Lorca

by Leslie Stainton

  The pair were married in the parish church of Fuente Vaqueros on August 27, 1897, two days before Don Federico’s thirty-eighth birthday and one month after Vicenta’s twenty-seventh. Nine months and nine days later, their first child, Federico, was born, on Sunday, June 5, 1898, in the plain white stucco house on Calle Trinidad where his father had lived, childless, for the past two decades. The infant arrived at midnight, a fitting hour for a boy who would grow up loving the night. At six days old he was carried to the church around the corner from his house and baptized Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. More simply, he was known as Federico García Lorca.

  Overseas, the once-resplendent Spanish empire was in its death throes. One month before Lorca’s birth, the United States declared war on Spain. The brief, catastrophic engagement that followed was to be Spain’s last imperial war in the Americas. The result of a complex set of circumstances—the Cuban independence movement; persistent economic and trade difficulties involving Cuba, the United States, and Spain; the United States government’s commitment to Manifest Destiny; and the ineptitude of an aging and authoritarian Spanish regime—the Spanish-American War lasted barely four months and shattered Spain’s centuries-old status as a world power. Within a week of the declaration of war, Admiral George Dewey had destroyed Spain’s Pacific squadron in a single hour’s battle off the Philippine coast. In early July 1898, Spain’s Caribbean fleet was defeated by the United States Navy in the waters off Santiago, Cuba, in what many consider one of the worst naval catastrophes of modern times. In a single gruesome day of battle, 2,129 Spaniards died; just one American perished. The only Spanish ship fast enough to slip away ran out of coal. Its lifeline to the Iberian peninsula cut, Cuba yielded at once to the American army. Two weeks later, against token resistance, the United States invaded Puerto Rico. In August 1898, Spain signed a peace protocol ending the war.

  Few Spaniards could forgive their government its folly. At home, citizens dubbed the year 1898 “the Disaster.” By 1899 the Spanish empire had evaporated, its last remaining colonies—Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines—jettisoned with the stroke of a pen. The Spanish mainland was visited by the depressed, fever-ridden remnants of its military, whose pitiable specter accelerated an already bitter process of national soul-searching. Only a handful of Spaniards gained anything from the losses of 1898. Among them was Federico’s father, whose sugar-beet business prospered.

  When Lorca was two, his mother gave birth to a second child, Luis. Twenty months later, the boy died of pneumonia and was buried in a tiny casket in the town cemetery. Lorca never forgot the ghostly child. At nineteen he signed a poem “Federico Luis,” and at twenty-four he recalled an infant lost in limbo, “my little brother Luis / in the meadow / with the tiny babies.” At thirty-one he was still imagining the dead boy, this time as his son.

  At first, the theatrics of death enthralled him—the white casket festooned in flowers and crepe, the candles and cross. But by adolescence his delight had turned to horror, and he could not face a burial procession without closing his eyes. Haunted by the thought of the cold body decomposing inside its chaste coffin, he repeatedly asked himself, and others, what happened to people after they died. What became of the soul after the body had dissolved into a putrid mass of fluids? Was there, as the Church promised, a “great beyond,” or merely interminable darkness, a void? In his struggle to reconcile himself to the fragility of human existence, his heightened imagination probed the very essence of death. He envisioned the process of decay: the stains, the pus, the “streams of black blood” that spilled from the nose, the glassy eyes with their unforgettable “look of terror.” His father, similarly perturbed by the death of his second son, took a more pragmatic approach to matters and began compulsively carrying medications with him whenever he and his family went on an excursion.

  Lorca learned early on that life and death were two halves of an indecipherable whole. Barely three months after Luis’s death, Vicenta Lorca gave birth to a third son, Francisco Enrique, nicknamed Paco. The following year a daughter, María de la Concepción, or Concha, was born. The girl, like Federico, resembled their father. Paco, with spare, lean features and an air of fragility, took after their mother.

