One of the most civilized aspects of this town is the vast greenness of Parque de Maria Luisa, which must be a cool green respite when Sevilla turns into the frying pan of Andalucia in summer. We walk the whole morning amid the mimosa and banana plants. The park is full of whimsy-fountains and duck ponds, tile benches, gazebos, and waterfalls. Great tropical trees with roots that seem to pour out at the bottom of the trunk, at home since the explorers returned from New World voyages, make me search for identifying labels, but few have them. One, an arbol de las lianas, came from the Amazon. The Swiss Family Robinson could have made their home in the spreading branches. A blind man walks slowly down a path. He knows his way, perhaps by scents and the texture of gravel underfoot. At the monument to the nineteenth-century local poet Gustavo Becquer, someone has left an extravagant bouquet of bright lilies in the arms of one of the allegorical marble women. Her cool flesh and the hot pink flowers surprise the January morning and make me hope the poet's language was capable of such contrasts. A local history describes him as "an incorrigible Bohemian, who earned a precarious living by translating foreign novels," and who "crooned a weird elfin music." I know him as hopelessly romantic, in the sappy mode, but who occasionally broke through with sharp perceptions such as: In a brilliant lightning flash we are born And the brilliance still lasts when we die.

So short is life.

Something about a park is timeless: glimpsing the wild bouquet in the arms of personified love, and the poet up on his pedestal, I think of them standing there all through the blunt and stultifying Franco fascist years, as though love poetry mattered. I resolve to start leaving armfuls of flowers at my holy spots, not just a wildflower or sprig of daphne picked along the way.

We exit the park near the last place where people were burned during that precursor of fascism, that evil twin of Franco's era, the Inquisition, when church and royalty in cahoots went unilaterally crazy, unchecked and blind. Sevilla-here people burned, here marble statues to venerated poets are still visited, here the energy of flamenco could raise the dead, spin them around, and lay them in the ground again.

In no other city have I grasped so quickly the layout of neighborhoods and monuments. A glance at a sixteenth-century map in a book was all it took. The park, the river, the anchor of the Giralda tower, and that long walk the first day make me feel that I know this place instinctively. We even take shortcuts and land exactly where we want. Getting to know a place on foot connects me to particulars-a green apartment building with a terrace jumbled with banana plants, a grand, peeling turquoise door, the mustard-yellow trimmed bullring with red and black posters of matadors, the tall palms pinwheeling in the sky, the enchanting patio gardens and trickling fountains along Callejon del Agua, Water Street.

I could live here. Is there a Callejon del Sol for me, a Sun Street? With my spotted background in Spanish, and the knowledge I have of Italian, I could cobble together a walking-around Spanish in a few months. I begin to imagine a house with a two-level courtyard and a fountain always singing; tiled rooms, patterned like oriental rugs, are dappled with light from the intricate windows. In the summer I can press my cheek to the tiles for coolness. The gardens are rooms, as the Arabs knew, and the sound of water smooths my sleep. Perhaps I dream of the desert. The shutters of carved wood close on storms that sweep across the plain. The bath is a remnant of a Moorish hamman, with a deep soaking pool. The vision includes a small blond child playing in the street and calling out his first word in Spanish: amigo.

I feel especially at home on Sunday morning in the Plaza del Salvador, where families sit at outdoor cafes sipping orange juice and taking in the sun, while babies climb out of their strollers to chase pigeons. After ma.s.s at Iglesia del Salvador, the handsome dark-suited young men with slick hair and the girls in short, short skirts stand under the trees at outdoor tables, as though at a party, drinking beer and eating chips. A cart sells pinwheels. All this under fragrant orange trees in the company of the looming church built on the foundations of a mosque. Rather fantastic children's clothing shops and bridal shops surround the plaza. Probably the impetus for both occasions begins here. We succ.u.mb and buy a white outfit for the baby we await in our family: fine cotton smocked a million times in blue, finishes with multiple tucks and dangling ribbons. I wonder who will slide into the pleated arms and pose for a photograph before carrots stain the front.

A taxi ride away we find a wonderful art exhibit in a Carthusian monastery that became a ceramic tile factory, then was restored by the city as a gallery. Even in January some roses and geraniums perk up the courtyards. Vines droop like long hair, blooming with ornamental pink trumpets. The vibrant paintings lead us back into the city to explore the contemporary galleries. At night we try desserts late at various tapas bars: orange rice pudding with cinnamon, quince with cheeses, fig biscuits with walnut sauce. And late, late flamenco. One venue featured a young male dancer full of pa.s.sion and precision. I was intrigued by his guitarist singer, whose involvement with the dancer seemed almost to make the dance possible. He strained toward the dancer, intently watched, egged him on, pushed his own energy into the dancer. The performance began with a piercing cry, "Aaiiee . . . ," a skull-ringing wail that might have originated with Jewish rituals, for the flamenco weaves the traditions of Gypsies, Muslims, and Jews, bringing their sorrow and pa.s.sion to indigenous folk music.

I love the moment when the dance suddenly stops and the dancer walks off, as casually as though the light turns and he crosses the street. Snap. The mood is broken. That dramatic shift signifies the difference between the duende of the dance and the normal world where we reveal little of what we feel. We like the new phrases we're learning-toque de palmas, clapping, pitos, finger snapping, taconeo, heel stamping. All contribute to the body as instrument. Castanuelas comes from chestnuts, and perhaps the first castanets were improvised from two dried ones. Ed buys the CD to take home, perhaps to listen to while we cook, so far away from this courtyard open to the stars. "Do you feel that by experiencing flamenco, another room in your mind has opened?" I ask.

"I had a pretty stereotyped impression before. Now we'll be listening to the music, recalling the faces, the pa.s.sion. Rip-roaring pa.s.sion."

"Good flamenco tours are sellouts all over the world. Did you know that there are three hundred flamenco schools in j.a.pan? j.a.pan! The center of decorum! What explains the rise in popularity of flamenco, here and everywhere?"

"A yearning. This art touches a yearning we have. The unspoken longings way inside the heart," Ed says.

What man can travel this long road and not fill up his soul with crazy arabesques?

The day arrives when we are to leave, though we are not going far. We will go to a hacienda in the country where they raise bulls and horses. Sevilla falls away quickly, and we are buzzing in our small rented car toward the vega, the plain. Although I never thought so with Las Vegas, the word carries a charge. Vega-we begin to experience it as we drive out of Sevilla and the big sky opens over the slightly rolling fields, some with olive trees, some planted with crops, some left to the bulls. My imagined house in Sevilla quickly reabsorbs into a fantasy of a country hacienda, a cortijo. We pa.s.s them every few miles, stark white, walled, big trees, paradises on their own out in the country.

