Federico García Lorca, to a friend: “My destiny is to die murdered by one side or the other”

Yesterday marked the 90th anniversary of the assassination of the poet Federico García Lorca in Granada. A crime committed by the Nationalist side.

The rain in Santiago de Compostela as seen by a German photographer and an Andalusian poet
29 writers murdered in the Spanish Civil War that the left-wing never remembers

The murder of Federico was one of the many crimes committed by both sides of the Spanish Civil War, taking advantage of that moment of chaos. In some cases, these crimes were motivated by political or religious reasons, and in others, they were simply acts of personal revenge. I have been pointing out for years that the crimes committed by both sides seem horrendous to me, and the sad thing is that in Spain, saying something so basic can earn you the hatred of both sides.

Many years ago, I was in Granada, and during a morning stroll, I came across Federico's house. I imagined him wandering there, giving free rein to that imagination that led him to write poetry that has always seemed purely magical to me. His literary genius not only contributed beautiful works to the Spanish language, but also to my other language, Galician, as I told you here last year when reviewing his beautiful "Madrigal á cibdá de Santiago" (Madrigal to the City of Santiago), a beautiful poem dedicated to that rain that becomes art in the capital of Galicia. It's one of the most beautiful poems I know.

Politically, this poet was difficult to define. Although Federico was a Republican, he was also a Catholic. He was a man who was well-liked by people of different ideologies. In fact, when he was arrested before being executed, he was hiding in the house of his friend, the poet Luis Rosales, who was a falangist. In his book "Rosas de plomo" (Stella Maris, 2015), Jesús Cotta recounts the testimony of another friend of García Lorca, the writer Felipe Ximénez de Sandoval, about the last time he saw the poet from Granada. He ran into him on Alcalá Street in Madrid on June 30, 1936. García Lorca was on his way to the Teatro Español, where a tribute had been organized for the Russian poet Maxim Gorky, who had died a few days earlier. Ximénez de Sandoval tried to dissuade him from taking a political stance at a time of great tension in Spain. Ximénez de Sandoval recounted the encounter with these words:

“Very pale, his large face, studded with freckles, so open, so expressive, so frank, contorted with anguish, he answered me tearfully: ‘Perhaps you are right, but I cannot help it. It is my destiny.’ ‘No, Federico, your destiny is different. Your destiny is to sing to the gypsies of the cities with cinnamon towers and to the barren women of Castile, but not to the peasants of the steppe and the tractors of the kolkhozes. Your destiny is to move among children and angels, not among beasts and machines. Your destiny is to continue creating beauty for the world.’ He interrupted me dramatically. ‘That is no longer my destiny, Felipe. My destiny is to die murdered by one side or the other; by the other, because they consider me a communist, forgetting that every word of my art is a word of love, because they think I care about Russia, when what fascinates me is Spain, because they think I am impious, forgetting my Ode to the Holy Spirit; Or by the others, because there will be no shortage of those who, remembering all this, will label me a reactionary, a clerical, a caveman, a fascist. You'll see how they kill me, before they kill you and before they kill José Antonio. After trying to reassure him, I said goodbye, worried. I saw him cross the street toward the theater and disappear into the crowd.”

The José Antonio García Lorca referred to was José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish Falange, with whom the poet from Granada had a relationship. At that time, the Falangist leader was already in prison. He was murdered on November 20, 1936, in the Alicante provincial prison, following a sham trial. García Lorca was terribly prophetic in his words: he was murdered three months before Primo de Rivera, but by those on the other side. An equally criminal murder, like those that ended the lives of other writers who are barely remembered today simply because their murderers, in the eyes of the left, were "the good guys". García Lorca's prophecy recalls some famous verses by Antonio Machado in "Campos de Castilla" (1912):

Little Spaniard who comes
into the world, may God protect you.
One of the two Spains
will freeze your heart.

I have different ideas than Federico, but like him, I love Spain, and I never want there to be another civil war among Spaniards. I want a free Spain where no one has to live in fear of being attacked or shot for supporting ideas different from those of the totalitarians. I want a Spain where political differences are expressed through words and not violence, a country where people with different opinions and beliefs can live together without resorting to violence like in Goya's famous painting. I want a Spain where the victims of horrendous crimes are officially remembered, regardless of the ideology of their murderers, because being murdered by one side or the other doesn't make them better or worse.

Is that too much to ask?

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Image: Grok / Elentir.