More likely, perhaps, is that his mother was from such a background, given the frequency of the surname Vargas among the Gypsies of Andalusia. Antonio Garcia's wife was celebrated for her beauty and, according to family tradition, may have been of Gypsy extraction. Unlike most of the inhabitants of the Soto de Roma he could read and write, and for many years held the post of secretary to the town hall. “Lorca's paternal great-grandfather, Antonio Garcia Vargas, had been born and bred in Fuente Vaqueros where, in 1831, he married a local girl, Josefa Paula Rodriguez Cantos. The plain was booming, and by the time Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros in the summer of 1898, his father had become one of the wealthiest men in the village.” (6) The loss of Cuba to the United States in 1898 came as a further fillip to the Vega's economy, for it meant that the importation of cheap sugar from the island had come to an end. Tall-chimneyed factories for the processing of the beet sprang up and many landowners made rapid fortunes, among them Federico Garcia Rodriguez, the future poet's father. “Towards 1880 another, much more decisive, factor came to bear on the situation, promoting the development and enrichment not only of the Soto de Roma but of the Vega in general: the discovery that sugar-beet could be grown there very successfully. Reading him, or seeing his plays, we enter a pre-logical world, presided over by the moon, where man is one more strand in the intricate fabric of life.” (xxii)īOOK ONE: From Fuente Vaqueros to New York 1898-1929 If it is true that poets are the last animists in our industrial society, then Lorca is surely one of the greatest. His work, due largely to the power of its earthy imagery, makes us experience that mystery more acutely than perhaps any other poet of the century. 'Only mystery enables us to live, only mystery', the poet wrote beneath one of his enigmatic drawings. “My own feeling is that Lorca's best work, both the plays and the poetry, puts us in touch with our emotions and reminds us forcefully, in a world ever more computerized and machine-controlled, that we are an integral part of Nature – a Nature that all too often we tend to forget.
Lorca called these moments his 'dramones' ('big dramas').” (xx-xxi)
Soon afterwards he would 'return' and carry on from where he had left off, as if emerging from a hypnotic trance. Several companions of the poet have recorded his disconcerning tendency suddenly to switch off in the middle of a lively conversation and to go deep within himself, his lips pursed and the light of his dark eyes temporarily extinguished. It was difficult enough to be a homosexual in that society, but Lorca's dilemma was aggravated by deep emotional conflicts which threatened at times to overwhelm him. A side every bit as real as the other, as might perhaps be deduced from a work in which death and frustrated love are obsessively recurrent themes. “It was hardly surprising, then, that few people suspected the anguished side to him.
His fellow countrymen recognized in the man and his work an extraordinary synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde, while foreigners who crossed his path always thought of Spain thereafter in terms of the amazing ebullient Andalusian.” (xx) Lorca's sense of humour was contagious, his bursts of laughter proverbial and he spread around him an aura of happiness. If ever anyone was the charasmatic life and soul of a party it was Federico. Pianist, poet, dramatist, lecturer, conversationalist, raconteur, actor, theatre director, mimic, Lorca could also sing folksongs feelingly and draw well enough to merit the praise of a critic as severe as Dali. “his dazzling range of gifts and huge charm so seduced most (not all) of those who came within his orbit that they had eyes – and ears – only for the staggering one-man show. EXCERPTS: Federico Garcia Lorca, A Life by Ian Gibson
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