A Year in the World (9 page)

The morning seemed to melt seamlessly into an afternoon of exploring the old city. We happened upon the quintessentially Andalucían church of Santa María. Built on the ruins of a mosque, it retains a patio of orange trees, where ritual washing took place. On a column in this peaceful courtyard, we find inscribed a Visigoth calendar of holidays. Again and again these three cultural layers abide, abide.

I'm
sure we are not the first to sing “Help, help me Rhonda” as we drive into the fabled white town of Ronda, perched on either side of an impressive abyss. We check into the
parador
, one of the government’s chain of inns, usually in historic buildings. Our room lacks charm, but the location can’t be matched. Right out the balcony door I look down at the bridge over the canyon and all the small streets and white houses of the old town. The inn’s terrace overlooks the gorge and distant mountains. Ronda has all the makings of a bad painting—the whitewashed, geranium-laden, perched tiled-roof town against blue-gray mountains and green fields. The main streets are depressingly jammed with tourists up from the coast on day excursions. Some hefty specimens, scantily clothed, provide their own kind of scenery. Real spring must bring a nightmare of people who in the privacy of their own backyards should never wear shorts but go on tour with their rumps and hams in full view.

Off the main streets we yield to Ronda’s beauty. Lanes that once were goat paths wind up and up to quiet and serene residential neighborhoods. These are more appealing to me than
casas colgadas
, the hanging houses so named because they’re perched right on the lip of the 525-foot-deep canyon. I’m too insecure to live there. We stop for a lemonade and a look at maps and books. I’m struck, once again, by the strange flattening of a guidebook—town after town, and each one seemingly equal. But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your own secret images. The slow fall of a coin into the gorge with the sun catching the copper only for a moment, and the fall into nothing says more about a sense of place than three pages of restaurant and hotel descriptions, or dry summations of history that are so compressed they make you dizzy.

I’m tired in Ronda. We both want to retreat for a couple of days and spread out our novels and prop our feet on the low table, or nap, take notes, sip blood orange juice, and partake of the breakfast buffet that features local specialties such as
migas
, a basic country dish of spicy breadcrumbs, chorizo, and garlic, along with platters of fruit and hot
churros
. Breakfast is such a key to the culture. An Italian nipping an espresso, an American chowing down on cereal, eggs, and bacon, the Frenchman grabbing a croissant—breakfast speaks to all the rhythms of the other meals and to the rising and sleeping and working motions. This basic Spanish meal links to people who were heading for hard work and who made do with a bit of meat and leftover bread—whatever was at hand.

The paradors emphasize regional cuisine. So do many local restaurants. Last night we had white almond gazpacho, followed by kid chops and partridge stew. The tapas mania of Sevilla subsides in the country. Hearty food that hunters would like, and plenty of it, seems to be the approach.

The full moon rises out of a pink sky and dangles itself over the gorge—the biggest moon I have seen in my life. I feel the gravity of fullness. So low and enormous, this moon hanging above the canyon. It could plunge into the river below.
Moon
, my daughter’s second word. She was a one-year-old pointing to the sky, sensing space and spirit. We lean on the balcony watching the slow trajectory. The Spanish moon has
duende
.

To
Marbella and Puerto Banús, just to dip down to the coast. As we drive south, the countryside goes wilder—escarpments and waterfalls, and mountain goats scrambling from rock to rock. “Are they trapped?” I wonder. Peering down from impossible outcrops, they look puzzled as to how they got there.
Help, help me Rhonda
. Hawks transfix in the air over prey. In Italy, this motionless hovering is called Il Santo Spirito because the hawk resembles the holy spirit.

Through a pass, we see the coast and sea. Soon we’re zipping by odd developments that look as if they’d landed here by mistake. Wintering English and German tourists pack into these condo and apartment blocks. This is not the ruined western Costa del Sol. The Marbella area is merely overdeveloped, American style. “Are we in Fort Lauderdale?” Ed says. “Look at all that ersatz Tuscan-Mediterranean architecture.” But then we find Marbella’s lively outdoor cafés around the Plaza de los Naranjos, the nice shops with fine soaps and French sheets, a purely Arab balcony outfitted with a plaster Mary, and again the charm of the air blessed with the scent of orange blossoms. We pass several consignment shops whose windows are filled with Armani and Gucci and Jil Sander. People on vacation must change their minds about what they packed in their suitcases and unload their mistakes rather than take them home. Or maybe they opt to wear less in the lovely sun. In a fancy children’s shop, we buy a pair of hand-knitted booties for our Mister X.

Down the road at Puerto Banús, many of the international rich are idling away their January. The yacht harbor,
mamma mia
, is a many-splendored thing. The cool jangles of the rigging and the wavering reflections in the water always give me an adventurous rush, probably that old encoded human desire for quest, for pushing off and heading into the open sea. But these Argonauts seem tightly tethered to land. Boys in crisp shorts polish and buff, flemish ropes, and touch up minute scratches, while portly owners speak into cell phones on the deck. Two women totter in pastel pants and high-heeled sandals across a gangplank. The rings on their fingers are the size of ice cubes. They’re
laden
with jewelry. “We’re just seeing a stereotype,” I tell Ed. “Down below someone is reading Heidegger, and over there on the bow of
Stardust Destiny
, someone is writing a villanelle.”

