Andalus

by Jason Webster

  ‘You seem to have forgotten Lucía pretty fast.’

  ‘Lucía wanted some fun. I gave it to her.’ He paused for a minute. ‘Look, you’re always going on about Moors and Christians, Islam and the West, how things were better in the past. Well, I’m doing my own bit for racial harmony.’

  ‘How?’

  He laughed.

  ‘There’ll be no more racism when these girls find they’ve got a bit of Moor in them.’

  And before I could say anything, he got up from the table and walked calmly towards the back door through which the waitress had just passed.

  ALMERÍA

  It was overcast when we reached the top of the Alcazaba, and a chill breeze blew in from the unusually grey Mediterranean. You didn’t often see it so stripped of colour and there was a sense of unease about it, as though searching deep down for the blues and purples that it usually shone forth with the light of the sun.

  We climbed up the battlements of the old Moorish walls to stare out at the city of Almería below.

  ‘Look, this is just like the castles in Morocco,’ Zine mumbled angrily as we walked through horseshoe archways past suspicious-looking security guards wearing mirrored sunglasses and standing incongruously among the rose bushes. He was still annoyed that the woman back in the tourist office had insisted the buildings were all Spanish.

  ‘Interested in lo moro?’ she said when I asked for information. ‘They built everything in brick. We’re the ones restoring it. Now all these North Africans are coming to settle here saying it’s all theirs. I don’t know what’ll become of us, I really don’t.’

  At least the black and tabby kittens now rubbing themselves against our legs didn’t care where you came from.

  The Alcazaba was Almería’s main tourist attraction: a giant fortress that stood on the hills above the city, built in the tenth century by the greatest caliph of Al-Andalus – Abd al-Rahman III, who turned what had been a simple harbour watchtower into a major metropolis and flourishing port. Not quite an Alhambra – no carved wooden ceilings or Arabesques decorating the walls – it was, nonetheless, an imposing place that overlooked the run-down streets below like a reminder of greater times.

  On our walk up through the city that morning we saw an elderly one-eyed woman dressed in black sitting in the doorway of her flat cube-house, pulling back the metal chains that kept the flies out in order to spit into the gutter just a yard away from her feet. Although the houses were only a hundred years old, the design had barely changed since Moorish times. There was a gloominess about the place, though, as if it was just half a generation away from becoming a ghost town. Once-bustling, winding streets, full of donkeys, children and workshops like the northern Moroccan towns it reminded me of, were now empty and barren. Below the castle walls, a stone’s throw from the nearest houses, car-wrecks decorated the dry hillside, given, I imagined, one last moment of glory as they rolled spectacularly down into the valley before they were left to rot. The place smelt of sand and diesel.

  ‘Moroccan ship,’ Zine said simply as he looked down at the white and green FerriMaroc vessel moving out from the harbour in front of us. A pillar of black smoke rose from its funnel into the still, humid air.

  ‘Homesick?’ I said.

  He’d been downbeat all day. I’d offered to put him up at the pensión I was staying at, but he’d refused, boasting instead that he’d find a warm bed somewhere in the city. His brief but astounding conquest of the waitress at the roadside café seemed to have given him some confidence about his luck with Spanish girls. I hadn’t minded – apart from having to wait in the car for twenty minutes before he came running out from the back smothering a grin on his face – but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a practical way of dealing with the question of board and lodging, as he seemed to be imagining, all the time. And then there was Lucía: it was none of my business, I told myself, but I assumed that that relationship had ended back in Valencia.

  Now, though, standing on the castle battlements gazing out to sea, he looked tired, unshaven and melancholy, and I had the strong impression he’d slept rough. Perhaps the girls of a port city like Almería weren’t so easily impressed by tales of lost orphans far from home.

  ‘I want nothing more than to go back to Morocco,’ he said, slouching his shoulders as he leant out over the wall. ‘Smell the incense in the markets, hear people speaking Arabic again, see my friends.’

