Córdoba

I

There are places of earth like eyes. They have more than a proportionate share of the light and the fire. They hold, within a fragile cup of space, measures infinitely deep, journeys very far beyond the physical scope of their flesh and their bone. Córdoba is an eye within the face of Spain.

But Córdoba is dead? This whirl of houses is a husk of splendor, a strew of ancient ash here and there speaking still in the remnant eloquence of an arch or a square? Córdoba is not dead. Its life is impalpable like that within an eye. Something has lived on in Córdoba. There was vision here: that quickening of the nerves to the spheres of life which we call vision. Here was an eye that saw; and it still sees despite the catalepsy of the ages. Perhaps no eye that truly sees is ever blinded. Perhaps if within this cup of the Sierras there were today no Mosque, no nervous weave of house and street, Córdoba still would be an eye; and if our eye were sharp enough to meet it, there would rise to us still the sense of its incarnate knowledge.

But the task is easier. Córdoba is inhabited by its sons. It has its streets, speaking in mellow words of facade, ceramic, sculpture. And it has its Mosque.

The Mosque is open. There is a patio asymmetrical about its orange trees, its palms, its fountains. The water runs over mosaic and tile, its cool pallor smoothes the varicolored stones. Women with their children stand about, filling their huge earth water-jars, setting them down in the shade of a palm to talk. A girl sings, quiet and incessant: like the cool water over the stones her notes flow in counterpoint against the hard hot day. On the mediaeval Puerto, del Perdon the Christian saints and regal arms set up their theme against the Moslem mass of the Mezquita. To the sides are colonnaded cloisters. But to the south under the blare of sun in the white sky is the Mosque itself. Nineteen arched gates make way into its open forest of low columns standing in shade beyond the patio whose palms and pools gleam like a gem in the day.

Hundreds of columns various like trees. They are all low: from their smooth shafts the arches of red and white rise agilely to the ceiling which once was an Arabic maze of lace-like wood, inlaid and pied. This in most part has been shut away by a dull roofing under whose load the arches seem to prance in a light grace; and all the movement of the columns becomes horizontal. Pillars of many marbles, of jasper, of porphyry, merge in this sweeping spread. There is no Gothic aspiration. There is a maze of delicate shafts with their heads arched and arabesqued, prancing in a cohort of lines all horizontal, all contained between a dull floor and a dull roof. In the heart of this battalioned whirl, stands the Catholic Capilla Mayor which the Cathedral Chapter placed there in the Sixteenth century. It is a formless embryon of plateresque gilt and marble. It replaces sixty Anabic columns and its heavy flesh rises far higher than the legion of shafts about it. It is perhaps the greatest monument in Spain of the anaesthesia of Spanish consciousness. But with the worst intentions, it has not broken the spirit of the Mosque. The rigid erect dance of the pillars moves toward this obtrusion, swirls before it to the right and left, sweeps graciously beyond into the shadows. Svelte and exquisite columns with their double-arched headdress of red and white, with their fleet ankles and shoulders arabesqued—marshalled like an army—move with the un-dulance of earth to the Mihrab of Abderrahman and Al-Hakim. The Mihrab is the cynosure of prayer. The Mihrabs of Córdoba are gems so bright that they make a ghostly swirl of the columns. They stand steadfast. The individual vibrancy of gem, of mosaic, of marbles frail like sea-shells, fuses into fixity. They are the goal of the sweeping race of the columns.

So, within Córdoba, stands and speaks today the Idea of Islam. Though the Spaniards call it a Cathedral, here lives still the Mesjid al-Jami, open to the fountains and the naranjeros, open to the skies. It is a place whose spirit in spreading columns suggests the horizontal swarm of Islam to the far ends of Spain. Islam speaks, and Córdoba which is far more than Islam, answers. The Córdoban streets press and swerve to the north of the Mosque. They are a compact of stresses doubly held together: the Guadalquivir turning back upon itself and the streets turning within the river hold Córdoba; and the rim of mountains in whose waste heights still live the fertile prayers of hermits, holds it.

