As much as on the plain as on the hills, there are to be found, albeit invisible on account of the trees, so many little Moorish houses scattered here and there, that if they were brought together they would form a city equal in extent [to Granada]. And even though the majority are so small, they all have their waters, their roses, musk rose and myrtles, and a complete refinement …
All this, from a sophisticated Italian accustomed to the splendor of Venice, the poetry of Pindar, the prose of Cicero, and the countryside of Northern Italy. It is just these beautiful houses, descendants of the munyas that ringed Córdoba, that are the first in Granada to carry the name of carmen. Our carmen, and all the carmenes in the Albayzín, have as their ancestors these refuges of knowledgeable beauty.
Navagiero’s account is confirmed from more than one source, including that of Hieronymous Munzer, a German who traveled through Granada about the same time:
Outside the city, in the Vega, there are large orchards and plantations irrigated with the water of canals led off the two rivers [the Darro and the Genil], which also operate many flour mills; so that everywhere Granada abounds in water from rivers or from springs. From the houses the view is a happy and delightful one at all seasons of the year. If one looks toward the Vega, one sees so many plantations in cool spots and so many settlements …
The adventures of the carmen were not over. During the time of real prosperity and power in Granada, from 1002 to 1492, the Albayzín came to hold so many houses that its population was over three times what it is today. The wealthy reserved for themselves the few spaces large enough to permit a garden to grow as part of the life of a house. How did the carmen, a house in the country with an enclosed garden and enough space for food crops, come to be imported into the Albayzín itself?
To understand this simple house with a garden, we had to study our own neighborhood. This we ardently wanted to do, as we settled into the pleasures of living in the Albayzín. Our garden, with fresh mountain water and hot summers, gave us a soft extended fireworks of flowering trees, and the children tracked the petals through the house. We began to cook with everything we grew. We had white figs in summer, which we ate off the tree for dessert, or baked in little galettes with brown sugar and cream. In the fall, we picked the pomegranates as they ripened and made pomegranate juice, or added the seeds to salads, or used them in a pomegranate tagine. The persimmons, which left to themselves fell like neon bombs to coat the unwary in persimmon jam, we harvested gingerly. We used them for luscious breakfasts or dessert, or baked them into moist cakes for Gabriella’s school. The blossoms of the lemon tree gave everyone an uplift of pleasure, and we cured the lemons with salt and cinnamon, cloves and coriander, and then used them promiscuously in our cooking of Moroccan dishes. The grapes we left as an offering to the birds.
In November, we harvested and cured the hundreds of olives from our lone tree; and even in January, we were harvesting oranges and drinking their juice, preserved in the cold, in midwinter.
Beneath the fruit trees, Lucy planted more roses, and borders of lavender and santolina, myrtle and sage, thyme and rosemary, violets and iris. The jasmine and passion flower flourished near the pilar. On the other side of the garden, a honeysuckle rose up the side of the house headed for the railing of the torreón. And in so small a space, there was still room for tomatoes, arugula, and mint. The fountains ran through the hot days and warm nights. In any room of the house, we could hear the sound of water. At night, the down-canyon breeze brought the fragrance of the flowers and the blessing of cool mountain air into the bedrooms.
Every morning, when little Gabriella would awaken, she would come on hands and knees up the narrow, curving stairs into the torreón. I would gather her in my arms, and we would go down to the trees to stand in the light together and greet each vine and tree by name, and wish them their fine day in the sun. She would point and chortle and look around wide-eyed. Among so many memories of our first months there, this comes back to me often, this standing in the morning light of the garden with my daughter in my arms.
We wanted to understand the Albayzín, just because we wanted to know whom we had to thank for all this.
Where Walking Is Like Flying
ONE SUMMER MORNING, we walked out our dark thick door into the slanting sunlight. On our narrow street, along the base of the high white wall of our neighbor’s carmen, we found five soft pink mounds. It took us a moment to see that each one was composed entirely of rose petals.
All night, in the warm breeze, the rose hedges of our neighbor had showered the street with petals. And in the morning, the famously handsome street-sweeper, Salvador, had gathered and arrayed the petals with his nicety of judgment into symmetrical mounds. They glowed against the white walls of our street.
As we walked through the neighborhood, hardly a day would pass without some such event. Call them blooms of another sort—the flowers of idiosyncrasy.
GABRIELLA’S SCHOOL WAS at the top of the Albayzín, so we had the chance to amble together through the barrio, hand in hand, day after day. Come with us.
As Gabriella had her school, the joyful Arlequin, the barrio itself became our school. We, too, looked forward to leaving the house to explore the whole neighborhood, passing from sunlight to shadow and back again, as we walked along the narrow streets full of flowers.
Our carmen was not far from the Darro River, which runs along the southerly edge of the neighborhood. Walking north from the Darro, that is, going uphill through the Albayzín, if you would climb with us, you will rise about two hundred twenty feet and cover just over a half-mile to the top and northernmost point of the barrio, marked by the church of Saint Christopher. Going from west to east, that is, from Calle Elvira to the beginnings of the gypsy barrio, the Sacromonte, the distance is just three-quarters of a mile. In this small space, ten thousand people live.
As we go together through these streets, one thing is certain: we will get lost, and we will be glad.
The street pattern shows its medieval origin: narrow cobbled lanes, perfect for two people walking together. These pathways come together in whimsy, branching here into a stairway, swooping there round a corner, darting off sideways in shadow, only to open into a plaza with trees and fountains and benches. Walking around, at first you muse, then you are amused. To make sense of it, you must surrender wholly to the playful design. Rather than straight lines in a grid, we have here a puzzle, a subtlety, a crazy quilt and playground of streets, formed by a labor of centuries of the people of the Albayzín. Not only are the streets narrow and eccentric, but the walls reject the plumb line. It’s as if the whole barrio is on tilt—straight lines and right angles have been banished. Crookedness is the rule. Long garden walls lean into the streets or proceed in meandering waves along a lane. Inside the houses, everything is equally cattywampus. When we installed bookshelves in our house, the carpenter had to cut a subtle set of curves into the wood to fit the undulating plaster of the wall behind. Furniture we set down along a wall in a bedroom leaned comically forward, as though about to leap onto the mattress. And one of Gabriella’s soccer balls, placed anywhere on a floor, rolled off by itself, as though booted by a phantom.
We came to love this swerve and tilt of things. Rather than clear lines of conceptual order, this was a neighborhood full of buildings that showed by their worn and worked surfaces their centuries of usefulness to life.
Most of the houses are white, often two stories with an occasional tower rising to a third story, for a lookout, a workroom, a trysting place. In some houses, windows open onto the street, and on the second story the house walls are studded with black iron balconies whose high doors can be thrown open to the sun and air. If the house is a carmen, then walls without windows enclose a secret garden, which shows above the wall some of the thriving within: palm trees, junipers, persimmon trees, a grape arbor, sunflowers, orange and lemon trees. From these gardens, vines and flowers clamber over the walls and arc down toward the street: roses, pink trumpet
flowers, ivy, plumbago, white and gold-leaved jasmine, bougainvillea. At any time walking in the Albayzín, you may turn a corner and find a full current of flowers spilling toward you. Sometimes, with the bougainvillea, more than a current—an avalanche of flowers.
Our street, at its widest point, is about seven feet—just wide enough for Lucy and me to walk with our little daughter toddling between us. Many streets are more narrow, with bizarre angles, zigzags, and high, haggard walls that shadow the street even in midsummer. And some streets, known by a Spanish word—adarve—lead nowhere. You walk down one such lane, and it may end abruptly in a wooden door so worn you begin to think in geological time. The neighbors will say they believe it is used, but no one has ever been seen going in or out. My theory is that the doors at the end of adarves open into the tunnels in space and time that physicists tell us about, and so lead us to the past or future, or even to other interesting and habitable planets. Advancing this theory over brandy in nearby cafés, I received knowing looks.
