A few weeks ago, before Semana Santa (Holy Week), I had a
class fieldtrip to the Parque Federico García Lorca to visit Lorca’s family’s
summer home in Granada, which is still preserved exactly as it was, there in
what is now the park. (The regular, non-summer home of the family, by the way,
was located a fifteen-minute walk away--though back then it was the difference between the city and the wilderness--where El Corte Inglés, a
huge Spanish department store chain, is now.)
The house is generously-proportioned, two or maybe three
storeys high, and painted white on the outside. Only guided tours are allowed.
I was a little nervous about the timing of our field trip, which started at 5;
I had to leave to go to class at the far-off Universidad de Granada-Filosofía
y Letras campus at 6:30. But it’s just a one-family house; the tour couldn’t
take that long, could it?
It did, in fact. I suspected as much as soon as our tour
guide opened her mouth: she was a talker. But although I started getting very
(excessively) anxious about the timing of it all, I needn’t have worried; we got
done just in time for me to start my hike up the high hill to Cartuja.
Highlights of the house included its furniture, which was
all original, including the beautiful cherry-stained piano (Lorca’s personal),
which apparently lots of celebrity musicians have played on over the years
during their visits to Granada; the framed drawings and paintings, some by
Lorca, who liked to doodle, and some by Dalí, a great friend during their
college years; and some original family photos.
~~~~~
Then, yesterday, we had our class’ final ‘excursión’ to Víznar,
site of Lorca’s untimely death.
We took a bus a good twenty minutes out of the city, winding
up into the hills that surround Granada. It was exquisitely picturesque: a
perfect Mediterranean landscape, stark and scrubby, of the kind you find on Grecian islands, filled in
with whitewashed, red-tiled Spanish villas.
We left the main road after a while, climbing up the
hillside, winding our way through smaller and smaller towns until we were on a
curving, one-lane narrow road, donkeys and horses to one side, dusty, sleeping
dogs to the other.
Our driver finally parked on the side of the road and we
got out. Our teacher had previously described Víznar to us as an isolated forest, and my mental image of dense, dark woods didn’t match up with the thin,
light-filled pine grove on the side of an otherwise almost bare
hillside that it turned out to be. Rocky soil, dry and dusty, it looked like a
strand of pines that you could have found in California.
There was a little sign denoting the place as a historical
monument, and a few dirt trails, all leading upwards. We paused there and our teacher filled us in on the details:
Well before the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Lorca
had achieved his status as a world-famous celebrity of a writer. (Borges, by
the way, who couldn’t stand Lorca—although the feeling wasn’t as strongly
returned by the other—had this to say about him: “He is a
professional Andalusian.”)
He had also drawn the attention of the country’s
growing Fascist faction, who perceived threatening political undertones in some
of his works. Yerma, for example,
which would be his last play, had dangerously subversive themes of, oh, I don’t know, yearning for freedom. Despite what the Fascists
thought about him, though, scholars still disagree about how staunch of a
Republican Lorca actually was: he had friends on both sides, and, though
decidedly liberal, didn’t seem to so overtly champion the cause—certainly not in
the way, for example, that Picasso did with Guernica.
The coup d’état that launched the war took place just three
days before Lorca had planned on traveling out of the country (he had postponed
his journey to be able to celebrate his Saint’s Day with his family at home in
Granada). The situation escalated very quickly, and Lorca suddenly felt himself
under scrutiny and unsafe. He had disturbing dreams he was looking down at his
own dead body.
One day, a few weeks after the coup, some members of the guardia civil came knocking at the
García Lorca house to take away some young men who worked for the family whom the police accused of killing a Fascist soldier. Lorca, who was there when the
police arrived, stepped in to defend the men, and was told ‘we’re taking them
with us, and when we come back, we’re taking you, too.’
Lorca, terrified, immediately fled. One of his best friends
since boyhood was a higher-up in the Fascist ranks, and Lorca knew he could
count on him for protection. He stayed in hiding at his friend’s house for nine
days, until someone betrayed him to the police, and then they came for him and
took him away.
He was taken to a secret prison (his family had no idea of
his whereabouts), and although his ever-loyal maid was able to find him and
smuggle him some money, which he hoped he could use to buy his freedom, it was
to no avail. They came for him, along with three other prisoners, and
led them on foot all through the moonless night out of Granada and up into the
mountains, to Víznar.
There in the forest was a detainment center where the prisoners
waited to be killed. They were always kept busy, digging the holes that would serve
as the mass graves after the next round of executions were carried out.
Not long after his arrival, Lorca and the three men he’d
arrived with were led out and shot from behind, then buried together,
disappearing into the anonymous earth.
(One fact which became important later was that one of the
men Lorca was buried with, a schoolteacher, had only one leg. More on that a
little later.)
Lorca was the first poet to be sacrificed for his beliefs in the war, and became a martyr-figure for the Loyalist side. It’s a tragic story.
Lorca’s family had been searching for him for a month,
completely unaware of his fate, before they found out he’d been killed. Lorca’s
father, quite rich, tried everything he could to find out where exactly his son had been
buried, to try to reclaim his body, at least. The official story holds that he
never did get his answer. The rumors that grow with time, however (and which my teacher herself believes), contend that
he was able to bribe some soldier
into giving him his son’s bones, and that the family took them to America with
them when they moved soon after.
This second version of events might help explain why the
García Lorca family was so resistant through the years, in the eighties and
beyond, when Franco started recognizing Lorca once more as a great Spanish
author (during the war, there was an absolute moratorium on his name, and all
his books had to be either burned or tightly hidden away) and started
permitting investigations into his final whereabouts. Lorca's family was staunchly against any efforts to locate and exhume his body. They
claimed his spirit was in his writings, not in his physical remains, and they
wanted to leave things as they were. The rumor whisperers suggest the family took this attitude
because they didn’t want it to be discovered that they had, in fact, retrieved
his body some years before. (A large constituency of Lorca’s supporters and
devoted followers would have felt very angry and betrayed should the truth have come to light.)
Whatever the reasons behind their reticence, the García
Lorca family found themselves in the middle of
controversy when the family of
the schoolteacher with whom Lorca had been buried (remember, the
distinctively-bodied man with one leg) decided that they did want to try to
recover their own family member’s remains. Were they to be successful, Lorca’s
body (or the lack thereof) would have been unavoidably discovered as well. After
a good deal of heated arguments between the two families, the García Lorca
family finally relented and allowed the search to take place—but it yielded
nothing.
There with my class, we walked up the trail a little bit until we came to a clearing. In a recessed area a cross had been formed out of
dusty, planted flowers, and there was a headstone: “LORCA ERAN TODOS” (“They
were all Lorca”). Scattered around nearby were various plaques recognizing
certain people, or incidences of killings (one recognized the fourteen women,
mostly maids, who had been led out of a building and shot all together). There
were also two other plaques, set at a distance from each other, commemorating Lorca with
two fragments from one of his poems, Preludio
(Prelude) (translation mine):
10 El viento está amortajado 1st The wind is shrouded
a
lo largo bajo el cielo. stretching
under the sky.
20 Pero ha dejado flotando 2nd But it has left its
echoes
sobre los ríos sus ecos. floating
over the rivers.
The project of finding and identifying remains is still
ongoing; government-sponsored testing occurs regularly, where the soil is probed to test it for bone and other materials. It is believed that about 3,000
people are buried in the vicinity. At least, one thinks, watching the doves
fluttering in the branches and feeling the wind blowing through the pines, this
is a beautiful place.
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