It was a time when fragments, lost poems, and early pages of unfinished manuscripts mattered. In 1938 the poet Antonio Machado, his mother, and his brother made their way from Spain to France to escape Franco’s advancing fascist forces. When Machado died in February 1939 in Collioure, his brother found in his pocket the first line of his last poem: “Those blue days, this childhood sun.”
In 1942, when the poet Miguel Hernández died in prison, where he had languished after the Spanish Civil War, he left a body of work that was later published as Cancionero y romancero de ausencias (Songs and Ballads of Absence, 1958). Some of his best-known poems were written on scraps of paper.
The most famous among these poets was Federico García Lorca, who was murdered by fascist soldiers near Granada in the south of Spain in August 1936. Lorca left much unpublished and half-finished work, both poems and plays. “The state of his manuscripts,” Leslie Stainton writes in Lorca: A Dream of Life (1999),
demonstrates the extent to which the act and art of creation were a part of his everyday life. He wrote poems on invitations to tea, royalty statements, envelopes, and drawings…. [He] wrote plays on the backs of poems.
After the civil war, most of Lorca’s family moved to New York. Before departing, Sarah Arvio writes in the introduction to Poet in Spain (2017), her translation of his poems,
Federico’s father collected all the manuscripts he could find and handed them over to a banker who had been friends with both the poet and his brother, Francisco. The banker stowed them in a vault in the Banco Urquijo—on calle Alcalá in Madrid, the very street where the poet had lived.
Many of these manuscripts are now in the Fundación Federico García Lorca in Granada. Among them is a group of poems known as the “Sonnets of Dark Love,” which were not published until 1983. Arvio describes seeing them for the first time: “The most moving of all the manuscripts I saw is a draft of Dark Love Sonnets—the only draft in the poet’s hand known to exist.” The poems were written on “thin, grayish paper,” the notepaper of the Hotel Victoria in Valencia, where he stayed in November 1935. “All were rapidly written with a blunt pencil in the same hand—as though he had not paused from beginning to end.” She reports that “Neruda and others have said that Lorca was at work on the sonnets in spring and summer of 1936, in the months before his death; he toted them around in his pockets.” But no later versions have ever been found. Arvio writes that Lorca, at the time he wrote these poems, “was deeply in love; he wrote these ten superb sonnets to his absent beloved…in a hotel room.” The beloved she names as Rafael Rodríguez Rapún. (This, however, is open to dispute, since there is also a claim that the sonnets were dedicated to Juan Ramírez de Lucas, whom Lorca referred to as “el rubio de Albacete”—the blond from Albacete—and who later became an art critic.)
Ian Gibson in his groundbreaking Federico García Lorca: A Life (1989) explains why Rapún remains somewhat mysterious:
About Lorca and Rafael Rodríguez Rapún’s relationship at this time [the summer of 1935], it is almost impossible to obtain any information: no correspondence has come to light; there are no diaries, and oral information on the subject is as scant as it is unhelpful. All we can surmise is that, given their professional as well as affective relationship, the two must have been together virtually every day.
Rapún, born in Madrid in 1912, was fourteen years younger than Lorca. He was, Gibson writes, “of athletic build, a good footballer and passionate socialist.” Although he was studying engineering, he joined La Barraca, the traveling theater group with which Lorca was involved, and became its secretary in 1933. According to one friend whom Gibson interviewed, Rapún was not homosexual:
Rafael was crazy about women…but he got caught in the net, no, not caught, immersed in Federico…. He became immersed in the whole affair without realizing what was happening. Later he tried to get away but he couldn’t…. It was tremendous.
We have to be careful, however, with this account of Rapún, since many who later gave accounts of this period were uneasy about homosexuality. The other account of Rapún—from a colleague in La Barraca—refers to his “elemental” nature that caused him to have an automatic orgasm “when our van overtook another car on the road.”
Only one letter from Rapún to Lorca has come to light. Quoted in Gibson’s book, it was written in 1933 when Lorca was in Buenos Aires:
I remember you constantly. Not to be able to see a person with whom you have been every hour of the day for months is too much to be forgotten. Especially if towards the person in question you feel yourself drawn as strongly as I do towards you.
