Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  In Buenos Aires he spoke at length about music. “Songs are creatures,” he explained, “delicate creatures that must be carefully tended so that no part of their rhythm is altered.” He talked of staging an evening of Christmas carols in Argentina, and arranged to meet the tango king, Carlos Gardel. Whenever possible, Lorca played the piano for friends, dazzling them with his effortless control of the instrument. “After a while he no longer watched the keys,” an acquaintance recalled. “He would lift his head, sharpen his expression, lean back at the waist, smile his radiant smile, and sing.” When a friend suggested to him that he seemed destined to resume the musical career he had abandoned in his teens, Lorca grabbed him by the shoulder, grinned, and said, “It’s possible you’re right.” In an interview with Pablo Suero, he confessed, “I am primarily a musician.”

  Lorca received so many invitations for Christmas that he did not know which to accept. Because summer was at its height, and the Argentine beaches lovely, he decided to spend the holiday swimming with friends.

  On Christmas day, a local Jewish magazine published an interview in which Lorca proclaimed himself a “good friend” of the city’s large Jewish population and defended himself against charges of anti-Semitism. A number of Jews had taken offense at The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, where the Shoemaker and his wife denounce their gossiping Andalusian neighbors as “Jewish executioners” and “rude Jews.” In the interview, Lorca struggled to explain that while the word “Jew” was a traditional term of insult in rural Andalusia, it was not anti-Semitic. “One says ‘Jew’ contemptuously, yes, but without thinking of actual Jews,” he said clumsily, adding that the moment he had realized his play was offensive, he had revised the script to read “hag” instead of “Jew.”

  He did not mention the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany—reports of which appeared regularly in the Buenos Aires press—nor did he acknowledge that, under the circumstances, his choice of vocabulary in The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife might be justifiably viewed as injurious to the Jewish people. Despite his lifelong protestations of sympathy for the oppressed, Lorca seemed oblivious to the impact of racist language. He professed genuine surprise and “distress” at the fact that his play had offended the Jewish community. His own surname, he volunteered, was Jewish. “So you can see that, having a Semitic name, I could not possibly hate you.” As for the Jews’ status in Spain, he said, “I consider them to be a very expressive part of our heritage.”

  The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife ran for fifty performances in Buenos Aires, closing on January 4, 1934. A week later, Membrives opened a new production of Lorca’s decade-old Mariana Pineda. Lorca was even more jittery about this play than about The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. Although to his parents he predicted that Mariana would enjoy the same overseas success as his other plays, to the Argentine public he was almost apologetic about the work. While not his first play, he explained in an interview in La Nación, Mariana Pineda “is nevertheless one of my earliest works, and I feel about her the way a bridegroom feels about a bride.” He told readers of Crítica that he had written the play at the age of twenty; in fact, he was twenty-five when he began Mariana Pineda. Speaking to the opening night audience from the stage of the Teatro Avenida, he described Mariana Pineda as a “youthful work,” which still bore the “scent of jasmine that filled my parents’ garden as I was writing the play.”

  The audience responded enthusiastically to the work. Lorca was called onstage at the end of the play, and in a brief statement confessed that he did not know what to say to such a large crowd. With so many faces staring up at him, he felt “small, with the shyness of a man who is too closely watched.” Reviews of the production were, at best, lukewarm. La Prensa called Mariana Pineda monotonous and suggested the play should never have been produced—not in 1927 and not in 1934. El Diario Español issued a stinging critique, not only of the work but of its author. According to the paper, Lorca had “progressed little, either theatrically or literarily,” since the age of ten. Had he gone into “experimental choreography” rather than literature, he would be world-famous. The tone of the paper’s remarks suggests the degree of envy Lorca’s celebrity had begun to provoke. Two weeks later, El Diario Español again attacked Lorca, this time insisting that Blood Wedding was overrated, and the city of Buenos Aires foolish for having placed Lorca on a “false pedestal.”

