Lorca Read online

  Lorca

  Leslie Stainton

  For my parents

  ANN SCARLETT PETTIGREW STAINTON

  and

  WILLIAM WHITFIELD STAINTON

  I remember a certain thunderstorm when we were young. The two of us were walking from Valderrubio to Fuente Vaqueros, and all of a sudden, without our even noticing it, a storm came up. Halfway between the two villages, as we were going through the tall poplars that border the Cubillas, day turned to night. The fields were deserted and silent. A few heavy raindrops fell, and the wind began to rock the trees. Then, suddenly, there was a dry, formidable clap of thunder. An unsaddled runaway horse almost ran over us. Then came another more distant clap and the typical odor of ozone. Federico ran over to me, his face pallid, and told me that his cheek was burning. He said he had been touched by a spark of the lightning, which had, in fact, been blindingly bright. I drew near him, looked at his cheek, calmed him down, and we began our return in silence.

  Francisco García Lorca,

  In the Green Morning: Memories of Federico

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 Fountains 1898-1905

  2 New Worlds 1905-15

  3 Young Spaniard 1915-16

  4 Crucible 1917-18

  5 Debut 1918-20

  6 Portrait of Youth 1920-21

  7 Falla 1921-23

  8 Garden of Possibilities 1923-24

  9 Dalí 1924-25

  10 Incorrigible Poet 1926-27

  11 Celebrity 1927

  12 Madness of Breeze and Trill 1928

  13 Rain from the Stars 1928-29

  14 New World 1929-1930

  15 Spanish America 1930

  16 Audience 1930-31

  17 Republic 1931

  18 A People’s Theater 1931-32

  19 Applause and Glory 1932-33

  20 Voice of Love 1933

  21 Our America 1933-34

  22 Sad Breeze in the Olive Groves 1934

  23 Revolution 1934-35

  24 Theater of Poets 1935

  25 To Enter into the Soul of the People 1935

  26 The Dream of Life 1936

  27 Fountain 1936

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Plate Section

  Abbreviations

  Bibliography

  Notes

  A Note on the Author

  Prologue

  1918

  On the evening of March 17, 1918, four days before the German army launched its final assault on the Western Front, Federico García Lorca, a nineteen-year-old university student, stood before a small crowd of friends in the Arts Center of Granada, Spain. He was of average height and weight, with pitch-black hair and mournful eyes. A smattering of moles sprinkled his face. His clothes hung awkwardly from his shoulders.

  He had agreed to read that night from his forthcoming book, Impressions and Landscapes, a prose account of his travels through Spain with one of his professors and a group of fellow students. It was his first public recital. For months he had been reading his poetry and prose to friends as they sat together in local cafés. He carried copies of his work on folded slips of paper in his pockets, even though he knew much of it by heart. But he had never given a formal reading of his work before now.

  He was uncertain about the book—his first. In a prologue to the volume he described Impressions and Landscapes as “just one more flower in the poor garden of provincial literature.” He feared readers would laugh at the work or, worse, ignore it. Within a month of its publication he confessed to a friend that he thought his new book was “very bad.”

  But that evening in the Arts Center, the audience applauded him warmly, and the following day, two local newspapers published favorable reviews of his recital. The Defensor de Granada announced that Impressions and Landscapes revealed “a most vigorous literary temperament.” The Noticiero Granadino predicted that the book was merely a “prologue” to greater work.

  Two weeks later, Lorca received his first copy of the 264-page paperbound volume. He found the experience of publication oddly disappointing. Once a book “hits the streets it’s not mine anymore, it belongs to everyone,” he said. That evening, he marked the arrival of his book by drafting a five-page poem entitled “Vision,” a melancholy work about youth and love, one of dozens he would write that spring. Midway through the poem he asked, “What will become of my passion?” On the final page of the manuscript, almost as an afterthought, he wrote, “April 3, 1918. Night of my book.”

