"The execution of Lorca: 'the worst bourgeoisie of Spain'"
The execution of Lorca: “the worst bourgeoisie of Spain”
On the morning of August 18, 1936, the news of Lorca’s execution is traveling fast around Granada. The news, not the rumor. Regarding this we have already seen the testimony Juan Luis Trescastro himself, repeated over and over by those who heard it. The conclusive proof of the date arrived in 2005, with the publication of Manuel Titos Martínez’ book, Verano del 36 en Granada, which contains a most valuable testimony about the event casually found in the archive of the Rodríguez-Acosta family, the celebrated bankers. It turns out that the administrator of the family business, José María Bérriz Madrigal, was informing two family members who were spending their vacation in Estoril (the brothers Miguel and the well known painter José María Rodríguez-Acosta González de la Cámara), of the course of events in Granada when the uprising broke out. On August 18 he tells them that their other brother, Manuel, and his own brother, Bernabé Bérriz, both enrolled in the “Spanish Patriots” militia, have just arrived at the house – it must have been around two in the afternoon – and “they tell me that the Falange killed Federico García Lorca last night”.
It seems that Emilia Llanos, a good friend of the poet, was also up to date with the news, and no less than five people, two of them belonging to the “Spanish Patriots”, would tell her on the morning of August 18th that Lorca had been killed in Víznar before dawn. Among them, Ramón Pérez Roda, Enrique Gómez Arboleya, and Antonio Gallego Burín, close friends of the poet.
That same letter by Bérriz confirms that the brutal character of Juan Luis Trescastro was only too well known in Granada. The rumor of the barbarities committed by the “reds” in Alhama had made it to the city. “They have killed all the rightists, women and children”, Bérriz writes. “They say that Arturo Martos was spared. Juan Luis Trescastro has volunteered for when the troops go to Alhama, and he says he’s ready to slit the throats of nursing children”. And, as if to pardon that monstrous idea, and confirming for us at the same time the manner thinking then of, in Lorca’s words, “the worst bourgeoisie of Spain”, Bérriz adds: “We are in a Civil War and not to give an inch, and when piety and mercy speak in our soul it quiets the memory of so many crimes and of so many evil-doings by that shameful and despicable idea that has made brothers enemies”. All the blame, obviously, goes to those who had opposed the military uprising.
From that moment, and for years afterwards in Granada, Federico García Lorca could not be mentioned, unless it was, “to defame or offend him; you could not even publish anything that he wrote or anything that made a positive reference to him”. A thick curtain of silence surrounded the poet and the circumstances of his death. It was even dangerous to have his books in one’s possession and, in view of the constant household searches, not a few people destroyed the books or hid them carefully. Lorca was taboo. But soon, very soon, he became the ultimate symbol of the sacrifices of the Spanish people, an innocent victim of fascist rage. In truth, a writer had never before been so mourned.
