His hunger for ritual stemmed partially from his mother, who attended Mass faithfully in Granada and instructed Lorca and his siblings in the Catholic liturgy. She taught them to regard the Church as a thing of beauty, independent of its theological function. “We’re not going to that church,” she sometimes announced. “It’s ugly.” Occasionally the family prayed together at home. During the month of May, “Mary’s month,” Vicenta Lorca recited the rosary in Latin after dinner every night, and Lorca periodically preached a sermon. His more skeptical father suffered such activities with forbearance. Don Federico once told his wife as she was about to leave for Mass, “Only stay a little while.”
“What do you mean?” Vicenta asked.
“I mean, I think that a little while won’t hurt you much.”
The entire family went regularly to the theater in Granada, where the offerings ranged from Shakespeare to comic folk operas known as zarzuelas to realistic drawing-room comedies by such popular Spanish playwrights as Jacinto Benavente and the Quintero brothers. But although Lorca delighted in the theater, his greatest love was music. His father saw to it that all four of his children received piano lessons. Lorca later recalled rapturously that in his teens he “took the Holy Orders of Music and donned its robes of passion.” From the start, he proved a gifted player, blessed with an innate understanding of the art. The piano allowed him to express himself with a candor that no other medium could match. “No one,” he observed, “can reproduce with words the shattering passion that Beethoven expressed in his Appassionata Sonata.”
Hunched over the piano, his dark hair falling onto his forehead, he surrendered easily to the music of Chopin, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven—composers he had admired since childhood. (As a boy, he had fallen in love “like a madman” with the sound of young village girls practicing Beethoven and Chopin on the piano.) After hearing Federico perform one day, his piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, turned to Vicenta Lorca and begged her to hug the boy. “It wouldn’t be proper if I were to do it,” he said. “It’s just that he plays so divinely!”
His father bought Lorca his first piano, an upright that his uncle Luis, the pianist, auditioned and approved. In time Don Federico replaced this instrument with a shiny black baby grand. “I love you more than anything else in the world” Lorca confessed to his piano in writing, underlining the words for emphasis. He envisioned the instrument as “a woman who is always asleep, and in order to wake her one must be filled with harmonies and grief.” Like a woman, he suggested—his understanding of the gender shaped almost exclusively by his reading—“she is unpredictable.”
Music became his idiom. He sought to emulate Beethoven, whose genius, he said, had been to translate his life into musical language, to convey through sound the “painful song of impossible love.” By age eighteen, Lorca was composing. His first works were inspired by Granada. He titled one composition “Serenade on the Alhambra,” then shortened it to “Granada.” His piano teacher encouraged him. A spare, timid man in his seventies, Antonio Segura Mesa had consecrated his life to music in the hope of becoming a great artist. He had composed a number of works, including an opera that was booed at its Granada premiere. He never played publicly, and outside his native Granada he was unknown. “Just because I haven’t reached the clouds,” he often reminded Federico, “… doesn’t mean the clouds don’t exist.” Lorca repeated the statement to himself like a mantra.
Keenly sensitive to criticism, and painfully shy, Segura Mesa rarely ventured from his house, except to teach Federico. A forlorn figure, with a domed forehead, buttonlike ears, and a thick mustache that trailed sadly down either side of his mouth, the older man made his way each day through Granada’s noisy streets to the Lorca apartment. Federico regarded him as “a saint.” As they sat together at the piano Segura Mesa frequently talked about famous composers, recounting their struggles as well as their achievements. More so than anyone else, he taught Lorca to view art as a grave calling, not a hobby. Sometimes, after a long session of rules and exercises, Segura Mesa would pull out samples of his own work for Lorca to analyze and perform. Neither man cared that these compositions had failed to attract a following. What mattered was the work itself. Inspired by the example of his teacher, Lorca set his sights on a musical career.
The piano stool became his favorite seat at home. In addition to his own compositions, he entertained family and friends with classical as well as popular works. He began performing in public. He joined Granada’s Arts Center, the hub of the city’s cultural life, and quickly established a name for himself in the institution by giving private recitals, helping to form a chamber music society, and providing background music for a life drawing class. He was the only outsider permitted to enter that particular classroom. While students sketched from human models, Lorca accompanied them on the piano with works by Beethoven.
