“On a background of mourning and with a white, almost ghostly face, He returns to the world to close his wounds so he can rest in peace.“This is how journalist Ana Bernal-Triviño describes the symbolic cover of ‘Federico returns’ (Lunwerg), “an exercise in historical memory” that, through imaginary spaces and encounters with friends and family, but also with its executors, allows a revived García Lorca maintain pending conversations and say goodbye to your loved ones. In this volume, which is at the same time a “reflection on the harshness of war, in which so many people could not say goodbye to their loved ones”, the writer from Malaga closes her triptych about the author of ‘Yerma’. She does so Giving his voice to the murdered poet by the rebels on August 18, 1936, at the beginning of the Civil war.
Illustrated by Lady Desidia (stage name of Vanessa Borrell), like ‘Federico’s Women’ and ‘Federico’s Men’, differs from the two previous titles in that if in those she approached her characters, in this one she talks about real people. Mother, father, siblings and others Lorca’s relativesbut also friends like the filmmaker Luis Buñuelthe painters Salvador Dalí and Maruja Mallo, the actress Margarita Xirgu or Pepín Bello and other colleagues from the Student Residence, such as Rafael Alberti or María Teresa León, or The Barrack, the theater group he co-directed. “This required a much greater documentation process and, although it is fantasy, this time the dialogues are as realistic as possible. I thought, for example, what I would say if I were face to face with Dalí again, who later had no conflict with dictatorship,” says Bernal-Triviño.
“You still find many versions about the cause of his murderbut there is an abundance of evidence that it was not because of Francoism but because of brawls, envy and personal quarrels, which is the self-serving explanation of the regime and the right, which accused him of being a freemason and homosexual -complains the also professor at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC)-. But not. It was a political crime, as Lorca’s own mother warned, who said that if the rights won they should leave the country because otherwise they would be killed, or as his brother warned; His own father died in exile. For dignity and historical memory we must listen to the voices of his family.”
Bernal-Triviño remembers that “In Granada, Lorca was a very uncomfortable character, because in his works he portrayed that society, all the miseries of the bourgeoisie, who did not forgive him for directing La Barraca, a way of educating with culture. They were afraid of the freedom he brought with his work and his words.”
The author “reincarnates” the feminist tone in this book that he imprinted on the previous two through ‘his wives.’” As Maruja Mallo, one of the Sinsombrero (the rebellious artists and writers of the Generation of ’27), or La Xirgu (who urged him to go with her on tour to Mexico before being murdered). “To them, Lorca confesses things like that in ‘Yerma’ he revealed the fact that he was never a father. He highlights women who were vital to him and inspired him in his creative process, such as his cousin Clotilde, the poet Josefina de la Torre. , Zenobia Camprubí (writer and wife of Juan Ramón Jiménez), Anna Dalí (sister of the painter) or the forgotten Agustina González (intellectual who inspired, among others, ‘The Prodigious Shoemaker’), who was shot shortly after him. “They explain the feminist struggle that cost so much and that so quickly destroyed the Franco regime, which stopped their aspirations and made them invisible.”
Through Lorca’s reflections, Bernal-Triviño warns of how easy it is, “at the beginning of the Civil War to find parallels of how delicate and fine the line that results in the use of hyperbolic, extremist, catastrophic and marked language is. because of the hatred from which conflicts drink”.
“Today all parties use Lorca as a brand. I flee from that iconic image and show a very human Lorca, with a dressing gown and slippers, creating stories in the austere bedroom of his house,” says the person who finished ‘Federico Returns’ in that room. from La Huerta de San Vicente, on the table where he wrote ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’.