Córdoban streets are not like those of Fez or of the Kas-bah of Algiers or of Lisbon. Fez, within its translucent hills and vales, swarms upon itself like the entrails of a body. Algiers mounts sinister from the sea, its streets a blackened subterranean coil within the white sepulcher that strikes the sun. Old Lisbon is explosive, gyrant, tragically repressed in its march upward, losing the sky as it comes closer to it. Córdoba is proud. Its pride is intricate as the Talmud, hard and abstruse as the mystic creed of the Sufi, and open as a page of Aristotle. This eye that is Córdoba is neither secret nor flinching., And its pride is not wilful. Córdoba is an unassertive town. Tourists will feel more in the chaos of Granada, in the self-adoration of Sevilla. Córdoba is profound. Not by chance was Seneca the Stoic born here, and Averroes the Commentator, and Moses ben Maimun the first rationalist of the Jews, and Lucan, and Spain’s greatest modern poet, Luis de Gongora. Not by chance was this the home of the most perfect Arab Knight, the quiet and strong Al-Mansur who ruled Spain and who decreed Sunday to be a day of rest in deference to the Christian slaves of Islam.

II

Córdoba lies within a tumult of mountains—the Sierra Morena; and Guadalquivir, the lazy river, circles away southward to the easier plains. Córdoba is a poise of mountain, river, plain. It is a kingly city within chaos; it is a masculine above a feminine land. The Christian Copts brought their woman worship to Sevilla whence came the first impetus toward the dogma of the Immaculate Conception; Don Juan, autoerotic and fallen angel, is of Sevilla; the gypsies found haven in Granada for their Black Sea spells whence sprang the aesthetic sadism of Spain. Córdoba forbids such fascinations. It is as quiet as its river, as dense as its mountains, as open and balanced as its Mosque. The streets turn just enough to throw shade into the patios. Donkeys and ox-teams splash no mud on these immaculate walls. Here a miracle of life overtook the death-cult and the lunge of Islam. There grew to be a kingdom of balance and of peace. Within a hundred years of its conquest, Islam forgot conquest and sought peace with Christian Europe. The Calif ate of Córdoba became the seat of urbane monarchs who collected pagan and Christian songs from the Bay of Biscay, who collaborated with the Jews to bring the schools of Babylon northward, who founded the autonomy of science and of speculation seven hundred years before the recanting of Galileo. The Córdoban spirit is a subtle deflection by reason and by will of the uppouring energies of man, into a horizontal balance.

It is in the Mosque. It is in the stately confinement of the streets whose sumptuous palaces raise unassertive walls beside inns and convents and the homes of the poor. It is in the Juderia, the mediaeval quarter of the Jews, where the houses cluster as in reticent prayer about the transformed synagogues and hide patios of shade and brilliant color. It is in the wider, modern streets: the earnerero at your cafe suggests it, waiting on you with unservile skill and then sitting at the next table with his cigarette, like any caballero, until another customer calls for his attention.

III

The summer night of Córdoba is cool as wisdom: its balance against day is delicious like that of Seneca the Stoic, of Averroes the Moslem, of Maimonides the Jew, against the fever of life. As the sun falls and is hidden behind the roofs that have been placed to take it, the town wakes. Day is often fiery night on Córdoba. The good folk have retired to their beds; the houses have been swathed in blinds and canopies to keep this white night out. Now, the awnings are drawn back from across patio and narrow streets. Windows open; air from the world is permitted to touch the shut inner courts where geese patter and women seat themselves at looms, and children, dripping from their deep sleep-journey into the sea of self, sing and play and send sprays of laughter against the cooling walls.

Córdoba expands. The day has hardened and shrunk it. Now sober human streams come like a melting along its streets. They are dark, quiet, silent like dusk. The sound of their moving is not personal: it is an organic murmur and creaking as of the walls widening, melting. The sky is pale, it has the glow of convalescence. The houses, serried so angular in the curving streets, are discreet with their few lights. The central Squares are emphatic, but not blatant. The cafes have a preoccupation, as if they were aware of the hinterland of alleys obscure save for the natural gleam on wall and roof of the gemmed suffusion of the sky. These walls are lowly, the lives they shelter are humble. But with the evening magic, they throb and swell with tacit fervors. The whole of Córdoba is quick under the glow of night with an extraordinary vibrance. The stone streets are flesh, wilfully rigid, of a spirit possessed with the desire to dance.

