Granada: Part II - Cats and History

    We did this and that and walked through the city up to a dry olive grove until we were no longer really in the city limits anymore because we could see no man-made borders from so high except a crumbling wall running along the hill from Muslim days.  In front of us here were mountains that I earlier in the day mistook for clouds, their peaks were that white.  It really looked as if the whole powdery top could trail off into the sky.  Sitting on a rock big and flat enough for just us two, close to the orange-red soil in the parched, out-of-season grove, we took everything in like the first tourists: contemplating the Alhambra below; in awe of its imposing structure and gardens and all their exotic embellishments; on top of the world with only the Sierra Nevada more mighty.
    “You go to these places,” motioning to the landscape ahead and sky “and you don’t think about anything.  Nothing.  You don’t even feel.”
    “I’m thinking right now.”
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Yeah, I’m thinking about Cats.* ”
    “..........”
    “...the little one we saw coming up here?”
    “You see, you’re thinking about nothing, it’s great.  Genial.” I throatily proclaimed.(It was a word I was and still am very fond of in such situations.)  “You know, I hate cats.  Almost as much as I hate Washington Irving.**"
    “Oh I get mad at my cat all the time.”
    “I think if I had a cat, I’d punch it in the face all the time.”
    “Have you seen that kitten YouTube video?” She just kept on chugging along with it.
    “No.”
    “It’s a little girl narrating a kitten’s picture book.  It’s called Kittens Presented by Kittens.”
    (Long pause here, much longer than the one before, such an amount of dot dot dots would be insulting.)  “If we lived here and had an open-air place, I’d let you have a cat.”
    “Yeah, I’d want a pretty independent cat, like it’d get its own food and be free-roaming.  I think that’d be the ideal cat.  And Life Partner.”
    It was an absurd conversation in an inspiring place.  And this was the best we could come up with?  Cats?  The big rock alone in the grove there for just us two, the cracked orange-red soil close enough to taste, the wide blue sky and the stony confusion of the clouds and mountain tops.  The view.***  I mean, this was a serious, historic site, some fucking holy ground, and we were both inward looking enough people.  It didn’t make much sense.  But then neither do many events when we’re busy living them. 
    It seems to be a reoccurring motif in my travels these days too more than it used to be, the inability to take what I need  - or what I think I need - out of a place while “in the moment.”  You want it to be all its worth, right?  Because there’s careful planning and preparation involved, anticipation for the sites and sounds and all it will be, an investment.  At the time, up there on the mount, from those lofty heights in the white light where we could peer into the fortress palace below, I didn’t think about much of anything (though I do remember noting that the soil had the same tinge as the cocktail**** I had drunk the night before in a little burn-out bar on Elvira street.) 
    So, finally we descended down to enter the Alhambra, purely giddy from the sunshine and wine settling in from lunch and each other’s presence.  Although, of course, as usual I did not know this then until much later when she had left at the bus station in Granada and I had gotten back to Madrid.





















*Not to be confused with the musical Cats; she really did make it sound like it was capitalized.

**American romanticist reference resulting from said author’s surprisingly steady, if not static, level of fame and the subsequent cafes, bookstores, vendors and even tobacco shops throughout Granada that bear his name and sell his acclaimed 1832 hit Tales of the Alhambra.

***We also proposed the landscape as suitably Jurassic - a perfect setting for dinosaurs to roam - then imagined c. 1200 AD Arabic warriors saddled atop them and what an even more formidable place, the Alhambra that is, really would be.

****a negroni