Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  Ostensibly less radical than Lorca’s other plays, The House of Bernarda Alba takes place indoors, is written in prose, and employs such timeworn theatrical conventions as household servants and offstage deaths. But within its apparent orthodoxy it is revolutionary. Silence punctuates the dialogue in highly developed, rhythmic ways; poetry infuses the prose; characters move and speak with the exaggerated gestures of the puppet theater. The story is conceived on an epic scale. Lorca calls for “two hundred women” dressed in black to appear onstage in the opening scene; he wanted the rafters of Bernarda’s ceiling to be completely covered with hanging melons. The paintings on Bernarda’s walls show legendary kings and nymphs. Bernarda’s mother, the biblically named Maria Josefa, a madwoman consumed by erotic desire and obsessed with children, periodically escapes from her locked offstage room to interrupt and comment on the action with the clairvoyance of a Tiresias or a Fool. Lorca modeled María Josefa on a woman he had known in his youth, the deranged grandmother of distant relatives.

  Although Lorca had long been appalled by the brutality of female existence in rural Spain, no play of his more directly depicts the austerity and sorrow of women’s lives in the south than The House of Bernarda Alba. “In church, women should look at no man but the priest, and at him only because he’s wearing skirts,” Bernarda reminds her daughters. In Bernarda’s world, a woman’s lot is marriage, followed by confinement inside the home. “To be born a woman is the worst punishment,” says her daughter Amelia. Within the constraints of Lorca’s black-and-white “photograph” of village life, men assume a near-mythical—if stereotypical—status; faithless and sensual, they roam the outdoors, taming horses, plowing and cultivating the earth, marrying only because they want “a submissive dog to cook for them.”

  Lorca had been asked in 1934 why he wrote so many plays for and about women. He gave two answers—one poetic, one practical. “It’s because women are more passionate, they rationalize less, they’re more human, more vegetal,” he said, adding, “Moreover, an author would find himself in great difficulties if his heroes were men. There’s an appalling lack of actors, of good actors, you understand.” He was right: the number of Spanish companies run by female actresses far outweighed those run by men. Lorca wondered nevertheless if it wasn’t “too daring” to exclude males entirely from the cast of The House of Bernarda Alba, but it was a risk he was willing to take in order to heighten the play’s impact. With The House of Bernarda Alba he aimed to jolt Spain as Ibsen had shocked northern Europe a half-century earlier with A Doll’s House. As late as 1919, when Ibsen’s drama played Granada, a critic wrote that Nora “cannot be a Spanish wife, nor Torvald a husband born in Spain.” The House of Bernarda Alba suggests otherwise. It shows the ancient Spanish caste system and code of honor at their deadliest and, like Yerma and Blood Wedding, demonstrates that women are just as passionate as men. It also reveals the fatal consequences of repression—social, sexual, and by implication political.

  With The House of Bernarda Alba, Lorca completed the “trilogy of the Spanish land” he had begun in 1933 with Blood Wedding and continued in 1934 with Yerma. For some time he had claimed the last play in the trio would be The Destruction of Sodom (a play he sometimes referred to as The Daughters of Lot). But he settled on The House of Bernarda Alba, a work whose thematic similarity to its predecessors guaranteed some degree of critical and commercial parity. With Xirgu in the title role of Bernarda, Lorca was further assured of another theatrical triumph.

  He tended to think of his plays in sequence. The creation of one work often impelled him toward another; later that summer he would begin writing a sequel to Doña Rosita the Spinster. He talked as well of creating a Biblical trilogy based on Old Testament figures; among those under consideration were Samson and Delilah, Judith, David, Thamar and Amnon, and Cain and Abel. According to Rafael Martínez Nadal, Lorca began making serious plans to write an antiwar drama about Cain and Abel during the late spring and early summer of 1936. He intended the drama as a parable.

