Authors: James Michener
However, when Carlos ascended the throne, the Christian
hierarchy of Córdoba saw a chance to do something they had
long wanted to do but which Fernando and Isabel, sensitive to
the Moorish architecture of the south, would never have
permitted. They wanted to erect across the inconspicuous nave
a transept, which when properly covered and cut off from the
rest of the mosque, would constitute a proper cathedral. They
therefore petitioned Carlos for permission to do this, and he,
knowing nothing of the problem for he did not appreciate the
south, carelessly granted it. Speedily Christian stonemasons went
to work and built, right in the heart of the mosque, their
monstrous structure. When Carlos finally visited Córdoba in 1526
and saw what had been done under his aegis he was ashamed,
saying, ‘If I had known what you were up to, you would not have
done it. For what you have made here may be found in many
other places, but what you have destroyed is to be found nowhere
else in the world.’
I do not share the emperor’s lament. As my own experience
proved, one can visit the mosque without at first being aware that
the gigantic church is there. It certainly did not spoil my visits,
and while I know that without the cathedral I would have seen
vistas that must have been profound, I could still see so far along
the outer walls that my eye got lost in the arches. That the
Christians had a right to use the mosque as a cathedral, there can
be no question; that they found it necessary to build a transept,
and such a gross one, is regrettable.
I spent many hours inside the church, for I found the choir a
comfortable place to rest. I grew to like the intricate vaulting, and
particularly the pink marble ox that held up the black pulpit; his
carved entrails had burst loose in conformity to the local legend,
which said that the Córdoban ox which bore the pillars for
constructing the cathedral burst his insides with joy to think that
the building was once more to be a church. The white eagle that
served as a lectern also attracted my attention and I did much of
my reading in its shadow. I rather liked the idea that what had
once been a pagan temple of the Romans, then a Christian church
of the Visigoths, next a mosque of the Muslims, was now a church
for Catholics; it was proper and in the order of things, but in spite
of the hours I spent there reading and thinking, I never felt it to
be a consecrated place. It was more like an ornate museum, as if
the contamination of having been a mosque had not been properly
cleansed. This feeling did not arise from the fact that the cathedral
was an ugly building, for in a sense that was appropriate; much
of what Christians introduced when they expelled the Muslims
was uglier than what it replaced, but on balance the change was
inescapable; it was necessary for the development of Spain.
I was less generous in my judgment of the endless chain of
second-rate chapels that usurp the outer walls of the mosque;
once these walls had stood open so that worshipers might enter
the mosque from any direction, and then when one was inside
he looked through this maze of columns out to the free sky of
Andalucia, and the impact must have been tremendous; but since
the building was now a cathedral it required chapels, so the
once-open walls were bricked shut, and as mournful a bunch of
cubicles as I have ever seen was strung along them. How many
are there, unused, undusted and unsung? One morning I walked
past the locked gates of each one, not slowly, but pausing now
and then to look at the moldering statues and the bad painting,
and it took me twenty-nine minutes to make the circuit, for there
must have been more than fifty. A few had touches of real charm,
and I could see that others had historic validity in that they related
to important figures in Córdoba’s history, but for the main part
they were a dismal, unattended group of structures which came
off poorly when compared with the mosque they had helped
deface.
One must be careful not to generalize about this matter, for a
distinguished French critic whom we shall meet later in another
context points out that it would be fallacious to condemn the
Christians for defacing a Muslim masterwork, because Muslims
had very little to do with the building of this mosque! The design
came from the Christian basilica around which the original
mosque was built. Most of the marble columns and their capitals
were appropriated from existing Christian monuments in Spain
or Africa. The workmen who built the mosque were Christians;
even the glorious mihrab which I had liked so much was built by
Christian workmen loaned to Córdoba by the Christian emperor
at Constantinople, who also sent as a gift three hundred and
twenty quintals of glass pieces for the mosaics (about thirty-five
tons). ‘Accordingly, in this great sanctuary of Islam, the first after
that of Mecca, everything, or nearly everything, is Christian: the
plan of the edifice, the material employed, and even the
workmanship.’
