Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  He feared for Spain’s future. He regretted the factions that divided his country; their existence countered his notion of what it meant to be part of the human community. He found Spain’s newly contentious political atmosphere suffocating. The previous summer, while touring with La Barraca, he had run into José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the young leader of the Spanish Falange. Lorca was sitting in a restaurant with several members of his company—all of them dressed in their blue Barraca coveralls—when Primo de Rivera walked in with three of his colleagues, each wearing the blue shirt of the Falange. “Look, there’s José Antonio,” actor Modesto Higueras whispered to Lorca.

  “Yes, I’ve seen him,” Lorca said nervously. Primo de Rivera recognized Lorca and scribbled something onto a napkin, which he then handed to a waiter to give to the poet. Lorca glanced at the note and hastily slipped it into his pocket. Higueras asked what it said.

  “Shhh,” Lorca muttered. “Don’t say anything to me. Don’t say anything.” Later Higueras found the napkin and read it. “Federico,” the Falangist leader had written. “Don’t you think that with your blue coveralls and our blue shirts we could between us forge a better Spain?”

  Daily life went on. In Madrid, Lorca presided over a nightly tertulia in a café across from the city’s main post office building. Writers and Barraca actors drifted in and out of the gatherings; Lorca and other poets—Neruda, Alberti—frequently read their work. At the time, Neruda was preoccupied with the health of his first child, a daughter born prematurely with hydrocephalus in August 1934, and subsequently diagnosed with Down’s syndrome. Lorca marked the infant’s sad arrival with a poem, “Lines on the Birth of Malva Marina Neruda,” in which he mourned his inability to “shatter the dark feet / of the night that howls through the stones,” to “halt the immense awful wind / that takes away dahlias and leaves shadows behind.” He did his best to console Neruda.

  After their tertulia, Lorca and his friends often went out to supper, or to another café, or to someone’s house. Lorca rarely went to bed before two in the morning. Sometimes he returned home after midnight and wrote until dawn. He told a reporter he worked “at all hours. If I pushed myself, I could write all day long, but I don’t want to chain myself down.” To another journalist he confessed that he worked only when he felt “an irresistible urge to write. Then I write feverishly for a few months so that I can get back to living as soon as possible.” Living, he said, “is most important to me … I spend the day in the street: in cafés, chatting.”

  By the fall of 1934, Lorca was, according to Pedro Salinas, an “institution” in Madrid. He welcomed friends to tertulias with hugs and laughter and friendly banter, and was “more than a person, he was a climate,” Salinas recalled. At night he wandered through the city with friends, talking at the top of his voice and laughing. One could hear his forthright, luminous laughter far in the distance. Friends trailed after him as fans would a celebrated bullfighter. His mother talked fondly of Lorca’s “celestial court”—by which she meant the talented, “handsome … intelligent … amusing” young men who invariably surrounded her son.

  He was no longer slender, as he had been in his twenties. At thirty-six, his face and body had widened. He had what one friend described as a “big, square, majestic head. Federico was a man crowned by his head.” He wore his black hair combed back from his face; stray locks often fell onto his forehead, and he was forever brushing them away with a mechanical sweep of his hand. Moles dotted his face. Whenever he had a formal portrait taken, studio photographers retouched his hair and skin to make both seem flawless.

  He tried to dress stylishly but more often than not looked slightly disheveled. The knot in his tie was almost always too big and loose, and never centered. His clothes were sometimes rumpled. He walked with an uneven gait. He smoked sporadically, at times puffing fretfully on one cigarette after another while telling a story. He drank when it pleased him. He had an enormous capacity for whiskey and brandy, a friend remembered, but was also capable of going for days without alcohol.