  The Armistice was still seven months away. During its final offensives, between March and November of 1918, the German army sustained nearly one million casualties. On even a quiet day on the Western Front, hundreds of German and Allied soldiers lost their lives. A total of nine million men died in uniform during the four years of the Great War—one in eight of those who served. Another eighteen million were wounded. Throughout Europe, veterans of the war returned home blind, limbless, gassed, or as “scar throats”—men whose faces were so crudely disfigured by wounds that sometimes even their own families could not recognize them.

  Lorca hated war. He hated the nationalistic sentiments that gave rise to it. “In a century of zeppelins and stupid deaths,” he told a friend in the spring of 1918, “I sob before my piano, dreaming in a Handelian mist, and I create verses very much my own, singing the same to Christ as to Buddha, to Muhammad, and to Pan.” Humanity was his only concern. “Why fight against the flesh when the terrifying problem of the spirit exists?”

  At home, his family supported the Allies. Although Spain was officially neutral, people across the country took sides in the conflict according to their political and religious beliefs. Spanish newspapers were filled with accounts of the fighting. On June 5, 1918, Lorca’s twentieth birthday, the Defensor de Granada described a battle that had raged the previous night between German and French troops along the Aisne river, some sixty miles east of Paris. The paper also reported on the victims of “shell shock” who were allegedly subject to “barbarous” treatment in German military hospitals.

  The carnage of World War I moved Lorca to denounce patriotism as “one of humanity’s greatest crimes.” In elementary school, he had been taught to love his country unreservedly, and to honor its military and political heroes. As he remembered it, his teacher, a gloomy man who struck his pupils’ hands with a cane whenever they misbehaved, talked repeatedly about the virtues of war and the glories of the Spanish Inquisition. Pounding his chest with his hand, he reminded Lorca and his classmates that Spain was their “second mother. As good sons, you must be willing to give her your last drop of blood.” In his teens, Lorca recoiled at the memory of these exchanges: “Instead of teaching us to love one another and help each other in our sorrow, they teach us the deplorable history of our countries, which are steeped in hatred and blood.”

  Late at night, while his family slept, he composed long, prayerlike treatises calling for peace and love. Often he worked until morning. He had made his first strides “toward the good of literature,” as he phrased it, in 1916, at eighteen. Since then he had filled hundreds of pages with his haphazard scrawl. He wrote on whatever was handy—the margins of books, leftover voting ballots, his father’s calling cards, his brother’s high school drawings. Sometimes he drafted as many as five poems in a single night. At the end of some compositions, as though weighing their merit for publication, he jotted the word “Good.” He stored his work in a wooden box beneath his bed.

  He thought of himself as a passionate “romantic,” an iconoclast who refused to conform to what society expected of him. He often neglected to comb his hair, and he wore unfashionably long cravats and patched trousers. He dreamt of becoming a writer. He persuaded his father, a wealthy landowner who was inherently skeptical about su
ch things, to pay for the publication of his first book. At the end of Impressions and Landscapes, Lorca listed his forthcoming books. They included a poetry collection of “eulogies and songs,” a series of “mystical writings,” and a hybrid work about a lovesick monk, “Friar Antonio (Strange Poem).”

  To a friend he acknowledged that Impressions and Landscapes “contains only a great emotion that flows from my sadness, and the ache I feel in the presence of Nature.” He thought the book mediocre. For a time after its publication he continued to give copies to friends and acquaintances. But eventually he retrieved all the unsold volumes from Granada’s bookshops and piled them in his family’s attic. He later claimed to have burnt them.

  He expected to fail. “There is within me an ideal so lofty that I will never achieve it. And I mean never,” he wrote, “because I have a cruel and deadly enemy—society.” Society was responsible for the slaughter in the trenches of France. Society was to blame for history’s darkest crime, the murder of Jesus Christ, “who filled the world with poetry!” More particularly, Spanish society was to blame for the ignorance and bigotry that surrounded Lorca in Granada. Spain was “a desert where great ideas die,” a “soulless” nation that turned its back on “the Christs” who sought to redeem it. At times, Lorca saw himself as a twentieth-century Don Quixote, consumed by insatiable passions. In such an enormous world, he wondered, would anyone be able to see the goodness in his heart?