After Lorca’s death, Rapún took an artillery course and, with the rank of lieutenant, was commanding a battery near Reinosa south of Santander when there was an air attack. Gibson writes, “Unlike the other men Rapún did not throw himself to the ground but remained sitting on a parapet. A bomb exploded nearby and he was mortally wounded.” He died in a military hospital in Santander on August 18, 1937, precisely a year after Lorca’s murder, and was buried in a graveyard beside the Cantabrian Sea.
In La Bola Negra, a film directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi that won the best director award at Cannes in May, Rapún, played by Miguel Bernardeau, is taken to the hospital in Santander, but he does not die there. Instead he is subsequently executed by firing squad in a field at the edge of the sea. The final shot is delivered by a young fascist soldier called Sebastián, played by the actor and singer known as Guitarricadelafuente.
We first see Sebastián as he prepares to play the trumpet in the opening scene of the film. The residents of a raggedy Spanish village are trying to show their loyalty to the fascist cause while they wait for Mussolini’s planes to fly over them. They are so eager that they are almost ridiculous. Sebastián seems to worry that his mother, by her absence, is not showing enough support for the cause. When she appears and puts her arm up in loyalty, the planes begin to strafe the villagers, mistaking them for the enemy; only Sebastián survives.
The problem is how to read this scene. Obviously it is sad and surprising, but on two viewings I found it oddly comic. This was partly because of Guitarricadelafuente’s portrayal of Sebastián. He is strangely vacant and endearingly gormless. He has the wrong haircut. As he tries to escape, he climbs on an oversize statue of the saint after whom he is named. That too has an absurd or exaggerated edge. Soon he is, as he says later, handed a rifle. He is put on a truck. He is now, as much as he can be, a full-fledged soldier on the fascist side.
He stands apart from his fellow soldiers throughout the rest of the film. He is uncomfortable; he peers; he gawks. They are a reasonably good-humored lot, many of them remarkably handsome, as though they were in a men’s cologne ad. There is a brilliant cabaret scene with Penélope Cruz in which they look like English troops from, say, World War I, smiling, innocent fellows on a night out. Since they are close to the ocean, they take off their uniforms and cavort naked in the water. They look good from behind and enjoy horseplay.
We get to view the other side—Republican troops—mostly when they are dead, as jumbled corpses in the back of a jeep. (This is one of the few moments that rupture the general avoidance of horror in the film.) In one of these jeeps, there is a man still alive. High-ranking fascist officers know that this soldier has seemed to want death, and they presume that he knows secrets and is concerned about being taken alive. They do not realize that he is Rafael Rodríguez Rapún and that he was Lorca’s lover.
Sebastián, who is detailed to guard him, is puzzled when his prisoner drops a piece of paper to the floor. It has a poem written on it, one of Lorca’s Sonnets of Dark Love: “The beloved sleeps on the poet’s breast.” Since Lorca did not make his homosexuality public, this poem is especially significant because in line two it uses the gendered word dormido, signifying that the beloved is a man.
The two often gaze at each other, Sebastián a bit more than Rapún. It is burgeoning love across the barricades. All the politics are taken out of the story, as is much of the sheer viciousness that characterized the war. The tone is light; it is brash; some of the material is farcical. The narrative deliberately, it seems, lacks weight and depth. It is extravagant, a kind of romp. It is hardly what we expect in a film about the fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. It says more, perhaps, about the period in which it was made than it does about the past. In King Lear, Gloucester says of his son Edmund, “There was good sport at his making.” The same feeling comes across in La Bola Negra: an infectious sense that the filmmakers had a good time putting it all together.
The first time I heard someone say that the fascists in Spain should not be demonized was in 1988 at the unveiling of a statue in a suburb of Barcelona to commemorate the withdrawal of the International Brigades from the country, at which the Socialist mayor of Barcelona, Pasqual Maragall, spoke. Among his audience were many ex-members of the brigades, old soldiers. Maragall, speaking in Catalan and French and English, alluded to the need for reconciliation and to not humiliate the other side. In English, he said, “They too had their ideals.” This caused one old lefty to heckle him, but the rest sat in stunned silence.
