Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  His principal source of fear, “the great anxiety that oppresses him,” Morla saw, was “the idea of death.” Lorca spoke of death as a “fixed, terrible, dreadful obsession” that dwells within every human being. “At all hours. Always! Whenever we undertake a journey or say ‘good night’ to a loved one, we are haunted by death,” he said to Morla one day. “It would be different if we knew with certainty the limits involved.” The unalterable, yet cruelly random nature of the event plagued him: he was doomed to die, but on what date, where, and how? And after death, what would become of him? Was there an afterlife? Lorca rubbed his hand across his forehead and asked Morla to read something from his diary. Morla chose a passage he had written about his dead daughter, Colomba. Lorca’s spirits lifted. The passage, he said, proved that even in death the essence of one’s being can go on living somewhere, “perennially.”

  By early April 1931, the government of Spain was in disarray. “These months have been awful,” Salinas wrote to Guillén on April 2. “The reason: POLITICS. Written just like that, with as many capital letters and spaces as possible.”

  In February 1931, Dámaso Berenguer, the army general who had governed Spain for a year at the king’s behest, resigned. In March, Alfonso XIII called for municipal elections throughout the nation. Although not a general election, the results of this vote for local candidates would provide a reliable reading of the country’s mood. Election day was set for Sunday, April 12.

  The polls opened at eight in the morning. Later that day Lorca ran into Carlos Morla Lynch in Madrid’s congested Puerta del Sol, and the two sat down to coffee in a café. To Morla, Lorca seemed more “curious” about the election than “ardent.” As they sat talking, taxis streamed past, many with republican posters prominently displayed. Onlookers roared their approval. At one point a brief disturbance broke out, and the police arrived with “sabers in hand” to end the fracas. No one was hurt, but Morla found the spectacle unnerving.

  By nightfall, rumors of a republican victory were rampant. Lorca made his way across town to another café to meet a group of friends. While crossing the vast Plaza de Cibeles near the post office, he suddenly found himself in the midst of a huge, peaceful demonstration in support of the republic. Just as he joined the marchers, a squadron of Civil Guardsmen appeared and abruptly blocked the path of the crowd. Shouts rang out, followed by gunshots. The marchers fled. Caught in the melee, Lorca fell to the ground and injured his finger. Eventually he reached the café where his friends awaited him. He arrived breathless, his face damp with perspiration and his clothing spattered with dust. Gesturing frantically and sucking on his wounded finger, he explained in a shrill voice what had happened to him. Meanwhile, people rushed in and out of the café with fresh rumors. At one point, someone reported that the government was about to declare a state of war. Under the circumstances, many who heard the announcement believed it.

  Contrary to expectations, the Spanish monarchy won the popular vote on April 12, 1931, in large part because the country’s powerful landowners insured a monarchist victory in the countryside. But in the cities, pro-monarchy candidates lost heavily. The final figures for the election were never published and probably never counted. It scarcely mattered. Despite the monarchy’s statistical victory, it was clear to most that the people of Spain wanted a new government.

  One day after the election, in demonstrations across the country, exultant crowds proclaimed the birth of a Spanish republic. In Madrid, the king consulted his advisers and was told that if he did not renounce the throne immediately, civil war was likely to erupt. Alfonso XIII promptly commenced negotiations for the transfer of power to a prime minister.

  On Tuesday, April 14, two days after the election, dawn broke quietly in Madrid. The streets were all but empty. Morning newspapers carried reports of a new government, but nothing was confirmed. As the day wore on, crowds assembled outside the Royal Palace. Inside the huge white building, the king and his family were packing their bags. At approximately four o’clock that afternoon, a republican flag rose slowly above the main post office building in the Plaza de Cibeles—the spot where two days earlier Lorca had been shoved to the ground. News of the flag’s appearance spread through the city. People poured into the streets, chanting the “Marseillaise” and the Internationale. They sang derogatory tunes about the king and toppled a statue of his grandmother, Isabel II, the controversial nineteenth-century queen whose inept rule had led to the establishment of a short-lived First Spanish Republic. Members of the Civil Guard watched, motionless.