And in the dance are darker intimations: cries, ravage, conquest. But the slow streams of men and women remain the sole expression. Are they puritans, then, these Andalusians? They wear easeful masks for faces. The women are clad in black, and their soft flesh within the shrouds seems not the flesh of lovers but of matrons. Even the girls, sinuous walking lilies, promise a snare of momentary passion: their will of men is not to be initiates of love, it is to become mothers. But all so easeful—the masks on the faces, the dark women’s weeds. They have been worn so long! They are like the streets whose stones are mellow and whose curves and windings have the fatality of forest paths. If these be puritans, these men and women, with their heritage of war, privation, pioneering—they whose ancestry is Islam, the Cross, the promised Zion—long since has the hard fruit formed and ripened. They are firm and condignly whole within their city whose maze of streets is whole within the tumultuous mountains. . . .

IV

This evening, Córdoba, released from day, is going to the Bull-Ring. There is no moon; the bowl of the arena holds a dark winey night in which the stars are bubbles. The seat tiers are deep. Men and women clamber noisily from perch to perch. But the thousand voices and foot-beats are segregate and aloof within the Ring holding this wine of the night. Upon one side, the seats have been roped off and are empty. Below hang two electric lamps and cast their naked glare upon a stage roughly improvised with unpainted planks. The stage is a little tongue thrust into the arena.

The crowd has come and paid for a good time. But it is self-sufficient—it is the strong-willed, resourceful crowd of Spain. Myriad calls and shreds of laughter, play of hand and foot weave about the Ring, agglutinate; the groups of clamor thicken and grow wider; the entire Ring is joined in the enterprise of shouting, shuffling, clapping. No Spaniards individually blacken the tiers, but this one sudden rough-hewn Spain. . . . It has many means for making itself live. Boys scurry over the laps of matrons: men sing falling cadences to girls: babies shout. The aguero with an earth-jar large as himself, the vendor of pastas and of Arabic sweetmeats, weave through the mass. But still the Bowl holds its uncanny silence; holds the night like wine.

On the stage step forth two figures: the lamps sharpen and deform them. A man, stout and short, clad in black broadcloth with a wide purple sash and linen that is green in the electric glare: he carries a guitar. A woman, slender and tall; her black manton is like a subtle fur over the angular brightness of her breast and shoulders. She wears a large sombrero ancho as black as the eyes in her white face.

They stand within the winey night, within the crowd’s clamor. The man takes a chair: the woman remains sheer and isolate beside him. The man’s hands brush the strings of his guitar. The woman’s mouth opens, and her breast rises in measure. Under the woven racket of the crowd, she sings, he plays, unheard—under the silent night. . . .

A note, hard like silver, high and sharp like an arrow, rises above the clamor and is heard. Far up, it tremors surrounded by the stars. It falls. And as it falls, reaching the clamorous crowd, it links itself upon the vast confusion. The rough-hewn mass of men and women fall along with the note; are drawn by it down to the naked stage, down to the red mouth of the singing woman. The crowd is transfigured. The woman’s voice fades into rest, within an utter silence.

The hand of the guitarist is not lean: yet his fingers make a murmur like a breeze upon the strings: clear in the silence is the music’s breathing. The music has conquered: it is the night’s silence speaking, the night’s quiet moving. The woman’s body stands rigid, her heels beat a tattoo of subtle restraining: her voice is confident and exultant.

Flamenco—the Andalusian voice. The clamor of the crowd has become this passionate silence. It and the night are an ear and eye, close to a slight woman singing and dancing flamenco.

Her fringed shawl scarce flutters on the harsh black skirt. Her arms are crossed on her breast: they rise in plastic measure above her rigid head. At her side sits a fellow wearing a straw hat and strumming liquid cadences with pudgy fingers.