  1

  Fountains

  1898-1905

  In the confusion of adolescence, Lorca turned to the past for clarity. At nineteen, he drafted “My Village,” a prose account of his daily life as a boy in rural Spain. He described the narrative as “the vague remembrance of my crystalline soul.”

  He recalled his childhood as a time of pure, unambiguous emotion, free from the destructive powers of politics and time. In childhood, his parents had loved him unconditionally. Each morning before dawn, his father had come into the room where Federico and his brother and sister slept, and gently kissed their faces. “There was a trembling at his mouth and a brightness in his eyes,” Lorca remembered. “Back then I laughed to see the expression on his face. Today I think I would weep.” His father then tiptoed off and rode out to his fields for the day. Shortly afterward, Lorca’s mother would stride into the room and, with a brisk “May the grace of God enter,” open the shuttered windows, cross herself, and lead her children in prayer.

  They lived in a white house in the center of the village of Fuente Vaqueros, some ten miles from Granada and thirty miles from the Mediterranean, in the heart of Andalusian Spain. The town had fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. It was built over deep underground springs and flanked by two rivers, the Cubillas and the Genii. Water poured from a fountain in the center of the village and coursed through an elaborate web of irrigation channels in the surrounding countryside. To Federico, it seemed that each morning the moisture in the air “kissed” all the houses and cloaked the village in a cold, silver gauze. Water had given the town its name: Fuente Vaqueros, “Fountain of the Cattlemen.” Or simply “la Fuente,” “the Fountain.”

  His home was spacious for its day, and far more comfortably appointed than most other houses in the village. Lorca was acutely aware of the difference between his family’s standard of living and that of his neighbors. His family’s house had tiled floors and beamed ceilings. By contrast, one of his friends, a young blond girl, lived in a house with dirt floors and reed ceilings. On wash days Federico was not allowed to visit the girl and her family, because they were “naked and stiff with cold, washing their rags, the only ones they owned.” When he thought of all the “clean, fragrant clothes” hanging in his wardrobe at home, he felt “a cold weight” in his heart.

  His father, Federico García Rodríguez, one of the richest men in the village, owned hundreds of acres of farmland in and around Fuente Vaqueros. A large man with a thick, coppery face and a broad smile, Don Federico began each workday with a shot of brandy and a cigar at the local café while the sun was still rising. As he sat at the table, he often talked to himself and occasionally laughed out loud. He had grown rich farming sugar beets in the wake of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent loss of the Cuban sugar crop, and each season hired dozens of men to work in his fields. But unlike other landowners in the region—most of them absentee landlords who left the administration of their property up to their agents, or caciques, who controlled local employment and ensured political calm—Don Federico lived in town and looked after his own land. His generosity to his workers was fabled. He always took on extra men when he knew they needed a job, and he kept some hands all year round.

  Lorca adored his father. He loved his mother, too. She was well-read and refined, and from her, he said, he acquired “intelligence.” But he was closest in temperament and looks to his father. Both men had round faces, coarse features, and dense black eyebrows. Both loved music. His mother bragged that before Federico was able to talk, he could hum popular tunes. He learned many of them from his father, who played the guitar at night while his family sang. It was his father, Lorca said later, who gave him his “passion.”

  A blunt, jocular man with a cigar-stained mustache and fingers, Don Federico García Rodríguez was, according to his son Federico, a “farmer, a rich man, an entrepreneur, and a good horseman.” He was born in Fuente Vaqueros in 1859 and lived in the town for the first forty years of his life. He was the oldest son of Enrique García Rodríguez, a modest landowner, and his wife, Isabel, both of whom enjoyed long-standing ties to the region. The couple had nine children. The Garcías were comfortable but not rich, bright but informally schooled. Unusual for that time and place, all nine of Enrique García’s children knew how to read, as did their parents, and all, thanks to their father, learned to play the guitar.

