Federico García Lorca had a premonition about his murder. At least that is what his great friend, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, believed, who mentioned it in his autobiography I Confess I Have Lived.
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The man from Parral noted that three months before the start of the Spanish Civil War, in July 1936, with the uprising in Melilla, he spoke with García Lorca, and the latter made a revelation. He had experienced a strange event that left him disturbed.
Neruda recounts: “Once, when (Federico) was returning from a theatrical tour, he called me to tell me about a very strange event. With the artists of La Barraca he had arrived at a very remote village in Castilla and camped nearby. Weary from the worries of the journey, Federico could not sleep. At dawn he got up and went out to wander alone around the surroundings. It was cold, that knife-like cold that Castilla reserves for the traveler, the intruder. The fog detached in white masses and everything turned to its phantasmagoric dimension.”
“A large rusty iron gate. Broken statues and columns, hot springs among the fallen leaves. At the gate of an old estate he stopped. It was the entrance to the extensive park of a feudal estate. The abandonment, the hour, and the cold made the solitude more penetrating. Federico suddenly felt overwhelmed by what would come from that dawn, by something confusing that had to happen there. He sat on a fallen capital.”
There, sitting doing nothing, the playwright saw something he would never forget; at first it was quite tender. “A tiny lamb came to graze the grass among the ruins and its appearance was like a little angel of mist that suddenly humanized the solitude, falling like a petal of tenderness over the loneliness of the place. The poet felt accompanied. Suddenly, a herd of pigs also entered the enclosure.”
Suddenly, everything turned into a harsh experience. “There were four or five dark beasts, semi-wild black pigs with fierce hunger and stone hooves. Federico then witnessed a terrifying scene. The pigs threw themselves on the lamb and, alongside the poet’s horror, tore it apart and devoured it. This scene of blood and solitude made Federico order his traveling theater to immediately continue on its way.”
For Neruda, the experience lived by his friend had a meaning: “I later saw, with greater and greater clarity, that that event was the anticipated representation of his death, the premonition of his incredible tragedy.”
Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca had met three years earlier, on October 13, 1933, in Buenos Aires. At that time both were at a very high point in their careers. García Lorca had premiered Bodas de sangre in 1932, and Neruda would publish his fundamental Residence on Earth in 1935.
“In 1933 I was appointed Chilean consul in Buenos Aires, where I arrived in August. Almost at the same time Federico García Lorca arrived in that city to direct and premiere his theatrical tragedy Bodas de sangre, with the company of Lola Membrives. We did not know each other yet, but we met in Buenos Aires and many times we were celebrated together by writers and friends.”
Neruda had only praise for the Spanish poet and playwright. “I was seduced by García Lorca’s great metaphorical power and was interested in everything he wrote. For his part, he sometimes asked me to read him my latest poems and, halfway through the reading, he would interrupt me shouting: ‘Don’t continue, don’t continue, you influence me!’“.
“In the theater and in silence, in the crowd and in decorum, he was a multiplier of beauty. I never saw a guy with so much magic in his hands, I never had a happier brother. He laughed, sang, set to music, jumped, invented, crackled. Poor guy, he had all the gifts in the world, and just as he was a golden worker, a bumblebee of great poetry, he was a spendthrift of his genius.”
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