  By nightfall, the news was official: King Alfonso XIII had elected to leave Spain. “I no longer enjoy the love of my people,” he announced in a terse statement that appeared that evening in newspapers throughout the country. Earlier in the day, officials had released the jailed leaders of the republican movement. Among them was Lorca’s friend Fernando de los Ríos, who was quickly named minister of justice in a new republican cabinet.

  Like many of his compatriots, Lorca rejoiced in the advent of the Second Spanish Republic. He took part in street demonstrations celebrating the new government and voiced his support for its liberal policies. Later in the month he autographed a copy of his Gypsy Ballads for a friend. Inside the cover he wrote, “Federico—1931—republican April.”

  The leaders of the republic wasted no time in implementing their radical agenda. They promptly changed the Spanish flag, revised the national anthem, and christened a number of streets with new, republican-inspired names. They scheduled elections for a constituent parliament, introduced agrarian reforms, and, in an effort to diminish the Church’s grip on public life, secularized hospitals, cemeteries, and schools. Most significantly, the republican prime minister and his cabinet launched an ambitious series of cultural and educational programs aimed at reducing the nation’s alarming rate of illiteracy. Lorca spoke out in favor of these initiatives and announced that he would volunteer his own services as a music teacher. He intended to form a youth orchestra, he said, using musical instruments especially designed to be played by small hands.

  Journalists called the republican government la niña bonita: the beautiful child. But the new regime’s honeymoon was fleeting. In early May, the Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of the Spanish Church, Cardinal Segura, issued a stinging pastoral letter in which he praised Alfonso XIII and urged believers to “fight like intrepid warriors” against those who wished to “destroy religion.” The republican leaders countered by demanding that Segura be exiled from Spain.

  By mid-May, members of the Spanish military had begun plotting to overthrow the new government. On May 10, monarchists clashed openly with republican sympathizers in downtown Madrid. Someone set fire to the offices of the pro-monarchist newspaper ABC. The following day, churches and convents throughout the country were burned, most likely by members of the extreme left anarchist movement. In Madrid alone, six convents went up in flames. Lorca spotted two nuns fleeing the site of one of the fires, carrying a portable typewriter case between them. According to the story he told a journalist—a tale he almost certainly embellished—he took pity on the women and put them in a taxi. “Sir, you seem like a good Christian,” the nuns said to him, “so we’re going to tell you what we’re carrying in this case. We’re carrying the Holy Sacrament.” Lorca fell to his knees in awe.

  In the wake of the burnings, the republican government reluctantly declared martial law and authorized the use of the Civil Guard to prevent further violence. A tenuous peace returned to the country. But the episode tarnished the new government’s image. Lorca noticed that in the convent school across the street from his apartment, the girls changed the words to one of their favorite songs. Where previously they had sung, “What the king commands, the mayor commands,” they now intoned, “What the President commands, the mayor commands.” Fearful of government scrutiny, the nuns in charge of the convent had changed the lyrics in deference to the nation’s new, anti-monarchy regime.

  Lorca’s newfound interest in
politics soon subsided. Although a passionate believer in the Republic and its ideals, he lacked the zealotry of his fellow poet Rafael Alberti, who shortly after the proclamation of the Second Republic premiered a blatantly political new play, Fermín Galán, a heroic account of the failed republican uprising in Jaca in 1930. Margarita Xirgu opened Alberti’s play in Madrid’s Teatro Español on June 1, 1931, less than two months after the declaration of the Second Republic. On opening night the play sparked a fight between republican and monarchist sympathizers in the audience.

  Lorca had other concerns. His improved “economic position” had given him an unaccustomed serenity, and he had resolved to publish his work—“all my things, absolutely all of them”—despite his lifelong distaste for publication. He was especially eager to bring out his American poems, which had sparked considerable interest among both journalists and publishers. “All the publishers” were after him, he told his parents. Although he did not yet know how to organize the collections, he expected his American poems to fill two books.

