Sanctuary of the Cristo del Paño of Moclín

The pilgrimage of the Cristo del Paño inspired the procession that tragically culminates Yerma. The play was written between 1933 and 1934. Its premiere was already shrouded in the hostile atmosphere that preluded the Civil War. The friendship of Margarita Xirgu with Manuel Azaña, in whose drama The Crown, she had starred, and his commitment to the cause of the Republic provoked a threat of rebellion among the conservative public who attended the first performance at the Teatro Español on December 29, 1934.

The García Lorca family had a lithograph of the Cristo del Paño hanging in their house in Valderrubio. Federico did attend the pilgrimage on occasion, although against the will of his father, as Isabel García Lorca recalled in her memoirs and suggested by Marcelle Auclair.

The younger sister specifies that she never attended and highlights some phrases taken from Yerma to underline the aspects that she believed to be less exemplary of the procession according to the moral criteria of those times. “I have seen more than forty barrels of wine at the back of the hermitage,” says the girl in the third act. Another character, the Old Pagan Woman, says: “Here women come to meet new men and the saint performs the miracle”. Isabel also recalls another phrase from the play: “A hundred leagues around you hear nothing but terrible words”.

Francisco García Lorca reveals in his memoirs that he did not attend the pilgrimage either, although he admits that “our bedroom” in the countryside was presided over by the “True Image of the Most Holy Cristo del Paño”, as it read at the foot of the reproduction.

Francisco remembers Federico “many times” reflecting on the pagan characteristics of the image. And he says: “I must confess that Federico’s imagination went further than mine”. The pagan aspect that hovers over Yerma is indisputable. The final dance of the pilgrimage act, between a man and a woman, comes from a dance from northern Spain of Bacchic origin.

The scene of the washerwomen (Act II, Tableau I) in Yerma is inspired by the women Lorca used to meet on his walks as a youngster at the La Carrura fountain, which no longer exists, on the banks of the river Cubillas, between Pinos Puente and Valderrubio.

In the play, the washerwomen sing songs in a carefree tone alluding to infecundity: “Yo planté un tomillo [I planted thyme], yo lo vi crecer./ [I saw it grow], / El que quiera honra [He who wants honor] / que se porte bien (Ríen) [let him behave well (they laugh)]”. Or they make cruel allusions: “Those macho women are like that: when they could be making lace or apple jams they like to climb on the roof and walk barefoot along those rivers”.

According to Marcelle Auclair, who knew Lorca well during the time he wrote Yerma, the playwright used to comment, between truths and jokes, that the painting of the Cristo del Paño covered another pagan. “Looking at it well,” he said, “you can see, under the thin layer that covers it, the hooves and the matted hair of a faun”.

Already in Madrid, Lorca spoke with his friends of the pilgrimage and the musician Gustavo Pittaluga decided to compose a ballet with a plot by Lorca and Cipriano Rivas Cherif. There was an attempt to perform the work in 1927 at the Students’ Residence with the backdrop of Alberto Sánchez, but it was finally suspended.

The symphonic version of The Pilgrimage of the Cuckolds was first performed at the Teatro de Cámara in Madrid in 1930. The danced version premiered on 8 November 1933, three weeks after Lorca left for Argentina, at Madrid’s Teatro Calderón, featuring Encarnación López, La Argentinita, and her sister Pilar.

Ian Gibson suggests that the failed attempt to perform the ballet in 1927 at the Students’ Residence led the poet to write a drama on the theme of the barren woman, the future Yerma.

José Mora Guarnido, a great friend of Federico’s since 1917, did attend the pilgrimage of the Cristo del Paño before leaving for Uruguay in 1923. In his memoirs he recalls: “For three or four days, at the beginning of October, all the villages of the Vega are filled with a strange rumor: a cry repeated by hundreds of voices, men or women, old people or children, who greet the pilgrims of Moclín shouting: `Jerk!, Jerk!’ The pilgrims carry in silence the intimate drama of their infertility”.