To Federico, the move was a slight but nonetheless dramatic change. Built on dry land, not wet, Asquerosa was older and smaller than Fuente Vaqueros. It sat low and bleached on the earth, with green fields and poplar groves at its edge. There were few trees to shade its streets and no public fountain. More so than Fuente Vaqueros, Asquerosa revealed to Lorca the cloistered, provincial nature of life in a tiny rural community. Within the privacy of his own home he could sense the presence of his neighbors. On summer afternoons, with the shutters drawn against the sunlight and flies, he could hear people passing by on the street outside the living room and see their silhouettes reflected on the ceiling. Little in the town went undetected or unremarked. Years later, while visiting Asquerosa, Lorca complained peevishly to his brother about daily life in the town: “It’s full of stupid etiquette. You have to greet people and say good night. You can’t go out in your pajamas or they’ll stone you, and it’s full of malice and bad will.”
Within a year or two of settling in Asquerosa, his parents abruptly sent Federico to school in Almería, a thriving Mediterranean seaport nearly a hundred miles to the southeast. They wanted him to prepare for his entrance examinations to secondary school under the tutelage of their good friend Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa, the former schoolmaster of Fuente Vaqueros. Rodríguez Espinosa had witnessed Federico’s baptism in 1898, and although he had left Fuente Vaqueros four years later, he remained in close touch with the boy’s parents. Don Federico and Vicenta admired their friend’s pragmatism and devotion to work, as well as his liberal outlook and quiet anti-clericalism—traits they hoped Don Antonio might instill in their son.
Lorca was eight or nine when he was sent to Almería; he had never been separated from either his parents or the vega. The sudden move deepened his sense of estrangement from other children. Aware that he was now about “to embark on another life,” as he later put it, he realized as never before the degree of his economic and social isolation from everyday village existence. When he heard his classmates mutter that “the boss’s kid” was going off to school, he felt homesick and depressed. When he said goodbye to them, he wept.
His father accompanied him on the long journey east. They were joined by two cousins and a fourth boy from the vega, all of whom were to live and study that year with Rodríguez Espinosa and his wife. Don Antonio later remembered that of the four children, Lorca was the smallest and the “most turbulent.” In school, he was an indifferent student who distinguished himself chiefly by coining puns and clever nicknames for his classmates. Nevertheless, he managed to complete his schoolwork with Rodríguez Espinosa, and at age ten he passed his entrance exam for the General and Technical Institute of Almería, a public secondary school.
Almost immediately afterward he contracted a gum infection. His face swelled and his temperature rose alarmingly. Terrified, Don Federico hurried to Almería to tend to his son. Lorca later recalled the episode with pride. He claimed his father feared he would die. He also claimed the infection inspired his first verse. “I asked for a mirror and saw my face all swollen, and since I couldn’t talk I wrote my first funny poem, in which I compared myself to the fat sultan of Morocco, Muley Hafid.”
At home in Asquerosa, Lorca gradually recovered from his illness. His face still bloated, he sat in an armchair by the window, occasionally strumming a guitar. Although in time he regained his health, his parents were so shaken by the incident that they elected not to send him back to Almería, and instead enrolled him in the General and Technical Institute of Granada, in the provincial capital, fifteen miles from Asquerosa. So that they could remain together as a family, they also decided to take a home for themselves in the center of Granada, and in the spring of 1909, shortly before Lorca’s eleventh birthday, they settled into a rented, three-story house on Granada’s Acera del Darro, a street named for the slender Darro river that wound past it. With the windows open in their living room, the family could hear the murmur of water below.
If Almería was bright light and the din of a Mediterranean harbor, Granada was cypress trees, rivers, and the toll of church bells through the night. The word granada means “pomegranate,” an image whose poetic implications were not lost on Lorca. The fruit, he would write, is hard and skull-like on the outside, but inside it contains the “blood of the wounded earth.”