  By June, members of the communist, socialist, and anarchist parties were openly promoting a left-wing revolution in Spain. Through its incendiary coverage of leftist rallies and demonstrations, the right-wing press fanned middle-class fears of a communist state, and convinced many that only a military coup could save Spain. Army conspirators moved rapidly forward with their plans to overthrow the government. Rumors of an attempt to establish a dictatorship swept through Madrid. Warned of a probable military plot, the republican government failed to act decisively, and the army conspiracy flourished.

  With the onset of warm weather, the violence on the city’s streets worsened. By mid-June, members of parliament were frankly asking, “Will it be war?” Gil Robles argued that Spaniards were witnessing the “funeral service of democracy.” His fellow conservative Calvo Sotelo, head of the Monarchist Party, decreed that the Spanish army must be prepared to rise “against anarchy—if that should be necessary.”

  On June 5 Lorca turned thirty-eight. He had never particularly wanted to grow old. He continued to look back with rapture on his childhood. “My laughter today,” he told a journalist in 1935, “is the same laughter I had yesterday, the laughter of childhood, of the countryside, my rustic laughter, which I will always, always defend, until the day I die.” He joked that he was afraid to publish his New York poems, for doing so would make him old, and he disliked old age. At nineteen he had pondered the “withered eyes of the old / treasures of life that evaporate / enamel cavities that recapitulate / distant laments.” At thirty-six he had confessed,

  At a gathering of elderly men I wouldn’t be able to say one word. Those squinty, tearful gray eyes, those sneering lips, those paternal smiles terrify me, and their affection is as undesirable as a rope pulling us toward an abyss. That’s what old people are—the rope, the ligature between youth and the abyss of death.

  When it came to his own life, he said he hoped to “grow old” in the Andalusian seaport of Cádiz. He envisioned himself at eighty, “with a white beard, supported by a cane, enormously popular and loved by the people of Cádiz … a Spanish Walt Whitman.”

  Five days after his birthday, on June 10, El Sol published a long and expansive conversation between Lorca and the celebrated Spanish cartoonist Luis Bagaría, known for his irreverent caricatures of the country’s leading political and cultural figures. The two men touched on a variety of topics, from poetry to politics, from bullfighting to cante jondo. Lorca restated his belief that under the present circumstances the artist must fight for social justice, “must set aside his bouquet of white lilies and sink to his waist in the mud to help those who are looking for lilies.” He denounced nationalism (“I am a brother to everyone, and I loathe the man who sacrifices himself for an abstract nationalist ideal”) and rashly condemned the Catholic Reconquest of Arab Granada in 1492 as

  a terrible moment, even though they say just the opposite in the schools. An admirable civilization was lost, and a poetry, astronomy, architecture, and delicacy unique in the world, in order to give way to a poor, cowardly, narrow-minded city inhabited at present by the worst bourgeoisie in Spain.

  That his remarks were bound to offend conservative Granadans did not seem to bother Lorca. He did request, however, that an exchange about communism and fascism be deleted from the interview before its publication. “It strikes me as imprudent at this precise moment,” he said, “and besides, it’s already been answered.”

  Turning to issues of a more metaphysical bent—and to a subject that Lorca had earlier in the year described as a source of “constant anguish” to him—he and Bagaría debated whether the “indecipherable mystery” of poetic creation led one toward the afterlife or away from it. “Neither the poet nor anyone possesses the secret to the world,” Lorca suggested. “Being good,” he added, “together with the ass and the philosopher,” he hoped someday to have the “agreeable surprise” of finding himself in the great beyond. In the meantime, the pressures and sorrows of corporeal
existence kept him grounded on earth. He asked Bagaría where the cartoonist derived his obvious “thirst for the great beyond. Do you really want to outlive yourself? Don’t you think that everything has already been decided, and that with or without faith, man can do nothing?”

  “You’re right, unfortunately you’re right,” Bagaría said.

  At heart I’m a nonbeliever hungry to believe. It’s so tragically sad to disappear forever. Health, the lips of women, the glass of good wine that made you forget the tragic truth; landscape, the light that made you forget the shadows! In the tragic end, I would only wish for one thing: that my body be buried in a garden, that at the very least my “great beyond” be a fruitful one.