Much confused, I left the Great Mosque. In many respects it
was unsatisfying; its Christian and Muslim halves were uneasy
with each other and failed to attain that harmony one finds in
Sancta Sophia. There is here a sense of imbalance and restlessness,
as if the Muslim component of Spanish life had accepted its role
of submission and were trying to escape; or as if the Christian
component were not content with its conquest and were
endeavoring to suppress even further the Moorish. In such
circumstances the Muslim explodes to the surface through
weakened fissures. There is in much of Spain this contradiction:
it is a Christian country but one with suppressed Muslim
influences that crop out of unforeseen points; it is a victorious
country that expelled the defeated Muslims from all places except
the human heart; it is a land which tried to extirpate all memory
of the Muslims but which lived on to mourn their passing; and
it is a civilization which believed that it triumphed when it won
the last battle but which knows that it lost in fields like poetry,
dancing, philosophy, architecture and agriculture. To me
Córdoba’s mosque was the most mournful building in Spain, and
on the evening after my first visit I went into the old Jewish
quarter, where memories of the Moors still linger, to see if I could
banish my unease.
If I had been disappointed by the mosque, I was enchanted by
the little courtyards of the Jewish quarter, for I suppose they
represent one of the perfect sights that a stranger can come upon
in Europe, like the Spanish Steps in Rome or the island museums
of Oslo. They are a series of small, informal patios strung out by
accident along unimportant back streets, and they number
perhaps a hundred. You see them casually through doorways as
you walk along, and occasionally one acquires a greater
importance than the others because it stands behind formal arches
and has had professional attention. Mostly, however, they are
family gardens, but unlike any you have seen before.
By luck, the first one I happened upon as I was looking for the
restaurant to which I had been directed by a friend, was one of
the best. I saw it through an open doorway, an ordinary patio
surrounded on three sides by a low two-story house whose walls
were whitewashed. The floor of the patio was paved with pebbles
set on end, so that it had a pleasing design. A flight of stairs led
to a second-floor balcony, over whose edge hung nineteen potted
flowers with tendrils covering the wall of the balcony. The top of
the balcony was lined with twenty-seven flowerpots which also
dropped flowers in abundance, while the six posts supporting the
roof each held three beautiful flowering plants. The two side walls
could scarcely be seen. In one corner of the patio stood a well
with a masonry rim, whitewashed and containing a dozen larger
pots of roses and dahlias, while around the line where the walls
met the patio floor scores of pots were ranged, each with some
flowering plant. To the right of the entrance a low wall had been
erected in previous centuries, perhaps when Jews still occupied
the house, and it must originally have been intended for visitors
to sit on like a bench, but now it too was crowded with flowerpots,
all of whose plants were in bloom. The little patio was thus a
theater offering a ballet of color against the stark whiteness of the
walls. The flowers danced up and down the stairway, pirouetted
across the balcony, around the well, up and down the posts, and
in a kind of majestic march moved about the lower walls. How
many separate plants were there? Well over a hundred, I suppose.
How many colors? More than I could count. How many different
kind of flowers? I’m not good at identifying them, but there were
at least a dozen.
There was one patio which quite captivated me, for I had not
heard of such a way of using flowers. In a whitewashed area of
rough walls and arcades, some sixty flowerpots were hung from
wire loops, and all were painted Muslim blue. This is a dark blue
often seen in the Middle East, where it is popular as a charm
guaranteed to keep away evil spirits; on the road from Tel Aviv
to Haifa, in the heart of Israel, there is an Arab village named
Faradis (Paradise) that used to be painted blue. In Córdoba the
concentration of blue pots against white walls was most charming,
and when varied flowers crept down from the pots to hang in a
hundred festoons, the effect was unlike anything I had seen before.
