Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Preparations for La Barraca’s 1933 touring season forced him to interrupt his work on Yerma that summer. The company premiered a new production of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna in Valencia on June 28, and rehearsals for the play consumed Lorca’s time and attention.

  To Lope’s drama about political upheaval in a fifteenth-century Spanish village Lorca added popular songs, music, and dance. He put so much energy into staging the play’s wedding scene—as he had similar scenes in Tirso de Molina’s Burlador de Sevilla and his own Blood Wedding—that his actors nicknamed him “Federico, wedding specialist.” He demanded that real wine, dried figs, and almonds be used during the scene in Fuenteovejuna, and that schoolchildren be drafted as extras in each of the towns La Barraca visited.

  His production of Fuenteovejuna was transparently pro-republican. Lorca condensed Lope’s script so that its focus became not the king and queen of Spain but the country’s rural population. Instead of period costumes, actors wore clothes from the 1930s. The evil Knight Commander who terrorizes the villagers of Fuenteovejuna appeared in a black business suit, underscoring his ties with the formidable caciques of Lorca’s day, local power-holders who by their wealth and affiliations controlled much of everyday life in the Spanish countryside. It was typical of Lorca to toy so boldly with an existing script. He was fond of reading the Spanish classics to friends, cutting lines as he went whenever he thought a passage too long. He shunned the notion of a definitive production. Given enough money, he remarked to a journalist that summer, he would stage “several versions of the same work: one old, another modern. One lavish, another highly simplified.”

  His updated staging of Lope’s work earned Lorca the wrath of the right-wing press. Lorca was unapologetic. At the play’s debut in Valencia, invitations were sent to local labor organizations. Workers, keenly attuned to its political implications, greeted the drama with tumultuous applause.

  La Barraca followed its Valencia appearance with trips to both southern and northern Spain. Anti-republican hecklers booed the company in Navarra, but otherwise the group was well received. Lorca dismissed any hint of political controversy. The troupe had enjoyed a magnificent reception throughout its journey, he insisted. As for the “nasty imputations of those who would see in our theater a political objective,” he and his actors were innocent. “There is nothing political about La Barraca. It is theater, just theater.”

  The company concluded its summer season with an extended stay in the city of Santander, on the Cantabrian coast. Cold, wet skies enveloped the mountains that flanked the town; Lorca had to wear a raincoat and scarf. La Barraca gave three performances in as many days at Santander’s International Summer University, a non-degree school established the previous year by the republican government. Most of Spain’s leading intellectuals were involved with the university. Lorca’s friend and fellow poet Pedro Salinas, the secretary of the board of trustees, was present during La Barraca’s visit, as were a number of his other friends, including Carlos and Bebé Morla Lynch, who were spending the August holiday in a nearby village.

  The university was housed in a massive stone palace built on a spur of land jutting into the Cantabrian Sea. Shortly after his arrival, Lorca roamed the site on foot, testing different locations acoustically and visually before selecting a particular spot for La Barraca’s three outdoor performances. Some two thousand people, many of them foreign students, attended the opening presentation of three Cervantes interludes. Critics praised the ensemble. One reviewer noted the extremely intelligent direction that characterized the troupe’s work. Lorca revealed in a subsequent interview that he was attempting to train some of La Barraca’s young actors to be directors. “A theater, first and foremost, is a good director,” he said smugly. He was increasingly brash in his pronouncements. A week before coming to Santander he had told a newspaper that the contemporary Spanish stage was, generally speaking, “a theater by and for swine. That’s right, a theater created by swine for swine.”

  Shocked by the bluntness of Lorca’s statement, his interviewer asked, “What kind of theater are you trying to create?”

  “Popular,” Lorca answered. “Always popular. While it may have aristocratic roots in spirit and style, it must always be nourished by ‘popular’ sap. And if I continue working, I hope to influence the European theater.”