He responded passionately to his new surroundings. Located at the base of two mountain spurs well above sea level, Granada fed on the waters of the Darro and Genii rivers. The second of these skirted the southern edge of town before making its way out into the vega, to Lorca’s birthplace and his father’s farmlands. The sound of water permeated the city. Lorca would boast that Granada “has two rivers, eighty bell towers, four thousand irrigation ditches, a thousand and one jets of water.” Mountains anchored the town on three sides, most spectacularly the snow-clad Sierra Nevadas to the south, whose gray peaks dominated the horizon. Unlike other Spanish cities, Granada turned in on itself, not out to the world—or so Lorca came to believe. He felt that Granada’s beauty lay not in monumental vistas but in small things: houses, patios, music, water, “everything reduced and concentrated, so that a child can feel it.”
He made frequent, often solitary visits to the city’s most celebrated monument, the Alhambra, which sat high above town on a steep hill covered with cypress and sycamores. From its heights, Arab sultans had presided in luxury over the final two centuries of Muslim rule in Spain. Their reign ended in 1492, after a long siege, when the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, swept into Granada on horseback and toppled the fabled kingdom of al-Andalus. The victory capped a four-hundred-year Christian reconquest of Islamic Spain, a militant holy war conducted by the infant Christian kingdoms of the country’s north, which in 1469, with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, had combined to form a fledgling Spanish nation-state. Granada was the last outpost of Muslim Spain; during its two-hundred-year tenure as the capital of al-Andalus, the city and surrounding province enjoyed a level of religious freedom and artistic and scientific brilliance unmatched elsewhere in Europe. Poetry, music, and architecture prospered; scholars pursued questions of philosophy, religion, astronomy, and medicine. Granada’s Arab rulers developed an elaborate irrigation system—still used in Lorca’s time—by which the waters from the Sierra fed the city and neighboring vega, yielding bountiful orchards and fields.
Although at first they tolerated the Arab presence, within months of their victory in 1492 the Spanish monarchs embarked on a violent campaign to “purify” the blood of Christian Spain. They ordered the expulsion of all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Both Arabs and Jews became disadvantaged minorities, subject to prejudicial racial laws. By 1610 the country’s Muslim population had been eradicated. Meanwhile, Ferdinand and Isabella, whose bodies lay buried in Granada’s massive cathedral, had instituted what Lorca, at nineteen, would call the “great crime of the Inquisition”: a savage system of control meant to forge a single, monolithic Christian ideology through the arrest, torture, imprisonment, and public execution of alleged heretics. The system endured into the eighteenth century. Coincidentally, the Catholic reconquest in 1492 inaugurated the era of Spain’s greatest expansion, and the start of the country’s role as a world power. That year, in the town of Santa Fe (not far from Lorca’s birthplace), which had been built to house the army laying siege to Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella authorized Christopher Columbus to investigate new trade routes to Asia.
Lorca’s boyhood visits to the Alhambra “tensed Federico’s soul,” his brother recalled. The ornate, long-empty citadel reminded him of what had been lost with the reconquest, when a tolerant, cultured civilization had given way to one marked by oppression and war. Throughout his life, Lorca voiced his support for the persecuted and talked of the “fatal duel” between Arab and Christian cultures “that throbs in the heart of every granadino.” In his teens he sometimes donned a white turban and robes and masqueraded as a Muslim sultan. A sense
of loss colored his understanding of Granada from the outset. Nowhere was that sense more palpable than in the grounds of the Alhambra. In the fountains of the Generalife gardens, he would write, the water “suffers and weeps, full of tiny white violins.”
His mother decorated the family’s new home in typical Granadan fashion, with dainty slipcovers and embroidered tablecloths, antique prints, family portraits, and a crystal lamp sheathed in pink crepe—surroundings as genteel as Vicenta Lorca herself. Like many Granadan women, she kept a canary. She also allowed her son Paco to keep a brood of pigeons in the small stable at the back of the garden. He and Lorca shared a bedroom in the new house. From their balcony they saw Halley’s comet blaze overhead in the spring of 1910.
