A Year in the World

by Frances Mayes

  We like Ubeda immediately. Our parador room’s balcony overlooks a courtyard, so I’m happy. Like Pienza in Tuscany, Ubeda is a Renaissance town of golden stone that catches the late afternoon light and turns it to warm honey. As we reach the plaza, we see that enormous backhoes have ripped out the entire square. People are routed over wooden sidewalks and away from the construction. We do not get to see the famous statue of the fascist Serro, which locals have peppered with bullets over the years. We walk back toward the parador and find St. Paul’s Church, which has a mosque shape—square and low. All four sides intrigue me. We find the Renaissance public fountain along one side, carved heads and decorative columns that look almost Venetian on another. What a privilege, to gaze and look at buildings. The church faces a plaza where women are knitting and talking ninety miles an hour. Four boys engage in a fast soccer game. Suddenly the ball hits one of the graceful three-branch wrought-iron streetlights. The lamp shatters, and the plaza comes to a halt for a moment; then the game and the talk resume.

  What better relic for a poet/saint than two fingers from the writing hand encased in a silver box on a stand? Spanish tour groups crowd into the rooms where Saint John of the Cross lived and wrote. I first heard of him in college when I read T. S. Eliot, who folded into his poems several quotes from the ascetic Spanish mystic. His philosophical and religious poems are fraught with the suppressed eroticism of mystical love. Lorca saw duende in his dark night of the soul, and his constant turning toward deprivation as a way to enlightenment. Much of his writing, however, feels almost homiletic: how to live in this world, self-help for the troubled well, down-home language, and a no-nonsense guide to the sublime. I love best the most poetic poems, where he lets loose his instinct for metaphor and speaks in an intimate voice. Is there a hint of the Arabic poets in his lines?

  Now that the bloom uncloses

  Catch us the little foxes by the vine,

  As we knit cones of roses

  Clever as those of pine.

  No trespassing about this hill of mine.

  Keep north, you winds of death.

  Come, southern wind, for lovers. Come and stir

  The garden with your breath.

  Shake fragrance on the air.

  My love will feed among the lilies there.

  (FROM “THE SPIRITUAL CANTICLE,”

  TRANSLATED BY JOHN FREDERICK NIMS)

  In his bedroom his hair shirt and the log he used for a pillow are displayed. In other rooms we see paintings of his miracles, one of which seems to have had something to do with asparagus. In his dialogue with Jesus, the painted ribbons of words come out of both mouths.

  The Moorish influence in Ubeda is minimal. A door, a gate—we find one arched gate with the characteristic right turn built into it under a double horseshoe. In the shadows we make out a painting of Mary. The faithful have decorated the table below with vases of dusty artificial flowers. Someone has left a doll leg, a red candle, and a pair of eyes painted on metal.

  My old habit of looking out for real estate offices and checking “for sale” signs comes back to me here. This is a town I could live in quite comfortably. I imagine the pleasure of anonymity, the spacious days for writing and for reading all of Juan de la Cruz. We could sell all, buy a house on the leafy, angular plaza of Santo Domingo. But tomorrow we press on to Baeza, then on to Córdoba, and then our time in Andalucía will end.

  An appealing small town surrounded by olive groves, Baeza is full of cadets from the Guardia Civil academy. They fill the streets in their veridian uniforms, all trim and groomed and young. Many sit in cafés with their girlfriends, enjoying the mild January sun. We meander through the covered market, plazas, and churches. We see the door ajar in a ruined patrician house and slip inside, fantasizing about restoring it to perfection. Across from the ayuntamiento (city hall), Ed spots a rose-bordered tile marker on a run-down house with a blue door: AQUI VIVIO EL POETA ANTONIO MACHADO. The poet’s house, where his wife of only three years died at twenty, is closed, but we see what he saw as he closed his door every morning and walked to his job teaching languages in the village school. He lived a life of simplicity until he passionately reviled the fascists and had to leave Spain. He died on his arrival in France in 1939. We drive out into the land of the olives. I read aloud to Ed a few lines of Machado:

  Over the olive grove

  The owl could be seen

  Flying and flying

  In its beak it carried

  A sprig of green

  for holy Mary.

