His father accompanied him on the long journey east. They were joined by two cousins and a fourth boy from the vega, all of whom were to live and study that year with Rodríguez Espinosa and his wife. Don Antonio later remembered that of the four children, Lorca was the smallest and the “most turbulent.” In school, he was an indifferent student who distinguished himself chiefly by coining puns and clever nicknames for his classmates. Nevertheless, he managed to complete his schoolwork with Rodríguez Espinosa, and at age ten he passed his entrance exam for the General and Technical Institute of Almería, a public secondary school.
Almost immediately afterward he contracted a gum infection. His face swelled and his temperature rose alarmingly. Terrified, Don Federico hurried to Almería to tend to his son. Lorca later recalled the episode with pride. He claimed his father feared he would die. He also claimed the infection inspired his first verse. “I asked for a mirror and saw my face all swollen, and since I couldn’t talk I wrote my first funny poem, in which I compared myself to the fat sultan of Morocco, Muley Hafid.”
At home in Asquerosa, Lorca gradually recovered from his illness. His face still bloated, he sat in an armchair by the window, occasionally strumming a guitar. Although in time he regained his health, his parents were so shaken by the incident that they elected not to send him back to Almería, and instead enrolled him in the General and Technical Institute of Granada, in the provincial capital, fifteen miles from Asquerosa. So that they could remain together as a family, they also decided to take a home for themselves in the center of Granada, and in the spring of 1909, shortly before Lorca’s eleventh birthday, they settled into a rented, three-story house on Granada’s Acera del Darro, a street named for the slender Darro river that wound past it. With the windows open in their living room, the family could hear the murmur of water below.
If Almería was bright light and the din of a Mediterranean harbor, Granada was cypress trees, rivers, and the toll of church bells through the night. The word granada means “pomegranate,” an image whose poetic implications were not lost on Lorca. The fruit, he would write, is hard and skull-like on the outside, but inside it contains the “blood of the wounded earth.”
He responded passionately to his new surroundings. Located at the base of two mountain spurs well above sea level, Granada fed on the waters of the Darro and Genii rivers. The second of these skirted the southern edge of town before making its way out into the vega, to Lorca’s birthplace and his father’s farmlands. The sound of water permeated the city. Lorca would boast that Granada “has two rivers, eighty bell towers, four thousand irrigation ditches, a thousand and one jets of water.” Mountains anchored the town on three sides, most spectacularly the snow-clad Sierra Nevadas to the south, whose gray peaks dominated the horizon. Unlike other Spanish cities, Granada turned in on itself, not out to the world—or so Lorca came to believe. He felt that Granada’s beauty lay not in monumental vistas but in small things: houses, patios, music, water, “everything reduced and concentrated, so that a child can feel it.”
He made frequent, often solitary visits to the city’s most celebrated monument, the Alhambra, which sat high above town on a steep hill covered with cypress and sycamores. From its heights, Arab sultans had presided in luxury over the final two centuries of Muslim rule in Spain. Their reign ended in 1492, after a long siege, when the Catholic king and queen, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, swept into Granada on horseback and toppled the fabled kingdom of al-Andalus. The victory capped a four-hundred-year Christian reconquest of Islamic Spain, a militant holy war conducted by the infant Christian kingdoms of the country’s north, which in 1469, with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, had combined to form a fledgling Spanish nation-state. Granada was the last outpost of Muslim Spain; during its two-hundred-year tenure as the capital of al-Andalus, the city and surrounding province enjoyed a level of religious freedom and artistic and scientific brilliance unmatched elsewhere in Europe. Poetry, music, and architecture prospered; scholars pursued questions of philosophy, religion, astronomy, and medicine. Granada’s Arab rulers developed an elaborate irrigation system—still used in Lorca’s time—by which the waters from the Sierra fed the city and neighboring vega, yielding bountiful orchards and fields.
Although at first they tolerated the Arab presence, within months of their victory in 1492 the Spanish monarchs embarked on a violent campaign to “purify” the blood of Christian Spain. They ordered the expulsion of all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity. Both Arabs and Jews became disadvantaged minorities, subject to prejudicial racial laws. By 1610 the country’s Muslim population had been eradicated. Meanwhile, Ferdinand and Isabella, whose bodies lay buried in Granada’s massive cathedral, had instituted what Lorca, at nineteen, would call the “great crime of the Inquisition”: a savage system of control meant to forge a single, monolithic Christian ideology through the arrest, torture, imprisonment, and public execution of alleged heretics. The system endured into the eighteenth century. Coincidentally, the Catholic reconquest in 1492 inaugurated the era of Spain’s greatest expansion, and the start of the country’s role as a world power. That year, in the town of Santa Fe (not far from Lorca’s birthplace), which had been built to house the army laying siege to Granada, Ferdinand and Isabella authorized Christopher Columbus to investigate new trade routes to Asia.
Lorca’s boyhood visits to the Alhambra “tensed Federico’s soul,” his brother recalled. The ornate, long-empty citadel reminded him of what had been lost with the reconquest, when a tolerant, cultured civilization had given way to one marked by oppression and war. Throughout his life, Lorca voiced his support for the persecuted and talked of the “fatal duel” between Arab and Christian cultures “that throbs in the heart of every granadino.” In his teens he sometimes donned a white turban and robes and masqueraded as a Muslim sultan. A sense of loss colored his understanding of Granada from the outset. Nowhere was that sense more palpable than in the grounds of the Alhambra. In the fountains of the Generalife gardens, he would write, the water “suffers and weeps, full of tiny white violins.”
His mother decorated the family’s new home in typical Granadan fashion, with dainty slipcovers and embroidered tablecloths, antique prints, family portraits, and a crystal lamp sheathed in pink crepe—surroundings as genteel as Vicenta Lorca herself. Like many Granadan women, she kept a canary. She also allowed her son Paco to keep a brood of pigeons in the small stable at the back of the garden. He and Lorca shared a bedroom in the new house. From their balcony they saw Halley’s comet blaze overhead in the spring of 1910.
Soon after settling in Granada, Vicenta Lorca gave birth to a fifth child and second daughter, Isabel, a name shared by several women in the García clan. Following Isabel’s birth, Vicenta, then thirty-nine, fell sick and was taken with the infant to the region’s best hospital, in Málaga, more than eighty miles from Granada, where they remained for months. Federico, Paco, and Concha occasionally visited their mother and sister by train, and between visits kept in touch by letter. “Mama I want to see you very much and I hope you come home soon,” Lorca wrote on an ink-stained card that appears to be his earliest correspondence. “Greetings all the way from the goatherd to the gypsies your son who loves you very much. Federico.”