Lorca and Pigs

This past weekend, as part of my Federico García Lorca literature class, we went to visit Lorca’s two childhood homes in Fuente Vaqueros and Valderrubio, two very small towns outside of Granada.  This is part of our class at the Fuente Vaqueros house (where Lorca was born), with our professor, Concha, second from the left in the standing row and Eva, one of the other IES directors, to her right:

This photo was taken in the patio, because we weren’t allowed to take any pictures inside the house.  It was a small house (big for its day, as Lorca’s father was an important landowner) with very small furniture.  We asked why everything was so small, and our professor explained that, quite simply, it was the style at the time.  It was mostly just a house, missing some furniture, as in the case of the homes of many famous authors.  Louisa May Alcott’s house comes to mind.  We saw the bed where Lorca was born, the crib where he slept, the kitchen with the hearth, and the upstairs, which is currently an exhibit about Lorca in New York City but used to be where his father’s agricultural products were stored.

The house in Valderrubio (which in Lorca’s time was called Asqueroso – meaning “Disgusting”; there’s a reason they changed the name) was much larger and fancier, but aside from that also had much more relevance to Lorca’s work.  He only spent the first few years of his life in Fuente Vaqueros, but it was in Valderrubio, on the other hand, where he spent the majority of his childhood.  When his family moved to Granada they continued to come back for the summers, and as Lorca got older and began to write he spent a good deal of his time writing in Valderrubio, the town from which he drew much of his inspiration.  This is the desk where Lorca wrote in the summers in his later years – as in the house of any author, the most prized possession of the museum:

And this is the well which served as the instrument in providing the inspiration for his play “La Casa de Bernarda Alba” (The House of Bernarda Alba).  The well was shared by two families – the other house belonged to a woman named Fernanda Alba, the real-life version of the fictional character, and it was possible to hear the conversations that went on in that house by listening through the well:

 

…But, really, Fuente Vaqueros and Valderrubio were almost more useful for learning about Spain in the early 1900’s than for learning about the life of Lorca.  As in Fuente Vaqueros, the Valderrubio house was lived in only in the downstairs – the second floor was used for storage of agricultural products:

…and for the materials used during annual matanzas, annual pig-butchering gatherings that most Spanish families in the countryside used to have (and in which some continue to participate).  The guide at Valderrubio was a particularly talkative man, and enjoyed talking about his own experiences growing up in the Andalusian countryside.  He talked for nearly half an hour about the matanzas of his childhood and with the awesome audio-recording application on my camera I recorded part of what he said.  I’ve made an English-translated transcript of excerpts of the recording, which may be of interest to you if you’re able to stomach detailed descriptions of pig-butchering at the moment:

“The matanzas usually happened in the winter time, in the cold months, usually in December, just before Christmastime, to have food at Christmas.  It was like that.  I remember it… ooohh, such good memories.

“They made murcilla (blood sausage).  And, well, shall I tell you what the matanzas were like?...  Well, the first thing that had to be done was, well, take all of these tools, everything you see here:

"…outside.  It all had to be out in the patio.  So, you see, this (room) is where everything was stored, but the matanzas themselves always took place out in the corral, or even in the street – if the house was very small and there wasn’t enough space, well, then right in front of the door to your house you held the matanza.  So you took the bench, the one you see right here:

"And you caught the pig, and you lay the pig down on the bench.  So then they took the head off, and then with a knife they cut it here (in the neck) so that the blood would drain out.  And a woman, kneeling, with a big bowl that filled up with the blood, she kept the wound from clotting up, so that all the blood would drain out.  Then when the blood was all out, they took the blood and put it inside a bag, or in a big pot if they had it, but almost always in a bag, in order to later make murcilla.

“…Then they started to take off the skin…. leaving it very white, like it was ready to have its first communion, all white.  And then they took this (holding up a wooden yoke-like piece of wood).  This is called a camal… and at either end of the camal you put one of the pig’s feet.  And in a stairwell, if you had a stairwell – and if not, always in the patio there was a kind of stick where you could hang it up – and you hung it up, the pig on the camal.  You took out the guts, which served for all kinds of things, and you hung the pig up for the night.  This is why they always did it in cold times of the year – they wanted it to get cold, so that the meat would get hard, so that it would be easier to cut through, because it’s a lot of work if you don’t, you know?  And so they left it for the night, and then the next day someone who knew how to do it would come and… take off the different parts of the meat, separating it into the different things it could be used for, see?  And then when the pig was all cut up, then the women started to transform it into food, and they said, this is for salchichón (like hot dogs), this is for chorizo (sausage), and the ham, well, they took it and they washed it, and then they cured it – there were lots of ways to cure ham.  They put it in salt.  If a piece of ham weighed 10 kilos, well then it had to spend 10 days in salt.  1 day for each kilo.  And so they had it in the salt, later they took it out and the hung it up…. The murcilla, with the pig’s blood, was cooked with onions.  Even the bones were used for things.  With the pig, nothing was wasted.  Everything was used for something.  Everything.  Very, very, very little was thrown away.  And then there was the bacon.  The bacon was so good – ooooooohhhh!!!  So good!”

Jamón (pork) in Spain is highly prized, and matanzas were highly important social events, similar to corridas de toros (bull fights) but on a much smaller scale and less an accepted art-form than a survival technique.  The guide at Valderrubio lamented the fact that they are dying out, citing the fact that people are less connected to their food now, not wanting to face the actual death of the animal – “these days,” he said, “we’re all lazy” – and are missing out on the social gatherings that the matanzas once facilitated.  I must agree with him, though I have to admit that I wouldn’t be particularly keen on butchering a pig myself – a fact which actually has a great deal to do with my choice to remain partially “vegetarian” here.  I haven’t been eating red meat or pork for a few years now, and I’ve chosen not to start again now this semester.  I find it difficult to justify eating an animal that I cannot be sure has lived a good life and that I could not bear to kill myself.  This means that I’m missing out on a lot of Spain’s traditional pork-based foods.  (I am, however, eating a LOT of seafood dishes, which are just as famous and much more delicious!)  Nonetheless, I think it’s very important to learn as much as possible about Spain’s food culture, in which jamón plays a very important role.

So, in the end, the Lorca trip was quite well-rounded.  Moody poet-playwrights may not appear to have much to do with pig-butchering… but in reality, Lorca was most inspired by life in the countryside, and matanzas certainly formed an important part of that life.