Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (58 page)

Seville! The injustices of reputation have little foundation: Shun, then, the famous Street of the Serpents, where there was once a celebrated flamenco café called El Burrero. . . . Shun even the
manzanilla,
that sherry so famous yet so oily and unlovable; shun, even if you are drawn to the bullfights, the
toreros
outside the ring. But worship, in ecstatic wonder, to the delight of your inner kingdom, the gardens of the Alcázar, as in Aranjuez, as in magical Granada. Of all the things my eyes have looked upon, one of those that has left the greatest mark upon my spirit is those cool, delightful retreats. Neither the moldy, ages-old walls of the city, which still attest the ancient power of the Roman conquerors, nor the remains of the Visigoths, nor the svelte Mauritanian Giralda, whose name delights like a flag snapping in the wind, nor the Tower of Gold on the banks of the river, nor the magnificences of the Alcázar, which stir in my memory the sensations I experienced in the Alhambra in Granada—nothing, nothing has made me meditate and dream like these gardens that have seen so many sights of historical grandeur, so many mysteries, and so many voluptuous encounters. And the culprit for all this wonder is, in large part, that Don Pedro who had so much of the Don Juan about him.

When one enters, to one side of the galleries that bear the name of that strange monarch who understood the beauties of the Moors, who was so very Eastern, so very much like the Haroun al-Raschid of the Arabian Nights, the first thing that will move one is the softest of silences, disturbed—if disturbed can be said of such a calming sound—by the burbling of a fine stream of water falling from a vessel into the broad pool of greenish water. The soft breeze stirs the leaves of two large magnolias. And among the rose gardens and the myrtles, two terraced lawns descend, and one glimpses what is called “the baths of María de Padilla.” There is a long pool, under a canopy of low Gothic arches. That is all. But what does it matter? Painters have tried to revive the sensual chapter of that beautiful novel of life. Let yourself be seduced by your imagination. Do you not hear the singing of the birds of spring? Do you not see the monarch as he approaches through the garden’s luxuriant new flowers? Do you not hear the sound of the transparent water in which the pink body of the royal mistress makes diamond circles all around her? She laughs, and the hard king smiles. Nearby, there are white doves with plumage that the light makes iridescent, and a peacock, dressed in gala finery, displays his gems, like a vizier from the East. That,
that,
is the enchantment of Seville.

Farther on you will enter the garden of the Grotto, and there the myrtles form a famous, childlike maze, and in a rustic pavilion, under a strange vault, you will find a white statue of two women joined at the back—the four breasts pour forth four streams of water. A decorative Neptune greets you in the Grand Garden, as it is called, and in the Garden of the Lions there are, indeed, leonine beasts: HIC SUNT LEONES. It is here that the circular garden of the caesarian Carlos V is still preserved. Here, among the marbles and polychrome tiles and intricately carven wood screens, the imperial eagles preserve the pride and nobility of their attitudes, and they recall the much-faded presence of the proud—even arrogant—sovereign.

When you leave, you will take with you an ineffaceable impression. . . .

There in the church of the charity hospital, I have bowed before illustrious names—names of mosaic-makers, painters, and sculptors: Murillo, for one, multiplied in excellent works, such as a Child Jesus, leaning on the world, all grace, and a Moses in which Bartolomé Esteban has demonstrated that celestial softness and sweet brush strokes do not prevent one, when one is determined, from striking a note of forcefulness. And then the realistic, macabre Valdés Leal, singing in the sculpted rhymes of Gautier, renewing in more than one painting the triumph of death and the cadaverous visions of the frescos of the Pisan burial ground.

A certain chronicler tells us that Murillo, seeing decomposition painted in so deathlike a manner upon a coffin, turned to the artist and said, “My friend, people will have to hold their nose when they look at this.” But pass on to the sacristy. Do not stop at the vision of San Cayetano, or Céspedes, or Roela’s St. Michael.

Look at that portrait of Old Time, look at that knight signed by Valdés Leal, and look at that ancient sword, which in these days of contemptible prose there is no hand worthy of describing. That proud knight, whose statue has been inaugurated only recently, is a
revenant,
is an inhabitant of dreamland, is a citizen of the city of eternal illusion, is a hero of poetry, a ghost of sword and cape. That man is the murderer of love and the champion of voluptuousness. He is Don Miguel de Mañara, celebrated in the immortality of art under the name Don Juan. And that is his sword. He is in a sacristy because, as you know, when the devil got old he became a friar.

