A Year in the World (8 page)

A taxi ride away we find a wonderful art exhibit in a Carthusian monastery that became a ceramic tile factory, then was restored by the city as a gallery. Even in January some roses and geraniums perk up the courtyards. Vines droop like long hair, blooming with ornamental pink trumpets. The vibrant paintings lead us back into the city to explore the contemporary galleries. At night we try desserts late at various tapas bars: orange rice pudding with cinnamon, quince with cheeses, fig biscuits with walnut sauce. And late, late flamenco. One venue featured a young male dancer full of passion and precision. I was intrigued by his guitarist singer, whose involvement with the dancer seemed almost to make the dance possible. He strained toward the dancer, intently watched, egged him on, pushed his own energy into the dancer. The performance began with a piercing cry, “Aaiiee . . . ,” a skull-ringing wail that might have originated with Jewish rituals, for the flamenco weaves the traditions of Gypsies, Muslims, and Jews, bringing their sorrow and passion to indigenous folk music.

I love the moment when the dance suddenly stops and the dancer walks off, as casually as though the light turns and he crosses the street. Snap. The mood is broken. That dramatic shift signifies the difference between the
duende
of the dance and the normal world where we reveal little of what we feel. We like the new phrases we’re learning—
toque de palmas
, clapping,
pitos
, finger snapping,
taconeo
, heel stamping. All contribute to the body as instrument.
Castañuelas
comes from
chestnuts
, and perhaps the first castanets were improvised from two dried ones. Ed buys the CD to take home, perhaps to listen to while we cook, so far away from this courtyard open to the stars. “Do you feel that by experiencing flamenco, another room in your mind has opened?” I ask.

“I had a pretty stereotyped impression before. Now we’ll be listening to the music, recalling the faces, the passion. Rip-roaring passion.”

“Good flamenco tours are sellouts all over the world. Did you know that there are three hundred flamenco schools in Japan? Japan! The center of decorum! What explains the rise in popularity of flamenco, here and everywhere?”

“A yearning. This art touches a yearning we have. The unspoken longings way inside the heart,” Ed says.

What man can travel this long road and not fill up his soul with crazy arabesques?

The
day arrives when we are to leave, though we are not going far. We will go to a hacienda in the country where they raise bulls and horses. Sevilla falls away quickly, and we are buzzing in our small rented car toward the
vega
, the plain. Although I never thought so with Las Vegas, the word carries a charge.
Vega
—we begin to experience it as we drive out of Sevilla and the big sky opens over the slightly rolling fields, some with olive trees, some planted with crops, some left to the bulls. My imagined house in Sevilla quickly reabsorbs into a fantasy of a country hacienda, a
cortijo
. We pass them every few miles, stark white, walled, big trees, paradises on their own out in the country.

We check into the Cortijo El Esparragal, three thousand hectares forming a private world with the courtyard as the center of it. A cloister furnished with carved wooden chairs and benches surrounds the arched courtyard with fountain and potted plants. The walls are covered in bull heads and bridles, as in a Florida restaurant where sailfish and marlin hang above the tables. One bull has a bloody tongue and a sword in his back. This is so like the gory religious imagery I found shocking in the Prado. Out in the fields horses play, running from one fence to the opposite. Your heart has to somersault when you see these handsome animals run, turn with a neigh, and race full tilt in the other direction.

We are the only guests, and it’s odd—we are in someone’s house. All of the family, the girl at the reception tells us, live in Madrid. We settle into our room on a small leafy courtyard. Ed cracks the window so the murmur of the fountain pours in the window. He’s soon out the door. The lure of the bull pasture, the long dirt roads to drive in silence, the big shady cork trees, the fragrance of ripe oranges, the private chapel, the miniature bullring—the intact
world
of this hacienda immediately seems compelling to us. I would like a bell tower on my house, and miles of bougainvillea blazing back at the sun. I would like one of these white horses. I would like to paint blue borders and evil eye circles on my house. The stark white haciendas, scattered through the countryside at greater distances than the Tuscan farmhouses, resemble Texas ranches—but of course, those Lazy X ranches descended from the Spanish, as did the tradition of horsemanship.

