Tales of the Alhambra

            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.