We check into the Cortijo El Esparragal, three thousand hectares forming a private world with the courtyard as the center of it. A cloister furnished with carved wooden chairs and benches surrounds the arched courtyard with fountain and potted plants. The walls are covered in bull heads and bridles, as in a Florida restaurant where sailfish and marlin hang above the tables. One bull has a b.l.o.o.d.y tongue and a sword in his back. This is so like the gory religious imagery I found shocking in the Prado. Out in the fields horses play, running from one fence to the opposite. Your heart has to somersault when you see these handsome animals run, turn with a neigh, and race full tilt in the other direction.

We are the only guests, and it's odd-we are in someone's house. All of the family, the girl at the reception tells us, live in Madrid. We settle into our room on a small leafy courtyard. Ed cracks the window so the murmur of the fountain pours in the window. He's soon out the door. The lure of the bull pasture, the long dirt roads to drive in silence, the big shady cork trees, the fragrance of ripe oranges, the private chapel, the miniature bullring-the intact world of this hacienda immediately seems compelling to us. I would like a bell tower on my house, and miles of bougainvillea blazing back at the sun. I would like one of these white horses. I would like to paint blue borders and evil eye circles on my house. The stark white haciendas, scattered through the countryside at greater distances than the Tuscan farmhouses, resemble Texas ranches-but of course, those Lazy X ranches descended from the Spanish, as did the tradition of horsemanship.

Having previously traveled only to Barcelona and Majorca in Spain, I did not know how close visually Mexico is to Spain. I attributed characteristics of Mexico to the indigenous population as much as to Spain until we drive through tiny Andalucian towns with their forlorn, weedy parks, their bodegas painted with waist-high bands of aqua or ochre, with human-sized Coca-Cola bottles out front, their dry fountains, and the open doorways where people sit knitting, smoking, or sh.e.l.ling beans. Shops as small as vending machines overflow with ladders, oranges, shoes, paint-all jumbled together. Often in Mexico I have thought, Where is everybody? I remember this just as Ed says, "It's quiet as the day after Judgment Day." One lone woman with a bundle of wash poised on her hip sways down the cracked sidewalk. We could be in the Sierra Nevada villages outside San Miguel. But Ed says, "This is limbo. Or this is where you come for a grande dose of duende."

For lunch, we're alone in the family dining room, presided over by a portrait of the senora who must have decorated these rooms. She's austere in a modest ballgown, no jewelry except for a thin bracelet. Her hair is cropped, her gaze direct, and she is not smiling. She merely looks in charge of her destiny, way back in the 1940s when she sat for this portrait. She chose to hang the walls of her living room with paintings of matadors and famous bulls, probably from this hacienda. Gracious white-gloved women bring us lunch. We don't order; they just bring on the roast pork and platters of potatoes and vegetables. "Are we the only guests?" we ask.

"Si, but the family arrives this afternoon. You see, in this period we are closed." We contemplate this odd reply while we eat. Our reservation must have been a mistake.

Instead of siesta, we settle by the fire with a tiny gla.s.s of sherry and read, glancing up at the looming bulls and elegant matadors who have been at home here for so long. When the light drizzle stops, we emerge into the washed afternoon. On our walk, we find wild asparagus, violets, and irises. We startle a jackrabbit in the olive grove, and a troop of seven wild boars startles us. They are so comical looking and seem to take themselves so seriously.

When we come into the living room at the dinner hour, the family has arrived. They are the early middle-aged daughters and sons of the woman in the portrait, I a.s.sume, with their various spouses. No children. They look exactly the way I imagined aristocratic Spaniards in the country would look. They must have been outfitted since infancy in those fancy riding stores in Sevilla with the flat hats, shawls, fine gloves, tooled saddles, and chaps cut in patterns like paper doilies. They sip sherry and talk quietly. Tweed, leather, boots, and big hair. Any one of them certainly could gallop across plains, Bolero or not. Not one of them could dance flamenco. They nod to us but say nothing. They're intent on themselves; perhaps they have not been together in a while. On all the tables, framed photographs of them as children and of their ancestors stand guard. We're the interlopers, content to observe. We sink into a sofa and begin talking about the next few days. The family moves into the dining room, where a long table under the eyes of the senora is set with candles and silver. In a few minutes one of the white-gloved maids comes to get us for dinner. We're shown the way, pa.s.sing the seated family, and not one of them smiles or looks at us. "That would never happen in Italy," I say to Ed. We're relieved to be taken to a smaller, private dining room, where we dine happily on soup, venison stew, and orange cake.

At breakfast they're nowhere in sight. We're served tortilla-sized pastries wrapped in waxed paper, stamped in red with the name Ines Rosales from nearby Castilleja de la Cuesta. She has made this from wheat, olive oil, essence of anise, and other ingredients the Oxford Spanish Dictionary did not see fit to include: matalahuga and ajonjoli, which I think means "sesame." Nice words to say aloud. The thick coffee ("undrinkable," Ed says) with the aromatic pastry takes me with a Proustian jolt back to Majorca, where my friends Susan and Shera and I rented a house one summer and walked all over the island, with the sea wind stirring the perfumes of shrubs along the coast.

Walking all over Sevilla gave us a sense of intimacy with the city; driving in Andalucia gives us a broader sense of place and of how the larger landscape psychologically imprints those who live here. Vega-the wide sky, the home, home on the range, the big sun slipping under the horizon, pulling down a profound darkness. We've found local people cordial but aloof. Is it the xenophobic fear of the stranger on horseback, or a remnant of Franco's cramped society? Vast, vast, endless olive groves carpeted with yellow oxalis puzzle Ed. Where are the houses? The land rolls on, without a dot of human habitation, only those spirits, the majestic, twisted, and sparkling olive trees. Even in January workers are beating the limbs, shaking the trunks with machines, and gathering the fallen drupes from the nets. In the first village we stop to look at Moorish walls and a herd of goats crossing a bridge. The owner of a dusty gift shop tells us that workers commute to the groves and always have. Unlike the Italian system, with a family share-cropping the amount of land they can handle, these seemingly infinite groves are owned by absent landlords but are managed and worked by local teams. Although Spain produces excellent olive oil, much of its exported oil has suffered ruination from bad processing. I've opened some wretched bottles, even when I rented the house on Majorca-thin and tainted with harsh industrial aftertastes. Fine artisan oils exist, if you search. I wish they didn't beat the trees, but if you own a million, something other than the slow human hand will have to get those olives to the mill.