Having previously traveled only to Barcelona and Majorca in Spain, I did not know how close visually Mexico is to Spain. I attributed characteristics of Mexico to the indigenous population as much as to Spain until we drive through tiny Andalucían towns with their forlorn, weedy parks, their bodegas painted with waist-high bands of aqua or ochre, with human-sized Coca-Cola bottles out front, their dry fountains, and the open doorways where people sit knitting, smoking, or shelling beans. Shops as small as vending machines overflow with ladders, oranges, shoes, paint—all jumbled together. Often in Mexico I have thought,
Where is everybody?
I remember this just as Ed says, “It’s quiet as the day after Judgment Day.” One lone woman with a bundle of wash poised on her hip sways down the cracked sidewalk. We could be in the Sierra Nevada villages outside San Miguel. But Ed says, “This is limbo. Or this is where you come for a
grande
dose of
duende
.”

For
lunch, we’re alone in the family dining room, presided over by a portrait of the señora who must have decorated these rooms. She’s austere in a modest ballgown, no jewelry except for a thin bracelet. Her hair is cropped, her gaze direct, and she is not smiling. She merely looks in charge of her destiny, way back in the 1940s when she sat for this portrait. She chose to hang the walls of her living room with paintings of matadors and famous bulls, probably from this hacienda. Gracious white-gloved women bring us lunch. We don’t order; they just bring on the roast pork and platters of potatoes and vegetables. “Are we the only guests?” we ask.

“
Sí
, but the family arrives this afternoon. You see, in this period we are closed.” We contemplate this odd reply while we eat. Our reservation must have been a mistake.

Instead of siesta, we settle by the fire with a tiny glass of sherry and read, glancing up at the looming bulls and elegant matadors who have been at home here for so long. When the light drizzle stops, we emerge into the washed afternoon. On our walk, we find wild asparagus, violets, and irises. We startle a jackrabbit in the olive grove, and a troop of seven wild boars startles us. They are so comical looking and seem to take themselves so seriously.

When we come into the living room at the dinner hour, the family has arrived. They are the early middle-aged daughters and sons of the woman in the portrait, I assume, with their various spouses. No children. They look exactly the way I imagined aristocratic Spaniards in the country would look. They must have been outfitted since infancy in those fancy riding stores in Sevilla with the flat hats, shawls, fine gloves, tooled saddles, and chaps cut in patterns like paper doilies. They sip sherry and talk quietly. Tweed, leather, boots, and big hair. Any one of them certainly could gallop across plains,
Bolero
or not. Not one of them could dance flamenco. They nod to us but say nothing. They’re intent on themselves; perhaps they have not been together in a while. On all the tables, framed photographs of them as children and of their ancestors stand guard. We’re the interlopers, content to observe. We sink into a sofa and begin talking about the next few days. The family moves into the dining room, where a long table under the eyes of the señora is set with candles and silver. In a few minutes one of the white-gloved maids comes to get us for dinner. We’re shown the way, passing the seated family, and not one of them smiles or looks at us. “That would never happen in Italy,” I say to Ed. We’re relieved to be taken to a smaller, private dining room, where we dine happily on soup, venison stew, and orange cake.

At breakfast they’re nowhere in sight. We’re served tortilla-sized pastries wrapped in waxed paper, stamped in red with the name Ines Rosales from nearby Castilleja de la Cuesta. She has made this from wheat, olive oil, essence of anise, and other ingredients the
Oxford Spanish Dictionary
did not see fit to include:
matalahúga
and
ajonjolí
, which I think means “sesame.” Nice words to say aloud. The thick coffee (“undrinkable,” Ed says) with the aromatic pastry takes me with a Proustian jolt back to Majorca, where my friends Susan and Shera and I rented a house one summer and walked all over the island, with the sea wind stirring the perfumes of shrubs along the coast.

Walking all over Sevilla gave us a sense of intimacy with the city; driving in Andalucía gives us a broader sense of place and of how the larger landscape psychologically imprints those who live here.
Vega
—the wide sky, the home, home on the range, the big sun slipping under the horizon, pulling down a profound darkness. We’ve found local people cordial but aloof. Is it the xenophobic fear of the stranger on horseback, or a remnant of Franco’s cramped society? Vast, vast, endless olive groves carpeted with yellow oxalis puzzle Ed. Where are the houses? The land rolls on, without a dot of human habitation, only those spirits, the majestic, twisted, and sparkling olive trees. Even in January workers are beating the limbs, shaking the trunks with machines, and gathering the fallen drupes from the nets. In the first village we stop to look at Moorish walls and a herd of goats crossing a bridge. The owner of a dusty gift shop tells us that workers commute to the groves and always have. Unlike the Italian system, with a family share-cropping the amount of land they can handle, these seemingly infinite groves are owned by absent landlords but are managed and worked by local teams. Although Spain produces excellent olive oil, much of its exported oil has suffered ruination from bad processing. I’ve opened some wretched bottles, even when I rented the house on Majorca—thin and tainted with harsh industrial aftertastes. Fine artisan oils exist, if you search. I wish they didn’t beat the trees, but if you own a million, something other than the slow human hand will have to get those olives to the mill.

