On Flamenco, Poetry, Genius, and Murder
OUR DAYS IN the Albayzín had many parts: our grapevine and books; the centuries of design intelligence within the layout of the streets; the play of light along the narrow lanes; the incorrigible good nature of our neighbors; Gabriella’s superb preschool in the barrio; the Arab bakery; the wonderful newsstands in Plaza Nueva, which even sell on occasion the books of Gabriel García Márquez and Dante; the persimmons and pomegranates and figs from our trees; and the tomatoes, basil, and rosemary from our vegetable garden. We even went so far as to cure our own olives. Our first year’s effort came out tasting like mildewed cardboard mush that would have disgraced a toxic waste dump. The second year’s batch was memorably delicious. It made us feel as if we might still be capable of learning.
Gradually, over the months and years, the parts of our experience gathered force and began to make a whole beauty, one with a strange spectrum of effects. It was more than the hot spring Andalusian light on the honeysuckle vine, or the waft of orange blossoms through the rooms of the house, or the soaring of the swifts every morning in their fantastical acrobatics. Such delights held the sensuality of the Albayzín at a high pitch. Beyond the sensuality, the history and poetry natural to the place, and the role of Granada as a magnetic center of events with the most far-reaching consequences, played upon our minds and became centermost in our musing. It was as if the neighborhood brought body and mind together, as if the each day formed a lens, and we could see before us a strange fortune. We were being drawn irrevocably into life in the Albayzín, and the joy of it was beyond anything I could have conjured. I simply had never been in a place of such tough, enveloping beauty, and I began to think that the Albayzín had some hidden power, that against all the odds it had been able to deflect the darkness and terror seething in the history of Granada, that it had suffered near devastation, but through some genius for survival, some singular life force, it had risen again with its hidden traditions and raucous energies.
We came to understand, in part, how such a thriving might be possible because of flamenco. It is the classic music of Granada and of Andalusia, and we had a lively interest in the art, though we in fact knew little of it. Less than little: to call us rank beginners would be to lavish praise upon us. But we devoutly wanted to hear some good flamenco, so we embarked upon our research using the time-honored method of asking questions in bars. One gentlemen, in the district of the Realejo, just near the centro, told us that at a certain theater that very night we might hear some flamenco puro. We straightaway bought tickets and sat down in a cavernous performance hall that was sparsely inhabited. Upon the stage was nothing but two chairs and microphones. Now and then a thickset man would come and go, repositioning the chairs, testing the microphones—obviously a technician. He was the very image of someone who, in the United States, would drive a big truck. He walked ponderously to and fro, as the time for the performance came and went. The stage was empty. The lights in the performance hall were brightly lit. We wondered what was going on. The same man appeared again, sat down on one of the chairs, and looked into the distance. We thought perhaps technical difficulties had overcome him, and the show as well.
Then the lights went down suddenly, and we realized the thickset gentleman had nothing to do with trucks. He began to sing. I remember the fine hair on Lucy’s arm standing on end, and my own shock at his unreserved, fierce, resonant voice. He sang one song, then another, each of them with scorching virtuosity, an independent, cut-loose ferocity. He was present with us but in a world of his own, made of his voice. We had never heard anything like it in our lives. We gripped tightly our chairs. The singer would hold a note until he had ripped it to pieces. There were prolonged and aggressive battles with single lines in the song. Sometimes a verse would be repeated until it was a rough, hypnotic induction, with singer and audience bound together in trance. The intonation was harsh, then melodious, sometimes a cry, sometimes a growl or snarl. There were notes of purest exaltation and of convulsive bitterness. I thought: a man soaring into a religious vision . . . then, two minutes later, no, a man slaughtered by anguish. Now and again I had the most absurd reflections, such as: Isn’t there supposed to be a dancer? A swarthy woman in a fluffy dress? What was going on? But such curiosities were blown straight out of my head by the unabated force of the songs. After four or five numbers, another man walked out with a guitar, took the remaining chair, and began to play for the next song. They performed together the rest of the evening. Their coordination was lively, subtle, precise, and beautiful. Some invisible communication, rich and life-giving, passed continuously between them. We tried to follow where they led us, and it was a rough territory of love and death, which could only be traversed with a music of deep remembrance and release. Then they were done and stood to acknowledge the audience and to salute one another, and they were gone, as if whisked away into shadows only they could see.
Lucy and I had walked into the concert hall as one couple and left as another, transformed by the raw force of an art we hardly knew existed. It was as if a blasting cap had gone off in us, and the encounter with flamenco led us back to the Albayzín, which turned out to have a most lively flamenco tradition of its own. Though we did not know it at the time, flamenco would come to mark our months and years in Granada, to answer our questions, reshape our minds, and introduce us to an art whose survival was just like the survival of the Albayzín: the music, like the place, just could not be killed.
