Virgin Spain

by Waldo David Frank

So, within Córdoba, stands and lives today the Idea of Islam. Though the Spaniards call it a Cathedral, it is still the Mesjid al-Jâmi, open to the fountains and the naranjeros, open to the skies. It is a place whose spirit in racing columns bespeaks the horizontal swarm of Islam to the ends of Spain. Islam speaks; and Córdoba, which is far more than Islam, answers. The Córdoban streets press and swerve to the north of the Mosque. They are a compact of stresses doubly held together: the Guadalquivir turning back upon itself and the rim of mountains in whose heights still live the fertile prayers of hermits, hold the streets.

Córdoban streets are not like those of Fez, of the Kasbah of Algiers, of Lisbon. Fez, within its translucent hills and vales, swarms like the entrails of a body. Algiers mounts sinister from the gleaming sea, its streets a blackened coil within the white sepulcher that strikes the sun. Old Lisbon is explosive, gyrant, tragically repressed in its march upward, losing the sky as it comes closer to it. Córdoba is proud. Its pride is intricate as the Talmud; hard and abstruse as the mystic creed of the Sufi; open as a page of Aristotle. This eye that is Córdoba is neither secret nor flinching. And its pride is not willful. Córdoba is unassertive. Its light speaks for it: Seneca the Stoic, Averroës the Commentator, Moses ben Maimun first rationalist of the Jews, Lucan, and Spain’s greatest lyric poet, Luis de Góngora ... such are the light of Córdoba. It is the home of the most perfect Arab Knight, the quiet Al-Mansor who, ruling Spain, decreed Sunday to be a day of rest in deference to the Christians.

Córdoba lies within tumultuous mountains and a lazy river. It is a poise of mountains and river. It is a kingly city within chaos; it is masculine in a feminine land. The Christian Copts brought their woman worship to Seville; the gypsies found haven in Granada for their Black Sea spells. Córdoba forbids such fascinations. It is quiet as its river, dense as its mountains, open as its mosque. The streets turn just enough to throw shade to the patios. Ox-teams survive, yet splash no mud on the immaculate walls. Here a miracle of life has overtaken the lunge and death of Islam: here grew a kingdom of balance and of peace.

For Córdoba is not the rock of Seneca, not the intellectual play of Averroës and Maimonides, not the deep current underneath of mystical devotion. Córdoba is the balance, and the contemplation, of all its parts.

. . . . . .

The summer night is cool as wisdom; it is a poise against day like that of Seneca the Stoic against the fever of life. When the sun falls behind the roofs, the town opens as northern towns with the dawn. Day indeed is often fiery night on Córdoba. The good folk have gone to bed; houses have been swathed to keep this white night out. Now, houses are opened wide. Air from the world is permitted to come in to the shut courts where geese patter and women seat themselves at looms.

The people are dark and silent like the dusk. The sky is pale with a glow of convalescence. The houses, serried in the curving streets, are hot. The evening has a magic, it throbs and swells with tacit fervors. The whole of Córdoba is quick under the glow of night. The stone streets are flesh, willfully rigid, of a spirit possessed with the desire to dance. And in the dance are darker intimations: cries, ravage, conquest. But the slow streams of men and women are the sole expression. Are they puritans, then, these Andalusians? They wear easeful masks for faces. The women are clad in black, and their soft flesh within the shrouds seems not the flesh of lovers but of matrons. Even the girls, sinuous walking lilies, promise a snare of momentary passion: their will of men is not to be initiates of love, but to be mothers. All is easeful—the masks on the faces, the dark women’s weeds. They have been worn so long! They are like the streets whose stones are mellow and whose curves and windings have the fatality of forest paths. If these be puritans, these men and women, with their heritage of war, privation, pioneering—they whose ancestry is Islam, the Cross, the promised Zion—long since has the hard fruit ripened. They are firm and condignly whole within their city whose maze of streets is whole within the mountains....

This evening, Córdoba, released from day, is going to the Bull-Ring. There is no moon; the bowl of the arena holds a winey night in which the stars are bubbles of effervescence. The seat tiers are deep. Men and women clamber noisily from perch to perch. But the thousand voices and footbeats are segregate and aloof within the Ring holding this wine of the night. Upon one side, the seats have been roped off and are empty. Below hang two electric lamps and cast their naked glare upon a stage improvised with unpainted planks. The stage is a little tongue thrust into the arena.

The crowd has come and paid for a good time. But it is self-sufficient—the strong willed, resourceful crowd of Spain. Myriad calls and shreds of laughter, play of hand and foot twine about the Ring: agglutinate: the groups of clamor thicken and grow wider: the entire Ring is joined in the enterprise of shouting, shuffling, clapping. No Spaniards blackening the tiers, but this one sudden Spain! It has many means of making itself live. Boys scurry over the laps of matrons: men sing falling cadences to girls: babies shout. The aguero with an earth-jar large as himself, the vendor of pastas and of Arabic sweetmeats, weave through the mass. But still the Bowl holds its uncanny silence. The night bubbles at its brim.