Lorca also managed to impress Fernando de los Ríos, a distinguished young law professor who had joined the university faculty in 1911 at age thirty-three. While Federico was playing a Beethoven sonata one day at the Granada Arts Center, de los Ríos, then vice president of the organization, happened to walk by and hear him. Struck by the teenager’s skill, he introduced himself. Before long, Lorca was traipsing out to the professor’s home, along with other young proteges, to talk about literature and to borrow books.
Fernando de los Ríos was a familiar sight in Granada. As he strode through the city in a top hat and morning coat, an assortment of young men often trailed behind. Occasionally the entourage would pause to browse in a bookstore or to buy churros before moving on to the professor’s house, where his pupils helped themselves to books from Don Fernando’s extensive private library. As unpretentious as he was kind, de los Ríos treated his students as peers. Through his “eloquence, wisdom, and honesty,” as one of them remembered, he awakened his young disciples to the social and political issues of the day and taught them to be critical of provincial Spanish society.
De los Ríos regarded himself as a “spiritual grandson” of the eminent nineteenth-century educator Francisco Giner de los Ríos, a distant relative whose commitment to the renovation of Spanish education had led him in 1876 to found the unorthodox and influential Free Teaching Institution in Madrid. This was a private, secular school devoted to intuitive methods of instruction—discussions, field trips, tutorials, student papers—instead of authoritarian lectures and tests. The school’s guiding pedagogical ethos, derived from the German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, emphasized freedom of conscience and discussion, an ecumenical view of philosophy, and a pantheistic spirituality. Its graduates included some of the finest minds in Spain, among them the philosophers Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset. As a young man, Fernando de los Ríos had attended the Institution and come to embrace its liberal and anticlerical ideals. He subsequently studied in Germany and returned to Spain an avowed “European,” inflamed by socialist thought and persuaded that his country’s future depended on education.
He was a handsome man, with dark eyes and black hair, a mustache and goatee. A native Andalusian, he loved both Gypsy song, which he occasionally performed, and bullfights. He played the guitar, wrote, lectured, and was conversant in several languages, ancient as well as modern. He also engaged in politics. Shortly after settling in Granada in 1911, he founded the city’s Socialist Party and boldly aligned himself with the working class in its struggle to end the region’s corrupt political system, caciquismo, whereby local powerholders, or caciques, controlled political life, fixed elections, and obtained graft from all political transactions. Many of Granada’s more prominent citizens treated de los Ríos with contempt. “Respectable” women crossed the street to avoid him. His daughter, Laura, had difficulty finding playmates. One of the few children to befriend her was Lorca’s sister Isabel, who became Laura’s closest friend.
Although nearly twice their age, Don Fernando took both Federico and Francisco García Lorca under his wing, and counseled them on practical as well as philosophical and spiritual matters. He urged Paco to “listen” for his true vocation by heeding his “inner voice” and being true to himself. Lorca received similar advice. Despite the teenager’s scholastic failings, de los Ríos admired Federico and did what he could to ease his passage through the university. He recognized Lorca’s superb musical talent and encouraged him to pursue a career in the arts. He also nurtured his budding awareness of social injustice.
He believed in Lorca at a time when few others did—least of all his family. At school, his brother surpassed him in everything but music; lately, Paco had begun writing poetry and appeared to excel at that, too. At home, their father complained daily about Federico’s lack of discipline and focus. “I don’t know what’s going to become of the boy,” he grumbled to a sister-in-law. “He won’t get anywhere like this.” Even Vicenta Lorca had begun to fret.
Pushed toward an adulthood he neither wanted nor understood, Lorca took refuge in music and books, in long, often solitary walks, and in those rare teachers and friends who saw beyond his indolence. He missed the simplicity of life in the vega. Much as he loved Granada, he believed that by moving to the city he had forsaken his true and legitimate roots, had severed his bond with the people. He risked becoming an Andalusian señorito—a young man who wallows in his own pleasure and privilege. Whenever he visited Asquerosa, he felt like an outsider. “The children who were in my grade school are field-workers now, and when they see me they scarcely dare to touch me with those great stony hands of theirs, filthy from work,” he brooded. Years later, reminiscing about his life at the University of Granada and his daily struggle against “the enormous mustachioed face of Mercantile Law,” Lorca noted wistfully that his “life of fun and practical jokes” as a student had in fact concealed “a true but charitable melancholy.”
3
Young Spaniard
1915-16
The Alameda Café stood a few blocks from the Lorca home in the middle of Granada. Inside the café, the walls were mirrored and the music refined. Most evenings a piano and string quintet performed until midnight, at which point Federico sometimes took over the keyboard and played until dawn.
He met nightly in the Alameda with a group of friends who called themselves El Rinconcillo, “The Little Corner.” Seated around marble-topped tables in a corner beneath a staircase, they listened to music and talked. Several members of the group were university students, who sought in these informal gatherings a more candid form of discourse than that available to them in the university’s staid lecture halls. Within the Rinconcillo, Lorca and his friends traded anecdotes and books, sparred over ideas, criticized each other’s work, debated the latest trends in literature and art, and discussed the progress of the Great War, then raging across Europe. All of them sided with the Allies. They fancied themselves bohemians. Of the dozen or so young men who belonged to the group, most, like Lorca, preferred Granada’s lyrical sites to its classrooms, and thought nothing of forsaking their work to spend a sunny morning in the Alhambra or a moonlit night in the Albaicín, reading poems by Darío or listening to Gypsy song.
Both Lorca and his brother joined the Rinconcillo in their mid-teens, but while Paco resisted the group’s more wayward tendencies, Lorca embraced them. It was the first set of friends with whom he had felt a genuine affinity since childhood, and he spent as much time with them as he could. His parents despaired. Don Federico blamed the Rinconcillo for Lorca’s growing delinquency at school, and lectured them on their responsibility toward his son. Vicenta Lorca likewise begged them to reform. “Why can’t you just study and let Federico study, too?” she pleaded, but they ignored her. When Lorca failed a grammar course, one of his Rinconcillo friends published a note in the local newspaper reprimanding the university for its shameful treatment of an outstanding student.