At around three in the morning of August 18, Lorca was taken away in the company of a schoolteacher, Galindo González, who had a wooden leg. They were driven up above the city, just outside of the village of Viznar. There, they were taken into a building converted from a summer center for children into a military prison. First they were told they were to be assigned to work building roads. Then they were told they were to be killed. Shortly thereafter, Lorca, the schoolteacher, and two bullfighters arrested in the Albayzín were taken along a road toward Aynadamar, the source of water for the Albayzín, whose name in Arabic means “the Fountain of Tears.” There, at about 4:45 AM, just at first light, Lorca, the schoolteacher, and the matadors were shot to death. One of the executioners said that Lorca got special treatment: “two bullets in the ass for being a queer.”
On that same morning of August 18, Manuel de Falla, who knew that Lorca had been arrested, bestirred himself at last and went to the government building in Granada to help the poet. He was a few hours too late.
Not even Sophocles could have set down a design of such fateful malevolence. If Lorca had gone to Mexico as he had planned, if he had listened to his friends and not boarded the train to Granada, if he had escaped to the Republican zone with Orgaz, if he had escaped with the help of Luis Rosales, if he had taken refuge with Falla, if the Rosaleses could have protected him as they thought they could, if the military order for his release would have been honored, if Jose Rosales would have confirmed that Lorca was still in his cell, if someone had not lied to Emilia Llanos in the street, if Manuel de Falla had intervened a day earlier, if the rebels in Granada had not despised Lorca … if, if, if …
The work of García Lorca was banned in Spain for a generation.
His death was one of hundreds of thousands, and it has come to stand for the irreparable loss to Spain and to the world, of so many, with such molten hatred, in a gaudy saturnalia of violence, as civil war gave way to the rebel takeover of the country.
The Secret in the Labyrinth
NOTHING IS MORE common in the Albayzín than to come upon visitors lost in the labyrinth of streets. The maps given out are wretchedly bad, showing not so much the layout of the streets but a series of mysterious clues as to where they might be found. The only way to learn the streets is to live there. We gave directions just about every day; often, we accompanied the inquirers, since anywhere they were going in the Albayzín would have on offer a host of eccentric beauties. And we could go in hope of being lost ourselves.
Just about every day, we walked in the barrio to buy bread or wine, to meet friends in a café, to find our way to flamenco, to dine outdoors on beautiful terraces or in plazas full of warm stone and spirited company. And every day, as we tried to learn enough to make sense of our neighborhood, as we worked in the garden or sat out late at night in the golden light of the Alhambra, we knew well enough what grew in us: thankfulness. There is a secret in the labyrinth of the Albayzín, in the history of the fortress and the city to which the Albayzín gave birth: the Alhambra and Granada. To come upon it was, for me, the most improbable result of our sojourn in the centuries of history here, and our embrace of the life here. The secret lives in the lustrous survival of the place. If the Albayzín means anything, it means that beauty may banish violence, grace bear us beyond hatred, and understanding conduct us to deliverance. What is delivered is simple: a life with children and safety, with flowers and common pleasures, good company, poetry, and trust, with time to talk and study, to work and to love. I do not know what more any of us can ask.
To say that such a life is within reach, today, in the repellent darkness of our own times, is thought to be sentimental. To think an easygoing, workaday, peaceable, open-minded life in the company of those we love might be available anywhere is said to be naive and simple minded. Yet if it is possible in the Albayzín, it is possible anywhere on earth. The barrio survived centuries of depredation and neglect to come round once more to its present resurgent splendor. In just the same way, the great Jewish and Arab poets of Al-Andalus, after more than a half a millennium of absolute neglect, now live in our hands. We can know them, know their names, their joys and fateful songs, and they are just as much a part of the heritage of Spain as Cervantes or Lope de Vega. The onetime vizier of the ruler of Granada, Ismail Ibn Neghrela, waited over nine hundred years for his poems to be read at all: they were discovered in a crate in the early twentieth century and not published until 1934. Yet now they are ranked among the most powerful Hebrew verse of the period, in all their wild variety, from the erotic to the satirical and proverbial. As for García Lorca, if anyone wants proof that execution, book bans, and censorship cannot kill a man or his work, then I invite you to walk down the streets of Granada today. You will not go twenty feet without seeing the portrait of Lorca. It is on posters, on the side of buses, and shown in bookstores and theaters. His plays are often performed, his poetry is widely read, his letters and interviews are known and quoted. His drawings adorn postcards and book covers. His work is made into ballets and flamenco shows. The airport and two parks are named after him. He loved Granada so much, and now, eighty years after his death, we can see how much the city loves him.
We have so many memories of the Albayzín that, wherever we are in the world, they visit us. It’s a place for learning and for loving. It has an idyllic charge. Lucy and I gave ourselves to the place, and to one other.
I remember the day Lucy visited the Albayzín blacksmith and came home with a birthday present for me: a weathervane that she had designed, which from its central axis offered to the bright air of the Albayzín the crescent moon of Islam, the star of David, and a Christian cross. It stands above our house, in honor of the past and in hope for the future.