The open road-almond and plum blossoms are beginning to shake, rattle, and roll. We're heading to Italica, a Roman city settled near the Guadalquiver when the river's course flowed nearer. Hadrian and Trajan were born here. Again, the geography unfolds naturally. A quick orientation, and it is easy to visualize the town flourishing in the second century B.C. on streets wider than Sevilla's. Though only mosaic floors and foundations remain, the reconstructed city rises easily in the imagination, much more so than at all the other hundreds of archaeological sites I've tramped across. We have Italica almost to ourselves, that bonus of travelling in January. The mosaics, mostly in black and white marble, lie intact. Why do we like to walk ancient streets? Curiosity, contemplation, for the surprise of history. These Romans paved their floors with tromp l'oeil squares that become stars. I'm ahead of Ed and call back, "Here's Medusa surrounded by geometric swastikas."

"Too bad Hitler ruined that design forever. Here's a scene for you-The House of the Birds." Bordered squares divide the floor. Each of the thirty-two depicts a different bird. We find Greek key borders, Bacchus, astrological figures, the days of the week mosaic, then the House of Neptune with its reminder of the town's founder, Publius Cornelius Scipio. He's better known to us as Scipio Africa.n.u.s for his sojourns in Africa, where he defeated Hannibal's Carthaginians and caused Spain to be awarded to the Romans.

Italica, the first Roman town in Iberia, was settled for Scipio's wounded Italian soldiers. There must have been mosaicists among them who fought in the African campaigns. Almost cartoonish squat black warriors with big lips climb palms, ride astride alligators, stand behind shields, and arch, poised to throw arrows. Exotic cranes and ibises intermingle with the border design. In the inside field, fish, seahorses, and mythological sea creatures cavort. The overall effect is muscular, ribald-a pygmy is poked in the rear by a heron, another opens a crocodile's mouth. Perhaps an oral epic was translated into mosaic, if only we could read it.

A workman mops the mosaic floor of one house open to the four winds. He swishes soapy water, then throws down a bucket of clear water. How many thousands of times has someone mopped these st.u.r.dy floors! Their makers set each marble chip on a layer of plaster, on top of a layer of lime and earthenware fragments, on top of a layer of lime and stone, on top of a pebble layer. The word mosaic comes from the Greek meaning "a patient work worthy of the muses." The first mosaics must have been bits of stone stuck into clay walls to keep them up, to keep them from dripping, to provide a bit of sparkle to a drab room. Then came the incorporation of pieces of lapis lazuli, jasper, onyx, marble, travertine, malachite-pretty colors for making designs and displaying the prosperity of a family. Who can know which is older, rug weaving or mosaics? The designs in mosaics often recall rug patterns and vice versa. As the workman washes, the colors of the stones shine. We take in the blue-fresh as when it was set. So it was always thus; after rain in the uncovered atrium, the family observed how gorgeous their courtyard floor looked when wet.

We have spent the past few hacienda days driving around to small towns where donkeys prove useful. We ate in workers' cafes, searched out Arab doorways on Christian church grounds, walked in back streets where flowered sheets and orange towels flapped in the breeze and dogs didn't open an eye when we pa.s.sed. The street life in Carmona reminded me of Cortona's. Babies were admired in the plaza, where boys played ball and clumps of people stood visiting in the sun. A large pa.s.sing truck stopped, and the driver leaned out to pick a few oranges, then drove on. Like Cortona and all other Tuscan towns, these Andalucian towns have their masterpieces and mysteries. Carmona has many. Sitting in the winter sun, we ordered tortillitas de bacalao, cod fritters, and oven-roasted vegetables, and a plate of cheeses as we watched little girls playing with their dolls on a park bench. The cheeses were addictive. We'd known manchego in California, though in Spain the taste is saltier, creamier, with a barnyard overtone. The sides are imprinted with a pattern from the gra.s.s mold where they're aged. I'm a fan of blue cheeses and have ordered cabrales several times. A blend of ewe, goat, and cow milk, the strong flavors are mellowed by the accompanying little dish of quince paste.

The morning seemed to melt seamlessly into an afternoon of exploring the old city. We happened upon the quintessentially Andalucian church of Santa Maria. Built on the ruins of a mosque, it retains a patio of orange trees, where ritual washing took place. On a column in this peaceful courtyard, we find inscribed a Visigoth calendar of holidays. Again and again these three cultural layers abide, abide.

I'm sure we are not the first to sing "Help, help me Rhonda" as we drive into the fabled white town of Ronda, perched on either side of an impressive abyss. We check into the parador, one of the government's chain of inns, usually in historic buildings. Our room lacks charm, but the location can't be matched. Right out the balcony door I look down at the bridge over the canyon and all the small streets and white houses of the old town. The inn's terrace overlooks the gorge and distant mountains. Ronda has all the makings of a bad painting-the whitewashed, geranium-laden, perched tiled-roof town against blue-gray mountains and green fields. The main streets are depressingly jammed with tourists up from the coast on day excursions. Some hefty specimens, scantily clothed, provide their own kind of scenery. Real spring must bring a nightmare of people who in the privacy of their own backyards should never wear shorts but go on tour with their rumps and hams in full view.

Off the main streets we yield to Ronda's beauty. Lanes that once were goat paths wind up and up to quiet and serene residential neighborhoods. These are more appealing to me than casas colgadas, the hanging houses so named because they're perched right on the lip of the 525-foot-deep canyon. I'm too insecure to live there. We stop for a lemonade and a look at maps and books. I'm struck, once again, by the strange flattening of a guidebook-town after town, and each one seemingly equal. But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your own secret images. The slow fall of a coin into the gorge with the sun catching the copper only for a moment, and the fall into nothing says more about a sense of place than three pages of restaurant and hotel descriptions, or dry summations of history that are so compressed they make you dizzy.

I'm tired in Ronda. We both want to retreat for a couple of days and spread out our novels and prop our feet on the low table, or nap, take notes, sip blood orange juice, and partake of the breakfast buffet that features local specialties such as migas, a basic country dish of spicy breadcrumbs, chorizo, and garlic, along with platters of fruit and hot churros. Breakfast is such a key to the culture. An Italian nipping an espresso, an American chowing down on cereal, eggs, and bacon, the Frenchman grabbing a croissant-breakfast speaks to all the rhythms of the other meals and to the rising and sleeping and working motions. This basic Spanish meal links to people who were heading for hard work and who made do with a bit of meat and leftover bread-whatever was at hand.

The paradors emphasize regional cuisine. So do many local restaurants. Last night we had white almond gazpacho, followed by kid chops and partridge stew. The tapas mania of Sevilla subsides in the country. Hearty food that hunters would like, and plenty of it, seems to be the approach.

The full moon rises out of a pink sky and dangles itself over the gorge-the biggest moon I have seen in my life. I feel the gravity of fullness. So low and enormous, this moon hanging above the canyon. It could plunge into the river below. Moon, my daughter's second word. She was a one-year-old pointing to the sky, sensing s.p.a.ce and spirit. We lean on the balcony watching the slow trajectory. The Spanish moon has duende.

