Alhambra, 1886
(Oil on canvas, 55 × 35 cm)
BY Adolf Seel
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE YORCK PROJECT:
10.000 MEISTERWERKE DER MALEREI

The first century of an enchantment is always the easiest. Say you’re a warrior spellbound in full armor under the mountain of the Alhambra, your brightly caparisoned charger lifting one immobile hoof, or say you’re an Arabian princess, bewitched in an invisible tower, looking into a mirror that reflects nothing. One midnight a year you’re released from the sorcery, and your stiff joints move again. Your horse shakes his braided mane, or your face appears in the glass, and you glide forward with thousands and thousands of other enchanted figures to the gates of an illusory city of palaces and courtyards, palm trees and fountains, hanging gardens and lemon groves. For a few hours you move silently among others of your kind. If you’re a woman, you feast your eyes on some handsome young man you might have married back in the ordinary days, if you hadn’t been so obsessed with another, or if you’re a man you fall in love with a lady more beautiful than the one who caused your downfall. For a few hours you are part of a splendid fantastic pageant, moving in ranks gracefully under the archways and up the wide marble staircase, dizzy from the cool night breeze carrying the scent of jasmine and roses. And when you return to your dark cave or gloomy tower, and resume the posture of a statue, and fall again into the poisoned sleep of the enchanted, your dreams are rich with hope, and the year of darkness and silence doesn’t seem too terrible. The longed for midnight will come again, releasing you with the others, and who knows, the one destined to break your enchantment forever may be getting closer, and when he or she touches you with the charm that will release your particular spell, your blood will flow, your pale cheeks will flush, and your breath will whistle up through your unused lungs.

For a few hours you are part of a splendid fantastic pageant, moving in ranks gracefully under the archways and up the wide marble staircase, dizzy from the cool night breeze carrying the scent of jasmine and roses.

The second century is harder. On those dreadful midnights when the enchantment allows you to ascend from the bowels of the earth or pass out of your richly fretted chamber in the tower, you can sometimes squint past the thin shapes of your wavering troop of fellow victims and see, just beyond the glowing smoke of the gardens, a ruined staircase, tangled weeds, cracked fountains and the rooftops of the bustling, unfamiliar city that has spread out on the plain below. By the third century you are unable to see the others who flock around you at midnight, though you can feel them brushing past, whispering, and sighing. In the fourth century you don’t even hear a summons to rendezvous on those bitter midnights, and the stony years pass in darkness.

Finally, in the fifth century, on the appointed date at the beginning of the third millennium, the spell comes to an end. But you have no flesh. Your body was never touched by the promised charm, so only your spirit creeps out of the enchanted cave, or wafts down from the magic tower, and before it blows away and scatters on the wind like pollen, you must gather yourself together and puff across the face of an approaching mammal.

So here I am, a cloud of particles holding myself together by will. Please not that scurrying rabbit. Please not that hunting cat. Thank heaven someone’s coming, a human on two legs. I whiff forward, and I’m drawn in with a deep breath. Ah, I’m alive again. But I’m no longer Princess Zora. I’m someone else.

I open my eyes in astonishment. I’m now an American tourist named Susan. She suspects nothing, of course. My past resides in her as her own imagination, her own daydreams, her scraps of remembered reading, and though for a few hours I still retain my separate consciousness, I will soon be subsumed inside her if I don’t do something. But what?

It’s strange to walk again, to move freely inside a structure of blood and bone and muscle. We’re strolling in a lemon grove just under the tower where I was imprisoned — not the enchanted tower, but the actual tower that’s been restored. Susan has a guidebook to the Alhambra in her bag, and occasionally sits down on a stone bench and gets it out and reads to herself. This makes me restless. I’ve been cooped up so long, I want to run and stretch and feel the blood running down to my toes. Her toes. She’s wearing sandals and her feet are dusty and poorly manicured. She needs to soak in a scented bath full of rose petals, and that frizzy hair — I can feel it prickling my neck — needs to be oiled and combed. I have not yet seen myself in a mirror, so I have no objective view of what I look like yet, only her own hazy memories of herself floating about in our shared brain. She thinks of herself as tall and willowy and young, with raven hair, though she must be forty if she’s a day, an old woman for my century. But I had no choice. It was either her, or that ginger cat stalking in the brush, or complete dissipation into the atmosphere.