“Dream on. He’s working a crossword puzzle, at best. Why tax yourself in this place?” Ferraris slowly cruise the street. We inspect the menus of the seafood restaurants lining the harbor and choose one where the crayfish, crab, and prawns thrash on ice and the fish look bright-eyed. Next to us a German woman orders a Tia Maria on ice after her lunch of grilled fish and white wine. She’s tan as a saddle, probably around seventy, with a magenta scarf wound around her neck and hair. Ed asks if she lives here, and yes, she bought a condominium five years ago and has joined book clubs and investment clubs but finds herself bored, hence the second Tia Maria, I assume, and besides the weather (seventy-five degrees today) is frigid but better than the iron-cold of Stuttgart. I fear retirement in places where the climate is the lure.

From
Ronda, via Antequera and Archidona, we make our way to Granada, city of García Lorca. Snow tops the surrounding mountains—a Xanadu setting. As we drive closer, we’re suddenly lost in dismal sprawl and dirty air. By the time we find our hotel near the Alhambra, we’ve gone quiet with disappointment. Granada, I’m not falling under your spell. Poetry, roses, nightingales, water gardens, Gypsies—no one’s fault but mine that I imagined a fabled city. Or perhaps it is the fault of the Nicaraguan on the lawn at Princeton, leafing through Lorca’s poems, stopping at “Ballad of the Three Rivers.” The book was worn leather (
cordovan
, I suddenly realize—from Córdoba).
Guadalquiver, high tower/and wind in the orange groves . . ./It carries olives and orange blossoms,/Andalucía, to your seas.
The breeze riffled the pages, tissue thin like an old Bible. Marienoelle, his little daughter, learned her first word that afternoon.
Agua
, she shrieked,
agua
, splashing in the plastic pool. I leaned against a tree, arms folded. From the lips of the Nicaraguan, I learned that Granada has “two rivers, eighty bell towers, four thousand watercourses, fifty fountains.” I lost a gold ring that belonged to my husband’s family, and I looked in the grass for hours. The poet said nothing about pollution headaches.

We arrive late. From the hotel window, the snowy mountain-ringed city below spreads into endless lights and the wavy slush of traffic noise. To compound our first impression, we face a greasy dinner in the small restaurant highly recommended by the hotel’s concierge. Ten o’clock, and the place is empty except for a silent couple having tapas at the bar. The owner nips at a large glass of wine on a sideboard each time he ducks into the room from the kitchen. He seems distraught when we ask for anything. “Must be the concierge’s brother,” Ed whispers. The uphill route back to the hotel takes us through ominous streets. Federico García Lorca, modest dreamer and son of water, I believe you said
Granada is made for music.
Please forgive me, but your Granada is a disaster. We’re relieved to see the hotel looming at the end of the street. Pseudo-Moorish, it is drafty, tiled, and old enough to have character. We chose it because Lorca gave his first poetry reading here. His guitar accompanist was Andrés Segovia. Two young men are getting out of a car. Federico and Andrés? Striding into the lobby, young, full of ideals?

Ed goes upstairs for a bath, and I order a sherry on the glassed-in terrace. The stars are fiery. Hey Federico, I expected horses, moon, jasmine,
duende
, an almond branch against the sky. Doesn’t the Arab saying
Paradise is that part of the heavens that is above Granada
have any truth to it? I don’t really like sherry, Federico. I’m not even thinking yet of the Alhambra just above us, how that massive presence must have seeped into your brain, must seep into the very canaliculi of every inhabitant of Granada. This nice
fino
—such a warm color—reminds me of my in-laws from my first marriage. Pouring from gallon jugs of cheap sherry into tiny crystal glasses, they tippled from noon on. My husband and I used to count the empties on the back porch and wonder if they were alcoholics. But sitting on a balcony in Granada, that dreary, bleary-eyed old father is the last thing I want to think about, smoking in his chair in the high-ceilinged room, clearing his throat, a weary figure everyone stepped around and tried desperately to glorify or at least explain. I later learned of his sick and evil streak, something I must have known by instinct as a bride. I always shuddered and turned my face away from any welcome or goodbye embrace. Taste is also memory. Maybe he’s why sherry burns my mouth with a back taste of medicine and mould.

