Many rulers have identified themselves with the sun, but the hubris of the carved stucco inscription in the Hall of the Ambassadors, where the Nasrid rulers greeted their subordinates, must be unsurpassed. Entering this hall, a hard-riding emissary, coming up from the Costa Tropical with a report, might have been stupefied by the deeply coffered ceiling of interlocking marquetry stars, the high windows that shed a line of sunlit arches on the floors, and the miradors with wooden screens carved as finely as lace. But as he waited, he eventually would have focused on the make-no-mistake poem carved in Kufic calligraphy near the throne:
From me you are welcomed morning and evening by the tongues of blessing, prosperity, happiness, and friendship . . . yet I possess excellence and dignity above all those of my race. Surely we are all parts of the same body; but I am like the heart in the midst of the rest and from the heart springs all energy of soul and life. True, my fellows here may be compared to the signs of the zodiac in the heaven of the dome but I can boast what they are lacking—the honor of a sun, since my lord, the victorious Yusuf, has decorated me with the robes of his glory and excellence without disguise, and has made me the throne of his empire. May its eminence be upheld by the Master of Divine Glory and the Celestial Throne.
The rhythmic lettering may be artistic, but the tone says so much: a smooth talker with a welcoming smile and an iron will.
As the emissary exited the Sala de los Embajadores, he could cool off in the Courtyard of the Myrtles, beside a long pool and low stone basin of gurgling water. These fountains and courtyards invite strolling, reading Rumi, sipping jasmine tea. They also bounce their light into the surrounding rooms, glazing the tiles and mottling the walls with wavering shadows. For those who lived their daily lives here, the light, the temperature, even their skin was changed by the wet-watercolor refractions from the fountains and channels. Water is transformative in this architecture. When I look at a floor plan of the Alhambra, I see that water was a building material, with as integral a part in the construction as arches and walls. The Alhambra gardens
are
paradisaical. I easily can imagine this whole place as the afterlife.
In the Alhambra gift shop, we are the only customers. As we look through the books, I become aware of the piercing sweetness of the background music. “What is that wonderful music?” I ask the girl at the counter.
“Angel Barrios, of course.” She looks at me as though I’d asked a totally self-evident question. I’ve never heard of Angel Barrios. We pick up several books on architecture and the gardens, and two CDs. One, of course, is the haunting music of Angel Barrios wafting about the shop and forever annealing my brain to this day when I finally came to Granada and saw the Alhambra. The other CD is
Noches en los jardines de España
,
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
, by Manuel de Falla, loveliest title and the most tender piano sequences ever to roll off the fingers of any Spanish composer. Back in our room, I listen to both. I’m electrified by Barrios—is he my third angel promised by the prophet who danced with God? I fall into an Alhambra trance. Barrios, I know I will listen to for the rest of my life.
Those
who live in the houses scattered below the Alhambra must sip the influence of the palace and gardens with their morning coffee, must always stroll there in their imaginations, as well as on many Sunday afternoons. One of the houses, with a weathered blue, blue door on a lane just below the Alhambra, belonged to Manuel de Falla, a friend of Lorca and also an
appassionato
of Gypsy traditions. With de Falla, Lorca organized the seminal Granada conference on deep song. De Falla, who lived with his sister, could hear faintly from his garden the Alhambra’s fountains’ spilling notes, a fluid, melancholy sound that entered his compositions. He’s long dead in Argentina, his dead-end street completely empty. Lorca lifted that knocker in the shape of a woman’s hand. De Falla opened that little window in the door to see who was there. Then the door swung open, and inside they laughed together, and Federico listened to Manuel play and Manuel listened to Federico’s latest poem. I imagine them inside, vital and strong, the buzz of their creativity humming in their veins, their hunger a force in the room. A fortunate friendship that ended tragically. I memorize the closed blue door of his whitewashed house.
The Lorcas’
huerta
, small farm, once was a sweet white house in the fields. The family could see the Alhambra and the distant Sierra Nevada mountains. A charming garden surrounded the house.
