Fuente la Teja

Escuchad los romances
del agua en las choperas.
¡Son pájaros sin alas
perdidos entre hierbas!
Listen to the ballads
of the water in the poplar groves.
They are birds without wings
lost in the long grasses.
 
Fuente la Teja
We arrive at the "Teja" spring following the road from Fuente Vaqueros to Valderrubio and turning left along the path that we come to after crossing the bridge over the River Cubillas and emerging from the poplar grove.
"I think my place is among these musical poplars and these lyrical rivers which let my heart finally come to rest and ridicule my passions which in the city set on me like a pack of panthers." "Creo que mi sitio está entre estos chopos musicales y estos ríos líricos, que son un remanso continuado, porque mi corazón descansa de una manera definitiva y me burlo de mis pasiones que en la torre de la ciudad me acosan como un rebaño de panteras."
 

Letter to Melchor Fernández Almagro, August, 1921.

"Yo siempre estaré encantado si me dejan ese delicioso e ignorado último rincón, fuera de luchas, putrefacciones y tonterías: último rincón de azúcar y picatostes, donde las sirenas cojen las ramas de los sauces y el corazón se abre a punto de flauta." "I will always be delighted if I could be left this delicious and unknown remote corner, far from all kinds of struggle, putrefaction and foolishness: this remote corner of sugar on fried bread, where the mermaids grasp hold of the branches of the willows and my heart opens at the sound of the flute."

 

More about Lorca and the "Fuente de la Teja" .

Mercedes Delgado, one of Lorca's favourite cousins, describes his daily routine when he visited Valderrubio during the summers as a young man: "He would get up mid-afternoon and go to the Fuente de la Teja. He'd stay there till nightfall and then go to the tavern that there used to be in the village. He'd go home about 2 o'clock and start writing. When the farmworkers got up to see to the animals, a light would still be burning in his room. He never got involved with any of the farm work."

He liked to spend the afternoons and evenings at the Fuente de la Teja in the company of the local youth, especially the farm workers, reading his latest works, talking about poetry, telling stories. He felt more at ease with the simple people than with his own class. In a letter, Lorca boasted: "I'm very popular among the villagers, especially with the young men!" He told his homosexual friend Pepe García Carrillo: "I've slept with all the boys of Valderrubio". He loved the farmworker-type, the more peasant-like, the better. He liked them dirty and sweaty. (Says Pepe Carrillo.)

Lorca's friend, the painter Manuel Angeles Ortiz, has commented on the spellbound devotion these village youth seemed to have for their poet.

One of these peasant-types was Frasco, Francisco Santalla Sánchez, who would leave his work and go without pay to be with Federico at the Fuente de la Teja. 20 years after Lorca's death, Frasco's arms were suddenly covered with goose-pimples caused by his memories of the great poet, while talking to the Lorca-researcher, Agustín Penón.

One can't help thinking, in reading the poem "Madrigal del Verano" from Libro de poemas (1921), that Lorca is describing his own preferences when he asks "Estrella la gitana":

 
¿Como no has preferido a mis lamentos
los muslos sudorosos
de un San Cristóbal campesino, lentos
en el amor y hermosos?
How is it that you didn't prefer to my whining
the sweaty thighs
of some peasant Saint Christopher, slow
in love and ample?

Before we go on to Valderrubio, we can take a look at the poplar grove on the banks of the River Cubillas.
  to the poplar grove

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