  Meanwhile, he embarked on a musical collaboration with his friend Encarnación López, the singer and dancer known as La Argentinita, who had appeared in The Butterfly’s Evil Spell in 1920, and whom Lorca often saw socially in the company of her lover, the former bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías. La Argentinita’s limpid soprano voice and graceful dancing had helped salvage The Butterfly’s Evil Spell at its disastrous opening, and she and Lorca had remained close friends. In the spring of 1931 the two recorded a series of Spanish folk songs, works Lorca had known since childhood. La Argentinita sang and played the castanets while Lorca accompanied her on the piano—the first and only time he allowed his exuberant playing to be recorded. The songs came out that summer in a set of five 78-rpm records. Critics applauded the set, and copies sold briskly. In Granada, Concha and Isabel García Lorca played the records “at all hours.” Lorca was pleased with the project. He thought it showcased his musical skills “quite well,” and he expected the records to yield “a lot of money very quickly.” But royalty payments failed to materialize as swiftly as he had hoped, and in time he had to ask his parents for some “emergency relief.”

  He also resumed work on the deep-song poems he had begun in 1921. He had published several of the poems in magazines, and had talked repeatedly of issuing the series in book form. But it was not until 1931, when Rafael Martínez Nadal urged him to do something with the poems, that Lorca at last made up his mind to publish the collection. Nadal saw the project through to completion. He introduced Lorca to publisher Julio Gómez de la Serna of Ediciones Ulises, a small new publishing house in Madrid, and he helped arrange and type the manuscript.

  Lorca relied on Nadal’s advice. The two spent so much time together that when Vicenta Lorca needed to get in touch with her son from Granada, she sometimes sent a letter to Nadal’s house in Madrid. Handsome and vigorous, with curly blond hair and mischievous eyes, Nadal understood Lorca as few did. Lorca described their friendship as “a marble pillar that grows more beautiful with time.” He looked to Martínez Nadal for insights into his writing, and he valued the “violent sincerity” with which the younger man criticized his work. Privately, Nadal teased Lorca about his sexuality, calling him “Federicón” in letters—a play on the Spanish term maricón, or “queer”—and sending rapturous descriptions of the beautiful male bodies to be seen at local swimming pools. “Such distended muscles! They made me weep. You’d weep too.”

  The two friends labored over Poem of the Deep Song. Although he worried about the brevity of the collection, Lorca was ruthless in selecting poems for the book. “And this one?” Nadal once asked after Lorca had cut a poem from the ensemble. “Rhetorical,” Lorca replied, and drew a huge X through the piece. When Nadal typed up the final manuscript, it contained only fifty short poems—scarcely enough to fill a book. Lorca laughed and suggested the poems be printed exclusively on one side of each page. In the end, he lengthened the volume by adding a handful of thematically linked dialogues and poems. Written several years later than his original deep song poems, the new works bore little stylistic resemblance to their predecessors. Nevertheless, Lorca was happy with the volume. On the day he and Nadal finished the manuscript, they dined at the Martínez Nadal home. Too excited to eat, Lorca picked at his food and toyed absentmindedly with his silverware. He told Nadal’s mother that Poem of the Deep Song would be a wonderful book, and he promised to give her the first copy.

  The 171-page volume came out in late May 1931, shortly before Lorca’s thirty-third birthday. The book went on sale in June, accompanied by an advertising campaign promoting the collection as “the great poet’s muse in its purest, most brilliant form.” Most of the poems in the book were distributed among four sections devoted to four types of Gypsy deep song. A prefatory note warned that the collection, composed largely in 1921, was written “with all the exaltation and valor of the most obvious youth.” As such, it represented a “first stage” in the author’s career.

  Critics responded favorably to Poem of the Deep Song. The essayist Azorín called it a “book of mystical poetry [that] carries us to the Infinite.” In Barcelona, Lorca’s friend Sebastian Gasch contributed a highly personal review to the magazine Mirador. Gasch hailed the reemergence of what he called the “true Lorca,” the “pure-blooded Andalusian Lorca”—as opposed to the “cosmopolitan Lorca” who had recently flirted with “pseudo-surrealism.” In Madrid, the critic Agustín Espinosa sounded a rare negative note. In his review for La Gaceta Literaria, Espinosa dismissed Poem of the Deep Song as a kind of “Spanish Maeterlinck.” One only needed to translate Lorca’s deep-song poems into French, Espinosa suggested, substitute a Belgian landscape for an Andalusian one, and think “north” wherever Lorca writes “south,” in order to perfect the analogy.

