Conversation with Carlos Morla Lynch.
“Not far from Granada, there is a hamlet where my parents owned a small property. In the neighboring house and adjacent to ours lived a very old widow who exercised an inexorable and tyrannical vigilance over her unmarried daughters. Prisoners deprived of all free will, I never spoke to them, but watched them pass like shadows, always silent and always dressed in black. Now, there was a well at the edge of the courtyard, without water, and I went down to it to spy on that strange family whose enigmatic attitudes intrigued me. And I was able to observe them. It was a mute and cold hell in that African sun, a sepulcher of living people under an inflexible ferule of a dark carcinogen. And this gave rise to The House of Bernarda Alba, in which the kidnapped women are Andalusian, but as you say, they have perhaps a coloring of ochre lands more in keeping with the women of Castile”.