Granada Read online

  The months passed, and the mountains of rubble slowly eroded. We could even see a bit of our future garden, and a good thing, too, since an amorous visitor now embraced the Albayzín: springtime in Granada. Leaves bolted from the trees, roses bloomed everywhere you looked, jasmine flowers on vines flung themselves over walls, the redbud raised up blossoms the color of skin in a blush of pleasure. Flocks of swifts turned through the air, big magpies strode along rooflines. And as the days heated up, the sheltering trees brought to the plazas of the Albayzín a cool and fragrant shade.

  One day, we had a workroom—with reliable broadband access, which is considerably easier to get, than, say, a kitchen cabinet. The next month, the cabinets, and even—mirabile dictu—a stove, found their places. Three and a half months after our arrival in Spain, we made coffee in our own house. Another month and, suddenly, everything was done. We sat in the light of early evening, at dinner outside, just as we did our first night in the Albayzín. It felt as if a gust of good luck had borne us from the one evening to the next.

  Perhaps the exhaustion of the months had levered open our ideas and made us candidates for enchantment. But looking around, after the months of dust and noise and improvisation, we felt as if we lived in the midst of something conjured. Just outside the blue-tiled entry, on a patio of cross-laid brick, we sat at a table under cover of grape leaves spread from two gnarled, thick vines. We looked out straight toward the stone fortress of the Alhambra. On one side of our garden, to our left, a small shed with dark-green door, and in front of it, a hundred-year-old olive tree. In the center, next to us, a fountain of white marble, whose water ran along a brick channel to a rectangular pool called an alberca. Alongside the alberca, a fan palm, slender and graceful, newly planted. To our right, the main garden with four mature, flourishing trees: persimmon, pomegranate, lemon, and orange. Beneath these mature trees grew mock orange and rosemary. We had room where Lucy would add a fig, a mandarin, another orange, and an almond. At the far end of the garden, a rough stone fountain, called a pilar, set into the wall. We had found the pilar on the outskirts of town, at a yard that sold olvidos—forgotten things. The water fell into a heavy, seamless basin made by hollowing out a single stone. Above the pilar, we had started a vine of fragrant white jasmine. Behind us, a rose vine had begun its spin around a drainpipe.

  Now it was time to learn where we had landed, beginning here, in the garden.

  The Time Travels of a Garden

  SOON AFTER WE swept away the last construction dust, we invited into our house our neighbors, who had been so kind to us during our move into the Albayzín. In fact, they were more than kind—they offered us late dinners and rambling conversation, they cuddled our daughter, they gave us mysterious recipes for curing olives. Their hospitality seemed to this American like something out of The Arabian Nights: if, for instance, any weekend evening, we knocked upon the door of any family among them, soon we would be at table, our daughter would be playing with their children, and we would be talking late into the night over superb bottles of vino tinto. They were so good to us that with shame I admit that at first I thought they might be pulling our legs. But no, they were not; it was their nature and our privilege.

  In the Albayzín, to invite someone into a carmen is to invite them into your garden, the hidden center of life. Our whole house gave on to the garden: the blue-tiled entryway and the dining room both had double doors that we could open upon the fruit trees and flowers. The bedrooms had small idiosyncratic terraces, and the torreón above, where we had our bookshelves and computers, had its own tilting terrace that looked over the grapevine and roses, honeysuckle and jasmine. In the warm air of twilight and evenings, we dined outside with our new friends, in sight of the Alhambra, to the felicitous music of the fountain, the air full of the fragrance of orange and lemon blossoms. As the sky darkened, we lit candles as the children played under the trees, splashed in the fountain, costumed themselves in any clothes they could find, and dashed through all the rooms of the house. Later, as they tired, they would one by one wander sleepily until they found a couch, a bed, or a cushion, until the house was full of snoozing children. In whatever room you entered, there might be one or two dreaming little ones.

  These nights were so peaceful, I sometimes thought I was dreaming. To what rare world had we been transported?

  As our first summer ripened, I grew more curious about the design of the garden, for it seemed to inspirit us all. A loved garden, with the right design, brings to most of us a rare pleasure; it seems like a blessing of centuries, enveloping, protective, suggestive.