  He exuded confidence. Jorge Guillén, who was in Santander to take part in the city’s summer university, had lunch with him one afternoon and came away convinced that Lorca was “better than ever.” Herschel Brickell, the publishing executive who had befriended Lorca in New York, also visited Santander that August and attended one of La Barraca’s productions. Afterward he and Lorca sat up late, talking. The early morning sky was streaked with pink when they parted. “Vaya con Dios, amigo” Lorca called out as Brickell left him. The American continued on his way, thinking as he went that, like Browning, he had “seen Shelley plain.”

  Lorca was happier than he had been in years. The cause, in part, was a young man who had joined La Barraca earlier that season, a twenty-one-year-old student from Madrid named Rafael Rodríguez Rapún. Muscular and debonair, with curly brown hair, dark eyes, and a lopsided grin, Rapún signed on as the company’s secretary in early 1933 and within months became Lorca’s closest companion. By autumn, as he confessed by letter to Lorca, Rapún was accustomed to spending “every hour of the day” in Lorca’s company.

  Although he was officially an engineering student at the University of Madrid, Rapún’s true love was literature. He occasionally wrote poetry, and through Lorca came to know and befriend many of the writers of the Generation of ’27. His fellow Barraca members admired his scrupulous and efficient management of the company’s accounts. A gifted mathematician, Rapún generally carried a thick blue notebook with him on Barraca outings, in which he made copious notes on the troupe’s expenses.

  To most he was affable and modest, a “decent” young man whose devotion to Lorca was genuine, not self-serving. But to some he seemed peculiar. Barraca member Luis Sáenz de la Calzada remembered Rapún as “violent and elemental.” According to Sáenz, Rapún became sexually aroused whenever the van in which they were traveling overtook another vehicle on the road. He was prone, as well, to angry outbursts, a trait Sáenz attributed to the fact that Rapún was “at a crossroads” in his life. The struggle between mathematics and poetry, between engineering and theater at times overwhelmed him, as did his deepening attachment to Lorca, which, while exhilarating, was fraught with danger of both a private and a public kind.

  Rapún was handsome in a classical sense, with the long, straight nose of a Greek statue. He had a robust physique, and he walked with a sure stride. He often wore black, which set off his bright white teeth and made his smile “more luminous.” Women found him seductive, and Rapún was responsive to them. But once he met Lorca he succumbed irretrievably to the poet’s charm. Rapún became “immersed” in Lorca, recalled Barraca member Modesto Higueras. “It was something tremendous.” To another friend who witnessed their affair, Rapún was clearly “the passion” for whom Lorca, then thirty-five, had been waiting much of his life.

  On Barraca outings, they were inseparable. They shared sleeping quarters, sometimes with other company members. In the spring of 1933, Rapún attended Lorca’s performance with Rafael Alberti and La Argentinita in Madrid and evidently accompanied Lorca to La Argentinita’s presentation of El amor brujo in Cádiz. The two men were photographed together among the palm trees and flower beds of the Hotel Reina Cristina in Algeciras. In one picture they sit side by side in wicker lawn chairs. Lorca, squinting into the sun, holds a filtertipped cigarette in his hand. Reclining casually in his chair, one leg draped over the other, hair brushed back from his forehead, he is the image of cool sophistication. Rapún, younger than Lorca and less accustomed to the camera’s scrutiny, slouches in his seat. He is heavyset, and although not an athlete, he projects a sportive, vaguely raffish air. Each man seems utterly at home with the other. />
  Lorca liked to call Rapún tres erres—“three Rs”—a reference to Rapún’s initials. In Madrid the pair made the rounds of the café circuit together. They exchanged letters and books. Over time Lorca gave Rapún several elaborately inscribed editions of his books. Inside a copy of Songs he wrote, “With a hug from your old, old friend Federico.” In August 1933, Lorca brought out a private, limited edition of his Ode to Walt Whitman. Published in Mexico, the slim volume was intended for close friends only. Lorca illustrated his copy for Rapún with an intricate sketch of Whitman’s face, half-bearded, half-framed by flowing locks of hair. “To my dear friend Rafael,” Lorca wrote beside the drawing, “from his companion Federico.” Emboldened, perhaps, by his friendship with Rapún and his growing theatrical celebrity, Lorca also published two scenes from The Audience in a Spanish literary journal in 1933. He told the Heraldo de Madrid that he intended to publish the entire play in the near future, and although he failed to do so, he did give a copy of the manuscript to Rapún, together with a draft of his unfinished play The Destruction of Sodom.

