La Lola se va a los Puertos

by William Washabaugh

"La Lola se va a los Puertos" is a line from a poem penned by Manuel Machado. It served as the title for a play written in 1929 by Antonio and Manuel Machado, arguably the most famous names in Spanish poetry of the 20th century. Their play was, by all accounts, highly successful, and probably influenced García Lorca in his writing of Bodas de sangre (Guerra, M. El Teatro de Manuel y Antonio Machado, Madrid: Editorial Mediterráneo, 1966, p. 132). In the 1930s, it was taken up and popularized in a zarzuela by A. Barrios. Subsequently in 1947, the play was used as the foundation for a film of the same title directed by the prolific Juan de Orduña. In 1993, the play again served as the basis for a film, this time directed by the Andalusian Josefina Molina. The playscript for the original is, of course, is available in libraries and bookstores (Chicharro Chamorro, D. Las Adelfa, La Lola se va a los puertos, Madrid: Collección Austral, 1992, hereafter noted as "CC"), and the films are currently sold in Spanish video stores.

The central theme of all three productions, 1929, 1947, and 1993, is that the beautiful and popular Lola not only sings flamenco, she veritably embodies the style. She is the incarnation of cante. She is flamenco. Accordingly, the fate of Lola in the different productions is a key to discovering the condition of flamenco music in their respective moments in time. Since these instantiations of Lola... hail from sharply and contrastively defined periods of Spanish social life -- on the brink of the ill-fated Republic in 1929, in the abyss of autarkic Spain in 1947, and at the height of the Spanish miracle in 1993 -- one should not be surprised to find that both Lola... and cante come off looking radically different. It is the distinctive self-characterizations of the society and its music that I will explore here.

1929

The original three-act comedy by the brothers Machado was written in verse. Guerra (p. 118) has summarized its plot nicely: Lola is a symbolic person who incarnates Andalusian cante jondo, that spiritual and melancholic song. Heredia is her guitarist and inseparable companion. He recommends Lola to Don Diego, a rich and donjuanesque landholder who, after meeting her, begin courting her favors. Jose Luis, the son of Don Diego, is not getting along with his father, and on top of that, he competes with him for the conquest of Lola. Rosario, daughter of an aristorcrat and niece of Don Diego, is espoused to Jose Luis.

La Lola lives exclusively for her art. She is the popular lyric personified. She is the poetic voice of the community, the anonymous epic of andalusian folkore, the aristocracy of the delicate sentiments that rise above and go beyond class boundaries. Neither Don Diego nor Jose Luis can quite comprehend her reserve. Heredia, her most intimate friend, is persistent suspicious and inquisitive. Rosario rises up with accusations, finally brandishing a revolver but Lola disarms her as easily and gracefully as she slips away from the compromising entreaties of Don Diego and Jose Luis.

Lola sings soleares in Seville, accompanied by Heredia's guitar, and the enchanted audience gathers round her. Don Diego and Jose Luis confront each other in the course of a juerga with wine and song, bringing their rivalry to a head; but Lola diverts their violence, saying that she has been asked to sing. One of Don Diego friends impugns her reputation. Heredia leaps to her defense and attacks him. Don Diego, in a final effort, tries to cover Lola in jeweled tiara, but she renounces the gift and gives it to Rosario.

Lola tours all of Andalucia singing in Heredia company. Near Cadiz she disembarks long enough to see her old friends. Don Diego has reformed himself; Jose Luis is reconciled with his father. Rosario is cold, but at least not jealous. La Lola declines a contract to sing in Madrid and, in the company of Heredia, heads off, instead, to Buenos Aires.

A number of distinctive features stand out in this original 1929 production. First and perhaps most importantly is the Machadian aesthetic that is repeated a number of times in the course of the play. "Flamenco is not a music, but a language of the heart." (CC, p. 214) "The copla lies in the heart; the art consists in projecting it outward." (CC, p. 267) "It rises up in the breast of a people when they laugh or cry. The issue is to know how to feel; the rest in trivial." (CC, p. 220).

In the midst of Lola's protestations of this Machadian aesthetic, Don Diego intervenes, prodding her with questions about artists who compete for wealth, and who crave 'the life'... that tries to make night into day and wineglasses into happiness." To this thinly veiled reference to the debaucherous excesses of the flamenco lifestyle, the unflappable Lola responds simply and steadfastly that none of these things matter. None of them count as a significant part of the art. Nothing matters, save perhaps the "pain" of it all, the pain that feeds directly into her coplas.