If we are to have a future, it will be in a place where beauty can be tasted every day, where the best of the past illuminates a way forward, where we can count on the care of all our children.
I remember playing soccer with 3-year-old Gabriella in the twilight of Plaza Bib Rambla, where she managed to kick the ball directly through the door of the lingerie shop. It scored a direct hit on the pantie rack, caromed over to the camisoles, and settled in among the filmy gowns. I thought we had committed a rather grave offense. I stood blushing in the street. Gabriella walked boldly into the store and was greeted with a smiling welcome, soothing talk, and soft laughter. Then her hand was filled with caramels and she was ceremoniously given back the rather soiled ball and helped to the door, that her twilight play might carry on.
I remember waking early in our house, one morning after a late-night party in our home with a score of families from the neighborhood. In Gabriella’s room I found two small children asleep, snuggled up with our daughter. I did not know their names. But I knew that later in the morning, their parents would come by the door, to bear their little ones home with smiles and easygoing sweetness. It was the way we trusted one another.
I remember crossing Plaza Nueva, at the base of the Albayzín, with Lucy and me trailing, as usual, our rocketing daughter. We passed by a priest so old that I thought he might be headed to an appointment with a taxidermist. But he stopped us and proved very lively indeed, talking to us animatedly through a nest of wrinkles and gesturing to Gabriella. When she came back to gaze up at him, he reached into his black robes and took out five orange balloons and held them out to her small hands. She was all smiles. So was he. I was ready to convert to Catholicism on the spot, Inquisition or no Inquisition.
I remember being in the taxi cab headed back to Plaza Nueva, with Gabriella asleep in my arms and a shopping bag heavy with books at my feet. The taxi driver was a laconic, heavyset man who looked as if he had not moved from his driver’s seat in several months. He pulled up to the plaza and, seeing my predicament in the rearview mirror, flung open his door and leapt from the cab with the fine form and energy of an Olympic athlete. Striding around the cab, he opened the door and reached in to take Gabriella in his arms with infinite gentleness and whispered to h
er as I got out with the books and was able to hold her again. I had no doubt that he would have abandoned his taxi and carried her home.
Every morning we walked among flowers and shadows to Gabriella’s school, Arlequin. And on Saturday mornings, we went together down through the Albayzín to her ballet class, taught by a woman with musical Russian-accented Spanish. On the move through the cool slanting light, we talked and improvised as usual, and wondered at the streets where we walked together. Then all at once Gabriella said:
The color of the Angel Gabriel’s wings is blue-green, with gold and yellow. There are angels of clouds, of stars, of heart, of light, and the angel Gabriel, and the angel of love.
Dios is made of clouds and light and stars and wisdom.
The house of Dios is hard to find, and no one of the angels knows how to get there, except for the angel of love. But the angel of love showed the angel Gabriel the road halfway there, and so the angel Gabriel, too, knows how to start on the way to the house of Dios. We go there. What we do there is have a tea party, and in the tea is wisdom.
When you drink the tea, then it means that you can start to grow wings. When you’re little you can only grow little wings. The wings I have I can use only to fly to ballet and to Arlequin. But when you get taller, you get to grow bigger wings so you can go farther, but to grow bigger wings you have to keep going to the house of Dios to drink the tea of wisdom.
We came to her ballet studio, and she was silent. It was the sudden declaration of one 4-year-old girl in the morning light, and I heard in her words her own savoring of the life offered gently every day by the neighborhood we had come to love. She had wanted to say for herself where she had been led by the beauties of the Albayzín.
I remember a day several months after the work had been completed on our carmen. It was about one in the afternoon, and there was a knock on the door. When I opened it, there stood Mario, one of the albañiles who had worked there so many months. In his hands was a two-gallon jug of olive oil from the fruit of his own trees, pressed that morning as a gift for our family. The oil was the most beautiful green I had ever seen; it concentrated within itself all the spring and summer of Granada. It lasted us for over a year. It was the best olive oil we had ever tasted. It is the best we will ever taste.
If anyone wants to be rocked by currents of beauty and infamy, Granada is the place. Every year, over three million people visit the Alhambra. Once a gypsy lodging, animal corral, and ammunition dump, it has been resuscitated into the most admired monument in Spain, a place of providential grace and blessing. The Alhambra presents to the world the art and culture of Al-Andalus, which survived a program of extermination and contemptuous neglect. García Lorca has survived his own murder in rambunctious good form. And the Albayzín, after five centuries marked by piecemeal demolition, arson, military invasion, and pillage, is now one of the best places in the world to live. It is one of the best places there will ever be to live. It has been perfected by catastrophe. The streets hold the spirit of cante jondo: let history come with death and ruin, and deep song will rise in time with a beauty that cannot be killed. In just this way, the Albayzín rises every day into the sunlight of Andalusia.
Wherever I walk in the world, I turn a corner, and that is the sunlight I feel on my face.
