A Son of Granada

I should imagine that a lot of people are familiar with the work of one of Granada’s most famous poets and playwrights.

Frederico García Lorca was born in the village of Fuente Vaqueros in the province of Granada in 1898. When he was eleven years old, the family moved to the city of Granada, where Lorca eventually became involved with local artistic groups and started to write.

In 1919 he moved to Madrid to the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he met Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel and other famous artists, writers, poets and playwrights who eventually became part of the avant-garde ‘Generación del ’27′.

Towards the end of his short life, Lorca was beset by depression, almost certainly stemming from difficulties in coming to terms with his homosexuality, and as a result he grew increasingly estranged from his artistic peers.

His creativity flourished regardless, however, and he continued to supply his public with  poetry and with some of his most successful plays – Bodas de Sangre, Yema and La Casa de Bernada Alba.

(I was lucky enough to be able to enjoy his Doña Rosita La Soltera one evening tucked into an atmospherically small theatre off the Plaza Aliatar in the Albaicín – an intriguing experience.)

In 1936, Lorca, and his brother-in-law who was an ardent socialist and the mayor of Granada, were shot by nationalist militia and thrown into an unmarked grave. Doubts have been cast on the motives of this assassination, many records stating that before his death Lorca’s captors had made overtly derogatory comments about his sexuality, leading some to believe that it was not a purely political killing.

Lorca, by dint of his liberal political leanings, was considered a subversive influence by Franco, and the dictator’s regime banned all of Lorca’s work until 1953, when edited versions of it started to appear once again.

Despite intensive and ongoing investigation and excavation, Lorca’s body has never been discovered: in that he was no different from so many thousands of others murdered during the Spanish civil war – one of Spain’s darkest hours and events which brutally divided its inhabitants in ways that they are still trying to come to terms with today.

The city of Granada still remembers its most successful son with great pride, and the park named after him also has a small museum in which one can peruse a selection of his original work and some of his pen and ink drawings.

By the end of April 1998, I had moved out of my pokey quarters in the Instituto, and into an even smaller room in a student apartment.

I found myself sharing with two German girls: Silke, an attractive blond who rather perplexingly kept herself busy by cheating on her devastatingly good-looking, long-term German boyfriend with a weedy bespectacled Spanish teacher from the school.

Mimi was a different kettle of fish altogether.

Slightly older at thirty-one, she was the only (and by all accounts, and her own admission, exceedingly pampered) child of wealthy parents, and had yet to set foot in the working world.

Mimi spoke English and French fluently, and was well on the way to becoming extremely proficient in Spanish as well. We shared a love of dancing, as well as a love of languages – she was drawn to me upon her arrival at the school, so she informed me at a later date, because of her curiosity at my level of Spanish – and initially things were rosy…

Being the last one into the flat, I was given the child’s bedroom – the clowns on the curtains and the hot air balloon lampshade providing some of the more obvious clues.

There was just enough space for a narrow single bed and a tiny wardrobe, but I had a window over which I didn’t have to draw curtains night and day which made a very pleasant change.

My view was over a small square that provided enough outside space for the children from surrounding buildings to safely play.

I also laid claim to the sadly unspoilt vista of the neighbour’s tail-less German shepherd that appeared to defy the laws of canine biology by being permanently on heat. Her owner spending an inordinate amount of his time roaring out of his house with buckets of water to cool the ardour of her various paramours, occasionally arriving slightly too late and with rather unpleasant consequences.

One of the best things about the flat; other than the big windows, the big bathroom, the big kitchen and the big sitting room, all of which I only had to share with two other people as opposed to twenty; was the fact that it was almost on the doorstep of the Cerveza Alhambra brewery.

The smells emanating from those mighty chimney stacks were mouth-watering, and I used to take the walks to and from the town centre very slowly, my nose high in the air hoovering busily at all that hoppy, malty goodness.

In between all the moving, beer-sniffing, salsa dancing, boyfriend-finding and doggy pornography; I still occasionally managed to make it up the hill to the school, where preparations for the D.E.L.E (Diploma de Español como Lengua Extranjera) exam were hotting up.

The exam was to be taken in the Escuela de Idiomas de la Universidad de Granada: an intriguing place, and the academic heart of a lot of the Erasmus exchanges that went on between Granada and other foreign universities.

The main body of foreign students was from the States, and as US youth as a whole seems to be in possession of boundless self-confidence and an unshakable belief in its own charm, they had pretty much taken over that part of the town. Whichever internet café you entered, you could hear strong US accents, whether speak English or Spanish.

I got chatting with one girl while I was waiting for my turn on a computer, who asked me from which country I hailed. Surprised that my accent had not already offered her a bit of a clue, I told her.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘That’s near my boyfriend!’

‘Really? Where is he from?’

‘New Zealand!’

I decided that in the interests of preserving her dignity in front of what would have been a rather large audience, I would refrain from vocalizing my true feelings. So I just smiled as sweetly as I could manage under the circumstances.

‘How nice.’ I said, as I mentally slapped her repeatedly round her pretty face with a large Atlas.

Eventually D-day arrived and we all traipsed to the language school for the exam; which, when the grammar, idiom, listening, reading, writing and spoken sections were taken into account, lasted the best part of a day.

It was exceedingly nerve-racking to be back in an exam hall – five years had passed since my GCSEs, and I hadn’t exactly excelled in those, so I was over the moon when the D.E.L.E results came out and I discovered that I had been given nearly 100% in my overall score (of course it also meant that I didn’t have to feel too guilty about skipping so many grammar lessons over the previous months).

So that was it, the Instituto Español de Granada has served its purpose, it had rearranged the Spanish language in my head into a semblance of grammatical order, I had met lots of new people and got to know the city; I had even made a bit of money working in the school office translating their promotional material and helping the owners’ children with their homework.

The time had come to slip my eternally itchy feet back into their travelling boots – for the summer at least – but this time, I was not going to be heading off alone…