We sought out flamenco puro whenever we could. The commercial flamenco in Granada is like commercial adaptation everywhere: the current of life has been extinguished. But the authentic tradition holds its strength, and we had exultant evenings in Granada as the music wove itself into our lives. Every now and then, late in the night, listening to one of Andalusia’s prodigiously gifted singers, in the dark room the hair would rise on the back of our necks, and we would be caught up in some uncanny transport of mind, a riptide and release of emotion. A whisper would go around the room . . . “¡El duende, es el duende!” There is no way to talk about flamenco without talking about duende. This word, which has no equivalent in English, is bound up with music and poetry, with physical passion and incendiary soul, and, most of all, with Andalusia. It is so complex and marvelous a quality that early in the twentieth century, only one person was willing to take a crack at an extended definition. Of course he is from Granada, and of course he is the poet Federico García Lorca.
In 1933, in Argentina, Lorca presented a lecture called “The Theory and Play of the Duende,” a title that must have baffled the audience, since duende, in the dictionary, means “an elf or mischievous goblin” or “a mysterious and ineffable charm.” Lorca, of course, had a different idea. He wanted to use the notion of duende to reorganize the aesthetics of the Western world. Perhaps of the whole world. To read the lecture is like riding a rocket of concepts; you have to hang on tight. But it is writing based on Lorca’s immersion in flamenco and his rich concord with the art. And it has all the poet’s dark, natural ebullience.
So let’s ride: Lorca wants to address the creation of art and the art of creation, principally in music, poetry, and dance. We have in our history, he says, counted on two sources of support and revelation: either an angel or a muse. The angel, messenger of heaven, is a guide and a gift-giver, a defender and savior, prophet and bearer of proclamation. He visits from another world, comes to dazzle the man or woman at work, and delivers a grace so trustworthy that the worker becomes the natural agent of an irresistible power. The art needed comes forth fully illuminated, in its beauties, with the savor of a divine visitation.
The muse is the ancient and traditional guide of the worker in the arts, and she appears to those with a readiness of mind and spirit, after long labor. She has an implacable and demanding beauty. Lorca tells us he has seen her twice, which qualifies him for a report and a critique. The muse can suggest, provoke, and inspire irrevocably. She fires the intelligence with a radiant and penetrating spirit. The risk is that she may dominate and devour the artist. But there is another grave risk, according to Lorca. The real risk is that such intelligence will restrict and distort poetry and lock poems in a style that is no more than “aristocratic finery.”
Having given us the angel and muse, Lorca turns to his real subject, the third great source of creation, the duende, which he finds throughout history but identifies with Spain and with Andalusia. Unlike the angel and muse, who come from without, duende lives within, a primordial force bound with blood and death and earth. Reject the angel, he recommends, and give the muse a boot out the door. And come to life in the struggle with duende, a struggle that will leave a wound that will never heal, a wound that opens onto creation itself. It frees a force of earth that surges in the blood, shakes us to the core, and acts upon us like wind on sand, like a storm on the sea. It is both incandescent sorrow and communion with God. It leads its possessor beyond form to the source of form, and beyond style and artifice to a suffering that bears us to clarity. And to a state of life where our senses become a work of the earth, where creation and action are the same. Late in his fierce essay, turning to the presence in poetry of duende, Lorca gives us this tender paragraph:
The magical virtue of poetry is to be always infused with duende, so to baptize in dark water all those who behold it, since with duende it is easier to love and to understand, we are sure to be loved, to be understood, and it is just this struggle for expression and communication that sometimes takes on a fatal character.
This is expression that folds together life and death, and it is the art of flamenco at its best. Lorca would say: poetry at its best, and any other art.
To this world we went, with sometimes weeks in between our excursions, so that we could recover our senses. Like raw, traditional blues in the United States, it’s an acquired taste. And like the blues, it runs deep into life and seems to color even our dreams. Our first, baffled encounter had instructed us rightly: the singing is primary, then the guitar. Andalusia has a deep bench of flamenco guitarists. They should be considered one of the principal assets in the national treasury of Spain and one of the most precious holdings of Europe. And there are dancers, after all, though more rarely, who can send a bolt of electricity through the audience. And most performances have musicians who accompany the singing with their hands, in the sonorous rhythm called palmas. Also, the caja, a box on the floor, that is the percussion instrument of flamenco. All in all, it’s such a rare and distant country that it is useful to have a map.
It turns out to be a map of human experience, in raw and forthright song. Each song is a poem. Love and death are the double suns around which many of the songs revolve. Yet flamenco turns out, as well, to hold in its art the whole prodigious complexity of Spanish history. So far from being an exclusively gypsy art, the gypsies fell heir to the whole musical heritage of Al-Andalus, to which they brought their genius for assimilation, as well as their resolute independence and strong ties to the Andalusian earth. And so flamenco comes in a bewildering and exultant variety of forms, since a poem that is sung might be derived from Arabic or Jewish sources, from gypsy ceremonies, or from the folklore of any of the host of cultures that found a home in Iberia: from Christian rites, Indian music, or even Celtic traditions. There is even flamenco that takes in musical contributions from Latin America—like the milongas from Argentina, or the guajiras from Cuba—and so enriches the songs with the savor of the New World.
