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|copyright (c) 2003 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights |
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|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. |