Fuente de la Salud
BY Isidoro Marín Gares
(Granada, 1863-1926)
FROM El Albayzín, Inspiración de Pintores,
Granada, AA. VV. Bajo Albayzín, 2001
Biblioteca Provincial de Granada

I find that I know all about Susan, just as if I really were her. I have complete access to her past through her visual and verbal memories. She grew up in the Midwest of that country called America, had brothers and sisters (unlike me) and studied Spanish in college. To my delight, her current strongest memories, stirred up by being here, of course, are connected with the Alhambra, for she came to Granada for a semester abroad, and used to leave the noisy city and walk up the Cuesta de Gomerez into these gardens. She was in love with a Spanish boy back then, and they met up here, but after she went home he stopped writing to her. She was miserable, but got over it. Now she’s married, with two children who are off at some music camp in Michigan. She’s come back to the Alhambra with her husband, but she’s thinking a lot about that old romance.

Susan looks up at my tower — or rather, the new restored tower that resembles the one I remember before my enchantment imprisoned me in the invisible duplicate, and the actual tower fell to ruin. I used to lean on my elbows and look out that narrow window near the top, trying to get a glimpse of Prince Ahmed lounging in his silk robes in the gardens below. This was after he’d used the magic carpet from Solomon’s throne to carry off a beautiful Christian princess from Toledo, and I knew my love was hopeless. He refused to take another wife, and even though he knew I was pining for him, he never stopped to pick up the roses I flung down, and he wouldn’t answer my letters. That’s when I made the terrible error of consulting an old sorcerer, who gave me an incantation to make myself irresistible. But he was either too dithery to get the words straight, or I recited them wrong, for as soon as they were out of my mouth I fell into the deep sleep of an enchantment.

Susan sighs deeply. That isn’t my sigh, for I gave up that useless activity centuries ago. But she thinks she’s imagining my life as she looks around the gardens of the Alhambra, that the details of my past flitting across her brain are something she’s making up. She’s even drawing a parallel between her love for that Spanish boy with a common name, Juan something, and my great passion for Prince Ahmed.

Absurd!

Her husband is a landscape designer, and he’s making sketches and notes as they visit the gardens of Spain. It’s his first trip to Europe, and he was reluctant to leave the United States at all after 9/11 until Susan convinced him that he could pick up ideas for his business, and write off the whole trip on his income tax. They’ve already toured the Alcazaba, the Palace of Charles the V and the Moorish courtyards of the Alhambra Palace. Susan sent Paul off to the upper gardens of the Generalife with his notebook and camera, while she stayed here, wandering different paths for a while and then deciding to sit in the shade by my tower to indulge in what-might-have-beens. If she’d stayed in Granada, like Juan wanted her to, instead of flying home with the other students, her whole life might have been different.

She’s staring past the glossy bright green leaves of the orange trees, fascinated by my tower, and images of silky veils and jeweled velvet slippers and gilded ottomans are passing through her head…

She’s tilted her head now, and I’m dismayed to feel the thick wedge of flesh under her chin. She’s staring past the glossy bright green leaves of the orange trees, fascinated by my tower, and images of silky veils and jeweled velvet slippers and gilded ottomans are passing through her head, familiar details from my own past, of course, but she believes she’s indulging in day dreaming. And, oh really! Now this is too much. Because of some half-remembered theory class she took in college, she’s accusing herself of orientalism, of indulging in romantic notions about the “other.”

Well, I’m the other, and I feel sick at heart, sensing the danger I’m in. If she blocks me from the conscious part of her brain, I’ll smother down here with all the other things she’s forgotten, or won’t allow herself to think about because of political correctness — the sweet taste of her mother’s nipple, her scratchy wool baby booties, the tickle of a fly on her face, the feel of pee running down her leg when she was three years old, the clammy taste of her first kiss in second grade, her shameful nervousness when she saw an Arab man walking down the aisle of the airplane on the flight over, and her silly old day dreams of Lord So and So asking her to dance at a ball as if she were a character out of Jane Austen.