There is flamenco that comes directly from work, work songs that hold the rhythm and ardor of labor, its effort and loneliness. The trilleras, for instance, originated among grinders of wheat; the tarantas are work songs of the miners; the martinetes, music and poetry from the dark shop of the blacksmith, that use the sound of hammers striking an anvil; the caleseras, songs of the labor and solitude of the drivers of carts in the country, with the rhythm of horse’s hooves and the mystery of long mountain roads. There is even a genre of songs from jail cells, the carceleras, sung in lament, or to carry a message to loved ones in freedom. To this day, there is a flamenco workshop in the Albolote prison in Granada.
There are song traditions tied directly to cities, as if they had grown from the alleyways, the plazas and caves, then were refined over decades and centuries until finally they came to embody a place in song. The malagueñas hail from Málaga, as a descendant of the great fandangos, and the granainas and media granainas are forms redolent of Granada itself, with pronounced Moorish rhythm and storytelling. The rondiñas celebrate the mystical city of Ronda, a city with a history of Sufi scholars and a surround of strange and beautiful mountains. The murcianas hail from Murcia, birthplace of the great poet, mystic, and theologian Ibn El-Arabi. The lively sevillanas, with their inspiriting and contagious rhythm, are part of the history and savor of the great Andalusian city of Seville, where Ibn El-Arabi studied. We do not know if the great twelfth-century poet set down any verses that even today flare here and there as flamenco in Andalusia. But this is Spain, and you never know.
There is a whole genre of flamenco, the nanas, that consists of lullabies, which is just as it should be, for what parent can deny the surge of hope and thankfulness that visits us when we hold a baby. It’s a moment honored by song in just about every culture.
Watches over your crib
His head toward the sun
His feet toward the moon.
Off to sleep goes
My rose among roses
Sleep, little girl,
As late night closes
My baby carnation,
Opening rosebud
Sleep, my life,
I’ll sing you a lullaby . . .
Sleep, little star of the morning
I quote these lovely verses to show how full a spectrum of experience flamenco may explore. As in traditional American blues, we have songs of the most tender communion, songs of longing and cherishing, and then the next moment, songs of black rancor, acid bitterness, or loss so anguished we feel mauled slowly to death. Many of us come in the course of our lives to such extremes because we love, and because so often the cultures and countries we make fail the ideals we bring to them. Flamenco gives verse and voice to the core of such common experience because there is nothing it will not take on: it is a music of celebration because it faces down the darkness.
Take, for instance, these three verses from different soleares, songs of solitude:
Is lost to hope
No need to bury me
I am buried alive.
Now all the world
Is black to me.
Your street is not just your street
It is any street.
Any road. Anywhere.
And this quatrain about hard luck:
What can be done?
Saints whom I painted
Demons become.
Lorca sees the centermost of flamenco in the great siguiriyas, primordial songs of cut-loose emotional power. The singer holds death close. The distinguished flamenco guitarist and writer D.E. Pohren tells us this form is not so much sung: it is unleashed upon the audience. And just as Lorca gave us his far-rambling essay, full of metaphors like fireworks on the nature of duende, so we have from him an emblematic speech on the cante jondo—deep song—which he takes to be the source and central form of flamenco singing. It is February of 1922; it is Lorca’s debut as a lecturer, and he will focus on musical history and on the siguiriyas. He has, with the revered Spanish composer Manual Falla, organized a festival in Granada—the Concurso de Cante Jondo (Contest of Deep Song), and the months preceding the festival are marked by Lorca’s talk, given at the usual Spanish ten in the evening, to the accompaniment of guitar. We should let the poet speak for himself. A set of quotes will bring us fully into his presence.
. . . cante jondo is like the trill of birds, the song of a chanticleer, the natural music of the woods and fountain . . . It is a most rare example of primitive song, the oldest in Europe, bearing in its sound the shuddering, raw emotion of the first Eastern races.
And who are these original poets and musicians? Lorca goes on to recognize them explicitly: he says that some of the oldest songs, the virtual stem of the great siguiriyas, “preserve their Arabic and Moorish affiliation.” And later research has proved him right. D.E. Pohren, when he constructed his genealogy—a whole family tree of flamenco singing, guitar, and dancing—noted how a whole set of branches showed strong Arabic influence, among them many of the work songs and songs associated with cities that were some of the strongholds of Al-Andalus. And in his Encyclopedia of Flamenco, he notes other Moorish influences, in forms such as the zambra, which clearly has roots in Muslim music and dance. There are other remarkable sources, which Lorca did not—perhaps dared not—mention. Some flamenco genres, especially the saetas, have Jewish origins. In one of those transcendent ironies found throughout Andalusia, they are songs devoted to Jesus and Mary, and their modern versions are sung principally in the precessions of Semana Santa, the famous celebrations of the Holy Week immediately preceding Easter. Such a musical form, of course, has made no sense for half a millennium but is perfectly sensible when we think of the centuries of the convivencia.
But let us carry on with Lorca’s speech. Here are some passages:
The gypsy siguiriya begins with a terrible cry . . . It is the cry of dead generations, a penetrating elegy for lost centuries, a plaintive evocation of love in a place of uncanny moons and wind.
It is not a matter of coincident sources, it did not reveal itself in one decisive moment, but is formed by an accumulation of historical and secular events here on our peninsula.
