Twice yearly, in the hope that select students could experience life beyond the confines of provincial Granada and could “know and love Spain,” Berrueta organized sightseeing expeditions to different regions of the country. The professor chose his travelers carefully, seeking those—such as Lorca—who were artistically or intellectually inclined, or who, as Mora Guarnido cynically concluded, were both skilled and docile enough to mimic Don Martin’s aesthetic theories. In June 1916, one week after his eighteenth birthday, Lorca set out on the first of four expeditions he would make with Berrueta. His father paid his travel costs. The excursions permanently altered Lorca’s perception of himself. “For the first time,” he remembered years later, “I became fully aware of myself as a Spaniard.”
He was one of six young men to accompany Berrueta on a week-long journey through Andalusia that June. The group traveled north by train to the hill towns of Baeza and Úbeda, then west to Córdoba, and south to Ronda before returning home. Every day they set out before dawn for an arduous morning’s tour of local monuments. In the evenings, Berrueta, and occasionally his students, gave lectures and informal talks to local hosts and dignitaries. Lorca sometimes played the piano.
Each student was expected to keep detailed notes on everything he saw and heard. Lorca applied himself to the task with unaccustomed zeal. On pages crowded with misspelled words and meandering lines, he logged his daily activities, noted the history of ancient sites, and traced the ancestry of Spanish kings and queens. He wrote exuberantly, his ear tuned to the melody and rhythm of words as if to music. In Baeza he observed rapturously, “Here among these golden stones, one is always drunk on romanticism.” He described the town’s cathedral as a “solemn black chord.” Upon his return to Granada the following week, he read some of his notes to the Rinconcillo. His friends were startled by Federico’s observant eye and unexpectedly graceful style.
He had until then remained intent on a career in music, and in recent weeks had become more than ever convinced of his calling. Shortly before his trip through Andalusia with Professor Berrueta, his beloved piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, had died. Wishing to consecrate his life to his teacher’s memory, Lorca had promptly asked his father to send him to Paris to study the piano. The landowner had refused. Dismayed, Lorca now turned impulsively toward a new vocation—one that would not require his father’s financial endorsement. He later described this period in a brief, dispassionate autobiographical note: “Since his parents did not permit him to move to Paris in order to continue his initial studies, and his music teacher had died, García Lorca turned his (dramatic) pathetic creative zeal towards poetry.” He never wholly reconciled himself to the choice. As an adult he once remarked, “Never in poetry will I be able to say as much as I would have said in music.”
Berrueta became his new idol. The art history professor taught Lorca to write and introduced him to writers. During their visit to Baeza in the summer of 1916, Lorca met the poet Antonio Machado. Then forty-one, Machado was known throughout Spain for The Castilian Country, a collection of poems drawn from the poet’s extended residence in central Spain. Published to wide acclaim in 1912, The Castilian Country revealed Machado’s preoccupations with time, death, and the spiritual calm of childhood—issues that had begun to absorb Lorca.
As a member of Berrueta’s ensemble, Lorca received a warm welcome from Machado. Whenever the art history professor visited Baeza, he and Machado engaged in long conversations and joint poetry recitals. During their brief visit in 1916, Lorca and his fellow students heard Machado read a selection of his verse as well as several poems by Rubén Darío. Following the reading, Lorca gave a short piano recital. His encounter with Machado so enthralled him that on returning to Granada he reenacted the episode for his parents, gravely imitating the poet’s measured voice.
Machado exemplified Lorca’s idea of a writer. A sad, reclusive man whose shabby black suit habitually bore traces of cigarette ash on its lapels, Machado had quietly observed the desolate landscapes of Castile and memorialized them in his poems. Born in Andalusia but educated at the Free Teaching Institution in Madrid, he had spent several years as a teacher in the small Castilian town of Soria. While there he married a beautiful woman in her teens. Their brief, blissful union ended in 1913 with his young wife’s sudden death. Near mad with grief, Machado fled south to the isolated town of Baeza, where he took a job teaching secondary-school French and wrote mournful poems steeped in the Andalusian landscape. Neighbors grew accustomed to the sight of him roaming the streets alone like a vagrant. Sometimes Machado wandered fifteen miles of twisting road to the nearby town of Úbeda for a cup of coffee, then returned, on foot, to Baeza.
He described his poetry as a “borderline song,” on the other side of which lay death. He resisted both artistic and intellectual fads, calmly drafting a body of work whose almost casual tempo and tone yield brief, surprising epiphanies. He was influenced by Hispanic modernismo but withstood its decadent excesses; he shunned free verse and avant-garde poetics. His work is marked by an acute consciousness of landscape and time, a subtle irony, and a receptiveness to both folklore and traditional verse and song—the latter a trait Machado acquired from his father, who collected popular Spanish folksongs and lore.
One of the most celebrated writers of his time, Machado spoke modestly of the poet as “a poor creature in a dream / groping for God perpetually in the mist.” He viewed poetry as “neither hard and timeless marble, / nor painting nor music, / but the word in time.” Through verse he aimed to effect a “deep pulsing of spirit.” His Castilian Country offers a harsh critique of provincial Spanish life and a bleak assessment of the country’s state of mind and role in history. Machado never fully resolved his ambivalence toward Spain.
By example, he taught Lorca to regard poetry as a melancholy medium and to view the poet’s mission as a solitary one. When a new edition of Machado’s Complete Poems appeared in 1917, Lorca borrowed a copy from a friend. Smitten by the collection, he drafted a seventy-nine-line poem that began, “In this book I would set down / my entire soul.” With a purple pencil he copied the poem out in its entirety on the title page of his friend’s book and signed his name at the bottom. The work conveys his understanding of the writer’s task:
The poet is the medium
of Nature
who explains her grandeur
by means of words.
The poet comprehends
all that is incomprehensible,
and it is he who calls things
that despise each other, friends.
He knows that every path
is impossible, and thus
he walks them calmly
in the night.
Poetry “is the impossible / made possible,” Lorca wrote. Not unlike music, it is the visible record of invisible desire, the mystery of the spirit made flesh, a mournful relic of what the artist once loved. “Poetry is the life / we traverse in anguish / awaiting the one who leads / our boat adrift.”
Lorca made his second trip with Professor Berrueta in October 1916. This time the group traveled to northern Spain—to Machado’s Castile, and from there to Galicia. The excursion lasted twenty-one days and included stops in Madrid, Avila, Burgos, and Berrueta’s hometown of Salamanca.
Like Machado, Lorca was transfixed by Castile, and in his journal described the region’s windswept fields as “all red, all kneaded with the blood of Abel and Cain.” Its towns were “full of melancholy charms, memories of tragic loves.” Throughout the trip Lorca kept a record of his impressions in which he blended fact with emotional fancy. He sprinkled his prose with musical terms. Of his arrival in Avila he wrote, “There were few stars in the sky, and the wind was slowly glossing the infinite melody of the night.”