A Year in the World by Frances Mayes Page A

death are closer companions than we can understand.
    We’re thrilled to find
churro
stands again. Miguel, who loops dough into hot oil and quickly lifts out the sizzling circle with tongs, tells us how to make them, though we probably miss half the recipe. His are big. He catches on when I say “hula hoop” and gives us an extra with a cup of chocolate. They’re best right out of the oil. My capacity for them has increased over the weeks in Spain.
    Right across from the Museo de Bellas Artes, Julio Romero de Torres, a local artist who died in 1930, has his own museum. I’ve never heard of him before today. He was a painter, primarily of women, and he painted some of the loveliest necks imaginable. Some of the many, many paintings slide off into the lugubrious, but enough of them have a quality of transcendental light. His fine small portraits could keep company with the Piero della Francesca, Zurbarán, and Ghirlandaio portraits we saw earlier in the trip in Madrid.
    We walk a long way to the Palacio de Viana, a house of many charms. Built in the seventeenth century, the style reveals the moment when Arab domestic architecture formed permanently into what we call Spanish style. Fourteen courtyards make this house a dream. We have to join a group to see the house. The leader speaks in Spanish so we are bored and lost. In a small bedroom a portrait of Franco looms. I would hate to have him looking down on my narrow bed. We amuse ourselves by imagining that we are buying the place and discuss in whispers what we would plant, how we would rearrange the dreary furniture, and what we’d serve for Sunday lunch in one of the sumptuous courtyards—bitter greens and roast venison, the fried cream with cinnamon ice cream we had last night. Artisan goat cheeses with a glass of
fino
or some little cordial made from ripe cherries. I detour to find a bathroom during the tour, then find myself alone. For fifteen minutes I get the chance to experience the worn tile floors and the views from the windows without the canned litany. Then I am scolded as I turn down a hallway and meet the group. I do love the pattern of days one would live in a house like this, the seamless weaving of inside and outside. “Surely the Spanish devised the most felicitous form of architecture for everyday living,” Ed says as we exit and prepare to be lost in the streets of Córdoba again.
    “Yes, but think of Pompeii. They had the courtyard concept, too, and way earlier.”
    “Their courtyard served a practical function—it sloped to a drain. The rainwater funneled into a cistern.”
    “I like entering a house through a courtyard. Such a cool transition into the private realm from the public. You’re in but out.”
    “Yes, a processional feeling.”
     
    We are saving the mosque, one of the great sights of this world, until last. As we walk past a tiny plaza, Ed stops in front of a sculpture of a seated man holding a book. “Maimonides! Of course. I’d forgotten. He was born in Córdoba.”
    I’m dim on Maimonides but recognize his major work when Ed mentions it,
A Guide for the Perplexed
. “What a contemporary title,” I say, “or are we just perpetually perplexed throughout history? I know I am.”
    “It seems like the right stance in life. Anyone who isn’t perplexed is deluded. Let’s see—he was a Jew who wrote in Arabic and had to go into exile. No one understands why, but he at some point went to North Africa instead of following the other Jews down into southern Spain. Maybe it was because he felt such strong affinity with Arab culture. Some say he converted to Islam.”
    We’re happy to see him standing his ground in the small plaza where university students blare their music from open windows all around. He’s a good still point of reference for them. Seneca, who became Nero’s tutor, also came from Córdoba, and also Averroës, whose commentaries on Aristotle stirred mighty debate in the twelfth century and reawakened discourse