Faces in the Wall

The name Madrid comes from the Arabic word al-Majrit, or the water-source. This name was given to this place when Muhammad I of Cordoba built a small castle here in the 9th century, around which the Moors built a citadel. So far, the most substantive remains of this memory I have found is a section of the old Muslim City wall about a hundred meters long that was excavated in 1985 and sits in a lovely park hidden under the grand Cathedral Almudena. The park has been closed both times I´ve gone by, but it´s small and easy enough to get the point from the outside the gate. The signage around it is weathered but informative, most interesting to me a metal map showing the Muslim city walls and the (much larger and more recent) Christian city walls--both existent and former--in relief. The notion of the Christians building on top of what they took from the Muslims is a familiar one I know I´ll see repeated in my upcoming travels across Andalusia, and of course it´s not unique to this place or to these two cultures/peoples/groups/whatever. It´s a tale as old as time: to make new and our own the thing that was here before us. The story, the reality can be beautiful and also there is a sadness, of course, and can be a lot of pain in the ways we remember, and don´t, what we have lost; because whether or not as a physical body, what has been lost is still here.

Back to Almudena--which, due to the "al" that one finds tacked at the beginning of many names here and many Spanish words, is of course a vestige of the Moors in some way, too--it is the seat of the arch-diocese of Madrid and its side which does not face the Muslim City walls faces the Palacio Real, one of the most visited sites in the city. The cathedral itself is full of tourists (and worshippers) too, and inside I found that looking up at the ceiling helped me imagine the mosque that must have been on this spot, as did some of the explanatory signage inside, about how the Christians who conquered the city in 1083 found "the face of the Virgin Almudena hidden in the old Muslim wall" and consequently built a church. Walking back down to the Muslim city wall, which is a substantial downward incline from the cathedral, and, as I said, somehow hidden by the shade and the way the roads have been preserved, I was floored by the site of the newer parts of the city spread out beyond, and the mountains in the distance. This helped me imagine what it must have been like when there was a mosque here, too, when there was nothing past the wall.

I walked down and up this edge towards the area south of the city center, and La Latina, guided by Lonely Planet´s directive to find the old Moorish part of the neighborhood and ¨strain [my] imagination a little" to catch "a whiff of the North African medina"--their words both annoyed me and attracted me... Anyway, I think I missed that corner, but I did find an old friend, a smaller cathedral with stunning frescos, and plenty of delightful tapas and beer. I´m glad I will be here for another week, that I have time to go back and work a little harder to find them, those old Moors who were expelled, forcefully, completely, in 1492, which was a hell of a year for the world, I guess.

Of course there are living, breathing Muslims here now, including me, including tourists who are obviously so in the center of town, one Arab-looking family with a head-scarved woman slurping water from underneath her niquab (the heat persists) and others that stand out to me. Also there are those who live here, men working in the stores of neighborhoods like La Latina and Lavapies, the families that run the strip of Arabic restaurants (with names like Palmyra and Habibi) I just came upon not so far from where I am staying last night--of perhaps they are Christians, but now we must acknowledge the way the label Muslim is used is and has been problematic since the Moors. There are also the people who go to the Islamic Center a couple miles east of El Centro. It´s a large marble edifice which I felt too strange to go inside, silent as it seemed, and ringed in a green fence, its only open entrance manned by a guard in a guard house and a sign saying that people entering were not allowed to carry their bags inside. I sat in the park outside it for a while, content to take in the people gathered there and thought, somewhat anxiously, about organized religion and socio-politics, but then I walked around the neighborhood, where I heard a lot of Moroccan Arabic and went into a bar/restaurant called La Pasha and had a my most delicious piece of Spanish tortilla so far.