  Lorca did not respond to Bagaría’s comments—or, if he did, his remarks were not published. With his next question he abruptly changed the subject. “Would you mind telling me why every politician you caricature has the face of a frog?” he inquired.

  “Because,” said Bagaría, “most of them live in ponds.”

  Friends continued to urge Lorca to join the Communist Party. Lorca resisted. He did not want to support the party directly, he said. He turned down an invitation to attend a pro-Soviet tribute to the late Russian playwright and novelist Maxim Gorky on June 30, saying, “I don’t want that. I’m a friend to all. The only thing I want is for everyone to be able to work and eat.” He complained about the “abusive” treatment he received from those communist friends and acquaintances, among them Rafael Alberti, who persisted in trying to make him join their cause. To José Antonio Rubio Sacristán he remarked, “Those of us who have mothers like you and I do—how are we going to become communists?”

  By late June he was still toying with the possibility of a trip to Mexico, where Margarita Xirgu was enjoying a triumphant tour. The dancer La Argentinita also happened to be on tour in Mexico, and she implored Lorca to visit. In April he had sent word to Xirgu that his departure was “imminent.” He planned to sail first to New York, then travel by train to Mexico. “Five days on the train! Such joy!” he told friends. Evidently he purchased tickets for the journey. By July, though, he had decided to postpone the trip until after a summer visit with his family in Granada. He appears to have had a second reason for changing his mind. He wanted Rafael Rapún to travel with him. Xirgu had apparently made preliminary arrangements for the young man to do so, but Rapún’s father refused to let him go before he had completed his university exams. Accordingly, Lorca delayed his trip. He informed friends and reporters that before going to Mexico he intended to complete The House of Bernarda Alba, so that Xirgu could premiere the play in the fall. As soon as he had finished the script, he would leave Spain.

  The last weeks of June and first week of July brought strikes by trade union members, elevator attendants, waiters, even bullfighters. Political murders took place almost daily. On July 2 two Falangists sitting at a Madrid café were shot and killed by a gunman in a passing motorcar. Later that day, right-wing extremists sought revenge by murdering two presumed members of the Left.

  Lorca grew more and more fearful. By July his parents had left Madrid for Granada; his sister Isabel was living at Madrid’s Residencia de Señoritas, studying for a teaching degree in Spanish literature and language; his brother was stationed in Egypt as a member of the Spanish diplomatic corps. Left alone in his family’s spacious, seventh-floor Madrid apartment, Lorca yielded to old fears and superstitions. He had always been afraid of everyday things—water, automobiles, traffic, street crossings. He often pleaded with taxi drivers to slow down, shouting, “We’re going to crash!” Morbidly afraid of crossing city streets, he would latch onto a friend’s arm and sometimes leap back to the curb in a panic after setting out into traffic. Earlier that spring, during rehearsals for Once Five Years Pass, he had thrown himself beneath a piano after hearing a car suddenly backfire on a street outside the theater.

  But with the exception of a two-week period in Granada in 1919, when members of the Left and Right had clashed in bloody street demonstrations, he had never experienced the kind of violence that gripped Madrid in early July 1936. He became so petrified that he rarely went out except in the company of close friends, men like Rafael Martínez Nadal, Adolfo Salazar, Rapún, the artist José Caballero, Carlos Morla Lynch, Pablo Neruda. He and Neruda sometimes talked about politics. Both were upset by the situation in Spain, although Neruda was not then the political activist he would later become. “I’m a diplomat,” he told Rafael Alberti. “I don’t understand politics at all, and I’m not interested in it.”

  In late June Lorca accompanied a small group of friends to an outdoor fair; before a painted carnival backdrop they had their picture taken together. He stood in the top row, grinning. With one hand he reached around to touch Rapún on the forehead. But such outings were increasingly rare. José Caballero visited Lorca one day and found him cowering inside his family’s apartment with the blinds drawn. He confessed that he hated sleeping alone in the vacant flat. Martínez Nadal noticed that Lorca seemed more and more lost, hesitant, alone. Although he gave several readings of The House of Bernarda Alba to friends, and continued to work on his sonnets of dark love, he was distracted. On July 4 he signed a manifesto in protest against the government of Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveiro Salazar. On July 11, at a gathering in Pablo Neruda’s home, he told a member of the Spanish parliament that he intended to join his parents as soon as possible in Granada, because he could no longer bear the anxiety of remaining in Madrid, waiting for “I don’t know what.” Besides, his saint’s day was approaching on July 18, and he wanted to be with his family.