I flood her with scenes from my life before the enchantment. I let her see the sandalwood box in which I kept my pearl necklace, and the little trellis work gate that led to the courtyard with the myrtles and stork fountain, and my little black-eyed maid who played the lute while I soaked in my bath, and later smoothed out my long dark tresses with a comb encrusted with pink shells. Orientalism! Does she think she’s imagining all that! Well, here comes my father, the chief counselor at court, striding across the tile floor in his rich robes, his face pale as death (for he knows my feelings) to give me the bad news that Prince Ahmed has just arrived on a magic carpet with a blond princess from Toledo. Let’s see how she feels about that!

Oh, it’s useless. Susan thinks it’s all about Juan, and decides that the story of my life is just an objective correlative for her life. I’m being overwhelmed by her mundane Midwesternism — mock orange bushes, fruitless Russian olives, lilacs (they bloom only two weeks a year!), outlet malls, ugly blue jeans, straight highways, cornfields and that delicate substance that should never be experienced directly, but only brought down in the panniers of donkeys from the high mountains, and served in golden goblets: snow. Doesn’t she remember how she felt that year after she came back from Spain, when she used to cross the park to the bus stop in a near blizzard? Well, down here in this faded compartment of her brain I can still find her ancient tears, her heavy sighs, her gut-wrenching regret. That year her heart almost broke at the thought of all she had left behind, not just Juan, but all those nights in the gardens of Spain.

Susan spies someone coming down the gravel path, and when I quickly compare the face of the approaching male with the stored images of her husband, I know it’s him, Paul, the landscape designer. I watch him nervously, for I’m going to have to kiss him and have sex with him pretty soon, and I’m not exactly impressed by his tall, bulky frame and his red sideburns. His face is lightly freckled, and his chin is too big. He’s wearing a tan bill cap that reads “AJ’s Seafood, Destin, FL” and wrap-around sunglasses. He has a camera around his neck, and a notebook in his back pocket.

“Hot enough for you?” he grins, and Susan and I both wince. He sits down on the bench beside her, plucking at the collar of his damp T shirt. “I’ve got some great ideas for that terrace I’m working on out at Lake Minnetonka.”

Once upon a time I thought I really would stay here forever, but Susan will soon be returning to the Midwest with this man, and taking me, Princess Zora, with her.

“Good,” Susan says. “I thought you’d be inspired here. It’s so beautiful.”

“You getting bored? There are some other spots I’d like to photograph.”

“Heavens no,” she says emphatically. “I could stay here forever.”

She doesn’t know what she’s saying. Once upon a time I thought I really would stay here forever, but Susan will soon be returning to the Midwest with this man, and taking me, Princess Zora, with her. I look out her eyes at the orange trees, at the aloe hedge, and down at the rose garden below the terrace. I can hear water trickling from a high fountain down the aqueduct to lower fountains and pools just as it did centuries ago, but there’s also a faint constant buzz from the automobile traffic in the city below. The Sierra Nevada, always so clear and sharp on the horizon, is lost in smoky pollution haze. Before my enchantment, I used to try to count the arroyos and canyons cut into the mountains from my tower window, and I’d cool my eyes on the snowy summit on hot days.

At Susan’s house, I’m going to have a view of a redwood picnic table and a swing set and a stucco garage and a birch tree circled with wood chips. Large orange pots full of petunias and begonias are situated on top of the wood chips. Someday Paul plans to landscape the yard, but he’s always so busy. He’s left it up to Susan, who doesn’t have time to garden, either, because she’s always driving on the freeway. She works as the print buyer for a large health care company, and serves as chauffer for two middle school children who take music lessons and play soccer and volunteer as stage hands for every school play and pageant that comes along.

I’m feeling feeble. Even though Susan’s brain is struggling to remember her semester abroad, trying to remember the Spanish word for happiness, and the way it felt to kiss Juan in an olive grove in the moonlight overlooking the twinkling lights of Granada, her Midwesternism is overwhelming both of us — like the signal from a stronger radio station (to use one of her own similes), images of snow shovels, ice backing up under the roof, brisk walks around Lake Harriet in the fall, backyard cookouts on the gas grill, Christmas shopping at the Mall of America, freeway backups, Friskies cat food, and a strong desire to buy some new patio furniture from Target when she gets home are beginning to dominate the dreamy flickers from winding staircases, cedar ceilings, and alabaster balconies.

