At Any Rate, We Were So Far From Tired That
After Luncheon We Walked To The Garden Of The Generalife, And Then
Walked All Over It.
The afternoon was of the very mood for such a visit,
and we passed it there in these walks
And bowers, and the black cypress
aisles, and the trees and vines yellowing to the fall of their leaves.
The melancholy laugh of water chasing down the steep channels and
gurgling through the stone rails of stairways was everywhere, and its
dim smile gleamed from pools and tanks. In the court where it stretched
in a long basin an English girl was painting and another girl was
sewing, to whom I now tardily offer my thanks for adding to the charm of
the place. Not many other people were there to dispute our afternoon's
ownership. I count a peasant family, the women in black shawls and the
men wearing wide, black sashes, rather as our guests than as strangers;
and I am often there still with no sense of molestation. Even the reader
who does not conceive of a garden being less flowers and shrubs than
fountains and pavilions and porches and borders of box and walls of
clipped evergreens, will scarcely follow me to the Generalife or outstay
me there.
The place is probably dense with history and suffocating with
association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where my
own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a
summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but
otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which it might photograph
itself without blurring any earlier record. This, perhaps, is why I love
so much to dwell there on that never-ending afternoon of late October.
It was long past the hour of its summer bloom, but the autumnal air was
enriching it beyond the dreams of avarice with the gold which prevails
in the Spanish landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could look
out of its yellowing bowers over a landscape immeasurable in beauty. Of
course, we tried to master the facts of the Generalife's past, but we
really did not care for them and scarcely believed that Charles V. had
doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who had it from Ferdinand of
Aragon, and so withheld it from his heirs for four generations until
they could ripen to a genuine Christianity at Genoa, whither they
withdrew and became the patrician family now its proprietors. The arms
of this family decorate the roof and walls of the colonnaded belvedere
from which you look out over the city and the plain and the mountains;
and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many places, but
otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian as the noble Pallavicini
who possess it. There were plenty of flower-beds, box-bordered, but
there were no flowers in them; the flowers preferred standing about in
tall pots. There was an arbor overhung with black forgotten grapes
before the keeper's door and in the corner of it dangled ropes of
fire-red peppers.
This detail is what, with written help, I remember of the Generalife,
but no loveliness of it shall fade from, my soul. From its embowered and
many-fountained height it looks over to the Alhambra, dull red, and the
city wall climbing the opposite slope across the Darro to a church on
the hilltop which was once a mosque. The precipice to which the garden
clings plunges sheer to the river-bed with a downlook insurpassably
thrilling; but the best view of the city is from the flowery walk that
runs along the side of the Alcazaba, which was once a fortress and is
now a garden, long forgetful of its office of defending the Alhambra
palace. From this terrace Granada looks worthy of her place in history
and romance. We visited the Alcazaba after the Generalife, and were very
critical, but I must own the supremacy of this prospect. I should not
mind owning its supremacy among all the prospects in the world.
XI
Meanwhile our shining hotel had begun to thrill with something besides
the cold which nightly pierced it from the snowy Sierra. This was the
excitement pending from an event promised the next day, which was the
production of a drama in verse, of peculiar and intense interest for
Granada, where the scene of it was laid in the Alhambra at one of the
highest moments of its history, and the persons were some of those
dearest to its romance. Not only the company to perform it (of course
the first company in Spain) had been in the hotel overnight, and the
ladies of it had gleamed and gloomed through the cold corridors, but the
poet had been conspicuous at dinner, with his wife, young and beautiful
and blond, and powdered so white that her blondness was of quite a
violet cast. There was not so much a question of whether we should take
tickets as whether we could get them, but for this the powerful
influence of our guide availed, and he got tickets providentially given
up in the morning for a price so exorbitant I should be ashamed to
confess it. They were for the afternoon performance, and at three
o'clock we went with the rest of the gay and great world of Granada to
the principal theater.
The Latin conception of a theater is of something rather more barnlike
than ours, but this theater was of a sufficiently handsome presence, and
when we had been carried into it by the physical pressure exerted upon
us by the crowd at the entrance we found its vastness already thronged.
The seats in the orchestra were mostly taken; the gallery under the roof
was loud with the impatience for the play which the auditors there
testified by cries and whistlings and stampings until the curtain
lifted; the tiers of boxes rising all round the theater were filled with
family parties.
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