These two patios were in no way exceptional; I must have seen
about sixty that evening as I wandered down the street of the
Good Shepherd in the general direction of the Maimonides statue,
but finally I found my restaurant and much to my satisfaction
saw that a flamenco concert was scheduled for that night. I had
dinner in a delightful room which duplicated something of the
charm of the patios, and while waiting for the program to begin
I wondered whether the spectacular display of flowers I had seen
was an inheritance from the Moors, who were reported to have
been excellent gardeners. I suppose I could have found comparable
gardens elsewhere in Spain, but as a matter of record I didn’t, so
I concluded that these Córdoban patios were a Moorish
carry-over.
About flamenco there is much debate. The easy explanation
of this unique art form, which combines guitar playing, singing,
chanting, dancing and staccato handclapping, is that it is a very
old inheritance from Moorish days, in which the distinctive wail
is an echo of the muezzin’s cry with Jewish overtones; but if, as
some think, it was derived from gypsy patterns imported from
Asia rather than from Africa, it must be a fairly recent
importation, for the gypsies did not reach Spain till 1435. We
know that the name dates only from 1520, when the Flemish
courtiers of Carlos V burst on the drab Spanish scene with slashed
doublets showing flashes of brilliant color and gave their name
to anything conspicuous or garish, like the flamingo bird and the
flamenco dance.
I had been introduced to flamenco under appropriate
conditions in that café in Valencia, because there I heard some
first-class guitar playing and that important flamenco song
‘Petenera.’ In intervening years I had bought most of the good
flamenco records reaching America, but they were not many, for
much junk was then purveyed as flamenco, a custom which has
not been broken. In Mexico I attended several flamenco parties,
and they were awful, though the versions offered in New York
were worse. The fact was that after that first superb evening I had
heard no acceptable flamenco and it was gratifying to find myself
now in the heart of the flamenco country, where I could catch
up.
The room in which the dance was to be held could hardly have
been more suitable, a cellar-type place with old iron-studded
doors, a beamed ceiling, intricate trellises up which vines crept,
and what looked like authentic Roman pillars except that they
were topped by rude, country-style capitals that seemed just right
for this room. The furniture was rough, and as the people near
me talked I was pleased to find that the room had a fine resonance,
for the brick walls absorbed sound. It promised to be an exciting
evening.
Then the troupe appeared, five people dressed a little too finely
for the work at hand. The three men (guitarist, singer, dancer)
wore suits that were too professional in their tightness and cut.
The two girl dancers wore dresses strongly modified by French
ideas and their heels were of an exaggerated height. What was
most disturbing, the girls were too young and too beautiful; when
this is the case the dancer is tempted to say, ‘Look at me, how
lovely I am,’ and not to do much honest dancing. The sleazy
guitarist struck a few dramatic chords, ran a series of notes and
went into the kind of sequence burlesque orchestras use to
announce the impending appearance of their chief stripper. One
of the girls rushed forth, assumed a fatalistic pose, stamped her
feet a couple of times and grunted, ‘!Ole!’ I thought, Oh boy! All
the duende of a boiler factory.
What a horrible evening it was. I had been trapped in a tourist
show of the worst sort: the dancing was strictly Hollywood, with
much heel banging and head gesture; the guitarist was nimble
rather than profound and his playing tended toward the staccato
chord; the singing done by the pomaded man in the tight suit was
closer to the Beatles than to either Moors or gypsies. All this I
could have borne, but the girls were arch and danced so as to
display their legs up to their navels and one even wore a rose
between her teeth; when I thought I had seen the worst, and that
can be pretty bad, for in this country when taste abdicates, the
results are unpredictable, the girls called onto the stage two
German sailors, wrapped mantones (shawls) about the bottoms
of the two men and proceeded to burlesque one of the few
authentic entertainments Spain has to offer its guests. It was
shocking, as vulgar as the scenes in Hawaiian night clubs when
hula girls lure men onstage to make asses of themselves. The two
Germans were good sports and one had a bawdy sense of humor:
he grabbed at the skirts of the flamenco girls; they stumbled and
he fell on his face. The audience roared approval and the guitarist
played a version of ‘Anchors Aweigh.’