  In letters home, Lorca maintained an air of confidence. Mariana Pineda was a “resounding success,” he told his family. By the end of the opening night performance, the “whole theater was crying. It was an apotheosis, and Lola kissed me onstage in front of everyone, and the theater was on its feet.” He promised his parents that he would soon return to Spain, although he would miss “this delightful country, which loves me so much, and where everything I do has repercussions.”

  Shortly afterward, Membrives announced to the press that she intended to open her company’s fall season on March 10 with the premiere of Lorca’s newest play, Yerma. Although Lorca had assured Margarita Xirgu that the play belonged to her, he had evidently changed his mind, as Xirgu had predicted, and now wanted both Membrives and Xirgu to premiere the work simultaneously in Buenos Aires and Madrid. “It will be tremendous,” he wrote to his family, “and people will see the difference between the two audiences.”

  But first he had to finish the play. In November he told a journalist he needed to go “to the country, to some quiet and green corner,” in order to complete Yerma. By late January 1934, newspapers were speculating that Lorca intended to write the last act of his play either “in the country or in some resort.” The “resort” turned out to be the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, where Lola Membrives and her husband planned to spend several weeks so that the actress could recuperate from her strenuous Buenos Aires season. The couple booked a hotel room for Lorca immediately next door to theirs, in downtown Montevideo.

  He arrived in Montevideo by ship, with Membrives’s husband, Juan Reforzo, on the morning of January 30. Dressed in a white linen suit and wing-tip shoes, his face bronzed by the sun, Lorca stood at the rail of the ship to greet the crush of journalists, friends, and dignitaries who had come to meet him. In the stifling heat, he spoke briefly to reporters about Yerma. Yes, he intended to work on the play in Montevideo, he said. “Is it possible you’ll give the work to another company?” someone asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Lorca replied. “In the theater you can never be sure of anything.”

  After checking into his hotel room, he changed into his sailor’s shirt and joined two Uruguayan writers for lunch. He knew one of the two, Enrique Amorím, from Buenos Aires. It was Amorím, in fact, who had given him the shirt he was wearing. Over lunch, Lorca continued to talk about Yerma. “Two acts. I’ve got two acts, and you know what? I like them. I like them!” The third act would be “magnificent,” he said. “People know the Lorca of Gypsy Ballads, of Deep Song, of Blood Wedding. But they haven’t seen anything! Now I’m in full García Lorca mode.” He tossed his head back, waved his hands, closed his eyes, and grinned. “Now I’m writing what I’ve always wanted to write. You’ll see.”

  After lunch, the writers climbed into Amorím’s automobile for a tour of the city. Lorca chattered on. When he glimpsed the countryside outside Montevideo, he shrieked with pleasure. “The greens! Did you see the greens?” Sometime later, near the beach, they encountered two horses walking along a road, followed by two children. Lorca grew suddenly gloomy. “I am surrounded by death! Death, physical death,” he announced. “My death. Yours. And yours. Do you understand?… Tell me: why does death stalk me?” Out loud, he imagined what would happen if the horses abruptly kicked the two children. He envisioned a child’s face, “covered in blood and shattered, right here in front of me.” Then he fell silent.

  Not far away, the ocean washed rhythmically against the land. The three men walked down to the beach. While the Uruguayans sat on a rock, Lorca recited his New York poems. He now called the collection Introduction to Death.
His impromptu performance lasted two hours. By the time he finished, the sky was dark. Afterward, as they walked toward Amorím’s car, Lorca again spoke about death. “That’s what I sing,” he said. “… I do it so that people will love me.” Moments later he launched into a recital of poems by Machado and Jiménez. It was ten o’clock in the evening. He had been going strong since noon.

  He told Amorím that he needed the sea in order to write. “Just as I need music. I don’t know. It’s the magic circle.” But despite the ocean’s calming presence, Lorca was unable to work in Montevideo. From the instant he arrived until his departure fifteen days later, the press tracked nearly everything he did and said. People recognized him on the streets. During Carnival, he rode through Montevideo in a parade. “It’s Lorca! It’s Lorca!” the crowd chanted. “He’s hot!” A woman stepped forward, holding a baby. “Kiss him on the forehead, Federico!” she begged, and Lorca did.

