Staircase, con’t

 

Previously.

Man on horseback

José Martinez Rioboó
Third and last of the three photographs from the book I found over Christmas in a carmen house in the barrio Realejo-San Matías, the old Jewish quarter at the foot of the Alhambra.

I think I remember this as taken in Almería – it might be Granada, east, in the mountains. It brings me forcefully back to the backcountry trails  in Ojai valley, in California, where I rode horseback at 13 – the burnt crests of the hills, the boulders. Going over the ridge. Hobbling horses to graze in pasture while you set up camp & got the water boiling.

The railroad bridge & the white suit remind you that it was taken in the early 1900s, and also why spaghetti westerns were later filmed out here – essentially replicating what this photograph captures as contemporary.

_

I read today an A.V. Club interview with Jim Jarmusch, who just finished his most recent film in Spain, of all places. (His fractured western, Dead Man, was one of my birthday presents this March, & it’s the only American movie I have here). And not just in Spain, but Andalucía:

I’ve always been madly in love with the city of Seville, and always wanted to shoot something there. The place is incredibly magical and visual, and has a lot of Moorish influence in its architecture. It’s where all that tilework comes from in Spain. There are balconies everywhere that are tiled underneath just for the visual pleasure of someone walking in the street. The streets are very narrow, and it has that weird tower of gold that we have in the film, which was colonial Spain’s warehouse of gold. It doesn’t even have doors; you had to get in by pulling a sailing ship up alongside it, and enter way above the line of the ground. It’s just a really amazing place, sort of central to Andalusian culture, flamenco culture. And then the south of Spain, where we shot outside of Almería, is where a lot of the spaghetti Westerns were shot. So the landscape is oddly familiar to me, even sort of semi-consciously, from biblical Hollywood epics that were shot there, and all the Italian Westerns that were shot there. So those things were drawing me. Spain entered the film and then kept pulling on me, even though the story could have been set in South America, or in Turkey or Mexico.

The tower of gold he mentions is the Torre del Oro, on the river Guadalquivir; there is also a Torre de la Plata (tower of silver), where the other precious metal from the conquest of the Americas was offloaded & stored.

Of course, nobody in Jaén would say something like this about Sevilla, because that would just encourage the sevillanos, & they’re already puffed up enough about their city as it is.

Albaycín staircase

I took a second walk up the vertical staircase in the Albaycín covered in graffiti when I was in Granada two weeks ago, part of the circuit I’m running, in my free weekends, around Andalucía one last time before my flight leaves out of Sevilla on June 2. This time, I took a few more pictures.

The ancient hillside neighborhood – a village unto itself, really – is supposed to have received its name when Moorish refugees from reconquered Baeza encamped in the hills above Granada. Baeza being a small city a half hour north of Jaén, briefly wealthy when its local families were in favor with the royal court; they left, as spent carapaces, a number of lovely Renaissance buildings. Squint and, through a linguistic process I can hear but can’t describe, the Arabic prefix al- gets added to baeza or baezín or bayyasa or bayyasín, and ends up as albaycín or albaicín or albayzín. There are Albaicíns scattered throughout Grenadino pueblos & nearby cities, presumably all refugee neighborhoods, peopled & named by the same flight.

Tourism, nineteen-fifteen

José Martinez Rioboó, ca. 1915.
“Grupo de socios del Centro Artístico en una visita a la Alhambra,”
Negativo estereoscópica sobre vidria (gelatino-bromuro) 45 x 107 mm.

_

When I was feverish in Granada over New Year’s with my family, I found a book of photographs taken by José Martinez Rioboó around the turn of the century. My sister had a digital camera; she took pictures of a few of the pages for me while I lay on the couch sweating & eating kiwis. (Digital replications of silver emulsions copied onto printed pages . . . )

There’s a whole chapter of photographs of the Alhambra before it was restored further – stones missing, leaning walls, birdnests, an abandoned ruin. It only became a thronging hive of digital cameras & images of crowds obscuring running water & mosaics relatively recently, in some ways thanks to Washington Irving, who was able to hole up in their for months & write Tales of the Alhambra – one of the myriad reasons why Andalucía has a perpetual tinge of exotic romanticism to Anglophones.

Belle Époque tourism seems like a tranquil affair, all said & done.