  I would like, reader, to have you at this table, just now, with us, so that we might talk of the time travels of this one garden, in the middle of this ancient neighborhood. It is a small garden, but its presence had in our lives an uncommon influence and gentleness. As we set ourselves to read our way into the history of our barrio, we began with our curiosity about our garden, and how so modest a space could offer such welcome and provoke such musings. It seemed to have a power beyond itself.

  The original part of the garden, with the big trees, comprised four rectangular beds created by pathways crossing at right angles in the center. As we looked into the history of gardens, we found that this four-part symmetry had ancient Middle Eastern roots. The first recognizable such garden is pictured on a bowl from the ancient city of Samarra—a sketch which, astonishingly, is four millennia old. And an existing archeological site, the garden of the Persian Cyrus the Great from 550 BC, shows clearly the same four-part design. A long road, full of delights, leads from those early centuries to our little plot in the Carmen de Nuestra Señora de la Purificación.

  The form is common and classic. It combines a restricted set of elements: symmetrical beds, moving water, a peaceful blaze of flowers, a rich assortment of fruit trees, slanting light, and aromatic plants, all in a protective surround of walls. Though this kind of garden is often called an “Islamic Paradise Garden,” the design is pre-Islamic; more than pre-Islamic, it is pre-Biblical. I think of it as something at the root of the mind. We find it in site after excavated site in the Middle East, and in the writings of classical antiquity, beginning with accounts of Persian gardens by the bellicose Greek adventurer Xenophon. He translated the Persian word pairidaeza, which meant “a wall around,” into the Greek paradeisos. This word held on to its meaning of pleasure-ground, or enclosed garden and orchard. Centuries later, when the Hebrew of the Old Testament was translated into Greek to produce the legendary Septuagint, the translators, needing a word for the Garden of Eden, were delighted to have one at the ready.

  Any musing about gardens leads straight to the Book of Genesis, which held to the blessed association of paradise and gardens, an association that runs all the way back to the wedge writing of Sumer. That is, as far as a written reference can go. As happens so often when I read through texts I know, I found that I had never read Genesis carefully enough. I had thought that Eden was a garden. I was wrong. Eden itself is not a garden at all; rather, it includes a garden, planted especially and personally by God, whom we should call the first gardener. He put it, smartly enough, on the east side of Eden in the morning light. It is there, and not elsewhere in Eden, that Adam and Eve are given life. And it is there that the water of paradise, after passing through this singular garden within Eden, splits into four rivers which descend to favor the earth below with the fresh water of life. Eden was then not just the place where human life began and beauty took form; it was the source of the water which gave life to the world around.

  We came to see the way the garden worked in favor of life, and to see what the garden walls were good for: they were not for keeping people out, but for concentrating beauty within. As we sat outside and talked with our neighbors in the candlelit evenings, sometimes with children asleep in our laps, we would settle into a rambling and branching conversation unlike anything I had ever known. Near us the fountain made its feathery music, the pomegranate and persimmon trees stood in a f
ull flourishing, and the rose wound up a pipe beside us. Even the shadows seemed fragrant. It looked to me as if our friends, without their knowing, had come to shine with their natural patience and generosity; by some millennia-old theurgy, the garden around us had made their good natures visible.

  Conversation and gardens belong together. Both are forms that, rightly used, bring into view what otherwise is hidden. Each has its own rhythms and requirements, but with the same power as other art forms to provoke the emergence of some idea, some hope, some joy, into the light of understanding. Somehow, living in another language brings a person into meditation upon conversational art and its hidden rules, which are as liberating as the rules which govern the sonnet, or haiku, or geometric tile work of the Alhambra, even the paintings of the Annunciation; or the rules that govern the art of gardening. All these rules, however differently they are applied, set a demanding order, necessary so that a clear liberty might rise within us.

  The garden being an ancient form, there are myriad ancient stories meant to give meaning to the form. Genesis led me on into this tradition of stories. And although Genesis is finally, of course, a story of disobedience and expulsion, it is not, despite its almost-crazed influence upon our ideas, among the most beautiful or playful of its genre.