The steadiness of Lola under Don Diego's grilling is significant. As events unfold, Lola will have numerous opportunities to display even greater unshakeability as she faces harrowing events that include familial enmity, lechery, love promised, love lost, threats of violence and finally expatriation. But -- and here is the key -- her song, paired with Heredia's toque, is a trustworthy guide for the perplexed and a soothing balm for the wounded. Individually and socially, one can do no better than to count on this deepest of all cultural resources. To find one's heart and to project it out into the world is the key to reorienting that very world. It is the compass that steers Don Diego, Jose Luis, and Rosario back together again. It is the gyroscope that can be trusted to correct Spain's downward spiral, and to bring the whole of Spanish social life -- including families and classes -- back into balance.

A second issue turns on the identity of Lola, played in 1929 by the actress Lola Membrives. At one point, as Lola and Rosario meet and joust with their words, Lola acknowledges that flamenco has little wide appeal. To Rosario, she says, "to a woman of your class, flamenco does not come off as anything popular" (CC, p. 231) Rosario decries the sad, anguished, heart-rending style of flamenco and suggests that the life of a singer must be both depressing and dangerous. One is, she says, always amongst those "bronzed people...who walk alone in the world" ("gente del bronce...que andan por el mundo solas") (CC, p. 232). While her words may refer to the laboring classes, that is to people who work in the sun, they may also refer to Gitanos. Lola's response to Rosario makes the latter significance more plausible. She says that her father had a forge in Cordoba, "where I learned that metals are bent and broken and that the air that feeds the fire is really stronger than the iron itself." The possibility that Lola is a Gitana is raised here, but nowhere else -- and not in any of the other filmic productions of '47 or '93. The muting of references to Gitanos in all of these productions is worth further discussion, though that will be a matter for another time.

Third, one cannot miss the expression of pro-Spanish sentiments. Flamenco is the voice of an honorable people, the musical expression of a comunity that "is fine, sensible, and in its own way, artistocratic. It works like no other, but does so with a song, and, being more artistic than laborial, it boasts of its accomplishments, not of the sweat that produces them, and of its work accomplished (obra), not of its labor expended (trabajo)" (CC, p. 238). Expressions such as these are consistent with the efforts of the brothers Machado to refurbish the image of Spain in the era following 1898.

Fourth and consistent with their post-1898 mode of expression, La Lola... of 1929 is vigorously anti-American, and specifically anti-Yankee. Spaniards of the period continued to hold a brief against the U.S. for the humiliating defeat of 1898 -- now exactly one century in the past. But additionally, fears about Yankee imperialism were rampant in 1929, and were often raised afresh in order to encourage stronger economic and political ties between Spain and the Latin American countries that felt threatened by the imperial power to the north. "The day will come," Heredia forewarns, "when they'll be selling us baptismal water bottled in Yankeeland" (CC, p. 272).

As extreme as this expression may sound, the anti-American rhetoric in the 1929 become more vicious and radical still in the course of the play. If the Americans have their way, "Sex will disappear. Men and women, as they say, will go naked, for less than nothing, not even noticing their differences" (Ibid.). The reason, of course, is that barbaric Yankees have little or no appreciation of the deep impact of gender on social structure. Men must be men, and women women, if social life is ever to find its balance.

This principle, I think, is close to the heart of the play, because gender is close to the heart of both cante and the society at large. One cannot help noticing that the dynamics of the play revolve around Lola's femininity. She is, after all, so very attractive that she drives two otherwise sensible men off their rockers -- setting father against son and a betrothed man against his fiancé. Lola's womanhood is indeed the provocative force in the play, the stimulus for the conflict, the source of all the trouble that the cante of her personhood eventually resolves. She is, in other words, a paradox. Heredia says so at the very outset of the play and repeatedly thereafter: Lola is really not a woman at all, but cante-in-a-skirt. Don Diego and Jose Luis keep missing that point. But, Heredia, the guitarist, is there to remind them of that simple reality. And he is there, too, to bring Lola back to her own essence when she strays momentarily. Finally, Heredia is the one who escorts Lola off to Buenos Aires after all affairs have been set aright.

So, when the whole tale is told, Lola-cante is a paradox, a bomb that threatens to blow the society apart, and a balm that heals its wounds. Heredia-toque is the half-god hero of the play. He quietly and self-effacingly steers all the charaters aways from the pyrotechnics that Lola's beauty ignites. And he more than any other directs the soothing powers of flamenco to the task of bringing the society back into balance.

1947

The Machadian aesthetic that dominated the 1929 production was "find your heart and project it into the world." When we turn to the film of 1947, we find that that aesthetic has been transformed just as radically as franquismo had transformed the whole of Spanish social life. The dominant message of the 1947 film is "the heart is weak; pray for strength."

