I’ve
just read Washington Irving’s Tales of
the Alhambra. It’s a pity I couldn’t have done it on one of my visits to
Granada; there are special pleasures in what Anne Fadiman calls “You-Are-There”
reading in one of the delightful essays in her Ex Libris. As in his
breakout book The Sketch Book, Irving
continues to use Geoffrey Crayon as his pseudonym in these sketches, which he
started on the way from Madrid to Granada (“The Journey”), continued while he
was allowed by the governor of the Alhambra to live within the mostly-shut-up
palace (“Important Negotiations. The Author Succeeds to the Throne of Boabdil”)
and finished in London while he served as a member of the United States legation
there.
The
narrator attempts to explain the situation and relation of the Generalife, the
Tower of Comares, the Court of the Lions, the Gate of Justice, and the other
buildings and spaces in the Alhambra, but even with a map (which he does not
provide) these relationships are difficult to hold in the mind.
From a
balcony of his apartments, the narrator could watch street scenes below in the
Albaicín section of the city. Like Virginia Woolf when she observed her fellow
travelers on a train, he would make up stories about what he saw. He compares
himself to the observer in Le Sage’s Asmodeus:
or the Devil on Two Sticks or his Spanish source, who “beheld all Madrid
unroofed for his inspection.” Unfortunately, his cicerone Mateo Ximenes, whom he compares to Asmodeus in the story,
tends to have the facts which, Irving writes, “put my fictions all to flight.”
Looking
at “The Court of Lions” from the Hall of the Abencerrages, the narrator muses
about scenes there, imagining Ferdinand and Isabella celebrating mass after the
reconquest and receiving Christopher Columbus. An old Moor tells him the fall
of Granada was caused by Boabdil’s treachery and that the Moors of Barbary will
once again take their rightful place in Granada. “The Abencerrages,” some of
whom were supposedly slaughtered at a fountain nearby in the hall named after
them, were a group with long Arab lineage who defended one faction in the struggle
among Moors for supremacy in Granada.
I
thought, until I read Tales of the
Alhambra, that my habit of rubbing my wet face with a bar of soap in
preparation for shaving, instead of lathering up with a brush, was a habit
peculiar to me, but Irving says it was the practice of Spanish barbers.
Many of
the tales are similar to the Arabian Nights stories. For example, a Moorish
king of Granada is assisted by an Arabian astrologer as venal and grasping as
himself to guard the kingdom from invasion. When the threat comes in the form
of a beautiful Christian girl, each of the two graybeards wants her for
himself. This legend purports to explain the mysterious key and hand symbols in
the arch of the Gate of Justice, and it is supplied to the narrator by Mateo,
as are indeed a number of the tales.
One tale
unusual in its lack of magic tells of a mason summoned by an old miser each
night to hide his gold in a brick compartment under a fountain. When the miser
dies and the mason is summoned by the landlord of the property containing the
fountain, the mason becomes the secret inheritor of the gold.
Rambling
the hills, the narrator is told by his “squire” Mateo the story of a gatherer
of snow and ice from the Sierra, Tio Nicolo, who is astonished to see the city
he has just left turned into a Moorish town with mosques and minarets and
cupolas topped with crescents, instead of the familiar churches and other
buildings he expected. After he and his mule are knocked down a hill by a
ghostly Moorish army bearing away the Grand Inquisitor of Granada, he returns
and finds the city as he left it, and the Inquisitor dies within the year.
In his
ramblings, Irving pieces together the story of the Galician water carrier who
helps a dying Moor and is rewarded with the secret of opening the treasure
vaults beneath the Tower of the seven Floors. He and the Moor who interprets
the dying man’s scroll help themselves to the treasure, and when a grasping
alcalde attempts to impede them, he finds himself enchanted and locked up with
the remainder of the treasure.
There is
romance in all senses in the tales: “The Pilgrim of Love” is a young man raised
with only a tutor for company because of an astrologer’s prediction that he
will be at peril because of an “amorous temperament.” He learns about love from
the flowers and the birds, one of whom puts him in contact with the similarly
mewed-up Princess Albondigas, or some such name. Magic armor and an enchanted
horse enable him to defeat all her other suitors; then a magic carpet allows
the pair to escape. The love interest in the tales continues in the frame story
of the narrator’s visit: at its end Dolores, the Palace housekeeper’s daughter,
is preparing to marry the narrator’s guide, Mateo.
The Thousand and One Nights and a Night
is an obvious model for Irving’s mostly marvelous tales about flying carpets
and horses enchanted into statues until a magic word brings them alive. But he
does not elaborately link the tales or nestle one within another as in the
Arabian stories. Instead he lets the Alhambra itself generate them. Irving,
either by taking a hint from a local legend or just making it up out of while
cloth, invents a story for each of the spaces of the place—the Generalife, the
Court of Lions, the Lindaraja, the Gate of Justice, and so on. His prose has
aged well and the tales go down like a good rosado
of low alcoholic content, smoothly, or better perhaps, like the water whose
purity and abundance the original builders of the Alhambra so prized.
