Each day for a week my waitress warned me, ‘You’re missing the best thing we do if you don’t take the rabo de toro.’ Now those words had to mean tail of bull and I have never been a big partisan of braised oxtail, which is what I supposed it was. ‘No, thank you,’ I said.
Her other suggestions had worked out so satisfactorily that I was not easy in rejecting this one. For example, one day she said, ‘No matter what you think you want, take the stewed partridge.’ I recalled my unpleasant experiences with this delicacy in Toledo and started to say no, but she whisked under my nose a serving which she was delivering to a nearby table, and it was so enticing that I allowed her to bring me a portion, and thereafter whenever it appeared on the menu I took it, a truly fine dish. But the tail of bull I avoided.
One day I had as my guests a pair of archaeologists who had been digging in the Old Testament copper mines at Río Tinto, northwest of Sevilla (they said there was a wealth of digging to be done there in a civilization three thousand years old), and they were delighted when they saw rabo de toro on the menu. ‘Famous throughout southern Spain,’ they said, so I went along with them and tried it. By itself it would have made the parador famous, so after the archaeologists had left I went into the kitchen to ask the chef how he made this dish, and even a quick glance at the place told me all I needed to know about why this parador was so well regarded for its food. The kitchen was both old-fashioned with handsome clay pots and modern with stainless steel; immaculately clean, it was also properly cluttered with vegetables and shellfish, and the people working in it were a robust crew who had fun in handling food and dishes. My waitress whispered that the excellence of the place could be traced to the unmarried daughter of a leading Andalusian family who had surprised her friends by volunteering to work in the parador and who had ended by being its chatelaine.
Like flamenco dancers they stomp the stage on which they perform. They spread their fans, they move in graceful rhythms and cry out in rasping voices.
Her chief cook was hardly what I had expected, a bulllike man who spoke in a confused rush with few verbs, but since he was using Andalusian, a much truncated dialect, I may have missed the verbs. He avoided all s sounds and most d’s and invariably used er for el.
Castilian Andalusian
mismo meemo
madre mare
bueno wayno
Jaime Ostos Aim O-o
el matador er matao
los amigos lo jarmigo
cuidado cuiao
The last word, pronounced in drawling whine kwee-ow, in which the last syllable rhymes with now, means “take care” and is much used in the region; it is practically the shibboleth of the true Andalusian.
The chunky cook was pleased that someone wanted to know how he made his rabo de toro: ‘So it’s a good bull’s tail, fat, much gristle in the joints. Taste from the gristle. Cut, cut, pieces not too big. Roll in flour, much salt, braise in fat. Cuiao! Don’t burn, but cook well. Must have juice left for sauce. Everything is the sauce. Cuiao! No spices. No pepper. Onions well fried for flavor. Olive oil, but cuiao! Not too much. Garlic, celery, carrots, mushrooms, but not one water. Cuiao! No water, or you make soup. Bake one hour and half in hot oven. To serve put three joints bull’s tail in ramekin, sauce, vegetables, two fresh onions, bake few minutes to turn brown. Cuiao! No water, no wine.’
As I sat on my hillside looking down on Córdoba, I became so preoccupied with Muslim Spain that I decided to take the journey over the mountain to Granada, where my driving companion had an excellent idea. He wanted me to approach Granada by a special route, so short of the city he turned to the south and took me a good twenty miles away. He turned into a narrow twisting side road that led into the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, where we came upon a remote village perched on the edge of a cliff, a most frightening but beautiful spot. ‘Here we’ll have our picnic!’ he said, and as we unpacked the car and sat beside a stream which tumbled into a valley far below, he pointed to the encircling mountains and said, ‘Tourists spend a lot of time oohing and aahing over the Alhambra, but it teaches them nothing about Islam. It’s this that explains why Granada was able to hold on for so long. The Christians couldn’t root the Muslims out of fastnesses like this. For more than three centuries they tried, but with no luck. This is Granada. Not the city back there.’