  By the summer of Concha’s birth, in 1903, the family had moved into a new home in Fuente Vaqueros, close to the village church. To Federico, the sound of the church bells seemed to rise straight from “the heart of the earth.” By seven o’clock, he was usually up and pulling on his acolyte’s robes so that he could get to church and dress the altar in time for Mass. He thrilled to the charged world of martyrs and orations. Sometimes, as he sat beside his mother at High Mass in the cold damp of a winter morning and fixed his eyes on the altar, he felt his soul go “into ecstasy” at the sound of the organ’s first chords.

  He studied the catechism, learned liturgical phrases in Latin, and became thoroughly schooled in Catholic ceremony. Although he sometimes arrived late for Mass and was scolded by his mother, once inside the sanctuary he gave himself fully, imaginatively, to the service. When his mother bowed her head devoutly in prayer beside him, he did the same, his gaze fixed on a likeness of the Virgin and the Christ child, “blessing us with his fingerless little hands.” It was principally the spectacle he enjoyed, the Mass as high drama. The sound of the organ and “the smoke of the incense and the tinkling of the tiny bells would excite me,” he recalled in his teens, “and I would be terrified of sins which today no longer disturb me.”

  The Church suffused his boyhood. At school a plaster statue of Christ stood watch over his classroom. The walls were hung with posters bearing moral and religious axioms. Federico sat in the second row of benches, beside two poverty-stricken village boys whom he kept supplied with sweets and sugar lumps from home. A lackluster student, he disliked his teacher and was bored by the routines of the classroom. What he remembered best from primary school, and relished most, was the soft, virginal sound of girls singing in the classroom next door to his, and the pleasures those voices implied. At school, as at church, boys were kept separate from girls and taught to assume their respective roles. But to Lorca and his young classmates the muted voices next door were a constant source of awe. One day as the girls were singing, an older boy leaned over to Federico and whispered, “Hey, what if all the girls were naked and we were all naked, would you like that?”

  Dumbfounded, Federico stammered, “Yes, yes, I’d like it a lot.” The schoolmaster heard them talking and slammed his cane down on the table. In the silence that followed, the girls next door went on singing. For Lorca, the incident, and the memory of their voices, came to signify his awakening both to “the mysteries of the flesh” and to all the “truths and disappointments” the flesh had to offer.

  When school was not in session he and his friends often played together in the Lorca family’s attic, gorging on dried fruit and engaging in a grisly, make-believe game of hide-and-seek that involved a ravenous wolf in search of innocent sheep prey. The rite provoked in Federico a strange, incomprehensible mingling of suffering and pleasure, and he later identified these moments as one of the “greatest emotions” of his early life.

  He lived at a high emotional pitch. He craved sensation—the keener the better. When the real world disappointed him, he made up a more interesting one. Physically neither graceful nor athletic, he preferred the life of the imagination to that of the body. One of his legs was slightly shorter than the other, and this gave him, he said, a “clumsy gait.” He did not enjoy sports. The one time his father managed to get him to mount a horse, Lorca simply sat on the motionless animal while his brother and sister looked on and giggled.

  He liked fiction best. One of his first toys was a little theater; he broke open his pottery bank to pay for it. The miniature stage came without plays, so Federico made them up. One day, after watching an itinerant puppet troupe perform in the village square, he persuaded an aunt to fashion a set of cardboard figures so that he and a neighbor could put on a puppet show.
With friends he periodically carried out mock funeral processions, bearing dead birds through the streets while intoning the Ave Maria. At home he set up improvised altars, donned priestly robes, and conducted Mass before his aunts, cousins, siblings, and neighbors. He urged his makeshift congregations to weep in response to his sermons and even showed them how.

  For the most part, his family indulged his fantasies. His mother, in particular, humored his passion for the dramatic and, long after he might have outgrown such pastimes, encouraged him in his theatrical and literary pursuits. She shared his fondness for literature. One January night, Lorca sat in the kitchen listening to his mother read Victor Hugo’s Hernani aloud to a group of farmhands and servants. “I was shocked to see the maids crying,” he recalled years later, “even though obviously I didn’t understand anything … anything? … yes, I understood the poetic atmosphere, although not the human passions of the drama.”

