Bárcena shared her companion’s enthusiasm for Lorca’s poetry. After the recital, Martínez Sierra approached Lorca and asked if he might be willing to give the couple a private reading. Lorca consented and, in an ancient Arab tower overlooking the Generalife, regaled the director and his companion with more poems. Martínez Sierra was spellbound. “This poem is pure theater!” he exclaimed after hearing one particular work, a sentimental account of animal life in the vega. “What you must do now is expand it and turn it into true theater. I give you my word, I’ll premiere it at the Eslava.”
The offer was irresistible. Lorca had already tried his hand at a number of scripts, most of them static dramas about familiar topics, barely indistinguishable from his poems. Except for the amateur productions he had staged at home for family and friends, he had no practical theater experience. But he loved the stage and was determined to write plays. He accepted Martínez Sierra’s proposal on the spot, and within weeks began trying to draft a script. The process turned out to be more difficult than he had anticipated, however, and despite Martínez Sierra’s repeated encouragements by letter, Lorca failed to complete a play that summer. When he returned to Madrid in the late fall of 1919, he went back empty-handed.
The threat of another flu epidemic kept him in Granada until the end of November. Because Lorca reached Madrid late in the term, he was unable to move into the Residencia, as planned, and instead took a room in a boardinghouse surrounded by “unendurable” street noise and vagrants whose presence was so distracting, he said, that it prevented him from writing letters home. He assured his parents that once he moved into the Residencia, “with my silent little room and my beloved books,” he would write regularly.
His parents worried about him. His mother fretted about his well-being, and his father about his career prospects. The landowner demanded to know “the truth” about Lorca’s literary affairs. He distrusted his son’s incessant declarations of success. Even Lorca’s brother nagged him. When their parents sent Federico a pair of shirts by rail, Paco reminded him to “please pick them up and don’t do what you usually do with your things.” He then apologized for his outburst. “You’re no doubt resting up from all the sermons you get here about your indolent temperament.”
But Lorca needed reminding. In Madrid he answered to no one. He lived spontaneously, indulging in fun, heedless of his obligations to his parents—or, more critically, his promise to Martínez Sierra, who had now announced that he intended to produce Lorca’s play early in 1920. During the first weeks of December, Lorca worked halfheartedly on a script in a friend’s apartment. At Christmas he went cheerfully home to Granada, assuring Martínez Sierra that he would be back in Madrid by January 7. But without bothering to inform the director, he then prolonged his stay. Shortly afterward Martínez Sierra sent a tart letter demanding to know “a firm date by which time I will have the finished work in my hands so that rehearsals can start.”
Lorca ignored him. He had no appreciation of the everyday workings of the theater, and was insensitive to the artistic, financial, and scheduling pressures Martínez Sierra faced. At twenty-one, Lorca had never taken responsibility for himself or his affairs. Money meant nothing to him; in matters of art, he preferred to let inspiration, not deadlines, be his guide. Convinced of his own genius and virtue, he blithely elected to delay work on his script for Martínez Sierra until it suited him to resume drafting the play.
He could conceive of no reason why anyone should fault his behavior. Months earlier he had told his parents there was “so much literary deadwood” in Madrid that success was his for the asking. “For me, the field is richly primed.” With little effort, he had been asked to write a play by one of the country’s leading directors, and another distinguished man of the theater, Eduardo Marquina, had volunteered to contribute a prologue to a published edition of his poems. Although the edition ultimately failed to materialize, Lorca remained buoyant. “I’m in no hurry to ‘arrive,’ as they say. In literature it’s extraordinarily prudent to proceed with leaden feet,” he informed his family. “… I am convinced that the doors will open for anyone who creates good work.”
His long Christmas holiday in Granada ended in late January 1920, when Lorca returned to Madrid and took a room at the Residencia de Estudiantes. From the instant he arrived, he gloried in the place. Founded in 1910 by royal order, and based on the tenets set forth in the 1870s by Francisco Giner de los Ríos and his Free Teaching Institution, the Residencia was an informal residential college where cultured young men could live and learn at leisure. Director Alberto Jiménez Fraud called it a “spiritual home” for Spaniards, and it was that: a rarefied setting in which a generation of men was meant to forge the new and liberal Spain envisioned by the country’s leading intellectuals. Foreigners nicknamed it the “Oxford and Cambridge” of Madrid.
At the Residencia, Lorca enjoyed the same pampered existence he had always led at home. A full complement of housekeepers, cooks, and maids was on hand to clean his room, make his bed, wash his clothes, and prepare and serve his meals. There were no academic requirements and few rules. Residents were expected to wear proper dress in the dining hall, to arrive punctually for meals, and to sit in assigned seats, but were otherwise at liberty to come and go as they pleased, to study or not, to pursue whatever avenues they deemed useful to their scientific, artistic, and intellectual advancement.
Lorca moved into a spacious room, “bathed in sunlight from dawn to dusk,” with magnificent views of Madrid. He felt immediately at home. Days after settling in, he told his parents that his new life in Madrid was healthier than the old one in Granada, “because I have to get up early and eat breakfast.” Although his room was spartan, with scrubbed wooden floors, pine furniture, and a single radiator for heat, he thought it a “happy” place and, in a poem written a few months after his arrival, observed that it had become
saturated with the aroma
of my new heart.
The chairs now smile at me.
And the mirror knows me. (At times
the mirror says I’m handsome.)
He flourished at the “Resi,” as occupants called the place. Built on a hilltop on the northernmost edge of Madrid, the peaceful campus was planted with flowering shrubs and hundreds of poplar trees, whose leaves rustled so loudly in the spring that Lorca compared the effect to the sound of “whales frying.” To his family he stressed the benefits of living in such relative seclusion. “You get absorbed in your studies and you forget completely about Madrid.” He neglected to mention that he did little studying himself while living there. His room possessed few of the academic tomes that filled his fellow residents’ quarters, and although he registered for a few university classes, he rarely attended them. Lorca “did practically nothing in Madrid,” a friend recalled. He was a hopeless student, “always on vacation.”
At the Residencia he took part in excursions to the Prado and other museums, and he attended in-house concerts and lectures. During his first years there, guest speakers included H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein, Paul Valéry, and Louis Aragon. A decade later Lorca claimed to have attended “nearly one thousand lectures” at the Residencia, all of which, he teased, left him gasping for “air and sunshine.” Among friends he parodied those speakers whose “literary accent” and “delicate pedantry” annoyed him. But despite his mockery, he learned from the Residencia’s speakers to regard teaching as a crucial component of what every artist must do.