That was almost forty years ago. But the debate about the civil war has not gone away. Earlier this year a controversy erupted over who had suffered most and who the victims were and who has the right to speak. David Uclés is a Spanish writer born in 1990. His third novel, La península de las casas vacías (The Peninsula of Empty Houses, 2024), which dramatizes the impact of the civil war on several generations of a family, has been a best seller in Spain and has won numerous prizes. Lorca appears in the book, as do Hemingway and Orwell. Earlier this year Uclés published La ciudad de las luces muertas (The City of Dead Lights), set immediately after the war, which won one of the main Spanish literary prizes and also became a best seller.
Soon after the appearance of La ciudad de las luces muertas, Uclés announced that he was withdrawing from a conference to be held in Seville entitled “1936: The War We All Lost,” partly because two right-wing politicians—former prime minister José María Aznar and one of the founders of the far-right party Vox—were among the participants, but also because of the title. “We didn’t all lose the war,” Uclés said. “We all suffered through it, but the Republicans lost it and the Francoists won it.” One of the organizers of the event, the writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, responded:
Any fool knows there was a winning side in the Civil War, undoubtedly; but all Spaniards lost, as I said before, freedom, culture, lives, homes, families, futures, democracy. And the proof that we lost is that we are still entangled in this mess. Ninety years later. Of course, we lost, and what’s worse is that we continue to lose. And this is said by someone whose father, grandfather, and uncle fought for the Republic and suffered the consequences, especially my grandfather. So, I am authorized to speak about this.
What was notable about this debate was its sheer vehemence and urgency, as though who won the war and who lost had not been settled many years ago.
It may seem obvious that the civil war is still a haunting presence in Spain, but that is only partly true. It is also the case that the war is often viewed with complete indifference. For many, it is hardly worth thinking about. La Bola Negra is caught between these two versions of the past, which perhaps accounts for its untidiness, its mixture of pathos and bright spectacle, its bloated rhetoric, its tender moments, its indifference to historical accuracy, its fascination with the legacy of Lorca.
The films about the civil war in Spain that have come fitfully and sporadically since the death of Franco in 1975 have been overshadowed by the films of Pedro Almodóvar, whose production company, El Deseo, is among the producers of La Bola Negra. Soon after the death of the dictator, Almodóvar came up with the idea that the present moment—especially in Madrid—was of supreme interest. Families did not interest his characters much, nor did parents or religion or party politics or history. Sexual politics interested them, as did self-invention and interior decor. They replaced their families with their friends. They replaced the haunting legacy of the civil war with sudden bursts of quick wit and fierce desire. After two decades of filmmaking, Almodóvar seemed to have made a country in his own likeness. It was surprising, then, in 2021 to see his film Parallel Mothers, in which a photographer, played by Penélope Cruz, is haunted by mass graves from the civil war in her village and has an affair with a forensic anthropologist who is working to identify the bodies of victims of fascism.
The war is like a vampire that won’t stay dead. The question is: Can it still be represented in a single story, with a single protagonist and a clear outcome? Could the tone of a film about it ninety years later be subtle and ironic and wistful? La Bola Negra could easily have been a moving and melancholy film about the death of Lorca and the subsequent year in the life of Rapún. Instead it comes with a kind of exuberance that Almodóvar once applied to the present. It tells a story with three strands, moving with gusto between them. The first is set in 1937 as Rapún is captured and guarded by the hapless Sebastián. It is partly based on a play by Alberto Conejero, La piedra oscura (The Dark Stone, 2017). Conejero, along with the two directors, wrote the screenplay.
The second strand is based on a fragment of a play in Lorca’s archive called La bola negra, which takes up all of two pages in his Teatro completo. The first page gives a list of characters that includes twenty-year-old Carlos, his friends and family, and the members of an exclusive club. It also includes skiers and snow as characters. We are given no explanation for this. The dialogue we have is just one page, a short encounter between Carlos and his sister. Although Lorca’s plans for the work were expanded in a letter to a friend, La bola negra remained just a dream. The film fleshes out the drama around Carlos (played by Milo Quifes) as in 1934 he is refused membership in the club because of his homosexuality.