  At approximately nine in the evening on Sunday, July 12, four Falangists murdered a leftist member of the republican Assault Guard in Madrid. The dead man’s colleagues immediately set out to reap revenge by killing the two most prominent leaders of the right wing, Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo. They were unable to locate Robles. At three the following morning they found Sotelo in his Madrid apartment, kidnapped him, shot him twice in the head, and dumped his body in a cemetery on the outskirts of the city. His identity was not discovered until noon that day, Monday, July 13. Ordinary Spaniards were horrified. The murder proved that the republican government could no longer control its own forces. Members of the right wing demanded vengeance. Wealthy citizens fled Madrid, and the roads to France and Portugal became clogged with refugees.

  On Tuesday, July 14, Sotelo was buried in Madrid. As his casket was lowered into the ground, mourners raised their arms in a fascist salute. That same day, during funeral services for the slain member of the Assault Guard, republican, communist, and socialist sympathizers lifted clenched fists into the air.

  The moment he learned of Sotelo’s death on July 13, Lorca resolved to leave Madrid at once. The killing terrified him. “What’s going to happen?” he asked poet Juan Gil-Albert, whom he encountered in a café. Lorca was “extremely nervous,” Gil-Albert remembered.

  Lorca spent much of the day with Rafael Martínez Nadal. Over brandy they talked about the country’s political situation. “Rafael,” Lorca said, puffing agitatedly on a cigarette, “these fields are going to be strewn with corpses.” “My mind is made up,” he said moments later. “I’m going to Granada, come what may.”

  He dropped in on his friends Concha Méndez and Manolo Altolaguirre, and gave Altolaguirre a sheaf of poems to print. “I’m scared,” he told the couple. Méndez thought he seemed pensive and sad. As he left, he said simply, “Goodbye, goodbye!” He did not disclose his travel plans. The pair learned later that evening that Lorca had gone to Granada. Others did not hear of his departure until days afterward. Rafael Rodríguez Rapún was out of town on July 13 and missed Lorca entirely.

  With Nadal’s help Lorca purchased a train ticket for the evening of July 13, then went home to his apartment and listlessly began tossing belongings into his suitcases. Nadal rearranged the bags and shut them. On their way to the train station that evening they stopped at the Residencia de Señoritas to say goo
dbye to Lorca’s sister Isabel and to Fernando de los Ríos’s daughter, Laura, who was also living at the Residencia that summer. Nadal waited in the taxi while Lorca hugged both women.

  It was still light outside at 9 p.m., when Lorca rang the doorbell at the home of his old friend and former elementary-school teacher, Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa. Espinosa’s maid answered the door. Lorca announced himself. “Don Homobono Picadillo.”

  “What’s this rogue Don Homobono up to now?” Espinosa said as he came to the door. He was a bald, heavyset man in his late sixties.

  “Nothing except to borrow 200 pesetas from you, because I’m leaving at ten-thirty tonight for Granada,” Lorca told him. “There’s a thunderstorm brewing and I’m going home. I’ll be safe from the lightning there.”

  27

  Fountain

  1936

  Lorca arrived home on the morning of July 14, relieved to be out of Madrid and surrounded by family. Bright red blooms flowered on the pomegranate bushes at his parents’ Huerta de San Vicente. The scent of roses and jasmine laced the air. He talked exuberantly of his sister Isabel’s achievements at school in the capital, where she had just passed her teaching exams, and caught up on his brother’s news. Rumors of an attempt against the secretary of the Spanish delegation in Cairo, where Paco was stationed, had reached the family a few days earlier and sent his parents into a panic. A subsequent cable dispelled their fears. “The soul went back into our body,” Vicenta Lorca said.