  Eventually Rapún came to function as Lorca’s private secretary, handling the poet’s business matters and shielding him from the public. He was evasive about the nature of his relationship with Lorca. Early one morning, after impulsively going with Lorca to see the sun rise in Toledo, he returned home to find his father waiting for him. The elder Rapún, a modest employee of a gasoline distribution firm, was perplexed by his son’s eccentric behavior. In time he confronted Rapún directly about Lorca’s reported homosexuality. Rapún assured his father that, although as an artist Lorca was sensitive, perhaps even feminine, and although he had homosexual friends, Lorca was not himself a homosexual.

  Among their colleagues in La Barraca the two were similarly discreet. Many in the company believed the pair’s friendship, while close, was platonic. One member recalled Lorca declaring repeatedly that the essential thing in life was to have a friend with whom one could forget one’s worries, as Achilles had with Patroclus. “Having a good friend is better than having a good marriage,” Lorca said with a smile. He knew better than to defy convention among those who were fundamentally conventional. The conservative press had already given him a taste of Spanish morality and the sort of ridicule it could spawn.

  The young artist and set designer José Caballero, one of Lorca’s closest friends in La Barraca, insisted years later that Lorca’s friendship with Rafael Rodríguez Rapún was so private that it was impossible for any outsider to know with certainty the extent of their devotion to one another. “Federico was so open, so very open,” Caballero remembered. “And yet at the same time he was so closed.”

  21

  Our America

  1933-34

  Six thousand miles away, in the city of Buenos Aires, Lola Membrives, the Argentine actress who had turned down the chance to premiere Blood Wedding in Madrid, opened a new production of the play on July 29, 1933, to unanimously rave reviews—a rare feat in the sophisticated and discriminating Argentine capital. Membrives gave twenty additional performances of the play, all to packed houses, before closing her season on August 7.

  Lorca was at first unaware of his overseas success. On the night of July 29, he later recalled, he lay in bed with a fever in a tiny village where he had gone to perform with La Barraca. When he awoke that night, he found his blanket covered with bugs. “That’s how it goes,” he shrugged. While crowds were applauding him in Buenos Aires, he was fighting off insects in a remote Spanish town.

  Soon he began receiving letters from Membrives and Juan Reforzo, the actress’s husband and business partner, imploring him to visit Argentina. “Your name,” wrote Reforzo, “is on everyone’s lips … You’ve conquered Buenos Aires in a matter of hours.” The couple encouraged Lorca to come in mid-September, in time for the reopening of Blood Wedding at the start of Membrives’s next season. They offered to pay his expenses and to arrange a lecture series for him.

  Lorca demurred. He did not particularly like Membrives, despite her status as the most famous actress in Argentina, and he resented her curt dismissal of Blood Wedding the previous year. It annoyed him that she only deigned to produce his work after other performers had proven its box-office merit.

  He told Reforzo he would make the trip on one condition: that he be given passage on a “very large ship.” Reforzo promptly agreed. But Lorca continued to vacillate. “As soon as I’ve consulted my parents, I’ll send you my acceptance,” he promised. In the end, the offer was too tantalizing to resist. In late August Lorca decided to make the trip. Sometime later he told a journalist that upon receiving Membrives’s invitation, he had accepted her offer “immediately.”

  He left Madrid by train for Barcelona on September 28. Rapún accompanied him to the station in a taxi. On their way there, Lorca scribbled a letter petitioning the Spanish government to exempt his friend from obligatory military service in Africa. Ultimately the entreaty worked, and Rapún was excused from domestic as well as foreign service.

  Lorca reached Barcelona the following day and dropped in briefly on the actress Margarita Xirgu. “I have a new work for you,” he announced, waving the first two acts of Yerma. Xirgu refused to look at the play. In Buenos Aires, she told Lorca, a local company would undoubtedly ask to premiere the work, and he would feel obliged to let them. “No, Margarita,” he insisted, “Yerma is for you and only for you.”

