We did not know as yet how almost entirely dramatic the palace of the
Alcazar was, how largely it was representative of what the Spanish
successors of the Moorish kings thought those kings would have made it
if they had made it; and it was probably through an instinct for the
genuine that we preferred the gardens after our first cries of wonder.
What remains to me of our many visits is the mass of high borders of
box, with roses, jasmine, and orange trees, palms, and cypresses. The
fountains dribbled rather than gushed, and everywhere were ranks and
rows of plants in large, high earthen pots beside or upon the tiled
benching that faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit on
if you had not had to supply the back yourself. The flowers were not in
great profusion, and chiefly we rejoiced in the familiar quaintness of
clumps of massive blood-red coxcombs and strange yellow ones. The walks
were bordered with box, and there remains distinctly the impression
of marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid with tiles; all Seville seems
inlaid with tiles. One afternoon we lingered longer than usual because
the day was so sunnily warm in the garden paths and spaces, without
being hot. A gardener whom we saw oftenest hung about his flowers in a
sort of vegetable calm, and not very different from theirs except that
they were not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle or falter in
his apparently unseeing gaze; but when one of us picked a seed from the
ground and wondered what it was he said it was a magnolia seed, and as
if he could bear no more went away. In one wilding place which seemed
set apart for a nursery several men were idly working with many pauses,
but not so many as to make the spectator nervous. As the afternoon waned
and the sun sank, its level rays dwelt on the galleries of the palace
which Peter the Cruel built himself and made so ugly with harsh brown
stucco ornament that it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic
frescos exaggerated from the Italian, and very coarse and rank.
It was this savage prince who invented much of the Alcazar in the soft
Moorish taste; but in those hideous galleries he let his terrible nature
loose, though as for that some say he was no crueler than certain other
Spanish kings of that period. This is the notion of my unadvertised
_Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ and perhaps we ought to think of him
leniently as Peter the Ferocious. He was kind to some people and was
popularly known as the Justiciary; he especially liked the Moors and
Jews, who were gratefully glad, poor things, of being liked by any one
under the new Christian rule. But he certainly killed several of his
half-brothers, and notably he killed his half-brother Don Fadrique in
the Alcazar. That is, if he had no hand in the butchery himself he had
him killed after luring him to Seville for the tournaments and forgiving
him for all their mutual injuries with every caressing circumstance. One
reads that after the king has kissed him he sits down again to his
game of backgammon and Don Fadrique goes into the next room to Maria do
Padilla, the lovely and gentle lady whom Don Pedro has married as much
as he can with a wedded wife shut up in Toledo. She sits there in terror
with her damsels and tries with looks and signs to make Don Fadrique
aware of his danger. But he imagines no harm till the king and his
companions, with their daggers drawn, come to the curtains, which the
king parts, commanding, “Seize the Master of Santiago!” Don Fadrique
tries to draw his sword, and then he turns and flies through the halls
of the Alcazar, where he finds every door bolted and barred. The king’s
men are at his heels, and at last one of them fells him with a blow of
his mace. The king goes back with a face of sympathy to Maria, who has
fallen to the floor.
The treacherous keeping is all rather in the taste of the Italian
Renaissance, but the murder itself is more Roman, as the Spanish
atrocities and amusements are apt to be. Murray says it was in the
beautiful Hall of the Ambassadors that Don Fadrique was killed, but
the other manuals are not so specific. Wherever it was, there is a
blood-stain in the pavement which our Granadan guide failed to show us,
possibly from a patriotic pique that there are no blood-stains in the
Alhambra with personal associations. I cannot say that much is to be
made of the vaulted tunnel where poor Maria de Padilla used to bathe,
probably not much comforted by the courtiers afterward drinking the
water from the tank; she must have thought the compliment rather nasty,
and no doubt it was paid her to please Don Pedro.
We found it pleasanter going and coming through the corridor leading to
the gardens from the public court. This was kept at the outer end by an
“old rancid Christian” smoking incessant cigarettes and not explicitly
refusing to sell us picture postals after taking our entrance fee; the
other end was held by a young, blond, sickly-looking girl, who made us
take small nosegays at our own price and whom it became a game to see if
we could escape. I have left saying to the last that the king and queen
of Spain have a residence in the Alcazar, and that when they come in
the early spring they do not mind corning to it through that plebeian
quadrangle. I should not mind it myself if I could go back there next
spring.