And what are these sources? Whence comes the cante jondo? Following the research of Falla, Lorca tells us of three main formative influences:
. . . the adoption by the Spanish church of liturgical chanting, the invasion of the Saracens, and the arrival in Spain of numerous bands of gypsies . . . resulting in a song purely Andalusian.
Lorca goes on to quote Falla on the strange technical properties of cante jondo, which Falla derives, in part, from the Byzantine liturgy:
. . . some Andalusian songs from a period well before the adoption of the Byzantine liturgy by the Spanish church are closely allied to music known today in Morocco, Algiers, and Tunis, music that is called, movingly to any Granadan with a heart, “the music of the Moors of Granada.”
It is already an extraordinary lecture, and Lorca is just getting warmed up. He wants not only to speak in praise of cante jondo. He wants all of Granada to join him:
. . . we must cry out in defense of these pure and truthful songs.
Lorca wants to lead his audience to an art that lives outside official channels, an art with unquenchable life, indispensable to life. In the months surrounding his lecture, he had, on foot, wandered throughout the province of Granada in the company of his childhood friend—Manolo Angeles Ortiz. Together they visited villages and farms, bars and campfires, listening, waiting, searching for the masters of cante jondo, listening to songs in small plazas in the twilight. Manolo Angeles was full of grief, having just lost his wife, who had died a year after giving birth to a daughter, Lorca’s goddaughter. On country roads, he and Lorca sang to one another:
It is deep, truly deep, deeper than any well, deeper than the seas of the world, deeper even than the hearts of those that create it presently and the voices of those who sing it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from a faraway people, crossing beyond the cemetery of the years . . . it comes from the first tear and the first kiss.
It is the song of night . . . it has nothing but night, deep night shot through with stars.
All of these exclamations proceeded from Lorca’s long study of Spanish popular music, the music that could not be extinguished by political power, that survived in the daily life of Andalusians. The poet was a gifted musician and knew hundreds of folksongs by heart. He could sit down at the piano and play and sing for hours. In cante jondo, he found more than music. He found a poetry with the savor of earth, a unity with earth both physical and spiritual.
All the poems of cante jondo show a magnificent pantheism, in dialog with the very earth, air, moon, and seas, with humble violets or rosemary or a bird. The things of the world come into their own and take form energetically in the lyrics.
Lorca, in the months preceding his lecture, had written a first draft of his first major work of verse, called, as we might expect, Poem of the Deep Song. In it he sought to be just such a singer, to compose songs in verse of rare vehemence and strange authority, so as to connect us to Andalusian land and history and to a current of beauty that carries away those who love the region and its people. After a search for the earliest roots of the lyrics that he had, with Falla, studied so intensively, he thought he knew where to look for the poetic sensibility he found there.
Just as in the siguiriya and its derivatives we find ancient elements from the East, so in many lyrics of the cante jondo we find an affinity with the most ancient songs of the East:
When our songs come to the extreme pitch of suffering and love, they match the expressive verse of magnificent Arabic and Persian poets.
And who does Lorca single out among those poets of the east? None other than Hafiz and Omar Khayyam, two of the great Sufi poets of Persia. It is remarkable to contemplate, this impassioned bond proposed by Lorca between some of the greatest mystical poetry in history and the life-giving beauty of cante jondo. It is as if Lorca was reaching back into just the history Spain had turned away from so violently and urging us to examine it once more, urging us to consider what comes of a hard but beautiful unity of cultures, to consider the improbable power of poetry to survive through centuries, even if it must take refuge in taverns and by campfires.
Lorca and Falla worked in company of other aficionados in Granada, all through late 1921 and the winter and spring of 1922 to prepare the Concurso. One week before it was to begin, Lorca, having given his first lecture, now gave his first poetry reading, accompanied by a young guitarist named Andrés Segovia. Thus in that one night in one small room in Granada, the audience had two of the most extraordinary artists in modern Spanish history.
Lorca read poems from his unpublished Poem of the Deep Song, and the force of his joy in the form left his audience enraptured. A local reviewer in the newspaper Defensor de Granada said: “This dreamy young man who is so in love with the beautiful and the sublime will soon be a glory.” Lorca was 23 years old and electric with promise.
The Concurso on June 13 and 14 of 1922 was held in the Alhambra and attracted an extraordinary four thousand people to an open courtyard alongside the palace. Performers came from all over Andalusia, and the two winners were the 72-year-old Diego Bermúdez, who had walked eighty miles to sing, and Manuel Ortega, an 11-year-old who would go on to become one of the great cante jondo singers of the century. The second night of the contest, there was a downpour. Hardly anyone left. The Concurso, first of its kind in Andalusia, was an explosive success noted all over Spain, and in Paris and London as well. It was a brilliant moment in Granada.
During that time, we have a sense of Lorca’s coming into his own. He was irrepressible and bold. He would visit gypsy camps to read his poems in homage to the cante jondo, and the Lorca biographer Leslie Stainton tells us of one such visit:
When he read Poem of Deep Song to one group of gypsies, they were so dazzled by his impassioned performance that afterward they swarmed around him, kissing and hugging him as though he were one of their own.