On a train to Ronda

Como viene la primavera -

Spring comes in Andalucía when the almond trees blossom. Small. White or pale pink. There are purple wildflowers in the countryside now. Grass grows between the rows of olives.

I have no pictures. You’re going to have to take my word for it.

The window: Views slide past without effort. When we cross into Málaga there are gorges, bulls grazing in grassy orchards. Three goatherders, old men in windbreakers, wave at the train.

I have never touched an olive tree. A friend tells me the leaves are velvety. I have never touched an olive tree. How have I never touched an olive tree?

See something every day & it feels familiar even if you don’t really know it.

A platform that is just a concrete shack, scabbing white paint, young peoples’ names carved into the walls. The oldest dated 18th of July, 1999.

There is nothing near the platform. Fields. A dirt road. A man gets off at the stop, starts walking.

Broken glass & old metal thrown by the tracks. Town: Setenil de las Bodegas.

The mountains above Granada (I am walking to the train station, two hours ago): sheathed in snow – blinding white, ice, in the sunlight, the clear blue sky, and below, walking through a park where a grandmother sits, squinting, dirt paths, pines, a man with grey dreads lighting up a bowl, you can see them & hear birdsong. I think of García Lorca:

El río Guadalquivir
va entre naranjos y olivos.
Los dos ríos de Granada
bajan de la nieve al trigo.

Granada again, briefly

i.

There is a stone & concrete staircase that descends vertically down one side of the Albaycín, the ancient neighborhood that looks over the entire city & across to the red, unremarkable, unadorned walls of the Alhambra (Moorish architecture, as in Roman architecture, as in much of the Mediterranean, reserves itself for interiors); it features some of the best graffiti in Granada, a city that in the face of all tourism preserves a shambling bohemianism that produces many good examples.

Most of it’s on the walls, & isn’t in this photograph (more film to come). But imagine, for a minutes, walking down the stairs in the morning with someone who lives in the place, who has heard you like photographing graffiti (I do), and is showing you this staircase, you’re looking at the walls – & then he says at the base of the stairs, Turn around, and you see that someone has painstakingly painted the front of every step so that it lines up & forms an image only if seen at the bottom, and that all that effort has been put forth to deliver a giant, cosmic FUCK YOU.

I had to smile.

ii.

Los pobres van a la ca’rcel / Los ricos al parlamento – Down the street from the fruit tree photographed below, a typical piece of political scrabbling on the walls: “The poor go to prison, the rich to parliament.”

Signed C.N.T., (the lower-case T has been made to resemble an anarchist A), which, at least in the years before the Civil War, was the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, an anarcho-syndicalist union founded in 1910; by the time the war began in ‘36, there were 1 million members. One of the oddest things about political graffiti in Spain is its recapitulation of decades-old political groups – on the walls, the Falange & the CNT are still at war.

iii.

Below, & to finish: a poor photograph of a part of the staircase, & the view behind me when I took it.

Pomegranates

The symbol of Granada is the fruit of the same name, the pomegranate, la granada, from which comes the liquor grenadino. Ensalada granada, a specialty of the city, is made with pomegranate seeds, walnuts, and a bitter four-leafed green, and I ate it for the first time the day before la Nochevieja, when I was there with my family, and ate as well pork in mozárabe sauce, thick & medieval, made with raisins & sesame seeds, and tortilla sacromonte, named after the famous clifftop barrio where gypsys live in swank caves and flamenco shows are filled to bursting with busloads of tourists; the tortilla is made with red peppers, sweetbreads, & brain.

Granada was the last Moorish kingdom in Al-Andalus to fall; the Alhambra, that red palace built upon ruins of itself, Romans entombed in the mountains, poetry inscribed in loops on the walls and ceilings, endlessly proclaiming the glory of God, was surrendered to the Reyes Cathólicos on the 2nd of January, 1492 by Boabdil, the boy king, who is reported to have wept upon leaving the city as his world fell down around him.

“Boabdil was a crybaby,” said an old, parchment-white man in a cream suit to me in English, in Boston, in the Central Sq. station on the Red Line, two months before I knew I’d be in Andalucía. He was blind; he stared at a point above my left shoulder, spoke in a dry, precise Castillan accent. “His uncle despised him.”

