#Pale moon gypsy windows#

#Pale moon gypsy windows#

The walls were flat and whitewashed doors and windows were in the positions you would expect them to be, but above there was no neat roof of red pantiles, only a continuation of rough rock sloping up the hillside. A servant opened the gate and we entered the patio. Jaime had spoken of “ Lola’s cave' and had told us nothing of iron gates and patios he smiled at our surprise and said that if we looked closer we would see that what appeared to be a charming villa was, indeed, a cave. Instead of a primitive cave we found ourselves in front of a forged iron gate beyond which lay a flower-surrounded patio and a fountain on whose base were carved the initials L.M. We walked on until, at a lower level of the hill, we suddenly came to a different world. Feeble candlelight came through the cracks in the doors and occasionally we heard the sound of singing -but we were on a part of the hill where the gypsies sing for their own amusement, far from the stretch of road dedicated to the tourists. We climbed the zigzag path in the transforming light, past the simple wooden doors set in the whitewashed rock and the dense plantations of prickly pear. Our Spanish friend, Jaime, was taking us to see Lola Medina, the acknowledged queen of the hill. In the moonlight we walked down the path to the trickle of the river Darro and across into the streets of the Monte itself, the gypsy quarter of the town. It is the same when they dance their gestures and the movements of their bodies are sensual and passionate, they tumble their hair and flash their eyes.

Though you know that their desire to please is mercenary it has a form of sincerity, a passionate genuineness of its own. They still feel that all who are not gypsies are legitimate prey-and tourists are heaven-sent. But today, although few of the families of the Sacromonte are without a strain of Spanish blood, they have managed to remain a people apart and to keep their own manner of thinking, speaking, and living. It was towards the end of the eighteenth century that Spain decided to do something about its gypsy problem laws were passed giving the gypsies the rights of citizenship and they were encouraged to give up their language and their distinctive, brilliantly colored clothes. Each generation was taught to think of the gentile Spaniard- or Busné as they called him in their own language - as an enemy to be hated, to be stolen from at every opportunity, to be used cynically. The gypsies settled on the Sacromonte some two hundred years ago, cut caves in the granite of the hill, and lived the life of pariahs. It grew darker, and in the center of the patches of whitewash on the opposite hill appeared blocks of light the candles had been lit in the gypsy caves and the Sacromonte was preparing for its nightly business of entertaining tourists with flamenco singing and dancing and a censored glimpse of gypsy life. The sounds of the city itself didn’t reach us, but from the Sacromonte we heard the click of castanets and the butter-pat sound of the rhythmic clapping for the dance - or sometimes an Oriental arabesque of notes as a gypsy practiced a saeta to be sung during the processions of Holy Week. Nestling close to the two hills of the Alhambra and the Sacromonte lay Granada, narrow at the valley’s end, broadening out across the great plain that was now bright green with young corn and red with rich, iron-laden earth. FROM the red Moorish ramparts that dominate Granada from the Alhambra hill, we looked across to the slope of the Sacromonte, where the evening sunlight had begun to turn the smooth planes of the prickly pears into trembling mirrors, a silver-green setting for the patches of whitewash that patterned the hillside almost to the church of San Miguel on its summit.