Federico Garcia Lorca

There was much debate about the date, as well as the place of the grave. According to some, it was between August 3rd and 6th, according to others - the 16th, according to still others - August 19th, 1936. "A cry," Lorca had written, "and a great horn of fire!" ... He had wanted to be buried in the sand, along with his guitar, but it was not there. He had wanted to leave the balcony open when he died. He had died many times, he had walked with Death, who played his old white guitar at the crossroads, under the orange and olive trees, together with gypsies, with black horses and sinister people, he had been wounded in Seville and killed in Cordoba, he had gone in and out of the tavern with Death. Death from thousands of images, both tender and innocent, both white and transparent - to the stinking, gangrenous deaths, like that of Ignacio Sánchez Mejias, the famous bullfighter, all these deaths merged into one or two shots from a revolver and one from a carbine. Three Granadan lumpens set off in their red Buick on the way back to Granada, to the village of Visnar. On the horizon remain the positions of the Republicans, from where a guitar can be heard, a silent witness to an absurd death. In time, they will look for the poet's bones among the bones of three thousand Granadans buried under this sand dune, but to this day nothing can be said with certainty. Federico García Lorca dissolved into Spanish soil - he is everywhere and nowhere, he has no grave - his grave is Spain. Then one of the assassins was shot by his own colleagues over some smuggling deal, another died of cancer, the third of typhus. Lorca's distant relative - Antonio Benavides - who had arrested him, hoping to appropriate part of the inheritance, had to flee Granada. And the other assassins scattered, disappeared. Only one Francisco Franco remained. And that people remained who can contemplate death behind a fence of saltpeter flowers and can communicate with death, whose most significant things carry its supreme metallicity. After all, Lorca painted this picture: