by Joanna Glen
The sun was the brightest yellow; the geranium petals were vivid red; the sky and the river dazzled blue; and gold shone from the portal of the mihrab, made with 1600 kilograms of glistening mosaic cubes.
The city’s colours shimmered into my mind as I wrote All My Mothers.
Spring unfolded like a love affair, a whirl of green and orange and white, fragrant with blossom and Spanish cologne (like Eva’s not-father wore), the citrus smell blowing through the streets and still today reaching me in dreams, and in the arrivals lounge at Seville airport, where one day I will go again. I will, I will.
And through the streets we skipped, love-struck with life, to cellar-bars, and out for tapas, and to dance bad flamenco.
And through the streets came nuns in pairs, arm in arm, waiting in the recesses of my mind to become Sister María Soledad and Sister Ana, in grey veils and big sandals.
And through the streets came pale priests, whose trousers stuck out beneath their long black robes, perhaps Eva’s father. One day. One day he’ll come. I just know it.
And through the streets came the Mili boys because Spain still required a year of national service from her sons (not daughters) – I remember them, climbing over their barrack walls after lights-out.
Young, olive-skinned, blue-uniformed, black-booted.
In the novel, they asked Carrie out.
They took Drusilla and me to the Seville feria.
As I write, their names miraculously come back to me across the years.
Paco (the funny one) and Miguel (the sidekick), both full of life and delight, a wonderful retort to the city’s hissers.
I hear Paco on the train, telling us over and over, ‘Sevilla es una maravilla.’
Seville is, by the way, a marvel, but my heart was lost to Córdoba.
Because you love a place the more you know it.
Paco and Miguel were young and they were laughing, and we were young and we were laughing, and I drank too much sherry, and I accidentally went to the men’s toilets, but I didn’t notice.
And there was Eva drinking too much at the Córdoba feria. But I didn’t let her go to the men’s toilets in the end because she’d spotted Barnaby dancing with Naomi, and she was falling out of love with Michael and getting a terrible stomach ache, and I thought she had enough on her plate for one evening.
And talking of plates: Spanish omelette, tortilla, soft with fried onions and potato; bocadillos stuffed with jamón serrano; huge tomatoes, good enough to eat alone with salt and olive oil; and gazpacho, ice cold soup; and plates of fried fish – pescaíto frito – in the centre of the table to be shared, before sharing was imaginable in England where we kept our plates to ourselves.
All washed down with a glass of sherry.
I was twenty years old, and doomed to like sherry. And everyone would laugh at me forever in England where nobody knows that it’s delicious, that it’s fino, and manzanilla, and amontillado, and palo cortado, and oloroso.
It’s stored in barrels under the streets of Córdoba, where you can visit it and be cool, and we were learning to jump from shadow to shadow, to stop and chat only in the shelter of trees.
I sat for a whole afternoon under a tree, as Eva did when she first arrived, watching a rider beneath a palm, on a dapple-grey horse, fine-tuning his dressage on the spot, and I didn’t move because it was siesta time and you were supposed to be lazy, and the shops were closed until six o’clock, and there was nothing to do but stare and sweat.
The old Royal Stables (where Eva and Carrie went to a horse show) stand behind the Alcázar, which was built on the site of the residence of Abd al-Rahman I, the seat of power of Moorish Al-Andalus, ruined as the caliphate collapsed and rebuilt as a palace for the Christian monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, architects of the Inquisition – a slap in the face to the ideals of the Convivencia.
The gardens, added later, are filled with cypress, orange and lemon trees, and flower-lined pools with fountains which wet your legs if you can get near enough without being shooed away by guards.
By the ninth century, it is said that the city was known as the meadow of murmuring waters.
Along the river, eleven water-wheels turned – only one, the Albolafia, remaining, and now restored.
My second-favourite Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, wrote a poem called La Noria, in which the sound of the water-wheel’s circling sorrow is divinely sweetened by music of the water dreaming.
I thought of that when I passed by.
Life’s sweet sorrow.
The water dreaming.
I loved the thought of water dreaming.
I dreamt of being a writer.
Near the water wheel, the water had dreamt little islands, leafy with tamarisk and poplar and eucalyptus, stalked by bittern, egret and heron.
Eva saw these on her love-struck walk with Barnaby.
I too was in love.
With neither Paco nor Miguel, but with Spain – the taste of it, the smell of it, the sound of it, the feel of it on my skin as I walked along the banks of the River Guadalquivir.
Here I place the fictional holm-oak, shedding its acorns out of season, little symbols of the beginnings of love between Eva and Yosef, which grows into a tree out of our sight.
Perhaps they’re walking now through the city, visiting the tiny synagogue and remembering Bridget and Blue Mother, chancing upon the remains of the tenth-century Moorish hammam – there were once hundreds of these public baths throughout the city, where men bathed in the morning, and women in the afternoon, a towel hung outside to denote the change of gender!
Michael took Eva to the reconstructed hammam, the fake one, near Plaza del Potro. It was not their happiest moment, and their love was not to be reconstructed.
Plaza del Potro is a favourite little square of mine, housing the flamenco museum – Posada del Potro – whose courtyard partially inspired the courtyard of Eva’s home and hotel, La Convivencia, in All My Mothers. When I last visited, there was an old wooden cart wheel leaning against the wall.
Plenty of pots dripping flowers.
No angel.
I put San Rafael in the courtyard of La Convivencia.
Because he’s everywhere in the city, guarding us carefully from the Roman bridge which leads to the other side of the river, where we were advised not to go when I was studying there.
No, it was dangerous, we were told.
Peligroso.
It belonged to the gitanos.
There they danced flamenco – the sort that wasn’t for tourists.
We looked across and it was dark and alluring.
‘People get stabbed,’ we were told. ‘Stay this side.’
This scene, the gitano community flamenco-dancing among rubbish bins and old sofas, finds its way into my first novel, The Other Half of Augusta Hope.
So of course, having been told not to go, we all went, and told tales of it, exaggerating, all bravado and nonsense and too much wine – and nobody got stabbed.
Now it’s full of modern hotels with roof terraces, which got fashionable when they worked out that the tourists wanted sunburn, not shadows.
But don’t book a room there – go back over the bridge and under the Roman arch to the cool ferny courtyards of simple old hostales like the fictional Hostal Jardín, where you are close to the centre of things.
And I think we’re ready now for the centre.
I’ve been skirting around the edges, putting off telling you the biggest thing of all.
Because I save my best Christmas present until last.
Because I enjoy leaving love letters on the doormat and not opening them, when there used to be love letters.
I think this might be a love letter.
To Córdoba.
To the Mezquita.
I know I can’t do it justice.
Because it’s indescribable.
Because it’s my favourite building in the world.
Because no matter where you go, it’s always there, the cent
ral character of the city, its head raised above the other buildings, against the sky, the way to get your bearings, tell other people where you are.
Oh, the Mezquita.
Which wasn’t done up when I was there the way it is today.
Which hadn’t yet appeared on international travel itineraries the way it has today.
Which wasn’t crowded the way it is today.
Crowded now but mercifully not roped and corralled like the Alhambra in Granada where you are no longer allowed to stand alone and stroke the marble lions as I did back then, as I did on my honeymoon – no, you are herded in groups behind ropes.
Like you still aren’t at the Mezquita.
There it stood.
And there it stands.
Guarding the magic of its story, holding its silent witness.
So let’s go back in time.
First there stood a monastery dedicated to Saint Vincent in the sixth century.
Then a Visigothic church.
Then Abd al-Rahman I reached an agreement with the Visigoths, buying part of the church, so that the Muslims and Christians could worship side by side.
But they didn’t have enough space so the Visigoths sold him the whole lot, and the first mosque came into being.
Are you ready?
Close your eyes tight.
Now open them.
My first time and I was awe-struck.
The pillars, the pillars, the pillars, the pillars.
A stone forest of columns, where people appeared and disappeared, like ghosts of all the city’s pasts, or all its futures, come to visit.
In the original mosque, each aisle is separated by walls leaning on columns held by arches making endless mirrored arcades, the upper parts semi-circular, the lower, horseshoe-shaped, echoing the shape of date palms, brick and stone alternating in mesmerising red and white stripes. This isn’t just a Moorish design, but inspired by arched Roman aqueducts and Visigothic horseshoe arches, with old pieces of the original church of San Vicente recycled and remodelled into a glorious piecemeal patchwork, itself a symbol of a place that grew organically, layer upon layer, extended by Abd al-Rahman II, Al-Hakam II and Al-Mansur.
And these are the layers on which Eva found herself reflecting as she caught sight of the ghost of her dear friend Billy who ran through the orange tree courtyard in the body of a young boy with a tennis racquet.
And here’s the orange tree courtyard through which you enter the Mezquita, where there are four water spouts at the fountain, where we drank, thirstily, because we were sweltering and those were the carefree days when we didn’t worry about germs, and when (hard to believe now) we didn’t walk around carrying water bottles. Perhaps that’s why I fainted in the street on the way to class!
The courtyard is a wonderful brouhaha of coming and going, the lines of shade and lines of sun intimations of our own mortality and immortality, of death and life, the stones holding the history of two millennia of stories of people and religions and cultures.
That’s what I sensed as I walked the city’s streets, young and hopeful, inclining forwards towards my own dreams, but also backwards towards the dreams of medieval people who were perhaps not so very different from me, as I sat with my book of poetry (in the city of poets, Seneca born there in 4 BC and Lucan, in 39 AD), my glass of sangría and slice of tortilla resting on an old black barrel beneath the olive tree by the city walls, the tree another silent witness to the city’s past, and reconfigured as a place where God appeared to Sister Ana in All My Mothers.
Córdoba has regrown into an easy-going peaceful city, a minor provincial capital these days – a shadow of what it once was at the height of its medieval greatness, which didn’t last, because things don’t last.
By 1031, Al-Andalus had divided into taifas, fragmented mini-states, and there followed the decisive Christian victory at Las Navas de Toledo in 1212, and one by one the southern cities fell – Córdoba in 1236, Seville in 1248 and finally Granada in 1492.
A few years later, the cathedral was plonked at the centre of the Mezquita, a cathedral that could be beautiful somewhere else, but seems to trespass on the divine symmetry of the original stone forest.
The bishop who thought up the idea was opposed by the citizens, who were supported by the Town Council. With Church and Town Council in dispute, the Emperor, Charles I, was called to adjudicate.
Build, said Charles I, which meant destroy the centre of the mosque.
When he saw the finished cathedral, he famously said: ‘You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world.’
The Mezquita, much changed, still stands, unique in the world, now walled in where once all nineteen naves were open to the orange tree courtyard, allowing Eva to picture birds and butterflies darting between the pillars, like prayers on the air, prayers which echo across the centuries from the minaret of the Mezquita, the bell tower built by Abd al-Rahaman III in 957, remodelled and reinforced over the years, and topped by the angel, San Rafael.
And there is San Rafael again, by Puerta del Puente, precariously atop a very tall thin column, in a plaza where locals gather, where Eva stopped on her night-time mission to the homeless, and where, if memory serves me right, I had my first experience of the festival of Cruces.
First we saw a cluster of people, and more arriving. On moving closer, a towering cross appeared, about three metres high, made of roses and beside it, a makeshift drinks bar. People started to dance, and we joined in.
We left, and we came upon gathering after gathering, each little scene similar: a tall cross packed with flowers – red, white, sometimes blue and yellow – the same wooden drinks bar, the same dancing, the same tinny music.
You can get a Cruces map but we didn’t know that, and anyway, it’s preferable not to.
It’s always far better to stumble upon.
And Córdoba is the greatest city for stumbling upon.
Put your map in your pocket and wander.
The festival of Cruces begins with the Battle of the Flowers (a petal riot as Eva sees in Sister Ana’s photo) and the crosses are in position from the end of April to the beginning of May. I’ve been back many times. I go to enjoy the simple spontaneity of the thing, the anything-goes and anyone-comes.
In fact, this is a competition with forty neighbourhood associations vying for the prize for the best-decorated cross, the preparations taking place secretly for months beforehand. It’s all statuary and candles and tapas and guitar and sevillana dances and live music and flounced dresses and beating hearts and beating feet and twisting hips, loud until midnight, quieter until 2, turned down a touch to respect the neighbours, who seem all to be there, whether they’re eight or eighty-eight.
Once this festival is over, it’s time for Patios, another competitive festival where those glimpsed slivers I’d seen behind bars on my first foray into the old quarter are opened up in a great glory of trailing floribunda, the white walls packed – packed – with shimmering flowers, which hang from railings and under lamps, encircling pools and wells, burgeoning from stone pots beneath the chatter of birds, and oh the fragrance of it, and oh the beauty of it – I was blown away and I’m still blown away.
And we haven’t even got to the May feria where nobody sleeps day and night for a week and the city swells with tens of thousands of visitors for flamenco and fireworks and fair rides.
So the year is structured, one festival at a time, and this, I noticed from the beginning, gave a communal feel to life in the city. The streets were nearly always full, and packed for the daily paseo, a leisurely evening stroll, with drinks and tapas and greeting the neighbours.
When later, as a teacher, I arranged an exchange between my own students and a school in Andalusia, as we bussed the Spanish students in from Gatwick Airport on a rainy English evening, they kept asking, ‘Where is everyone?’ and, ‘Is this town uninhabited?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘Everyone’s insi
de their houses.’
But in Córdoba, we were never inside our houses, unless we were asleep, which we mainly weren’t.
Because we knew our time there was finite – and there was so much to do and love and drink and think and find and find out.
My favourite Spanish poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca, himself a son of Andalusia, catches life in images so true they hurt – and it was he who spoke of a thousand butterfly skeletons sleeping inside walls.
I think they’re still sleeping inside the hot stone walls of Córdoba, waiting to resurrect with a thousand untold secrets.
And I will keep going back.
To see if I can catch them.
Joanna Glen, April 2021
About the Author
Joanna Glen read Spanish at the University of London, and lost her heart to Andalusia whilst studying at the Faculty of Arts in Córdoba. She went on to become a teacher of English and Spanish, and a school principal.
Joanna’s debut novel, The Other Half of Augusta Hope, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. She and her husband live in Brighton.
Also by Joanna Glen
The Other Half of Augusta Hope
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