The Alhambra 34

The Alhambra 34

Tio Nicolo wondered to see him in

such company, for the Inquisitor was famous for his hatred of Moors,

and, indeed, of all kinds of Infidels, Jews, and heretics, and used to

hunt them out with fire and scourge. However, Tio Nicolo felt himself

safe, now that there was a priest of such sanctity at hand. So making

the sign of the cross, he called out for his benediction, when, hombre!

he received a blow that sent him and his old mule over the edge of a

steep bank, down which they rolled, head-over-heels, to the bottom! Tio

Nicolo did not come to his senses until long after sunrise, when he

found himself at the bottom of a deep ravine, his mule grazing beside

him, and his panniers of snow completely melted. He crawled back to

Granada sorely bruised and battered, but was glad to find the city

looking as usual, with Christian churches and crosses. When he told the

story of his night’s adventure, every one laughed at him; some said he

had dreamed it all, as he dozed on his mule; others thought it all a

fabrication of his own; but what was strange, Señor, and made people

afterwards think more seriously of the matter, was, that the Grand

Inquisitor died within the year. I have often heard my grandfather, the

tailor, say, that there was more meant by that hobgoblin army bearing

off the resemblance of the priest, than folks dared to surmise.”

 

“Then you would insinuate, friend Mateo, that there is a kind of Moorish

limbo, or purgatory, in the bowels of these mountains, to which the

padre Inquisitor was borne off.”

 

“God forbid, Señor! I know nothing of the matter. I only relate what I

heard from my grandfather.”

 

By the time Mateo had finished the tale, which I have more succinctly

related, and which was interlarded with many comments, and spun out with

minute details, we reached the gate of the Alhambra.

 

The marvellous stories hinted at by Mateo, in the early part of our

ramble about the Tower of the Seven Floors, set me as usual upon my

goblin researches. I found that the redoubtable phantom, the Belludo,

had been time out of mind a favorite theme of nursery tales and popular

traditions in Granada, and that honorable mention had even been made of

it by an ancient historian and topographer of the place. The scattered

members of one of these popular traditions I have gathered together,

collated them with infinite pains, and digested them into the following

legend; which only wants a number of learned notes and references at

bottom to take its rank among those concrete productions gravely passed

upon the world for Historical Facts.

 

 

 

 

LEGEND OF THE MOOR’S LEGACY

 

 

Just within the fortress of the Alhambra, in front of the royal palace,

is a broad open esplanade, called the Place or Square of the Cisterns,

(la Plaza de los Algibes,) so called from being undermined by reservoirs

of water, hidden from sight, and which have existed from the time of the

Moors. At one corner of this esplanade is a Moorish well, cut through

the living rock to a great depth, the water of which is cold as ice and

clear as crystal. The wells made by the Moors are always in repute, for

it is well known what pains they took to penetrate to the purest and

sweetest springs and fountains. The one of which we now speak is famous

throughout Granada, insomuch that water-carriers, some bearing great

water-jars on their shoulders, others driving asses before them laden

with earthen vessels, are ascending and descending the steep woody

avenues of the Alhambra, from early dawn until a late hour of the

night.

 

Fountains and wells, ever since the scriptural days, have been noted

gossiping-places in hot climates; and at the well in question there is a

kind of perpetual club kept up during the livelong day, by the invalids,

old women, and other curious do-nothing folk of the fortress, who sit

here on the stone benches, under an awning spread over the well to

shelter the toll-gatherer from the sun, and dawdle over the gossip of

the fortress, and question every water-carrier that arrives about the

news of the city, and make long comments on everything they hear and

see. Not an hour of the day but loitering housewives and idle

maid-servants may be seen, lingering, with pitcher on head or in hand,

to hear the last of the endless tattle of these worthies.

 

Among the water-carriers who once resorted to this well, there was a

sturdy, strong-backed, bandy-legged little fellow, named Pedro Gil, but

called Peregil for shortness. Being a water-carrier, he was a Gallego,

or native of Gallicia, of course. Nature seems to have formed races of

men, as she has of animals, for different kinds of drudgery. In France

the shoeblacks are all Savoyards, the porters of hotels all Swiss, and

in the days of hoops and hair-powder in England, no man could give the

regular swing to a sedan-chair but a bog-trotting Irishman. So in Spain,

the carriers of water and bearers of burdens are all sturdy little

natives of Gallicia. No man says, “Get me a porter,” but, “Call a

Gallego.”

 

To return from this digression, Peregil the Gallego had begun business

with merely a great earthen jar which he carried upon his shoulder; by

degrees he rose in the world, and was enabled to purchase an assistant

of a correspondent class of animals, being a stout shaggy-haired donkey.

