The coming year would not be as festive. Miners were killed in Asturias, a province in northwest Spain. While Alberti and María Teresa León were on a trip to Moscow, Fascists tried to destroy their house. In January 1936, the Second Spanish Republic experienced yet another governmental crisis. The previous fall, two major financial scandals, combined with internal factionalism, had discredited the administration. In the power struggle that followed, parliament was dissolved and national elections were called for February.
The left-wing parties set aside their differences and ran as the Popular Front. Right-wing propaganda labeled the Front a creation of the Soviet-headed Communist International, or Comintern, in an attempt to stir fear of an imminent Moscow-sponsored Spanish revolution. The head of Spain’s Monarchist party, José Calvo Sotelo, called for military force to combat the “red hordes of communism” and warned the nation that if Spaniards did not vote for the conservative National Front, a “Red Flag” would fly over Spain.
On February 16, 1936, the Popular Front won both the popular vote and a plurality in parliament. It was a fragile victory, though; if the right-wing National Front had merged with the center, it would have obtained a slight numerical majority. Neruda and his friends celebrated the victory in a magnificent fiesta at his apartment in La Casa de las Flores.
The day following the elections, rumors of a possible military coup swept through Madrid as Francisco Franco and other generals conspired to overthrow the new government. Franco was detested by the Left for leading a brutal suppression of the miners’ uprising in 1934. He often publicly praised Mussolini.
On February 19, Manuel Azaña assumed power as Spain’s new prime minister. Two days later, Franco was removed from his post as chief of the general staff and ordered to Las Palmas, as commandant general of the Canary Islands. This “banishment” fueled Franco’s hostility toward the new government and his ambitions to overthrow it.
In the early months of 1936, the tension between the Left and the Right in Spain intensified, both in the government and on the streets. In March, members of the Fascist group Falange started to ride ostentatiously through Madrid in squads of motorcars, wielding machine guns, sporadically firing at alleged reds in working-class neighborhoods.* After the Falange attempted the assassination of a Socialist member of parliament, Prime Minister Azaña outlawed the party and jailed much of its leadership. This created further polarization, and the violence continued. By June, many members of the Communist, Socialist, and anarchist parties were publicly promoting a revolution against the failing Republican government, while the right-wing press was instilling in the middle class a fear of a Communist state and promoting the idea that only a military coup could save Spain. The government’s inability to act decisively kept the surging tempers on the Right aflame as the country fell into a state of undeclared civil war.
At the end of June, such was the state of chaos in Madrid that Neruda convinced Maruca that she and the baby would be safer in Barcelona, where the local Chilean consul would take care of them. With his wife and child out of the picture, Neruda and Delia lived together openly, though their time in Madrid was also running out.
On July 11, Lorca and other friends, including Fulgencio Díez Pastor, a Socialist member of parliament, dined at La Casa de las Flores. The events of that day included a group of Falangists temporarily seizing Radio Valencia and broadcasting that the Fascist revolution was on its way. Tough rumors were swirling through Madrid; everyone was on edge. At the dinner Lorca could see the extreme worry that Díez Pastor was exhibiting—and he was a member of parliament; he knew more than everyone else! Lorca was petrified and couldn’t stop asking Díez Pastor question after question: What’s going to happen? What should I do? Will there be a coup? Lorca suddenly yelled, “I’m going to Granada!” “Don’t,” Díez Pastor told him. “You’ll be safer in Madrid.” Other friends would give him similar advice over the coming days.
The next day, July 12, was Neruda’s thirty-second birthday. Even that didn’t bring a reprieve: Falangists assassinated the police lieutenant José Castillo, one of the leaders of the Republican Left. The next day, one of the leaders of the conservative Monarchists, José Calvo Sotelo, was kidnapped, shot twice in the back of the neck, and dumped in a cemetery on the outskirts of Madrid. That night, at dinner with friends, Delia insisted that the Fascists themselves shot Calvo Sotelo to put blame on the Republicans. In fact, Republican colleagues of Lieutenant Castillo had committed the murder, proving to many that the Republican government could no longer control its own forces. At Calvo Sotelo’s funeral, his mourners raised their arms in a Fascist salute. At Lieutenant Castillo’s funeral, Republican, Communist, and Socialist sympathizers raised their clenched fists into the air.
Lorca’s premonition of his own death, which he had first felt when leaving Argentina, was recurring. A homosexual leftist poet who had become increasingly outspoken in his defense of the Republic, Lorca knew he would be a target of the Fascist Right. The intensity of the violence gripping Madrid was fraying his nerves. He was so frightened by it all that he rarely went out at night unless he was with friends, like Neruda or Carlos Morla Lynch. On the day of Calvo Sotelo’s murder, he ran into the poet Juan Gil-Albert in a café, who later described him as being distraught, frantically asking, just as he had the other night at dinner with Díez Pastor: “What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?” That evening, drinking brandy with a friend, taking drag after drag off his cigarette, Lorca warned that “these fields are going to be strewn with corpses.” He left Madrid without saying good-bye and fled to his hometown of Granada, where he hoped
