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
tatterdemallion family, who become joint
tenants, with the bats and owls, of its
gilded halls; and hang their rags, those
standards of poverty, out of the 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
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 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 oilskin
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
Gonsalvo of Cordova, the grand captain.
Nay, he actually bears the name of
Alonso de Aguilar, so renowned in the
history of the conquest; though the
graceless wags of the fortress have given
him the title of
et 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
Alonso 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 riband weaver, and who succeeded the
historical tailor at 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 lawsuits, which he cannot read; but
the pride of his hovel 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 claims
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 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 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 castañets.
Here 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
favoured spot, so I am inclined at times
to fancy, that a gleam of the golden age
still lingers about the 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 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 have
lately danced away the moonlight nights
on the harvest home of a small field
within the precincts of the fortress, which
yielded 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, 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, 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 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!
