LOOKING FOR LORCA.

On August 18, 1936--or perhaps it was August 19th, no one is quite sure--Federico Garcia Lorca was taken from the cell where he was being held, in Granada, and driven into the hills north-east of the city. He may have spent the night, or just a few hours--again, there are conflicting accounts--at a children's summer camp called La Colonia, which, in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, had been converted into a way station for the condemned; or, alternatively, it is possible that he was held in a parked car. In the hours before his execution, Lorca either smoked and talked despairingly with his cellmates or sat silently between the armed men who were guarding him, and when he realized that he was being taken on a paseo, or "walk of death," it has been said that he asked for a priest. (According to this account, he was told that none was available.) He may have been tortured: one of his killers reportedly boasted afterward about having "fired two bullets into his ass for being a queer." However, like so many other rumors about Lorca's final moments, this one has never been substantiated.

At the time of his slaying, Lorca was thirty-eight. With the publication of "Gypsy Ballads," composed while he was still in his twenties, he had become, almost instantly, Spain's most famous poet, and the phenomenal success of his Andalusian tragedies "Blood Wedding" and "Yerma" had made him the country's most celebrated dramatist as well. From early childhood, Lorca had been obsessed with his own death, including the details of his interment. Salvador Dali, a close friend and, probably, love interest, recalled how Lorca, as a student in Madrid, used to act out his burial, describing the position of the corpse, the closing of the coffin, and the bumpy passage of the funeral procession over the cobbled streets. "In this game, the process of putrefaction lasted five days," the painter remembered. "Poet in New York," which Lorca wrote during a yearlong stay in the United States and Cuba, in 1929-30, contains at least a half dozen first-person allusions to an assassination, including this one, from "Fable of Three Friends to Be Sung in Rounds":

When the pure shapes sank, under the chirping of daisies,, I knew they had murdered me.

Lorca's celebrity outside Spain was also considerable. "Blood Wedding" had been a hit in Buenos Aires, and Lorca, visiting the city to promote the play, had charmed Pablo Neruda and infuriated Jorge Luis Borges. His American friends included the Times reporter Mildred Adams and the editor and critic Herschel Brickell, who once called him "the nearest thing to a pure genius" that he had ever encountered. Inquiries into Lorca's disappearance began almost immediately. In October, H. G. Wells, then the president of the London pen Club, sent a telegram to the military governor in Granada requesting news of his "distinguished colleague." However, as much as it was possible to maintain that a world-renowned writer had simply vanished, the Nationalist government tried to do so. The governor's response to Wells's telegram read, in its entirety, "I do not know whereabouts of Don Federico Garcia Lorca."

Now, nearly seventy years later, some of the questions surrounding the poet's murder may, finally, be answered. As part of a belated reckoning with the crimes of the Civil War, volunteers all over Spain are trying to identify the location of hundreds of suspected mass graves, and, where possible, to open them. In a scene eerily anticipated by "Poet in New York"--"They combed the cafes, graveyards, and churches for me,/pried open casks and cabinets,/destroyed three skeletons in order to rip out their gold teeth"--what's left of Lorca is scheduled to be dug up.

Exhumations in Spain tend to take place on weekends. This is partly to accommodate the families of the victims, in case they want to be there when the bodies are unearthed, but mostly to accommodate the people who are doing the exhuming, all of whom are donating their time. On a Saturday not long ago, I went to observe an exhumation in the town of Vadocondes, in the province of Burgos. About two hours' drive north of Madrid, the town consists of a few blocks of stone houses and a bar. In the surrounding countryside, farmers grow sugar beets, which, at the time that I visited, were being harvested and lay in huge, lumpy piles in the middle of the fields. The site of the grave--off a tractor road that disappeared into the scrub--was difficult to find, and by the time I got there a three-foot-deep trench had been dug out of the earth, which was a deep red and had the consistency of pancake mix. A few bones--tinted red, like the dirt--could be seen sticking out from the bottom.

The exhumation was being led by Francisco Etxeberria, a professor of forensic medicine at the University of the Basque Country, in San Sebastian, and his wife, Lourdes Herrasti, an archeologist. The couple had brought along several graduate students, as well as their ...