To Marbella and Puerto Ba.n.u.s, just to dip down to the coast. As we drive south, the countryside goes wilder-escarpments and waterfalls, and mountain goats scrambling from rock to rock. "Are they trapped?" I wonder. Peering down from impossible outcrops, they look puzzled as to how they got there. Help, help me Rhonda. Hawks transfix in the air over prey. In Italy, this motionless hovering is called Il Santo Spirito because the hawk resembles the holy spirit.

Through a pa.s.s, we see the coast and sea. Soon we're zipping by odd developments that look as if they'd landed here by mistake. Wintering English and German tourists pack into these condo and apartment blocks. This is not the ruined western Costa del Sol. The Marbella area is merely overdeveloped, American style. "Are we in Fort Lauderdale?" Ed says. "Look at all that ersatz Tuscan-Mediterranean architecture." But then we find Marbella's lively outdoor cafes around the Plaza de los Naranjos, the nice shops with fine soaps and French sheets, a purely Arab balcony outfitted with a plaster Mary, and again the charm of the air blessed with the scent of orange blossoms. We pa.s.s several consignment shops whose windows are filled with Armani and Gucci and Jil Sander. People on vacation must change their minds about what they packed in their suitcases and unload their mistakes rather than take them home. Or maybe they opt to wear less in the lovely sun. In a fancy children's shop, we buy a pair of hand-knitted booties for our Mister X.

Down the road at Puerto Ba.n.u.s, many of the international rich are idling away their January. The yacht harbor, mamma mia, is a many-splendored thing. The cool jangles of the rigging and the wavering reflections in the water always give me an adventurous rush, probably that old encoded human desire for quest, for pushing off and heading into the open sea. But these Argonauts seem tightly tethered to land. Boys in crisp shorts polish and buff, flemish ropes, and touch up minute scratches, while portly owners speak into cell phones on the deck. Two women totter in pastel pants and high-heeled sandals across a gangplank. The rings on their fingers are the size of ice cubes. They're laden with jewelry. "We're just seeing a stereotype," I tell Ed. "Down below someone is reading Heidegger, and over there on the bow of Stardust Destiny, someone is writing a villanelle."

"Dream on. He's working a crossword puzzle, at best. Why tax yourself in this place?" Ferraris slowly cruise the street. We inspect the menus of the seafood restaurants lining the harbor and choose one where the crayfish, crab, and prawns thrash on ice and the fish look bright-eyed. Next to us a German woman orders a Tia Maria on ice after her lunch of grilled fish and white wine. She's tan as a saddle, probably around seventy, with a magenta scarf wound around her neck and hair. Ed asks if she lives here, and yes, she bought a condominium five years ago and has joined book clubs and investment clubs but finds herself bored, hence the second Tia Maria, I a.s.sume, and besides the weather (seventy-five degrees today) is frigid but better than the iron-cold of Stuttgart. I fear retirement in places where the climate is the lure.

From Ronda, via Antequera and Archidona, we make our way to Granada, city of Garcia Lorca. Snow tops the surrounding mountains-a Xanadu setting. As we drive closer, we're suddenly lost in dismal sprawl and dirty air. By the time we find our hotel near the Alhambra, we've gone quiet with disappointment. Granada, I'm not falling under your spell. Poetry, roses, nightingales, water gardens, Gypsies-no one's fault but mine that I imagined a fabled city. Or perhaps it is the fault of the Nicaraguan on the lawn at Princeton, leafing through Lorca's poems, stopping at "Ballad of the Three Rivers." The book was worn leather (cordovan, I suddenly realize-from Cordoba). Guadalquiver, high tower/and wind in the orange groves . . ./It carries olives and orange blossoms,/Andalucia, to your seas. The breeze riffled the pages, tissue thin like an old Bible. Marienoelle, his little daughter, learned her first word that afternoon. Agua, she shrieked, agua, splashing in the plastic pool. I leaned against a tree, arms folded. From the lips of the Nicaraguan, I learned that Granada has "two rivers, eighty bell towers, four thousand watercourses, fifty fountains." I lost a gold ring that belonged to my husband's family, and I looked in the gra.s.s for hours. The poet said nothing about pollution headaches.

We arrive late. From the hotel window, the snowy mountain-ringed city below spreads into endless lights and the wavy slush of traffic noise. To compound our first impression, we face a greasy dinner in the small restaurant highly recommended by the hotel's concierge. Ten o'clock, and the place is empty except for a silent couple having tapas at the bar. The owner nips at a large gla.s.s of wine on a sideboard each time he ducks into the room from the kitchen. He seems distraught when we ask for anything. "Must be the concierge's brother," Ed whispers. The uphill route back to the hotel takes us through ominous streets. Federico Garcia Lorca, modest dreamer and son of water, I believe you said Granada is made for music. Please forgive me, but your Granada is a disaster. We're relieved to see the hotel looming at the end of the street. Pseudo-Moorish, it is drafty, tiled, and old enough to have character. We chose it because Lorca gave his first poetry reading here. His guitar accompanist was Andres Segovia. Two young men are getting out of a car. Federico and Andres? Striding into the lobby, young, full of ideals?

Ed goes upstairs for a bath, and I order a sherry on the gla.s.sed-in terrace. The stars are fiery. Hey Federico, I expected horses, moon, jasmine, duende, an almond branch against the sky. Doesn't the Arab saying Paradise is that part of the heavens that is above Granada have any truth to it? I don't really like sherry, Federico. I'm not even thinking yet of the Alhambra just above us, how that ma.s.sive presence must have seeped into your brain, must seep into the very ca.n.a.liculi of every inhabitant of Granada. This nice fino-such a warm color-reminds me of my in-laws from my first marriage. Pouring from gallon jugs of cheap sherry into tiny crystal gla.s.ses, they tippled from noon on. My husband and I used to count the empties on the back porch and wonder if they were alcoholics. But sitting on a balcony in Granada, that dreary, bleary-eyed old father is the last thing I want to think about, smoking in his chair in the high-ceilinged room, clearing his throat, a weary figure everyone stepped around and tried desperately to glorify or at least explain. I later learned of his sick and evil streak, something I must have known by instinct as a bride. I always shuddered and turned my face away from any welcome or goodbye embrace. Taste is also memory. Maybe he's why sherry burns my mouth with a back taste of medicine and mould.

