Visiting Lorca's Andalusia

Doreen Carvajal writes for the New York Times about Federico García Lorca's Andalusia, where he set his play, "Blood Wedding," "based on the crime story in 1928 of a runaway bride who fled her arranged marriage on horseback to be with her true love. He was killed by her relatives, and she died decades later as an elderly recluse, buried in 1987 in a secret tomb. If only the poet could write this last act of forgetting," writes Carvajal, who traveled to the region—the cities, the hills, and Lorca's family home—in search of "the spirit of a fractured Spain." An excerpt:

To search for García Lorca’s Andalusia is to chase fragments of poetry and loss. He was silenced more than 81 years ago at 38 — murdered in the summer of 1936 by a paramilitary death squad at the outset of the Spanish Civil War for his anti-fascist sentiments and homosexuality. His burial site in an anonymous mass grave somewhere in fields outside Granada remains a mystery.

But his powerful voice is still one that binds this nation as it struggles with tensions between the Catalan independence movement and the Spanish state, which threatened to remove the region’s separatist government and initiate a process of direct rule by the central government in Madrid.

In August, the poet’s verses offered a measure of comfort after the deadly van attack along the Ramblas, the heart of Barcelona. Over booming loudspeakers, thousands of antiterrorism protesters listened to a recital of García Lorca’s tribute to his favorite thoroughfare: “The street where all four seasons live together. The only street I wish would never end.”

When he was 18, he set off from Granada in 1917 on the first of four expeditions by steam train with his art history professor and other students to tour Andalusia. It was then, he said, that “I became fully aware of myself as a Spaniard.” He was seeking memories of “the ancient souls who once walked the solitary squares we now tread.”

My love of García Lorca extends to all his writing that explores the rural tragedies of women in Andalusia and an earthy culture where death and love are deeply intertwined. I had never expected to visit his house in Granada, where the poet wrote his trilogy of greatest plays — “Blood Wedding,” “Yerma,” and “The House of Bernarda Alba.”

But a reporting assignment took me to the city one day, and I met his niece, Laura García Lorca, in his family home, Huerta de San Vicente, now a museum and whitewashed sanctuary, which is surrounded by linden trees and roses.

The downstairs living room was dark and smelled faintly of jasmine. It was furnished with black and white photos from many decades ago, along with García Lorca’s baby grand piano and a pensive portrait of the writer, with dark wavy hair and sharp eyes, wearing a mustard robe...

Read it all at the NYT.