  It was the first time I had seen him like this. Something had happened the night before to knock the hopefulness out of him, and I cursed myself for not insisting that he stay in the hotel with me. Yet I sensed that his dependence on me was beginning to grate on him. If he could find something else on the way, he would probably take it: I’d made a promise, yet he was free to do what he wanted.

  ‘I would go. But …’ He trailed off.

  The sound of trickling water started behind us as the fountains were switched on. I turned my back to the sea and looked up at the sloping rose gardens, wood pigeons cooing gently from the trees. An Andalusi poet, Ibn Hazm, had once written a book of love poetry called The Pigeon’s Necklace. From eleventh-century Spain, his sophisticated romanticism had spread north, influencing the troubadours and the emergence of courtly love in France and England.

  When I leave your side my steps

  Are like those of a condemned man.

  To reach you, I run like the full moon

  Crossing the confines of the sky.

  But to leave you, I move slowly

  As the highest stars.

  This new, more refined and poetic view of human relationships had quickly caught on: they said a Christian prisoner once held in the Alcazaba of Almería had thrown himself to his death from one of the towers after falling in love with a Moorish slave girl. The girl had tried to help him escape, but their plan had been discovered, causing him to take his own life. She later died from a broken heart.

  ‘Perhaps you should go back,’ I said.

  ‘In sha’ Allah.’ Then, lifting his head and turning to me with a flat smile, he added, ‘Ojalá.’

  I grinned and placed my hand on his shoulder. Despite his defeated air, he could still make gentle fun of my obsession – ojalá being the Spanish derivation of in sha’ Allah.

  ‘The most difficult thing,’ he said, lifting himself straight and turning towards me, ‘is facing everyone at home. I can’t return without any money. You think I can turn up with tales of farm work and those bastards who kept us locked up, and not bring back a single euro, a single dollar? It’s all shit. There, here. Wherever. I need work, money. Here there’s no work; there there’s no money.’

  ‘You seem to be having a good time, though,’ I said.

  ‘We have girls in Morocco, too,’ he said. ‘Pretty girls.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘OK, so here it’s easier to go to bed with them. But there are girls like that in Morocco too, if you want them. You know. You are just like me – standing there passing judgement, but you left home too. You have a foreign girl, not English. It’s different.’

  It was sometimes easy to forget we were both foreigners in this country, but each saw the other as less of an outsider than himself: in my eyes because he was Moorish, and for him because I was a Westerner. To me, Almería felt almost like an extension of Morocco, a foothold across the Mediterranean. Ferries with Arabic writing on them steamed in and out of the port; there were Moroccan tea-houses on the esplanade, a mosque in a first-floor flat, and North Africans crowding the streets heading down to the sea front. Yet it was also the least welcoming place I had ever come across in the whole time I had been in Spain, with its edgy atmosphere and empty landscape stripped bare. Nothing in this far south-eastern corner of the peninsula felt familiar to me; there was nothing I could identify with or warm to. It was Spain, and clearly Moorish, yet none of the things that normally appealed to me about Spain were evident, as though some vital element I had not yet identified was missing, noticeable only by its absence.
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  But Zine, so close as we were to Morocco, gazed mournfully out to sea, and felt as isolated as I did.

  ‘This is not my home; it never can be,’ he said. ‘Perhaps for you, but here I am foreign.’

  As we’d passed through villages on our way to Almería the day before, we’d seen headscarf-wearing women sitting on the steps of their houses, peeling almonds as they chattered in low voices and turning their faces away modestly as we’d slowed down to look. The faces in this part of Spain were dark, and many men who passed us in the street had widely set-apart eyes, like so many Berbers. In the countryside, agricultural co-operatives known as alhondigas worked the land, their name derived from an old Arabic word for corn exchange. At almost every turn there was the evidence I needed. But for Zine it was still, and always would be, Spain.