Better to think of that stellar being, the poet, polar opposite of the downward-dragging former father-in-law. Lorca's meteoric trajectory through life was short-only thirty-nine years. He lived with a powerful exuberance that deserves a lift of the gla.s.s anytime. Everything he touched ignited with his creativity. Besides his poetry and plays and lectures, he started a travelling troupe of actors to take drama into the countryside where people did not see plays. He studied flamenco guitar with Gypsies and loved folk music, riddles, and songs. He painted, made puppets, wrote extraordinary letters. He was legendary at the piano, singing with friends until all hours. With other musicians, he organized a local conference in 1922 on cante jonde, deep song. "The Gypsy siguiriya [a type of deep song] begins with a terrifying outcry," he said in his lecture: a scream that divides the landscape into two perfect hemispheres. It is the cry of dead generations, a sharp-edged elegy for lost centuries, the pa.s.sionate evocation of love under other moons and other winds. Then the melodic phrase gradually reveals the mystery of tones and sets off the jewel-stone sob, a musical tear shed in the river of the voice. No Andalucian hears that cry without a shudder of emotion, nor can other regional songs compare to it in poetic grandeur, and seldom, very seldom, does the human spirit succeed in shaping works of art of such naturalness.

At that conference, local artists awakened to their heritage. Lorca was the brightest bloom of Granada's promise. The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda remembered him as "an effervescent child, the young channel of a powerful river. He squandered his imagination, he spoke with enlightenment . . . He cracked walls with his laughter, he improvised the impossible, and in his hands a prank became a work of art. I have never seen such magnetism and such constructiveness in a human being." I would love to have had him as a close friend. I feel a sharp sting of loss. Wondrous that you can miss someone who died before you were born. Buenas noches, Federico. I will try to find your Granada.

Fourteen ninety-two resonates in Granada for reasons other than Columbus's New World discovery. That same year this last major city of the Nasrid Arab rulers fell to the forces of our old friends Isabella and Fernando. Prior to their victory, during the 250-year reign of the Nasrids, the fabulous fortress, the Alhambra, symbolized the refinement, play, and range of Moorish art. When Fernando and Isabella took over the keys to the Alhambra, they walked up the hill to claim their new residence, dressed, I'm astounded to read, in Arab clothing. They moved in, these reconquerors, and did their damage to the complex. But they were profoundly acclimated to Moorish design and oddly enough (to the traveller), they were at home with the Arab lifestyle.

We're up early-this is the most-visited tourist attraction in the world. We are lucky-few people are here yet-and no tour buses. Only a black cat welcomes us, a reincarnation of our cat, Sister, who lived in feline glory for eighteen years. Here she is, Sister the Moor; she was never put to sleep by a vet named Dr. Blood, never carried away wrapped in a monogrammed green towel I'd had since college.

As we learn about the Alhambra and gardens, what fascinates me most is how art was so closely connected to living. Through the decorative-interior design and landscape design-the entire panoply of Moorish art is displayed. The complex, added on to and improved over two centuries, began with al-Sabikah, a citadel, and eventually included stables, barracks, servants' quarters, and administrative apartments. The exquisite jewel remains the Nasrids' royal palace, their courtyards, baths, and enchanted rooms, along with their gardens, which extend to the Generalife (meaning "the architect's paradise"), their second home (probably bought from the architect) nearby. The Alhambra's gardens recalled the legendary gardens of Damascus. We walk, as they lived, with the sound of water, soothing to us and to the ears of desert people. Green, green-the lush trees and damask roses must have soothed the Nasrids. The intricate stucco carved ceilings, the Mudejar-tiled walls with epigraphs calligraphed on borders, the horseshoe-arched mihrabs, the gold-filigreed walls of complex vegetal and geometric patterns-even with all the splendor, the rooms maintain a human scale. A few rugs, a pile of cushions, a brazier, and we'd be ready to rinse our hands in orange flower water, relax, and settle down for a feast of lamb tagine, stuffed eggplants and cabbages flavored with coriander and cinnamon, preserved lemons, chickpeas with saffron, and a pastry pie of pigeons. The bath, too, reveals an appreciation of life's pleasures. A balcony for poets and musicians rests on top of the tiled soaking pool. The royals could bathe while listening to dulcet music drifting down. The arches, galleries, and entablatures that adorn many rooms are supported by columns. Are the rooms any larger than the grand Berber tents their nomadic ancestors pitched in the sand? Maybe the extensive use of columns comes from an inheritance of tent poles. The 124 columns supporting panels of fretted lattice in the Courtyard of the Lions reminded visitors of palm trees. The central fountain symbolized to them the oasis in the desert. What a marvel, that fountain. The twelve lions-a.s.sociated with the zodiac-spout water into channels for all the garden. They have a history older than this courtyard. Their mysterious, smooth forms radiate from the flat basin where a jet of water rises in the middle. I've always liked the Latin hortus conclusus, "walled garden." In the Old Testament Song of Songs, such a garden is a.s.sociated with "my sister, my spouse." Later a.s.sociations of Mary and the walled garden resonated with the purity and beauty of the inviolate body. But earlier, the etymological root of paradise reveals the deeply metaphorical workings of the garden in the human psyche. The root of the word paradise means "walled garden." The enclosed Islamic gardens profoundly influenced the western medieval gardens. The cruciform designs of the monasteries conveniently paralleled Christian iconography, but the design previously reflected the Islamic concept of paradise, with four rivers flowing out in the cardinal directions from a single source. "Four-chambered heart," Ed muses. "Did they think of that, too?" How did we live so long without knowing what we've learned on this trip?

Many rulers have identified themselves with the sun, but the hubris of the carved stucco inscription in the Hall of the Amba.s.sadors, where the Nasrid rulers greeted their subordinates, must be unsurpa.s.sed. Entering this hall, a hard-riding emissary, coming up from the Costa Tropical with a report, might have been stupefied by the deeply coffered ceiling of interlocking marquetry stars, the high windows that shed a line of sunlit arches on the floors, and the miradors with wooden screens carved as finely as lace. But as he waited, he eventually would have focused on the make-no-mistake poem carved in Kufic calligraphy near the throne: From me you are welcomed morning and evening by the tongues of blessing, prosperity, happiness, and friendship . . . yet I possess excellence and dignity above all those of my race. Surely we are all parts of the same body; but I am like the heart in the midst of the rest and from the heart springs all energy of soul and life. True, my fellows here may be compared to the signs of the zodiac in the heaven of the dome but I can boast what they are lacking-the honor of a sun, since my lord, the victorious Yusuf, has decorated me with the robes of his glory and excellence without disguise, and has made me the throne of his empire. May its eminence be upheld by the Master of Divine Glory and the Celestial Throne.

The rhythmic lettering may be artistic, but the tone says so much: a smooth talker with a welcoming smile and an iron will.

