El Rinconcillo, The Poet’s Corner

In Granada, El Rinconcillo group met in a little corner of the Alameda Café, whose tastefully maintained descendant now has a wide kerb in front of it, setting it back from the traffic in such a way that it appears withdrawn, recherché, a perfect spot for neat huddles of conversation, which today are made up of business people’s intimations on the Euro and the market, not art, nor the bubble and ebullience of the Spanish Republic through that of the artists, seventy years ago, when El Rinconcillo’s were in the vanguard of change, steering a culture that had stayed withdrawn, turned in on itself at the farthest corner of Europe, overlooking the dusty line of Africa on the southern horizon and the turquoise Atlantic to the west.  The tiles in the café as I remember them are blue, the tables discreet and small, but of heavy wood.  In Lorca’s time, they would have had metal legs, perhaps some sawdust on the floor to sop up the spillage from the barrelled wine, their huge butts in the bodega at the back, where the brandy kegs squatted cockily, ready to squirt into the coffee to make the carajillos, the drinks to go with the tapas of bread and olives, bocarones, dried bull’s meat, salmonetes, squid.  All the Rinconcillo talk was of making new poetry, new theatre, new music, new painting, the source of which is secreted in the ancient, pre-bourgeois—gypsy cante hondo, in African Art, in cave drawings, in Moorish moods and colours, in an all-involving music and design to match the intricate mathematical patterns, so precise and multiplied in the domed arches of the mosque, those miniature indoor firmaments a few feet overhead, dizzyingly elaborate to draw the eye—or if converted from a midnight blue sound stricken with the intricate notes of stars, the ear—into a maze, an encoded sky, which frees the secret soul, a sky blue which is still inscribed in the common tilework, the azulejo of the café walls, the tile… azulejo: a Spanish word—an adjective, when it isn’t posing as a ceramic—the stem of which is azul: blue.

Here in the rinconcillo, the pagan, the gypsy, the African in the Spaniard is freed from the centuries of Christian convents and straightjackets, monasteries and murders in the name Torquemada and the Inquisition—for a while before Franco and the falange reinstalls all the constraints, the full regalia of shackles in the cramped corner of Europe, in that square of earth which is a nation and a peninsula of rainy northland, central plains that were once the granary of Europe, and the dry deserts, dark grape and olive-domed glades of the south, El Rinconcillo de zelos, which once cornered the jealousy of the world in its days of empire.  In El Rinconcillo they plotted to let back in the New World after a century or more of absence, and they did it to music, the playing of the piano and cante hondo; that deep song whose throat is full of cries, like a choked well, full of feelings and recollections, with a hex in it: el amor brujo, and its songs that sound like spells, the singers either caught in them or casting them; spells as dank and poisoned as the wells or sparkling with the life of water in a merry drinker’s mouth, or ringing with the Moor's lament at the loss of the Alhambra in "Romance del rey moro que perdio Alhama." The lament and the buildings of the Alhambra loomed on the hill behind the Alameda café.

"Ay de mi Alhama!" — (Ay day mee Ahlahmah). ‘Ay for my Alhambra’ —the cry turns dead and dull, doubly horrible in correct or any stiff English equivalence, as does most Arab legacy of sounds when rendered from Spanish.  But dip back into the dialect of English, the Irish, the Scots and it will stay sad, soaring and piercingly the same.  Through my crude phonetic portrayal, in southern Irish or south west English it goes, "Ah mee Ahlahmah;" in northern Irish and Scots: "Ah mah Ahlahmah." 

The Moorish king was passing        through the city of Granada
                  from the Elvira Gate          to the Vivarambla.
                                                               Ah ma Alhama !

The rinconcillo group swore, unspokenly, to restore to Granada the ultramodern glory of yore, the art of the verbal, visual, vocal and instrumental roiled and rolled out into the dark, and they walked home half-under the Arab streetlamps and half-under the Spanish Republic’s.  For a while the light of a new world shone on their faces and their cries were tied to its demise.