Simpatico

The Japanese guide and his thirty-strong flock were following me this morning, right from the main entrance to the palace to the front rooms with their round-arched windows through which one could see the city below and its clusters of white houses, to the central courtyard that was simpler than imagined, a perimeter pathway around a rectangular bed of water shimmering in the sunlight. There I tried to find a corner to stand in, to look above and away from the sea of camera-clicking, chattering heads, towards the balcony, empty of people, and the embroidered gable along the sloping roof. At the entrance by the row of orange trees Ferdinand and Isabella, names remembered from history textbooks, 'took back' the keys to Spain; where Boabdil, the last of the Nasrids sighed the Moor's last sigh as he handed it to them and walked away from this fortress at the top of the hill. Of this palace Menocal writes, "This was their triumph, a serendipitous echo of the alternating reds and whites of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, a testament to their own vision of their loneliness as the last Islamic polity in all of what had once been the great Umayyad caliphate."* I walked around a lot after the 32 dropped us off down the hill, by the river along the hill below looking straight up at it, through Albaycin up the adjoining hill of yesterday stealing glances behind me, to a bench at the foot of the hill. Alhambra stands there, an elaborate signature in red and brown carved into the mountainside, framed by the white ranges of the Sierra Nevada.

The hour's nap wore off the lunchtime beer - beer that had made it easy to stay whimsical; standing outside the cafe looking at the time wondering if Maria or Jozef will be home, the feeling that vaguely hangs over the last day of this trip, like the Sunday before school re-opens after the summer holidays, becomes plain and present fact: It is time to leave.

Maria asked me last night if I liked Andalucia. Yes, very much, I said, it is the first time in Western Europe that I have looked around and been able to be reminded of home. "Yes, yes", she cut in enthusiastically, "the guy from Colombia who stayed with us last week? He said the same thing, that this is the first place in Western Europe that reminded him of his own country." For me it was true: the lottery ticket seller who sets up a bicycle-stall on the side of a street and shouts out his wares, the loudspeaker from the back of a small van during election time, the way middle-aged husbands get the attention of their wives in public when there are people around, not by calling out their names but with two claps of the hands. How when you stop and ask for directions the man will also tell you which street not to take and wants to know why you are going to that village. Even the clothes men wear, buttoned cotton shirts with familiar checked patterns tucked often without a belt into dark-coloured trousers. In looking out from a balcony or a hill in Andalucia at the tops of buildings clustered in the neighbourhood below, with their small minarets and domes on the posts of walls, like looking out at the tops of buildings clustered in a neighbourhood in Hyderabad. The way clotheslines are tied from television antennas on the flat terraces of houses, and brightly coloured clothes flutter in the hot breeze. The houses in Sevilla, as my aunt exclaimed, really do look like houses back home.

It is said -- and accepted as a fact of human nature -- that a place is really about its people. This is not a fact to disagree with. But how then does one explain this 'feeling' about a place that comes from just the place, from the limited hours or days that one spends there, often without really talking to anybody else?

This feeling is to be cherished all the more for its circumstances: you are cast in this new place on a random evening or afternoon for a very short period before you up and leave to the next (or, eventually, go back home). At the moment of arrival you could be sleep-deprived or tired or wanting a bit of familiarity - all unlike how you'd pictured your moment of arrival (you had assumed you'd be at your alert, interested best). And simultaneously have to handle mundanities that you wouldn't ordinarily take into account: look to offload luggage that is beginning to feel a little bit heavier at every passing street corner, hoping that shop a few streets earlier hasn't closed yet or having to walk forty minutes to find food, standing in front of Mezquita and realize just as you're entering that your socks (and feet) are damp and smelly and that there is nothing to be done about it till the end of the day. You cannot speak the language, and you look different from everyone else (so that it becomes common that every pair of eyes as you walk down a street or sit down to eat is studying you). You are not only a tourist but also a stranger, and it makes no difference to Cordoba whether you were there or not - you might have been looking forward to your day there but it is just another day in its life. Nine days is a supremely short period of travel compared to the average backpacker one crosses, but I discover that it is time enough to find things that do not happen within the window of a weekend travelling: to experience hours and afternoons like this, when you long for a dose of familiarity or at least anonymity, and to find that since you are alone there is nobody to distract you from it when it happens. This feeling about the place that comes from just the place must show through these things, these isolating things; when it did, even amidst the foreigners walking past, it made that feeling about Cordoba and Sevilla that much more of a thing to cherish.