  Country around Baeza,

  I’ll dream of you

  When I cannot see you.

  A few miles outside town we see a cortijo for sale, white walled and serene, with nine thousand olive trees. The price is half what a studio apartment costs in San Francisco. The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.

  A glance at the map of Córdoba makes it clear why we keep getting lost. The Arabs must have had a firm rule—nothing parallel can exist. Streets radiate in star-shaped clusters, following the old labyrinthine medina lanes, converging at a church or plaza. Many are too narrow for cars, but we see an intrepid driver, cigarette hanging from his lip, negotiating them anyway. He’s pulled his mirrors in and doubtlessly holds his breath as he creeps along with two inches to spare on either side.

  We give up trying to figure out where we are and just turn into any old cobbled alley festooned with geraniums. We skirt the Mezquita, the famous mosque, and avoid the river road dense with traffic. Granada, with a major tourist attraction, was surprisingly untouristy. Córdoba has caught on. Shops selling kitschy souvenirs proliferate throughout the whitewashed maze of the old Jewish section. But the area exudes the enchantment of secret courtyards and curly iron gates. I see hardly a street that I don’t want to turn down. We keep coming upon very simple and small Gothic churches—an unexpected treat. Some have Arabic touches—a dome, an arch, a window design—showing the continuing Mudéjar influence after the Christian conquest.

  Our hotel is across from the Museo Taurino, museum of the bullfight. Oh! Hides and heads, sculptures of gored matadors lying in state. Lorca wondered if olé is not related to that moment in Arabic music when the duende begins and the crowd cries, Allah, Allah. We don’t linger. I’m fascinated that the origins of the bullfight root in ritual sacrifice among the Tartessos people, who lived near the delta of the Guadalquivir around 1,000 B.C. This glory eludes me. Perhaps because I come from a culture where death is regarded as something like selling short. Where death is somewhat embarrassing. Again, I turn to Lorca: “Everywhere else . . . death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live indoors until the day they die and are taken out into the sunlight. A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than anyplace else in the world.” Yes, with the exception of Mexico. In Guanajuato I passed a coffin-maker’s shop. A little girl in pink ruffles played with her dolls inside an open coffin, while her parents attached the lid on another. Life and death are closer companions than we can understand.

  We’re thrilled to find churro stands again. Miguel, who loops dough into hot oil and quickly lifts out the sizzling circle with tongs, tells us how to make them, though we probably miss half the recipe. His are big. He catches on when I say “hula hoop” and gives us an extra with a cup of chocolate. They’re best right out of the oil. My capacity for them has increased over the weeks in Spain.

  Right across from the Museo de Bellas Artes, Julio Romero de Torres, a local artist who died in 1930, has his own museum. I’ve never heard of him before today. He was a painter, primarily of women, and he painted some of the loveliest necks imaginable. Some of the many, many paintings slide off into the lugubrious, but enough of them have a quality of transcendental light. His fine small portraits could keep company with the Piero della Francesca, Zurbarán, and Ghirlandaio portraits we saw earlier in the trip in Madrid.

  We walk a long way to the Palacio de Viana, a house of many charms. Built in
the seventeenth century, the style reveals the moment when Arab domestic architecture formed permanently into what we call Spanish style. Fourteen courtyards make this house a dream. We have to join a group to see the house. The leader speaks in Spanish so we are bored and lost. In a small bedroom a portrait of Franco looms. I would hate to have him looking down on my narrow bed. We amuse ourselves by imagining that we are buying the place and discuss in whispers what we would plant, how we would rearrange the dreary furniture, and what we’d serve for Sunday lunch in one of the sumptuous courtyards—bitter greens and roast venison, the fried cream with cinnamon ice cream we had last night. Artisan goat cheeses with a glass of fino or some little cordial made from ripe cherries. I detour to find a bathroom during the tour, then find myself alone. For fifteen minutes I get the chance to experience the worn tile floors and the views from the windows without the canned litany. Then I am scolded as I turn down a hallway and meet the group. I do love the pattern of days one would live in a house like this, the seamless weaving of inside and outside. “Surely the Spanish devised the most felicitous form of architecture for everyday living,” Ed says as we exit and prepare to be lost in the streets of Córdoba again.