Be that as it may, on the streets of the Albayzín, we have been lost, and early in our wanderings we noted the key principle: the barrio was not made for automobiles to live well. It was made for people to live well. There are only two roads that pass east to west through the Albayzín; they are used principally for public transport, and on one of them is located the single large garage for private cars. Going north to south, the only roads run at the far edges of the barrio. What difference does all this make in life?
It’s a godsend. Gabriella and her legion of friends (and their parents with them) could rumpus in the little streets, invent stories, play soccer, sing to the trees, and in general dash around unforgettably, yet every parent is easy in the flesh. No truck is going to crush the children. Not only are kids safe, but the neighborhood is quiet, with no spewing and hacking of internal combustion engines. But even more than all that, something obvious and splendid: none of your neighbors are walking out to find their cars and go off to their lives. They are all walking out, straight into their lives. So all of us who live here run into one another, often. What begins with salutations turns easily to stories, to curiosities and exclamations, all of it leading to a friendship that has our children playing at each other’s houses. This happened again and again in the Albayzín. It happens because our neighbors have sweet natures, and it happens because the barrio itself, the very design of it, has a genius, an irrepressible, gift-giving life.
Take, for example, Plaza Larga, in the upper Albayzín. We passed through it on the way to school and always paused to take in the spirits of the place. You walk into the plaza through an arched gate in a fortress wall at least a thousand years old, built on the foundations of another wall made a thousand years earlier. It is where Lucy and Gabriella and I dined our first night in the Albayzín. On weekdays, the plaza is filled with fruit and vegetable stands on one side, and at the other, a rack and tables of clothes for sale. Nearby is a legendary café, Bar Aixa, with coffee so intoxicating it should qualify as international contraband. Along the two mains streets that lead from the plaza—Calle Panaderos and Calle Agua (the street of the bakers and the street of water)—you’ll find a hardware store, a ceramics store, fish markets, restaurants, a pharmacy, remnants of Arab baths, a big church that preserves the courtyard of a medieval mosque, small grocery stores, a newsstand, a flower shop, the butcher, the baker, and, I am sure, the candlestick maker. It’s roistering and buoyant, with babies in strollers, kids hiding behind piles of artichokes, nuns gliding to and fro like swans, shouts of recognition or outrage, a garrulous humming of conversation, a blind gypsy selling raffle tickets, and black-garbed old women sitting on benches and talking, no doubt, about Aquinas. And of the side streets, you’ll find work that asks more solitude and intensity—the guitar maker, and a world-class blacksmith.
Action and repose, idiosyncrasy and purity, flowers and surprises: the Albayzín offers daily some strange art of cumulative beauty. As the days and months pass, wherever you go, a host of details quicken the senses. Because everyone is living so close to one another, yet privately, life is in your face with rough edges, past tragedies, and a daily sense of promise. What came round to us, as we walked here, is a certainty that each day, we have our chance.
One might think that a neighborhood composed of small buildings, close together, and using so few elements—gardens, stone, brick, wood, plaster—would be monotonous. All the more so since, constrained by the rules that govern historic neighborhoods, no one may construct, say, a three-story aluminum house with a front lawn and a big garage. But the severity of the constraints invites beauty to move in and stay awhile. An analogy is the sonnet: with its strict fourteen lines, rhyme, and metrics, the form does not limit our labors, but offers a place where meaning may flourish.