And indeed, popular legend has Boabdil’s mother rebuking him on the hill above his surrendered city, a refrain as apocryphal as the Spartan mother reported in Plutarch: “No llores como una mujer lo que no supiste defender como un hombre.” Don’t cry like a woman for what you didn’t know how to defend like a man.

Navidades, & el año nuevo

i.

The twelve days of Christmas, whose gifts given to the sweethearts of traditional English song are golden rings, and milkmaids, and partridges roosting in pear trees, begin on the day of the birth itself and last through the 6th of January, the Epiphany, celebrated in Spain as the Día de los Reyes, the day the three Parthian kings or sorcerers arrive bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, myrrh, & the day too that Spanish children are showered with brightly wrapped presents & swell the parks and avenues of the cities in the morning and the early afternoon, bundled adorably in woolen coats, proving out their jugetes.

If my 1º de ESO are any indication, kids receive money in colored envelopes, clothing, some kind of electronic gewgaw – mobile phones, or a Wii, or robotic dogs, or walkie talkies. Local news films parents painstakingly arranging the gifts that come from the imaginary los Reyes, a civic myth more enduring than the imported Santa Claus, with a lot of reassuring discourse: the crisis, our announcers report, has not dampened the inimitable spending power of the Three Kings, thank goodness, who continue buying expensive consumer goods & wrapping them shinily. This is followed always by street footage of the latest winners of the lotería de la Navidad, waving their tickets & spraying champagne into the air, surrounded by a cheering crowd of people from the barrio. Commercials advertise perfume & sparkling wine (cava).

The night before los Reyes there are parades throughout Spain – big illuminated floats & marching bands rolling through the main streets of Jaén, closed to traffic, Santa’s helpers & costumed childrens’ mascots throwing caramels & candies wrapped in wax paper by the handful from bottomless sacks into the crowds, people holding umbrellas upside-down to catch the sweets. The avenues are paved in confetti, colored plastic wrap, popped balloons, candy wrappers, noisemakers, and paper hats.

ii.

Something like 9/10 of Spain self-identifies as Catholic, even though a vanishingly small proportion are church-going. This gives an odd quality to religious expression in civic life, very different from the States: the iconography & trappings are everywhere & taken for granted; the actual practice is rare. Zapatero’s PSOE government (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), in power since 2004, has had an uneasy relationship with the Church, as socialists tend to, & there are murmurs here & there over, say, crucifixes hung in government elementary schools – articles in El País or El Mundo, for example, about religion in public life, or the subject cropping up parenthetically in casual conversation, so you know something’s going on even though you can’t quite say for sure what. While Feliz Navidad is what you say to the old woman whose stroller you carry up four flights of stairs in your apartment building, & while ‘Navidades’ are used to refer to the entire season (almost the equivalent of ‘holidays’ in English), you will occasionally see ‘Felices fiestas‘ in a store window.

Still & all, my instituto had in the lobby an enormous nativity scene, seen also in storefronts throughout Jaén, with hand-painted ceramic figurines of Nuestra Señora and the infant Christ and the Reyes Magos and some of the animals, decorated with wood chips & other trimmings the older students had done in art class & surrounded by colored electric lights. On some terraces in the pueblos hang red cloth banners, almost the quality of beach towels, imprinted with a cherub-like infant Christ, painted with the same loving hyperrealism of a day-glo portrait of Elvis on black velvet, raising two fingers in blessing, a halo around his head, and beneath the exclamation, ¡He Nacido! , roughly equivalent to “He is born!” – both share the characteristic grammar of Christianity, where the birth & death of the Christ are in the eternal present, his return always imminent.

Navidades are celebrated with jamón, sold as whole cured legs with the trotters still on, cava brut, paté, turrón, wines & cheeses, giant luxury fish, cakes, sweets, & magdelenas. A Christmas turkey is typically served. Santa Claus is well-known because of global capitalism – he tosses sweets out from the floats, between Disney princesses & soaring orchestral versions of Jingle Bells, or hangs, a plush miniature figure, off of a rope with his bag of toys, dangling from apartment terraces, as though he were trying to climb up.

iii.

