A Year in the World

by Frances Mayes

  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?

  Many rulers have identified themselves with the sun, but the hubris of the carved stucco inscription in the Hall of the Ambassadors, where the Nasrid rulers greeted their subordinates, must be unsurpassed. Entering this hall, a hard-riding emissary, coming up from the Costa Tropical with a report, might have been stupefied by the deeply coffered ceiling of interlocking marquetry stars, the high windows that shed a line of sunlit arches on the floors, and the miradors with wooden screens carved as finely as lace. But as he waited, he eventually would have focused on the make-no-mistake poem carved in Kufic calligraphy near the throne:

  From me you are welcomed morning and evening by the tongues of blessing, prosperity, happiness, and friendship . . . yet I possess excellence and dignity above all those of my race. Surely we are
all parts of the same body; but I am like the heart in the midst of the rest and from the heart springs all energy of soul and life. True, my fellows here may be compared to the signs of the zodiac in the heaven of the dome but I can boast what they are lacking—the honor of a sun, since my lord, the victorious Yusuf, has decorated me with the robes of his glory and excellence without disguise, and has made me the throne of his empire. May its eminence be upheld by the Master of Divine Glory and the Celestial Throne.

  The rhythmic lettering may be artistic, but the tone says so much: a smooth talker with a welcoming smile and an iron will.

  As the emissary exited the Sala de los Embajadores, he could cool off in the Courtyard of the Myrtles, beside a long pool and low stone basin of gurgling water. These fountains and courtyards invite strolling, reading Rumi, sipping jasmine tea. They also bounce their light into the surrounding rooms, glazing the tiles and mottling the walls with wavering shadows. For those who lived their daily lives here, the light, the temperature, even their skin was changed by the wet-watercolor refractions from the fountains and channels. Water is transformative in this architecture. When I look at a floor plan of the Alhambra, I see that water was a building material, with as integral a part in the construction as arches and walls. The Alhambra gardens are paradisaical. I easily can imagine this whole place as the afterlife.

  In the Alhambra gift shop, we are the only customers. As we look through the books, I become aware of the piercing sweetness of the background music. “What is that wonderful music?” I ask the girl at the counter.

  “Angel Barrios, of course.” She looks at me as though I’d asked a totally self-evident question. I’ve never heard of Angel Barrios. We pick up several books on architecture and the gardens, and two CDs. One, of course, is the haunting music of Angel Barrios wafting about the shop and forever annealing my brain to this day when I finally came to Granada and saw the Alhambra. The other CD is Noches en los jardines de España, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, by Manuel de Falla, loveliest title and the most tender piano sequences ever to roll off the fingers of any Spanish composer. Back in our room, I listen to both. I’m electrified by Barrios—is he my third angel promised by the prophet who danced with God? I fall into an Alhambra trance. Barrios, I know I will listen to for the rest of my life.

  Those who live in the houses scattered below the Alhambra must sip the influence of the palace and gardens with their morning coffee, must always stroll there in their imaginations, as well as on many Sunday afternoons. One of the houses, with a weathered blue, blue door on a lane just below the Alhambra, belonged to Manuel de Falla, a friend of Lorca and also an appassionato of Gypsy traditions. With de Falla, Lorca organized the seminal Granada conference on deep song. De Falla, who lived with his sister, could hear faintly from his garden the Alhambra’s fountains’ spilling notes, a fluid, melancholy sound that entered his compositions. He’s long dead in Argentina, his dead-end street completely empty. Lorca lifted that knocker in the shape of a woman’s hand. De Falla opened that little window in the door to see who was there. Then the door swung open, and inside they laughed together, and Federico listened to Manuel play and Manuel listened to Federico’s latest poem. I imagine them inside, vital and strong, the buzz of their creativity humming in their veins, their hunger a force in the room. A fortunate friendship that ended tragically. I memorize the closed blue door of his whitewashed house.

  The Lorcas’ huerta, small farm, once was a sweet white house in the fields. The family could see the Alhambra and the distant Sierra Nevada mountains. A charming garden surrounded the house. There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake up with lyrical headaches. We can see the ease of the indoor/outdoor life. Now the freeway rims one edge of the property, and ten-story block apartment buildings oppress the other edge. Still, once we are on the grounds, the simple house is profoundly moving. The kitchen’s black stove, the small room where Federico slept, the piano, the manuscripts and framed whimsical drawings—the house retains a soul, even given the current institutional status. Outside the grounds a Gypsy woman offers me a bunch of rosemary and I take it because Federico would have.