Lorca took just such risks, trying out his work on strangers and friends. He was a phenomenon, a young man of exotic energy, working up a world of his own. Everywhere he would go in the ensuing years, he found his way to a company of friends with deep gifts of their own. The list is long, dazzling, and we can only touch on a few names: Manuel de Falla, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Luis Cernuda, Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Pablo Neruda, the professor and politician Ferdinand de los Rios, the great actress Margarita Xirgu, the philologist Ramon Menéndez Pidal. It is as if Lorca lived in a force field of great minds. Three of them, Neruda, Aleixandre, and Jimenez, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
When we read the descriptions of Lorca, what moves us is the incandescent life of the man: poet, musician, essayist, playwright, actor, director, producer; incorrigible creator of whimsical, tragic drawings, puppeteer, folksinger, storyteller; and a sensitive, devoted friend. He gave electrifying readings of his verse and experimented with language and form with a restless ebullience. With the production of his play Mariana Pineda in 1927 and the publication of the book of poems Gypsy Ballads in 1928, he became a celebrated figure in Spain. More plays followed, and more travel: New York and then Havana, where the sensuous lifestyle and beautiful companionship gave him what he called later “the happiest days of his life.”
We read of this and remember another element of Lorca’s character: his almost complete lack of pretension. For all his life, he was never Don Señor anything, to anyone. He was just Federico.
In 1931, with the coming to power of the Spanish Republic, Lorca had a chance come momentously his way: to go throughout the Spanish countryside, bringing the life of Spanish classical theater to small villages. The original idea had come from Madrid University, and it was part of the effort of the Republic to reform education nationwide. The idea was to take the plays of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderón de la Barca to plazas and theaters and to perform free of charge, using the best young talent, carrying a portable stage that could be swiftly assembled with basic sets and lighting, and taking everyone with them: not just the players, but the carpenters and electricians, drivers and stage managers. This university theater was known as La Barraca (a country barn or storehouse), since its members hoped to have such a simple structure in Madrid for plays year-round. They never got their permanent venue, but they did elect Lorca their artistic director. He auditioned students, gathered talent, advised on the set and props, arranged music, and brought in help from among the whole community of the arts. And in midsummer 1932, Lorca and the students set out in a caravan: a bus, a couple of vans, a few cars. Reading about it, it is hard to imagine a more utopian initiative: as a public service, to see that brilliant Spanish plays, with vitality and joy, brought something of the whole spectrum of Spanish theatrical imagination to people who had almost no chance of such an experience. Despite the attacks of the ultra-right-wing press of the day and some outright attempts to sabotage the troupe, La Barraca was a rambunctious success, with rapt audiences and celebration among the critics. The most moving story is from the first tour, in the plaza of the tiny village of Almazán, where during the presentation of Calderon’s Life Is a Dream, it began to rain. The players carried on. The audience, mostly peasants, stayed on with them, deeply moved by the play, following every turn of events onstage, clapping and laughing at one or another episode. It is a moment with an uncanny similarity to the second night of the Contest of Deep Song at the Alhambra. Twice in his short life, García Lorca had brought to the people of Spain an art so beautiful that people would sit in the rain to watch, to listen, to understand.
The year of 1933 was fateful for Lorca, for Spain, and for Europe. In Germany, Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Reichstag was set on fire, the Third Reich was proclaimed, and the Gestapo was formed. In Spain, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera established the Falangists, the Spanish fascist party, and elections in Spain brought the right wing back to power after two years of Republican government that, based on the country’s new Constitution, had embraced universal suffrage, separation of church and state, the right to divorce, freedom of worship, heavy investment in education, and other progressive themes. To the extent these hopes had been embodied in law, the new government set about repealing them, or dismantling the effort to enforce the laws. Since Spain lacked a neutral, independent, and efficient civil service—a centerpiece of effective government—the national leaders and legislature could begin, delay, or undo national programs. In 1933, this whipsaw worked again. Lorca, always a man of his time, was drawn into political declarations, and in May, he was the first to sign a protest against the “fascist barbarism” of Hitler, as the Führer consolidated power in Germany with laws targeted against Jews and widespread book burnings. Yet Lorca kept up his writing, and in the spring of that same year, his play Blood Wedding opened under his direction in Madrid and took the city by storm. Not only was it received with joy by the audience, who went so far as to interrupt the play twice to salute Lorca personally with their applause, but the critics, one after another, lauded the depth of the work and the beauty of its language. There were immediate plans to move the production across the sea to Buenos Aires; venues were found, dates were set, and Lorca set off for Argentina. Blood Wedding opened in Buenos Aires to widespread public acclamation. A few months later, another play of his, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, opened to more acclaim. Lorca’s life there was hyperactive, a wild variety of theatrical responsibilities, lectures, readings, parties, and interviews. He became, for months, the central phenomenon of the city. The great Chilean poet and future Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, who formed his friendship with Lorca during that visit, called it “the greatest triumph ever achieved by a writer of our race.” Remembering those times years later in his autobiography, Neruda said that Lorca was
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, in his hands a prank became a work of art. I have never seen such magnetism and constructiveness in a human being.