  “Yes, but think of Pompeii. They had the courtyard concept, too, and way earlier.”

  “Their courtyard served a practical function—it sloped to a drain. The rainwater funneled into a cistern.”

  “I like entering a house through a courtyard. Such a cool transition into the private realm from the public. You’re in but out.”

  “Yes, a processional feeling.”

  We are saving the mosque, one of the great sights of this world, until last. As we walk past a tiny plaza, Ed stops in front of a sculpture of a seated man holding a book. “Maimonides! Of course. I’d forgotten. He was born in Córdoba.”

  I’m dim on Maimonides but recognize his major work when Ed mentions it, A Guide for the Perplexed. “What a contemporary title,” I say, “or are we just perpetually perplexed throughout history? I know I am.”

  “It seems like the right stance in life. Anyone who isn’t perplexed is deluded. Let’s see—he was a Jew who wrote in Arabic and had to go into exile. No one understands why, but he at some point went to North Africa instead of following the other Jews down into southern Spain. Maybe it was because he felt such strong affinity with Arab culture. Some say he converted to Islam.”

  We’re happy to see him standing his ground in the small plaza where university students blare their music from open windows all around. He’s a good still point of reference for them. Seneca, who became Nero’s tutor, also came from Córdoba, and also Averroës, whose commentaries on Aristotle stirred mighty debate in the twelfth century and reawakened discourse all over the continent. While the rest of Europe plodded through the centuries, this city was famous for its immense library of 400,000 books, for lighted streets and houses with hot and cold water, for weavers and ivory carvers, for three hundred baths, fifty hospitals, and seventeen colleges. Mathematicians, philosophers, musicians, and poets were exalted. Even women were writers and musicians. A spirit of tolerance prevailed among the Jews, Muslims, and Christians, creating a munificent climate for the expansion of culture. This convivencia (peaceful coexistence) came to a crashing halt in the twelfth century with the rise of the bigoted Almohad rulers, who supplanted the more flexible and intellectual Umayyads. Then in 1236 Fernando III subdued the city and caused the non-Christians to flee.

  The Umayyads are the heroes of Córdoba. Their dynasty in Spain began with a fabulous character, Abd ar-Rahman. In 750 he was in his teens when his entire family, the rulers of Syria, was deposed and murdered. Like other pioneers since, he set out for the west, making his way to what he’d heard of as al-Andalus, where he quickly built a loyal following. María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World tells how Abd ar-Rahman changed the course of history. She’s right. The more I’ve read about Andalucía, the more I realize that the history I studied in college was a stripped-down version, emphasizing at every turn the joyful triumph of Christianity. Courses often take a path that illustrates certain biases because it’s much more vexing to teach contradictions or coexisting truths.

  Living in Italy, I began to see more clearly how the Western world was fitted intricately together from all the cultures around mare nostrum, our sea, as the Romans intimately called it. Even in Tuscany I began to be aware of the farther influence, the almost-ignored Arab influence. Saracinesca, a word we use frequently, reveals the Saracen way with water. They brought west with them elaborate irrigation methods, waterwheels, and evidently a kind of perpendicular faucet that cuts off the flow of water, which is how we use saracinesca. On our first trip to Sicily, we had a full exposure to the intermingling of that island’s history with the Moors. Now in Andalucía, the depth of the Arab contribution to the Mediterranean cultures almost overwhelms us. There is much to rethink.

  The mosque. We’ve skirted it, looking at the portals that relieve the plain sandstone exterior. Each horseshoe-arch opening, with the door below, reminds me of a schematic human figure, with the radiating design around the arch like a nimbus. Since realistic images were forbidden, I wonder if this design had the hidden purpose of placing the idea of the body within the design. The portal openings are backed by geometric designs of great variety and complexity.

