Full Text (5746 words) | | |copyright (c) 2003 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights | |Reserved.) | | | |On August 18, 1936--or perhaps it was August 19th, no one is quite | |sure--Federico Garcia Lorca was taken from the cell where he was | |being held, in Granada, and driven into the hills north-east | |of the city. He may have spent the night, or just a few | |hours--again, there are conflicting accounts--at a children's | |summer camp called La Colonia, which, in the early days of the | |Spanish Civil War, had been converted into a way station for the | |condemned; or, alternatively, it is possible that he was held in a | |parked car. In the hours before his execution, Lorca either smoked | |and talked despairingly with his cellmates or sat silently between | |the armed men who were guarding him, and when he realized that he | |was being taken on a paseo, or "walk of death," it has been said | |that he asked for a priest. (According to this account, he was told| |that none was available.) He may have been tortured: one of his | |killers reportedly boasted afterward about having "fired two | |bullets into his ass for being a queer." However, like so many | |other rumors about Lorca's final moments, this one has never been | |substantiated. | |At the time of his slaying, Lorca was thirty-eight. With the | |publication of "Gypsy Ballads," composed while he was still in his | |twenties, he had become, almost instantly, Spain's most famous | |poet, and the phenomenal success of his Andalusian tragedies "Blood| |Wedding" and "Yerma" had made him the country's most celebrated | |dramatist as well. From early childhood, Lorca had been obsessed | |with his own death, including the details of his interment. | |Salvador Dali, a close friend and, probably, love interest, | |recalled how Lorca, as a student in Madrid, used to act out his | |burial, describing the position of the corpse, the closing of the | |coffin, and the bumpy passage of the funeral procession over the | |cobbled streets. "In this game, the process of putrefaction lasted | |five days," the painter remembered. "Poet in New York," which Lorca| |wrote during a yearlong stay in the United States and Cuba, in | |1929-30, contains at least a half dozen first-person allusions to | |an assassination, including this one, from "Fable of Three Friends | |to Be Sung in Rounds": | |When the pure shapes sankunder the chirping of daisies,I knew they | |had murdered me. |