The Federico García Lorca suite spent its last Christmas in Barcelona. In December 1935 he chose the city to premiere the play Doña Rosita the Spinster or the Language of Flowers, premiered a few days earlier at the Teatro Principal de la Rambla with the company of Margarida Xirgu. That gesture earned him a famous tribute dinner at the Majestic Hotel with a splendid menu of eight courses, wines, champagne and spirits.
In the photos that are preserved, large bouquets of white roses on the tables, the poet with a flower in his lapel and declaiming with his arms raised, energetic, capturing all the attention of those present… and also that of the waiters, solemn but curious . Federico was a star without even having published (he would not see it while he was alive) his unforgettable Poeta en Nueva York.
The following year, just a month after the uprising, on August 18, García Lorca would be murdered by the Francoists and buried (still) at an unknown location. The electricity given off by the images, which are preserved in the hotel’s archive, makes your hair stand on end.
The act of tribute was organized, as documented by Ángel Miguelsanz -economist and former professor at the University of Barcelona-, writers such as Sagarra, Carles Soldevila, Joaquim Ventalló or Joan Puig i Ferrater. In the menu, the poet’s number was printed in Catalan. Frederic It was like saying: “You were one of ours”.
“Federico and Barcelona always had a very special relationship, he saw that Spain had two capitals and that the city was very open and very cosmopolitan, they treated him very well and he had great friends, those days he frequented Dalí, Sebastià Gasch, the Amics de les Arts, he loved the people, walking down the Rambla, the atmosphere of Chinatown,” recalls Ian Gibson, 84 years old and with an oak voice, the biographer and world’s leading expert on the figure of the poet, by phone.
“They always ask me about his death and where he could be, but sometimes we forget how wonderful Federico’s life was. When I went to Barcelona I frequented all the theaters I could and yes, in fact, there premiered Rosita the Bachelorette, a work that he never saw premiered in Madrid,” says the Irish author, also an expert on Machado and Dalí who is returning to his roots and revising the figure of James Joyce and Ulysses. Dalí and Margarida Xirgu were Lorca’s two great friends in Catalonia.
Antonio Machado arrived in Barcelona sometime in early April 1938 (the exact date is unknown) as the national troops advanced. He had less than a year to live. He had started his journey from Villa Amparo, in Rocafort, a town neighboring Valencia, fleeing into exile. The Majestic, intervened by the republican authorities. It had become a luxury refuge for writers looking for a way out of Spain.
Through its corridors and rooms, Machado crossed paths and chatted with León Felipe and José Bergamín, who would later become transcendental figures in the dissemination of Spanish culture. Felipe went to Mexico. Bergamín, a work apart, will always be remembered for two things: commissioning Guernica from Picasso and receiving from Federico himself the manuscript with additions and deletions of Poeta en Nueva York shortly before the Granada poet died. Bergamín edited it in 1940. The universe thanks him
Lorca was no longer in this world when Machado, Bergamín and León Felipe met at the Majestic. But Lorca and Felipe did do it a few years ago in New York, precisely when the latter was teaching at Cornell University and Federico discovered a new world in the Big Apple. An opportunity that also served him to explore his inner and sentimental world, which he had not yet fully mapped.
Machado’s footprints can still be seen in the hotel. Right at the entrance, under the arches of the hall, there is a marble plaque sponsored by the Almenara Andalusian Cultural Society, which was hung in 1989. And for a few years, until 2016, the hotel dedicated a suite to it (the only one with a name own) and where there were hanging drawings and portraits of him.
The poet occupied two rooms at the Majestic for three weeks with his mother, brother, sister-in-law and three nieces. Monique Alonso, a student of Machado for decades (since she was a student of Professor Tuñón de Lara) and founder of the Machado Foundation of Colliure, remembers that the three nieces, Eulalia, Carmen and Mary, “really enjoyed the Majestic since it was the “It was the first time they were in such a large and luxurious hotel, with meals served with tablecloths by waiters who, according to them, were very attentive.”
But for Don Antonio, the hotel was light years away from an austerity that was more familiar to him: the communities did not abandon Machado in his second and last stop and inn in Barcelona, ??but he obtained peace of mind. Ironies of life, the Castanyer Tower, belonging to the Marchioness of Moragas, had received a visit from the queen regent María Cristina in 1888 with her son Alfonso XIII. The marchioness (who took refuge in Lourdes before the advance of Franco’s troops) temporarily gave the palace to the Socorro Rojo charity association.
It was during that period that Machado published almost 30 articles for La Vanguardia. At least the first from Villa Amparo, in Rocafort, because there is a letter sent on March 27 to the newspaper. He probably wrote the rest from Barcelona. He had a hard time going up and down stairs and on the landings he organized his gatherings with León Felipe or whoever he was with. At the Majestic he only came down for meals.
“Don Antonio was physically and morally exhausted. In Barcelona he saw that there was nothing more to do, but he was lucid until the end, until the last moment,” recalls Monique Alonso, founder of the Machado de Collioure Foundation. Lucidity and premonitory arts are evident in the articles published in this newspaper.
Most of his analyzes focused on criticizing powers such as France and, especially, Chamberlain’s United Kingdom, for their neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, which would later pay first for Hitler’s obvious movements on the European board. The vanguard. April 6, 1938. Page 3.
“The English and French governments have preferred to help our enemies, who are also theirs, with the so-called non-intervention and they seem to want our extermination, to come to terms with the victors.” Machado seemed to care more about British Prime Minister Chamberlain than Chamberlain did about himself.
Federico also had an eye on Barcelona. Some time after his visit to Barcelona for the premiere of Doña Rosita, the last piece he would premiere before dying, the Granada poet wrote to his friend Melchor Fernández Almagro: “On the other hand, Barcelona is already different, right? ? There is the Mediterranean, the spirit, the adventure, the high dream of perfect love. There are palm trees, people from all countries, surprising commercial advertisements, Gothic towers and a rich urban high tide made by typewriters. “How comfortable I feel there with that air and that passion!” It is a perfect portrait of a Barcelona that may be idealized, but ideal.
