Spanish Republicans were demoralized by the European and Latin American democracies that honored the nonintervention agreement and did nothing to help them. Mexico’s strong support of the defense of the Republic was a notable exception, though there was little that nation could offer the cause. At least the Republicans were bolstered by the committed sacrifices of the International Brigades, which came on their own to fight for the Republic against the Fascists.
* * *
When Lorca had fled Madrid before the start of the war, it took a couple of days for word of his departure to spread. Neruda didn’t understand why his friend had missed the wrestling match they were supposed to see together. But Lorca was in Granada, relieved to be away from the upheaval in Madrid and comforted by his family now surrounding him. He was able to relax a bit, to at least calm his anxiety enough after settling in that he began work on a new play.
Then on the night of Friday, July 17, just three days after he arrived, news about the uprising by army officers in Spanish Morocco reached Granada. On Monday, July 20, soldiers in the Granada garrison rose up against their Republican loyalist general. By late that afternoon, they had taken over much of the city. Lorca’s brother-in-law, a Socialist physician who just ten days before had been elected mayor of Granada by the city council, was jailed. The prisons were quickly filled beyond capacity. People barred themselves inside their homes, and the city basically shut down.
Two days later Granadinos lined the streets to cheer the arrival of a general and troop reinforcements sent by Franco. Around five thousand locals enlisted in the Nationalist army. The first executions of “undesirables” took place.
Lorca’s presence in the area was not a secret as neighbors ratted on neighbors, and lists were drawn up. He was staying with his family at Huerta de San Vicente, their summer home on about five acres just outside of Granada. One night he dreamed that women in black dresses and black veils approached him with crucifixes in their hands.
Members of the Fascist Falange did come out to Huerta, once to search for a shortwave radio that Lorca supposedly had and with which he was talking to Russia, another time to interrogate the property’s caretaker, whose brothers had been accused of murder. They strapped the caretaker to a tree and beat him. Then they entered the Lorca residence. The Falangists threw Lorca down the stairs, hit him and called him a faggot, and demanded information about people he knew. They had lined up the whole household as if they were going to execute them, when another squad pulled up and told the first one to stop and leave.
Naively, the Lorcas didn’t imagine that the danger would persist much longer. After weighing different options, they moved Federico to the house of a family friend, the internationally renowned composer Manuel de Falla, a religious Catholic who was respected by the Nationalists. But on August 15, Nationalist officers showed up at de Falla’s house demanding Lorca’s arrest. When Lorca’s protector asked why he was being arrested, the belligerent officer in charge, Ramón Ruiz Alonso, simply responded, “His works.” He took Lorca away and imprisoned him in Granada’s civil government building.
Three days later, at around three A.M., Lorca was put into a car and handcuffed to a teacher who had been arrested just an hour earlier. Two guards and two members of the Falange drove them to the tiny village of Viznar, six miles from Granada. Lorca and the teacher joined two bullfighters known for their left-wing politics, who were being held in a building that had served, until that month, as a summer play place for children. Now, soldiers, guards, gravediggers, and a pair of housekeepers occupied the upper floor. Lorca was put downstairs, where a young, devout Catholic guard told him he was going to be killed, believing that it was his Christian duty to inform Lorca so he’d have a chance to make a final confession. “But I haven’t done anything!” the poet cried. He tried to recite a prayer but could only weep. “My mother taught it all to me, you know? And now I’ve forgotten it. Will I be damned?”
Before the sun rose that morning, Lorca and the three other prisoners were shot beside a stand of olive trees. A year before, Neruda had written his “Ode to Federico García Lorca.” The emotive lines now seem eerily premonitory, exuding the desperate grief Neruda would feel at his friend’s death:
If I could weep with fear in a solitary house,
if I could take out my eyes and eat them,
I would do it for your voice of a morning orange-tree,
and for your poetry that comes forth shouting.
“This criminal act was the most painful in the course of a long struggle,” Neruda wrote in his memoir. Alberti said that Lorca’s death was his own death. “The news of his death made everyone cry,” Delia reminisced years later. Besides the horror of a friend’s assassination, Lorca’s death represented something more. It made everybody feel vulnerable. He became a martyr because he was targeted in part for being a poet. When asked what crime Lorca could have committed, Ramón Ruiz Alonso answered, “He’s done more damage with a pen than others have with a pistol.” “The truth is Lorca died because he was a poet,” Luis Buñuel said, echoing