On each side of this his long-eared aide-de-camp, in a kind of pannier,

were slung his water-jars, covered with fig-leaves to protect them from

the sun. There was not a more industrious water-carrier in all Granada,

nor one more merry withal. The streets rang with his cheerful voice as

he trudged after his donkey, singing forth the usual summer note that

resounds through the Spanish towns: “_Quien quiere agua--agua mas fria

que la nieve?_”--“Who wants water--water colder than snow? Who wants

water from the well of the Alhambra, cold as ice and clear as crystal?”

When he served a customer with a sparkling glass, it was always with a

pleasant word that caused a smile; and if, perchance, it was a comely

dame or dimpling damsel, it was always with a sly leer and a compliment

to her beauty that was irresistible. Thus Peregil the Gallego was noted

throughout all Granada for being one of the civilest, pleasantest, and

happiest of mortals. Yet it is not he who sings loudest and jokes most

that has the lightest heart. Under all this air of merriment, honest

Peregil had his cares and troubles. He had a large family of ragged

children to support, who were hungry and clamorous as a nest of young

swallows, and beset him with their outcries for food whenever he came

home of an evening. He had a helpmate, too, who was anything but a help

to him. She had been a village beauty before marriage, noted for her

skill at dancing the bolero and rattling the castanets; and she still

retained her early propensities, spending the hard earnings of honest

Peregil in frippery, and laying the very donkey under requisition for

junketing parties into the country on Sundays, and saints’ days, and

those innumerable holidays which are rather more numerous in Spain than

the days of the week. With all this she was a little of a slattern,

something more of a lie-abed, and, above all, a gossip of the first

water; neglecting house, household, and everything else, to loiter

slipshod in the houses of her gossip neighbors.

 

He, however, who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, accommodates the

yoke of matrimony to the submissive neck. Peregil bore all the heavy

dispensations of wife and children with as meek a spirit as his donkey

bore the water-jars; and, however he might shake his ears in private,

never ventured to question the household virtues of his slattern spouse.

 

He loved his children, too, even as an owl loves its owlets, seeing in

them his own image multiplied and perpetuated; for they were a sturdy,

long-backed, bandy-legged little brood. The great pleasure of honest

Peregil was, whenever he could afford himself a scanty holiday, and had

a handful of maravedis to spare, to take the whole litter forth with

him, some in his arms, some tugging at his skirts, and some trudging at

his heels, and to treat them to a gambol among the orchards of the Vega,

while his wife was dancing with her holiday friends in the Angosturas of

the Darro.

 

It was a late hour one summer night, and most of the water-carriers had

desisted from their toils. The day had been uncommonly sultry; the night

was one of those delicious moonlights which tempt the inhabitants of

southern climes to indemnify themselves for the heat and inaction of the

day, by lingering in the open air, and enjoying its tempered sweetness

until after midnight. Customers for water were therefore still abroad.

Peregil, like a considerate, painstaking father, thought of his hungry

children. “One more journey to the well,” said he to himself, “to earn a

Sunday’s puchero for the little ones.” So saying, he trudged manfully up

the steep avenue of the Alhambra, singing as he went, and now and then

bestowing a hearty thwack with a cudgel on the flanks of his donkey,

either by way of cadence to the song, or refreshment to the animal; for

dry blows serve in lieu of provender in Spain for all beasts of burden.

 

When arrived at the well, he found it deserted by every one except a

solitary stranger in Moorish garb, seated on a stone bench in the

moonlight. Peregil paused at first and regarded him with surprise, not

unmixed with awe, but the Moor feebly beckoned him to approach. “I am

faint and ill,” said he; “aid me to return to the city, and I will pay

thee double what thou couldst gain by thy jars of water.”

 

The honest heart of the little water-carrier was touched with compassion

at the appeal of the stranger. “God forbid,” said he, “that I should ask

fee or reward for doing a common act of humanity.” He accordingly helped

the Moor on his donkey, and set off slowly for Granada, the poor Moslem

being so weak that it was necessary to hold him on the animal to keep

him from falling to the earth.

 

When they entered the city, the water-carrier demanded whither he should

conduct him. “Alas!” said the Moor, faintly, “I have neither home nor

habitation; I am a stranger in the land. Suffer me to lay my head this

night beneath thy roof, and thou shalt be amply repaid.”

 

Honest Peregil thus saw himself unexpectedly saddled with an infidel

guest, but he was too humane to refuse a night’s shelter to a

fellow-being in so forlorn a plight; so he conducted the Moor to his

dwelling. The children, who had sallied forth open-mouthed as usual on

hearing the tramp of the donkey, ran back with affright when they beheld

the turbaned stranger, and hid themselves behind their mother. The

latter stepped forth intrepidly, like a ruffling hen before her brood

when a vagrant dog approaches.

 

“What infidel companion,” cried she, “is this you have brought home at

this late hour, to draw upon us the eyes of the inquisition?”

 

“Be quiet, wife,” replied the Gallego; “here is a poor sick stranger,

without friend or home; wouldst thou turn him forth to perish in the

streets?”