As the emissary exited the Sala de los Embajadores, he could cool off in the Courtyard of the Myrtles, beside a long pool and low stone basin of gurgling water. These fountains and courtyards invite strolling, reading Rumi, sipping jasmine tea. They also bounce their light into the surrounding rooms, glazing the tiles and mottling the walls with wavering shadows. For those who lived their daily lives here, the light, the temperature, even their skin was changed by the wet-watercolor refractions from the fountains and channels. Water is transformative in this architecture. When I look at a floor plan of the Alhambra, I see that water was a building material, with as integral a part in the construction as arches and walls. The Alhambra gardens are paradisaical. I easily can imagine this whole place as the afterlife.

In the Alhambra gift shop, we are the only customers. As we look through the books, I become aware of the piercing sweetness of the background music. "What is that wonderful music?" I ask the girl at the counter.

"Angel Barrios, of course." She looks at me as though I'd asked a totally self-evident question. I've never heard of Angel Barrios. We pick up several books on architecture and the gardens, and two CDs. One, of course, is the haunting music of Angel Barrios wafting about the shop and forever annealing my brain to this day when I finally came to Granada and saw the Alhambra. The other CD is Noches en los jardines de Espana, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, by Manuel de Falla, loveliest t.i.tle and the most tender piano sequences ever to roll off the fingers of any Spanish composer. Back in our room, I listen to both. I'm electrified by Barrios-is he my third angel promised by the prophet who danced with G.o.d? I fall into an Alhambra trance. Barrios, I know I will listen to for the rest of my life.

Those who live in the houses scattered below the Alhambra must sip the influence of the palace and gardens with their morning coffee, must always stroll there in their imaginations, as well as on many Sunday afternoons. One of the houses, with a weathered blue, blue door on a lane just below the Alhambra, belonged to Manuel de Falla, a friend of Lorca and also an appa.s.sionato of Gypsy traditions. With de Falla, Lorca organized the seminal Granada conference on deep song. De Falla, who lived with his sister, could hear faintly from his garden the Alhambra's fountains' spilling notes, a fluid, melancholy sound that entered his compositions. He's long dead in Argentina, his dead-end street completely empty. Lorca lifted that knocker in the shape of a woman's hand. De Falla opened that little window in the door to see who was there. Then the door swung open, and inside they laughed together, and Federico listened to Manuel play and Manuel listened to Federico's latest poem. I imagine them inside, vital and strong, the buzz of their creativity humming in their veins, their hunger a force in the room. A fortunate friendship that ended tragically. I memorize the closed blue door of his whitewashed house.

The Lorcas' huerta, small farm, once was a sweet white house in the fields. The family could see the Alhambra and the distant Sierra Nevada mountains. A charming garden surrounded the house. There is so much jasmine and nightshade in the garden that we all wake up with lyrical headaches. We can see the ease of the indoor/outdoor life. Now the freeway rims one edge of the property, and ten-story block apartment buildings oppress the other edge. Still, once we are on the grounds, the simple house is profoundly moving. The kitchen's black stove, the small room where Federico slept, the piano, the ma.n.u.scripts and framed whimsical drawings-the house retains a soul, even given the current inst.i.tutional status. Outside the grounds a Gypsy woman offers me a bunch of rosemary and I take it because Federico would have.

Today is our Lorca Pilgrimage. We drive across the vega to his early childhood home in Fuente Vaqueros (Cowboys' Fountain). The flat landscape, with immense breaks of poplars, feathery in the white, still winter air, feels mysterious, close to Lorca's perception that the vega possessed a feeling of immensity and "spiritual density." His synesthetic images must have grown inside him because of his closeness to the earth: "The gray arm of the wind/ wrapped around her waist," and "the sun inside the afternoon/ like the stone in a fruit," and so many others. In the pearly light, the stands of poplars set me dreaming. When the sun burns off the mist, will they be gone? His childhood house, too, is touching-the baby bed, the tile floor, the pump and well in the courtyard, the Mama's boy photographs. Upstairs we see a video of him, grown, with his thespian group, travelling the provinces. His big smile. His vigor. His affection for his fellows breaks out of the film. The family moved again, to Valderrubio, and we go there, too, crossing the big olive country, and finally just peering in the door. Enough. We drive back to Granada, listening to Barrios and de Falla and talking quietly about going home.

Since it's late afternoon when we return, we stop at a Lorca hangout for tapas, then walk down Las Ramblas and through back streets crowded with shoppers. Guitar stores! They're everywhere. In each, someone intently tunes the strings or strums or just gets the feel of holding the instrument. We turn into a shadowy Moroccan area near the university, then end up for dinner in a restaurant where a photo of Lorca hangs above the bar. We are, again, the only ones here. The waiter offers an aged mahon cheese from the island of Minorca, which tastes like toasted hazelnuts, and an odd smoky cheese called idiazabal. Dinner ends on a grace note.

The fate of Lorca hangs over Granada. Was his death at the hands of the fascists one reason de Falla, who so loved his house under the Alhambra, emigrated to Argentina? Would he have found his beloved city insupportable after he journeyed to government headquarters, attempting to save his friend, only to find out Lorca already had been murdered?

When Carlos introduced me to Lorca's poems, he told me that a rare quetzel bird landed on the roof at his family's farm near Leon in Nicaragua. The workers were so overcome by the bird's beauty that they did the only thing that came to mind-they shot it dead. Many Spanish birds were shot-the civil war lasted almost three years. From July 1936 until the end of March 1939, that war killed half a million, 130,000 by execution. In Granada around five thousand were executed. At the huerta with the flowery garden, Lorca's family must have cried for years.

Lorca was a free spirit but far too intelligent to criticize outright the burgeoning fascist regime. I think he had a sixth sense that he was, nonetheless, in danger. As he boarded a train from Madrid, for what would prove to be his last trip to his family in Granada, he spotted an official from his hometown and raised his forefinger and smallest finger in the air, chanting "Lizard, lizard, lizard" to deflect the evil eye of this member of parliament. His brother-in-law, recently elected mayor of Granada, was murdered eight days before Federico was arrested at the home of the Rosaleses, old friends. Those who took him away, Ruiz Alonso, Juan Luis Trecastro, Luis Garcia Alix, and the name of Governor Valdes, deserve black paint thrown on their graves forever, especially Trecastro, who was overheard the next day saying that the rounds from the fusillade had not killed Lorca; he himself shot "two bullets into his a.r.s.e for being a queer." Lorca was killed in an olive grove near a spring hallowed to the Moors. They'd called it the Fountain of Tears.

Neruda wrote: "If one had searched diligently, scouring every corner of the land for someone to sacrifice as a symbol, one could not have found in anyone or anything, to the degree it existed in this man who was chosen, the essence of Spain, its vitality and its profundity." Antonio Machado's poem will always remind us that Granada was the scene of the crime./Think of it-poor Granada-his Granada.

