At eleven, Lorca became an official student in Granada’s General and Technical Institute, despite having failed a part of the school’s entrance exam. He most likely began attending classes in the fall of 1909 as one of 442 students, all but one of them boys, enrolled in five separate grades at the public institute. Each was pursuing his bachillerato, or secondary school degree.
During his second year at the Institute, he began taking supplementary afternoon classes at the Academy of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a private school run by one of Vicenta Lorca’s relatives, Don Joaquín Alemán. The option to attend private school, either in place of or in addition to public school, was available to most Spanish schoolchildren, but generally only rich families could afford the tuition. Despite the piety of its name, Alemán’s Academy was a secular institution. Located on the ground floor of a rambling nineteenth-century Granadan house, its classrooms were chilly, damp, and dark. In the winter, students’ hands turned numb with cold. Like many of his classmates, Lorca suffered from chilblains.
He was an odd, shy student, whose fellow pupils, with their city-bred ways, intimidated him. Some of them poked fun at his eccentric dress—a flowing cravat instead of a tie—and at his mannerisms and interests, which they deemed effeminate. “Federica,” they jeered, with an emphasis on the feminine a. They ridiculed his ungainly stride. He walked “like a sailor on deck,” remembered classmate José Alemán, the director’s son, who thought Lorca far less attractive, less “normal,” than his younger brother, Paco, who started school not long after Federico.
Although neither brother especially liked school, Paco sailed through his classes, passing every exam and earning prizes and honors along the way. Lorca struggled. He lacked his brother’s “schoolboy pride.” He ignored subjects that did not interest him, rarely studied for exams, and paid no attention to penmanship, then a required course. His erratic handwriting went from bad to worse; in time, Lorca himself called it “vile.” Often he skipped classes and wandered off by himself to some corner of Granada—to the Alhambra or to the Albaicín, the Gypsy quarter. Although his parents knew about some of his absences, they were ill-prepared for the extent of his truancy. His mother urged him to follow the example set by his younger brother. “Federico, study!” she pleaded. Lorca ignored her.
He received the standard schooling of his day: courses in Spanish language and literature, mathematics, history, geography, Latin, and French. Most of these subjects confounded him. Although Lorca learned to read French, he never managed to say so much as “good afternoon” in that or any foreign tongue, according to his brother. Somehow he contrived to take the final examinations for his bachillerato in October 1914, at age sixteen. After failing and retaking the mathematics part of the test, he passed the exam and received his diploma the following May. His apathy was such that he waited another twelve years before requesting a copy of his certificate.
On his own, away from school, he read avidly. His father opened an account for his children at a local Granada bookstore, and although it was intended for the exclusive purchase of “useful” books, Lorca bought whatever he liked. Together he and Paco amassed a small but impressive library complete with new editions, liberal texts, and works thought to be scandalous, among them Voltaire’s Candide and Darwin’s Origin of Species. The classics were well represented and well thumbed. With a tenacity that might have stunned his schoolteachers, Federico pored over such works as the Platonic dialogues, Hesiod’s Theogony, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, about which he later exulted, “It has everything.”
Thick underlinings crisscrossed his copies of Shakespeare (he and Paco owned the complete works in Spanish translation) and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, whose hedonistic invocations to love enthralled Federico. From Maeterlinck’s essay The Treasure of the Humble, this line caught his eye: “Everything that can be learned without anguish belittles us.” Pencil marks underscored a similar passage in his copy of Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, written, as Lorca surely learned, during the Irishman’s brutal imprisonment on the charge of indecent behavior with men: “Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation for the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world.”
In his growing quest to understand himself and his place in the world, Lorca turned to the Spanish mystics, to Augustine’s Confessions, Goethe’s Faust, works of Indian philosophy, and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. It was chiefly his exposure to Hispanic modernismo, though, with its call to Beauty and Art as the highest absolutes, that nourished his emerging sense of himself as an artist. A Latin American phenomenon that eventually took hold in Spain, where it held sway from 1890 to 1910, Hispanic modernismo was a late and decadent flowering of romanticism, a poetic and artistic revolt against both the prosaic nature of late-nineteenth-century art and verse and the materialism and philistinism of bourgeois society. In contrast to Anglo-American modernism, Hispanic modernismo coincided roughly with the fin de siècle art nouveau or modern style. Inspired by Baudelaire and the French symbolists Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, its literary practitioners forged a new and expanded poetic language characterized by exotic imagery, unconventional meters, technical virtuosity, a darkly pessimistic view of reality, and a concomitant belief in art, women, and love as transcendent ideals.
By the time he was eighteen, Lorca had adopted a new literary idol, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, father of Hispanic modernismo (he coined the term), whose embrace of symbolist and Parnassian technique had led to a revolution in Spanish prosody in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Darío’s lush imagery, expansive vocabulary, and metrical innovations and revivals had freed the Spanish language from conventional versification, much as Whitman’s unorthodox meter and line liberated English. Darío sought to effect a “musical miracle” in poetry. He believed that art was “not a set of rules but a harmony of whims,” a view Lorca admired, and in his two most important books, Azul (1888) and Prosas profanas (1896), Darío evoked an aristocratic, fairy-tale world brimming with swans, roses, champagne, pearls, and peacocks, a Dionysian existence peopled with mythological figures. Darío’s radical verse inspired a generation of Spanish writers, among them Juan Ramón Jiménez and Antonio Machado. Likewise enthralled by the brilliant Nicaraguan, who died in his late forties in 1916 from poor health and alcohol abuse, Lorca looked for spiritual and aesthetic guidance to “Rubén Darío, The Magnificent.’”
At night Federico often stayed up late in his bedroom, reading. Because the light kept his brother awake, the two struck a compromise: Lorca would read on alternate evenings only. On the nights when he did not read, his brother would recite a brief dialogue with him. The ritual drew its inspiration from Victor Hugo’s “Legend of the Handsome Pécopin and the Beautiful Baldour,” a tale about two lovers separated, on the eve of their wedding day, for the next one hundred years. When at last they are reunited, Pécopin is still a young man, while Baldour has become an old woman. The story fascinated Federico, who would gently call out to Paco from his bed, “Pécopin, Pécopin.”
“Baldour, Baldour,” his brother would answer.