Lorca had become, at age 35, one of the most celebrated writers in the Hispanic world. In Spain, he had a rare sense of the complex splendor of his country’s heritage, a sense derived from his homeland in Granada, his study of Arab and Persian poetry, and his immersion in flamenco. Upon his return to Spain in early 1934, he took up with vigor all his projects. He handed out versions of the poems in his unpublished book Diwan of the Tamerit, meant in tribute to the Arab poets in Granada before the coming of Ferdinand and Isabel. He finished his play “Yerma” and wrote the unforgettable elegy “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” after that Andalusian bullfighter—a friend of Lorca and aficionado of flamenco—was gored to death by a bull that summer. He kept up some oversight of La Barraca, which performed in Seville and still toured the country to excellent critical reviews, though it was under attack in the right-wing press as a band of promiscuous youths who perverted the peasants with, among other terrible defects, their “obedience to the dictates of Jewish Marxism.” However absurd these taunts were, they took their toll, and the funds available for La Barraca began to dwindle.
In 1935, he moved forward with a host of projects. At one point early in the year, he had three plays in Madrid showing at once: Yerma, the imported Buenos Aires production of Blood Wedding, and a revival of The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife. It was also the year of the first performance of Doña Rosita the Spinster, which is set in our very own Albayzín. Lorca was incorrigibly a man of Granada, and within Granada, of the Albayzín. Not only did he write about the barrio, he visited there often and loved the carmenes. He knew the way their beauty could transform daily life, felt the simmering of paradise in the gardens there, with the radiant presence of the Alhambra on the promontory just above. He wrote to a friend, “I love Granada but only to live there on another plane, in a carmen. The rest is nonsense. In a carmen, close to what one loves and feels. White walls, flowering myrtle, and fountain.”
As is the case so often in Lorca’s work, the dream of love in a place of beauty turns into a nightmare of grief and betrayal. Though Doña Rosita the Spinster is full of flowers, they come to signify not the trustworthy unfolding of mind and senses, an intimation of paradise, but instead the withering away of the life of a beautiful young woman. Doña Rosita is caged by the social and religious conventions of the time and by the rigor of her own self-deception. It was a common theme of Lorca’s: the way, even among the most promising and powerful beauties, human dishonesty, treachery, and self-delusion can corrupt love, so that the living die within before dying in the body. Doña Rosita’s fiancé is called to Argentina to work with his father on the land. She waits for him to return, to take up the only life in the society of the day open to her: as a Catholic wife. The years pass; Rosita works on her wedding clothes, a nightdress, sheets. More years pass as she awaits the man who called her his “nightingale on the mountain,” who pledged to return to her “in a boat all of gold” with “sails of jubilation.” His arrival, he has told her, will be marked by the “bright dove of my faith.” He promises “by the diamonds of God” to return to her.
He does not return. He observes the convention of letter writing, and he marries someone else, a rich woman he courted in Argentina. Rosita is left with nothing, since women, by the Catholic and cultural standards of late-nineteenth-century Granada, had no other options left. The carmen is sold to pay debts incurred to pay for flowers in the garden. Rosita, her aunt, and a housekeeper leave the house at night, in the rain, glad that no one will see their destitution and shame. It is the Albayzín of futility and social oppression, and it strikes a theme common in Lorca’s plays: women destroyed by the society of their times and paralyzed within a delusion encouraged by that society. Rosita has so many virtues: she is brave, loyal, devoted, and holds virtuously to the one chance given her. But she is imprisoned in a definition of virtue that limits her chances at life and at love. It might be called lethal virtue.
The analogy, of course, is with the way Lorca, as a homosexual, had to live in a society that forbid him an honest life and the love he sought. Catholic Spain was violently contemptuous of same-sex love. Those rare periods in his life when we see Lorca happy are in places such as distant and sensual Havana, where it seems the poet was more at liberty to love as he chose. In Spain, whatever his liaisons in any other country, he was passionate about the young and handsome Rafael Rodriquez Rapún, and one of the few open conversations Lorca had with anyone about his sexuality was in Barcelona, when he thought Rapún might have left him for a gypsy woman. He failed to appear at a rehearsal of Blood Wedding. The director of the play found him, shattered, alone in a café. He told the director, Rivas Cherif, that “My flesh, my blood, my entire body and soul have been betrayed.” Saying that he had been attracted to men since childhood, he tells Cherif that he has “never known a woman.” And when challenged by the heterosexual Cherif, Lorca cries out for liberty: “Normality is neither your way of knowing only women, nor mine. What’s normal is love without limits.” Lorca says he seeks “a new morality, a morality of complete freedom.” A society that values love as defined by Catholic tradition of dominant males, with procreation the primary duty of females, he turns away from: “With my way, there is no misrepresentation. Both partners remain as they are, without bartering. No one gives orders; no one dominates; there is no submission. There is no assigning of roles . . . There is only abandon and mutual enjoyment.”
It was a conversation concealed by Rivas Cherif for more than twenty years. But Lorca’s poetry cries out against tyranny of every kind, whether it be the suffocation of women in gender roles or a brutish morality bound to power and social control. Lorca warns us of the suffering fated for any society that denies its own history and our common need for the freedom to learn, to love, and to live by bonds of respect, honesty, and goodwill.
