Not visiting Lorca’s house

This is the house where the great Spanish poet/playwright/writer Federico Garcia Lorca spent summers and wrote for the last 10 or so years of his life. It was his family’s summer home on what used to be the outskirts of Granada. Apparently it is preserved largely how it was when the family lived there, including Lorca’s writing desk and the piano he used to play around on.

Huerta de San Vicente

Before I realized the house was there, the kids and I walked down to the adjacent park, which is full of gardens and playgrounds. Another day, Saoirse and I tried to squeeze in a visit before Spanish classes but ran out of time after not finding a taxi and taking a few too many wrong turns. A third time, I ran and taxied my way there after the kids’ Spanish class, arriving 4 minutes after the final group tour was scheduled to leave (you can only go through the house with a guide at set times). I teared up, I begged, I pleaded, I threw myself at the mercy of the guy working the front desk, but to no avail. He refused to let me in despite my pleas and explanations. He kept repeating “Hay un horario y hay que respectarlo.” There is a schedule, and it must be respected.” After leaving, dejected, I noticed that he quickly locked up the house and left. I believe he lied to me that there was a group in the house (when I asked if I could just join late, my loss) because I was the only person there and he preferred to go home. I actually went back to the door and told him I didn’t appreciate how rude he had been. He wasn’t buying it or budging. After he left, I sat in the neglected orchard outside the house and wrote, thinking at least maybe I had gotten a poem out of the experience! On the way there, the taxi driver went on and on to me about his epileptic dog. He was devastated by the dog’s episodes and was comforting his even more devastated wife on the phone during the drive. He told me that before getting this dog, he had never understood how people could be so obsessed with their animals, but now, he wasn’t sure how his family could even cope with the impending loss. Something in the juxtaposition of this moment, a distracted, emotionally fraught drive over through a maddeningly difficult city to navigate and a militant adherence to the rule of law at the Lorca house, began to vibrate with that tension that lets me know a poem might be emerging. Lorca was executed by Nationalist fascists during the Spanish Civil War, by people who had no space for his art or his politics or his sexuality. I couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t rolling in his undiscovered, unmarked grave at the militant way his memorial was being run, by people repeating robotically that hay un horario y hay que respectarlo. So, in the end, I spent two weeks in Granada and never saw the inside of Lorca’s house. Maybe I never will. I’m still working on that poem. I was able to visit the Centro Cultural Garcia Lorca and see handwritten manuscript pages, which was very moving, and which I will write about next post :).

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