Machado already said that the crime was in Granada.
Blood on the forehead and lead in the bowels of Federico García Lorca, the most alive dead of the war.
The symbol of a country of gutters.
Now, almost ninety years later, that night returns, shrouded in mystery, an August night marked by the indelible siege of tragedy.
The new and dark Moon.
The light cool of the mountains.
The exhausting heat of summer.
The clumsy and rough hands of the jailer.
The salt of tears in Federico's glassy eyes.
The flashing glances of gunpowder and hatred.
The hungry wolf pack.
The abruptness of voices that smell of sweat and tobacco.
The sinister laughter.
The gloomy and lonely streets of Granada.
The silence of crickets on the outskirts, in the countryside.
The old dark olive trees.
A sky where the roulette wheel of stars spins.
The lieutenant's cry: go, sons of bitches.
And the fire.
And the gutter.
And the broken body of a downed animal.
And this is how Manuel Bernal Romero, writer, professor and scholar of the generation of '27, recreates one of the poet's endings.
Because he had many.
And they all fit in this book:
The Deaths of Federico
(Renaissance).
Its pages are an original journey, through fiction, about the poet's end.
All the conjectures that have been considered about the death of Federico García Lorca are valid.
One, the most daring, recreates the possibility that the poet could have survived the shooting and ended his days very far from Spain.
From fiction - but supported by the data of the versions that once pointed out this theory - we see how Lorca survived the shot and, helped in the first instance by one of his jailers who loved poetry, left Spain by boat to end his days. under the anonymous protection of his friend Pablo Neruda in a lost place on the Pacific coast.
There, affected by a gunshot that had damaged important areas of his brain, Federico, who was no longer Federico, who could no longer speak but could be moved by music, awaited death watching the beating of the sea waves and listening through the radio the songs of Miguel de Molina.
More information
'Lorca.
Based on real events': what the poet transported from life to literature
There is another recreation, guided by the canonical version established by the Hispanist Ian Gibson, where you can see the prisoners of the La Colonia estate, who said they had closed the eyes of Federico, already dead and looking at the stars, there in the ravine. from Víznar.
Or the version that focuses the spotlight, from desperation and madness, on the only man – Juan Ramírez – who acknowledged that he had a love relationship with Federico.
“Juan experienced his death very differently from everyone else: with passion and silence, the silence imposed by a very traditional family that did not accept the reality of his son,” says Manuel Bernal.
The writer Manuel Bernal Romero, scholar of the generation of '27 and author of 'The Deaths of Federico'.
Renaissance Publishing House
These literary recreations of the deaths that were and the deaths that were not make up, like small tiles, the collective memory about the end of Federico.
For example, the story of the taxi driver Francisco Murillo, to whom the author grants a key role in the transfer and final destination of the poet's body.
Or the composer Manuel de Falla, who was the only person who clearly interceded for Federico during the days that he was present in the Civil Government of Granada and who, according to Bernal, “gave a version different from all the ones we know.”
Or the ordinary people of Granada who went around saying that the body was in Madrid, or those who said that the family had secretly recovered Federico's body and had buried it in the family home in Huerta de San Vicente.
—And what continues to fascinate us about Lorca's murder?
—It is almost amazing that Federico is still so alive among us.
It is, without a doubt, the name that we all carry inside when we say poet.
Why is he still alive?
Perhaps because, as Pedro Salinas said, he has survived all those who wanted to kill him.
To all those who tortured him, who pulled the trigger or who ordered him to be shot.
Like a flag of freedom, honesty, sensitivity.
That is the man who fascinates us, because he has been able, with his vitality, to unite those dreams that the men and women of the Second Republic created with the reality of the democracy of 1978. But the great unknown is, surely , the same one that will continue to be forever: where is Federico.
Why did the family remain silent and silent after his death?
It was probably nothing more than fear.
Now there is no one left who knows, firsthand, where Federico's body is.
There were people who knew it, but everyone who knew it is already dead.
The friendly voices
There is a second part to this hybrid book.
A search through the works of twenty poets and writers who sang the death of Lorca and who have made him survive over all those who wanted him and his ideas dead.
Luis Cernuda said: “Hatred and destruction always linger deafly in the depths of all the everlasting gall of the terrible Spaniard.”
Manuel Altolaguirre said: “Where you stayed, the tree of your name, of your glory, has blossomed.”
Miguel Hernández said: “Federico García until yesterday was called: dust is his name.
Yesterday he had a space under the day that today the hole gives him under the grass.
Juan Ramón Jiménez told him: “I want to sleep until you die!”
María Teresa de León added: “The nights, the days, the hours are over.
"Better to die."
Emilio Prados wrote: “The Moon is looking for him, prowling, slowly, in the sky.
The blood of the gypsies calls him open on the ground.”
Federico García Lorca, in an undated photo.
Universal History Archive (Universal Archive/Universal Imag)
And so many other poets recreated his death, Lorca's death converted into a literary topic – a
ubi est
, perhaps.
Rafael de León wrote: “They killed him in Granada, one summer afternoon, and the entire gypsy sky received the stab.”
Concha Méndez remembered: “Your presence was a poetry festival.”
María Zambrano noted: “The voice of blood sings and screams through the poetry of García Lorca.
“Ancient blood that carries an ancient wisdom.”
And Edgar Neville trusted in tomorrow: "They will tell where he is when we go to carry him on our shoulders to the Alhambra, to rest at the feet of a fountain that murmurs: —'The crime was in Granada."
And so other poets sang his death, from hopeful sorrow.
Vicente Aleixandre said: “I feel all the flowers that flow from your mouth towards life, green, early, invincible”, and Dámaso Alonso said: “Do not tell the dawn your mourning, do not break the day's hope of spikenard and green shadow", and Pedro Salinas said: "They will never be free from his most terrible revenge, from the durability of his broad peasant smile, from the durability of his poetry.
They will never get rid of his life.”
Manuel Bernal Romero, author of the essay
Federico García Lorca or the modern conception of flamenco
and
The invention of the generation of 27
, tells EL PAÍS that he has exhumed all these friendly voices to reconstruct “the admiration of his friends, the details that They united, the spark that had made them be what they were to each other and the other to them.
And all this so that together, fiction and reality, convey a kaleidoscopic vision capable of presenting us with the true face of the poet, his most real and human voice, even if it were moments before all his deaths.
Because that is what
The Deaths of Federico claims, as a telluric current.
That the poet is alive.
That he has survived the murderers of him.
That the crime, but also the legend, were in Granada.
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