As he matured, Lorca chafed at being “a rich little boy in the village.” In adolescence he wrote movingly of the misery he had witnessed as a child. His accounts of poverty spared few details. He recalled winter days when his classmates dressed in threadbare clothes while he wore a fur-trimmed red cape to school. He told of a six-year-old village boy who fell gravely ill and was forced to drink a folk remedy made of mule dung cooked with beetles. As neighboring children looked on from the window, adults held the boy down and forced him to swallow the foul mixture. Shortly afterward he died, prompting the woman who had prescribed the cure to snort, “Such a delicate child! He wasn’t fit to belong to a poor family.”
The lot of rural women, in particular, dismayed Lorca. In Andalusia, he wrote, “all poor women die of the same thing, of giving lives and more lives.” The cycle was relentless. More than once in boyhood he glimpsed the body of a woman lying in a coffin with a dead child between her legs, both having perished from “misery and neglect.” Childless women fared no better. Lorca was profoundly moved by the plight of one woman in his village, a recluse and spinster born with froglike hands. He asked himself how often this pitiful woman must have cursed her parents for having conceived her—“without thinking”—during an instant of pleasure.
Little that he saw or heard as a child was lost on him. He spent hours exploring the countryside around Fuente Vaqueros, roaming his father’s property or daydreaming beside one of the shallow rivers that flowed past the town. The landscape of his birthplace—the vega of Granada, a lush river plain ringed by hills and watered by snows from the Sierra Nevada mountains—stirred him as few locations could. He was intimately familiar with the sensations of the place. As a teenager he wrote of the echo of birds in the vega’s sprawling poplar groves and the smell of straw burning in autumn fields. Momentarily neglecting its more troubling aspects—poverty, death, the cruelties of fate and the mysteries of desire—he described his childhood as “shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Simplicity itself.” For Lorca, the vega embodied these. Uninhibited and pagan, it provided a vivid contrast to the tedium of the classroom and the constraints of the catechism.
He was keenly attuned both to the agricultural rhythms of the landscape and to its human legacy. Hints of past civilizations—Greek, Iberian, Roman, Arab—littered the countryside. To the north of Fuente Vaqueros, along the road to Asquerosa, stood a crumbling brick residence that Renaissance courtiers had used as a hunting lodge during the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Carlos V. A few hundred yards to the south were the remains of an Arab watchtower, a vestige of the eight-hundred-year Muslim occupation of Andalusia. Beyond it was the tiny village of Romilla, “Little Rome,” a reminder that for nearly seven centuries before the Arabs invaded Spain, the country—Hispania—had belonged to the Roman Empire, and from it derived both a religion and a language. Time and again, Andalusia had passively absorbed foreign cultures, then quietly imposed its own sophisticated customs and character. From the eighth until the late-fifteenth centuries—what to the rest of Europe was a “dark age”—the region sustained one of the most spectacular civilizations in history, the Arab kingdom of al-Andalus, a model of ethnic tolerance in which Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions and residents not only coexisted but flourished. The era gave to the region an artistic, scientific, linguistic, and agricultural heritage that endured well into the twentieth century.
With his brother, Lorca pondered the origin of local names and pored over the deeds to certain of their father’s properties. The oldest documents were written in Arabic. Roman relics occasionally turned up on neighboring farms, and one day their father’s own land yielded a set of small unpainted vases of unknown origin, which the two brothers subsequently kept in their bedroom.
As a boy, Lorca once watched a plow unearth a fragment of Roman mosaic from one of his father’s fields. He later recalled “how the huge steel plowshare cut gashes into the earth, and then drew forth roots instead of blood.” The rugged blade tore deep into the soil, so deep that according to Lorca it scraped the foundations of ancient buildings. As he watched, the tool struck “something solid and stopped. The shiny steel blade had turned up a Roman mosaic.” The mosaic bore an inscription whose precise subject Lorca could not remember. “But for some reason I think of the shepherds Daphnis and Chloë,” he said. “So the first artistic wonder I ever felt was connected with the earth.”
2
New Worlds
1905-15
At the age of seven or eight, Lorca moved with his family to the small village of Asquerosa, a mile or so to the northwest of Fuente Vaqueros. The word asquerosa means “repulsive,” which disturbed Lorca, who in later years deemed the name unworthy of his biography and went out of his way to avoid using it. (Residents of the town eventually changed its name to Valderrubio.) In fact, Lorca viewed Asquerosa, with its pristine white buildings and placid streets, as “one of the prettiest towns in the vega.”
His father owned two homes in the village, a sprawling farm on the edge of town, the Cortijo de Daimuz, and a two-story house in the center. It was to the second of these that Don Federico moved his family in 1905 or 1906. A lavish residence by village standards, the new home had stables, a corral, four bedrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, and an imposing pair of lightning rods on its roof. By moving to Asquerosa, Lorca’s father gained closer access to his properties, the train stop, and the sugar-beet refinery where much of his business took place.
To Federico, the move was a slight but nonetheless dramatic change. Built on dry land, not wet, Asquerosa was older and smaller than Fuente Vaqueros. It sat low and bleached on the earth, with green fields and poplar groves at its edge. There were few trees to shade its streets and no public fountain. More so than Fuente Vaqueros, Asquerosa revealed to Lorca the cloistered, provincial nature of life in a tiny rural community. Within the privacy of his own home he could sense the presence of his neighbors. On summer afternoons, with the shutters drawn against the sunlight and flies, he could hear people passing by on the street outside the living room and see their silhouettes reflected on the ceiling. Little in the town went undetected or unremarked. Years later, while visiting Asquerosa, Lorca complained peevishly to his brother about daily life in the town: “It’s full of stupid etiquette. You have to greet people and say good night. You can’t go out in your pajamas or they’ll stone you, and it’s full of malice and bad will.”
Within a year or two of settling in Asquerosa, his parents abruptly sent Federico to school in Almería, a thriving Mediterranean seaport nearly a hundred miles to the southeast. They wanted him to prepare for his entrance examinations to secondary school under the tutelage of their good friend Antonio Rodríguez Espinosa, the former schoolmaster of Fuente Vaqueros. Rodríguez Espinosa had witnessed Federico’s baptism in 1898, and although he had left Fuente Vaqueros four years later, he remained in close touch with the boy’s parents. Don Federico and Vicenta admired their friend’s pragmatism and devotion to work, as well as his liberal outlook and quiet anti-clericalism—traits they hoped Don Antonio might instill in their son.
Lorca was eight or nine when he was sent to Almería; he had never been separated from either his parents or the vega. The sudden move deepened his sense of estrangement from other children. Aware that he was now about “to embark on another life,” as he later put it, he realized as never before the degree of his economic and social isolation from everyday village existence. When he heard his classmates mutter that “the boss’s kid” was going off to school, he felt homesick and depressed. When he said goodbye to them, he wept.