Like the Spanish mystics and his modernista idols, Lorca yearned to reconcile his erotic and spiritual selves. Sex was a demon that prevented his pure self—“my spirit, which is me”—from prospering. “From on high, my spirit contemplates my body’s actions, and I become two during the great sacrifice of semen.” He convinced himself that he was in love with women. But it was the idea of woman he loved, not flesh and blood women themselves. By day he indulged in unrequited crushes on his pretty young Granadan neighbors, to whom he occasionally read his work. By night he imagined himself being kissed by a woman in white, with “lips that burn,” her bare legs girded by turquoise snakes, her breasts so large they drowned him.
Intrigued by homoeroticism, he drafted a fictive dialogue between Sappho and Plato in which he explored the ancient Greek notion that all kinds of love are permissible. About his own sexuality, he was both naive and ambivalent. Although he craved carnal experience, it repulsed him. He spoke wistfully of his desire “to be a flower … and to enjoy the reproductive act in a spiritual way.” He vacillated between a passive wish to remain celibate and an aggressive need to flaunt his virility. “An exotic and distant virgin and a muscular and powerful man dance together inside me,” he confessed in a prose text on Pierrot, a favorite modernist emblem of poetic fantasy, a figure Lorca claimed he resembled “most of the time.” As he aged, he would often return to the image of Pierrot, the mournful clown whose contradictory nature both reflected and revealed the dichotomies in his own personality.
In page after page of ornate schoolboy script, Lorca dramatized his plight. At nineteen, he complained of being old. Viewed from a distance of only twelve years and as many miles, his vega boyhood came to signify a lost paradise, a transcendent era when the world, as he remembered it, had been good and whole. In “My Village,”, a sentimental attempt at an autobiography, he recalled the “quiet, fragrant little village” of Fuente Vaqueros, where he had been born and where he hoped to die. “Its streets, its people, its customs, its poetry, and its evil are the scaffolding where my childhood ideas once took shape and then melted in the crucible of puberty.”
“My Village” includes a lengthy account of the final illness, death, and funeral of one of Lorca’s closest boyhood friends, a fifty-five-year-old man known as Compadre Pastor, or “Shepherd Godfather.” During Compadre Pastor’s burial, Federico, then seven, had glimpsed his friend’s body in its casket. Recalling the scene twelve years later, Lorca described the dead man’s rigid form, his folded hands, the silk handkerchief that hid his decaying face. The episode proved to Lorca that death was neither a liberation, nor a transition to some new phase of existence, but the complete physical annihilation of life. Unamuno had reached the same conclusion in The Tragic Sense of Life, a work whose blunt admission of doubt helped fuel Lorca’s growing agnosticism.
Neither he nor Unamuno romanticized death. But Lorca did romanticize his friendship with Compadre Pastor. The dead man, a former shepherd, epitomized everything Lorca had lost at puberty: virtue, harmony with nature, the unconditional love of his parents and friends. Compadre Pastor was an “angel come down from heaven,” a hero, a saint. At night, the young Federico used to sit in his lap and listen to Compadre Pastor tell stories, until the boy fell asleep and was carried to his mother, “who pressed me against her bosom and covered me with kisses.” “My poor Compadre Pastor,” Lorca reminisced. “You were the one who made me love Nature. You were the one who shed light on my heart.”
Vicenta Lorca nurtured her son’s dreams of a writing career. Some years later, in a confidential letter, she suggested to him that the “things” he had written in adolescence were “beautiful” and ought to be more widely known. “If all this is a secret, well and good. But if not, tell me and no one else. Write a little note and I’ll keep it to myself and not show it to anyone.”
His father was more practical. “Good God!” the landowner sputtered when told that his oldest son intended to become a writer. “Imagine trying to earn a living writing poetry!” He warned Lorca to expect failure. Don Federico’s own uncle Baldomero, a gifted but unsuccessful poet and minstrel, had ended his days roaming the vega in poverty, dependent for survival on family charity. “You’re just going to turn into another Baldomero!” Don Federico accused his son.
“If only I could!” Lorca said.
Determined to prove himself, Lorca published his first work in February 1917, four months after sallying forth “toward the good of literature.” A vignette of the nineteenth-century Granadan poet José Zorrilla, the piece appeared in a special edition of the Granada Arts Center bulletin, published on the centenary of Zorrilla’s birth. In contrast to the more conventional essays submitted by others, Lorca contributed a short, highly romantic dialogue entitled “Symbolic Fantasy,” in which a variety of elements—among them a bell, a river, and the spirit of Zorrilla himself—pay homage to the city of Granada.
A few months later, in early summer, Lorca embarked on another of Professor Berrueta’s Andalusian tours. In Baeza, he overcame his earlier reserve and confessed to Antonio Machado his love of poetry and music. The poet thought Lorca like “a young olive tree.” Machado admired the teenager’s piano playing, and took mental note of their encounter. Later in the evening Lorca and his fellow travelers went for a moonlit stroll through town. Seized by the poetry of the setting, Federico dramatically “baptized” the group with imaginary, “moon-filled water” from a dry fountain in the cathedral square. His companions marveled at his ability to turn an ordinary occasion into a moment of pure lyricism.
While in Baeza, Lorca renewed his acquaintance with a young man named Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, whom he had met the previous year during his first visit to the town. The two had subsequently struck up a correspondence. Thin and dark-haired, with delicate features and a pensive smile, Martínez Fuset aspired to a writing career and for a time labored on a novel he intended to dedicate to Lorca. He was certain that no one understood or loved him. “I want a friendship, one friendship, yours alone,” he told Federico. Despite this bold assertion, Martínez Fuset claimed to be in love with a girl named Lina, while Lorca carried on about a variety of young women. Together the two struggled to make sense of the female sex. Martínez Fuset once urged Federico to visit him in Baeza so that, among other things, they could talk about “woman. She is lovely because we spiritualize her … But she is inherently dirty, her elements are lustful and black, and her menstrual periods diminish her in my eyes. Nevertheless, I revere women, I love them.”
Neither man had any genuine understanding of the female sex. Both had grown up in a largely segregated society, separated from girls in school and at church, taught to assume gender-specific roles, told to prize virginity, and left to speculate about the physical and emotional realities of women’s lives. Lorca’s few friendships with young women were confined largely to long walks and conversations about art. In late 1916 he became infatuated with a young neighbor in Granada named Amelia, who shared his interest in poetry and reportedly read him “her dramas and stories.” But nothing came of their friendship.