“Turn off, turn off …”
“The light, the light.”
Only then would Lorca “put out the light without reading,” Paco remembered. “But even when he was reading, if he saw that I was not completely asleep, he would softly say, ‘Pécopin, Pécopin,’ before turning off the light. Sometimes I took this with a grain of salt, and sometimes I answered with an expletive.”
By day Lorca drafted his siblings into more elaborate entertainments. He costumed his brother, sisters, and the family maids in towels to look like Arabs, or dressed them in Vicenta Lorca’s clothing when she was gone from the house. He dusted their faces with rice powder and led them in short pantomimes or recitals of poems and ballads that he had adapted into plays. Sometimes he staged plays on the patio for his youngest sister, Isabel, whom he cherished. In a room next door to his bedroom he set up makeshift altars and shrines and delivered prayers, sermons, and lectures on the Passion of Christ to his family and servants. The trappings of Christian doctrine appealed to him as much as its stories, with their powerful lessons on good and evil, charity and faith. He presented puppet performances and took part in local pageants. Once, during Carnival, he dressed up as a bullfighter, coated his legs with fake blood, and allowed his friends to carry him through the streets on their shoulders as though he were mortally wounded. By simulating death he sought to dispel its mystery.
His hunger for ritual stemmed partially from his mother, who attended Mass faithfully in Granada and instructed Lorca and his siblings in the Catholic liturgy. She taught them to regard the Church as a thing of beauty, independent of its theological function. “We’re not going to that church,” she sometimes announced. “It’s ugly.” Occasionally the family prayed together at home. During the month of May, “Mary’s month,” Vicenta Lorca recited the rosary in Latin after dinner every night, and Lorca periodically preached a sermon. His more skeptical father suffered such activities with forbearance. Don Federico once told his wife as she was about to leave for Mass, “Only stay a little while.”
“What do you mean?” Vicenta asked.
“I mean, I think that a little while won’t hurt you much.”
The entire family went regularly to the theater in Granada, where the offerings ranged from Shakespeare to comic folk operas known as zarzuelas to realistic drawing-room comedies by such popular Spanish playwrights as Jacinto Benavente and the Quintero brothers. But although Lorca delighted in the theater, his greatest love was music. His father saw to it that all four of his children received piano lessons. Lorca later recalled rapturously that in his teens he “took the Holy Orders of Music and donned its robes of passion.” From the start, he proved a gifted player, blessed with an innate understanding of the art. The piano allowed him to express himself with a candor that no other medium could match. “No one,” he observed, “can reproduce with words the shattering passion that Beethoven expressed in his Appassionata Sonata.”
Hunched over the piano, his dark hair falling onto his forehead, he surrendered easily to the music of Chopin, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven—composers he had admired since childhood. (As a boy, he had fallen in love “like a madman” with the sound of young village girls practicing Beethoven and Chopin on the piano.) After hearing Federico perform one day, his piano teacher, Antonio Segura Mesa, turned to Vicenta Lorca and begged her to hug the boy. “It wouldn’t be proper if I were to do it,” he said. “It’s just that he plays so divinely!”
His father bought Lorca his first piano, an upright that his uncle Luis, the pianist, auditioned and approved. In time Don Federico replaced this instrument with a shiny black baby grand. “I love you more than anything else in the world” Lorca confessed to his piano in writing, underlining the words for emphasis. He envisioned the instrument as “a woman who is always asleep, and in order to wake her one must be filled with harmonies and grief.” Like a woman, he suggested—his understanding of the gender shaped almost exclusively by his reading—“she is unpredictable.”
Music became his idiom. He sought to emulate Beethoven, whose genius, he said, had been to translate his life into musical language, to convey through sound the “painful song of impossible love.” By age eighteen, Lorca was composing. His first works were inspired by Granada. He titled one composition “Serenade on the Alhambra,” then shortened it to “Granada.” His piano teacher encouraged him. A spare, timid man in his seventies, Antonio Segura Mesa had consecrated his life to music in the hope of becoming a great artist. He had composed a number of works, including an opera that was booed at its Granada premiere. He never played publicly, and outside his native Granada he was unknown. “Just because I haven’t reached the clouds,” he often reminded Federico, “… doesn’t mean the clouds don’t exist.” Lorca repeated the statement to himself like a mantra.
Keenly sensitive to criticism, and painfully shy, Segura Mesa rarely ventured from his house, except to teach Federico. A forlorn figure, with a domed forehead, buttonlike ears, and a thick mustache that trailed sadly down either side of his mouth, the older man made his way each day through Granada’s noisy streets to the Lorca apartment. Federico regarded him as “a saint.” As they sat together at the piano Segura Mesa frequently talked about famous composers, recounting their struggles as well as their achievements. More so than anyone else, he taught Lorca to view art as a grave calling, not a hobby. Sometimes, after a long session of rules and exercises, Segura Mesa would pull out samples of his own work for Lorca to analyze and perform. Neither man cared that these compositions had failed to attract a following. What mattered was the work itself. Inspired by the example of his teacher, Lorca set his sights on a musical career.
The piano stool became his favorite seat at home. In addition to his own compositions, he entertained family and friends with classical as well as popular works. He began performing in public. He joined Granada’s Arts Center, the hub of the city’s cultural life, and quickly established a name for himself in the institution by giving private recitals, helping to form a chamber music society, and providing background music for a life drawing class. He was the only outsider permitted to enter that particular classroom. While students sketched from human models, Lorca accompanied them on the piano with works by Beethoven.
His academic career continued to founder. In the fall of 1914, shortly before completing his bachillerato, he had enrolled as a student of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Granada. Although he survived his first year, the classwork soon became more difficult. Before long Lorca was no more than a nominal student. He fled subjects that perplexed him, such as Hebrew and Arabic, without so much as attempting to learn the material.
During his second year as a university student he switched from Philosophy and Letters to Law, then a conventional discipline for the sons of good Spanish families, or for undecided students like Lorca who were eager to please their fathers. Again, he passed a few easy courses before stumbling over the difficult ones that inevitably followed. Unwilling to abandon his interest in Letters, in 1916 he enrolled in both programs, and for the next three years took courses in literature as well as law. He did poorly in both. On the first day of an economics class, he burst out laughing at the professor’s odd mannerisms and was expelled from class. He never returned, and consequently failed the course. His brother, Paco, enrolled in the same university in 1918 and sailed through his studies, earning stellar marks in every class.
Daunted by mandatory courses in such topics as civil, canonical, and administrative law, Lorca shunned the classroom and spent much of his time exploring Granada by himself or with a group of like-minded friends. He rarely prepared for class and seldom studied. He soon gained a reputation as a prankster in school, an inventor of nicknames. Only a handful of professors saw him as anything but a wayward dreamer with tousled black hair and a faraway gaze. The university’s elderly librarian liked Lorca enough to let him spend hours in the library reading classical texts in lieu of the law books he had been assigned. Long after the building officially closed, the two men would sit together in the vast book-lined space overlooking the school’s botanical gardens, reading and discussing literature.