On Christmas Eve I attended a Catholic mass in the cathedral of Sevilla, the third largest in the world, a massive & soaring Gothic-Baroque building built on the ruins of a mosque taken when the city was reconquered in 1248; the minaret tower & certain portions were preserved, the tower stripped & hung with bells inscribed with biblical verses. Inside, innumerable chapels dedicated to saints, & saints’ bones wrapped in red cloth in the sacristy tied with string, with the name written on a small label & sealed with wax & mounted in a glass & gold.

The high altar was behind a high iron cage, and there were folding chairs out to either side of the pews for Christmas crowds, and for the tourists, which were many – French, southeast Asian, Italian, English, some Americans, from what I could see. The bishop sang the mass, & there was no choir, & the whole thing was mostly conducted in vernacular Spanish, the liturgy & structure roughly the same as the High Anglican [Episcopalian] service I was used to. The Nicene Creed, for example, was note-for-note the same – a strange feeling, to say the least, sitting on a folding chair in that cavernous buttressed nave, lit up by electric lights, listening to a Spanish bishop sing the same song I’d fallen asleep to as a four year-old in Michigan.

The mishmash of ancient Hebrew, old Greek, & Sumerian translated into Vulgate Latin translated into King James’ English is what, unavoidably, I think of when I think of the Word of God, so I felt a shock of almost Brechtian alienation to hear a different language retranslate translation into the vernacular. It’s all wrong, you kneejerk unconsciously, and then catch yourself.

Spanish, for instance, doesn’t distinguish between ‘meat’ & ‘flesh’ – it is all carne, and the Word Made Flesh is la Palabra hecho carne, the word made meat. ‘Our Lord’ comes out as Señor, the most basic term of address. The word for ‘people’ strikingly, is pueblo, which means not just the town, but a people, a nation, a comprehensive & communal group linked by mutual responsibility & obligation. “The people of God” becomes “el pueblo del Dios” (‘We the people’ in the U.S. Constitution becomes Nosotros, el pueblo de los Estados Unidos), so that there is an identification at the basic, root, moral center of the godly language with the village, and not the City, of God. There is no such word in a Spanish Catholic mass as elevated as mankind. We are all hombre, man at the most basic. The language of the mass as a whole seemed more stripped-down & everyday than that of the Anglican English, words at their simplest, without the archaic flavor of, for instance thee and thou, or forgive their trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I have a feeling of real communion, even though I don’t take it (being Protestant, after everything), seeing European & Asian & scattered world Catholics, rise, separated by language and culture and history, to take a communion wafer, and I reflect on the enduring power of this institution, the Church, even still. There are many tourists in the arcades & in the nave. We are made embarrassed by an old Spanish man, in a faded cardigan & three-day stubble & glasses behind us, who carries a black, well-thumbed hymnal & knows the words & responses & is the only one in this section of folded chairs singing back to the bishop.

iv.

You return to a city you visited once a different person, in a different capacity, & it’s like coming back to a completely different city – one that, even more disorientatingly, has the same important landmarks, has fragments that out of the unfamiliar will leap out at you & be suddenly, unmistakably home, in the midst of the rest of things, which have unfolded in a slightly different way & rendered themselves strange. The city you live in & the city you visit in a four-star hotel with your entire family & the city you bum through with a ragged crew of students and expatriates & the city you are shown by someone who grew up there are not the same city. Jaén during la Fería de San Lucas*, and Jaén shivering under the wet, slick onslaught of late November rains*, and Jaén* at the Navidad are three different places, and it seems to me you don’t know a place until you’ve seen it in all seasons, and maybe not even then.

v.

I ate two Christmas comidas this year. The first, the instituto’s Christmas dinner (lunch doesn’t quite serve, even though it started at 3; think of it as a Sunday dinner) was a prix fixe, four-hour affair before the break in a typical (there’s that Spanish again: típico) restaurant in the pueblo, el Mirador, with a private dining room & panoramic views of the infinite multitude of olive groves in fruit below the snowcapped Sierra Máginas & old rural tools, butter churns, ploughs, saddles, hanging from the ceiling or mounted decoratively in the corner. There were endless bottles of house rioja, & a succession of platters in the center of the table: a variety of cured hams, aged manchego, whole prawns, fried calamari, croquettes, four different kinds of olives, other bits & pieces, before the main plates arrived – chops of pork, a cut of beef, or fish, if I remember correctly. Every place setting had a full set of silverware, a wine glass, a beer glass, and a small loaf of bread wrapped in cloth, set to the left, which in Spain is practically a utensil.