One of my favorite quotes from Lorca came from his time in New York. He loved Harlem jazz and connected black music with that of the Gypsies in Andalucia. He said he couldn't understand a world "shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color when color is in fact the sign of G.o.d's artistic genius." Bravo, Federico.

Machado has the last word here: Friends, carve a monument out of dream stone for the poet in the Alhambra over a fountain where the grieving water shall say forever The crime was in Granada, his Granada.

In an antique shop, I buy a marble pomegranate for my desk because Granada means "pomegranate." I buy six old blue and white tiles of boar and deer, a small still-life of oranges and lemons, and a bronze-gone-to-verdigris door knocker in the shape of a horse's head, a few small things closely tied to my perceptions of the place. In the back of this crammed shop, the owner and his friend are barely visible amid the chaos. The friend is from Damascus but lives in Granada. He whispers something to the owner; then he opens a small box and gives me a silver hand of Fatima. "For good luck," he says.

"Against evil eye," the friend from Damascus adds. He is dark, with soot-black eyes lighted with little fires. He is missing an incisor, though he smiles broadly. He has much advice about what to see. He runs a falafel shop, speaks six languages. We feel that we are meeting a Moor who came hundreds of years ago, bringing with him cuttings of damask roses, spices, alchemical recipes, and songs. There, Federico, we begin to see.

Someday I will come back to Granada. I loved the tiny Arab bath, the archaeological museum, the unprettified streets of the Albacin area. And the Alhambra charged every neuron in my body. Over the week the geography of the place, the lonely vega and the glory of the mountains, began to imprint my senses. But while I was here, I felt restless and agitated. Lorca's ghost walks, uneasy in this city. Some things cannot be forgiven. The crime was in Granada.

We like Ubeda immediately. Our parador room's balcony overlooks a courtyard, so I'm happy. Like Pienza in Tuscany, Ubeda is a Renaissance town of golden stone that catches the late afternoon light and turns it to warm honey. As we reach the plaza, we see that enormous backhoes have ripped out the entire square. People are routed over wooden sidewalks and away from the construction. We do not get to see the famous statue of the fascist Serro, which locals have peppered with bullets over the years. We walk back toward the parador and find St. Paul's Church, which has a mosque shape-square and low. All four sides intrigue me. We find the Renaissance public fountain along one side, carved heads and decorative columns that look almost Venetian on another. What a privilege, to gaze and look at buildings. The church faces a plaza where women are knitting and talking ninety miles an hour. Four boys engage in a fast soccer game. Suddenly the ball hits one of the graceful three-branch wrought-iron streetlights. The lamp shatters, and the plaza comes to a halt for a moment; then the game and the talk resume.

What better relic for a poet/saint than two fingers from the writing hand encased in a silver box on a stand? Spanish tour groups crowd into the rooms where Saint John of the Cross lived and wrote. I first heard of him in college when I read T. S. Eliot, who folded into his poems several quotes from the ascetic Spanish mystic. His philosophical and religious poems are fraught with the suppressed eroticism of mystical love. Lorca saw duende in his dark night of the soul, and his constant turning toward deprivation as a way to enlightenment. Much of his writing, however, feels almost homiletic: how to live in this world, self-help for the troubled well, down-home language, and a no-nonsense guide to the sublime. I love best the most poetic poems, where he lets loose his instinct for metaphor and speaks in an intimate voice. Is there a hint of the Arabic poets in his lines?

Now that the bloom uncloses Catch us the little foxes by the vine, As we knit cones of roses Clever as those of pine.

No trespa.s.sing about this hill of mine.

Keep north, you winds of death.

Come, southern wind, for lovers. Come and stir The garden with your breath.

Shake fragrance on the air.

My love will feed among the lilies there.

(FROM "THE SPIRITUAL CANTICLE,"

TRANSLATED BY JOHN FREDERICK NIMS).

In his bedroom his hair shirt and the log he used for a pillow are displayed. In other rooms we see paintings of his miracles, one of which seems to have had something to do with asparagus. In his dialogue with Jesus, the painted ribbons of words come out of both mouths.

The Moorish influence in Ubeda is minimal. A door, a gate-we find one arched gate with the characteristic right turn built into it under a double horseshoe. In the shadows we make out a painting of Mary. The faithful have decorated the table below with vases of dusty artificial flowers. Someone has left a doll leg, a red candle, and a pair of eyes painted on metal.

My old habit of looking out for real estate offices and checking "for sale" signs comes back to me here. This is a town I could live in quite comfortably. I imagine the pleasure of anonymity, the s.p.a.cious days for writing and for reading all of Juan de la Cruz. We could sell all, buy a house on the leafy, angular plaza of Santo Domingo. But tomorrow we press on to Baeza, then on to Cordoba, and then our time in Andalucia will end.

An appealing small town surrounded by olive groves, Baeza is full of cadets from the Guardia Civil academy. They fill the streets in their veridian uniforms, all trim and groomed and young. Many sit in cafes with their girlfriends, enjoying the mild January sun. We meander through the covered market, plazas, and churches. We see the door ajar in a ruined patrician house and slip inside, fantasizing about restoring it to perfection. Across from the ayuntamiento (city hall), Ed spots a rose-bordered tile marker on a run-down house with a blue door: AQUI VIVIO EL POETA ANTONIO MACHADO. The poet's house, where his wife of only three years died at twenty, is closed, but we see what he saw as he closed his door every morning and walked to his job teaching languages in the village school. He lived a life of simplicity until he pa.s.sionately reviled the fascists and had to leave Spain. He died on his arrival in France in 1939. We drive out into the land of the olives. I read aloud to Ed a few lines of Machado: Over the olive grove The owl could be seen Flying and flying In its beak it carried A sprig of green for holy Mary.

Country around Baeza, I'll dream of you When I cannot see you.

A few miles outside town we see a cortijo for sale, white walled and serene, with nine thousand olive trees. The price is half what a studio apartment costs in San Francisco. The world cracks open for those willing to take a risk.

A glance at the map of Cordoba makes it clear why we keep getting lost. The Arabs must have had a firm rule-nothing parallel can exist. Streets radiate in star-shaped cl.u.s.ters, following the old labyrinthine medina lanes, converging at a church or plaza. Many are too narrow for cars, but we see an intrepid driver, cigarette hanging from his lip, negotiating them anyway. He's pulled his mirrors in and doubtlessly holds his breath as he creeps along with two inches to spare on either side.