  Our big cowboy who took over the town, Abd ar-Rahman, bought a Christian church, which had been built over a Roman temple, and began to enlarge it for a mosque. His heirs continued the work. This is the largest mosque in the world, where you can feel how the architecture guides you toward a philosophy of prayer. The immense, spreading horizontal space keeps you close to the ground, with no sense of hierarchy, no sense of uplifting the spirit toward heaven. It is profoundly unlike the experience of the Gothic but does not feel totally foreign to the experience of the Romanesque. In a mosque, calligraphic inscriptions from the Koran replace the holy images in Christian churches. Wherever you prostrate yourself is holy, as long as you face Mecca; the mosque has no focal-point high altar. Any inspired supplicant can become a prayer leader in his part of the mosque. In the Córdoba mosque, the multiplied columns make it clear to the worshiper that all the space therein is equal space before Allah.

  The most often-used word to describe the mosque is forest. One writer compared the endless columns topped by arches to a petrified forest. I can support that conceit. There’s even a lovely parallel of the inside to the courtyard of trees outside, where the faithful washed before prayer, and—this bends my mind—where scholars sat in appointed spots and discussed recent theories with anyone interested. But walking around the mosque, looking up at the layers of arches, I do not have the sensation of being in a forest. I have a more primitive instinct—that we are in the mind of Allah. The arches topped with other many-lobed arches form a great brain. The space is intimate, even claustrophobic. At the same time I feel something is called for here. I’ve never had a similar reaction in a building before.

  The columns and the sublime cream and terra-cotta colors resemble a paradise, and at the same instant the ludicrous additions later heaped upon the mosque by the Christians are hard to look at. They literally plunked down a large church right in the prayer room of the mosque, a hideous intrusion that disrupts the harmony of the structures. When Charles V finally made it to Córdoba three years after this monstrosity was built, he said, “You have destroyed something that was unique to this world and replaced it with something that can be seen anywhere.” Despite his outrage, Charles did nothing to restore the mosque’s integrity, so what we have today is this absurd combination, like a camel with a chicken’s face. The Christians also walled in many of the arcades, reducing the light inside. Surely this is one of the major architectural atrocities of the world. Luckily, the size makes it possible to ignore the strange church and to dream awhile in the ancient Andalucían manner. In such places, the heart expands and admits the new.

  Back in Madrid, we spend the last night at the Ri
tz in great comfort. The hotel notebook cautions guests not to appear in the lobby in sports attire. If you must wear such attire, notify the concierge and he will escort you out another door.

  We dress up and have a fine dinner in the hotel restaurant, among all the Spanish families so formally dressed that we feel we’ve stepped back thirty years. The Gran Reserva Bodegas Muga wine smells like wet violets in spring and the antique rose called Paul Neyron at Bramasole. The cheese, garrotxa, tastes like the basket of herbs I pick there when I’m about to prepare a feast. Or maybe I’m homesick. Our neighbor Chiara has sent Ed his passaporta. He can leave Spain and enter Italy legally.

  It seems like months since we landed, Ed sick, my bag lost. The little jet lifts off for Florence, its motor humming rather oddly, like a paper airplane propelling from an unwinding, twisted rubber band. Ed is sipping water and looking out the window, and I lean over to see Madrid receding into an abstraction. Goodbye to the azure and saffron sky over the vega; goodbye to the museum courtyard, where birds drench the air with their song; goodbye to the night when women named Agueda are serenaded; goodbye to the “incorrigible bohemian” now immortalized in marble; goodbye to the Arab inscriptions on the tombs of Isabella and Fernando; goodbye to the sun high over the bullring; goodbye to the turkey thrown from the church tower and the good luck of the catcher; goodbye to the goat marooned on an outcrop; goodbye to the children carrying rosemary wreaths and colored birds in the Virgin’s procession; goodbye to the brain of Allah; goodbye to the cold garlic soup of Ronda; goodbye to Machado’s words Beneath the blue of oblivion, the sacred water/ sings nothing—not your name, not mine; goodbye, Federico García Lorca.