Soon after settling in Granada, Vicenta Lorca gave birth to a fifth child and second daughter, Isabel, a name shared by several women in the García clan. Following Isabel’s birth, Vicenta, then thirty-nine, fell sick and was taken with the infant to the region’s best hospital, in Málaga, more than eighty miles from Granada, where they remained for months. Federico, Paco, and Concha occasionally visited their mother and sister by train, and between visits kept in touch by letter. “Mama I want to see you very much and I hope you come home soon,” Lorca wrote on an ink-stained card that appears to be his earliest correspondence. “Greetings all the way from the goatherd to the gypsies your son who loves you very much. Federico.”
At eleven, Lorca became an official student in Granada’s General and Technical Institute, despite having failed a part of the school’s entrance exam. He most likely began attending classes in the fall of 1909 as one of 442 students, all but one of them boys, enrolled in five separate grades at the public institute. Each was pursuing his bachillerato, or secondary school degree.
During his second year at the Institute, he began taking supplementary afternoon classes at the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a private school run by one of Vicenta Lorca’s relatives, Don Joaquín Alemán. The option to attend private school, either in place of or in addition to public school, was available to most Spanish schoolchildren, but generally only rich families could afford the tuition. Despite the piety of its name, Alemán’s Academy was a secular institution. Located on the ground floor of a rambling nineteenth-century Granadan house, its classrooms were chilly, damp, and dark. In the winter, students’ hands turned numb with cold. Like many of his classmates, Lorca suffered from chilblains.
He was an odd, shy student, whose fellow pupils, with their city-bred ways, intimidated him. Some of them poked fun at his eccentric dress—a flowing cravat instead of a tie—and at his mannerisms and interests, which they deemed effeminate. “Federica,” they jeered, with an emphasis on the feminine a. They ridiculed his ungainly stride. He walked “like a sailor on deck,” remembered classmate José Alemán, the director’s son, who thought Lorca far less attractive, less “normal,” than his younger brother, Paco, who started school not long after Federico.
Although neither brother especially liked school, Paco sailed through his classes, passing every exam and earning prizes and honors along the way. Lorca struggled. He lacked his brother’s “schoolboy pride.” He ignored subjects that did not interest him, rarely studied for exams, and paid no attention to penmanship, then a required course. His erratic handwriting went from bad to worse; in time, Lorca himself called it “vile.” Often he skipped classes and wandered off by himself to some corner of Granada—to the Alhambra or to the Albaicín, the Gypsy quarter. Although his parents knew about some of his absences, they were ill-prepared for the extent of his truancy. His mother urged him to follow the example set by his younger brother. “Federico, study!” she pleaded. Lorca ignored her.
He received the standard schooling of his day: courses in Spanish language and literature, mathematics, history, geography, Latin, and French. Most of these subjects confounded him. Although Lorca learned to read French, he never managed to say so much as “good afternoon” in that or any foreign tongue, according to his brother. Somehow he contrived to take the final examinations for his bachillerato in October 1914, at age sixteen. After failing and retaking the mathematics part of the test, he passed the exam and received his diploma the following May. His apathy was such that he waited another twelve years before requesting a copy of his certificate.
On his own, away from school, he read avidly. His father opened an account for his children at a local Granada bookstore, and although it was intended for the exclusive purchase of “useful” books, Lorca bought whatever he liked. Together he and Paco amassed a small but impressive library complete with new editions, liberal texts, and works thought to be scandalous, among them Voltaire’s Candide and Darwin’s Origin of Species. The classics were well represented and well thumbed. With a tenacity that might have stunned his schoolteachers, Federico pored over such works as the Platonic dialogues, Hesiod’s Theogony, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, about which he later exulted, “It has everything.”
Thick underlinings crisscrossed his copies of Shakespeare (he and Paco owned the complete works in Spanish translation) and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, whose hedonistic invocations to love enthralled Federico. From Maeterlinck’s essay The Treasure of the Humble, this line caught his eye: “Everything that can be learned without anguish belittles us.” Pencil marks underscored a similar passage in his copy of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written, as Lorca surely learned, during the Irishman’s brutal imprisonment on the charge of indecent behavior with men: “Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation for the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.”
