Dictators Kill Poets: On Federico García Lorca’s Last Days

On August 18 or 19, 1936 Federico Garcia Lorca, Spanish poet and composer, was murdered at the age of 37 or 38. An excerpt from the article:

"On the afternoon of August 16th, just hours after Lorca learned that his brother-in-law had been executed, Ruiz Alonso led a convoy of over 100 soldiers to the Rosales home, which they surrounded with their guns aimed as if preparing for the last stand of a legendary bandit. With the men of the house away at the front, Mrs. Rosales resisted the demand that Lorca show himself. Ruiz Alonso refused to be diverted. “He’s done more damage with a pen than others have with a pistol,” he said. Trembling, Lorca finally appeared. He was taken to a government building, then after nightfall driven up into the scrubby hills of the Sierra Nevada mountains to an ad hoc prison in the white- painted village of Víznar. Before dawn, he and his three fellow prisoners were delivered to a bend in the road to Alfacar, where he stepped out onto the dirt under a sky with no moon, dressed in his blazer and white pajamas.

“Just as being born didn’t concern me, neither does dying,” Lorca had told a reporter not three months earlier, during what he didn’t know would be his last interview. This was a lie. He feared his mortality to the point of morbid obsession; for years he periodically playacted out his death in front of friends as a form of comic therapy. But how could he have properly prepared for this end, with its nightmare logic and unforgiving suddenness? Death, the “question of questions,” as Lorca called it, the great unknowable void—it was upon him, emptied of all poetic romance.

On the dark field adjacent to the road, the soldiers told the prisoners to stop. The five men weren’t professional executioners. They had taken a side and now accepted their duties, some more zealously than others. One of the soldiers, who would later brag in public about having shot Lorca in his “big head,” was the first cousin of a man whom the poet had unflatteringly fictionalized in a new play. One of the other men had paced nervously earlier in the night, exclaiming, “This isn’t for me! This isn’t for me!” Another, the leader of the firing squad and a former chauffeur for the first prime minister of the Republic, had lost his firstborn ten-month-old son the day before.

The five men lifted their guns, took aim, and fired."