Rose for Winter by Laurie Lee Page A

You must show it, or they will never speak to me more. Go with me on your balcony, and shake my hand before them. Then they will know that my shame is forgotten.’
    â€˜ Hell,’ I said, and we went on to the balcony.
    A solemn crowd of young men was gathered below us. In a frantic voice the boy began a speech of contrition, addressed to me and to all assembled.
    â€˜Behold,’ he cried, ‘the Frenchman has forgiven me! See, he is shaking my hand.’ Here he pumped mine up and down. ‘He is embracing me.’ Here he threw his arms around me. ‘We are friends.’ Here he kissed me. ‘He has forgiven my offence. Viva el senor!’
    â€˜Viva!’ roared the crowd.
    I bowed; we both bowed. Then I dragged him off the balcony and pushed him out through the door.
    â€˜Good night’ I said, ‘and don’t come back.’
    â€˜Good night,’he said.
    â€˜Merry Christmas,’ said Kati, ignored till then in these proceedings.
    So we went to bed, but we got very little sleep. For the boy had grouped his friends beneath our window and organized a serenade in our honour, which continued, with songs, guitars and drums, till six o’clock in the morning.
    Christmas morning; the streets empty, chastened and full of crumpled cymbals. So we went up into the Palace of the Alhambra, into the fresh gold air under the crimson roofs, to walk among the courts and fountains, to stroke the plump lemons and watch the fish. This was the first time we had been into the Palace, and one’s immediate impression was surprise at its smallness. Here was none of the official bombast of Versailles and Blenheim, designed to impress by sheer weight of masonry. Instead a series of perfect little rooms, like tiny pavilions, draped themselves on slender pillars round courts of orange trees and water. Everything was open to the air, with fretted windows and pierced, arcaded walls framing green gardens and the distant hills. All was tender, feminine and intimately sensual. For the men who built the Alhambra were supreme miniaturists, scaling their work to set off a handsome, small-boned people, and preferring the epigram and the lyric poem to all forms of rhetoric and inflation.
    It was a new dimension in architecture – or rather an old forgotten one. It grew like a flower on its many-levelled hill. The delicate pillars, reflected in the pools, shivered like the stalks of lilies; the cloistered fountains trickled on leaves and lions; and the small gold rooms gathered across their walls a quivering light of snow and water, asking only for a group of cloaked ambassadors or trousered girls to furnish them completely. This was the home of pastoral kings, of poet shepherds raised to glory, and looking upon its ornate surfaces one found no fault in it – only a profusion of exotic fancy controlled by absolute self-confidence and taste.
    In the Palace gardens we ate a Christmas lunch of bread and raisins, and then, in the afternoon, followed a great crowd under a threatening sky to see another bull-fight. This was a special show designed to celebrate the first day of the Pascua. Six young Granadinos, nominated by their various supporters, had been voted into the ring to fight six young bulls as green in years and mixed in courage as they were.
    We climbed to the wide concrete seats high above the arena and shared a cask of wine with a family from the Alpujarra. The bull-ring was crowded to the sky, the black clouds rolled down from the mountains, the air darkened, and the young toreros, in their tight suits, looked waxen and frightened.
    The spectacle that now began was in many ways a repetition of the one we had seen in Seville. There was the same drawn intensity on the faces of the boys, the same brash courage alternating with bouts of hysterical panic, the same uneven, confused and often vicious bulls. It was their very youth that made them so dangerous. They came trotting in, their tasselled