Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  “You know something else?” Lorca mused, as he and Suero sailed slowly along the muddy Plata river.

  In art, you must never let yourself remain quiet or complacent … You must have the courage to hammer your head against things and against life … and then we’ll see what happens.… Another thing that’s essential is to respect your instincts. The day you stop fighting your instincts—that’s the day you’ve learned to live.

  They reached Buenos Aires that evening. “How grand it is!” Lorca exclaimed as he beheld the constellation of lights girding the city’s busy shoreline. It was spring, and the air was mild. A crowd of admirers stood waiting on the pier as he stepped onto the gangplank, suntanned and smiling. He carried a briefcase and wore a dark, double-breasted coat with a velvet collar. His hair was unkempt. As he made his way down the stairs to the pier, the crowd burst into applause, and he heard someone shout, “Federico! Federico! Ay! Ay!” To his amazement he spotted a group of former neighbors from Fuente Vaqueros, men and women who had emigrated to Buenos Aires from Spain in the early 1920s. “He’s from our village! He’s from our village!” they cried, as a photographer snapped their picture. A woman who had known Lorca as an infant threw her arms around the husky poet and wept. Lorca’s eyes welled with tears.

  Reporters surrounded him. Speechless, he fumbled with his bags and at last muttered to one member of the press:

  Please forgive me. It’s just that when I travel, I don’t know who I am. It’s what I call the “discomfort of traveling,” the discomfort of arrival and departure, when people drag you from one side to the other, and in a daze you respond mechanically and let yourself be pushed and pulled, oblivious to everything around you.

  He then gave an impromptu interview in which he discussed his plays—with emphasis on The Audience and Once Five Years Pass—his poetry, and his writing habits. “I never deliberately set out to create literature,” Lorca said. “It’s just that during certain times I have an irresistible urge to write. Then I write, feverishly, for a few months, so that I can get back to living as quickly as possible.” He confessed that in Buenos Aires he was anxious to “have fun, enjoy life, live!” He wanted to get to know the city, “to make friends and meet girls.”

  Nearly three million people inhabited Buenos Aires in 1933. By and large a cosmopolitan lot, of European descent, they were accustomed to elegant dining in cafés and clubs, to leisurely strolls along the city’s boulevards, and late-night displays of tango dancing. They were immensely proud of their sprawling river-front city, whose grandeur rivaled that of Paris. Mansard roofs, cupolas, domes, and fanciful figures of winged women punctuated the low skyline. Palm trees, shrubs, cactuses, and fountains filled the squares.

  Lorca settled into a small room at the Castelar Hotel on the Avenida de Mayo, in the heart of Buenos Aires. Chocolate shops and theaters lined the fashionable street outside his hotel. Inside, Lorca pinned photographs of his niece Tica to the wall above his bed. He also hung a snapshot of himself, in his Barraca uniform, standing in the midst of a cabbage field with his arms outstretched in an eerie, Christ-like pose.

  “I don’t stop for a minute,” he told his parents by letter five days after his arrival. He sent home a mass of newspaper clippings—“just a small part of what’s been published and what … I’ve been able to collect.” Someone had retained a clipping service to track press coverage of his visit. “I’ve had to hire a secretary to answer the phone and receive visitors,” he marveled. “Just like a government minister!” Although he found being a celebrity “an awful nuisance,” he also courted attention by visiting the offices of local newspapers and introducing himself to journalists. On his first night in Buenos Aires Lorca attended Pablo Suero’s translation of an audacious new play about contemporary German society, Ferdinand Bruckner’s Sickness of Youth, a work whose sexual candor, in particular, astonished him. In Madrid, he told reporters, such a play could never be produced. During the course of the evening, the audience discovered Lorca’s presence in their midst and applauded him. From his box seat he thanked the crowd. “Here in this enormous city I’m as famous as a bullfighter,” he told his family.

  On October 20, one week after his arrival, he gave the first of four lectures for the Buenos Aires Friends of Art Society. His talk, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” was new. Lorca had drafted it on the Conte Grande and further revised it on reaching Buenos Aires. A reporter for the Correo de Galicia went to Lorca’s hotel room on the evening of the lecture and found a typist hunched over Lorca’s manuscript, straining to decipher the poet’s handwriting. The desk was strewn with cigarettes, books, pencils, papers, and loose change in a variety of currencies. Lorca was in the shower, singing. “What’s this word?” cried the typist.

