Rosales’ Family House

The architect Francisco Prieto Moreno, who had met Lorca at the Casa de los Tiros along with Antonio Gallego Burín and Emilio García Gómez, learned of Lorca’s arrest, as he tells Eduardo Molina Fajardo, from Manuel de Falla. “Despite the fact that [Falla] did not go out on the street then because he was ill, he went to see me at the barracks of the Españoles Patriotas [paramilitary militias that acted alongside organizations such as Requetés and Falange], in the Triunfo bullring. He told me: “They have arrested Federico, what can we do”. I answered him astonished, thinking what I could do… (…) I went home. I was newly married and I went to my in-laws’ house for lunch, in Gran Vía. I told my father-in-law about it, so he tried to find out what was going on, and in the evening, at dinner time, he told me: ‘Federico was shot last night. It was a terrible mistake!

The room that Federico occupied had “two beautiful golden beds, with hoops, tassels and a bedside table on which a lithograph of Santo Domingo” was hanging, although he spent most of his time in Luisa Camacho’s living-room which, in addition to a piano, had a balcony overlooking Angulo Street. According to family testimonies, collected by Molina Fajardo, the poet ate on the first floor and also liked to spend several hours reading. In case of a bombing, everyone would hide in a corner that Lorca baptized as El Bombario. In the afternoon he used to go down in his pajamas or in pants and shirtsleeves to Luis’ library on the first floor.

Ruiz Alonso was a friend of Horacio Roldán Quesada, the relative of Don Federico with whom he had problems because of some land in Valderrubio and who participated in the search on August 9 for the siblings of the landlord Gabriel Perea in the Huerta de San Vicente.

The car in which the Falangists arrived to arrest Lorca was an Oakland with license plate GR-2185. According to Eduardo Molina Fajardo, one of the unknown companions of Ruiz Alonso was called Federico Martin Lagos, head of the Falange century. Miguel Rosales claims that when they arrived at the house “it was surrounded by assault and militia guards”. Ruiz Alonso was dressed in overalls (they nicknamed him “the trained worker”) with a Falange insignia sewn on. “Federico was in the courtyard in his pajamas. My mother gave a large glass of coffee with milk to Ruiz Alonso and me. Trescastro and the others stayed at the door without entering.” The former CEDA party MP and linotypist of the newspaper Ideal told Lorca: “You have to accompany me to the Gobierno Civil, but only for you to make some statements”. According to Miguel Rosales, the poet turned white: “He was like a doll and all the women in the house began to cry. García Lorca went upstairs to dress in his bedroom, and the rest of us waited in the courtyard”. Then he said goodbye to the family and Miguel Rosales escorted him to the car”, adds Rosales in the account he gave to Molina Fajardo.

When Lorca was arrested, the Rosales’ mother told the poet’s family that had gathered at the house on San Antón street where the socialist mayor, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, resided, that on that same day he would be shot at the cemetery walls. Desperate due to the arrest of Federico, Miguel Rosales, accompanied by Lorca’s father hired the lawyer Manuel Pérez Serrabona to save the poet. The gesture was futile: Spain was a lawless country, broken by war and in many cases in the hands of gunmen who applied justice themselves.