  In 1880, at age twenty-one, Federico García Rodríguez married for the first time. His bride was Matilde Palacios Ríos, then twenty, the daughter of a neighboring landowner whose wealth far surpassed Enrique García’s simple holdings. Upon his marriage, Don Federico’s fortunes prospered. He obtained a house in the center of Fuente Vaqueros, on Calle Trinidad, went to work for his father-in-law, and began purchasing farmland of his own. He became town clerk of Fuente Vaqueros, a post both his father and grandfather had held. In 1891, at the age of thirty-two, he was elected municipal judge by the town council, a position contingent upon its occupant’s social, moral, and economic standing.

  But his life was marred by loss: the deaths of his father and of Matilde’s parents in the early 1890s, the fact that he and Matilde remained childless. In the fall of 1894, six days after her mother’s death, Matilde Palacios died from a sudden illness. The previous day, from her bed in the white house in Fuente Vaqueros where she and her husband had lived for fourteen years, she dictated her last will and testament. In it she ordered that the whole of her estate, save a token bequest to a maid and the inheritance due her sister, be left to her thirty-five-year-old husband, Federico García Rodríguez. His wealth was assured. Within months of his wife’s death, Don Federico had purchased a second home in Fuente Vaqueros, thirty-five acres of farmland outside the neighboring village of Asquerosa, and a sizable new home in the center of Asquerosa. If to his first marriage he had brought “only the clothes on his back”—as the wording in Matilde’s will quaintly phrased it—to his second marriage he brought considerable property and wealth.

  Three years after Matilde’s death, Don Federico chose as his new bride a soft-spoken young woman named Vicenta Lorca, who worked as a schoolteacher in Fuente Vaqueros. At first his family questioned the match, judging Vicenta neither rich nor particularly talented. But her quick mind and gentle ways appealed to Don Federico. The first time he approached the window of her home in Fuente Vaqueros and began to speak to her through its grille, as was the custom in village courtship, he was smitten. “Vicenta,” he exclaimed, “you talk just like a book.” From that moment on he tried to polish his own rough speech in her presence. />
  Nothing she had known in her brief, difficult life could have prepared Vicenta Lorca for the prosperity she would enjoy as the wife of Federico García Rodríguez. She was a Granadan by birth, and something of that city’s melancholy had settled in her eyes—or perhaps it was the strain of poverty that had quietly left its mark on her face. Her father died one month before Vicenta’s birth on July 25, 1870. She grew up an only child in her mother’s care, dependent on family charity for her existence. By the time she was thirteen, Vicenta and her mother had lived in four different homes in Granada, each belonging to some relation.

  At thirteen, she was sent to a convent school for poor children. The experience horrified her. Behind cloistered walls the nuns bickered among themselves and forced the child to eat food she loathed. The sisters’ piety was more than offset by the envy and rancor with which they treated one another and their charges. Vicenta Lorca never forgot the ugliness she saw in the convent, and although she remained a devout Catholic throughout her life, she avoided any show of zealotry.

  She spent five years with the nuns, then several more years in Granada training to be a schoolteacher—one of the few jobs, besides motherhood, then available to women. She worked hard at her studies and graduated with glowing marks as a licensed maestra of elementary education. Her first and only job sent her ten miles away, to the girls’ primary school in Fuente Vaqueros. The salary was meager, and the village a far cry from her cherished Granada, but Vicenta dutifully packed her belongings and moved to the countryside with her mother to begin her career. By the age of twenty-two she was installed as a professor of primary instruction in Fuente Vaqueros.

  Her relative good fortune lasted little more than a year. In the fall of 1893, her mother suddenly died. Vicenta was inconsolable. Time did little to blunt her grief. Years later she could still remember the desperation of those days, and with the candor that often characterized her words, she told a niece, “After all that struggle and effort, I finally got my degree, and then what happened? My mother died.” Four years later Vicenta Lorca became the bride of Federico García Rodríguez.