  “Which one?” Lorca shouted, and went on singing.

  “Elvira … Elvira … What?”

  “Hot Elvira, lad,” Lorca cried. “She’s called ‘Hot Elvira.’ It’s the sacred and aristocratic name of a whore from Seville.”

  A moment later he emerged from the shower, embraced the reporter, posed briefly for a photograph in his bathrobe, and hurriedly answered questions while he dressed. He then tossed a tie around his neck, gave a farewell hug to his interviewer, and raced out the door on his way to the lecture hall.

  In his new talk, “Play and Theory of the Duende,” Lorca returned to the subject of poetic creation, this time focusing on a phenomenon peculiar to Spain—the irrational, demonic, death-seeking spirit known as duende, without which deep inspiration is impossible. “That’s the secret of art: to have duende,” he remarked to an Argentine journalist a few days before the lecture. In Andalusia, dancers, bullfighters, and singers were said to possess duende. Alternately a visible presence and an ineffable quality, duende, Lorca said, is “the hidden spirit of disconsolate Spain.” It alone gives artists the power to move audiences in profound ways, baptizing them “in dark water.” Lorca claimed to have been visited by a duende early one morning in Buenos Aires. Dressed in a red-and-gold costume with a pointed green hood, the tiny sprite had flown through his hotel room on wings. Lorca believed he had brought the spirit to life and could subsequently order it about. “Do you understand the consequences?” he said later to a reporter. “Can you dare to imagine them … my duende perched on my shoulder as I give my lectures?”

  Difficult though it was to describe, Lorca knew what it meant to “have” duende. “‘All that has black sounds has duende,’” he said in his lecture, quoting a Gypsy singer he had once met in Seville. “And there is no greater truth. These black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and ignore, the mire that gives us the very substance of art.” Neither “angel” nor “muse”—both of which may grace an artist from without—the duende emanates from “the remotest mansions of the blood.” It “wounds” an artist. “And in the healing of that wound, which never closes, lies the invented, strange qualities of a man’s work.”

  Ultimately the duende is linked with death, and dependent on an artist’s acknowledgment of his or her mortality. The duende “does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible,” Lorca told his Argentine audience. Inasmuch as Spain is a nation preoccupied with death—where the national sport, bullfighting, is a sport of death, and where a dead man, Lorca argued, is “more alive as a dead man than any place else in the world”—the duende is a uniquely Spanish phenomenon, deeply rooted in popular thought and superstition. While creators in other countries may at times possess it, the duende most commonly visits the artists of Spain, men and women such as Goya, Quevedo, Zurburán, Jorge Manrique, Saint Teresa, the bullfighter Joselito, and the Andalusian singer Pastora Pavón, whose “scorched” voice, Lorca said, conveys “not forms but the marrow of forms.” Although he refrained from saying so, he clearly counted himself among this elite group, for death was his muse, and the duende its most palpable incarnation.

  The Buenos Aires audience loved his talk. Even if his subject was obscure and his jargon de
nse, they warmed to the histrionics of his delivery. To his parents, Lorca characterized his inaugural lecture as “extraordinarily successful. You have no idea!” He continued to be amazed by the degree of his celebrity in Argentina. He’d had his picture taken “more than two hundred” times. “Photographs in bed, in a bathing suit, on the street looking out of a window. It’s too much!” He was both exhausted and happy.

  Later in the week he gave his second lecture, “How a City Sings from November to November,” a lyrical account of one year in the life of Granada. Accompanying himself on the piano, he sang and spoke his way through the seasonal fluctuations of his hometown, regaling listeners with the sounds of Arab folk tunes and Christian ballads. He bellowed songs with what one reviewer described as a sailor’s voice. At the close of his elegiac talk he told his audience that year in, year out, Granada would “always be like this. Before and now. We must leave but Granada remains. Eternal in time, but fleeting in these poor hands—these hands of mine, the smallest of her children.”