…for a quick, surprising moment I see someone else looking out of his eyes, someone I recognize from the early years of my enchantment, a handsome warrior who used to parade by me on a fine black horse…

Then, suddenly, because he’s sitting in the shade now, Paul takes off his sunglasses, and for a quick, surprising moment I see someone else looking out of his eyes, someone I recognize from the early years of my enchantment, a handsome warrior who used to parade by me on a fine black horse, his visor raised. Though we could never speak to one another, by the end of the first century of enchantment we used to look for one another on those midnights when the enchanted horde emerged into the moonlight. I think we both realized by then that our true loves back in the world of time — my Prince Ahmed, his lady-what-ever-she-was-called — had already grown old and perished, and that it might be wise to select a new object of affection. But when you only see someone once a year, and cannot speak to them, it’s hard to build a romance, and as the centuries passed we both grew discouraged.

Why, he must have been released from his enchantment, too, at the same moment as me, and taken refuge in this two legged mammal, Susan’s husband Paul. I yearn up out of Susan’s eyes, trying to communicate with him, wishing there were some way I could give him a sign that I exist.

“I wish I had a bangle bracelet,” Susan says.

“What?” Paul squints at her. “A bangle bracelet? What for?”

Susan looks at her arm, frowning. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“They sell jewelry at that tourist shop near the Baths. You might as well get a souvenir. I’d like something myself. A scimitar with a jeweled hilt.”

“A scimitar! What would you do with a scimitar? How would you get it home on the airplane?”

“You’re right.” He looks puzzled. “Well, how about a sandwich then? I’m starving.”

They get up off the bench together, heading for a snack bar, and I feel myself gagging as Susan begins to think about food. The word “sandwich” has conjured up all kinds of memories from Midwestern lunches — pizza slices gooey with cheese, potato chips, brownies, bananas, hamburgers with sesame buns, dill pickles, frosty glasses of iced tea. I’m hungry, too — I haven’t eaten in centuries — but I long for sherbets and dates and pomegranates. We pass other tourists on the way to the snack bar, and occasionally, from the bemused face of a young women in Capri pants or a grey-haired man in shorts frowning over his new digital camera or a sunburned teenager in a halter top dragging behind her parents, I catch a glimmer of another enchantment survivor looking out in shock and amazement at this new millennium. There must have been hundreds of us released from spells today, and we lucky ones found a mammal to enter, a German businessman on holiday, a French travel agent, an insurance adjuster from Prague, a rabbit, or even a mole. Maybe those of us residing in rabbits and feral cats are the lucky ones after all, for animals will stay here in this garden in Spain for the rest of their short lives, while the rest of us travel to countries where it snows, where people live in gloom and darkness most of the year.

Paul orders two cheese sandwiches, a bag of taco chips, and two Cokes from the good-looking Spanish teenager behind the snack bar, and he and Susan carry their goodies over to a table by the parking lot. When Paul takes off his sunglasses again, I see my poor nameless warrior peeking out from his eyes, just a flicker of dark eyes behind the pale blue. I know he sees me, too, floating disconsolately behind Susan’s stare. Are we both about to disappear inside these large doughy bodies? No, no! I feel myself flashing and sparking. I reach out — Susan reaches out — and touches Paul’s shoulder.

“Yusef,” Paul says. “For some reason that name flashed across my brain. Who’s Yusef?”

Susan reaches for her guidebook. “It says here that Yusef I was the Moorish ruler who began the Alhambra. But it’s a common name. Like Zara.”

“Zara?”

“It’s a pretty name. I just thought of it. Zara.” She smiles, and looks up at my tower in the distance.

I’m thrilled and hopeful. He’s told me his name. Is he Captain Yusef? Prince Yusef? It doesn’t matter. It’s true we won’t have any more nights in the gardens of Spain, but at least we’re going back to Minnesota together. And on those snowy Sundays in January, when the wind rattles the windows, and Paul and Susan are sitting around in bathrobes reading the newspaper and eating coffee cake, we’ll both be struggling valiantly to assert ourselves, finding ways to triumph over their dreary Midwesternism with our singing birds, marble esplanades, and gushing fountains.