 | INHABITANTS OF THE
ALHAMBRA. 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 the 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
joint tenants with the bats and owls of its gilded
halls, and hang their rags, those standards of poverty,
out of its windows and loop-holes.
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
named Maria Antonia Sabonea, but who goes by
the appellation of la Reyna Cuquina, 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 on one
seems to know her origin. Her habitation is 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 story 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 Doña Antonia, at which she occasionally is an
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
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 five's 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 Gonsalvo 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 exstence about this once haughty fortress,
which his ancestor aided to reduce; yet such
might have been the lot of the decendants 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.
This family has inhabited the fortress ever
since the time of the conquest, handing down a hereditary
poverty from father to son, not one of them
having ever been known to be worth a marevedi.
His father, by trade a riband 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 his clothes, and the archives of his
family; that is to say, a few papers concerning old
law-suits which he cannot read; but the pride of
his heart is a blazon of the arms of the family, brilliantly
coloured and suspended in a frame against
the wall, clearly demonstrating by its quarterings
the various noble houses with which this poverty-stricken
brood claim affinity.
As to Mateo himself, he has done his utmost
to perpetuate his line; having a wife, and a numerous
progeny who inhabit an almost dismantled
hovel in the hamlet. How they manage to
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 holyday stroll in 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 gaily to the castanets.
There are two classes of people to whom life
seems one long holyday, 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 garbanzos, 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 grandioso 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
to fancy that a gleam of the golden age still lingers
about this ragged community. They possess nothing,
they do nothing, they care for nothing.
Yet, though apparently idle all the week, they
are as observant of all holydays and saints' days as
the most laborious artisan. They attend all fêtes
and dancings in Granada and its vicinity, light bonfires
on the hills of St. John's eve and have lately
danced away the moonlight nights, on the harvest
home of a small field of wheat within the precincts
of the fortress.
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 manœuvring two or three fishing
rods, as though he was 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,
martlets, who sport about its towers in myriads,
with the holyday 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
favourite 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.
| INHABITANTS OF THE
ALHAMBRA. The Alhambra | |