Distant footsteps echo through the corridors of time
David Gilmour
Spanish poets seldom generate books about themselves in English. To induce three, as Lorca has done, all written by the same person, is thus extremely unusual. Even odder, perhaps, is his posthumous power to elicit a large and lavish volume of his drawings, for art was a minor talent. Presumably the next book about Lorca will commemorate his musical ability, which the great composer Manuel de Falla considered at least as high as his remark- able poetic gifts.
Federico Garcia Lorca was charming, sad and somewhat naive, and so are his pictures. He was not a great draughtsman but he loved drawing: `I feel clean, com- forted, a happy child, when I do them,' he wrote. Some are merely doodles, illustrat- ing a letter, others are more complicated and allusive, reflecting the surrealist influence of his friend Dali. The most attractive, featuring the landscapes of Granada and the melancholic women of the south, suggest themes from his most powerful plays. Although only a few can be regarded as serious works, the whole collection, elegantly presented by Mario Hernandez, is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Lorca and his work.
The poet's association with Granada has inspired Ian Gibson and his publishers to combine the two in yet another book on Lorca. On the face of it, the idea seems a good one. Granada will be full of tourists this year (the 500th anniversary of the defeat of the Moors, which Lorca consid- ered a 'disastrous' event), the poet spent much of his life in and around the city, and Gibson, the author of an excellent biography of Lorca, is the ideal man to write about both the place and the person.
Unhappily, the subjects don't quite match. The author divides the book into ten itineraries, hoping, presumably, that the tourist will follow each of them around the city. But Granada is not like Seville or even Cordoba, where you can spend sever- al agreeable days wandering through differ- ent quarters. Nobody could want to do more than three walks in Granada: from the Alhambra to the Generalife, around the Albaicin, and from the Archbishop's palace to the Plaza Nueva.The first of these should naturally be the centrepiece of the book, but unfortunately, as Lorca never wrote about the area, Gibson is forced to tell us about other people who did. In his desperate search for associations he is sometimes reduced to visiting a square, recounting an anecdote and remarking that Lorca probably knew about it.
The best chapters, when the author can launch into narrative, are those dealing with the poet's arrest, imprisonment and Lady on Balcony witl a Mantilla of Madronos, Granada, 1925 execution. Yet they are inevitably what the Spaniards call refrito (fried again) because the author has already described the events twice before, in his biography and in his first book, The Assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca. In any case, it must be a pretty morbid kind of visitor who sets out, guidebook in hand, to trace the last terrify- ing days of a condemned man. It's difficult to think of any death route that has much tourist appeal, except possibly the road to Golgotha.
But the book's chief drawback, which Gibson is only too aware of, is the fact that most of Lorca's Granada has disappeared. The text is full of references to buildings which have been demolished and replaced by hideous blocks of flats. The tourists who attempt Tour Six, for example, are in for a rather depressing experience because all the buildings referred to in the first four paragraphs have been knocked down. The most dismal tour of all, however, must be the visit to Lorca's country house, from where the poet could view the Alhambra and the Generalife while he listened to the bells of the cathedral. Today both the view and the bells have been cut off by a 'mon- strous wall of buildings' and a 'horror of horrors', the city by-pass. The house itself has just managed to survive but its orchard is about to be turned into a horrible munic- ipal park containing, absurdly, the largest rose garden in Europe. It is difficult not to feel sorry for Gibson as he tramps method- ically through the devastation. '0 tempora, 0 mores!; he exclaims when confronted with yet another vanished building. And in the Gran Via he forces us to stop and con- template 'the monstrous edifice' (a bank) at the end of it.
`How', one asks, `could such an insult to all things beautiful get planning permission? How could a town council permit such a horror in such a visible place?'
How indeed?
The author's ecological indignation gets another outing in an admirable chapter in Fire in the Blood, a book which accompa- nies a current BBC television series. The work is partly a potted history of Spain, aimed at viewers who know little of the country, and partly a 'state of the nation' report. Gibson, who is an Irishman with Spanish citizenship, writes with affectionate criticism of his adopted fellow citizens and comments with charm and humour upon their addiction to noise, machismo and dangerous driving. But he also sees the good points of the most altered and vibrant society in Europe. If the socialist govern- ment of Felipe Gonzalez has disappointed him by failing to achieve the promised `ethical revolution' in political behaviour, he applauds it for having brought stability and improvements in human rights. On the environment, he concludes, some things are getting better — nothing could be worse than Franco's record on the matter — but there is a long way to go. What can one say about the environmental awareness of a defence minister who justifies the expropriation of a beautiful landscape with the argument that bombing ranges are `privileged spots for the preservation of eco-systems' because they are never tramped over by human beings?
Cities of Spain by David Gilmour is published by John Murray next month at £17.95.
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