There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake up with lyrical headaches.
We can see the ease of the indoor/outdoor life. Now the freeway rims one edge of the property, and ten-story block apartment buildings oppress the other edge. Still, once we are on the grounds, the simple house is profoundly moving. The kitchen’s black stove, the small room where Federico slept, the piano, the manuscripts and framed whimsical drawings—the house retains a soul, even given the current institutional status. Outside the grounds a Gypsy woman offers me a bunch of rosemary and I take it because Federico would have.
Today is our Lorca Pilgrimage. We drive across the
vega
to his early childhood home in Fuente Vaqueros (Cowboys’ Fountain). The flat landscape, with immense breaks of poplars, feathery in the white, still winter air, feels mysterious, close to Lorca’s perception that the
vega
possessed a feeling of immensity and “spiritual density.” His synesthetic images must have grown inside him because of his closeness to the earth: “The gray arm of the wind/ wrapped around her waist,” and “the sun inside the afternoon/ like the stone in a fruit,” and so many others. In the pearly light, the stands of poplars set me dreaming. When the sun burns off the mist, will they be gone? His childhood house, too, is touching—the baby bed, the tile floor, the pump and well in the courtyard, the Mama’s boy photographs. Upstairs we see a video of him, grown, with his thespian group, travelling the provinces. His big smile. His vigor. His affection for his fellows breaks out of the film. The family moved again, to Valderrubio, and we go there, too, crossing the big olive country, and finally just peering in the door. Enough. We drive back to Granada, listening to Barrios and de Falla and talking quietly about going home.
Since it’s late afternoon when we return, we stop at a Lorca hangout for tapas, then walk down Las Ramblas and through back streets crowded with shoppers. Guitar stores! They’re everywhere. In each, someone intently tunes the strings or strums or just gets the feel of holding the instrument. We turn into a shadowy Moroccan area near the university, then end up for dinner in a restaurant where a photo of Lorca hangs above the bar. We are, again, the only ones here. The waiter offers an aged
mahón
cheese from the island of Minorca, which tastes like toasted hazelnuts, and an odd smoky cheese called
idiazabal
. Dinner ends on a grace note.
The
fate of Lorca hangs over Granada. Was his death at the hands of the fascists one reason de Falla, who so loved his house under the Alhambra, emigrated to Argentina? Would he have found his beloved city insupportable after he journeyed to government headquarters, attempting to save his friend, only to find out Lorca already had been murdered?
When Carlos introduced me to Lorca’s poems, he told me that a rare quetzel bird landed on the roof at his family’s farm near León in Nicaragua. The workers were so overcome by the bird’s beauty that they did the only thing that came to mind—they shot it dead. Many Spanish birds were shot—the civil war lasted almost three years. From July 1936 until the end of March 1939, that war killed half a million, 130,000 by execution. In Granada around five thousand were executed. At the
huerta
with the flowery garden, Lorca’s family must have cried for years.
Lorca was a free spirit but far too intelligent to criticize outright the burgeoning fascist regime. I think he had a sixth sense that he was, nonetheless, in danger. As he boarded a train from Madrid, for what would prove to be his last trip to his family in Granada, he spotted an official from his hometown and raised his forefinger and smallest finger in the air, chanting “Lizard, lizard, lizard” to deflect the evil eye of this member of parliament. His brother-in-law, recently elected mayor of Granada, was murdered eight days before Federico was arrested at the home of the Rosaleses, old friends. Those who took him away, Ruiz Alonso, Juan Luís Trecastro, Luis García Alix, and the name of Governor Valdés, deserve black paint thrown on their graves forever, especially Trecastro, who was overheard the next day saying that the rounds from the fusillade had not killed Lorca; he himself shot “two bullets into his arse for being a queer.” Lorca was killed in an olive grove near a spring hallowed to the Moors. They’d called it the Fountain of Tears.