So in the Albayzín, the restricted space, history, simple building materials, and municipal regulation have created a place where daily life may flourish. In fact, all the rules have ignited the most promiscuous variety of ideas for making a space to live. One day, walking around, we chose one element in the barrio, the terrace, and we made it our study. The first terraces we see are tiny balconies, looking like aeries, which can be reached only by spiral staircase. Others have cane roofs and resplendent tiles; they are outfitted with chairs and a table for sherry and open toward the Darro and the Alhambra. Larger terraces have canvas awnings and iron railings woven with honeysuckle, within which a bed may be hidden, for an outdoor tryst. Some terraces at the top of a house have four-sided tile roofs of shallow pitch, open to the air on all sides and holding a white hammock strung between posts; others are without any roof and open to the stars and to the mystery of the city. The largest terraces you enter through arches of plaster carved in arabesques and painted in soft azure, and walk onto an esplanade whose swirling pebblework floors hold pools of cool water for blessed relief from the summer heat. One could take a summer, walk around, go to the heights of the Alhambra, look over the whole of the Albayzín, and write the definitive treatise on terraces. Or chimneys. Or garden pathways, rooflines, the shapely columns that support balconies around a courtyard full of flowers—for in the Albayzin, these common elements come into the most bemused variety. With a few rules and a handful of elements, we have a feast of forms. And all of them within one small barrio, fifteen minutes to walk, from the river to the church at the top of the hill.
If you and I walked through the Albayzín, to school or to market, to see friends or just to have a ramble; if we took a whole day, what would we find? Among white walls, flamenco guitarists practice. And flamenco singing—at once fierce and melodious—comes from doorways and terraces. Wafting from windows is the sound and smell of the simmering in olive oil of lamb or onions and tomato. We hear jokes being made, the susurrus of conversation, rambunctious toasts, a clink of dishes being washed. Around the next corner, a dozen orange trees in full blossom in a big carmen. Around the next, a little plaza with a bench, and a brouhaha of bird songs—because of all the gardens and plazas, the barrio is full of swifts and magpies. Sitting in a plaza, you may see through a gate to a wall of tiles that makes up a fountain—white stars set in large squares of baked clay. By your side, through another gate, another fountain, this one faced with blue and green Moorish tiles, and beyond it a kitchen garden in a surround of fruit trees, all meticulously kept. Moving on, we watch the light of the afternoon slant across one lane, fill another to the brim with soft heat, and fill the next with a filigree of shadow as light passes through the leaves of a grape arbor. As the afternoon carries on, we rise though the lanes of the barrio to see junipers straight as geysers and windows covered and adorned by wood jalousies, whose openings are six-pointed stars, so that when the sun flows through, the walls within are bright with their own constellations. Some houses have a torreón, a high, open room whose ceiling has fine wood carvings called alfarjes, with their own mystical geometry. Walking higher up the narrow streets of the barrio, we come to a door set in a horseshoe arch, that arch itself s
et into a classic pattern of tiles, this time of ten-pointed stars that move, grow, and unfold before you. If we carry on until the sky darkens around, the lights of the Alhambra come on, and we turn around to sudden views of a pale stone tower rising out of a dark green hillside. Another few minutes, rising higher on the hill, we see the whole palace, curiously graceful—as though stone could float.
At night, iron and glass streetlights come on throughout the Albayzín, amber lights glow in the bell towers of the churches, white lights stream from the doors of little bars whose hubbub falls on the street like bright paint. In quiet stretches of meandering streets, and in tiny, isolated plazas called placetas, there is peace, and occasionally, thieves. Shadows patch the white walls, so they look like the robe of harlequin. Young people gather in plazas to drum and kiss and swig hard liquor.
How does any place become so eccentric, exultant, and hard-scrabble, all at once? By sheer unlikelihood, and as a result of twenty-seven hundred years of luck and work and anguish. It’s a story that begins early, in the seventh century BC, so long ago it’s the century of the Old Testament Jeremiah.
The Albayzín holds a history of pagans, wacky church councils, classical civilization, genocidal outbursts, amorous shenanigans, incomparable works of genius, terrible religious fevers, and ethnic cleansing—all these, set into a story of Visigothic, Roman, Islamic, and Christian conquests. It’s as if the great currents of Mediterranean history all coursed through this one neighborhood. If this were not enough, it’s a history that holds as well the discovery of Holy Scripture from the first century bearing the magical Seal of Solomon. It was a find that rocked the Christian world.
Into that history we now gave ourselves, in hopes of understanding where we now lived. The story of the Albayzín led us into so zigzag and labyrinthine a maze, it was as if, in our reading, we walked in the barrio itself.
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