Free A Year in the World by Frances Mayes Page A

Ronda has all the makings of a bad painting—the whitewashed, geranium-laden, perched tiled-roof town against blue-gray mountains and green fields. The main streets are depressingly jammed with tourists up from the coast on day excursions. Some hefty specimens, scantily clothed, provide their own kind of scenery. Real spring must bring a nightmare of people who in the privacy of their own backyards should never wear shorts but go on tour with their rumps and hams in full view.
    Off the main streets we yield to Ronda’s beauty. Lanes that once were goat paths wind up and up to quiet and serene residential neighborhoods. These are more appealing to me than
casas colgadas
, the hanging houses so named because they’re perched right on the lip of the 525-foot-deep canyon. I’m too insecure to live there. We stop for a lemonade and a look at maps and books. I’m struck, once again, by the strange flattening of a guidebook—town after town, and each one seemingly equal. But the essence of a place, the part of it that picks you up and puts you down somewhere else, cannot be given to the reader through factual description. And maybe not at all. You have to find your own secret images. The slow fall of a coin into the gorge with the sun catching the copper only for a moment, and the fall into nothing says more about a sense of place than three pages of restaurant and hotel descriptions, or dry summations of history that are so compressed they make you dizzy.
    I’m tired in Ronda. We both want to retreat for a couple of days and spread out our novels and prop our feet on the low table, or nap, take notes, sip blood orange juice, and partake of the breakfast buffet that features local specialties such as
migas
, a basic country dish of spicy breadcrumbs, chorizo, and garlic, along with platters of fruit and hot
churros
. Breakfast is such a key to the culture. An Italian nipping an espresso, an American chowing down on cereal, eggs, and bacon, the Frenchman grabbing a croissant—breakfast speaks to all the rhythms of the other meals and to the rising and sleeping and working motions. This basic Spanish meal links to people who were heading for hard work and who made do with a bit of meat and leftover bread—whatever was at hand.
    The paradors emphasize regional cuisine. So do many local restaurants. Last night we had white almond gazpacho, followed by kid chops and partridge stew. The tapas mania of Sevilla subsides in the country. Hearty food that hunters would like, and plenty of it, seems to be the approach.
    The full moon rises out of a pink sky and dangles itself over the gorge—the biggest moon I have seen in my life. I feel the gravity of fullness. So low and enormous, this moon hanging above the canyon. It could plunge into the river below.
Moon
, my daughter’s second word. She was a one-year-old pointing to the sky, sensing space and spirit. We lean on the balcony watching the slow trajectory. The Spanish moon has
duende
.
     
    To Marbella and Puerto Banús, just to dip down to the coast. As we drive south, the countryside goes wilder—escarpments and waterfalls, and mountain goats scrambling from rock to rock. “Are they trapped?” I wonder. Peering down from impossible outcrops, they look puzzled as to how they got there.
Help, help me Rhonda
. Hawks transfix in the air over prey. In Italy, this motionless hovering is called Il Santo Spirito because the hawk resembles the holy spirit.
    Through a pass, we see the coast and sea. Soon we’re zipping by odd developments that look as if they’d landed here by mistake. Wintering English and German tourists pack into these condo and apartment blocks. This is not the ruined western Costa del Sol. The Marbella area is merely overdeveloped, American style. “Are we in Fort Lauderdale?” Ed says. “Look at all that ersatz Tuscan-Mediterranean architecture.” But then we find Marbella’s lively outdoor cafés around the Plaza de los Naranjos, the nice shops with fine