  The script remained in Lorca’s possession later that afternoon as he boarded the Italian liner Conte Grande. With him was Manuel Fontanals, an artist and set designer who was married to an actress in Membrives’s company. Membrives had asked Fontanals to help redesign Blood Wedding. Slender and deeply tanned, with golden hair and bright white teeth, Fontanals looked and behaved like a matinee idol. He often sported a white cravat and bowler hat, and carried a walking stick, which he never used. On board the Conte Grande, he and Lorca wore tuxedos each time they visited the ship’s elegant dining room.

  The trip took two weeks. According to Lorca, the Conte Grande scarcely moved “a hair” throughout the journey. He managed to write a new lecture and otherwise spent his time reading, or talking to Fontanals, whom he found far more entertaining than the rest of the ship’s “mummylike” passengers. Inside his cabin Lorca brightened the walls with photographs of his family, and in a letter to his parents confessed that whenever he saw an older passenger on the ship he thought of his mother and father. He also missed his young niece and nephew, who “sparkle so brightly and bring us such joy.” During a brief stop at the Canary Islands he mailed home a long letter to his family as well as a postcard to Rafael Rapún.

  As the Conte Grande crossed the equator, each passenger received a diploma from the ship’s crew. Days later, near the Brazilian coast, Lorca spotted flying fish in the sea and, above the water, “tiny white butterflies borne by the wind from the land.” He was thrilled to be returning to “American soil.” But this time, he told his parents, he was coming to “our America, Spanish America.”

  The Conte Grande sailed into the harbor of Montevideo, Uruguay, on the morning of October 13. Dozens of reporters, photographers, dignitaries, and fans were waiting to greet the celebrated Spanish playwright. Lola Membrives had presented Blood Wedding in the city two months earlier, and the play’s triumphant run had sparked enormous interest in its author. Journalists and admirers swarmed around Lorca. They asked questions, held out autograph books and slips of paper, and snapped pictures. Lorca smiled, bewildered by the commotion. “What can I tell you?” he said repeatedly. He asked that photographs not be taken, but few heeded his request. One reporter scrutinized his appearance and later informed readers that the writer was

  of medium height, dark, with a rather coppery face, black hair, thick eyebrows, a wide forehead, a tiny mouth, a penetrating gaze, a small nose, and an almost round face … He seems extremely young, younger than he really is, for as we understand it, he’s about twenty-six years old.

  In fact, Lorca was thirty-fi
ve.

  Eventually the ship sounded its horn, and Lorca embarked on the final leg of his journey to Buenos Aires. As the Conte Grande sailed upstream along the enormous Plata river toward Argentina, he was joined by Membrives’s husband, Juan Reforzo, and the critic Pablo Suero, both of whom had boarded in Montevideo. Suero took an immediate liking to Lorca. He was struck by the playwright’s “handsome” forehead and “plum-colored gaze,” by his rapid-fire speech and pronounced Andalusian accent. Suero found it difficult to believe that someone so “boylike” had written as profound a tragedy as Blood Wedding.

  During their daylong journey to Buenos Aires, Suero deluged Lorca with questions. (“They killed me with interviews,” Lorca said afterward, recounting the trip to his parents.) Topics ranged from New York, to Salvador Dalí, to Manuel de Falla, to La Barraca, to Lorca’s parents. “My father is charming,” Lorca declared. In the midst of having his photograph taken, he turned gravely to Suero and asked, “Do you know what will happen as a result of your generosity? My mother will be happy when she sees a copy of Noticias Gráficas with my picture in it.”

  “And that’s enough for you?” Suero asked.

  “Ah, that’s more than enough …”

  Lorca talked about his recent publications, including the limited edition of Ode to Walt Whitman he had just issued, and a series of waltz poems he hoped to publish in the near future. “I detest what’s fashionable,” he said, by way of explaining his interest in something so quaint as a waltz. He spoke briefly about Blood Wedding, but, as Suero observed, he was far more interested in discussing “the theater he wants to do.” Lorca talked of The Audience and apparently read Once Five Years Pass and the first half of Yerma to Suero, who thought Lorca’s experimental work epitomized “the theater of the future.”