He studied the catechism, learned liturgical phrases in Latin, and became thoroughly schooled in Catholic ceremony. Although he sometimes arrived late for Mass and was scolded by his mother, once inside the sanctuary he gave himself fully, imaginatively, to the service. When his mother bowed her head devoutly in prayer beside him, he did the same, his gaze fixed on a likeness of the Virgin and the Christ child, “blessing us with his fingerless little hands.” It was principally the spectacle he enjoyed, the Mass as high drama. The sound of the organ and “the smoke of the incense and the tinkling of the tiny bells would excite me,” he recalled in his teens, “and I would be terrified of sins which today no longer disturb me.”
The Church suffused his boyhood. At school a plaster statue of Christ stood watch over his classroom. The walls were hung with posters bearing moral and religious axioms. Federico sat in the second row of benches, beside two poverty-stricken village boys whom he kept supplied with sweets and sugar lumps from home. A lackluster student, he disliked his teacher and was bored by the routines of the classroom. What he remembered best from primary school, and relished most, was the soft, virginal sound of girls singing in the classroom next door to his, and the pleasures those voices implied. At school, as at church, boys were kept separate from girls and taught to assume their respective roles. But to Lorca and his young classmates the muted voices next door were a constant source of awe. One day as the girls were singing, an older boy leaned over to Federico and whispered, “Hey, what if all the girls were naked and we were all naked, would you like that?”
Dumbfounded, Federico stammered, “Yes, yes, I’d like it a lot.” The schoolmaster heard them talking and slammed his cane down on the table. In the silence that followed, the girls next door went on singing. For Lorca, the incident, and the memory of their voices, came to signify his awakening both to “the mysteries of the flesh” and to all the “truths and disappointments” the flesh had to offer.
When school was not in session he and his friends often played together in the Lorca family’s attic, gorging on dried fruit and engaging in a grisly, make-believe game of hide-and-seek that involved a ravenous wolf in search of innocent sheep prey. The rite provoked in Federico a strange, incomprehensible mingling of suffering and pleasure, and he later identified these moments as one of the “greatest emotions” of his early life.
He lived at a high emotional pitch. He craved sensation—the keener the better. When the real world disappointed him, he made up a more interesting one. Physically neither graceful nor athletic, he preferred the life of the imagination to that of the body. One of his legs was slightly shorter than the other, and this gave him, he said, a “clumsy gait.” He did not enjoy sports. The one time his father managed to get him to mount a horse, Lorca simply sat on the motionless animal while his brother and sister looked on and giggled.
He liked fiction best. One of his first toys was a little theater; he broke open his pottery bank to pay for it. The miniature stage came without plays, so Federico made them up. One day, after watching an itinerant puppet troupe perform in the village square, he persuaded an aunt to fashion a set of cardboard figures so that he and a neighbor could put on a puppet show. With friends he periodically carried out mock funeral processions, bearing dead birds through the streets while intoning the Ave Maria. At home he set up improvised altars, donned priestly robes, and conducted Mass before his aunts, cousins, siblings, and neighbors. He urged his makeshift congregations to weep in response to his sermons and even showed them how.
For the most part, his family indulged his fantasies. His mother, in particular, humored his passion for the dramatic and, long after he might have outgrown such pastimes, encouraged him in his theatrical and literary pursuits. She shared his fondness for literature. One January night, Lorca sat in the kitchen listening to his mother read Victor Hugo’s Hernani aloud to a group of farmhands and servants. “I was shocked to see the maids crying,” he recalled years later, “even though obviously I didn’t understand anything … anything? … yes, I understood the poetic atmosphere, although not the human passions of the drama.”
His family owned a deluxe edition of Don Quixote and a complete set of Hugo’s works, bound in red with gold-tipped pages and color illustrations. His father had bought the set on the occasion of Hugo’s death in 1885, and the beautiful tomes accompanied the family wherever they lived. Both Lorca and his brother, Paco, read Hugo as boys. At times Lorca crept off by himself to a corner of his home to pore over one of Hugo’s novels. He admired the Frenchman’s pacifism and his compassion for the maligned. He was not the first in his family to idolize Hugo. His paternal grandmother, Isabel, an ardent reader, once kept a life-size plaster bust of the novelist in her room.
At night, Lorca’s parents, aunts, and uncles often read books out loud or told stories—local tales of passions, kidnappings and murders, or accounts of cruelty by the Civil Guard, who patrolled the countryside around Fuente Vaqueros. Federico relished their stories and begged to hear more. He loved it equally when his family sang. He had eight aunts and uncles and nearly forty first cousins on his father’s side of the family, and all of them lived within a few miles of Fuente Vaqueros. Most worked the land, but “within their simplicity,” as a friend of Lorca’s later observed, they were remarkably sophisticated. Many in the huge clan were musical. Federico’s father and his aunt Isabel were both spirited guitarists, and his uncle Luis, who stood witness at Lorca’s baptism, was a splendid pianist known throughout the region for the speed of his playing. From his father, uncles, and other relatives who knew flamenco guitar, Lorca learned dozens of Gypsy songs—seguidillas, soleares, peteneras—and countless ballads. He listened time and again to popular Andalusian tunes such as “Elcafé de Chinitas” and “Los cuatro muleros.”
The songs Lorca heard in the village—ballads, flamenco lyrics, love songs—were his introduction to poetry, and he later used the medium of poetry to recall them, writing in adolescence of village field hands who used to gather in their doorways at night to drink wine, eat cheese, and dance “the fandango / with religious unction” while guitars “wept their / rhythm quietly or with thunderous ardor.” He responded instinctively to the dense, allegorical images and concise lines of popular Spanish songs, and to the harsh, often tragic nature of Spanish lullabies, which he heard not only from his family but from household servants.
At birth he was given a wet nurse, and for the rest of his life he was tended by maids, housekeepers, cooks, caretakers, and chauffeurs—men and women whose presence he took for granted, although he later spoke rapturously of the cultural debt wealthy children owed their servants. “The rich child listens to the lullaby of the poor woman, who gives him, in her pure sylvan milk, the marrow of the country,” he said. He failed to mention that for most poor women, servitude was an economic necessity.
With some irony, Lorca later characterized his childhood as being that of “a rich little boy in the village, a bossy child.” As his father’s firstborn and namesake, he was indeed the object of countless attentions while growing up, more so than either his brother or his sister. His father served as paterfamilias to the entire García clan, dispensing money and advice to those who needed it, and the family, in turn, revered him. Each year on July 18, they celebrated Don Federico’s saint’s day, and eventually that of his son Federico. Relatives and friends brought gifts of ice cream and anisette, baskets of candied fruit, live roosters, iced drinks made from almonds and hazelnuts.