  So many stories ran through our conversations that we should tell one of them. We will throw off the sour narrative of Genesis and go instead to one of complex whimsy and pagan energies: the story of the Garden of the Hesperides. This divine garden grew, like the garden within Eden, on the side of a mountain. Flourishing there was a tree with golden apples that bountiful Mother Earth had given to the delighted goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus, as a wedding present. Anyone who ate an apple would become immortal; and once immortal, if she then had some ambrosia, she would be granted godly powers. This, of course, looks forward to Genesis, when an alarmed God is trying to prevent Eve and Adam from becoming “as gods.” Yet rather than Adam and Eve, in the Garden of the Hesperides lived three nymphs known for their melodious singing. Curiously, their garden, as though the mythmakers had Persia in mind, grew within a wall. In that place of protected pleasures, the lovely nymphs were in full possession of the apples, and guarded them in company of, you guessed it, a serpent—there he is again, this time one with a hundred heads. Enter Hercules, who had already cleaned the Augean stables and wrestled the Minotaur to the ground. Hercules first, and comically, has to find the garden, and on his search he is always being challenged to combat by swaggering young men, scatterbrained as usual, all the more so because most of them are sons of gods. Hercules dispatches them all and finds his way to Prometheus, who once stole fire from the gods and gave it to all of us. In punishment, Prometheus is chained to a rock, where an eagle comes and stays all day, eating his liver; then overnight, his liver grows back, and so arrives the eagle the next morning to dine again. Hercules, who has learned a thing or two, is having none of it. He kills the eagle, Prometheus tells him where the garden is, and Hercules goes straight on to kill the serpent and take possession of the apples, which are eventually returned to Athena. Athena then passes them on—straight back to the nymphs in the garden, to whom, she decided, they rightfully belonged. Even the slain serpent found his place among the stars, in the constellation we know today as Draco.

  This is just one garden story, but it is wonderful, full of suggestive detail and drama. We wish that Eve had been able to have some nymphs for company, so as to be able to make use of all she learned at the Tree of Knowledge. But Eve had the dull Adam, rather than the valiant Hercules, and she had the Old Testament God, in a foul mood, rather than the helpful, wise Athena. Such men have given her trouble ever since.

  But however much the two stories of Genesis and the Garden of the Hesperides mark two poles of our experience of the sacred, there is a telling, deep theme the two stories share: gardens are where fate is decided; gardens mark decisive turns of events in the story of our life on earth; gardens safeguard wisdom; gardens hold beauties that help us learn how the order of nature offers the secrets of life. The special garden in Eden, the nymphs’ garden of the Hesperides, and various other mythic plantings would all take form and have a place on earth as the iridescent gardens that mark history throughout the Middle East. These same gardens, bearing their fragrance and coolness, came to be cherished across northern Africa, coming finally to the Iberian peninsula. Warm Andalusia holds some of the finest of these gardens. Granada held some of the finest in Andalusia. In all these travels, such gardens have held fast to their association with the origin and future of beauty.

  As the summer began to loosen with heat, this history came home to us as we watched Gabriella and her friends ride tricycles along the garden paths, lay out like leopards on the thick branches of the fig, eat persimmons and pomegranates, and cry out at the world they made as they romped together in the green shade. If all that hard work by God, Cyrus the Great, Hercules and Athena, nymphs and snakes, and centuries of gardeners across countries and continents can lead to the making of a place that gives such various joys, then it stands to reason that it may be a place of learning.

  In the hot months in the Albayzín, we saw the way the plants, with water and care, leapt from the soil. Such was the vigor of the grapevine and the honeysuckle that they began to grow straight into the bedrooms. The garden and house embraced one another, took up an amorous life together, so that every room came to include air and flowers, trees and starlight, rustling water and ripening fruit. How had this unity, so easy and preternatural, come to be here in Granada?

  As our neighbors shared their lives with us, so all of us shared in the lives of those before us who loved this sunny hillside and loved southern Spain. As we learned of our compatriots over the past centuries, we found that we were participants in Mediterranean history in ways we could not have foreseen. It was our first hint that Granada, somehow, offers a clear window for looking into our whole past; it offers a chance to see how singular events took form, and why.