This film by Juan de Orduña with Juanita Reina in the lead role has all the main features of the original play, though the historical period has been shifted half a century back, to roughly 1860. Don Diego, the señorito, his gushing son Jose Luis on whom Rosario has set her sights, and finally Lola and Heredia.

As in the play, Don Diego invites Lola to his cortijo. The occasion for their festivites, however, is the return of Rosario from her four-year stay in Paris. Her sidekick and chaperone, the fatuous Uncle Willy provides the audience with intermittent comedy while availing Orduña multiple opportunities to poke fun at the French and British. Jose Luis is instantly captivated by Lola's beauty. He leaves Rosario in the lurch, and much to Don Diego's dismay -- Don Diego has his own sights set on Lola -- Jose Luis captures Lola's heart. She moves in with him. He, wanting to show her what a brave lover he is, becomes a bullfighter. Don Diego plots to intervene in the relationship, but his plot turns sour, when Diego's villanous friend insults Lola. Jose Luis intervenes to defend her honor, and in the ensuing scuffle gets a rather large blade stuck into his gut. The doctor doubts he'll live.

Side by side, Rosario and Lola pray to the Virgin as a Holy Week processions passes outside, and Lola promises to give up her love if only Jose Luis might survive. He does survive. Everyone calls it a miracle. Lola heroically withholds herself despite Jose Luis's pleas to see her. She defers to Rosario. Rosario embraces Lola thankfully and rushes to the side of her erstwhile lover. Heredia and Lola go off Buenos Aires as Lola sings a tearful siguiriyas.

In this production, Lola is a fairly vulnerable individual. She doesn't need to hear many sweet nothings in the moonlight before she gives herself over to Jose Luis. She falls truly and pathetically in love with him, so much so that thereafter she sings only for Jose Luis, and no longer in public. But while vulnerable, she is also pious, and it is her piety and not the "life force" of flamenco that ultimately succeeds in returning her to balance, bringing her back to a life of cante with Heredia, though never without a tear in her eye.

There is hardly a sustained moment of cante throughout the entire film. A guitar falseta might lead into a solea or a siguiriyas, but quickly the strains of orchestral accompaniment overwhelm the guitar, and the cante turns to a cuplé, a canción, or ballad. When combined with elaborate period costumes, with elaborate scenes of folk dance, with depictions of field hands singing as they work in the olive groves, the music in this film turns into something of a self-mockery. The director, one of the most prolific of the period, was obviously bent on rectifying the tawdry images of Spain that tantalized foreign tourists (Gubern, R. et al., Historia del Cine Español, 1995, Madrid, Ediciones Cátedra, p. 215). But his efforts nevertheless have generated something of a self-aggrandizing caricature, an image that is every bit as fictitious as the one it aimed to supplant. In the end the film comes off as a startling example of the "españolada" that films of the 40s set out to abolish.

Juanita Reina's Lola is light, bouncy, ever-smiling, and always willing to please her admirers and audiences by tossing her hair and flashing her smile. She was, in reality, the cantaora of choice for many aficionados of the day, having just burst onto the scene of flamenco cancion five years earlier at the age of sixteen (Blas Vega 1995: 121-2) . Her meteoric rise to stardom was capped in 1947, by the production of two films in addition to La Lola..., Serenata Española and Vendabal.

Besides the youth and vulnerability of Reina's Lola, viewers should note that the anti-Yankee slant of the 1929 production has been replaced here with a decidedly anti-French and anti-British sentiment. This new and distinctly franquista version of xenophobia is evident from the very outset of the film when Rosario returns from her four-year stay in Paris brandishing haughty airs. Together with her silly Uncle Willy, she is visible sign of the dangers of foreign influence in Spanish social life.

Despite many differences between this film and the play of los hermanos Machado, especially with respect to the presentation of cante, the character of Lola, and political overtones, the same gender issues remain. Lola is a beautiful woman whose presence disrupts a household of men. Prayer, if not cante, is the only method for rebuilding the household that her femininity has fractured.

1993

The 1993 film is directed by Josefina Molina, with the screenplay adaptation written by Josefina Molina, Jose Manuel Fernandez, Romualdo Molina, and Joaquin Oristell. This Lola.. is visually and audially beautiful, an extraordinary effort to replay in updated fashion the challenging message of Antonio and Manuel Machado, especially that of Manuel (see Amelina Correa Ramón 1998). It recovers something of the same fundamental Machadian aesthetic of the 1929-production, but it sharpens the focus of the drama on the community of Andalucía. Its theme is that cante lies at the heart of Andalucía, and though this diverse region may be marginalized in Spanish national life, it can still congeal itself into a unity and project itself forward into the future if it recovers its roots in cante.