It was an ideal spot in which to contemplate the fortunes of Islam; the combination of mountain and valley refreshed the eye and the sight of people moving about the landlocked village at the edge of the cliff gave one a sense of historical continuity. Under Muslim rule their ancestors had lived in those homes and after the collapse of the Muslim kingdom they had probably reverted to Christianity. Royal lines had come and gone but these farmers and smugglers had bothered little, and now, when their country perched on the edge of a precipice of uncertainty as to what might happen when Generalísimo Franco left, they were as unconcerned as ever. This was really timeless Spain, even more remote than the parched villages of Extremadura, for here movement in or out was much more difficult.
‘The wonder of the Christian Conquest of Granada,’ my friend said, ‘was not that it came when it did but that it came so very late. For nearly eight hundred years the Christians of Spain conducted what they describe as a permanent crusade. That’s why no Spanish knights appear in what we call the Crusades. They were occupied at home. But they rarely fought all-out battles. It was mostly a “you let me hold Toledo and I’ll let you hold Córdoba” business. Muslim armies served Christian kings and Christian knights worked for Muslim caliphs, and a kind of happy-go-lucky truce operated most of the time. By 1242 the Christians had meneuvered themselves into such a favorable position that one final push would have kicked the Moors out, but they dawdled for another two and a half centuries. I suppose when Spanish generals pictured themselves leading their armies over terrain like this they lost heart.’
On the rocky earth by our picnic ground I traced out a series of maps showing Spain in various periods, insofar as I could remember them, and my friend was right. In 711 the Muslims had conquered a defunct Spain with indecent ease. Had there ever before been a nation so large that had collapsed so swiftly to an invader with so few men? In one battle, the chroniclers tell us, more than one hundred thousand well-armed Christians evaporated before twelve thousand partially armed Berbers, and the conquest of most cities was more like a procession than an invasion; even Toledo fell with shocking speed. In contrast, when the time came for the Christians to reconquer Spain, their advance was slow. The final stage began in 1482, when Fernando and Isabel, with a more or less united Spain behind them, were at last able to bring the weight of the nation to bear on Granada.
On our way back to inspect the city we reached the mournful point on the road known as El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro (The Last Sigh of the Moor), where Boabdil is supposed to have paused, as he abandoned Granada to the Christians, for one last look at his noble city. Here he lamented his loss, whereupon his mother remarked, ‘You do well, my son, to weep as a woman for the loss of what you could not defend as a man.’ From this spot the towers of Granada, set down among mountains, were exciting enough to evoke a sigh.
We did not stop there, however, nor in the city itself, but went to that hill east of the city on the road to Guadix where one can look down upon Granada and perceive its structure. Two rivers join, and instead of plunging through the mountains eastward to the Mediterranean, start west across Andalucía to enter the Guadalquivir near Córdoba. At their confluence a town grew up prior to the Romans, under whom it flourished. It provided a starting point for the Muslims when they sought a mountain capital safe from Mediterranean pirates and Christian land armies. The main body of the city crouched in valleys but the gypsy quarter perched on a hill. ‘It’s the other hill you should study,’ my guide said, and it was from this favorable position that I looked down onto the most famous hill in Spain. Its crest consisted of a long, narrow wooded area completely enclosed by a turreted wall inside which were many
gardens, pools and rambling buildings, the whole creating a sense of beauty and repose.
‘Which building is the Alhambra?’ I asked.
‘Everything within the walls. The whole complex of woodland, water, gardens and buildings. It all goes together to make the Alhambra.’ Seeing it thus from a mountainside. I was able to appreciate the inventiveness of the Muslim architects in converting a considerable hilltop into a natural palace in which gardens and fountains were as important as buildings.
I can still recall my first experience within the walls of the Alhambra. My friend had gone to confirm our reservations at the parador, which stands within the Alhambra and is a part of it, and I went off into one of the gardens, and there an old man, clad much as he would have been five hundred years ago, was gathering figs, pulling the branches down with a crook and examining each fruit to see if it was ripe. He gave me one, black as night and filled with seeds. From all parts of the garden I smelled the heavy scent of boxwood, and in the valley below, where the city stood, I could see mists covering roofs. In the trees at the edge of the garden, birds sang and beyond them rose the somber wall and the turrets that protected it. This was the Alhambra; the buildings would come later.