  To many, Lorca was a “synonym for joy.” He continued to have moments of gloom, however, brief lapses during which he fell silent, the light in his eyes dimmed, and he became vague and distant. During such “absent” spells he would often fix his eyes on some remote object and move his lips as though speaking; when friends called his name, he refused to respond. Afterward he would return to the reality around him with what Ernesto Pérez Guerra described as “a renewed impetus toward extroversion,” a renewed desire to “yield to the joy of the moment.” Pérez Guerra believed that Lorca was “sociable by will and solitary by nature. But he was a solitary being for whom solitude was intolerable.” At Morla Lynch’s home, when asked to play the piano and sing, Lorca sometimes said, “No, I’ve got a cold, and I’m tormented by at least six personal tragedies.” Then he would sing.

  He lived a compartmentalized life. With close friends he was open about his sexuality; with others—particularly his family—he was evasive. He enjoyed numerous liaisons. “He’d get excited about a boy, and sometimes they’d travel, go to the provinces,” remembered the artist and amateur actor Santiago Ontañón, who had known Lorca for years. “He needed lots of sexual adventures,” recalled the painter Gregorio Prieto. “But he was discreet. He knew whom to approach, when and where.” His “erotic stamina,” said a friend from Granada, was “formidable.” He delighted in ogling handsome young men. Manuel Altolaguirre later sketched an evocative portrait of Lorca “at dawn, as he returned home from love and from wine. From music and perfumes, Federico, sensual poet, lost, carried away in the labyrinth of blood.” Luis Cernuda recalled “the radiant young men / who loved you so.”

  Lorca accepted the contradictory nature of his existence. In 1934 he told a reporter that “the majority of men have a special life that they use like a calling card. It’s the life by which they are publicly known, by which they introduce themselves … But those same men also have another life, a gray life that is hidden, torturous, diabolical, and that they try to hide like an ugly sin.” He knew that despite the more tolerant atmosphere of the Second Spanish Republic, hatred of homosexuals ran deep in Spain. In 1933, the right-wing newspaper El Duende had published a diatribe against “los ambiguos”—“the ambiguous ones”—homosexual men who, since 1930 and the onset of the Republic, had “corrupted” Madrid by inflicting their “vice” on “innocent young men.” The article called for the arrest of such reprobates.

  Lorca himself had encountered similar attitudes. Certain of his detractors, particularly the newspaper Gracia y Justicia, routinely alluded to his sexuality; right-wing opponents of La Barraca referred to the company as “Sodom on the road.” In the summer of 1934, in Granada, Lorca briefly visited the town casino with a friend. While there, an older man had turned to him and remarked, “They say you poets are queers.”

  Lorca feigned indifference. “What do you mean, poets?” he asked. But he knew that among certain circles he was disliked. In Buenos Aires he had admitted to a reporter that not all Spaniards appreciated his work. “They say it’s good, but I don’t really know. I don’t really know if they like my poems. The priests in Granada, for instance, don’t find them amusing.”

  In mid-November, Yerma began rehearsals in Madrid with Margarita Xirgu in the title role. The play was scheduled to open in late December at the Teatro Español. Although he had toyed with giving the work to Lola Membrives to premiere in Buenos Aires, Lorca had ultimately settled on the more regal, less temperamental Xirgu. He told an acquaintance, “We must all stick by Margarita, because Margarita loves the theater more than anyone else.”

  He often took friends with him to rehearsals. He would telephone the young painter José Caballero, whom he had commissioned to design the poster for the production, and identify himself as the nonsensical “Don Críspulo Tentor, de Onteniente”—a sure sign, Caballero recalled, “that Lorca wanted something from me.” The two inevitably arrived late at the theater. Each time, Lorca
would invent some preposterous excuse for his tardiness. His motto, said Caballero, was “late, but on time.” Xirgu called him “the impossible Federico,” and bemoaned his improvisatory approach to life. Whenever he showed up late for a rehearsal the actress had to start the session from the top so that he would not—as he insisted—miss a single detail. One day Xirgu lost her patience. “Federico,” she told him, “I love you a lot, but rehearsals start at a given time, and we make actors who arrive late pay a 5-peseta fine. Since you always come late, you’ll have to pay just like everyone else.” Lorca paused, then kissed Xirgu effusively and began rummaging in his pockets. “You’re completely and absolutely right,” he said, and handed her 50 pesetas. “If you don’t mind, I’ll just give you this in advance.”