Neruda wrote: “If one had searched diligently, scouring every corner of the land for someone to sacrifice as a symbol, one could not have found in anyone or anything, to the degree it existed in this man who was chosen, the essence of Spain, its vitality and its profundity.” Antonio Machado’s poem will always remind us that
Granada was the scene of the crime./Think of it—poor Granada—his Granada
.
One of my favorite quotes from Lorca came from his time in New York. He loved Harlem jazz and connected black music with that of the Gypsies in Andalucía. He said he couldn’t understand a world “shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of God’s artistic genius.” Bravo, Federico.
Machado has the last word here:
Friends, carve a monument
out of dream stone
for the poet in the Alhambra
over a fountain where the grieving water
shall say forever
The crime was in Granada, his Granada.
In
an antique shop, I buy a marble pomegranate for my desk because
Granada
means “pomegranate.” I buy six old blue and white tiles of boar and deer, a small still-life of oranges and lemons, and a bronze-gone-to-verdigris door knocker in the shape of a horse’s head, a few small things closely tied to my perceptions of the place. In the back of this crammed shop, the owner and his friend are barely visible amid the chaos. The friend is from Damascus but lives in Granada. He whispers something to the owner; then he opens a small box and gives me a silver hand of Fatima. “For good luck,” he says.
“Against evil eye,” the friend from Damascus adds. He is dark, with soot-black eyes lighted with little fires. He is missing an incisor, though he smiles broadly. He has much advice about what to see. He runs a falafel shop, speaks six languages. We feel that we are meeting a Moor who came hundreds of years ago, bringing with him cuttings of damask roses, spices, alchemical recipes, and songs. There, Federico, we begin to see.
Someday
I will come back to Granada. I loved the tiny Arab bath, the archaeological museum, the unprettified streets of the Albacín area. And the Alhambra charged every neuron in my body. Over the week the geography of the place, the lonely
vega
and the glory of the mountains, began to imprint my senses. But while I was here, I felt restless and agitated. Lorca’s ghost walks, uneasy in this city. Some things cannot be forgiven.
The crime was in Granada.
We
like Ubeda immediately. Our
parador
room’s balcony overlooks a courtyard, so I’m happy. Like Pienza in Tuscany, Ubeda is a Renaissance town of golden stone that catches the late afternoon light and turns it to warm honey. As we reach the plaza, we see that enormous backhoes have ripped out the entire square. People are routed over wooden sidewalks and away from the construction. We do not get to see the famous statue of the fascist Serro, which locals have peppered with bullets over the years. We walk back toward the
parador
and find St. Paul’s Church, which has a mosque shape—square and low. All four sides intrigue me. We find the Renaissance public fountain along one side, carved heads and decorative columns that look almost Venetian on another. What a privilege, to gaze and look at buildings. The church faces a plaza where women are knitting and talking ninety miles an hour. Four boys engage in a fast soccer game. Suddenly the ball hits one of the graceful three-branch wrought-iron streetlights. The lamp shatters, and the plaza comes to a halt for a moment; then the game and the talk resume.
What
better relic for a poet/saint than two fingers from the writing hand encased in a silver box on a stand? Spanish tour groups crowd into the rooms where Saint John of the Cross lived and wrote. I first heard of him in college when I read T. S. Eliot, who folded into his poems several quotes from the ascetic Spanish mystic. His philosophical and religious poems are fraught with the suppressed eroticism of mystical love. Lorca saw
duende
in his dark night of the soul, and his constant turning toward deprivation as a way to enlightenment. Much of his writing, however, feels almost homiletic: how to live in this world, self-help for the troubled well, down-home language, and a no-nonsense guide to the sublime. I love best the most poetic poems, where he lets loose his instinct for metaphor and speaks in an intimate voice. Is there a hint of the Arabic poets in his lines?
Now that the bloom uncloses
Catch us the little foxes by the vine,
As we knit cones of roses
Clever as those of pine.
No trespassing about this hill of mine.
Keep north, you winds of death.
Come, southern wind, for lovers. Come and stir
The garden with your breath.
Shake fragrance on the air.
My love will feed among the lilies there.