The sun low in the evening fractures the cobblestoned roads and pebbled paths into two different time zones, two different weathers, two different moods: one deep and suggestive; the other, grindstone sharp and dazzling. These two worlds line the underside of each other, like a moebius cape infinitely folding into itself. At this late hour in Granada, towards the end of June, Aidabeth and I descend the flanks of the barrio Sacromonte into walkways of growing shadow towards the city’s centro.
As we turn a corner where the wall dogears a place in time layered over by signs, ghosts of signs, whitewash, and dark bare patchworks, the sky’s embering orb catches and suspends my attentions. The point of light throws out these ringing, expanding crowns of brilliance over the mountains and church spires into the alley-depths of evening. Aidabeth and I are just returning from visiting las cuevas, the caves in which people, once upon a time not too long ago, used to live. There, we walked through the cuevas and observed how their organic stone mouths followed the natural openings of the mountainside into the accident of geology and the limits of humanity. Within, the walls whitewashed, a vestibule led to a kitchen, and off to a side a short tunnel ran laterally to a pantry. Off another side of the kitchen, another short tunnel led to a bedroom – all concaved and domed into the mind of the mountain. These homes, like memory, embrace the unstructured flows of resistance and desire from the stone and flesh and trace their very own pattern of vitality, opening chamber upon chamber into rock and dust-layered past, a chain of dirt-flowers and quietened echoes.
When we turn the corner, I point out to Aidabeth the streetlight craning its vigilant neck into the vertical space between walls – an image that has potentially existed unchanged for two centuries, only with gas sparkling out its tip instead of today’s electricity. This very image of an evening falling on a streetlight over a cobblestone street has also existed in my memory for decades, ever since, as a teenager, I read the scene in a Spanish story: a dim-lit evening falls along a street in a 19th century town, sparse people wearing tall hats and dark clothing pass between close buildings… the whole setting creates a sense of familiarity, but also strangeness. I am here; I have never been here. These memory spaces overlap onto the physical experience; the sense of being in both times and places at once opens a third reality – a feeling of comfort and home that exists in neither space and time, but rather in the present of my mind.
Aidabeth and I continue down to the Avenida de la Constitución as the bright lens of the sun bathes the distant mountains and the concaved chambers in my being branched off again and again into the refracted patina of night.