Granada, by Lorca’s reckoning, had known its share of tyranny. And yet Granada and the Albayzín, with their deep art and Moorish glamor, their flamenco and their brilliant history of Arabic and Jewish poetry, were the places Lorca loved most on earth. In his poetry and letters and in his conversation, he identified himself, his poetry, and his sense of beauty with Granada. Yet this was the city of the triumph of Ferdinand and Isabel, their conscripted Catholic church, and the power of the Inquisition. What must Lorca have thought of all this? In the years of 1935 and 1936, he said clearly what he thought. In a famous, and at the time infamous, newspaper interview with El Sol, in Madrid, on June 10, 1936, he spoke of the fall of Granada to Ferdinand and Isabel as:
. . . a disastrous event, even though they say just the opposite in schools. An admirable civilization was lost, and a poetry, astronomy, architecture, and sensitivity unique in the world—all were lost, to give way to an impoverished, cowed city . . .
It was a brave, accurate, and desperate statement, this bitter criticism of popular opinion and assumption. Yet it was true to his work and his experience. Lorca was Granada’s most celebrated native son. His family had deep roots there, and Lorca had many cherished friends and colleagues in the city. In the newspapers there, his words and actions, and even his travels, were closely followed. And yet, among some in the city, he was known as “el maricón con la pajarita”—“the fag with the bow tie.”
In the months before the interview, Spain had been in torment. The narrow victory of the Popular Front, a coalition of leftist parties, had in February of 1936 given them, because of the way the votes translated into parliamentary seats, a strong majority of 267 to 132 in the Cortes—the sole governing legislative body in Spain. This in turn strengthened the power of Primo de Rivera’s Falange, which gained support throughout the country, increasing in membership and organizing violent confrontations where possible. The country began to slide toward the agony of civil war, with the population urged in melodramatic and inflammatory terms to choose between communism and fascism, as if those were the only two ways forward. In the meantime, Lorca continued to write and told a friend he had another five books of poetry now ready for publication—an astonishing total. He gave a reading to the Madrid Worker’s Club and joined organizations that fought against dictatorships in the Americas and in Portugal. His ideals were equality and personal freedom, informed by the blessed power and consolations of art. He would say in his last interview:
I am totally Spanish, and it would be impossible for me to live outside my geographical boundaries . . . I am a brother to all men, and I detest the person who sacrifices himself to an abstract, nationalist ideal just because he loves his country with a blindfold over his eyes . . . I express Spain in my work and feel her in the very marrow of my bones; but first and foremost I am a cosmopolitan and a brother to all.
As the months of 1936 unrolled, there were anarchist and communist strikes, resurgent violence and provocations on the right and left, and ominous rumors of a military uprising against the Republic, which after all was the elected government of the Spanish people. Lorca was depressed, confused, erratic, moody. And even all these years later, we have, in July of 1936, the sense of a fuse being lit and burning down to one fateful decision after another, burning down to darkness.
Lorca had promised Margarita Xirgu that he would go to Mexico for the staging of his plays. Early in July, Lorca had a ticket in his pocket and made plans to say goodbye to his family in Granada. On July 11, 1936, he dined with Pablo Neruda and other friends at Neruda’s flat. A rightist there, Augustín de Foxá, told him flatly not to go to Granada. Luis Buñuel was there. He, as well, urged Lorca not to go to Granada. On July 13, Lorca boarded the train for Granada. All three newspapers in the city announced his arrival. The presumption was that he was still bound for Mexico. On July 14, he was with his family in the family compound he loved, the Huerta de San Vicente, just west of Granada. In the next few days, he was already back in his cherished Albayzín, in a carmen, reading a new play to his friends. The Civil War began on July 17 with the fascist rebel announcement from Morocco by General Franco. Seville fell to the fascists almost immediately, and the military in Granada declared for the rebels and took control of the city on July 20; took control, that is, except for the Albayzín, which held out for three days. There were widespread arrests in the city, beatings, torture, and summary executions. The executions took place every day directly behind the Alhambra. Granada was coiling with violence. The mayor of the city, Lorca’s brother-in-law, was arrested.
Two and a half weeks passed. The repression intensified, and the summer turned to blood sport. On August 7, the city’s chief architect arrived at the Huerta. His name was Alfredo Rodriquez Orgaz, and he was a hunted man. Lorca’s father, a prosperous landowner sympathetic to the Republic, offered him passage to safety behind Republican lines. Lorca could easily have accompanied him. He would have been guided by farm workers loyal to his family. Orgaz escaped that night. Lorca chose not to go.
On August 9, a group of conservative local landowners came to the Huerta in search of the brothers of the caretaker of the Lorca family property, a man named Gabriel Perea. The brothers were wanted on trumped-up charges. Gabriel was tied to a tree and whipped. Lorca went to intervene and was knocked to the ground. The intruder knew the poet, kicked him, and called out: “It’s the little fag . . .” And they told him he was under house arrest.
