Free A Year in the World by Frances Mayes Page B

soaps and French sheets, a purely Arab balcony outfitted with a plaster Mary, and again the charm of the air blessed with the scent of orange blossoms. We pass several consignment shops whose windows are filled with Armani and Gucci and Jil Sander. People on vacation must change their minds about what they packed in their suitcases and unload their mistakes rather than take them home. Or maybe they opt to wear less in the lovely sun. In a fancy children’s shop, we buy a pair of hand-knitted booties for our Mister X.
    Down the road at Puerto Banús, many of the international rich are idling away their January. The yacht harbor,
mamma mia
, is a many-splendored thing. The cool jangles of the rigging and the wavering reflections in the water always give me an adventurous rush, probably that old encoded human desire for quest, for pushing off and heading into the open sea. But these Argonauts seem tightly tethered to land. Boys in crisp shorts polish and buff, flemish ropes, and touch up minute scratches, while portly owners speak into cell phones on the deck. Two women totter in pastel pants and high-heeled sandals across a gangplank. The rings on their fingers are the size of ice cubes. They’re
laden
with jewelry. “We’re just seeing a stereotype,” I tell Ed. “Down below someone is reading Heidegger, and over there on the bow of
Stardust Destiny
, someone is writing a villanelle.”
    “Dream on. He’s working a crossword puzzle, at best. Why tax yourself in this place?” Ferraris slowly cruise the street. We inspect the menus of the seafood restaurants lining the harbor and choose one where the crayfish, crab, and prawns thrash on ice and the fish look bright-eyed. Next to us a German woman orders a Tia Maria on ice after her lunch of grilled fish and white wine. She’s tan as a saddle, probably around seventy, with a magenta scarf wound around her neck and hair. Ed asks if she lives here, and yes, she bought a condominium five years ago and has joined book clubs and investment clubs but finds herself bored, hence the second Tia Maria, I assume, and besides the weather (seventy-five degrees today) is frigid but better than the iron-cold of Stuttgart. I fear retirement in places where the climate is the lure.
     
    From Ronda, via Antequera and Archidona, we make our way to Granada, city of García Lorca. Snow tops the surrounding mountains—a Xanadu setting. As we drive closer, we’re suddenly lost in dismal sprawl and dirty air. By the time we find our hotel near the Alhambra, we’ve gone quiet with disappointment. Granada, I’m not falling under your spell. Poetry, roses, nightingales, water gardens, Gypsies—no one’s fault but mine that I imagined a fabled city. Or perhaps it is the fault of the Nicaraguan on the lawn at Princeton, leafing through Lorca’s poems, stopping at “Ballad of the Three Rivers.” The book was worn leather (
cordovan
, I suddenly realize—from Córdoba).
Guadalquiver, high tower/and wind in the orange groves . . ./It carries olives and orange blossoms,/Andalucía, to your seas.
The breeze riffled the pages, tissue thin like an old Bible. Marienoelle, his little daughter, learned her first word that afternoon.
Agua
, she shrieked,
agua
, splashing in the plastic pool. I leaned against a tree, arms folded. From the lips of the Nicaraguan, I learned that Granada has “two rivers, eighty bell towers, four thousand watercourses, fifty fountains.” I lost a gold ring that belonged to my husband’s family, and I looked in the grass for hours. The poet said nothing about pollution headaches.
    We arrive late. From the hotel window, the snowy mountain-ringed city below spreads into endless lights and the wavy slush of traffic noise. To compound our first impression, we face a greasy dinner in the small restaurant highly recommended by the hotel’s concierge. Ten o’clock, and the place is empty except for a silent couple having tapas at the bar. The owner nips at a large glass of