  Today is our Lorca Pilgrimage. We drive across the vega to his early childhood home in Fuente Vaqueros (Cowboys’ Fountain). The flat landscape, with immense breaks of poplars, feathery in the white, still winter air, feels mysterious, close to Lorca’s perception that the vega possessed a feeling of immensity and “spiritual density.” His synesthetic images must have grown inside him because of his closeness to the earth: “The gray arm of the wind/ wrapped around her waist,” and “the sun inside the afternoon/ like the stone in a fruit,” and so many others. In the pearly light, the stands of poplars set me dreaming. When the sun burns off the mist, will they be gone? His childhood house, too, is touching—the baby bed, the tile floor, the pump and well in the courtyard, the Mama’s boy photographs. Upstairs we see a video of him, grown, with his thespian group, travelling the provinces. His big smile. His vigor. His affection for his fellows breaks out of the film. The family moved again, to Valderrubio, and we go there, too, crossing the big olive country, and finally just peering in the door. Enough. We drive back to Granada, listening to Barrios and de Falla and talking quietly about going home.

  Since it’s late afternoon when we return, we stop at a Lorca hangout for tapas, then walk down Las Ramblas and through back streets crowded with shoppers. Guitar stores! They’re everywhere. In each, someone intently tunes the strings or strums or just gets the feel of holding the instrument. We turn into a shadowy Moroccan area near the university, then end up for dinner in a restaurant where a photo of Lorca hangs above the bar. We are, again, the only ones here. The waiter offers an aged mahón cheese from the island of Minorca, which tastes like toasted hazelnuts, and an odd smoky cheese called idiazabal. Dinner ends on a grace note.

  The fate of Lorca hangs over Granada. Was his death at the hands of the fascists one reason de Falla, who so loved his house under the Alhambra, emigrated to Argentina? Would he have found his beloved city insupportable after he journeyed to government headquarters, attempting to save his friend, only to find out Lorca already had been murdered?

  When Carlos introduced me to Lorca’s poems, he told me that a rare quetzel bird landed on the roof at his family’s farm near León in Nicaragua. The workers were so overcome by the bird’s beauty that they did the only thing that came to mind—they shot it dead. Many Spanish birds were shot—the civil war lasted almost three years. From July 1936 until the end of March 1939, that war killed half a million, 130,000 by execution. In Granada around five thousand were executed. At the huerta with the flowery garden, Lorca’s family must have cried for years.

  Lorca was a free spirit but far too intelligent to criticize outright the burgeoning fascist regime. I think he had a sixth sense that he was, nonetheless, in danger. As he boarded a train from Madrid, for what would prove to be his last trip to his family in Granada, he spotted an official from his hometown and raised his forefinger and smallest finger in the air, chanting “Lizard, lizard, lizard” to deflect the evil eye of this member of parliament. His brother-in-law, recently elected mayor of Granada, was murdered eight days before Federico was arrested at the home of the Rosaleses, old friends. Those who took him away, Ruiz Alonso, Juan Luís Trecastro, Luis García Alix, and the name of Governor Valdés, deserve black paint thrown on their graves forever, especially Trecastro, who was overheard the next day saying that the rounds from the fusillade had not killed Lorca; he himself shot “two bullets into his arse for being a queer.” Lorca was killed in an olive grove near a spring hallowed to the Moors. They’d called it the Fountain of Tears.

  Neruda wrote: “If one had searched diligently, scouring every corner of the land for someone to sacrifice as a symbol, one could not have found in anyone or anything, to the degree it existed in this man who was chosen, the essence of Spain, its vitality and its profundity.” Antonio Machado’s poem will always remind us that Grana
da was the scene of the crime./Think of it—poor Granada—his Granada.

  One of my favorite quotes from Lorca came from his time in New York. He loved Harlem jazz and connected black music with that of the Gypsies in Andalucía. He said he couldn’t understand a world “shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of God’s artistic genius.” Bravo, Federico.

  Machado has the last word here:

  Friends, carve a monument

  out of dream stone

  for the poet in the Alhambra

  over a fountain where the grieving water

  shall say forever

  The crime was in Granada, his Granada.

  In an antique shop, I buy a marble pomegranate for my desk because Granada means “pomegranate.” I buy six old blue and white tiles of boar and deer, a small still-life of oranges and lemons, and a bronze-gone-to-verdigris door knocker in the shape of a horse’s head, a few small things closely tied to my perceptions of the place. In the back of this crammed shop, the owner and his friend are barely visible amid the chaos. The friend is from Damascus but lives in Granada. He whispers something to the owner; then he opens a small box and gives me a silver hand of Fatima. “For good luck,” he says.

  “Against evil eye,” the friend from Damascus adds. He is dark, with soot-black eyes lighted with little fires. He is missing an incisor, though he smiles broadly. He has much advice about what to see. He runs a falafel shop, speaks six languages. We feel that we are meeting a Moor who came hundreds of years ago, bringing with him cuttings of damask roses, spices, alchemical recipes, and songs. There, Federico, we begin to see.

  Someday I will come back to Granada. I loved the tiny Arab bath, the archaeological museum, the unprettified streets of the Albacín area. And the Alhambra charged every neuron in my body. Over the week the geography of the place, the lonely vega and the glory of the mountains, began to imprint my senses. But while I was here, I felt restless and agitated. Lorca’s ghost walks, uneasy in this city. Some things cannot be forgiven. The crime was in Granada.