A Year in the World by Frances Mayes Read Free Book Online Page B

provides. Do they hear God talking? Do they dance with God? At another door, we place our money on a carved wheel that spins into the convent. Out comes a wooden box of sweets from the cloistered nun on the other side.
    In the plaza and along the streets, men in yellow slickers harvest oranges into big burlap sacks. Our shoes on the sidewalks and curbs stick and slide in juice and pulp. I ask a worker if they will make juice concentrate or the famous local marmalade. “Neither,” he says, “they’re too close to car exhaust. They will go into soaps and perfumes.” Oh great, perfume with a hint of toxic fumes.
Azahar
, Arabic for “orange,” and then into Spanish,
la naranja
. Here, they drink orange juice like water, sweetening it with a spoon of sugar. In the cathedral orange garden, where the Arabs made their ritual ablutions at the fountain before entering the mosque, the orange trees are intoxicated with birdsong, dripping and heavy on the air. Even the pigeons look holy. There are many in the plazas, but often they’re white, not like urban rats aloft but, instead, reminders of the holy spirit honing in on the Annunciation. A young mother in a fitted red jacket calls,
“Venga, caro! Alejandro, venga.”
Come here, darling! Alejandro, come. And little Alejandro beams and keeps running away. The children are dressed like children in photographs of the 1940s. Alejandro wears navy short pants buttoned to his crisp white shirt with ruffled collar. His hair is a Byronic toss of ringlets, and his cheeks look like tiny burnished pomegranates. I look carefully at all small children. There is one in our future. My daughter is expecting a baby in March.
Venga, caro
. Perhaps we shall one day be foolish enough to buy him one of the miniature matador’s “suits of light” displayed in shops, along with little admiral and sailor suits for small boys.
    Sevilla is full of lived life, surprises, and secret loveliness. We locate La Venera, the Venus, a marble scallop shell on a house that once was the center of the city. In steps and in leagues, legal measurements once were made from here. Two well-fed nuns hoist a stuffed garbage can between them, struggling to keep the can away from their long gray habits. From birdcages perched on balconies or hanging in windows, trills and chirps light the steps of the people below. Ah, Love of God Street. Bells start the dogs barking.
    We dip in and out of churches, admiring the little Arab windows, which look as if they’re formed by big star-and-moon cookie cutters, and the whitewashed arches in San Marcos, and the plaza behind it laden with oranges. In Santa Catalina we spot an Arab arch behind the Christian arch. The air clouds with the cinnamon smell of incense. By the altar to Santa Lucia, hundreds of pairs of eyes and even sunglasses adorn four panels. I exist visually. If I ever laid down a votive in a church, it would be to Santa Lucia.
    To place such a votive, as we see in the archaeological museum, is an ancient instinct. Some of the first found objects shaped in bronze were ex-votos, just as we’ve observed in the Cortona museum. The Etruscans left thousands of these little animals and figures. Farmers turn them up when they plow.
Please, bless my girl. Please, cure my liver. Thank you for tipping me clear of the cart. Please, let me cross the swollen river. Thank you for sparing me when I had fever.
The instinct to offer a gift to the gods seems deeply human. The archaeological museum also has a wall of marble squares, each with a footprint. These are ex-votos to Isis and Nemesis. The names of the ancient devotees are carved with each footprint. Oddly moving, these surviving gestures toward the holy. They remind me of the thirty-thousand-year-old handprints on the cave wall at Pech Merle. Here, too, we see little heads of bulls thought to have been offered as sacrifice.
    The bull! How he charges through Mediterranean history, how he survives as an icon! Spain itself is the