Finding Lorca’s remains; or, how I stopped searching
Author’s note: I am quite late in publishing this final piece of my Lorca series because I was sad, and then lazy, and then took a wonderful trip to Dakar, Senegal to visit my amazing friends Noah and Senam, and then met up with my family in Portugal, and then moved into my new apartment in Durham, North Carolina. I know you were all sick with worry awaiting my next post. Maybe you took up a new cigarette habit to deal with the suspense. Well, here it is, so invest in a nicotine patch.
Where the taxi let me out, in the center of Viznar, a small town 30 minutes from Granada, there wasn’t cell reception, so the driver’s card reader didn’t work; I had to use all my remaining cash to pay the fare and tip him for the trouble. I set out, cashless, on my pilgrimage.
Viznar is a beautiful town, full of those picturesque white houses with courtyards and pools that one associates with southern Europe. It sits on a mountain, so when you look beyond the houses, you can see the Depresión de Granada (the valley in which Granada sits) and the northern outskirts of the city down below. The wind blows in Viznar, and you’re thankful for it. I watched old folk scrape their elbows against the sides of buildings as they walked down the street, trying to find some shade.
I was in Viznar for a pilgrimage, as I said, and like many pilgrimages, the journey involved a dead person’s remains.
On August 19, 1936, Federico García Lorca was arrested in Granada. Modern scholarship indicates that he was hiding in a friend’s house when Franco’s Nationalist forces arrested him. Lorca knew he was in danger. His political views and rumors about his homosexuality had attracted increasing scrutiny from the Spanish right-wing, which was a coalition of ultra-Catholics and fascists. He returned home to Granada against advice, putting himself in the eye of the storm. On the same day that Lorca was arrested, his brother-in-law, who had just accepted the position of Mayor of Granada after the position was left vacant for months, was shot dead.
They arrested Lorca and took him in a dark red Buick to the Palacio del Cuzco, an eighteenth century palace that had become a strategic outpost for Nationalist forces in the area. Soon thereafter, they took him and other prisoners to La Colonia, a summer house for children on the road between Viznar and Alfacar, another town three kilometers away. The Nationalists had evicted the children who lived in La Colonia and put the building to a near-opposite use: a holding cell for prisoners approaching their end.
Then, they took him to the Barranco de Viznar, a beautiful ravine between the two towns, and shot him. They left his body among all the other bodies. Pine trees cover that ground: gravestones for the forgotten.
I set out along the road between Viznar and Alfacar, on my pilgrimage. I was looking for Lorca’s remains, of course. Not his bones: many have tried, and none have succeeded. His family hopes they stay buried.
What do I mean by remains, then? I’m not sure. I thought I was. I set out on this entire voyage with the intention of following Lorca’s footsteps through southern Spain and Madrid. I had a specific reason for doing so: I figured that there was something to gain from seeing the same sights that Lorca saw, from inhabiting his world, long after his death. I saw his childhood homes, his place of birth, the coffee shop where he spent his free time, the places he completed his education, and how I was at the place of his murder: where his footsteps ended.
I think what I wanted to gain from following Lorca’s footsteps was an understanding of how all this could have happened. How does one grow up in a landowning, conservative family outside Granada, become a well-known, multimedia artist, and then end up buried underneath a pine forest, outside Granada once more? Maybe immersing myself could provide some clues.
I’m not naïve. Many of the best, most meaningful artists have come from privileged backgrounds. One’s place in the world at the time of their birth is by no means a perfect predictor of where they’ll end up, or of how they’ll die.
And the story becomes even more complicated when you consider not only where and how Lorca was born, but what he did when he was alive. His artistic talents were known when he was still a child, and then they were incubated in his young adulthood by some of the best artists of his day and of all time, like Salvador Dalí. He was a homosexual* who enjoyed (suffered?) extremely intimate, ambiguous friendships with Dalí and others throughout his life. He was political on account of his membership in the avant-garde and the social criticism present in his work, but he wasn’t expressly political. He wasn’t a member of any political party; he wasn’t an activist; he wasn’t a firebrand. He had friends of all political stripes. The friend whose house Lorca was hiding in when fascists arrested him, it turns out, was a fascist himself. And in 2023, his death is mourned by normal people and disputed by fascists who want to bring back Franco’s Spain through their current political project, Vox.
