Herb led the way to the great church of Santa Maria, which had been the central synagogue before the Reconquista. When we visited El Greco’s house, I recalled Willie Maugham’s suggestion, in Don Fernando, that the Greek’s flamboyant superficiality was typical of, as they used to say, ‘queers’ (Herb’s term was ‘fruit’). I had no idea that Maugham was painting an incidental portrait of himself. Herb said he had never met anyone of my age so well read. Judy seemed happy that Herb had talkative company. She occupied herself with Linda, who had derived small pleasure (‘playzher’) from spending weeks in the little Simca, as they honoured Herb’s virtuous, demanding itinerary. He wore his father’s money modestly, but it dressed him with the presumption that he was entitled to the best. He had a three-dimensional camera, which he wielded assiduously. We broke our pot-holed ride south, through Aranjuez and along the wide, monotonous plain of La Mancha, by stopping overnight in Ubeda. The four-square, thick-walled Parador was an early Renaissance castle of unadorned brown stone.
The following morning, as Herb and I were loading the car while Judy was busy with Linda, we were approached by the son of the last private owner of the property. He had a round, heavy head, like a polished bean, and a front tooth missing. His suave English had the rueful cadences of those who had known cosmopolitan days. When Judy arrived, with the fractious Linda, he asked why they didn’t hire a muchacha to look after her. A local girl would work fifteen hours a day for between 150 and 300 pesetas (£2–£3) a month.
We had to stop at a level crossing on the Ubeda–Linares narrow-gauge railway while a train shunted back and forth several times. A throng assembled around the alien Simca. They smiled at Linda and offered us cigarettes (Celtas were only a few pesetas for twenty). The ragged children were often misshapen: skin eruptions, oozing ears, gummy or already divergent eyes. Others might have been Murillo angels. Dark eyes stared, enviously but without malice, at the plump American kid.
Judy Birdwood had recommended the Hotel de Cuatro Naciones at Córdoba. Herb rated it ‘minimal’ but its blue tiled floors and white walls seemed quite elegant to me. The city was an impacted monument to the centuries of the Convivencia when, under a tolerant caliph, the dominant Muslims lived on easy terms, some of the time at least, with both Christians and Jews, who occupied powerful positions in the city. Monotheistic Judaism made better sense to the Muslims than the Christian Trinity. The magnificent Mezquíta and its fate stood in unique witness to the city’s history.
I wrote in my notebook:
… there is a great Moorish gateway of tawny stone. Through it, a court of orange trees (naranjos) and a black-and-white pebbled path to the entrance of the Mezquíta … Inside, the ceiling and shell of the building are suddenly exalted. The double Moorish arches seem not to need their pillars. They fly up and support the roof with no effect of effort; like formal foliage, they rise apparently independent of the marble trunks below them. Arches stride away in all directions. The desecrated, roped-off Mihrab evokes more awe than any crucifix or statue. (In Toledo we saw an exhibition of Virgins; the only one of merit came from the Congo.)
The cathedral pillars – pink, white, mottled with black, quartz-like and marble – had been cannibalised, probably from a temple of Janus. In the centre, the ornate and gilded chapel of the Christian cathedral is a wilfully tactless intrusion. The reticence of the ruptured mosque comments, with stylish sarcasm, on the presumptuous rhetoric of Christianity.
You are always aware of the arrogance of the Church. I never met a polite priest. At Ubeda we were told that ‘the Reds’ destroyed many Christian ornaments. They were woefully unthorough. Of all that I have seen, only one ghastly piece of work achieved its effect: in Toledo Cathedral some Baroque artist plastered the pillars supporting the lantern and frescoed them with figures that thicken into three dimensions. Statues step up through the domed opening and climb into the pink heavens until they seem to stand on naked air. Concealed light from the lantern gives an impression of lurid infinity. It is perfectly appalling. Who could dream up anything in worse taste? But what showmanship!
Whatever the Reverend Harper Wood might have thought of my insolent sentiments, thanks to him I was seeing things in a way I never had before. Alone in my hotel bedroom, pen in hand, I was no one in particular, sure only that he was a writer.