  His family owned a deluxe edition of Don Quixote and a complete set of Hugo’s works, bound in red with gold-tipped pages and color illustrations. His father had bought the set on the occasion of Hugo’s death in 1885, and the beautiful tomes accompanied the family wherever they lived. Both Lorca and his brother, Paco, read Hugo as boys. At times Lorca crept off by himself to a corner of his home to pore over one of Hugo’s novels. He admired the Frenchman’s pacifism and his compassion for the maligned. He was not the first in his family to idolize Hugo. His paternal grandmother, Isabel, an ardent reader, once kept a life-size plaster bust of the novelist in her room.

  At night, Lorca’s parents, aunts, and uncles often read books out loud or told stories—local tales of passions, kidnappings and murders, or accounts of cruelty by the Civil Guard, who patrolled the countryside around Fuente Vaqueros. Federico relished their stories and begged to hear more. He loved it equally when his family sang. He had eight aunts and uncles and nearly forty first cousins on his father’s side of the family, and all of them lived within a few miles of Fuente Vaqueros. Most worked the land, but “within their simplicity,” as a friend of Lorca’s later observed, they were remarkably sophisticated. Many in the huge clan were musical. Federico’s father and his aunt Isabel were both spirited guitarists, and his uncle Luis, who stood witness at Lorca’s baptism, was a splendid pianist known throughout the region for the speed of his playing. From his father, uncles, and other relatives who knew flamenco guitar, Lorca learned dozens of Gypsy songs—seguidillas, soleares, peteneras—and countless ballads. He listened time and again to popular Andalusian tunes such as “Elcafé de Chinitas” and “Los cuatro muleros.”

  The songs Lorca heard in the village—ballads, flamenco lyrics, love songs—were his introduction to poetry, and he later used the medium of poetry to recall them, writing in adolescence of village field hands who used to gather in their doorways at night to drink wine, eat cheese, and dance “the fandango / with religious unction” while guitars “wept their / rhythm quietly or with thunderous ardor.” He responded instinctively to the dense, allegorical images and concise lines of popular Spanish songs, and to the harsh, often tragic nature of Spanish lullabies, which he heard not only from his family but from household servants.

  At birth he was given a wet nurse, and for the rest of his life he was tended by maids, housekeepers, cooks, caretakers, and chauffeurs—men and women whose presence he took for granted, although he later spoke rapturously of the cultural debt wealthy children owed their servants. “The rich child listens to the lullaby of the poor woman, who gives him, in her pure sylvan milk, the marrow of the country,” he said. He failed to mention that for most poor women, servitude was an economic necessity.

  With some irony, Lorca later characterized his childhood as being that of “a rich little boy in the village, a bossy child.” As his father’s firstborn and namesake, he was indeed the object of countless attentions while growing up, more so than either his brother or his sister. His father served as paterfamilias to the entire García clan, dispensing money and advice to those who needed it, and the family, in turn, revered him. Each year on July 18, they celebrated Don Federico’s saint’s day, and eventually that of his son Federico. Relatives and friends brought gifts of ice cream and anisette, baskets of candied fruit, live roosters, iced drinks made from almonds and hazelnuts.

  As he matured, Lorca chafed at being “a rich little boy in the village.” In adolescence he wrote movingly of the misery he had witnessed as a child. His accounts of poverty spared few details. He recalled winter days when his classmates dressed in threadbare clothes while he wore a fur-trimmed red cape to school. He told of a six-year-old village boy who fell gravely ill and was forced to drink a folk remedy made of mule dung cooked with beetles. As neighboring children looked on from the window, adults held the boy down and forced him to swallow the foul mixture. Shortly afterward he died, prompting the woman who had prescribed the cure to snort, “Such a delicate child! He wasn’t fit to belong to a poor family.”

  The lot of rural women, in particular, dismayed Lorca. In Andalusia, he wrote, “all poor women die of the same thing, of giving lives and more lives.” The cycle was relentless. More than once in boyhood he glimpsed the body of a woman lying in a coffin with a dead child between her legs, both having perished from “misery and neglect.” Childless women fared no better. Lorca was profoundly moved by the plight of one woman in his village, a recluse and spinster born with froglike hands. He asked himself how often this pitiful woman must have cursed her parents for having conceived her—“without thinking”—during an instant of pleasure.