  Let me give you, in one short paragraph, as the children play, the ebullient history here: it begins in 7 BC, with early settlements of a people known only as Iberians. They lived just up the hill from our house, and throughout Andalusia. In the ensuing centuries, an array of cultures, both distinguished and ragtag—Greeks and Phoenicians and Carthaginians—settled along the eastern and southern coasts of Andalusia, which in those days had more pristine beaches but fewer tapas. Then, beginning early in the second century BC, sonorous and imperial Rome put the region under its military grinding stone, marched all over Iberia, built roads and aqueducts, and moved in for three centuries of sun and red wine and occasional mosaics. Then in the fifth century AD, a rough medley of Germanic tribes invaded, with the Visigoths prevailing after confused decades of spasmodic military action. For two hundred years, Iberia meant Christian Visigothic Iberia. The brawling culture of the Visigoths was followed by the nearly eight centuries of Islamic Spain, a period which is referred to today as Al-Andalus. And then the fateful year, for Spain and for the world, of 1492.

  There you have a one-paragraph children’s sketch of Spanish history. We will, in this conversation with you, see our way into that span of centuries, in more of their dark, rambunctious detail, as they played out in our experience living in the barrio we would come so wholeheartedly to love.

  What did this history mean for gardens? Consider together the myths of the early Mediterranean, Cyrus’s careful four-part garden, the paradise in the Bible and the Koran, and the enclosed gardens of the Middle East, which are studies in botany, beauty, and peace: all this delectation of design and association is concentrated in the Persian garden, a gift of the Middle East to Europe. But before these gardens arrived in Iberia, they made a bizarre detour to Italy, entering Imperial Rome when general Lucullus brought back his own account of Persian horticulture. And not just his account. He brought his own rootstock—peach trees, cherries, apricots—all for his garden in the hills of Rome. The descendants of these gardens
, in present-day Rome, are a joy. But they seem distinct from Roman gardens from the classical period—which we know about to some extent from the writings of Pliny and Cicero, among others—mostly because of the fixative qualities of lava. When Vesuvius blew off in 79 AD, it buried Pompeii and Stabiae and neatly preserved their houses and gardens for all of us to study. What we find are not just incinerated gardens, but florid wall paintings of gardens. Many of the scenes are, to my eye, ridiculous; I am heartily glad to have the paintings, in place of the actual plantings. There are ornate fountains, frilly and scalloped flower beds, fishy pools, heaping ivy and myrtle, fussy pergolas, and statues, ad nauseam, of gods and goddesses, to say nothing of the portrayals of large estates imitating the Persian hunting preserve, in which boar and bull, lion and deer, and other magnificent animals sport around, killing each other, or being killed themselves in virile sport. As to the grander horticultural projects of Rome, let us leave aside the bushes trimmed into the owner’s initials, the grottoes, and, eventually, the grotesque projects of topiary, in which pliant hedges metamorphosed into ranks of centurions and preening warships. This was a society that wanted to remake even the hedges in its own image.

  Roman Italy had the luxury of water, the wealth of empire, and a robust taste for excess. With unrestrained appetite it fed on nature, until in the fourth century the Germanic tribes fed on it.

  As they fed on Iberia. When after decades of military scrimmaging the Visigoths took power in Iberia, they fell heir to the villas of the Roman province, sited in the river valleys or near springs in the mountains. What they made of these sites of luxury and plenty is anybody’s guess. But we may be sure they did not take trowel in hand and begin working the soil, nor begin trimming the hedges into escutcheons, nor adopt botany as a central study. In fact, nothing known about them leads us to think they enriched the verdant Iberian estates with Teutonic flower beds. Rather, they carried on in their tempestuous ways. They specialized in theological fisticuffs with the holy Catholic church, submitting to orthodoxy and winning the wealth and power that come to losers in such bouts. Battening down to make their historical mark, they gave us squabbling aristocrats, a furious enforcement of feudal rights, the periodic robbery of the populace by taxation, cantankerous secession struggles, and a randomly murderous anti-Semitism. After a couple of centuries of such devotions, the people of the Iberian peninsula, numbering five to six million, rightfully began wondering about deliverance. We like to think that some of them even longed for an experience of gardens that seemed to live only in scripture and in stories. Their hopes on all fronts were about to be addressed.