The
open road—almond and plum blossoms are beginning to shake, rattle, and roll. We’re heading to Italica, a Roman city settled near the Guadalquiver when the river’s course flowed nearer. Hadrian and Trajan were born here. Again, the geography unfolds naturally. A quick orientation, and it is easy to visualize the town flourishing in the second century
B.C.
on streets wider than Sevilla’s. Though only mosaic floors and foundations remain, the reconstructed city rises easily in the imagination, much more so than at all the other hundreds of archaeological sites I’ve tramped across. We have Italica almost to ourselves, that bonus of travelling in January. The mosaics, mostly in black and white marble, lie intact. Why do we like to walk ancient streets? Curiosity, contemplation, for the surprise of history. These Romans paved their floors with tromp l’oeil squares that become stars. I’m ahead of Ed and call back, “Here’s Medusa surrounded by geometric swastikas.”

“Too bad Hitler ruined that design forever. Here’s a scene for you—The House of the Birds.” Bordered squares divide the floor. Each of the thirty-two depicts a different bird. We find Greek key borders, Bacchus, astrological figures, the days of the week mosaic, then the House of Neptune with its reminder of the town’s founder, Publius Cornelius Scipio. He’s better known to us as Scipio Africanus for his sojourns in Africa, where he defeated Hannibal’s Carthaginians and caused Spain to be awarded to the Romans.

Italica, the first Roman town in Iberia, was settled for Scipio’s wounded Italian soldiers. There must have been mosaicists among them who fought in the African campaigns. Almost cartoonish squat black warriors with big lips climb palms, ride astride alligators, stand behind shields, and arch, poised to throw arrows. Exotic cranes and ibises intermingle with the border design. In the inside field, fish, seahorses, and mythological sea creatures cavort. The overall effect is muscular, ribald—a pygmy is poked in the rear by a heron, another opens a crocodile’s mouth. Perhaps an oral epic was translated into mosaic, if only we could read it.

A workman mops the mosaic floor of one house open to the four winds. He swishes soapy water, then throws down a bucket of clear water. How many thousands of times has someone mopped these sturdy floors! Their makers set each marble chip on a layer of plaster, on top of a layer of lime and earthenware fragments, on top of a layer of lime and stone, on top of a pebble layer. The word
mosaic
comes from the Greek meaning “a patient work worthy of the muses.” The first mosaics must have been bits of stone stuck into clay walls to keep them up, to keep them from dripping, to provide a bit of sparkle to a drab room. Then came the incorporation of pieces of lapis lazuli, jasper, onyx, marble, travertine, malachite—pretty colors for making designs and displaying the prosperity of a family. Who can know which is older, rug weaving or mosaics? The designs in mosaics often recall rug patterns and vice versa. As the workman washes, the colors of the stones shine. We take in the blue—fresh as when it was set. So it was always thus; after rain in the uncovered atrium, the family observed how gorgeous their courtyard floor looked when wet.

We
have spent the past few hacienda days driving around to small towns where donkeys prove useful. We ate in workers’ cafés, searched out Arab doorways on Christian church grounds, walked in back streets where flowered sheets and orange towels flapped in the breeze and dogs didn’t open an eye when we passed. The street life in Carmona reminded me of Cortona’s. Babies were admired in the plaza, where boys played ball and clumps of people stood visiting in the sun. A large passing truck stopped, and the driver leaned out to pick a few oranges, then drove on. Like Cortona and all other Tuscan towns, these Andalucían towns have their masterpieces and mysteries. Carmona has many. Sitting in the winter sun, we ordered
tortillitas de bacalao
, cod fritters, and oven-roasted vegetables, and a plate of cheeses as we watched little girls playing with their dolls on a park bench. The cheeses were addictive. We’d known
manchego
in California, though in Spain the taste is saltier, creamier, with a barnyard overtone. The sides are imprinted with a pattern from the grass mold where they’re aged. I’m a fan of blue cheeses and have ordered
cabrales
several times. A blend of ewe, goat, and cow milk, the strong flavors are mellowed by the accompanying little dish of quince paste.