephoning ahead of time. One night, on impulse, he dragged Pedro Salinas and several others to Morla’s apartment. The moment they arrived, Lorca introduced his friends to Bebé Morla Lynch and started to ransack the couple’s closets and kitchen. Within minutes he was improvising a vaudeville routine. He costumed his friends in Bebé’s fur coats, put kitchen pots on their heads, and gave them silver trays to hold as shields.

  Salinas witnessed this sort of behavior more than once. Lorca loved to stage impromptu performances and to lead friends through poetic charades. On Morla’s saint’s day in 1931, he presented an improvised show at midnight. Wrapped in a bedsheet, with curtain rings on his wrists, he performed a snake dance, then delivered a “Holy Week sermon,” and finally, holding two teacups to his chest as breasts, offered an original interpretation of the legendary Mata Hari’s “latest dance.”

  Like the prodigious shoemaker’s wife of his imagination, Lorca waged a constant battle against the poverty of reality. Since childhood he had been unable to resist the impulse to embellish his surroundings, to transform ordinary existence into theatrical spectacle. Mo
re often than not, he viewed life as an empty stage in need of costumes, props, actors, and poetry. He could bring anything to life, a friend recalled: “a glass, a pencil holder, a newspaper, a napkin, a hat, an umbrella.” He loved to invent words and had a complete vocabulary of made-up sayings. At restaurants he liked to order imaginary items—a chorpatélico, some pimpavonillas—then watch to see if the waiter could deduce what it was he wanted. Salinas was present during one such outing. “We dined as usual,” he remembered, “but the meal was surrounded with that fantastic, ingenuous, poetic humor typical of Federico.”

  Morla Lynch kept a running account in his diary of the poet’s habits, actions, and sayings. Every night he jotted down the events of the preceding day. His entries on Lorca alone were sufficient to fill a book. Lorca knew about the diary and approved of it. Morla sometimes left the volume out for friends and family members to read and respond to. “Federico lives the truth of my home,” he wrote one day after reading parts of the diary to Lorca.

  Occasionally Morla tried to analyze Lorca’s character. Whenever an argument arose, the diplomat observed, Lorca usually wandered off to play the piano, thumb through a magazine, or telephone a friend. He is “not a man of polemics,” Morla concluded. But on those few occasions when Lorca did engage in a dispute, he rarely conceded defeat. He was “conscious of his superior talent.” Keenly aware of Lorca’s mood swings, the diplomat noticed that during his periodic bouts of “misanthropy,” Lorca would decline invitations and refuse to see people. In the spring of 1931, Morla tried to introduce him to the pianist Artur Rubinstein, but Lorca chose to stay home in his pajamas rather than meet the famed performer.