If I had been disappointed in Córdoba’s Great Mosque, the contrary was true in Granada, for the Alhambra was much lovelier and much more Muslim than I had anticipated. I think what pleased me most in the buildings was the subtle manner in which one memorable room or hall led quietly into the next, as if an intricate musical composition were unfolding with always the right notes appearing where they were needed. One moves through this extensive collection of architectural highlights as if he were in a dream, in which one gentle surprise lures him on to the next.
It is not my intention to describe the buildings of the Alhambra, since it has already been well done. I was amused, however, to discover in an alcove of the Courtyard of the Myrtles, with its large reflecting pool, the shell of Santiago used as an ornamental device. There it was: the symbol of the force that would drive Islam from Spain built into the final palace, as if the Muslims had foreseen their own expulsion. And in a room off the Courtyard of the Lions, I found the Star of David, because as I said before, in Spain one finds old memories at unexpected places.
Although to the practiced Spanish eye this gesticulating flamenco dancer would be spotted as an amateur, because his fingers are distorted in grotesque rather than poetic fashion, he is properly caught up in the spirit of the dance and is experiencing catharsis in the Aristotelian sense of the word.
I think the most beautiful thing I saw among the buildings was the passageway leading from the Courtyard of the Myrtles to the Courtyard of the Lions, because here the architect was faced with a universal problem: how to relate two unrelated spaces? He solved it by placing two doorways of radically different widths side by side, then uniting them with one lintel, whose ends dropped down around the sides of the doors, and covering the entire with handsome carving. When I looked at the two doors everything about them seemed wrong; a child could have designed them better, but only a great artist could have juxtaposed them so as to achieve an effect so right and good. I studied them for a long time, because in my own work I have often tried to attain a similar result. It seems to me that any writer should be able to produce ‘a well-constructed English novel’; it takes someone like the Alhambra architect to slap together disparate items and make them sing, and if I have not always been successful in my own efforts, I know success when someone else achieves it.
I was surprised at the flimsy construction of the buildings. Is there another structure of comparable importance put together with such contempt for permanence? The ceilings, whose stalactite traceries are so exquisite, are nothing but stucco whose points one could knock off with a knuckle, and the walls of delicate geometric pattern are built up of plaster exactly as one would build up the decoration of a wedding cake and of not much greater permanence. That the palaces of the Alhambra have survived for seven hundred years is astonishing; when one sees how fragile they are, one better understands how vast areas like Medînat az-Zahrâ and caliphate Córdoba have vanished. The surprising thing is that any Muslim remains have survived.
The Courtyard of the Lions was as pure a work of art as I had been told, for there the inventive architects had converted a collection of slim marble columns and filigreed arches into a garden of stone which includes that handsome twelve-sided fountain protected by a pride of granite lions who look more like friendly puppy dogs than jungle beasts.
Turning a corner on one of the upper floors, I came upon the plain notice: ‘In these quarters Washington Irving wrote his Tales of the Alhambra in the year 1829.’ It was easy to visualize the bachelor lawyer, embassy official and future ambassador to Spain ensconced in these rooms with their cloistered balcony of marble columns overlooking the hills and caves of Granada. The workroom looked onto a patio with tall cypresses and a chattering fountain built up from a square inscribed with a circle, and it must have been a romantic place for a man with Irving’s imagination; one can understand the flowery visions he entertained here. Tales of the Alhambra, composed in a few weeks’ time, swept the English-speaking world and made its author famous. Irving was partial to the Muslims as contrasted to the Christians, and his slight tales, often no more than mood pieces, had considerable effect upon subsequent historical judgment; one could not read Irving, especially his more substantial Conquest of Granada, without becoming an advocate of Islam and a mourner over its expulsion.