In the starched streets of the ghetto, Maimonides’s house had been turned into a museum of tauromachy. The little synagogue where the great Rambam had prayed was clean and void of memories, a square, blanched, lifeless room; no black elders; no bewigged women looking down from the balcony; no light, no ark in the niche. The old guardian, who had but a single tooth, announced that it was a ‘Monumento Nacional. Antigua sinagoga Ebraica.’ He indicated where the Torah had been kept and how it was wrapped and I nodded as if to imply that what he was saying was familiar to me. Delusions of Sephardic origin prompted furtive aggression. I wrote in my notebook: ‘The Jews, we are still told, must learn to behave. Must they? How many people have we driven from their homes; burned, murdered, crucified? Before the walls of Jerusalem, Titus crucified seven thousand men who had defended their city. Eso no es lo peor, far from it.’ I cadged the phrase from the title of one of Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra.
Herb was a New York Democrat. He believed that the Rosenbergs were innocent. Certainly they had not deserved the death penalty. Greenglass, the chief witness against them, had everything to gain by saying whatever the FBI wanted. Even so, he said only that he had heard of a man called Julius who was some kind of a ‘leader’; the name Rosenberg was not mentioned. Did I know that Klaus Fuchs’s middle name was Julius? Surely he was the ‘Julius’ who was alleged to have memorised and passed on information about the mathematical formulae necessary for making an atomic bomb. Rosenberg had failed every mathematical grade in school.
Einstein and another physicist, Harold Urey of the University of Chicago, had said that it was inconceivable that such a man could remember abstruse information. The Supreme Court said that if the defence had been properly conducted, the case could, at one stage, have been thrown out; had it not been, they would have had grounds for allowing the appeal, but only if appropriate objections had been voiced during the trial. Even so, three Supreme Court justices dissented from the judgment, all Liberals. Herb maintained that the Rosenbergs would never have been convicted, on the evidence, by an impartial jury. America was on the way to Fascism: you had only to compare Judge Medina’s attitude to the trial of Communists to his conduct in the federal anti-trust case over which he presided at the same time.
Herb was neither loud nor heated. He had no intention of living anywhere except in the US. He was a keen advocate of the international style, all glass, steel and concrete of the kind celebrated in Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, which I made a note to read; and in due time I did, all four volumes. The name of Alvar Aalto sticks adhesively in the mind, the man to be if you wanted to come top in any index. I also remember Baron Horta, whom Giedion accused of betraying the modern movement by deciding that there can be too much steel, glass and concrete.
I asked Herb what he thought about the Willie McGee case. McGee was a Mississippi black man, sentenced to death for rape in 1945 and eventually electrocuted, after a series of appeals, in 1951. A number of famous people from William Faulkner to Albert Einstein pleaded with Harry Truman to reprieve or pardon him. Herb thought it likely that McGee was having an affair with the white woman, who accused him of rape, to avoid being called a nigger-lover, when rumours started to spread about them.
Linda cried and cried. We stopped for coffee on the way to Granada and ate the cakes we had bought in Sevilla. Herb crumpled the pasteleria’s cardboard box and left it on the table. As we were going, the waiter punched the box back into shape and took it into the café. By the time we reached the gardens of the Alhambra, all the rooms in the Parador San Francisco had been taken. A young American, in slick clothes, called Russell, advised that ‘the neatest of you’ go into the
Alhambra Palace Hotel and have them recommend somewhere within our means. Russell told us that Granada was ‘wonderful’, quite as if we might not have heard. He was figuring to stay till at least – I expected him to say the following year – ‘Monday’. He wrote travel pieces for Holiday magazine. Herb said, later, that he was a ‘snide Ivy League snob’.
We found rooms at the Pensión America, a hundred yards up from the entrance to the Alhambra. My bedroom window looked across the deep, steep valley to the Sacro Monte, where the gypsies lived. Since I was down to my last few £5 traveller’s cheques, I went to the Correos and sent a telegram to St John’s College asking for another tranche of money to be sent to the Banco Central. The following evening, the son of the padron took us, in a party of tourists, to see and hear some flamenco. The ‘Zambra’ took place, under unshaded electric bulbs, in a large cave lined with wicker-seated chairs. We sat down, awkward, and looked at the few gypsies already there. Two guitarists strummed listlessly. Our lame guide whispered that the dancing would probably be bad. At the back of the deep, whitewashed cave, you could see an old iron bedstead with a red cover. A tired tiered dress hung on a wardrobe.