The narratives aren’t simple. You can follow someone’s footsteps in clean lines from Fuente Vaqueros to Valderrubio to Granada to Madrid to New York to Madrid again to Granada to Viznar to a pine forest outside Viznar, but you can’t map the person himself in the same way. There’s no route from a person’s birth to their ideology to their sexuality to their relationships to their personality to their art to their death.
All you can do is walk along a dusty, hot road between Viznar and Alfacar and realize that the whole thing is more complicated than you thought. Those are the remains I found.
The footpath alongside the road led me alongside a series of chicken coops and farmers’ houses until, only about a half-kilometer in, it ended, spitting me back out onto the road. I walked along the road, noting the remains of La Colonia, which was demolished in the 1970s, and admired the view of the valley down below. The path was hot and dusty; I was glad when I reached La Barranca, which took me off the road and into the forest.
There’s a trail there that leads up the mountain to an overlook. 40 minutes, mild difficulty, said the sign, and I looked down at my beat-up Allbirds and figured we could handle the journey. I walked up the path for a few minutes until I reached a sort of clearing, where multiple paths snaked together, culminating in a group of the type of white tents that get pitched for outdoor cocktail parties or receptions on fields. The tall, white kind with walls and clear flaps. Next to one of the tents was a stone block with a metal plate on it, which was engraved with a line from “Preludio — Amor” [“Prelude — Love”]:
“El viento está amortajado
a lo largo bajo el cielo.”
“The wind is shrouded
full length below the heavens.”
a lo largo bajo el cielo.” [“The wind is shrouded
full length below the heavens.”]
I walked farther into the clearing and found the memorials: a set of plaques honoring the memory of various people and groups who were now buried under my feet.
Eugenio Ruiz Rueda, 9 de marzo 1902 | 20 de mayo 1938
“La muerte no existe. La gente sólo se muere cuando la olvidan. Si puedes recordarme, siempre estaré contigo.”
- Tu familia que te quiere
Eugenio Ruiz Rueda, March 9, 1902 — May 20, 1938
“Death doesn’t exist. A person only dies when they’re forgotten. If you can remember me, I’ll always be with you.”
- Your family, who loves you
Sección Sindical Santa Barbara
En memoria a los trabajadores de la fábrica de “El fargue” que yacen en este lugar asesinados por el régimen franquista.
“Sin Memoria Histórica no puede construirse una sociedad totalmente libre.”
Union of Santa Barbara
In memory of the workers of the factory of El Fargue that lie in this place, murdered by Franco’s regime.
“Without Historical Memory, a truly free society cannot be constructed.”
En memoria de las personas asesinadas por defender al legítimo gobierno de la II República
Asociación Plataforma Cívica por la República, Granada
In memory of the people murdered for defending the legitimate government of the Second Spanish Republic
Republican Civic Association, Granada
And then I turned around to see a humble monument, set apart from the others. It was a stone block, about four feet tall, cut like a headstone. “Lorca eran todos,” it said [“Lorca was everyone”]. The ground in front of it was covered with flowers that fellow pilgrims had left: some real and wilted, others plastic and enduring. I stared at it for a while, walked around it to see it in its entirety, then picked up a smooth, round rock from the ground and stacked it on top. I hadn’t thought to bring flowers.
I turned back around quickly so that the two English tourists, brought here by a Spanish guide, wouldn’t see my moment of earnest vulnerability.
