By the summer of 1917, he had abandoned his quest for Amelia and taken up a new love, a pretty blonde named María Luisa Egea González, who enjoyed playing duets with Lorca on the piano in his parents’ living room. Her very name inspired him. “And I, like the saints / love only María,” he declared. Martínez Fuset teased Lorca about his prowess as a “Don Juan!” and urged him to renounce his “schoolboy scruples,” to love María “without timidity, without that monastic reserve that impedes and diverts you.” But María Luisa ignored what overtures Lorca was able to muster, and he despaired. He longed to retreat from puberty, to crawl back in time to the sanctity and safety of childhood. “Let the goblet of my semen / spill over and empty completely,” he wrote in an early poem.
I want to be like a child
rosy and silent,
who, in the ermine thighs
of his loving mother,
can listen to a star
speaking with God.
In July 1917, Lorca set out on the fourth, and last, of his cultural expeditions with Domínguez Berrueta. This time the group toured Castile, with a brief visit to Madrid and a prolonged stay in the city of Burgos, where they spent three hours every day writing up their notes in libraries and archives. Lorca polished his observations with an eye toward publication. He and fellow student Luis Mariscal each published several articles in rival Burgos dailies. Lorca’s first effort, an elliptical description of a visit to a local convent, appeared on August 3. An accompanying note informed readers that the article was adapted from a book “under preparation, Long Romantic Walks through Old Spain, with a prologue by Señor Berrueta.”
The group’s itinerary in Burgos included an overnight stay in the remote monastery of Silos, south of the city. Lorca spent the night in a white room with a single bed, a table, and a crucifix. As he lay in bed in the dark, he heard dogs barking. Their howls filled him with “intense fear,” and he felt the presence of death. By morning his terror had passed, and he was able to enjoy the “tragically solemn theatricality” of High Mass and the beauty of the monks’ Gregorian chant.
After Mass he spoke to the organist, a monk who had spent most of his life in the monastery. To his astonishment, Lorca learned that the man, an able musician, had never heard of Beethoven. Impulsively, Federico sat down at the organ and played a passage from the Allegretto of the composer’s Seventh Symphony, a movement Lorca regarded as a “work of superhuman grief.” During his performance, a second monk came quietly into the organ loft and hid his face beneath his hands. Deeply moved, he begged Lorca to keep playing. Shaken by this unexpected confrontation between plainsong and romanticism, between the spirit and the flesh, Lorca’s memory failed him. Later, when the second monk had regained his composure, he cautioned Federico against a life in music. “It is lust itself,” the man warned. Lorca found the remark both intriguing and sad. But the encounter merely reinforced his devotion to art.
Nearly a month into their Castilian tour, three of the students on Berrueta’s trip returned home to Granada. Lorca remained alone in Burgos with his professor during August. He was the only student whose father was able to afford the additional month’s expense. His parents were pleased with the progress Lorca had shown during his travels. “Father says for you to get three or four more newspapers like the one you sent, because your uncles are eager to have copies,” his mother wrote after receiving one of Lorca’s published articles. She asked if he had a good hat and enough warm clothing for the city’s cool climate. She missed him intensely.
In Burgos, Lorca continued to write. He published two articles in August, the first a descriptive account of a Castilian inn—part of his forthcoming book on “Old Spain”—and the second a reflective essay entitled “Rules in Music,” in which he examined a number of issues that would continue to engage him for years: the rules of creative expression, the role of the critic, the profound unity of the various arts, and the relationship between an artist and his public. Rules, Lorca argued, are created chiefly for the mediocre. While it is important to learn rules at the outset of one’s career, ultimately an artist must discard them, because art springs from the soul, not from some preexisting code. “How are you going to lock one person’s heart inside a prison belonging to somebody else?” He cited the example of his idols—Beethoven, Wagner, Darío—men who had broken the rules and triumphed because of it. By implication he counted himself among them.
He was certain of his power and promise as an artist. More so than his three previous expeditions with Professor Berrueta, his tour of Castile in 1917 confirmed Lorca’s determination to write. During the trip he saw his name in print not once but several times, an intoxicating experience for any beginner. While in Burgos he enjoyed the undivided attention of his teacher, and he basked in his parents’ praise. He emerged from his monthlong visit newly persuaded of his extraordinary talent, and keen to publish his first book. Some years later he told a friend that whenever he thought of Burgos, tears overcame him. “For the cathedral’s gray towers of air and silver showed me the narrow door through which I had to pass in order to know myself and to know my soul… My heart will never again be so alive, so full of pain and eternal grace.”
The pain he referred to stemmed in part from another infatuation. In Burgos, Lorca evidently fell in love with a girl whose cool response so crushed him that at the end of August he fled the city, and in a melodramatic display of emotion went directly home to Granada. He refused to stop in Madrid, where his friend José Fernandez-Montesinos had been expecting him. Montesinos responded calmly to Lorca’s histrionics. “I suppose all this is a consequence of your emotional state,” he wrote. “Your hasty departure portends an unhappy outcome, and if that’s the case, I sympathize with you.”
At home, Lorca’s friends were equally solicitous. “Are you grieving, sad?” Lorenzo Martínez Fuset asked. “Then come to my fountain and refuge.” Lorca resolved instead to heed Beethoven’s example and transform his grief into art.
By the time Lorca rejoined his family late in the summer, his parents had moved into a new home in the center of Granada, a roomy apartment overlooking one of the city’s most fashionable promenades, the Acera del Casino. Cheerfully decorated with flowered wallpaper and slipcovered furniture, the apartment remained the family’s primary residence for the next decade.
Lorca settled into his new surroundings and began work almost immediately on a novel, “Friar Antonio (Strange Poem),” about a “romantic” man whose sexual torment impels him to enter a monastery. In the wake of his recent visits to Castilian convents and monasteries, Lorca was drawn to the idea of monkhood. Initially he saw it as a refuge from both society and the anguish of sexual desire, and for a time he apparently considered it for himself, to such an extent that he studied San Juan Clímaco’s The Spiritual Ladder, a treatise outlining the route to perfect monkhood. But in the end Lorca loved the world too much to renounce it, and he came to view monasticism as an unhealthy subversion of carnal instinct.
He completed fifty pages of “Friar Antonio,” then abandoned the novel. Narrative was not his medium. By the summer of 1917 he had begun to experiment with both poetry and drama, frequently in combination with one another or with prose. By mixing genres he sought to tap deeper wells of creativity. Increasingly, he thought of himself as a poet. He wrote his first poem a few weeks after his nineteenth birthday. Within a year his output was so prolific that a friend referred to him in a book dedication as “the poet” underlined twice. “I am a poet and cannot help it,” Lorca told his family and friends. Even his handwriting changed. As if liberated by verse, it grew looser, more careless than the large, curling script he had cultivated in prose.