His academic career continued to founder. In the fall of 1914, shortly before completing his bachillerato, he had enrolled as a student of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Granada. Although he survived his first year, the classwork soon became more difficult. Before long Lorca was no more than a nominal student. He fled subjects that perplexed him, such as Hebrew and Arabic, without so much as attempting to learn the material.
During his second year as a university student he switched from Philosophy and Letters to Law, then a conventional discipline for the sons of good Spanish families, or for undecided students like Lorca who were eager to please their fathers. Again, he passed a few easy courses before stumbling over the difficult ones that inevitably followed. Unwilling to abandon his interest in Letters, in 1916 he enrolled in both programs, and for the next three years took courses in literature as well as law. He did poorly in both. On the first day of an economics class, he burst out laughing at the professor’s odd mannerisms and was expelled from class. He never returned, and consequently failed the course. His brother, Paco, enrolled in the same university in 1918 and sailed through his studies, earning stellar marks in every class.
Daunted by mandatory courses in such topics as civil, canonical, and administrative law, Lorca shunned the classroom and spent much of his time exploring Granada by himself or with a group of like-minded friends. He rarely prepared for class and seldom studied. He soon gained a reputation as a prankster in school, an inventor of nicknames. Only a handful of professors saw him as anything but a wayward dreamer with tousled black hair and a faraway gaze. The university’s elderly librarian liked Lorca enough to let him spend hours in the library reading classical texts in lieu of the law books he had been assigned. Long after the building officially closed, the two men would sit together in the vast book-lined space overlooking the school’s botanical gardens, reading and discussing literature.
Lorca also managed to impress Fernando de los Ríos, a distinguished young law professor who had joined the university faculty in 1911 at age thirty-three. While Federico was playing a Beethoven sonata one day at the Granada Arts Center, de los Ríos, then vice president of the organization, happened to walk by and hear him. Struck by the teenager’s skill, he introduced himself. Before long, Lorca was traipsing out to the professor’s home, along with other young proteges, to talk about literature and to borrow books.
Fernando de los Ríos was a familiar sight in Granada. As he strode through the city in a top hat and morning coat, an assortment of young men often trailed behind. Occasionally the entourage would pause to browse in a bookstore or to buy churros before moving on to the professor’s house, where his pupils helped themselves to books from Don Fernando’s extensive private library. As unpretentious as he was kind, de los Ríos treated his students as peers. Through his “eloquence, wisdom, and honesty,” as one of them remembered, he awakened his young disciples to the social and political issues of the day and taught them to be critical of provincial Spanish society.
De los Ríos regarded himself as a “spiritual grandson” of the eminent nineteenth-century educator Francisco Giner de
los Ríos, a distant relative whose commitment to the renovation of Spanish education had led him in 1876 to found the unorthodox and influential Free Teaching Institution in Madrid. This was a private, secular school devoted to intuitive methods of instruction—discussions, field trips, tutorials, student papers—instead of authoritarian lectures and tests. The school’s guiding pedagogical ethos, derived from the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, emphasized freedom of conscience and discussion, an ecumenical view of philosophy, and a pantheistic spirituality. Its graduates included some of the finest minds in Spain, among them the philosophers Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset. As a young man, Fernando de los Ríos had attended the Institution and come to embrace its liberal and anticlerical ideals. He subsequently studied in Germany and returned to Spain an avowed “European,” inflamed by socialist thought and persuaded that his country’s future depended on education.
He was a handsome man, with dark eyes and black hair, a mustache and goatee. A native Andalusian, he loved both Gypsy song, which he occasionally performed, and bullfights. He played the guitar, wrote, lectured, and was conversant in several languages, ancient as well as modern. He also engaged in politics. Shortly after settling in Granada in 1911, he founded the city’s Socialist Party and boldly aligned himself with the working class in its struggle to end the region’s corrupt political system, caciquismo, whereby local powerholders, or caciques, controlled political life, fixed elections, and obtained graft from all political transactions. Many of Granada’s more prominent citizens treated de los Ríos with contempt. “Respectable” women crossed the street to avoid him. His daughter, Laura, had difficulty finding playmates. One of the few children to befriend her was Lorca’s sister Isabel, who became Laura’s closest friend.
