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 her 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