  By mid-December, talk of Yerma permeated the Madrid press. Public curiosity about the work reached such heights that the play’s producers had to restrict the final dress rehearsal to invited guests only. Annoyed at being shut out of the rehearsal, one journalist took his revenge in print and informed readers of the Madrid daily La Voz that the only people to attend the event were “pale little boys who don’t drink wine.” The piece—with its implied slur against homosexuals—distressed Lorca, who complained about it to the play’s director, Cipriano Rivas Cherif. Rivas Cherif banned the journalist from entering the theater during the run of the production.

  On December 28, the day before opening night, El Sol reported that according to those who had seen the tragedy, Yerma was Lorca’s best work to date. Among the luminaries to attend the final dress rehearsal were the celebrated Galician dramatist Ramón del Valle-Inclán, who praised the work, and Miguel de Unamuno, who told reporters that Yerma was an “auspicious” drama by a playwright at the “top of his form.” Jacinto Benavente, the 1927 Nobel laureate, also attended, and sought out Lorca after the first act to congratulate him. Lorca listened, pleased, but confessed that the play seemed “hopelessly bad” to him that evening. “Everything weighs me down … Everything seems hollow.”

  “No, friend,” Benavente assured him. “Don’t worry.”

  The story of an unhappily married woman who yearns in vain to have a child, Yerma was the second in Lorca’s proposed trilogy of Spanish tragedies. He described it as a play with a classical theme but a contemporary treatment and “modern” intentions. “We must return to tragedy,” he said. “Our theatrical tradition demands that we do so.”

  He subtitled Yerma a “Tragic Poem”—the only one of his plays to be designated as such. Unlike its more complex predecessor, Blood Wedding, whose drama springs primarily from its plot, Yerma dwells on a single character, Yerma, and her intensely private struggle to transcend her situation. The work is a long, intricate poem written in prose and punctuated with passages of verse, a solitary cry from a protagonist of mythic proportion. The cast, as in Greek drama, is minimal, and formal choruses intensify and comment on the action. In its profound and persistent reliance on nature as an accomplice to human emotion, the play is fully Andalusian.

  The name Yerma, the feminine of the adjective yermo, means barren land. Throughout the play Lorca contrasts dry, arid elements of nature with such wet, life-giving entities as rivers, wombs, and rain. Bound to the natural world, Yerma goes out in her bare feet “to walk the earth, I don’t know why,” and carries jugs of water to her table to quench her thirst. By contrast, her pale, passionless husband, Juan, spends entire days pruning fruit trees and whole nights watering his crops—to no avail. He cannot make nature flourish. “There’s very little water,” he complains.

  From one scene to the next, words and phrases echo one another, forming an elaborate web of imagery that points repeatedly to the play’s title and principal concern: the barren woman, or, more broadly, the sterility of desire. As the drama unfolds, time passes. In Act 1, Yerma has been married two years; by the end of Act 2, it is five. Clocks strike, the years drag on, and Yerma continues to seek the impossible. “Juan, do you hear me? Juan. It is time,” she says to her husband at the opening of the play.

  Unlike other women in the village, Yerma refuses to stay inside her house, despite her husband’s efforts to confine her. She roams the countryside, talking to a man named Victor whose presence, she claims, is “like a jet of water that fills your whole mouth.” Town gossips describe her as “mannish”; her husband accuses her of not being a “real woman” and orders his two spinster sisters to keep her captive at home. Yerma herself acknowledges her sexual ambiguity. During nightly forays to the shed to feed the oxen—something “no woman does,” she admits—her footsteps sound to her “like those of a man.”