Better to think of that stellar being, the poet, polar opposite of the downward-dragging former father-in-law. Lorca’s meteoric trajectory through life was short—only thirty-nine years. He lived with a powerful exuberance that deserves a lift of the glass anytime. Everything he touched ignited with his creativity. Besides his poetry and plays and lectures, he started a travelling troupe of actors to take drama into the countryside where people did not see plays. He studied flamenco guitar with Gypsies and loved folk music, riddles, and songs. He painted, made puppets, wrote extraordinary letters. He was legendary at the piano, singing with friends until all hours. With other musicians, he organized a local conference in 1922 on
cante jonde
, deep song. “The Gypsy
siguiriya
[a type of deep song] begins with a terrifying outcry,” he said in his lecture:

a scream that divides the landscape into two perfect hemispheres. It is the cry of dead generations, a sharp-edged elegy for lost centuries, the passionate evocation of love under other moons and other winds. Then the melodic phrase gradually reveals the mystery of tones and sets off the jewel-stone sob, a musical tear shed in the river of the voice. No Andalucían hears that cry without a shudder of emotion, nor can other regional songs compare to it in poetic grandeur, and seldom, very seldom, does the human spirit succeed in shaping works of art of such naturalness.

At that conference, local artists awakened to their heritage. Lorca was the brightest bloom of Granada’s promise. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda remembered him as “an effervescent child, the young channel of a powerful river. He squandered his imagination, he spoke with enlightenment . . . He cracked walls with his laughter, he improvised the impossible, and in his hands a prank became a work of art. I have never seen such magnetism and such constructiveness in a human being.” I would love to have had him as a close friend. I feel a sharp sting of loss. Wondrous that you can miss someone who died before you were born.
Buenas noches
, Federico. I will try to find
your
Granada.

Fourteen
ninety-two resonates in Granada for reasons other than Columbus’s New World discovery. That same year this last major city of the Nasrid Arab rulers fell to the forces of our old friends Isabella and Fernando. Prior to their victory, during the 250-year reign of the Nasrids, the fabulous fortress, the Alhambra, symbolized the refinement, play, and range of Moorish art. When Fernando and Isabella took over the keys to the Alhambra, they walked up the hill to claim their new residence, dressed, I’m astounded to read, in Arab clothing. They moved in, these reconquerors, and did their damage to the complex. But they were profoundly acclimated to Moorish design and oddly enough (to the traveller), they were
at home
with the Arab lifestyle.

We’re up early—this is the most-visited tourist attraction in the world. We are lucky—few people are here yet—and no tour buses. Only a black cat welcomes us, a reincarnation of our cat, Sister, who lived in feline glory for eighteen years. Here she is, Sister the Moor; she was never put to sleep by a vet named Dr. Blood, never carried away wrapped in a monogrammed green towel I’d had since college.

As we learn about the Alhambra and gardens, what fascinates me most is how art was so closely connected to living. Through the decorative—interior design and landscape design—the entire panoply of Moorish art is displayed. The complex, added on to and improved over two centuries, began with al-Sabikah, a citadel, and eventually included stables, barracks, servants’ quarters, and administrative apartments. The exquisite jewel remains the Nasrids’ royal palace, their courtyards, baths, and enchanted rooms, along with their gardens, which extend to the Generalife (meaning “the architect’s paradise”), their second home (probably bought from the architect) nearby. The Alhambra’s gardens recalled the legendary gardens of Damascus. We walk, as they lived, with the sound of water, soothing to us and to the ears of desert people. Green, green—the lush trees and damask roses must have soothed the Nasrids. The intricate stucco carved ceilings, the Mudéjar-tiled walls with epigraphs calligraphed on borders, the horseshoe-arched
mihrabs
, the gold-filigreed walls of complex vegetal and geometric patterns—even with all the splendor, the rooms maintain a human scale. A few rugs, a pile of cushions, a brazier, and we’d be ready to rinse our hands in orange flower water, relax, and settle down for a feast of lamb tagine, stuffed eggplants and cabbages flavored with coriander and cinnamon, preserved lemons, chickpeas with saffron, and a pastry pie of pigeons. The bath, too, reveals an appreciation of life’s pleasures. A balcony for poets and musicians rests on top of the tiled soaking pool. The royals could bathe while listening to dulcet music drifting down. The arches, galleries, and entablatures that adorn many rooms are supported by columns. Are the rooms any larger than the grand Berber tents their nomadic ancestors pitched in the sand? Maybe the extensive use of columns comes from an inheritance of tent poles. The 124 columns supporting panels of fretted lattice in the Courtyard of the Lions reminded visitors of palm trees. The central fountain symbolized to them the oasis in the desert. What a marvel, that fountain. The twelve lions—associated with the zodiac—spout water into channels for all the garden. They have a history older than this courtyard. Their mysterious, smooth forms radiate from the flat basin where a jet of water rises in the middle. I’ve always liked the Latin
hortus conclusus
, “walled garden.” In the Old Testament Song of Songs, such a garden is associated with “my sister, my spouse.” Later associations of Mary and the walled garden resonated with the purity and beauty of the inviolate body. But earlier, the etymological root of
paradise
reveals the deeply metaphorical workings of the garden in the human psyche. The root of the word
paradise
means “walled garden.” The enclosed Islamic gardens profoundly influenced the western medieval gardens. The cruciform designs of the monasteries conveniently paralleled Christian iconography, but the design previously reflected the Islamic concept of paradise, with four rivers flowing out in the cardinal directions from a single source. “Four-chambered heart,” Ed muses. “Did they think of that, too?” How did we live so long without knowing what we’ve learned on this trip?