Spain, v. 2 (of 2)

by Edmondo De Amicis

"Now that you have seen all the marvels of Moorish art and tropical vegetation there remains the suburb of the Albaicin to be seen before you can say that you know Granada. Prepare your mind for a new world, put your hand on your purse, and follow me."

So said Gongora to me on the last evening of my sojourn in Granada. A Republican journalist was with us, Melchiorre Almago by name, the director of the Idea, a congenial, affable young man, who to accompany us sacrificed his dinner and a leading article that he had been cogitating since morning.

We walked on until we came to the square of the Audiencia. There Gongora pointed out an alley winding up a hill, and said to me, "Here commences the Albaicin;" and Señor Melchiorre, touching a house with his cane, added, "Here commences the territory of the republic."

We turned up the alley, passed from it into another, and from that into a third, always ascending, without my seeing anything extraordinary, although I looked curiously in every direction. Narrow streets, squalid houses, old women dozing on the doorsteps, mothers carefully inspecting their children's heads, gaping dogs, crowing cocks, ragged boys running and shouting, and the other things that one always sees in the suburbs; but in those streets nothing more. But gradually, as we ascended, the appearance of the houses and the people began to change; the roofs became lower, the windows fewer, the doors smaller, and the people more ragged. In the middle of every street ran a little stream in a walled gutter, in the Moorish style; here and there over the doors and around the windows one saw the remains of arabesques and fragments of columns, and in the corners of the squares fountains and well-curbs of the time of the Moorish dominion. At every hundred steps it seemed as if we had gone back fifty years toward the age of the caliphs. My two companions touched me on the elbow from time to time, saying as they did so, "Look at that old woman!"—"Look at that little girl!"—"Look at that man!" and I looked, and asked, "Who are these people?" If I had unexpectedly found myself in that place, I should have believed on seeing those men and women that I was in an African village, so strange were the faces, the dress, the manner of moving, talking, and looking, at so short a distance from the centre of Granada—so different were they from the people that I had seen up to that time. At every turn I stopped to look in the face of my companions, and they answered, "That is nothing; we are now in the civilized part of the Albaicin; this is the Parisian quarter of the suburb; let us go on."

We went on, and the streets seemed like the bed of a torrent—paths hollowed out among the rocks, all banks and gullies, broken and stony—some so steep that a mule could not climb them, others so narrow that a man could scarcely pass; some blocked by women and children sitting on the ground, others grass-grown and deserted; and all so squalid, wild, and uncouth that the most wretched of our villages cannot give one an idea of them, because this is a poverty that bears the impress of another race and another continent. We turned into a labyrinth of streets, passing from time to time under a great Moorish arch or through a high square from which one commanded a view of the wide valleys, the snow-covered mountains, and a part of the lower city, until finally we arrived at a street rougher and narrower than any we had yet seen; and there we stopped to take breath.

"Here commences the real Albaicin," said the young archeologist. "Look at that house!"

I looked; it was a low, smoke-stained, ruinous house, with a door that seemed like the mouth of a cavern, before which one saw, under a mass of rags, a group, or rather a heap, of old women and little children, who upon our approach raised their eyes heavy with sleep, and with bony hands removed from the threshold some filth which impeded our passage.

"Let us enter," said my friend.

"Enter?" I demanded.

If they had told me that beyond those walls there was a facsimile of the famous Court of Miracles which Victor Hugo has described, I should not have doubted their word. No door has ever said more emphatically than that, "Stand back!" I cannot find a better comparison than the gaping mouth of a gigantic witch breathing out pestilential vapors. But I took courage and entered.