  Little that he saw or heard as a child was lost on him. He spent hours exploring the countryside around Fuente Vaqueros, roaming his father’s property or daydreaming beside one of the shallow rivers that flowed past the town. The landscape of his birthplace—the vega of Granada, a lush river plain ringed by hills and watered by snows from the Sierra Nevada mountains—stirred him as few locations could. He was intimately familiar with the sensations of the place. As a teenager he wrote of the echo of birds in the vega’s sprawling poplar groves and the smell of straw burning in autumn fields. Momentarily neglecting its more troubling aspects—poverty, death, the cruelties of fate and the mysteries of desire—he described his childhood as “shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Simplicity itself.” For Lorca, the vega embodied these. Uninhibited and pagan, it provided a vivid contrast to the tedium of the classroom and the constraints of the catechism.

  He was keenly attuned both to the agricultural rhythms of the landscape and to its human legacy. Hints of past civilizations—Greek, Iberian, Roman, Arab—littered the countryside. To the north of Fuente Vaqueros, along the road to Asquerosa, stood a crumbling brick residence that Renaissance courtiers had used as a hunting lodge during the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Carlos V. A few hundred yards to the south were the remains of an Arab watchtower, a vestige of the eight-hundred-year Muslim occupation of Andalusia. Beyond it was the tiny village of Romilla, “Little Rome,” a reminder that for nearly seven centuries before the Arabs invaded Spain, the country—Hispania—had belonged to the Roman Empire, and from it derived both a religion and a language. Time and again, Andalusia had passively absorbed foreign cultures, then quietly imposed its own sophisticated customs and character. From the eighth until the late-fifteenth centuries—what to the rest of Europe was a “dark age”—the region sustained one of the most spectacular civilizations in history, the Arab kingdom of al-Andalus, a model of ethnic tolerance in which Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions and residents not only coexisted but flourished. The era gave to the region an artistic, scientific, linguistic, and agricultural heritage that endured well into the twentieth century.

  With his brother, Lorca pondered the origin of local names and pored over the deeds to certain of their father’s properties. The oldest documents were written in Arabic. Roman relics occasionally turned up on neighboring farms, and one day their father’s own land yielded a set of small unpainted vases of unknown origin, which the two
brothers subsequently kept in their bedroom.

  As a boy, Lorca once watched a plow unearth a fragment of Roman mosaic from one of his father’s fields. He later recalled “how the huge steel plowshare cut gashes into the earth, and then drew forth roots instead of blood.” The rugged blade tore deep into the soil, so deep that according to Lorca it scraped the foundations of ancient buildings. As he watched, the tool struck “something solid and stopped. The shiny steel blade had turned up a Roman mosaic.” The mosaic bore an inscription whose precise subject Lorca could not remember. “But for some reason I think of the shepherds Daphnis and Chloë,” he said. “So the first artistic wonder I ever felt was connected with the earth.”

  2

  New Worlds

  1905-15

  At the age of seven or eight, Lorca moved with his family to the small village of Asquerosa, a mile or so to the northwest of Fuente Vaqueros. The word asquerosa means “repulsive,” which disturbed Lorca, who in later years deemed the name unworthy of his biography and went out of his way to avoid using it. (Residents of the town eventually changed its name to Valderrubio.) In fact, Lorca viewed Asquerosa, with its pristine white buildings and placid streets, as “one of the prettiest towns in the vega.”

  His father owned two homes in the village, a sprawling farm on the edge of town, the Cortijo de Daimuz, and a two-story house in the center. It was to the second of these that Don Federico moved his family in 1905 or 1906. A lavish residence by village standards, the new home had stables, a corral, four bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and an imposing pair of lightning rods on its roof. By moving to Asquerosa, Lorca’s father gained closer access to his properties, the train stop, and the sugar-beet refinery where much of his business took place.