There is much to admire in the cathedral, and the guides go into great detail about it, but there, too, as everywhere else, it is the past, with its page from history or legend, that makes us pause. Thus, from that pulpit which you will find in a court-yard, where illustrious men such as the vigorous Vicente Ferrer once preached, you will pass on to the marvels of the naves, where glorious palettes left tapestries of great value and fame. And the traditional anecdote awaits you in every chapel and corner, from the colossal St. Christopher, at the Gamba altar, to the small Child Jesus, which the people call “the mute one,” the work of Montañés. And here we come upon a curious note.

You will find people of years-long devotion, to whom you will address some word or question, and you will find that however much you speak to them, they will never answer you. These are fanatics who have made the blond child upon the altar a promise of silence for a certain length of time. In one of the chapels—and here the anecdote is modern—is the famous St. Antony, by Murillo, a painting that was mutilated by a visitor from the United States who thought it best to isolate the saint from the rest of the composition, for the saint’s own good. The Spanish consul in Boston received a report of the fragment’s whereabouts and managed to rescue it. Today, thanks to the art and ability of an eminent painter, the painting has been restored, and no sign of the Yankee robber’s amputation is to be seen.

I will not stop you before the many famous art works kept here, for there are so many, and of such quality, that there are entire books, written by scholars such as Cean Bermúdez, dedicated to them. But I must tell you that you will see a certain funereal monument near Pérez de Alesio’s
Christoforo,
a modern and very cerebral monument, composed of four figures holding up an urn—surely it will be familiar to you from the illustrations. In that urn—hats off, if you please!—repose the ashes, the controversial ashes, of Christopher Columbus, which were formerly deposited in the cathedral in Havana. I believe that even the most impassive and indifferent of Latin Americans must feel at least some vague emotion before that handful of dust. Although later, eternal Eironeia may appear and remind us that the favor he did us is not, perhaps, such a great one.

The evening was gay and golden when I crossed the Triana bridge to make my way into the quarter of that name, so oft-song in certain folksongs. Shall I say that I had more than one illusion shattered? Aside from one and another window filled with the usual flowerpots of Andalucía, and one and another face out of a lithograph or the label on a box of matches, I was unable to satisfy my curiosity as to the particular beauty of Seville. I saw many a young man in coat and tight pants, conversing loudly on the corners not far from the docks on which the Sevillan stevedore sweats as he takes part in the modern world’s bustle. I saw unswept and unmopped entryways and salt-fish markets, and one old-fashioned stagecoach, traveling alongside the tram tracks with its load of people and luggage. I saw the Tower of Gold bathed in the gold of the afternoon, and the river a sort of dirty yellow color, and in the distance the heights that were beginning to fade, to turn smoky in the twilight. And if I did not return happy with Triana—given that I went with the idea of a fantastic and imaginary Triana, either impossible or too much
á la française
—at least I gathered some consolation from the vision of a beautiful girl and an old duenna as they came out of an old church. Doña Inés of my soul, and her inseparable chaperone.

CÓRDOBA

A modest train station; an omnibus bumping along the street, through mud and potholes.

Bad weather. That is my first impression in centuries-old, illustrious Córdoba. But soon, despite the inclement day, the green orange trees and flowers in the nearby gardens have made up for that initial disappointment. The hotel at which I am staying is on the city’s principal thoroughfare, the tree-lined avenue called the Great Captain, in memory of that magnificent warrior Don Gonzalo, whose birthplace was here. When the rain relents and I am able to go out, I see groups of people along the avenue, the eternal gatherings of a Spanish city, conversing and “killing time.”

Off this tree-lined boulevard, which the inhabitants of this city are rightly proud of, the other streets are markedly typical; they descend from the higher part of the city to the lower, the Ajerquia. With each step I have taken in ancient Andalucian Córdoba, I have thought, as though inevitably, of that other Córdoba, in Argentina. Not that they bear any resemblance to one another, mind you, aside from the spirit of the race that fills the men of the colony as well as those of the motherland; it is the name that brings the memory, and the fact that this grandmother city has been a center of study and of knowledge since time immemorial, like that newer city in more recent days. . . .