The sobriety and balance that the brothers Machado intended to invest in cante in more than adequately realized in the character played by Rocio Jurado. Here in 1993, Jurado is approximately twice as old as Juanita Reina on screen in '47 -- Blas Vega (La Canción Española, Madrid, Taller El Búcaro, 1996) provides ample biographical information on both. Like Juanita Reina, Jurado was at the top of her form as a performer of protean flamenco styles. However, by 1993, she had been enjoying that position of prominence for almost thirty years. Her very presence on the screen creates a sense of dignity, sobriety, and grace. Her voice conveys the depth and solemnity of cante. In other words, the casting choice of Rocio Jurado and nothing more places the Josefina Molina's '93 film in a completely different category from Juan de Orduña's film of 1947.

Politics enters into this '93 production no less than it did in '29 and '47. Most notably, a subplot in the '93 film is the problem of labor unrest. Lola's own sympathies clearly favor the interests of the laborers rather than of the landholding elites. Early on in the film, as Lola and Heredia are being taken by carriage to Don Diego's cortijo, a laborer emerges out of the hedgerow, and races toward them pleading for help. This poor fellow on the lamb was evidently responsible for the recent vandalization of some of Don Diego's farm equipment, and was being pursued by Don Diego's henchmen. Lola looks at Heredia for a sign. Heredia nods. And they immediately disembark and give their carriage over to the laborer. They finish their journey to Don Diego's cortijo on foot. Later in the film, Lola pleads for the release of another vandal caught by Don Diego's men. Don Diego grants her wish, but only as a ploy to insinuate himself into Lola's affections. Finally, while in Sevilla, viewers are made aware of a labor demonstration that occurs on the street at the same time that Don Diego's cronies are partying in high style in their fancy club.

A second and even bolder political move, unprecedented in the '29 and '47 productions, is the cameo role given to Blas Infante, the celebrated martyr of Andalusian regionalism, who focused Andalusians' attentions on their glory days prior to 1492 when Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in what was then a harmoniously hybrid Andalucía. He was murdered in 1936. Stepping out of the character of megalomanical lecher, Don Diego invites Lola to a meeting, where Blas Infante, played by Juan Valdez, lectures on the glorious and honorable history of Andalucía. The lecture is punctuated with his introduction of Lola as the consummate singer of cante jondo. She then leads the assembled patricians -- all standing at respectful attention -- in an anthem to Andalucía, here accompanied by piano played by Federico García Lorca.

Jose Luis, dashing in every production, enjoys his own distinctive flair in this '93 film. An avid pilot -- at a time when flying planes was only a tad bit safer than fighting bulls -- he enjoys soaring over the rolling hills of Andalucia, treating viewers to jaw-dropping vistas. More to the "andalucista" point of the film, he flies Lola over Sevilla, providing the requisite glimpse of the Giralda and more. He buzzes the statue at the top, coming so close to this revered symbol of Andalusian identity that viewers can almost reach out and touch it.

Lola, in this production is a bit more vulnerable that the character in the '29 play, but far less fragile, and certainly less easily swept into love than Reina's Lola of 1947. Still in all, it is she, Lola who provokes all the enmity and bitterness expressed by father and son. She is the one with the power to draw Jose Luis out of the pool where he confronts Rosario with his full frontal nakedness. She is the one with strength enough to give up a diamond tiara that could buy a cortijo. She is the one who sends Don Diego, sprawling across his banquet table, in paroxysms of self-pity. She is the source of it all...yet strangely, this cante-in-a-skirt is the also the source of all healing. Well, almost all the healing...

The guitar, again, remains the rock-steady force that keeps Lola on track. Heredia, played here by Jose Sancho -- whose traditional guitar sounds are provided, ironically, by new wave artists such as Juan Manuel Cañizares and Ricardo Pachón -- is finally given the focus that has been long denied guitarists. Heredia is really the hero of this film.

It's about time that flamenco guitarists are applauded for their crucial role in flamenco artistry. These yeomen of flamenco, at everyone else's behest, are the ones who set into motion the vibrations that bind cantaores and bailores together. Often in the shadows, and out of the loop of the libidinous webs that ensnare singers and dancers, the guitarists constitute the Machadian foundation of the art form. They mediate the "life force" that lends stability to everything on stage now, and off stage later. Perhaps the proper prayer for twisting damsel perched atop the Giralda, who has witnessed so much conflict, misery, and shame from her lofty stand, should be: "Lola me good, but then please pass me my guitar!"

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