A burden heavy with ages of flesh, bright with ages of dream. Plaint of spirit, rush of blood miraculously woven. A body in dance, rigid as a column; a voice in song, light and swift as a bird. Many Orients are here. In the form, a slender mystic draughtsmanship—Byzantine; a clamor of soul, a submissiveness of body with all its sweetness and its joys merged in the ecstacy of an ideal—Jewish; an intensive thrust, lean, fierce, hunting—Arab. Yet all these elements are not flamenco. Rising like revelation from the Córdoban Plaza, flamenco is Andalusia: these many lyric and tragic wills made one, made into a drama that is Spain.

The woman’s body scarcely moves. Even as she circles the stage, her arms slowly rising and falling, her heels in periodic showers of sharp strokes, it is as if she did not move: rather the stage, rather the Ring and the crowd stir than this plastic fixity of dance. All this sea of torment and of passion, all this sky of vision, ruthlessly impressed in a thin hard body stirless.

The dance cadence is vertebral. There is a time counterpoint of two adverse factors: a rising lilt, a falling plaint. And they are broken, fused into a skeletal arabesque, the backbone of Spanish music, to catch in the soul and to bewilder it. Within this integration live and are woven the voices of Spain’s world. Most deeply perhaps, the Jew: a sensual mysticism, a flash of the conflict between a homely passion and a cosmic fate, languor for love and ease, will to pain and power which rises to a parabolic line more Arabic than Jewish. And a fine-drawn slender cadence, a hunger of this music to transcend its scale, that is Byzantine, that bespeaks the Syria and Egypt of Porphyry and Plotinus. But even here, a savage stress more Arab than neo-platonist. The form of the music is Spain. The elements of this art do not suffice to make it great. It is greatly moving because the moving parts become articulate not progressively, not in unimpeded moments, but in their restraint, in their defeat—in the triumph of the artist’s will upon them.

This woman is not a genius. Spain’s genius speaks through her. This dark light flame of song is the heritage of her people. Tonight in the streets and taverns of a hundred towns, Spain is dancing, Spain is singing—unaware. The passion does not depart: the woman’s body holds it, and we are moved not by the passion but by the unmoved victory of breast and arm fiercely at grips with passion. This cadence is a plaint of agony. It does not bend her, it does not break her face. We are moved by no pathos: but by the high head, by the arms crushing the breast, by the torrent of heel-notes riveting down her triumph over pathos. The mouth sings notes of languorous desire: but the breast is hard, the hips thrust angularly. Sudden the song flares like a banner from her mouth; fades to a shred of synagogic chant. But the body is circling in a crisp gaiety, the fingers are clipping like castanets (absent ever in flamenco), the eyes are smiling, the knees dip in a play of courteous bestowal. Vision, passion, song, the essential experience of many bloods and creeds are here dominioned and formed by a Spanish will into a Spanish art.

At the other end of Córdoba, the luminous night moves among the columns of the open Mosque: with arched head and heel of arabesque they dance their mystery—a forest of wilful motion under the will-less stars. This woman with her black broad hat and her tiny red-heeled slippers is a flamenco shaft: rigid, too, and stone-like, and a-dance. The dance of the Arab columns is horizontal: it is an easeful flowing with the earth. Her dance, which is a dance of Spain, is deeper and is higher. It is more intricate and it is tragic. There is terror in its lean restraint. So calm, it touches Hell: so still, it touches God.

V

Córdoba was great before Mohammed. In the Ninth Century it ruled over Spain. It was the heart of Arab culture and of Jewish culture, even as it had been of Spanish Roman culture. In the Twelfth Century, it dimmed—and dimmed forever. The fanatical Almohades who possessed indeed the initial virtues of Islam—intolerance, violence, motion—could do no more than conquer Córdoba. Their exile of Maimonides was symbol of all their act. Córdoba dimmed, because the spirit which Córdoba had become was exiled from it and driven far and wide. But the spirit lives, because it has a form. Córdoba builds restraint about passion; reason it builds to be the body of vision. It is a fusion of the warring worlds of Spain: a balance in tragic contemplation of all life’s tragic parts. . . .