The paradigm of the Eucharist

Lorca’s favourite game as a child was to celebrate mass, critics have confirmed via friends of the poet. Carmen Ramos, the daughter of Lorca’s wet nurse, tells how Federico used to place a statue of the Virgin on a low wall in the backyard of his house at Fuente Vaqueros and have his family, servants and friends sit before this improvised altar while he, dressed in assorted garments, said mass with enormous conviction. The seven- or eight-year-old Lorca stipulated that everyone should cry during his sermon, an order that Carmen’s mother – tear ducts as obliging as lactic glands – always fulfilled. Luis Buñuel enjoyed the same game: ‘I used to play at celebrating mass in the attic of our house, with my sisters as attendants. I even owned an alb, and a collection of religious artefacts made from lead.’ As sons of relatively wealthy landowners, Lorca and Buñuel were brought up in a church-going tradition. One of Buñuel’s uncles was a priest who gave him Latin lessons every summer when the young Luis ‘served as his acolyte’, he tells us: ‘I also sang and played the violin in the Virgin of Carmen choir … We were often invited to the Carmelite convent.’ Attachment to the Church was fostered in both families by the mother, as it was in the Alberti household and especially in Dalí’s, over whose parental bed there hung a painting of Velázquez’s Christ Crucified. It is not surprising that the Eucharist, like the closely related Passion, formed part of everyday consciousness, for the eschatological content of the Last Supper was acted out daily under the sign of the meal. Yet the fascination of the Eucharist as a play activity is remarkable and one suspects that the principal reason for it, over and above the attractions of role-play and dressing up, is the extraordinary, magical feature at its heart: transubstantiation.