Then I tried to continue up the path, to the lookout point, but there were too many paths leading away from the clearing. I couldn’t tell which one was the right one, so I chose one and started up the mountain, but after a few minutes the path stopped looking like a path, so I turned back and considered other options. I stood in the clearing, looking around, and started to hear the sound of bells approaching from the distance. I waited until a herd of sheep appeared, marching down the path I had just attempted. They poured into the clearing, flanked by sheepdog and an all-business shepherd, and then walked right by me, down the path that had brought me to the clearing. When they had all passed, I decided to give up on the viewpoint: I followed the sheep back to the road and continued to Alfacar. A few minutes later, I stopped to let the herd cross the road to the shepherd’s house; “pasa” [“pass”], he shouted to me when he saw me waiting. Following orders, I waded into the herd. “Perdóname” [“Pardon me”] I said softly to the sheep, and I continued on my way as they queued for the water spigot.
In Alfacar there’s a large park called Parque Federico García Lorca. Much of it is a nature preserve, but there’s a small portion along the road that has well-maintained shrubbery and fountains and stone steps that lead to a monument to Lorca’s poetry. A wall surrounds a circular tile plaza, and every few feet, there’s a blue and white ceramic plaque (à la azulejo), beautifully adorned with verses of Lorca’s writing. It was fitting, I felt, to end my pilgrimage not with Lorca’s death but with his work, or, his life, which endures.
In Alfacar I waited thirty minutes outside a police station for the next bus to Granada to arrive. I tracked its movements on my phone until I saw it approaching. I stepped out into the road and waved, so that the driver would see me. He slowed down, looked me in the eye, smirked, and shrugged his shoulders. Then he kept driving. I stared after the bus long after it was gone and then called an expensive Uber, which took me back to my hostel.
Once I had a drink of water and a few minutes in the air conditioning, I was feeling reflective again: maybe it was fitting, I decided, that transportation woes were part of my pilgrimage. Pilgrimages can’t be easy, after all: that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Mine wasn’t. But among the sheep, the tents, and the plaques, I found what I didn’t know I was looking for: a reminder that, even when its beginning and end can be mapped, a life is long and circuitous. The lessons Lorca’s life teaches are contradictory. He sends you on pilgrimages that offer to provide you with an illusion of understanding. Once you’re there, you find him under the ground, surrounded by thousands of compatriots. He looks up at you and thanks you for coming to visit but tells you politely that he’ll stay down there, with everyone else, for the time being. Down there it’s simple and safe, and he isn’t alone. Through the trees and mountains, he winks and whispers: finding me is only the beginning.
Second authors’ note: Whew! Now that that’s finished, I have many people to recognize and thank. Thanks to all of you who read one or more pieces in the Lorca series. Thanks to the Morehead-Cain Foundation for funding my project. Thanks to all the people I met: my Spanish classmates in Granada (especially Luna, Rafael, and Fan Fan), my Spanish teachers at UNC (especially Prof. Irene Gómez-Castellano, who helped me craft this project) and in Granada, the kind cheesemongers who fed me and said hola to me, my various hostel roommates, Laura García Lorca who met with me in Granada, and Professors María Ángeles Varela Olea and Fernando Larraz who met with me in Madrid.
While this post ends my Lorca series, I hope to go back to blogging about other things. Subscribe to get my posts in your email, or see them on my Facebook and Twitter. Thank you all!
*I use the term “homosexual,” and not “gay,” to describe Lorca for a reason. While “homosexual” feels a bit antiquated today, this is the term that most closely aligns with the way people thought about sexuality in Lorca’s day. “Gay” suggests a social identity (and, by extension, a community) that simply did not exist in the 1920s and 1930s. It was forming in some places, but not ubiquitous, like it is today. “Homosexual” is more of a description of romantic and sexual behavior, and not of identity, which is why we might see it as more of a clinical term, but also why it’s a more precise term to describe people in the early 20th century. It’s a common practice among well-intentioned folks in the present day to connect historical dots to come to the conclusion that various historical figures (Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, etc.) were “gay.” I find this to be a case of presentism, which is an arrogant sort of assumption that the way we see things in the present is the only, or most advanced, way of seeing things. I prefer to consider people as closely as possible to how they would have considered themselves. This leads me to describe Lorca as homosexual, not as gay.