A fat-armed gypsy with an elusive brassiere came and sat down, yellow flowers absurd in her towered hair. Others, older, wrinkled, with rounded noses and thin reddened lips, wore similar flowers. Six elderly gypsies, in washed-out costumes, began to dance. The routine might have been the sad opening chorus of ‘Why go to Granada?’ You felt like a visitor to a brothel; wishing you weren’t with people you knew, insufficiently excited to forget your embarrassment.
A young gypsy girl sat beside me, mouth heavily rouged, and clapped with petulant servility as a solo dancer replaced the sad sextet. The newcomer whirled, and nearly fell, and clicked her castanets, brows contracted. More gypsies arrived and more chairs were brought, and more. A new young girl, fourteen or fifteen, very slim, no bosom, darker than most, luminous black, accusing eyes, pride in her shaken, lustreless hair, thin fingers with crescents of whitened nail, stared unblinkingly over our heads, serving a different god. She snapped her fingers and the clapping resumed.
Perhaps her technique was bad, but there was no separating the dancer from the dance. Her young repertoire was instinct with proud resentment. Her heels spurned the red tiles as she jumped forward, skirt raised, rapping the rhythm with her heels, claps, cries. Suddenly she would stop; hands writhing in the silence, eyes frowning at them, dark and love-ready, flicking across the audience now, available for a moment and then, oh no; then secret, guarding the flame within. She bent back over the floor, red lips, white teeth, face knit yet reposed; beauty.
Then she was moving her hands again, arms so slowly moving, as she watched and watched them. Up again, shaking her shoulders, eyes narrowed and suspicious; more clapping, sharper, demanding. The cries of the onlookers more earnest now, the dancer’s hair tumbled over her nose, dark eyes, knit brows, red lips, heels rapping and rapping; head flung back, virgin eyes dark with knowing innocence; then the hair flung forward again: climax, stillness, applause. The god spent, all that was left was a shy girl who nodded to the company and went to sit down.
A girl of twelve, with broad flat feet and the wide-apart hazel eyes of a Velázquez princess, came in and danced, brows drawn in concentration, breastless chest arched, hair long and lank and brushed back. A young boy danced with her, almost a dwarf. The angular, haughty postures of his puny body, the slanting contempt in his little eyes left you uncomfortable at how perfectly he mimicked the big man he would never be. He beckoned to Linda and the little American girl seemed possessed; she writhed like a Bacchante, her eyes caught fire, legs twitched, hands straining to clap in a kind of sexual paroxysm.
An old man with a long nose, sad small eyes in a pale face, quavered some flamenco; he was said to be the most inspired of the singers, but his voice was past its best; when the singers are young, their voices are suitable, but they lack the wisdom. You can never hear a perfect flamenco singer.
I ended the account in my notebook with: ‘When the girl danced again, briefly, it was more calculated. You wanted to give her your heart, but she wanted only pesetas.’
XIV
AFTER A FEW days, the Oppenheims were ready to drive on to the next architectural landmark. They urged me to come with them, but each time I went down the hill to the Banco Central, I was greeted by a head-shaking clerk: there was still no sign of my money. I was not entirely sorry to be alone again. Herb and Judy had made things easy, for which I was grateful, but I had been drawn out of the anonymity with which I now resumed spying on the world. What I overheard seemed truer than anything said to me directly. A Welshman staying at the pensión with his teenage son snatched at the moscas that blackened the buffet tablecloth at breakfast. ‘Nothing like Spanish flies, boy,’ he said. I noted the leer. Why would a man say that, like that, to his son?
I went back to the Alhambra and, on the advice of Russell (he seemed more cogent because I did not like him), bought a five-day ticket that included the bonus of a visit to the gardens by moonlight. I took my Oxford Complete Shakespeare. The fountains were all dead. It was shadowy and cold. I read a few sonnets by what I could cadge of the moon’s own borrowed light and then went back to my narrow bed.