  Lorca went home to Granada in July. This year, more so than others, he missed his friends in Madrid keenly, especially Carlos and Bebé Morla Lynch. He kept a portrait of Bebé on his desk at the Huerta de San Vicente. As he worked, he gazed at it repeatedly, sometimes falling prey to “intense attacks of affection,” which he “cured” by drinking local wine in one of Granada’s garden cafés and remembering his absent friends “amidst the fragrance of the myrtles.” He stayed in touch with both Bebé and her husband, although at heart he professed to find letters “frozen.” The very notepaper on which he wrote felt cold to him, he said, “despite the fact that my hands are resting sweetly on its surface.” The spoken word alone retained the vigor of life.

  At his father’s Huerta de San Vicente, roses bloomed in the garden, and the sound of lullabies wafted through the house. The previous December, Concha García Lorca had given birth to her first child, a daughter, and family life now revolved around the little girl. Lorca doted on his niece and godchild. At her birth he had insisted she be named Vicenta, after her grandmother, and she was. He had offered to pay for her baptism, and promised that his distinguished friends, the Chilean ambassadors, would attend the event. He welcomed the infant’s disruptive presence in his home. He loved the lullabies with which she was sung to sleep, and when she spoke her first words that summer he sent a long, poetic account of the event to Carlos Morla Lynch: “A day of jubilation at home. For the first time the baby has said ma-ma-ma-ma. And then she got excited and said ma-ta-pa-la-ca-ti-pa. It’s the text of an angelic telephone call, without doubt, where the child sheds her innocence in order to pass through the terrible and theological gate of human reason.”

  But in the midst of so much life, death hovered. Earlier in the summer one of Morla Lynch’s close friends, a bullfighter named Gitanillo, had been wounded in the bullring. The man lingered for weeks in a Madrid hospital. Throughout the ordeal Lorca sent Morla tender letters of condolence. “I can imagine how you must have suffered, and I am with you because I understand you and because I too am accustomed to suffering from things people neither understand nor suspect,” Lorca wrote in August, after Gitanillo had finally died. “Between one person and
another there are tiny spider threads that eventually turn into wires and even bars of steel. When death separates us we are left with a bloody wound in the place of each thread.”

  By mid-August Lorca claimed to have finished a new book of poetry, “one of the most intense works to leave my hands.” He called it Poems for the Dead. “I’ve been like a fountain,” he told an acquaintance. “Writing day and night. At times I’ve had a fever like the old Romantics, but without losing this immense conscious joy of creating.” While Poems for the Dead never appeared as a book, Lorca seems to have drafted at least six new poems that summer, works whose stark imagery and opaque language are reminiscent of his New York poems. Earlier in the year he told a journalist he had come to view poetry “with a new eye.” As a result, he intended to invest his verse with greater lyricism and pathos. “But a cold, precise, purely objective pathos.”

  In August, Lorca completed a new play, Once Five Years Pass. Like The Audience, which he continued to read to select friends, the new drama was an attempt to shatter the bounds of the mainstream theater. Lorca had conceived of the play before going home to Granada that summer and had talked about it with Carlos and Bebé Morla Lynch. Bebé had expressed such enthusiasm for the work that Lorca looked to her portrait for encouragement as he labored over the script. He appears to have written the play in its entirety that summer, working rapidly in both pencil and ink. He finished and dated the manuscript on August 19, 1931.

  He subtitled the drama “a legend of time,” a notion derived largely from Victor Hugo’s “Legend of the Handsome Pécopin and the Beautiful Baldour.” In Hugo’s story, two lovers are separated for one hundred years; when at last they are reunited, one is a young man and the other an old woman. In Lorca’s play, two lovers agree to wait five years before marrying. But when five years have passed, the young woman has abandoned her fiancé for a virile soccer player. The bereft Young Man—as he is called throughout the play—is left to mourn his “purposeless love.” In desperation he pursues a second woman, a typist who has loved him for years, but she too now scorns him. “I’ll marry you,” she taunts, “once five years pass!”