  The demand for tickets to his final two lectures, “Poet in New York” and a revised version of his 1923 talk on Andalusian deep song, was so great that officials considered moving the events to a larger hall. All four of Lorca’s Buenos Aires talks were broadcast by radio, vastly expanding his audience and prompting a barrage of requests for photographs of the poet, especially from women. “It’s expensive attending to every female admirer,” Lorca complained to his parents. When, in response to audience demand, he gave a repeat performance of his Duende lecture on November 14, women “invaded” the auditorium, a reporter observed.

  In late October, Lola Membrives reopened Blood Wedding with a gala performance in the cavernous Teatro Avenida. Resplendent in a black tuxedo and starched white shirt, Lorca surveyed the huge crowd that packed the theater that evening. Twice the audience applauded him, at the start and close of his play. To his delight, he heard someone cry “Marvelous!” in the midst of the forest scene. The sophistication and acuity of the Argentine audience astounded him. “As I was sailing up the Plata River, with waves as ruddy and rough as a lion’s mane,” he told the crowd afterward, standing on the stage of the Avenida to address them, “I never dreamt I would receive the trembling white dove of faith that this enormous city has placed in my hands. For I don’t deserve it.” Later he described the evening to his parents: “In Madrid, nothing happened. But here I’ve had an apotheosis fit for the bullring.”

  The stream of interviews and photographs flowed on. Autograph seekers hounded him. Admirers made their way, like pilgrims, to his hotel room. Prominent society women invited Lorca to meals, and he rarely refused. Afterward, among friends, he made fun of his hostesses, imitating their mannerisms. To his parents, he deliberately dramatized his popularity among women. “Not a day goes by that I don’t receive declarations of love from young ladies (they must be out of their minds!), telling me the most remarkable things!” he wrote. One night, Victoria Ocampo, a wealthy Argentine writer, asked Lorca to her home for a candlelit dinner. During the course of the evening she began flirting with him. When he realized what she intended, he left. Later, he told friends that in Buenos Aires a beautiful woman had come to his hotel room and, in an effort to seduce him, removed her clothes. Lorca ordered her to leave.

  He soon grew weary of the incessant attention. Because his photograph appeared so frequently in the newspapers, people recognized him on the street. Despite exhaustion, he had trouble sleeping. He craved solitude, but was “always being invited out and taken or brought somewhere.” Sometimes he fled from engagements. “I’m an Andalusian, don’t forget,” he would say afterward with a chuckle, and glance at his wristwatch. In photographs he began to sport what he called a “false smile.” Although he claimed to hate interviews, he submitted to them, “because it means I’ve conquered an immense public for my theater.” He professed dismay at seeing his name plastered about the city on posters. “I feel as if I’m standing naked before crowds of curious onlookers … But I must tolerate it because that’s what the theater demands.”

  He was not without his detractors. Arturo Cambours, a Buenos Aires resident who spent an afternoon touring the city with Lorca, expressed disgust at Lorca’s vanity. “Spanish poetry began and ended with him. The Spanish theater began and ended with him. Yerma, whose third act he had yet to finish, would be the consummation of Greek tragedy,” Cambours remembered. He described Lorca as a “conceited fool, a fat and petulant little charlatan.” The writer Jorge Luis Borges was similarly disappointed by the Spaniard. When the two met briefly, Lorca seemed to Borges to be acting a part, performing the role of “a professional Andalusian.” Lorca apparently sensed Borges’s dislike and subtly mocked the Argentine by speaking gravely about the “tragedy” of the United States of America, and the one figure who embodied it.

  “Who is that?” asked Borges.

  “Mickey Mouse,” Lorca replied. Borges, thinking the comment infantile, walked off in a huff. Years later he claimed that Lorca had always struck him as a “minor poet,” an exclusively “picturesque” author whose verses revealed “a certain intimate coldness.” Borges deemed him a writer “incapable of passion.”

  Lorca recoiled from snobs and social climbers who merely wanted to rub shoulders with a famous author. He preferred to spend his time with friends, many of them writers, drinking wine or vodka in taverns and cafés, or wandering the streets. Sometimes at dawn, after a night of roaming the city with friends, Lorca would slip into a church to hear Mass.