  I too felt foreign here, though, a country that looked up to and simultaneously disdained other cultures: from my hair colour and features it was obvious I was an outsider – not even from the north, where you often saw lighter skins and blue-green eyes. Accident of birth, childhood associations, being comfortable with what you knew – did ‘belonging’ ever account to more than this, though? We were both connected to, yet dislocated from, the land we were crossing.

  ‘Let’s go.’ Zine pulled himself away from the battlements and headed up the slope towards the keep, scuffing his shoes on the steps as he walked between decorative terracotta gutters. I stayed for a few minutes more, scanning the sea.

  ‘I’ve discovered something for you,’ he said, coming back to find me not much further on.

  I’d been watching the castle cats in operation. When first you saw them they quickly won your sympathy – all battered and skinny, with half-closed eyes as though almost blind. Who could refuse to pass on whatever crumbs he had in his pocket to such unfortunate creatures? But if you continued to watch them, once the tourists had walked on they quickly transformed into lively, healthy bundles of energy, racing up and down the hill in the undergrowth in search of playmates. A skill passed on from generation to generation, perhaps, and far more convincing than many of the human beggars I’d seen.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘This was a major silk and textiles centre under the Moors,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been talking to one of the gardeners.’

  ‘You’ve been talking to the gardeners?’

  ‘Yes. I thought they might have some work for me. But the man’s an idiot – thought I was some visiting professor from Casablanca, or something. So he starts telling me about the history and the Moors. Ha, ha.’

  ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘See those?’ I said, pointing to the cats now lazing underneath an oleander tree. ‘They’re tabbies. “Tabby” comes from the name of an old quarter of Baghdad where they made striped cloth, which used to be imported into Europe through this very port. Hence the name for stripy cats.’

  ‘OK. Well, I can tell you where the name Almería comes from.’

  ‘Where?’ I said. Our unexpected sparring match was bringing the colour back into his face, and his voice rose into his usual high-pitched sing-song. For the first time he seemed less than dismissive of my pet subject.

  ‘Al-miraya – the mirror.’

  The usual etymology given was that it came from the Arabic for watchtower – al-mariyya. But at that moment this new origin for the city’s name seemed more apt: grey as the sky was, the sea below had an almost silvery, mirror-like feeling to it.

  ‘There, you see?’ I said with a laugh. ‘It’s a reflection of Morocco, of North Africa.’

  ‘A reflection,’ he said. ‘Not the real thing.’

  CHAPIZ

  ‘Spain is essentially a Latin country. There’s far too much emphasis today on Al-Andalus and the Moors.’

  We were sitting in a 500-year-old Moorish house in Granada’s Albaicín quarter, the view from Camilo’s window dominated by the Alhambra on the hill opposite.

  ‘When I was a child, at school we hardly studied the Arab period of Spanish history at all. Now, though, they’ve forgotten about the Romans.’

  I was surprised by Camilo’s statement. I had expected a professor of Arabic history to be, if anything, a fan of his country’s Moorish past. But his comment reminded me of a number of other Arabists I’d met, who seemed to develop a curious hostility towards their chosen subject the further into their books they buried themselves. Like paparazzi, who always spoke with a peculiar venom when interviewed about the people they spent their lives taking pictures of.

  Camilo Alvarez de Morales was a former classmate of Pedro; they had studied Arabic together back in the sixties. Today, he held a post at the Escuela de Estudios Arabes, one of the most important centres of Islamic studies in the country. The building itself was an important piece of Granada’s Moorish past – the Casa del Chapiz sat at the far end of the Albaicín on the edge of the Sacromonte, the traditional Gypsy area, and was one of the oldest houses in the city. Built by an influential sixteenth-century Morisco merchant – Lorenzo el Chapiz – it was renovated in the early twentieth century by Leopoldo Torres Balbás, the same man who restored the Alhambra. In many ways it felt like a miniature version of the palace across the valley, with its delicate columns, tranquil gardens and Arabesques decorating high archways. A long rectangular pool flanked by myrtle bushes and covered in lilies was the centrepiece of the old courtyard below Camilo’s office.

