It is Pure Rome

At first glance, one would say he has succumbed to Morpheus’s lullaby. Stranded on the beach, the sand cradles him while the water laps at half of his increasingly aged face. Too much sleep even for a child. Three-year-old Aylan has grown gills of shame. In El País, one reads: “A pensioner offers 5,000 euros to anyone who hires his unemployed son.” As in Milena Tusquets’ novel, this too shall pass, “we will forget this crisis because they will come to show us other films. We forget the past with astonishing ease,” criticizes Josep Maria Rosselló. His new book, Lorca, la incògnita visita (work in progress), which is being presented today, starting at 7 PM at the Antiga Audiència, is, above all, “a creation against oblivion,” he emphasizes.

The evening descends, and a persistent breeze alleviates the crowded corners of the artist’s studio, with its imposing horizon of the Praetorium and the Mediterranean. Through the balcony, the chords of the pasodoble being rehearsed at the Casa de la Festa drift in, “the flies are extremely heavy, the universal deluge looms.” Five years have now passed since the first publication of Lorca, la incògnita visita (Silva Editorial), a book straddling research and essay that unearthed from newspaper archives an almost unnoticed episode in the city’s history: the presence of the Grenadian poet in Tarragona on November 14, 1935, during the premiere of La dama boba at the Teatre Modern. With a keen archaeological nose, Jordi Rovira recovered the gem, an interview of immense beauty that Lluís de Salvador, director of the Diari de Tarragona at the time, conducted with the Andalusian genius backstage, and he ceded it to a ‘lorcat’ (Lorca enthusiast), Josep Maria Roselló, eternally enchanted by his colossal work and capable of illuminating a piece of admirable craftsmanship that sold out instantly.

Then began the silent journey of this second installment, a leisurely and expanded re-reading of the first, “which delves into the same theme but in a completely different way.” As a chronicle, Rosselló unfolds a profound contemporary reflection woven around the conversation held between Lluís de Salvador and Lorca, a dialogue that might seem anecdotal until the poet confesses his enchantment with Tarragona’s luminous Roman heritage, “it is pure Rome,” he proclaims, and reveals an “unknown” previous stay, for the Santa Tecla festivities, which specialists place in the company of Dalí. “The parallels between the two eras are constant. There are comments by Lorca that are strikingly relevant. The work is dedicated to committed journalism, like that of Lluís de Salvador,” and to art without censorship, like Lorca’s, the poet of the gypsies, of women, and of Black people, and to top it all off, “queer and red,” in the words of Luis Antonio de Villena, the work’s prologuist.

In a “fierce and Cainite” time, a tragic destiny was foretold. Sabina already sang it in a duet with Chavela Vargas: May being brave not be so costly, may being cowardly not be worth it…

Lorca, the unknown visit