Bloody and Beautiful

Following my weeks in Madrid, my meanderings in Spain were guided by exploring the most famous Andalucían cities—Cordoba, Seville, Granada—and punctuated by visits with old friends who had ended up nearby—in wildest Portugal, in Alcala, in Oliva. Although not Top Ten destinations, these latter settings added to my thinking about Moorish history in Iberia and Islam too, to my understanding of life here and now in this faraway place, to my love quotient (and to my growing suspicion that my life has not progressed in a line, that a life flows in currents and eddies that circle, then crisscross and multiply, creating a particular and ever-changing shape).

Oliva is a Mediterranean town south of Valencia and where my dear friend Ana grew up. We cemented our bond in Richmond and she lives in Texas now (comes to stay with me in New York often to get her art fix when going to or coming from Spain) but Ana is very much of Oliva and to spend three days with her there, hosted by her sweet sweet mother, was an exquisite treat—of swimming each day in the sea, big beautiful lunches made of motherly love, leisurely siestas, hearing stories of a childhood bursting with siblings and cousins and friends. And we visited some of the settings where those stories played out—the terraced citrus groves spread across the landscapes between towns, an old house up on the hill with a sprawling garden, an old-fashioned flat in the middle of the old part of the new city with photographs of so many past lives, close by towns with ancient houses perched up on mountains now populated by foreigners. Scent of jasmine, cold marble underneath my bare feet, sherbet colors of the sun setting across the sea, images of childhood: so much in Oliva echoed my experience in my mother’s own Mediterranean town, hundreds of miles away, in Lebanon. And of course so much was different.

Amazing that Ana’s uncle agreed to take us on a walking tour of Oliva’s somewhat forgotten old city, where Ana translated his Valencian (a dialect of Catalan) as he pointed out the remnants of the walls that divided the Christians from the Muslims and the Jews during the inquisition and before the expulsion, gestured towards now-dry wells that signaled the complex systems Moors had devised to bring water from mountain springs and down to sea level, reminded us this grandest cathedral was once a mosque, showed us how the grand Catalan palace that had still stood here when his father was a boy had been destroyed, divided; most impressive and visible now was a window in the Mudejar style that had been removed from that disappeared building and placed in the façade of a new building, one last sliver for all to see.

Amazing that I don’t think I’d ever seen and might never again see a Mediterranean sunset so bloody and beautiful as I did my last night with Ana in her Oliva...