Granada, his Granada, dressed in sun and gold to pay homage to Federico GarcÃa Lorca and vindicate the fundamental residue of bullfighting in it, with Crying for Ignacio Sánchez MejÃas as the summit.
It was – we said – on a bright morning and in the Huerta de San Vicente, summer home of the Lorca family, where Federico sought shelter in the first days of the Civil War, until at the Rosales’ house they went looking for him heralds of death.
But it was not death, but life, just one day after the 125th anniversary of his birth.
Organized by the Government Delegation in Granada of the Junta de AndalucÃa and the Toro de LÃdia Foundation, whose president, the rancher Victorino MartÃn, intervened in the first place, claiming precisely that fundamental relationship between Lorca and bulls and vice versa. A relationship that many have wanted to marginalize and even hide.
Then two renowned Lorca natives spoke, the playwright Jose Moreno from Granada and the Hispanist Frederick Allen, and it was the bullfighters Cayetano and Curro DÃaz who read the final manifesto, in which it is written.
In Lorca there is everything, good, evil, life, death and love. And, of course, bullfighting, a source of inspiration for the poet.
Federico has contributed decisively to demonstrating the universal, mythical, magical and strictly real, existential nature of the fiesta brava. “We owed him a gesture of gratitude and this is it.”
And if we are talking about Granada and Federico, we are also talking about Morente, a fundamental city and poet in the work of the much-mourned and well-remembered Enrique Morente. For this reason, what better ending than the cante of his son Kiki Morente, accompanied by the flamenco guitar of Rubén Campos.
The public, who filled the marvelous patio next to the house to overflowing, under the blinding sunlight and the pure blue sky, participated in a morning in which Granada, Lorca and the bulls went, once again, hand in hand. “The bullfights, the most cultured festival in the world today”, the poet declared.
It was not at five in the afternoon, at five o’clock in the afternoon, the fateful hour of that afternoon in which the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez MejÃas received the mortal goring of the bull from Granada – fatal destiny and its things – and his friend Lorca he immortalized it in the most beautiful funeral elegy ever written.
It was noon in Granada and Lorca, between speeches and cante, was there.
