Spain, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

"There! that is enough!" cried his friends.

But the young man, who already felt that he had become suddenly strong, keen, and confident, cast a compassionate glance at his companions, and with a lordly gesture ordered the waiter to fetch him another glass.

"You will be drunk," they said.

His only response was to drain a second glass.

Then he became wonderfully talkative. There was a score of persons at table: in a few minutes he was conversing with them all, and he revealed a thousand secrets of his past life and his plans for the future. He said that he was from Cadiz, that he had eight thousand francs a year to spend, and that he wished to devote himself to a diplomatic career, because with that revenue, added to something which his uncle would leave him, he should be able to cut a good figure wherever he might be; that he had decided to take a wife at thirty, and to marry a woman as tall as himself, because it was his opinion that the wife should be of the same stature as her husband, to keep either from getting the upper hand of the other; that when he was a boy he was in love with the daughter of an American consul as beautiful as a flower and strong as a pine, but she had a red birth-mark behind one ear, which looked badly, although she knew how to cover it very well with her scarf, and he showed us with his napkin how she covered it; and that Don Amadeus was too ingenuous a man to succeed in governing Spain; that of the poets Zorilla and Espronceda, he had always preferred Espronceda; that it would be folly to cede Cuba to America; that the examination on canon law made him laugh; and that he wished to drink another four fingers of Xerez, the finest wine in Europe.

He drank a third glass in spite of the good counsel and disapprobation of his friends, and after prattling a little longer amid the laughter of his audience, he suddenly became silent, looked fixedly at a lady sitting opposite to him, dropped his head, and fell asleep. I thought that he could not present himself for the examination that day, but was mistaken. A short hour later they awakened him; he went up stairs to wash his face, ran off to the university still drowsy, took his examination, and was promoted, to the greater glory of the wine of Xerez and Spanish diplomacy.

I devoted the following days to visiting the monuments, or, to be more accurate, the ruins of the Moorish monuments which besides the Alhambra and the Generalife attest the ancient splendor of Granada. Insomuch as it was the last bulwark of Islam, Granada is the city which presents the most numerous relics of all the cities of Spain. On the hill called the hill of Dinadamar (the Fountain of Tears) one may still see the ruins of four towers rising at the four corners of a great cistern into which flowed the waters from the Sierra to supply the highest part of the city. There were baths, gardens, and villas of which not a trace remains: from that point one overlooked the city with its minarets, its terraces, and its mosques gleaming among the palms and cypresses. Near there one sees a Moorish gate called the gate of Elvira—a great arch crowned with battlements—and beyond it are the ruins of the palaces of the caliphs. Near the Alameda promenade stands a square tower in which there is a great hall ornamented with the usual Arabian inscriptions. Near the convent of San Domingo are the remains of gardens and palaces once joined to the Alhambra by a subterranean passage. Within the city is the Alcaiceria, a Moorish market almost perfectly preserved, formed of a few little streets as straight and narrow as corridors, lined with two rows of shops, one adjoining the other, and presenting the strange appearance of an Asiatic bazaar. In short, one cannot take a step in Granada without coming face to face with an arch, an arabesque, a column, or a pile of stones which suggests its fantastic, luxurious past.

What turns and windings have I not made through those tortuous streets at the hottest hour of the day, under a sun that shrivelled my brain, without meeting a living soul! At Granada, as in the other cities of Andalusia, the people are alive only at night, and the night repays them for the imprisonment of the day; the public promenades are crowded and confused by the hurry and jostling of a multitude, one half of which seems to be seeking the other half upon urgent business. The crowd is densest in the Alameda, but, for all that, I spent my evenings on the Alameda with Gongora, who talked to me of Moorish monuments, and with a journalist who discoursed on politics, and also with another young man who talked of women, and frequently with all three of them together, to my infinite pleasure, because those cheery meetings, like those of school-boys, at odd times and places, refreshed my mind, to steal a beautiful simile, like a summer shower refreshes the grass as it falls faster and faster, dancing for joy.

If I were obliged to say something about the people of Granada, I should be embarrassed, because I have not seen them. In the day-time I met no one in the streets, and at night I could not see them. The theatres were not open, and when I might have found some one in the city I was wandering through the halls or avenues of the Alhambra; and then I had so much to do to see everything in the short time which I had allowed myself that no unoccupied moments remained for those chance conversations, like the ones I had in the other cities, in the streets and the cafés, with whomever I happened to meet.

But from what I learned from men who were in a position to give me trustworthy information, the people of Granada do not enjoy an enviable reputation in Spain. They are said to be ill-tempered, violent, vindictive, and bloodthirsty; and this arraignment is not disproved by the pages of the city newspapers. It is not publicly stated, but every one knows it for a fact, that popular instruction in Granada is at a lower ebb than even in Seville and the other smaller Spanish cities, and, as a rule, everything that cannot be produced by the sun and the soil, which produce so bountifully, goes to the bad, either through indolence or ignorance or shiftlessness. Granada is not connected by railway with any important city: she lives alone, surrounded by her gardens, enclosed by her mountains, happy with the fruits which Nature produces under her hand, gently lulling herself to sleep in the vanity of her beauty and the pride of her history—idle, drowsy, and fanciful, content to answer with a yawn to any one who reproves her for her condition: "I gave Spain the painter Alonzo Cano, the poet Louis de Leon, the historian Fernando de Castillo, the sacred orator Luis di Grenada, and the minister Martinez de la Rosas. I have paid my debt, leave me in peace;" and this is the reply made by almost all the southern cities of Spain, more beautiful, alas! than wise and industrious, and proud rather than civilized. Ah! one who has seen them can never have done exclaiming, "What a pity!"