Lorca was now terrified. He telephoned the young poet Luis Rosales, whom he had seen often in Madrid. Luis had joined the Falangists, more out of convenience than conviction. And he had two older brothers who were key players in the fascist cabal who now ruled Granada. The whole family admired Lorca, including the father, Miguel, a prosperous merchant whose stores were in the heart of the city. Luis came straight to the Huerta to help decide how to keep Lorca safe. Luis suggested immediate flight to the Republican zone. It would have been straightforward. Luis himself had arranged for the escape of other men from the city. Lorca refused. Luis suggested refuge in the carmen of Manuel de Falla, a devout Catholic, the most celebrated composer in Spain and an international figure. It was hard to imagine anyone violating Falla’s house. And the composer had felt a close bond with Lorca, since their work together on the Concurso de Cante Jondo fifteen years earlier. Lorca was unwilling to ask such a favor of Falla. Instead, he chose for refuge the Rosaleses’ house, in the center of Granada, a few blocks away from the command center of the fascist military that now controlled the city. And there he went, the same night.
The next day, August 10, Lorca settled in nervously at the house of the Rosaleses. Every day, he read notices in Ideal, a local newspaper, of more executions behind the Alhambra. He took time to study in the library, finding a medieval Spanish poet who enchanted him and whose verses he read aloud to the family. He thought of a poem to be composed with Luis, in honor of all those fallen in the Civil War. On August 15, men arrived at the Huerta with a warrant for his arrest. They forced from the poet’s family his place of refuge. It was only a matter of hours before they would come for him. The Rosaleses immediately suggested, again, refuge with Manuel Falla. It seemed Lorca was considering it.
On the morning of August 16, a fascist firing squad executed Lorca’s brother-in-law, whose only crime was being mayor of the city. Lorca was informed immediately. That afternoon, police and military forces swarmed around the Rosaleses’ house, occupying the block, watching from rooftops, taking up positions in the Plaza de la Trinidad. Esperanza Rosales, the matriarch of the family, refused to surrender him. She was told that Lorca was to be arrested “for what he had written.” After further confrontation, two of the Rosales brothers, Miguel and Luis, walked outside with the poet and went with him to the civil government building. There, Lorca was locked up. But Miguel assured Lorca nothing would happen to him.
José Rosales, one of the leading fascists in Granada, now arrived back in the city from his military duties in the Vega. He was furious that Lorca had been taken. He entered by force into the office of the military governor, Commandant Valdés Guzman, to confront him. Valdés had a written accusation against Lorca, full of idiotic and fraudulent charges, among them that Lorca was in contact with the Russians via a secret radio transmitter at the Huerta de San Vincente. So far as is known, only one fact in the accusation was true: that Lorca was homosexual. Rosales, determined to free Lorca, went to see him in his cell and assured him he would be back in the morning to take him to safety. With the help of a lawyer who was the head of the Granada Falange, Rosales wrote a statement explaining why they thought Lorca should be protected and why they had sheltered him in their own house. For they knew, now, that they were themselves in danger. The statement was distributed among rebel command posts, and the next morning, August 17, Jose Rosales had in his hands an order from the military command for Lorca’s release. He went straight back to Guzman. Guzman told him that Lorca had already been taken away. But he had not. He was still in his cell that morning, and the whole day of the 17. On that same day, if not the day before, Lorca’s mother went to see Emilia Llanos, who lived at the base of the Albayzín. She begged Emilia to intercede with Manuel de Falla so that Lorca could be set free. Emilia set off at once to the Fallas’ carmen, but on the ascent was told by someone in the street that Lorca had already been killed. In despair, she abandoned her effort to see Falla.
At around three in the morning of August 18, Lorca was taken away in the company of a schoolteacher, Galindo González, who had a wooden leg. They were driven up above the city, just outside of the village of Viznar. There, they were taken into a building converted from a summer center for children into a military prison. First they were told they were to be assigned to work building roads. Then they were told they were to be killed. Shortly thereafter, Lorca, the schoolteacher, and two bullfighters arrested in the Albayzín were taken along a road toward Aynadamar, the source of water for the Albayzín, whose name in Arabic means “the Fountain of Tears.” There, at about 4:45 AM, just at first light, Lorca, the schoolteacher, and the matadors were shot to death. One of the executioners said that Lorca got special treatment: “two bullets in the ass for being a queer.”
On that same morning of August 18, Manuel de Falla, who knew that Lorca had been arrested, bestirred himself at last and went to the government building in Granada to help the poet. He was a few hours too late.
Not even Sophocles could have set down a design of such fateful malevolence. If Lorca had gone to Mexico as he had planned, if he had listened to his friends and not boarded the train to Granada, if he had escaped to the Republican zone with Orgaz, if he had escaped with the help of Luis Rosales, if he had taken refuge with Falla, if the Rosaleses could have protected him as they thought they could, if the military order for his release would have been honored, if Jose Rosales would have confirmed that Lorca was still in his cell, if someone had not lied to Emilia Llanos in the street, if Manuel de Falla had intervened a day earlier, if the rebels in Granada had not despised Lorca . . . if, if, if . . .
The work of García Lorca was banned in Spain for a generation.
His death was one of hundreds of thousands, and it has come to stand for the irreparable loss to Spain and to the world, of so many, with such molten hatred, in a gaudy saturnalia of violence, as civil war gave way to the rebel takeover of the country.