But as I was saying, the streets of the city strike me as remarkably
typical,
and there is good reason for that, for according to Ramírez’ historico-topographical monograph on the city, “in terms of neither direction nor breadth have the streets undergone any substantial alteration since the most remote ages, and they are, in general, as in all ancient cities, narrow and tortuous, or ill-aligned, so that it is worthy of note that in the center of the city one finds a few streets of some breadth.” In neither Granada nor Sevilla nor Málaga have I found this atmosphere of antiquity that I have found here in this capital illuminated by—or in fact the focus of—universal wisdom. And in the narrowness and solitude of the streets, I am entranced by the constant wrought-iron grilles, the barred windows so well-fitted for discreet midnight courtships, the mysterious courtyards that one glimpses as one passes. In one place, a sort of circular plaza, one finds the name of Seneca, and one recalls that admirable philosopher and journalist
avant la lettre,
while a familiarity not quite so ancient presents itself to one in those houses on the narrow byways, from which there often bursts, all unexpectedly, the sound of a piano. . . . In one or another of these houses, the illustrious Juan Valera may have been born, for as we know, he, like Góngora, is from Córdoba.

From ancient times, Córdoba retains traces of the Caesars, but there are also vestiges of its masters before Rome, the Carthaginians. Its place as a Roman colony is attested to by medallions, and histories tell us that it was notable. One of the city’s historians even declares that when Marcus Claudius Marcellus was praetor of the Spanish lands, “the city was expanded and ennobled with luxurious buildings, and apparently it became fashionable in Rome, at that time, to possess a ‘country house’ in the pleasant countryside of Córdoba.” Today, of those grandeurs there remain only gravestones, inscriptions on monuments, milliary columns,
⁹⁸
Augustan coins that present blurry problems for numismatists, and a venerable bridge, which is still upheld over the turbid Guadalquivir by its heavy arches. The city belonged to the Goths and then to the Arabs, and the Islamites raised it to its highest potency and preeminence. To read this history is to penetrate into the almost fabulous life of an imperial capital, an empire from an Arabian Nights tale.

Today there is almost nothing in comparison to the ancient splendors of the caliphs, but what does remain—the mosque converted into a cathedral, a transformation that must anger every artist-traveler—gives one an idea of what sort of brain was covered by those venerable turbans. What must that magnificent Rusafa, or royal garden, have been like, in which the puissant Abd al-Rahman I—who, like so many men of the East, was a prophet—stole a poetic march on the Cuban José Martí and sang to his compatriot, a solitary palm tree, like the caliph a stranger in a strange land, of his nostalgia for the desert? And what setting can compare for the story of Prince Camaralzahman and Princess Badura, or the other young princes and princesses in whom Dinarzad took such interest, with that Garden of Azhara built by Abd al-Rahman III—a garden that took its name from the king’s favorite in the harem? The truth is, King Solomon himself might have resided in this place, in the company of the Queen of Sheba. I will not repeat here the somewhat prosaic information given by Christian chroniclers such as Díaz de Rivas, although I cannot pass over a description given by Arab authors who lived in the times of that splendid caliph:

“The houses, built to a uniform design, with great taste and magnificence, and crowned with rooftop terraces, had gardens planted with orange trees, and they suited the grandeur and luxuriousness of the alcázar (fortress) to which they had been added. For the construction of this royal compound, Abd al-Rahman put immense sums at the disposition of his dream. The workmen employed in the construction numbered one thousand; one thousand five hundred were the mules; and four hundred, the camels that brought materials. The labors were overseen by the most famous architects of Baghdad, Tosthat and Qaioran, and from Constantinople, sent by the caliph’s ally Constantine VI, who also gave him forty granite columns, the most beautiful he could find. Abd al-Rahman had more than one thousand two hundred varieties of marble brought to him, at great cost, from the provinces of Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Africa, and Asia. The exterior of the Alcázar, as well as the interior, contrary to the custom of the Arabs, was adorned with the same devotion and wealth of detail as the rest of the building, and the interior contained all the beauty and enchantment that art, seconded by wealth, could create. The walls were encrusted with arabesques of great taste, the windows and doors were of cedar adorned with precious carvings, and the ceilings were painted a celestial azure and enameled with gold.