We give up trying to figure out where we are and just turn into any old cobbled alley festooned with geraniums. We skirt the Mezquita, the famous mosque, and avoid the river road dense with traffic. Granada, with a major tourist attraction, was surprisingly untouristy. Cordoba has caught on. Shops selling kitschy souvenirs proliferate throughout the whitewashed maze of the old Jewish section. But the area exudes the enchantment of secret courtyards and curly iron gates. I see hardly a street that I don't want to turn down. We keep coming upon very simple and small Gothic churches-an unexpected treat. Some have Arabic touches-a dome, an arch, a window design-showing the continuing Mudejar influence after the Christian conquest.

Our hotel is across from the Museo Taurino, museum of the bullfight. Oh! Hides and heads, sculptures of gored matadors lying in state. Lorca wondered if ole is not related to that moment in Arabic music when the duende begins and the crowd cries, Allah, Allah. We don't linger. I'm fascinated that the origins of the bullfight root in ritual sacrifice among the Tartessos people, who lived near the delta of the Guadalquivir around 1,000 B.C. This glory eludes me. Perhaps because I come from a culture where death is regarded as something like selling short. Where death is somewhat embarra.s.sing. Again, I turn to Lorca: "Everywhere else . . . death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. Many Spaniards live indoors until the day they die and are taken out into the sunlight. A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than anyplace else in the world." Yes, with the exception of Mexico. In Guanajuato I pa.s.sed a coffin-maker's shop. A little girl in pink ruffles played with her dolls inside an open coffin, while her parents attached the lid on another. Life and death are closer companions than we can understand.

We're thrilled to find churro stands again. Miguel, who loops dough into hot oil and quickly lifts out the sizzling circle with tongs, tells us how to make them, though we probably miss half the recipe. His are big. He catches on when I say "hula hoop" and gives us an extra with a cup of chocolate. They're best right out of the oil. My capacity for them has increased over the weeks in Spain.

Right across from the Museo de Bellas Artes, Julio Romero de Torres, a local artist who died in 1930, has his own museum. I've never heard of him before today. He was a painter, primarily of women, and he painted some of the loveliest necks imaginable. Some of the many, many paintings slide off into the lugubrious, but enough of them have a quality of transcendental light. His fine small portraits could keep company with the Piero della Francesca, Zurbaran, and Ghirlandaio portraits we saw earlier in the trip in Madrid.

We walk a long way to the Palacio de Viana, a house of many charms. Built in the seventeenth century, the style reveals the moment when Arab domestic architecture formed permanently into what we call Spanish style. Fourteen courtyards make this house a dream. We have to join a group to see the house. The leader speaks in Spanish so we are bored and lost. In a small bedroom a portrait of Franco looms. I would hate to have him looking down on my narrow bed. We amuse ourselves by imagining that we are buying the place and discuss in whispers what we would plant, how we would rearrange the dreary furniture, and what we'd serve for Sunday lunch in one of the sumptuous courtyards-bitter greens and roast venison, the fried cream with cinnamon ice cream we had last night. Artisan goat cheeses with a gla.s.s of fino or some little cordial made from ripe cherries. I detour to find a bathroom during the tour, then find myself alone. For fifteen minutes I get the chance to experience the worn tile floors and the views from the windows without the canned litany. Then I am scolded as I turn down a hallway and meet the group. I do love the pattern of days one would live in a house like this, the seamless weaving of inside and outside. "Surely the Spanish devised the most felicitous form of architecture for everyday living," Ed says as we exit and prepare to be lost in the streets of Cordoba again.

"Yes, but think of Pompeii. They had the courtyard concept, too, and way earlier."

"Their courtyard served a practical function-it sloped to a drain. The rainwater funneled into a cistern."

"I like entering a house through a courtyard. Such a cool transition into the private realm from the public. You're in but out."

"Yes, a processional feeling."

We are saving the mosque, one of the great sights of this world, until last. As we walk past a tiny plaza, Ed stops in front of a sculpture of a seated man holding a book. "Maimonides! Of course. I'd forgotten. He was born in Cordoba."

I'm dim on Maimonides but recognize his major work when Ed mentions it, A Guide for the Perplexed. "What a contemporary t.i.tle," I say, "or are we just perpetually perplexed throughout history? I know I am."

"It seems like the right stance in life. Anyone who isn't perplexed is deluded. Let's see-he was a Jew who wrote in Arabic and had to go into exile. No one understands why, but he at some point went to North Africa instead of following the other Jews down into southern Spain. Maybe it was because he felt such strong affinity with Arab culture. Some say he converted to Islam."

We're happy to see him standing his ground in the small plaza where university students blare their music from open windows all around. He's a good still point of reference for them. Seneca, who became Nero's tutor, also came from Cordoba, and also Averroes, whose commentaries on Aristotle stirred mighty debate in the twelfth century and reawakened discourse all over the continent. While the rest of Europe plodded through the centuries, this city was famous for its immense library of 400,000 books, for lighted streets and houses with hot and cold water, for weavers and ivory carvers, for three hundred baths, fifty hospitals, and seventeen colleges. Mathematicians, philosophers, musicians, and poets were exalted. Even women were writers and musicians. A spirit of tolerance prevailed among the Jews, Muslims, and Christians, creating a munificent climate for the expansion of culture. This convivencia (peaceful coexistence) came to a crashing halt in the twelfth century with the rise of the bigoted Almohad rulers, who supplanted the more flexible and intellectual Umayyads. Then in 1236 Fernando III subdued the city and caused the non-Christians to flee.

The Umayyads are the heroes of Cordoba. Their dynasty in Spain began with a fabulous character, Abd ar-Rahman. In 750 he was in his teens when his entire family, the rulers of Syria, was deposed and murdered. Like other pioneers since, he set out for the west, making his way to what he'd heard of as al-Andalus, where he quickly built a loyal following. Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World tells how Abd ar-Rahman changed the course of history. She's right. The more I've read about Andalucia, the more I realize that the history I studied in college was a stripped-down version, emphasizing at every turn the joyful triumph of Christianity. Courses often take a path that ill.u.s.trates certain biases because it's much more vexing to teach contradictions or coexisting truths.

Living in Italy, I began to see more clearly how the Western world was fitted intricately together from all the cultures around mare nostrum, our sea, as the Romans intimately called it. Even in Tuscany I began to be aware of the farther influence, the almost-ignored Arab influence. Saracinesca, a word we use frequently, reveals the Saracen way with water. They brought west with them elaborate irrigation methods, waterwheels, and evidently a kind of perpendicular faucet that cuts off the flow of water, which is how we use saracinesca. On our first trip to Sicily, we had a full exposure to the intermingling of that island's history with the Moors. Now in Andalucia, the depth of the Arab contribution to the Mediterranean cultures almost overwhelms us. There is much to rethink.