To a friend he acknowledged that Impressions and Landscapes “contains only a great emotion that flows from my sadness, and the ache I feel in the presence of Nature.” He thought the book mediocre. For a time after its publication he continued to give copies to friends and acquaintances. But eventually he retrieved all the unsold volumes from Granada’s bookshops and piled them in his family’s attic. He later claimed to have burnt them.
He expected to fail. “There is within me an ideal so lofty that I will never achieve it. And I mean never,” he wrote, “because I have a cruel and deadly enemy—society.” Society was responsible for the slaughter in the trenches of France. Society was to blame for history’s darkest crime, the murder of Jesus Christ, “who filled the world with poetry!” More particularly, Spanish society was to blame for the ignorance and bigotry that surrounded Lorca in Granada. Spain was “a desert where great ideas die,” a “soulless” nation that turned its back on “the Christs” who sought to redeem it. At times, Lorca saw himself as a twentieth-century Don Quixote, consumed by insatiable passions. In such an enormous world, he wondered, would anyone be able to see the goodness in his heart?
1
Fountains
1898-1905
In the confusion of adolescence, Lorca turned to the past for clarity. At nineteen, he drafted “My Village,” a prose account of his daily life as a boy in rural Spain. He described the narrative as “the vague remembrance of my crystalline soul.”
He recalled his childhood as a time of pure, unambiguous emotion, free from the destructive powers of politics and time. In childhood, his parents had loved him unconditionally. Each morning before dawn, his father had come into the room where Federico and his brother and sister slept, and gently kissed their faces. “There was a trembling at his mouth and a brightness in his eyes,” Lorca remembered. “Back then I laughed to see the expression on his face. Today I think I would weep.” His father then tiptoed off and rode out to his fields for the day. Shortly afterward, Lorca’s mother would stride into the room and, with a brisk “May the grace of God enter,” open the shuttered windows, cross herself, and lead her children in prayer.
They lived in a white house in the center of the village of Fuente Vaqueros, some ten miles from Granada and thirty miles from the Mediterranean, in the heart of Andalusian Spain. The town had fewer than 2,500 inhabitants. It was built over deep underground springs and flanked by two rivers, the Cubillas and the Genii. Water poured from a fountain in the center of the village and coursed through an elaborate web of irrigation channels in the surrounding countryside. To Federico, it seemed that each morning the moisture in the air “kissed” all the houses and cloaked the village in a cold, silver gauze. Water had given the town its name: Fuente Vaqueros, “Fountain of the Cattlemen.” Or simply “la Fuente,” “the Fountain.”
His home was spacious for its day, and far more comfortably appointed than most other houses in the village. Lorca was acutely aware of the difference between his family’s standard of living and that of his neighbors. His family’s house had tiled floors and beamed ceilings. By contrast, one of his friends, a young blond girl, lived in a house with dirt floors and reed ceilings. On wash days Federico was not allowed to visit the girl and her family, because they were “naked and stiff with cold, washing their rags, the only ones they owned.” When he thought of all the “clean, fragrant clothes” hanging in his wardrobe at home, he felt “a cold weight” in his heart.
His father, Federico García Rodríguez, one of the richest men in the village, owned hundreds of acres of farmland in and around Fuente Vaqueros. A large man with a thick, coppery face and a broad smile, Don Federico began each workday with a shot of brandy and a cigar at the local café while the sun was still rising. As he sat at the table, he often talked to himself and occasionally laughed out loud. He had grown rich farming sugar beets in the wake of the Spanish-American War and the subsequent loss of the Cuban sugar crop, and each season hired dozens of men to work in his fields. But unlike other landowners in the region—most of them absentee landlords who left the administration of their property up to their agents, or caciques, who controlled local employment and ensured political calm—Don Federico lived in town and looked after his own land. His generosity to his workers was fabled. He always took on extra men when he knew they needed a job, and he kept some hands all year round.
Lorca adored his father. He loved his mother, too. She was well-read and refined, and from her, he said, he acquired “intelligence.” But he was closest in temperament and looks to his father. Both men had round faces, coarse features, and dense black eyebrows. Both loved music. His mother bragged that before Federico was able to talk, he could hum popular tunes. He learned many of them from his father, who played the guitar at night while his family sang. It was his father, Lorca said later, who gave him his “passion.”
A blunt, jocular man with a cigar-stained mustache and fingers, Don Federico García Rodríguez was, according to his son Federico, a “farmer, a rich man, an entrepreneur, and a good horseman.” He was born in Fuente Vaqueros in 1859 and lived in the town for the first forty years of his life. He was the oldest son of Enrique García Rodríguez, a modest landowner, and his wife, Isabel, both of whom enjoyed long-standing ties to the region. The couple had nine children. The Garcías were comfortable but not rich, bright but informally schooled. Unusual for that time and place, all nine of Enrique García’s children knew how to read, as did their parents, and all, thanks to their father, learned to play the guitar.
In 1880, at age twenty-one, Federico García Rodríguez married for the first time. His bride was Matilde Palacios Ríos, then twenty, the daughter of a neighboring landowner whose wealth far surpassed Enrique García’s simple holdings. Upon his marriage, Don Federico’s fortunes prospered. He obtained a house in the center of Fuente Vaqueros, on Calle Trinidad, went to work for his father-in-law, and began purchasing farmland of his own. He became town clerk of Fuente Vaqueros, a post both his father and grandfather had held. In 1891, at the age of thirty-two, he was elected municipal judge by the town council, a position contingent upon its occupant’s social, moral, and economic standing.
But his life was marred by loss: the deaths of his father and of Matilde’s parents in the early 1890s, the fact that he and Matilde remained childless. In the fall of 1894, six days after her mother’s death, Matilde Palacios died from a sudden illness. The previous day, from her bed in the white house in Fuente Vaqueros where she and her husband had lived for fourteen years, she dictated her last will and testament. In it she ordered that the whole of her estate, save a token bequest to a maid and the inheritance due her sister, be left to her thirty-five-year-old husband, Federico García Rodríguez. His wealth was assured. Within months of his wife’s death, Don Federico had purchased a second home in Fuente Vaqueros, thirty-five acres of farmland outside the neighboring village of Asquerosa, and a sizable new home in the center of Asquerosa. If to his first marriage he had brought “only the clothes on his back”—as the wording in Matilde’s will quaintly phrased it—to his second marriage he brought considerable property and wealth.