Tica (92) remembered her uncle Federico’s voice. “She laughed with the ‘o’ and pulled me by my braids,” she told me. Tica Fernández-Montesinos García-Lorca (Granada, 1930) has died in her bed in Aravaca (Madrid), peacefully summoned by her age during her sleep. Carnal niece of Federico García Lorca (by daughter of Concha, the poet’s sister), Tica was five years old when her father – Manuel Fernández Montesinos, mayor of Granada – and her uncle Federico were murdered, one day later, in the bloody Granada uprising of August 1936. Tica is mourned by her sons Miguel and Claudio de Casas, and by her daughters-in-law and grandchildren.
Tica, with a prodigious memory, remembered everything until the end. She remembered her uncle Federico’s jokes and laughter, her good humor, her joy, her incomparable voice when reciting and singing. She remembered the sound of the ditches in the Huerta de San Vicente and the sadness and silence that overshadowed her family since that August. She remembered the day in 1940 when her family went into exile aboard the ocean liner “Marqués de Comillas” from Bilbao: “I’m not going to set foot in this fucking country again, damn it,” she heard her grandfather Federico swear. her. This is what Tica told me on her 90th birthday.
“To my good new friend Víctor”, he dedicated to me with a trembling pulse his two wonderful books of memoirs (The sound of water in the ditches and Unraveled memories of a girl who lost the war), evocations of his Granada and the New York where he grew up. . His uncle Federico had lived there in 1929, and upon learning his sister Concha was pregnant, he wrote: “a girl will be born and I will be her godfather and her name will be Tica” (diminutive of Vicenta, mother of the poet. And so it was. “My uncle was very bossy,” Tica laughed when she told it to me.
And Tica told me that when she was born there was a black doll in her crib. Federico brought it from Cuba. He had stopped for seven days in Havana and was so happy that he extended it to 98 days. Hearing it from Tica’s lips inspired me Si yo me perse (2022), a novel that I dedicated to her. What a luxury to put it in her hands last October, when I published it. Thank you, Tica, for your elegance, intelligence, kindness and inspiration.