  We sat inside, protected from the midday heat and humidity. Camilo, grey haired and moustached, appeared rather formal sitting behind his dark heavy desk, and a row of books propped on one side created a kind of double barrier between us as I sat on a chair opposite. It felt more like an interview than a chat with a friend of a friend with a common interest.

  ‘Some people talk about the end of Al-Andalus – the conquest of Granada – as a kind of national tragedy. But I’ll tell you what it would be like here today if Ferdinand and Isabel had never taken the city – it would be like Morocco.’

  He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  In his view, the Nasrids, the reigning dynasty of Moorish Granada, had essentially been decadent rulers. The Alhambra might have been a magnificent palace, but it was built at the same time as the European Renaissance was getting off the ground. The Moors in Spain by this point were in decline, and scientifically Granada had nothing to offer its Christian neighbours.

  I shuffled in my seat. Technically, perhaps, Moorish Granada was merely equal or inferior to late-medieval Spain, but the Alhambra was one of the most magical places I had ever visited, with a certain rare power to it. I wasn’t sure if anywhere in Christian Europe quite matched it – at best a handful of Gothic cathedrals came close. How could a culture that produced such a masterpiece be dismissed as merely ‘decadent’?

  When I asked him if Spain still resembled a Moorish country, his answer was dismissive.

  ‘We absorbed elements from the Arabs, but there wasn’t this marvellous co-existence between Muslims and Christians that’s been romanticized by some historians. We’re Europeans – Latins and Visigoths.’

  I noticed his use of the word ‘we’, but continued with my next question, as much as anything to see his reaction.

  ‘You don’t think of yourself as having Moorish blood at all?’

  ‘No,’ he said without a pause. ‘I study the history of Al-Andalus as an outsider.’

  ‘Like a biologist looking down his microscope,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Objectively. Scientifically.’

  Speaking to him was a stark contrast to being with Pedro, his old university friend. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that much was lost when you only looked at something down the end of a long metal tube, as he was proud to admit. Microscopes were all very well for seeing small things in detail, but how could an academic talk about the smell of a city, or expressions on faces, body language or the flavour of food? Or was it that, as Zine had said and now Camilo was suggesting, I was just a romantic?


  Feeling my way around the conversation, looking for a chink in the wall-like armour he seemed to have placed around himself, I asked Camilo about the mosque I’d seen earlier that morning being built on the crest of the Albaicín hill. Overlooking the Darro valley, it sat directly opposite the Alhambra.

  ‘No-one knows who’s behind it,’ he said with a note of annoyance in his voice. ‘I think the imam is Scottish.’ I laughed, but he didn’t appear to find it funny. ‘Some say Libyans are paying for it, but we don’t know. Sometimes the money runs out and it stays as it is for a few months, then the builders come back and it’s all go again. But its position on top of the Albaicín is a bit …’ He paused.

  ‘Provocative?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. It’s a statement. There are a lot more Arabs here now than there were, say, ten years ago.’

  I had noticed this as well. It was common to see veiled women on almost every street in the centre of town – a rarity only six or seven years beforehand.

  ‘What happens is Spanish converts to Islam marry Moroccans and then the whole family comes over. The numbers are increasing.’

  He looked uneasy. It seemed the professor of Arabic was not entirely pleased that Arabs were becoming more numerous in his home town.

  ‘We dedicate ourselves here to studying medieval history, though,’ he said quickly. ‘We’re not concerned with what’s happening today.’ It appeared we’d taken a wrong turn in our conversation.

  It seemed typical of the academic approach: a whole culture reduced to some minute aspect of the Arabic language, a forgotten poet, or a period of history buried in dusty books and under sand dunes. Very few seemed to have any living contact with the Arab world, and you wondered if some of them could even hold a proper conversation with an ordinary Arab, or whether, like the dons at Oxford who’d taught me, they studiously avoided ever having to speak the language. There were notable uncommon exceptions, but I often wondered if an academic environment might not actually be unsuitable for what it purported to be about: the collection and passing on of knowledge.