  He had agreed to give two lectures in the Uruguayan capital, but because the demand for tickets was so great, he quickly added two more talks to his schedule. The president of Uruguay attended Lorca’s first lecture. Uruguayan poets, politicians, and actors sought him out during his stay in Montevideo. There were banquets, cocktail parties, and luncheons. Lorca spent time with the Spanish ambassador, Enrique Díez-Canedo, a short, stout, jovial man who had followed his career for years and, in his capacity as a literary critic had published numerous reviews of Lorca’s work in both Spain and South America. Lorca stayed briefly with Díez-Canedo and his family in Montevideo, and later boasted that the ambassador had treated him “like a father.”

  He found time, as well, to visit his old friend and former Rinconcillo companion José Mora Guarnido, who had left Granada in 1923 and moved to Montevideo. For years Mora had used his influence as a journalist to promote Lorca’s name and work in the Uruguayan capital. The day after Lorca reached Montevideo, the two men met in a cafe, and, sitting at a table piled high with bottles of orangeade, reminisced about the past. “The first article ever written about me—you wrote it,” Lorca recalled.

  “I’d forgotten!” said Mora. “Do you still have it?”

  “I do. And everything that’s been said about me since, you said first in that article.”

  But Mora saw disappointingly little of his friend during his visit to Uruguay, because Lorca became distracted by new friends and acquaintances. He spent hours with Amorím and his wife, Esther, who pampered Lorca by preparing eucalyptus infusions for his throat, just as Salvador and Ana María Dalí had done years earlier in Spain. Lorca also befriended the Uruguayan poet Juana de Ibarbourou, who later remembered his “large, noble head” and “chestnut-brown eyes, which, despite his general euphoria, were quite sad.” One morning the two attended Mass together. Ibarbourou was struck by the way Lorca clutched his rosary—so stiffly that it resembled a piece of wire. Afterward, over lunch, he stuffed himself with olives and appetizers while telling stories. Ibarbourou thought him as boylike as her young son, who that day watched Lorca with amazement.

  He still found it impossible to write. Fans besieged him. A reporter turned up at his hotel one day for an interview and discovered Lorca hiding in a tunnel in the basement. Evidently, a crowd of young women seeking autographs had planted themselves at the entrances to the hotel, and, much as he enjoyed such adulation, Lorca wanted to avoid them. “Don’t ask me to sing,” he cautioned the reporter.

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t ask me to recite poetry.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t ask me to play the piano.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t ask me to read you the two acts of Yerma which I think I’ve completed.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Don’t ask me for an autographed photograph.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or for a tiny piece of my sailor’s shirt.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And above all, for God’s sake, don’t ask me to write something clever for you!”

  Lorca then explained that he had come to Montevideo with the aim of completing Yerma. “Or rather, I didn’t come, I was brought here. Membrives, who wants my play, abducted me and brought me here.” But in Montevideo, his admirers had prevented him from working on the script. “Membrives tells me to shut myself away under lock and key,” he continued. “And I say to her, yes, I’ve got no choice but to lock myself away, because if I don’t, I’ll end up being locked away by doctor’s orders. But where? Would you mind telling me where?”

  In time, Lorca also grew tired of Membrives, who became so desperate for a finished script that she conspired to isolate him from his friends and fans. She ordered the hotel to inform guests that he was away from his room when, in fact, he was inside, working. Lorca was at first amused by her tactics, then angry. He had never completely liked or trusted Membrives, in part because her ego rivaled his own. Toward the end of his visit to Uruguay, he behaved like “a fugitive,” a friend remembered, practically fleeing from the actress and taking refuge in private homes.