There is no place better, I think, than Irving’s rooms in the Alhambra for weighing the moral significance of the Muslim occupation of Spain, and here I tried to reach a judgment. I had always been much disposed toward the Muslims, both in Spain and elsewhere, and I had once written an essay on Muhammad that had gained approval in various countries of the Muslim world. I had lived in six different Islamic countries—Turkey, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Malaya and Indonesia—and had visited half a dozen others. I had schooled myself in at least the outlines of Islamic philosophy, poetry and art and found myself sympathetic to the Muslim view of life.
I was therefore susceptible to the Washington Irving point of view that Spain had called down upon herself a sad retribution when she expelled the Moors; special damage had been done to her intellectual and agricultural life, and from this she had not recovered. Certainly, post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning sustantiated this: as long as the Muslims were in Spain and making their contribution to Spanish life, Spain stood at the head of nations, but coincident with the expulsion of the Moors, starting in 1492 and ending in 1609, began that long decline which the country has not yet reversed.
In an out-of-the-way inn in a different part of Spain, I had come upon a three-volume book of travels published in 1829, entitled A Year in Spain and attributed to ‘A Young American.’ Who he was I did not know, but whatever college he attended had taught him fine writing; his sentences were some of the longest and most polished I had read and his reflections on the Conquest of Granada were typical of the attitudes which I had inherited:
Though this victory of Ferdinand and Isabella was a Christian triumph, in name at least, it was not a triumph of humanity; and if the philanthropist or the colder economist, speculating with a view to utility alone, were to inquire what use Christian Spain had made of her dear-bought conquest, and how far the aggregate happiness of mankind and the interests of civilization had been promoted by the extermination of an heroic, ingenious, and industrious people, a picture of fraud, cruelty, and oppression would be presented, as frightful as the world has ever witnessed, and followed by consequences equally ruinous to the oppressors and the oppressed.
(Upon my return to America, I learned through the kindness of the librarian at The Hispanic Society of America that the author of this book was Alexander Slidell [1803–1848], the younger brother of that famous John Slidell of New York City, who, after graduating from Columbia College in that city, wound up as United States senator from Louisia
na, a post he surrendered when Louisiana withdrew from the Union at the start of the Civil War. As a diplomatic representative of the Confederacy, the older Slidell earned a place in history when the northern navy lifted him from a British ship in which he was traveling to Europe, thus precipitating an incident which nearly brought Great Britain into the war on the side of the Confederacy. Alexander Slidell published his book on Spain at the age of twenty-six; three years later, on August 20, 1832, the Spanish King Fernando VII issued a royal decree banning him from Spain because of intemperate remarks he had made against the country. In 1838 Slidell added the name Mackenzie and was henceforth known as Slidell Mackenzie. In 1842, after three of his sailors were detected in a mutiny, Mackenzie hung the trio from the yardarm of his ship, thus involving himself in a scandal, since one of the hanged men was the son of the Secretary of War. Seven years after the publication of his first book on Spain, he issued a second, Spain Revisited, which would indicate that the ban against him had been lifted after the death of King Fernando.)
By training and inclination I was disposed to agree with Slidell Mackenzie’s attitude on the Muslim expulsion, but recently I had come upon Bertrand and Petrie’s refreshing history, and Bertrand’s austere judgments on Muslim Spain derived from his experience and study in the Muslim colonies of French North Africa. Bertrand knew Muslim culture and history in a way that Washington Irving and the anonymous ‘Young American’ never did, and his acerb views are a corrective to their romanticizing. One of Bertrand’s repeated cautions is that we must be suspicious of pro-Muslim writing because its real intention is anti-Catholic; Protestant writers had found in the banished Muslims a convenient club for beating Spaniards: To judge Islamic civilization reasonably, it is important not to let ourselves be carried away by the hyperbolical admiration, the preconceptions, and the prejudices of those who exalt Arab-Spanish culture to an exaggerated extent only in order to degrade Catholic Spain in proportion.’
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