Sevilla's "old quarter" is still a living thing; the city's Mudejar architecture (the Muslims and their influences that remained in Andalucia after the Christian reconquest were called Mudejar) still inspires it. In many European cities and towns the old towns are extremely well-preserved but often they have seemed just that, preserved, like a precious relic that is then showed off, painted up, often in due course acquiring chic property value and fashionable folk moving in. Sevilla's old town, in so far as it exists in this usual sense, seems to blend into and lend to the city that has grown around it; the elements that gave such a city a character and expression in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries live on actively, in the way its buildings are till today built and its public spaces still constructed. "Many people, origin Muslim" Olmo said that evening, arching his hand behind his head to indicate eras past. Though the Mezquita has long since been converted into a cathedral Olmo and Marcos refer to it as 'the mosque'; Many street and place names have retained their Arabic roots - "Si, si", Olmo and Marcos say turning to each other when I mention this, "even the family names." Do you still feel a connection to it, that culture, today? "Si...", Olmo started as he considered his answer for a few seconds, "our houses? still we build in Arabic style. It is where we grow up. Eh... aceite oliva, olive oil? We got it from the Arabic people. Olive oil produccion, very important for us."

My first trip to this part of the world was the things that are most readily associated with Andalucia, in the flesh: the bullring, the guitar, the flamenco dancer. These too were not cultural curios to be found in designated places, but a visible part of their city - pictures hung on cafe walls of local bullfighting heroes; posters for the coming season stuck on lampposts by the road; the matador's regalia in the window of the Sestreria and the brightly-painted pointy-shoes used as footwear in Marcos's house; posters announcing guitar lessons on the streets; the guitar case strapped onto the back of a man in workday clothes getting onto a bus; the outline of a classical guitar painted in black on a whitewashed wall.

Yet a place is about its people.

Olmo is from a village called al-Aroja ('the Red') near Cordoba. "The name is the colour of the earth there", he said. "Typical Arabic, of Andalucia". Olmo has thin, curly black hair, the colour of his skin is closer to brown; in Spain his features might be called Moorish. Sara is from Caceres near the border with Portugal, she told of spending summers of her childhood in a beach-house on the Costa del Sol, where her dad would sit outside in the sunshine and paint. "Landscape? Natural?" I asked. "Eh... impresionistas?", she replied (the way the word rolled off her tongue is to remember), "One day he will be famous. I just know it!" Maria and Jozef sometimes slept nights in the beat-up pale blue Fiat they picked me up in in the Sierra Nevada mountainside, when they went to village festivals to sell their jewellery. "In Carmona no secrets! Everybody know everybody!" Sara said, lamented, of her father's village near Sevilla. There are more places in Andalucia I want to go to now than when I started this trip, places I heard of not from reading or pictures or a map but from a story someone told.

That night at Cordoba after I'd exchanged goodbyes with Marcos's housemates -- I was leaving early the next morning -- Olmo came back to the living room in a few minutes. He sat down with the clay-like ball and the lighter, and said something to Ernesto to translate: "He wants to share a last one", Ernesto turned and said, "As a...", he searches for the word: "...simpatico, with you. You understand that word?" Yes, I nodded and smiled.

So we sat around for a while longer, breaking down sentences, acting out words, looking to each other to translate, partaking and passing on. That night I felt that my trip could have ended there, then; I would be content.

I leave the map with Maria, invite them to London and to India, and walk to the bus station just in time for the hourly bus to the airport. She is happy to have it: they are hosting more people this week, and now it has the route back home from town, traced with a pencil. Soon it will be in someone else's bag, as they head out to see a new place on a sunny afternoon.





* The Ornament of the World - Maria Rosa Menocal