Although nearly twice their age, Don Fernando took both Federico and Francisco García Lorca under his wing, and counseled them on practical as well as philosophical and spiritual matters. He urged Paco to “listen” for his true vocation by heeding his “inner voice” and being true to himself. Lorca received similar advice. Despite the teenager’s scholastic failings, de los Ríos admired Federico and did what he could to ease his passage through the university. He recognized Lorca’s superb musical talent and encouraged him to pursue a career in the arts. He also nurtured his budding awareness of social injustice.
He believed in Lorca at a time when few others did—least of all his family. At school, his brother surpassed him in everything but music; lately, Paco had begun writing poetry and appeared to excel at that, too. At home, their father complained daily about Federico’s lack of discipline and focus. “I don’t know what’s going to become of the boy,” he grumbled to a sister-in-law. “He won’t get anywhere like this.” Even Vicenta Lorca had begun to fret.
Pushed toward an adulthood he neither wanted nor understood, Lorca took refuge in music and books, in long, often solitary walks, and in those rare teachers and friends who saw beyond his indolence. He missed the simplicity of life in the vega. Much as he loved Granada, he believed that by moving to the city he had forsaken his true and legitimate roots, had severed his bond with the people. He risked becoming an Andalusian señorito—a young man who wallows in his own pleasure and privilege. Whenever he visited Asquerosa, he felt like an outsider. “The children who were in my grade school are field-workers now, and when they see me they scarcely dare to touch me with those great stony hands of theirs, filthy from work,” he brooded. Years later, reminiscing about his life at the University of Granada and his daily struggle against “the enormous mustachioed face of Mercantile Law,” Lorca noted wistfully that his “life of fun and practical jokes” as a student had in fact concealed “a true but charitable melancholy.”
3
Young Spaniard
1915-16
The Alameda Café stood a few blocks from the Lorca home in the middle of Granada. Inside the café, the walls were mirrored and the music refined. Most evenings a piano and string quintet performed until midnight, at which point Federico sometimes took over the keyboard and played until dawn.
He met nightly in the Alameda with a group of friends who called themselves El Rinconcillo, “The Little Corner.” Seated around marble-topped tables in a corner beneath a staircase, they listened to music and talked. Several members of the group were university students, who sought in these informal gatherings a more candid form of discourse than that available to them in the university’s staid lecture halls. Within the Rinconcillo, Lorca and his friends traded anecdotes and books, sparred over ideas, criticized each other’s work, debated the latest trends in literature and art, and discussed the progress of the Great War, then raging across Europe. All of them sided with the Allies. They fancied themselves bohemians. Of the dozen or so young men who belonged to the group, most, like Lorca, preferred Granada’s lyrical sites to its classrooms, and thought nothing of forsaking their work to spend a sunny morning in the Alhambra or a moonlit night in the Albaicín, reading poems by Darío or listening to Gypsy song.
Both Lorca and his brother joined the Rinconcillo in their mid-teens, but while Paco resisted the group’s more wayward tendencies, Lorca embraced them. It was the first set of friends with whom he had felt a genuine affinity since childhood, and he spent as much time with them as he could. His parents despaired. Don Federico blamed the Rinconcillo for Lorca’s growing delinquency at school, and lectured them on their responsibility toward his son. Vicenta Lorca likewise begged them to reform. “Why can’t you just study and let Federico study, too?” she pleaded, but they ignored her. When Lorca failed a grammar course, one of his Rinconcillo friends published a note in the local newspaper reprimanding the university for its shameful treatment of an outstanding student.
