Spring light

Last December, I took a photograph of the blue & white checked plaza I walked through on the way to the bus station every morning, talked about the quality of the light. I carried my camera through again in early April. By now the sun is so bright in Andalucía it’s become impossible to walk outside at midday without dark glasses, & the heat transforms the air, & the white buildings are made brilliant by it. It becomes impossible to imagine that it was ever any other way – as now, in Boston, it is becoming impossible to imagine that I was ever in Spain.

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.

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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.

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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.

Painted tile

Front of a stair, garden park (I can’t remember which), Sevilla.

Mosaic fountain in Las Casas de la Juderia, a hollowed-out city block of terraces, atriums, & underground passageways turned hotel in the barrio de Santa Cruz.

Window column, the Alcazar. The palace is still occasionally used by the Spanish royal family as a residence.

Marking time

I like the sundial painted onto the façade of this strikingly-colored church in Sevilla. And the way that the radial gaps between the hours have been warped to account for way the sunlight strikes the building.

I’m marking time, too; only a little more than a month left in Jaén, which seems like no time at all. The usual tightening in my throat, the crowded feeling, the listmaking – what things, undone, can I still finish? What promises to myself can I still fulfill? How much can be fit into four weeks?

I still don’t know if I’ll be able to come back here next year to teach again. I’ll know in a week & a half.

Absence

Sometimes, after having been traveling & then sick, not having written enough in either condition, it’s hard to start again on the big things you’ve charged yourself to write, and their incompletion stops up your throat & leaves you unable to write anything at all.

So it helps to start with the small stuff. Do you know that the way someone will wave you closer in Jaén looks almost exactly like a shooing-away gesture? It is the damndest thing.

A week ago, Semana Santa: I stood underneath a rain of flower petals – a shower of them, rose petals, carnations, others innumerable, flowers I did not know the names for, red or stained white or yellow, in ankle-high heaps, children clutching them out of the sky or scooping them into bags, old men throwing them by handfuls at women, flower petals in my hair, my mouth, between my neck and my collar.

Then they went into José Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

- One Hundred Years of Solitude
(Cien años de soledad), p. 144

I thought to myself then that I understood better García Marquez when he said he did not set out to write magical realism, that he’d intended instead to render the world in writing as accurately as he could, exactly how it was.

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.