The End
RECOMMENDED READING AND LISTENING
THERE IS A wilderness of books about the Albayzín, Al-Andalus, Islamic tile work, the Sufis, and the literature of the period. For those who want a path forward, this brief list, chosen from hundreds of books, will give you a useful beginning. For those who want to carry on with a long expedition, see the complete bibliography.
ON THE ALBAYZÍN
The best single source is in Spanish, a three-volume work:
El Albayzín en la historia, El Albayzín en la leyenda, las tradiciones y la literatura, and El Albayzín y sus monumentos. All three are by Miguel J. Carrascola Salas. The books are comprehensive, affectionate, and learned.
Albayzín, solar de reyes, by Gabriel Pozo Felguera, is a superb one-volume summary that ranges over the centuries of this iconic barrio.
ON AL-ANDALUS
The Legacy of Islamic Spain, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi. Incomparable. A series of wonderfully intelligent essays on the whole sweep of history in Medieval Spain. A breakthrough in historical writing.
The Arts of Intimacy, by Maria Rosa Menocal, Jerilynn Dodds, and Abigail Krasner Balbale. A collaboration of three of the world’s leading scholars of Al-Andalus. Brilliant, meditative, deeply learned. With clear explanations of the beautiful art, architecture, culture, and literature of the period, and a searching investigation of the history. The book has superbly selected color illustrations and an invaluable bibliography with the authors’ commentary. A major achievement in writing about the period.
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570–1215, by David Levering Lewis. An elegantly written, recent, magisterial look at medieval Europe, which allows us, as no other book I know, to understand Al-Andalus in the context of European history.
A Vanished World, by Chris Lowney. A thoughtful examination of the period by an independent scholar. Useful, witty, capacious, and a superb travel companion.
ON ISLAMIC TILE WORK
Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach, by Keith Critchlow. For an erudite examination of the sacred art of Islamic design and tile work, this is the book. A searching, patient journey into practical and mystical geometry.
Islamic Geometric Patterns, by Eric Broug. The very best book for those who want to take compass and straightedge in hand and make for themselves some of the complex, lovely patterns of the tiles. Unmistakable, essential fun.
ON THE SUFIS
The Sufis, by Idries Shah. The seminal work of the times on the subject. This book, and many others by the same author, are available in English, Spanish, and other languages. They offer an authentic portal into the Sufi tradition. In them, a beautiful and useful tradition of storytelling is clarified, revived, and strengthened, and the stories offered have a generous spectrum of meaning. A complete list of the works of this author can be easily obtained online at, for example, www.idriesshahfoundation.org
The Book of Wisdom, by Ibn ‘Ata Illah. This beautiful translation by Victor Danner of a twelfth-century Cairene mystic is full of phrases and ideas that stay in the mind and provide material for sustained musing and helpful conversation.
ON LITERATURE
The Dream of the Poem, edited and translated by Peter Cole. A recent, revelatory compendium of the Jewish poets of Al-Andalus. Essential for an understanding of the poetic landscape of the times, and an introduction to poets whose work is coming into prominence only now, in our times, principally because of the gifts of Professor Cole.
The Literature of Al-Andalus, edited by Maria Rosa Menocal. A selection of essays on the writers of Al-Andalus, their forms, their influence, their experiments. Such a helpful book—musing, knowledgeable, clear.
MUSIC
La música de pneuma: las tres culturas de la música medieval española by Paniagua, Eduardo. A rapturous look at the music of all three faiths of Al-Andalus on CD.
Magna antologia del cante flamenco is an anthology of flamenco of the last many decades and includes many spine-tingling classics that are otherwise difficult to access. Ten CDs. It is produced by Hispavox and compiled and presented by José Blas Vega. A rare, powerful surge of beautiful song.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK WAS written with the help of my family and the scholars, writers, friends, and readers who looked at many drafts of the book over the years. I could never have moved to Spain without my wife Lucy Blake. With her derring-do, resourcefulness, and high spirits, Lucy made our residency possible and our life a delectation. She is a superb writer and an acute critic, and I hope this text holds some of her insight and intelligence. Our daughter, Gabriella, showed me the Albayzín with the fresh lights of her young mind. Her company was, and
is, an unreserved joy, and my notebook of her ideas and declarations is one of my most treasured possessions.
Javier Martínez de Velasco, a gifted scholar and resident in the Albayzín, read the whole book with care and erudite attention and saved me from many errors and infelicities. My dear friend Elizabeth Dilly, lover of language and devotee of good books, read this whole text, as well, and I happily incorporated her corrections and suggestions. Bob Blake reviewed the whole manuscript and gave me his sage and worldly comments, which were invaluable to me.
As this manuscript took final form, Jack Shoemaker, my editor at Counterpoint Press, offered his wise counsel and helped me to make the book decisively more clear, open, and forthcoming. To have so learned and generous an editor is the good fortune every writer dreams of.
Any remaining difficulties or inaccuracies in the book are wholly my own responsibility, and a reader with comments of vitriol or animosity is hereby encouraged to vent his bile upon the author only.
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