The Rinconcillo included two painters, a poet, and at least three local journalists. One of these, José Mora Guarnido, was in his late twenties when he met Federico, who was seventeen at the time. At their first encounter, Lorca wore a poorly knotted tie beneath a loose piqué collar and a black hat with a brim so flimsy it fluttered in the wind like “a huge butterfly wing,” Mora recalled. He noted Lorca’s dark face and thick eyebrows, lustrous eyes, the delicate mole above his lip, and his smile, which was “full of kindness.” Over glasses of sweet Málaga wine, the two talked about Granada and found they had much in common, including a shared contempt for artistic mediocrity and bad taste, two sins of which, in their view, the city’s painters and writers were eminently culpable. Mora Guarnido had long used his clout as a reporter to rail against pretension. In 1915, the year he met Lorca, he published, in collaboration with another Rinconcillo member, a slim work entitled The Book of Granada, in which he called for a rediscovery of the authentic “Granadan spirit.”
During their first meeting, Lorca sat at a piano and idly ran his fingers over the keyboard, producing, to Mora’s mind, a “distant murmur that echoed our words.” The journalist realized he was in the presence of an uncommon talent—one capable, perhaps, of fulfilling the aims he had set forth in his Book of Granada. He became one of Federico’s most devoted fans. Not long after they met, he inscribed a copy of his book for Lorca. “To my friend Federico Garcia Lorca,” Mora wrote, “admirable interpreter of Granada’s music, with all the fervor and admiration I can muster.”
Lorca received similar encouragement from another Rinconcillo journalist, Melchor Fernández Almagro, a portly, good-natured young man whose breadth of knowledge and prodigious memory prompted one friend to call him a “living archive.” A critic and historian as well as a reporter, “Melchorito,” as friends knew him, was five years older than Lorca. He was deeply impressed by Lorca’s musical gifts, and together with Mora Guarnido, regarded him as a likely means of reviving Granada’s ailing cultural life.
In their passion for Granada, both Fernández Almagro and Mora Guarnido echoed the late-nineteenth-century Granadan author Angel Ganivet, whose small book Granada the Beautiful had inspired readers since its publication in 1896. Ganivet had committed
suicide in 1898, furthering the notion of that year as a “disaster” in Spain’s intellectual and political life. But his little book survived and became a clarion call to young men of Lorca’s age and outlook. In Granada the Beautiful, Ganivet sketched a portrait of a Granada “that could and ought to exist,” one where the old blended harmoniously with the new, and the local with the universal. He praised the city’s humble, diminutive beauty—a sentiment Lorca endorsed—but decried Granada’s ongoing “epidemic of expansion.” He believed such innovations as electric lights and broad streets threatened the city’s physical and spiritual well-being. Lorca shared this view, and later proclaimed Ganivet “the most illustrious granadino of the nineteenth century.”
Ganivet belonged to the “Generation of ’98,” a circle of writers, scholars, and theorists whose informal alliance was born of the disillusionment that followed Spain’s military defeat in 1898. In addition to Ganivet, the Generation included the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, the poet Antonio Machado, the essayists Azorín and Ramiro de Maeztu, and the novelist Pío Baroja. All were politically and intellectually progressive, with strong ties to Giner de los Ríos’s Free Teaching Institution in Madrid. All had spent their formative years in an atmosphere of pessimism and soul-searching sparked by the sense of despair and isolation that gripped Spain in the wake of the Spanish-American War. They came together as a generation to address what they viewed as the country’s degeneration and decadence, and in their creative writings and political and social polemics they both analyzed and criticized the country’s predicament. If Spain was to avoid slipping permanently into the realm of nations whose past grandeur outweighed their present and future achievement, something had to be done—spiritually as well as practically. Through their outspoken work, the Generation of ’98 sought to define the essence of the Spanish soul, and in doing so to help bring about the spiritual and ideological regeneration of individual Spaniards, and, in turn, of Spain itself. Convinced that this could be achieved, in part, by invoking the past as a model for the future, several members of the Generation turned to the seventeenth-century story of Don Quixote as a framework for Spain’s twentieth-century revitalization. Their ideals inspired Lorca and his friends in the Rinconcillo, who saw themselves as logical heirs to the older generation.
Lorca Page 4