  He made no progress on Yerma in Montevideo. But he did manage to complete an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s La dama boba, which he had agreed to do for the Argentine actress Eva Franco, and he made revisions to his 1923 puppet play about Don Cristóbal. Lorca planned to produce both works when he returned to Buenos Aires. He spent his last day in Montevideo visiting the grave of an old Spanish friend, Rafael Barradas, the artist who had designed the costumes for his first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, and whose spartan Barcelona apartment Lorca had visited in the mid-1920s. A native Uruguayan, Barradas had returned to Montevideo in 1928 and died there shortly afterward from tuberculosis.

  Dressed in a white linen suit, Lorca stood beside his friend’s grave on the morning of February 16, and scattered a handful of tiny flowers one by one onto the earth. Attached to each flower was a card bearing the name of one of Barradas’s friends in Spain. It was raining. Several of Lorca’s Uruguayan friends stood with him. No one spoke. Later that day, Lorca left Montevideo. José Mora Guarnido and Enrique Díez-Canedo found him on board his ship one hour before setting sail for Buenos Aires. Lorca made no reference to his departure. When the moment came for his friends to leave, he embraced them and murmured, “See you later.” “Every time we say / goodbye,” he had written ten years earlier, “we leave something of ourselves / in the cold current of the wind.”

  Lorca returned to Buenos Aires on the morning of February 17, and that afternoon read his adaptation of La dama boba to Eva Franco and her company. He also wrote to inform his family that he planned to wire them the earnings from his Montevideo lectures. “You can do whatever you want with this money, because it’s yours. Mama and Papa can spend it all if they like. You’ve certainly spent enough on me.” He announced that he had booked his return passage to Spain on March 6. He knew his mother would be pleased. In a recent letter she had beseeched Lorca to come home: “Wrap up your affairs, pack your suitcases as best you can, and get on with it.” The entire Lorca family, she reminded him, had moved to Madrid “principally for you, and as it turns out, you’re not even here.”

  Membrives opened her fall season on March 1 with a tribute to Lorca. Although he claimed it was difficult to recite a theatrical work in the one place “where an author’s dreams come true,” Lorca read the first two scenes of Yerma to the audience that night. They eagerly applauded the work. He told the crowd he intended to leave Buenos Aires on March 6, but he suggested he might change his mind and stay. “Days go by, nights go by, a month and a half, but… as the old ballad says, ‘I remain …’ I leap from the sixth to the twentieth to the thirtieth and then to the first of the month. Nothing! I’m still here, as you can see.”

  Two nights later he attended the premiere of Eva Franco’s production of La dama boba, now retitled La niña boba, “The Simple-Minded Girl.” Chiefly as a lark, Lorca had agreed to adapt Lope’s play for the actress, and since returning to Buenos Aires, had devoted much of his
time to helping Eva polish the rhythm and diction of her company’s performance. To Lope’s script he added music and songs, but, as he admonished the critic Octavio Ramírez of La Nación, he did not rewrite the work. “I’ve cut it, which is a very different matter. You can’t rewrite a masterpiece. That’s a sin I’d never dare commit.” Franco’s production was a hit, commercially as well as critically; ultimately it ran for nearly two hundred performances.

  Lorca thanked the audience from the stage on opening night, and with profound emotion invoked the memory of Lope de Vega, “monster of nature and father of the theater.” Eva Franco was astonished to realize that Lorca was nervous when speaking to the public. He told the actress he was shy about being watched, that he felt “spied upon.” Because of his timidity, he never improvised his remarks. Instead, he always carried a small piece of paper with him.

  As he had anticipated, Lorca extended his stay in Buenos Aires. On March 10, La Nación announced that, because he had been unable to complete the script, Lorca had withdrawn Yerma from Membrives’s forthcoming season and had suggested that the actress produce Once Five Years Pass in its place. Membrives and Lorca were rumored to have come to physical blows over the issue. According to one witness, Lorca interrupted a reading of Yerma at Membrives’ house and curtly informed the actress that he had no intention of letting her premiere the work, because he had written it for Margarita Xirgu. He was fed up with Membrives’s imperious treatment of him. His decision so infuriated the actress that she threatened retaliation. Her actors nicknamed her “Lola balls.” But in the end, she did nothing.