  Like all of Lorca’s tragic protagonists, in poems as well as plays, Yerma is powerless to halt the historical current that pulls her along. Much of her life passes in a state of reverie, during which she croons lullabies to make-believe children. Alone and desolate, she vents her passion in brief soliloquies whose rhymed and metered lines underscore the classic stature of her grief. Once, with Victor, she believes she hears a child weeping. Lorca compares her suffering to Christ’s. “What a hard time you’re having, what a hard time, but remember the wounds of Our Lord!” a neighbor advises. But Yerma shuns the consolations of conventional faith. Trapped in a loveless union and determined to preserve her honor, despite her infatuation with Victor, she turns for help to an old pagan woman and conjurer, Dolores, who is reputed to know ways of achieving fertility. “God help me,” Yerma implores the woman.

  “Not God. I’ve never cared for God,” Dolores insists. “When will you people realize he doesn’t exist? It’s men who’ll have to help you.”

  The tragedy culminates in a bacchanalian pilgrimage to a mountain hermitage, where childless women pray for the miracle of pregnancy. The scene is drawn from the real-life pilgrimage in the town of Moclín, near Fuente Vaqueros, which had long fascinated Lorca. He later maintained that in Blood Wedding he had written choral passages “with the timidity of a beginner.” By the time he drafted Yerma he had mastered the device of the chorus, and in both the pilgrimage scene and a second, earlier passage, where a group of village women launder clothes beside a stream, he created choral moments of such intense lyricism that at least two reviewers pronounced them “poems.” The effect was deliberate. At rehearsals, Lorca drove his cast to achieve a precise rhythm in each scene so that it would achieve a poetic unity. In the clothes-washing scene he instructed his actresses to move their hands and garments rhythmically, and to talk and sing in a rising crescendo of sound.

  At the center of the climactic pilgrimage scene he staged a lurid dance whose pagan celebration of lust recalls the frenzied action of Walpurgis Night in Goethe’s Faust. At times Lorca’s extravagant spectacle unintentionally verges on comedy. During the dance in Yerma, a horn-wielding “Male” and a “Female” clutching a strap of harness bells mime the impregnation of a childless woman, while onlookers cheer them on to ever more ecstatic heights. “Seven times she moaned, and / nine times she rose, and / fifteen times the jasmine / fused with the orange,” the crowd shrieks.

  “Now use the horn!” they shout.

  “Oh, how the wife is throbbing!” someone cries. Children refer to the pair as “the devil and his wife.”

  In the midst of the scene, Dolores reveals to Yerma that her husband, Juan, is infertile. She counsels Yerma to find another man. But Yerma cannot defy fate. She confronts Juan, who confesses that he has never wanted children, only a wife and a home; he begs Yerma to embrace him. She does so. Her grief quickly turns to rage, and in a fury she strangles him. “What do you want to know?” she cries out to the stunned villagers who suddenly gather around her. “Don’t come near me, because I have killed my child. I myself have murdered my own child!” The play ends on this maudlin note. As the final curtain falls, the sounds of the pilgrimage go on in the distance.

  For years Lorca had been appalled by the plight of women in Spanish society, particularly in rural Spain. As an adolescent he had written compulsively—in prose, poetry, and theat
er—of the constraints imposed on women in Andalusian villages. In their tightly circumscribed lives he saw a reflection of his own struggle to transcend hidebound social and religious convention; he saw what happens when instinct is suppressed and nature denied. “Girls like me, who grow up in the country, have all doors closed to them,” Yerma observes at the start of the drama. “Everything becomes half-words and gestures, because we’re not supposed to know these things.” Elsewhere she says, “Men have another life: the flocks, the trees, conversation; we women have nothing but children and caring for our children.”

  With Yerma, Lorca created both a portrait and an indictment of traditional Andalusian society and its treatment of women. Local superstitions and turns of phrase combine with elements of popular song and dance to evoke the flavor of the region, while characters such as Juan and his two spinster sisters embody recognizable Andalusian types. In the work’s female characters, especially Yerma, Lorca revived his lifelong fascination with Andalusian spinsters, widows, nuns, and childless wives—women for whom love is at best a matter of deprivation, at worst a rebuke. As he wrote the work he doubtless recalled his father’s childless first wife, Matilde Palacios, whose portrait stood for years in the Lorca family home.