The Mystery of the Flowers (1935)

From 1935, Federico García Lorca increases the social tone and sympathy with the most underprivileged in his public statements with the excuse of the theater: “A sensitive and well oriented theater in all its branches, from tragedy to vaudeville, can change in a few years the sensitivity of a people; and a broken theater, where the hooves replace the wings, can make a whole nation sick”.

In September he moves to Barcelona with Margarita Xirgu where he remained until December. Another opportunity to vindicate the theater: “The theater is a school of tears and laughter, and a free tribune where men can put in evidence old or wrong morals and explain with living examples eternal norms of the heart”.

On the success of his theater in Barcelona, Lorca wrote to his parents: “Of course the right wing will take all these things into account to continue the campaign against me and Margarita, but it doesn’t matter. It is almost convenient that they do so, that they know once and for all the fields we are treading. Of course, in Spain you can’t be neutral.”

On September 10, Xirgu debuts at the Barcelona Theater and begins an unrepeatable cycle: the premiere of Yerma and then Blood Wedding. On October 6, Federico offers a recital for the workers’ athenaeums: “There was a huge audience that filled the theater,” he writes in a letter to his parents, “and then the entire Rambla de Cataluña was full of an audience that listened over the loudspeakers, because the event was transmitted. It was thrilling, the gathering of the workers […]. Afterwards I had to resist for more than an hour and a half a parade of people shaking my hand […]. Of course, the right wing will take all these things into account to continue the campaign against me and Margarita, but it does not matter. It is almost convenient that they do it, that they know once and for all the fields we are treading. Of course, in Spain one cannot be neutral”.

García Lorca, Margarita Xirgu and Rivas Cheriff. / Photo: National Archive of Catalonia.
García Lorca, Margarita Xirgu and Rivas Cherif. / Photo: National Archive of Catalonia.

On the night of December 12, 1935, he premiered Doña Rosita the Spinster or the language of the flowers. From that day on, every evening, before the beginning of the performance, he receives a mysterious bouquet of flowers in the dressing room. In the end it is revealed that it is a gift from the florists of La Rambla. In return, Lorca and Xirgu dedicate a tribute to the florists: “Tonight, my youngest and most beloved daughter, Rosita the Spinster, Miss Rosita, Doña Rosita, on the marble and among cypresses Doña Rosa, has wanted to work for the nice florists of La Rambla, and I am the one who has the honor of dedicating the party to these nice women of frank laughter and wet hands, where the tiny ruby caused by the thorn trembles from time to time”.

In the final days of his stay, he meets up with the writer Arturo Serrano Plaja in the port of Barcelona and comments: “This is the revolution, the florists’ unions come to bring flowers to me, the poet. Do you realize what this is?

In those days, pressed by the lack of time, he leaves La Barraca. In Santiago de Compostela the Six Galician Poems appear under the care of his friend the writer and journalist Eduardo Blanco-Amor.