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Inhabitants Of The AlhambraInhabitants Of The Alhambra
Inhabitants Of The Alhambra
I have often observed that the more proudly a mansion has been tenanted
in the day of its prosperity, the humbler are its inhabitants in the day of
its decline, and that the palace of a king commonly ends in being the
nestling-place of the beggar.
The Alhambra is in a rapid state of similar transition. Whenever a tower
falls to decay, it is seized upon by some tatterdemalion family, who become
jointtenants, with the bats and owls, of its gilded halls, and hang their
rags, those standards of poverty, out of its windows and loopholes.
I have amused myself with remarking some of the motley characters that
have thus usurped the ancient abode of royalty, and who seem as if placed
here to give a farcical termination to the drama of human pride. One of these
even bears the mockery of a regal title. It is a little old woman named Maria
Antonia Sabonea, but who goes by the appellation of la Reyna Coquina, or the
Cockle-queen. She is small enough to be a fairy, and a fairy she may be for
aught I can find out, for no one seems to know her origin. Her habitation is
in a kind of closet under the outer staircase of the palace, and she sits in
the cool stone corridor, plying her needle and singing from morning till
night, with a ready joke for every one that passes; for though one of the
poorest, she is one of the merriest little women breathing. Her great merit
is a gift for stomy-telling, having, I verily believe, as many stories at her
command, as the inexhaustible Scheherezade of the thousand and one nights.
Some of these I have heard her relate in the evening tertulias of Dame
Antonia, at which she is occasionally a humble attendant.
That there must be some fairy gift about this mysterious little old
woman, would appear from her extraordinary luck, since, notwithstanding her
being very little, very ugly, and very poor, she has had, according to her
own account, five husbands and a half, reckoning as a half one a young
dragoon, who died during courtship. A rival personage to this little fairy
queen is a portly old fellow with a bottle-nose, who goes about in a rusty
garb with a cocked hat of oil-skin and a red cockade. He is one of the
legitimate sons of the Alhambra, and has lived here all his life, filling
various offices, such as deputy alguazil, sexton of the parochial church, and
marker of a fives-court established at the foot of one of the towers. He is as
poor as a rat, but as proud as he is ragged, boasting of his descent from the
illustrious house of Aguilar, from which sprang Gonzalvo of Cordova, the grand
captain. Nay, he actually bears the name of Alonzo de Aguilar, so renowned in
the history of the conquest; though the graceless wags of the fortress have
given him the title of el padre santo, or the holy father, the usual
appellation of the Pope, which I had thought too sacred in the eyes of true
Catholics to be thus ludicrously applied. It is a whimsical caprice of fortune
to present, in the grotesque person of this tatterdemalion, a namesake and
descendant of the proud Alonzo de Aguilar, the mirror of Andalusian chivalry,
leading an almost mendicant existence about this once haughty fortress, which
his ancestor aided to reduce; yet, such might have been the lot of the
descendants of Agamemnon and Achilles, had they lingered about the ruins of
Troy!
Of this motley community, I find the family of my gossiping squire, Mateo
Ximenes, to form, from their numbers at least, a very important part. His
boast of being a son of the Alhambra, is not unfounded. His family has
inhabited the fortress ever since the time of the conquest, handing down an
hereditary poverty from father to son; not one of them having ever been known
to be worth a maravedi. His father, by trade a ribbon-weaver, and who
succeeded the historical tailor as the head of the family, is now near seventy
years of age, and lives in a hovel of reeds and plaster, built by his own
hands, just above the iron gate. The furniture consists of a crazy bed, a
table, and two or three chairs; a wooden chest, containing, besides his scanty
clothing, the "archives of the family." These are nothing more nor less than
the papers of various lawsuits sustained by different generations; by which it
would seem that, with all their apparent carelessness and good humor, they are
a litigious brood. Most of the suits have been brought against gossiping
neighbors for questioning the purity of their blood, and denying their being
Cristianos viejos, i.e. old Christians, without Jewish or Moorish taint. In
fact, I doubt whether this jealousy about their blood has not kept them so
poor in purse: spending all their earnings on escribanos and alguazils. The
pride of the hovel is an escutcheon suspended against the wall, in which are
emblazoned quarterings of the arms of the Marquis of Caiesedo, and of various
other noble houses, with which this poverty-stricken brood claim affinity.
As to Mateo himself, who is now about thirty-five years of age, he has
done his utmost to perpetuate his line and continue the poverty of the family,
having a wife and a numerous progeny, who inhabit an almost dismantled hovel
in the hamlet. How they manage to subsist, he only who sees into all mysteries
can tell; the subsistence of a Spanish family of the kind, is always a riddle
to me; yet they do subsist, and what is more, appear to enjoy their existence.
The wife takes her holiday stroll on the Paseo of Granada, with a child in her
arms and half a dozen at her heels; and the eldest daughter, now verging into
womanhood, dresses her hair with flowers, and dances gayly to the castanets.
There are two classes of people to whom life seems one long holiday, the
very rich, and the very poor, one because they need do nothing, the other
because they have nothing to do; but there are none who understand the art of
doing nothing and living upon nothing, better than the poor classes of Spain.
Climate does one half, and temperament the rest. Give a Spaniard the shade in
summer, and the sun in winter; a little bread, garlic, oil, and garbances, an
old brown cloak and a guitar, and let the world roll on as it pleases. Talk of
poverty! with him it has no disgrace. It sits upon him with a grandiose style,
like his ragged cloak. He is a hidalgo, even when in rags.
The "sons of the Alhambra" are an eminent illustration of this practical
philosophy. As the Moors imagined that the celestial paradise hung over this
favored spot, so I am inclined at times to fancy, that a gleam of the golden
age still lingers about this ragged community. They posses nothing, they do
nothing, they care for nothing. Yet, though apparently idle all the week, they
are as observant of all holy days and saints` days as the most laborious
artisan. They attend all fetes and dancings in Granada and its vicinity, light
bonfires on the hills on St. John`s eve, and dance away the moonlight nights
on the harvest-home of a small field within the precincts of the fortress,
which yields a few bushels of wheat.
Before concluding these remarks, I must mention one of the amusements of
the place which has particularly struck me. I had repeatedly observed a long
lean fellow perched on the top of one of the towers, manoeuvring two or three
fishing-rods, as though he were angling for the stars. I was for some time
perplexed by the evolutions of this aerial fisherman, and my perplexity
increased on observing others employed in like manner on different parts of
the battlements and bastions; it was not until I consulted Mateo Ximenes, that
I solved the mystery.
It seems that the pure and airy situation of this fortress has rendered
it, like the castle of Macbeth, a prolific breeding-place for swallows and
martlets, who sport about its towers in myriads, with the holiday glee of
urchins just let loose from school. To entrap these birds in their giddy
circlings, with hooks baited with flies, is one of the favorite amusements of
the ragged "sons of the Alhambra," who, with the good-for-nothing ingenuity of
arrant idlers, have thus invented the art of angling in the sky.
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