In the morning, I went again to the Banco Central and gave them my name ‘Raphael, Frederic’. There was still nothing. I went to the Capilla Real and tried to enjoy the unSpanish precision of the Dutch paintings that happened to hang there. I bought and pretended to enjoy Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. In the Court of the Lions, I overheard a guide explain that the Moorish recipe for covering the ceilings with that pendent plasterwork included white of egg, which rendered it proof against the weather. When the Christian conquerors tried to repeat it, in order to efface the original mouldings, with their Koranic citations, the added plaster fell off.
Among the tourists, I saw the couple who owned the hotel Mon Repos in Juan-les-Pins, where my parents stayed. I smiled and said, ‘Bonjour.’ They were not responsive. One afternoon, an Englishman whom Herb had befriended came in search of a fourth for bridge. His name was Murdoch; he was staying at the Hotel Washington Irving. When I told him that Linda and her parents had left, he said that they would have been wise to give her ‘a good hiding’. He had been at Cambridge and had served as a supply officer in the Far East. The Chindits kept asking for things he couldn’t provide. When the next war broke out he knew exactly what he was going to do: ‘I shall polish up my Morse and become a wireless officer on a small ship.’ The bridge game was not of a high standard. We did not play for money, but I happened to win every rubber. Murdoch and his friends looked at me as if my name might be Sandheim.
I trekked again to the Banco Central and was greeted again by a shake of the head. ‘Nada.’ I could not believe that St John’s College had let me down. It occurred to me to say, ‘Por favor, mire sobre effe. Frederic.’ The money was there. They had, unsurprisingly, taken Raphael to be my first name. After two weeks, unlike the last Moorish sultan, I left Granada without a sigh.
I took the bus to Algeciras and caught the morning ferry to Tangier. The enclave was still governed by an international consortium. Bourgeois timidity led me, past a red British pillar box by the harbour gate, to the Hotel Bristol in the European quarter. After lunch, I walked up to the casbah. A Moroccan boy, perhaps twelve years old, in a faded brown shirt and dirty trousers led me up a cobbled alley faced with blank walls to a cruciform café. Dark-stained doors opened onto three tiled rooms with black tables, few chairs. A man lay unconscious on a stone bench against the wall. Another Arab sat beside him, in a fez and brown djellaba (collar and tie underneath), a small violin upright on his knee. He sawed at it with no effort at tunefulness.
In a corner, by the unglassed window, a boy was smoking a long bamboo pipe with a tiny clay bowl. In the room across from us, unshaded electric light shone on Arabs sitting or reclining as they smoked pipes similar to the boy’s. On the sawdusty ground
in front of the bar, several glasses lay on their sides. The elderly landlord, in a soiled suit and yellow apron across pyjama-like trousers, brought me a tall glass of black coffee, another of tea for my companion, who told me that he did not work; he smoked kif all day to dispel the blues.
The boy informed me that marijuana in its dried state was pale green. You had to pull away the diamond-shaped leaves and remove the tiny yellow seeds. The stalks and seeds were too strong to smoke. The leaves had to be chopped finely, like parsley, and left to dry. The boy filled a new pipe and handed it to me. The bluish smoke tasted mild, not at all like Player’s No 3. When I had finished my bowlful, the boy indicated that I should blow down the cob. The dottle popped out onto the floor. The violinist looked alarmed when I was offered a second instalment: I should be careful, he said. The other Arab and the boy laughed. They smoked all day and look at them. The unconscious Arab rolled off his narrow bench and thumped on the floor, without waking.
The boy walked me back to the Hotel Bristol. He promised to come back at eight o’clock that night and take me on a tour of the brothels. He knew all the best places where the girls were clean and would do whatever I liked. Or did I prefer boys, like so many of the Europeans in Tangier? I suppose that I gave him some money, but I was already too sleepy to remember. I went upstairs in a leaden haze and fell on the bed. I woke at eight o’clock the following morning, after a dreamless fifteen-hour sleep. I never did go to the brothels. I arranged to leave my big suitcase at the Bristol before I caught the train to Fez.
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