A teacher had brought his guitar & made photocopies of the lyrics to villancicos, Spanish Christmas carols, which are adapted from popular preindustrial working songs (villancico comes from the same root as villain, or villager) – peasant hymns, harvest songs, centuries old, appropriated & laden with religious lyrics. A classroom full of my children taught me “Los Peces en el Río” (the musical characteristics of your typical villancico are, for lack of better English words, unmistakably flamenco in rhythm, the melody Moorish or gítano or Iberian).

American carols: I’d taught them “Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town,” written in 1934 for the NBC variety show, “The Chase & Sandborn Hour,” led by the famed comic Eddie “Banjo Eyes” Cantor, & “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” made up five years later by an ad man working the Montgomery Ward department store account.

Afterwards: flan, café, cigarettes, obscene improvised flamenco songs about people from Cadíz, chupetos of dark, sweet rum, and dense, nutty cakes wrapped in wax paper with white frosting & cinnamon.

My second comida, on Christmas day, was with the family, at the impossibly posh five-star Hotel Alfonso XIII in Sevilla, built over ten years and finished in 1929, with its glassed-in atrium, its vaulted dining room, the mix of Moorish & romanesque or Gothic motifs common in newly Catholic Spain between the 13th and 17th centuries and in vogue again at the end of the 19th. There, again, a small loaf of bread wrapped in cloth at every place setting, and again, a fixed menu for the holiday. A different wine paired with exquisite precision to each course. The prices had been lowered, slightly, to accommodate the crisis. I wore a tie. I never go out to eat in restaurants in Spain; in this, too, the city is different when your family comes, knowing no Spanish, and suddenly you are a group of 6, & sitting down at siesta. You can barely squeeze everyone in at the bodega de Santa Cruz, where, in the grand & overwritten tradition of Sevillano tapas bars, they really do chalk up your tab on the wood bartop with a kind of wet nub of chalk, lines splitting the clusters of people crowded around the cups of wine or beer, so that the bar is segmented radially, like a sundial.

vi.

I had a fever at New Year’s, in Granada, where the graffiti is cryptic & the interior of the cathedral is painted a blinding white in place of bare stone. But fever & all, I still found myself on a street off the end of the Gran Vía, running past the Reyes Católicos seated on their marble throne dedicated to Columbus, running because everyone else was running, towards the plaza de Carmen, so that we wouldn’t miss the New Year.

My black oxfords seasoned with champagne & confetti & broken glass. Cinders from the low rooftop fireworks in my hair. Having dodged corks, a bottle in everyone’s hand, going off with their hollow, muted pops at the start of the New Year, champagne spraying through the air. In Spain you eat grapes for luck (uvas de suerte), one for every toll of the bell striking twelve. There is no countdown. The night is not New Year’s Eve, but la Nochevieja, the Old night, and you do not shout the seconds until the new tips over & supplants the old – you swallow the last twelve tolls of the bell, the indeterminate place in between the ending & the beginning, the moment that midnight has struck but before it is finished striking, the moment of suspension. There’s no countdown – it’s a sendoff, not a waiting game.

In the plaza, there, packed with people, all of them holding a bottle of champagne & a handful of grapes, we didn’t even hear the bells. Nobody did. We started eating grapes, the seeds in, swallowing them anyway, when the champagne corks started to pop, & by the time we were done & drinking champagne the fireworks had started & they were exploding so low you could feel the heat. Me, black tie, sweating out my fever, seeds in my teeth, I had a swallow of cava with everyone else – ten days with my family & my Spanish had already depreciated, I was thinking in English – and I took in that familiar & unfamiliar city, Granada, the city that had been new before & would be new to me again, and I still don’t know what the new year’s going to bring or where I’m going, I think I know less than I did when I came here, if that’s possible, but still and all:

When you come back to school after the New Year you are greeted by every single teacher you see with a handshake or a hug or a kiss on the cheek, you take your coffee with them & they pay, as per usual, and they wish you & you wish them in return, “Feliz año nuevo.” This – you can’t help yourself – this feels like a homecoming, too.