Everywhere about the cathedral beggars lay in wait, and the neighboring
streets were lively with bargains of prickly pears spread open on the
ground by old women who did not care whether any one bought or not.
There were also bargains in palmistry; and at one place a delightful
humorist was selling clothing at auction. He allured the bidders
by having his left hand dressed as a puppet and holding a sparkling
dialogue with it; when it did not respond to his liking he beat it with
his right hand, and every now and then he rang a little bell. He had a
pleased crowd about him in the sunny square; but it seemed to me
that all the newer part of Granada was lively with commerce in ample,
tram-trodden streets which gave the shops, larger than any we had seen
out of Madrid, a chance uncommon in the narrow ways of other Spanish
cities. Yet when I went to get money on my letter of credit, I found
the bank withdrawn from the modernity in a seclusion reached through a
lovely _patio._ We were seated in old-fashioned welcome, such as used to
honor a banker’s customers in Venice, and all comers bowed and bade us
good day. The bankers had no such question of the different signatures
as vexed those of Valladolid, and after no more delay than due ceremony
demanded, I went away with both my money and my letter, courteously seen
to the door.
The guide, to whom we had fallen in the absence of our French-speaking
guide of the day before, spoke a little English, and he seemed to
grow in sympathetic intelligence as the morning passed. He made our
sightseeing include visits to the church of St. John of God, and the
church of San Geronimo, which was built by Gonsalvo de Cordova, the
Great Captain, and remains now a memorial to him. We rang at the door,
and after long delay a woman came and let us into an interior stranger
ever than her being there as custodian. It was frescoed from floor to
ceiling everywhere, except the places of the altars now kept by the
painted _retablos_ and the tombs and the statues of the various saints
and heroes. The _retablo_ of the high altar is almost more beautiful
than wonderful, but the chief glory of the place is in the kneeling
figures of the Great Captain and his wife, one on either side of the
altar, and farther away the effigies of his famous companions-in-arms,
and on the walls above their heraldic blazons and his. The church
Was unfinished when the Great Captain died in the displeasure of his
ungrateful king, and its sumptuous completion testifies to the devotion
of his wife and her taste in choosing the best artists for the work.
I have still the sense of a noonday quiet that lingered with us after we
left this church and which seemed to go with us to the Hospital of St.
John of God, founded, with other hospitals, by the pious Portuguese,
who, after a life of good works, took this name on his well-merited
canonization. The hospital is the monument of his devotion to good
works, and is full of every manner of religious curio. I cannot remember
to have seen so many relics under one roof, bones of both holy men and
women, with idols of the heathen brought from Portuguese possessions in
the East which are now faded from the map, as well as the body of St.
John of God shrined in silver in the midst of all.
[Illustration: 29 LOOKING NORTHWEST FROM THE GENERALIFE OVER GRANADA]
I do not know why I should have brought away from these two places a
peacefulness of mind such as seldom follows a visit to show-places, but
the fact is so; perhaps it was because we drove to and from them, and
were not so tired as footworn sight-seers are, or so rebellious. One
who had seen not only the body of St. John of God, but his cane with
a whistle in it to warn the charitable of his coming and attune their
minds to alms-giving, and the straw basket in which he collected food
for the poor, now preserved under an embroidered satin covering, and an
autograph letter of his framed in glass and silver, might even have been
refreshed by his experience. At any rate, we were so far from tired
that after luncheon we walked to the Garden of the Generalife, and then
walked all over it. The afternoon was of the very mood for such a visit,
and we passed it there in these walks and bowers, and the black cypress
aisles, and the trees and vines yellowing to the fall of their leaves.
The melancholy laugh of water chasing down the steep channels and
gurgling through the stone rails of stairways was everywhere, and its
dim smile gleamed from pools and tanks. In the court where it stretched
in a long basin an English girl was painting and another girl was
sewing, to whom I now tardily offer my thanks for adding to the charm of
the place. Not many other people were there to dispute our afternoon’s
ownership. I count a peasant family, the women in black shawls and the
men wearing wide, black sashes, rather as our guests than as strangers;
and I am often there still with no sense of molestation. Even the reader
who does not conceive of a garden being less flowers and shrubs than
fountains and pavilions and porches and borders of box and walls of
clipped evergreens, will scarcely follow me to the Generalife or outstay
me there.
The place is probably dense with history and suffocating with
association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where
my own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a
summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but
otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which it might photograph
itself without blurring any earlier record. This, perhaps, is why I love
so much to dwell there on that never-ending afternoon of late October.
It was long past the hour of its summer bloom, but the autumnal air was
enriching it beyond the dreams of avarice with the gold which prevails
in the Spanish landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could look
out of its yellowing bowers over a landscape immeasurable in beauty. Of
course, we tried to master the facts of the Generalife’s past, but we
really did not care for them and scarcely believed that Charles V. had
doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who had it from Ferdinand
of Aragon, and so withheld it from his heirs for four generations
until they could ripen to a genuine Christianity at Genoa, whither they
withdrew and became the patrician family now its proprietors. The arms
of this family decorate the roof and walls of the colonnaded belvedere
from which you look out over the city and the plain and the mountains;
and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many places, but
otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian as the noble Pallavicini
who possess it. There were plenty of flower-beds, box-bordered, but
there were no flowers in them; the flowers preferred standing about
in tall pots. There was an arbor overhung with black forgotten grapes
before the keeper’s door and in the corner of it dangled ropes of
fire-red peppers.
This detail is what, with written help, I remember of the Generalife,
but no loveliness of it shall fade from, my soul. From its embowered and
many-fountained height it looks over to the Alhambra, dull red, and the
city wall climbing the opposite slope across the Darro to a church on
the hilltop which was once a mosque. The precipice to which the garden
clings plunges sheer to the river-bed with a downlook insurpassably
thrilling; but the best view of the city is from the flowery walk that
runs along the side of the Alcazaba, which was once a fortress and is
now a garden, long forgetful of its office of defending the Alhambra
palace. From this terrace Granada looks worthy of her place in history
and romance. We visited the Alcazaba after the Generalife, and were very
critical, but I must own the supremacy of this prospect. I should not
mind owning its supremacy among all the prospects in the world.