4 0 Y L O R C A ’ S G R A V E N O Ë L V A L I S In November 2009, the novelist-essayist Francisco Ayala died at the age of 103, and his ashes are buried in a biodegradable urn beneath a lemon tree at the Alcázar Genil de Granada Palace. The poet Federico García Lorca was thirty-eight when he was assassinated at the start of the Spanish Civil War in August 1936, and we do not know where his bones or his ashes are, although there is talk of an olive tree, a fountain, and a handful of gray earth. Both were from Granada and both supporters of the Second Republic. The ironies of these two deaths abound, with multiple possibilities for symbolic interpretation. But the death of Lorca is not a postmodern phenomenon. It is a fact. A brutal fact, the product of history, of savagery and malevolence all too sadly common. At the same time, any commentary on his assassination has to deal with the double predicament created by his death, with the reality and the fiction of Lorca’s wartime fate. His murder, along with his earthly remains, has been turned into something mythic, in which the meaning of history plays a large behind-the-scenes role. The search for Lorca’s bones, which is ongoing, represents an e√ort to take possession of his myth and memory and to mold both to fit the desires of ideology and identity politics. More generally, the 4 1 R fate of Lorca and his remains compels us to consider what place poets have in the public arena (if indeed they do have one, given the modern view of poetry as a private matter). It is Lorca’s grave, or rather its absence, that interests me here, though we must bear in mind that, to extrapolate from Lorca’s ‘‘The Rider’s Song,’’ no one ever makes it to Córdoba: ‘‘for death awaits me before I get to Córdoba.’’ Or as his brother Francisco said, ‘‘For Federico dying is not arriving, because death surprises us always in the midst of our journey.’’ We never get to Córdoba because we do not know what or where it is, in contrast to the Iraqi fable that Lorca appears to reinvent in the poem. A servant sees Death in Baghdad, and runs to his master to beg for a horse so he can escape to Samarra. When the master inquires why Death threatened his servant, Death, dressed as a woman, replies, ‘‘I was surprised to see your servant there in Baghdad, because I have an appointment with him in Samarra.’’ Samarra is the inevitable end point, the place of death, while Córdoba is an illusion, a not arriving , from which, the poet says, death ‘‘keeps a watch’’ on the rider. Death, then, is already a myth in Lorca’s writings, and it is the myth we cannot escape. By this I am not referring to the cliché of Lorca’s supposed premonition of his own death but to a peculiar truth about the illusory character of death as being impossible to know. In this sense, the grave is always going to be empty. This view of death, of the poet’s death, will never satisfy those for whom the quest for Lorca’s missing bones is in psychic terms his desired reincarnation or at least the reanimation of a symbol that is at once uncertain and overdetermined in its meaning. The quixotic search-and-rescue e√ort has consumed Lorca’s biographer Ian Gibson. Lorca’s family prefers to leave the poet where he is, somewhere outside the city of Granada, with the other victims of Civil War madness. The desire to dignify death is universal; the manner of implementing that desire is not. Hence the decision to bury the ashes of Francisco Ayala in a biodegradable urn beneath a lemon tree, with the idea that they will leave no trace, will disappear little by little as the ashes are gathered into the breast of the earth. There is, however, nothing natural in our view of human death. Despite all...
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