The third strand of the film is set in the Madrid of 2017. Alberto (played by Carlos González) is a young gay man and the grandson of Sebastián, who has recently died. Having abandoned playwriting, he is now doing research on music. His coked-up mother is out of control. There is a brilliant scene in a restaurant where, in a rage, she hurls abuse and dumps some food on him. He leads a kind of life that could easily be from an Almodóvar film. Indeed, Almodóvar is mentioned in a scene with Alberto and his friends.
Alberto’s grandfather, whom he never met, has left him something mysterious in his will. It turns out that Sebastián had in his possession all those years the full manuscript of the play La bola negra—minus the first four pages—which can now be performed.
The discovered manuscript also has to be shown to an American Lorca scholar, played superbly by Glenn Close with a magnificently wooden Spanish accent. When she realizes its significance, she can say “Cancel my flight” without any worry about cliché. The film is unembarrassed about cliché. The clichés come in battalions. As the end approaches, for example, Sebastián is given “one minute” by a fellow fascist soldier to be alone with Rapún. Some of the big bodega or cabaret scenes could come from a thousand earlier movies. When Carlos is forced to answer whether or not he is gay, the ceiling falls in on him, as it would. This use of cliché adds to the general sense of broad-stroked comedy verging on farce, exacerbated by the speed with which things happen and the many scene changes.
As Rapún is taken to be executed, Sebastián sits beside him in the back of the truck, putting his thigh close to Rapún’s, as if their affair were only starting. Rapún’s final moments are either desperately sad or almost ludicrous or a heady, melodramatic mixture of both. Alberto, eighty years later, is in a strange position: his grandfather shot Rapún; he was also, to some extent, in love with Rapún; he rescued and preserved an important Lorca manuscript; he was a gay man in Franco’s Spain. Alberto’s relationship to the past is thus vastly ambiguous. He seems puzzled when Rapún’s brother hangs up the phone on him. Like several others in the movie, he only wants to help.
On the matter of fascism and Franco, the film is notable for its lack of earnestness about what has been viewed up to now as a most tragic event. But there is one subject on which it is wholly earnest: gay freedom and sexual repression. Indeed, there are moments in the film when you could be at a progressive meeting about the gay future in some open-minded forum in present-day Madrid.
The war offers young Sebastián a slow sexual awakening. We learn that he spent most of his subsequent life in a satisfying gay relationship. His partner tells Alberto how happy Sebastián would be if he were to witness his grandson living openly with his boyfriend in Madrid.
The scenes with Carlos, inspired by Lorca’s fragment La bola negra, offer us a version of young Lorca, the gay scion of a respectable upper-middle-class family. The scene in which Carlos is blackballed by the club is heavily stylized, like a dream of Spanish repression before the war. The young man moves innocently and confidently in the streets. When, on his father’s advice, he returns to face the membership committee, he is asked directly if he is homosexual. Rather than a likely moment from 1934, this is closer to the kind of nightmare that threatened Lorca and eventually overtook him—that he would be ruined in the city that had nurtured him. But it is significant that it is not his politics that puts Carlos in danger but rather his sexuality.
In a black-and-white sequence, Lorca actually appears in the film, played by the theater director and performer Alberto Cortés. In these scenes, Cortés and Bernardeau bear an uncanny resemblance to the Lorca and Rapún we know from photographs. Cortés plays Lorca in an exquisitely mannered style. He is about to go to Granada, where he believes, wrongly, that he will be safe. Rapún is right to be concerned about him. The screenwriters have a chance here to let Lorca speak, find a tone for him. He was known as a great talker. What he mainly says is that he hopes that the lives of the next generation of gay people will be better.
La Bola Negra, then, distills the battles fought in Spain in the 1930s between fascism and democracy, between restriction and freedom, down to questions of sexuality. All the main characters are gay men—Sebastián, Carlos, Alberto, Rapún, and Lorca. Their search for freedom offers the film a tone that is glittering and flippant. The dark knowledge of what happened in the civil war is left throbbing in the background. It is as though the filmmakers sought release from the war’s grim embrace and came up with La Bola Negra as a brilliant and wayward distraction, slyly sidestepping the tragedy of what happened, creating an alternative panorama.