  Among his closest friends in Argentina was the celebrated Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who had recently been appointed Santiago’s consul in Buenos Aires. Twenty-nine years old, tall, big-boned, and pale, Neruda was both physically and imaginatively imposing. He had large, vigilant eyes, “rather like those of a bemused lizard,” a friend was to write. Earlier in the year Neruda had published the first volume of his third collection of poetry, Residence on Earth, a startling series of poems written between 1927 and 1932 during the poet’s service as a member of his country’s diplomatic corps in Asia. Dense and hallucinatory, the poems in Residence on Earth pushed the Spanish language to new heights. Young Argentine writers were riveted by the collection.

  Lorca met Neruda in Buenos Aires that fall. As usual, Lorca seized the floor within minutes of his arrival and launched into a vigorous discussion of poets and playwrights. Neruda was mesmerized. Physically, Lorca struck him as dark, “darker than the darkest of Spaniards, as dark as a Mexican or a Gypsy.” Years later, in a poignant memoir, Neruda remembered Lorca as a torrent of motion and joy,

  an effervescent child, the young channel of a powerful river. He squandered his imagination, he spoke with enlightenment … he cracked walls with his laughter, he improvised the impossible, and in his hands a prank became a work of art. I have never seen such magnetism and such constructiveness in a human being.

  The two became immediate friends. Unlike the more cerebral and aristocratic Borges, Neruda relished Lorca’s exuberance and shared his robust appetite for life. Both men came from rural backgrounds, and both felt an affinity with the working class. Born and raised in the remote wine country of southern Chile, Neruda had spent his student days in Santiago as an impoverished bohemian who wore black clothes and wrote melancholy verse. His father opposed his desire to be a poet. When Neruda showed him his first poem, his father glanced at it and asked, “Where did you copy this from?” Neruda never fully recovered from the insult. At sixteen he renounced the name his parents had given him at birth—Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes—and took a new name, Pablo Neruda, after the Czech poet Jan Neruda.

  He published his first book of poems at nineteen, and a second collection, Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, at twenty. The direct, intensely sensual poems in this volume resonated with readers, and Neruda became famous. As a result of his celebrity, he was appointed to the Chilean consular service, and between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-eight served in Rangoon, Ceylon, Java, and Singapor
e. In Java he met and married his first wife, Maruca. But the marriage was unhappy, and Neruda increasingly sought the company of other women.

  Lorca admired the Chilean immensely. He inscribed a copy of his Gypsy Ballads, “For my dear Pablo, one of the few great poets I’ve had the good fortune to love and know.” During the course of their friendship, which lasted well beyond Lorca’s stay in Buenos Aires, he often asked Neruda what he was writing or what he had just completed. Lorca so revered the Chilean’s work that whenever he heard Neruda begin to recite his poems, he would raise his arms, cover his ears, shake his head and cry, “Stop! Stop! That’s enough, don’t read any more—you’ll influence me!”

  On November 20, he and Neruda attended a banquet organized in their honor by the Buenos Aires PEN Club. When it came time to thank their hosts, both poets rose simultaneously from their seats. “Ladies …,” said Neruda, “… and gentlemen,” continued Lorca. Speaking antiphonally, they delivered a short, impassioned speech about a man who had inspired them both, “the poet of America and of Spain,” said Lorca. “Rubén …” “… Darío,” cried Neruda. In unison they raised their glasses to toast the fabled Nicaraguan, whose “lexical fiesta … crashing consonants, lights and forms” had forever enriched the Spanish language. It had been Lorca’s idea to present the talk jointly—like two bullfighters, he explained, battling the same animal with a single cape.

  By late November, reporters were hailing Lorca’s “gastronomic” endurance. The banquets and homages continued. With the president of the Argentine republic in attendance, fans marked the one hundredth performance of Blood Wedding with food and dancing until dawn. Lorca, sprucely attired in a black tuxedo, read excerpts from his work and dutifully posed for photographers. On another occasion, at a luncheon, he wolfed down food “like a decadent Roman,” intoning Andalusian coplas with every course. Afterward, over brandy, he played the piano and sang.