CHAPTER 25

A Lorca Evening (1951)

Lorca’s theatre is surrounded, as the house of Bernarda Alba is surrounded, with heat and starvation, the sexual cries of summer, and the wildness of animals, meaning the heart of man.1 Even when you stand among the whitewashed walls of a scene, the songs are outside. When the reapers go past, the hoarseness and the repetition should drive the audience mad, as they drive mad five young girls locked in a house of mourning, an airless house, a house without a man. The slashing of grain in the fields, the hot sounds of the cicadas rubbing their legs together—or whatever they do—are in these plays, as clearly as the rose of which María says, in Yerma,

Lord, make blossom the rose,

leave not my rose in shadow.2

The theatre is close to all Mediterranean theatre. Lorca’s theatre, like the Greek theatre—upon which, again and again, he builds—celebrates the holy powers which cannot be denied. The holy powers of life, whose denial means every time doom coming down like lightning on a dark-green sky. Many of his people—the dried-up man who will not give Yerma her child, the woman Bernarda Alba whose torrent of domination rains down on the family—do deny these powers. They act against life, the outside life and the life of the house. And then the blood begins, or the madness, the emptiness which leaves Bernarda in her house, calling among the silence, “Silence! Silence!”3

Lorca’s theatre is close to the classic theatre of Greece in form as well as in theme. The daughters, the maid of Bernarda Alba, do more than serve the purpose of the Greek chorus. They are the chorus and leader.4 The passion and clarity of that theatre is in Lorca’s scenes, a combination of purity and violence which emerges, not as brutality—recent handling of Greek themes has translated everything into brutality and cruelty—but as form. A control and sense of law in which denial and repression are the worst violence, and can lead only to doom.

This law, which is natural and is to be found in Greek theatre and in Lorca’s theatre, is not acknowledged in most of the plays which we may see if we look through the theatres—or the movies. The violence we admit leads to other violence, yes. Guns lead to guns. But this is a theatre of emotions, in which life leads to life, and the denial of life leads to death. Blood means life, and tyranny over the blood will lead to the spilling of it.

But imagine Bernarda Alba, for example, translated to New England! In Lorca’s play, although the daughters are in jail, although every repression and jealousy and hostile passion is alive on that stage—those women do not once question their own nature. They do not question their sexuality because they are locked away from themselves, with the same key that locks them from the world beyond the door—the world of the reapers, of summer, and of love.

And if the life is blood, the summer that raises it is hope—a fierce hope, the hope of Doña Rosita at the end of the play, when she says: “I lost all hope of marrying the one I loved with all my blood, the one I loved and still do. [. . .] I want to flee. I don’t want to see. I want to be left serene, empty. Doesn’t a poor woman have the right to breathe freely? And yet, hope pursues me, encircles me, bites me; like a dying wolf tightening his grip for the last time.”5

But Lorca is not the poet of denial; the rose, the fullness, breathes through his plays like music—the red capes, the balconies, the saffron and cloves, Belisa saying, “His skin must be dark, and his kisses must perfume and burn at the same time—like saffron and cloves,” saying, “Sometimes he passes underneath my balconies and moves his hand slowly in a greeting that makes my breasts tremble,” saying,

Love, love,

Enclosed within my thighs,

The sun swims like a fish.

Warm water in the rushes,

love.6

(Unpublished, 1951)