In his growing quest to understand himself and his place in the world, Lorca turned to the Spanish mystics, to Augustine’s Confessions, Goethe’s Faust, works of Indian philosophy, and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. It was chiefly his exposure to Hispanic modernismo, though, with its call to Beauty and Art as the highest absolutes, that nourished his emerging sense of himself as an artist. A Latin American phenomenon that eventually took hold in Spain, where it held sway from 1890 to 1910, Hispanic modernismo was a late and decadent flowering of romanticism, a poetic and artistic revolt against both the prosaic nature of late-nineteenth-century art and verse and the materialism and philistinism of bourgeois society. In contrast to Anglo-American modernism, Hispanic modernismo coincided roughly with the fin de siècle art nouveau or modern style. Inspired by Baudelaire and the French symbolists Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, its literary practitioners forged a new and expanded poetic language characterized by exotic imagery, unconventional meters, technical virtuosity, a darkly pessimistic view of reality, and a concomitant belief in art, women, and love as transcendent ideals.
By the time he was eighteen, Lorca had adopted a new literary idol, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, father of Hispanic modernismo (he coined the term), whose embrace of symbolist and Parnassian technique had led to a revolution in Spanish prosody in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Darío’s lush imagery, expansive vocabulary, and metrical innovations and revivals had freed the Spanish language from conventional versification, much as Whitman’s unorthodox meter and line liberated English. Darío sought to effect a “musical miracle” in poetry. He believed that art was “not a set of rules but a harmony of whims,” a view Lorca admired, and in his two most important books, Azul (1888) and Prosas profanas (1896), Darío evoked an aristocratic, fairy-tale world brimming with swans, roses, champagne, pearls, and peacocks, a Dionysian existence peopled with mythological figures. Darío’s radical verse inspired a generation of Spanish writers, among them Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. Likewise enthralled by the brilliant Nicaraguan, who died in his late forties in 1916 from poor health and alcohol abuse, Lorca looked for spiritual and aesthetic guidance to “Rubén Darío, The Magnificent.’”
At night Federico often stayed up late in his bedroom, reading. Because the light kept his brother awake, the two struck a compromise: Lorca would read on alternate evenings
only. On the nights when he did not read, his brother would recite a brief dialogue with him. The ritual drew its inspiration from Victor Hugo’s “Legend of the Handsome Pécopin and the Beautiful Baldour,” a tale about two lovers separated, on the eve of their wedding day, for the next one hundred years. When at last they are reunited, Pécopin is still a young man, while Baldour has become an old woman. The story fascinated Federico, who would gently call out to Paco from his bed, “Pécopin, Pécopin.”
“Baldour, Baldour,” his brother would answer.
“Turn off, turn off …”
“The light, the light.”
Only then would Lorca “put out the light without reading,” Paco remembered. “But even when he was reading, if he saw that I was not completely asleep, he would softly say, ‘Pécopin, Pécopin,’ before turning off the light. Sometimes I took this with a grain of salt, and sometimes I answered with an expletive.”
By day Lorca drafted his siblings into more elaborate entertainments. He costumed his brother, sisters, and the family maids in towels to look like Arabs, or dressed them in Vicenta Lorca’s clothing when she was gone from the house. He dusted their faces with rice powder and led them in short pantomimes or recitals of poems and ballads that he had adapted into plays. Sometimes he staged plays on the patio for his youngest sister, Isabel, whom he cherished. In a room next door to his bedroom he set up makeshift altars and shrines and delivered prayers, sermons, and lectures on the Passion of Christ to his family and servants. The trappings of Christian doctrine appealed to him as much as its stories, with their powerful lessons on good and evil, charity and faith. He presented puppet performances and took part in local pageants. Once, during Carnival, he dressed up as a bullfighter, coated his legs with fake blood, and allowed his friends to carry him through the streets on their shoulders as though he were mortally wounded. By simulating death he sought to dispel its mystery.
Lorca Page 3
