The heat that had hammered Spain all summer didn’t relent as the days dragged on into autumn. Paul Stewart raised the blinds in his room each morning, tense with anticipation, worrying when the arid season would exhaust itself and the weather break. The Sahara seemed about to invade Andalucia. Just east of Granada, an actual desert, the only one in Europe, was devouring acres of formerly arable land.
Finally, at the end of October, Paul woke one day to discover that snow had scrawled what appeared to be Arabic characters across the highest peaks of the Sierra Nevada. It wouldn’t be long now before rain and cooler temperatures swept down from the mountains.
As the sun rose, turning the crenellated walls of the Alhambra from red to gold, Granada suggested shapes that neither man nor nature alone could contrive. Architectural precision collided with a chaos of hills and valleys that separated the oldest quarters of the city into neighborhoods distinct from the right-angled modern town. The scene was of such magnificence that Paul could forget that his bank account was at rock bottom and his life adrift.
To avoid shops where he had run up bills, Paul kept to the Albaicín, the old Arab area of Granada. He lived in a vast, slightly shabby carmen that had belonged to his family for generations. There he slept and worked in a tower previously occupied by the family cook, Virtudes. She had always referred to it as her querencia—an almost mystical space where, she claimed, she was her strongest, truest self. The term came from bullfighting, Virtudes told him; it was the spot in the ring where the dying bull made its last stand, bowing its head as the matador bared his sword for the kill. Now the tower had become Paul’s querencia.
Back when Virtudes had presided over it, the carmen had devolved from a richly furnished family mansion into a low-cost bed-and-breakfast that catered to students and rowdy tribes of hippie backpackers. Leaving most parental duties to Virtudes, his mother had had more than she could handle managing the B&B. Even as a child, Paul had sensed the fragility of the enterprise. Or perhaps that fragility had come from growing up among transient strangers with a mother whose mind was elsewhere after her husband, his father, upped stakes and returned to the States.
When his mother died, Paul inherited the carmen and attempted to attract a more prosperous clientele, not to mention a more interesting one, by transforming it into an arts residency. At first, paying guests streamed in steadily—retired academics persuaded that they possessed a creative side, weekend artists determined to discover what they could achieve if they painted full-time, bookish folks convinced they had a story to tell. To supplement its revenue, Paul registered the carmen in the United States as a not-for-profit 501c3—and with grants from private foundations and occasional awards from US arts agencies, the residency remained solvent.
But then the bottom fell out, not just for Paul but for any business that depended on international travelers. First, the COVID-19 pandemic kept people from coming. Even after the vaccine opened up Europe, a few grisly terrorist incidents made Americans wary of Spain, especially its southern provinces, which were roiled by migrants from Muslim countries.
By the time artists and writers began to trickle back, climate change had turned the carmen’s un-air-conditioned rooms into hotboxes. And the demands of guests had changed. There were new “woke” exigencies, vigilance about gender nonconformity and a heightened emphasis on diversity. Yet nothing Paul did to adapt brought the number of residents back to what it had been before the pandemic.
He started to stress the carmen’s deep and evolving history. He promised to lead trips to Lorca’s house, a popular destination with the LBGTQ community. He pointed out Granada’s multicultural, multiracial, multireligious population. He showed his guests the tiny arrow that had been etched into the kitchen’s tile floor indicating the direction of Mecca. The house, he told them, had foundations that contained stones from the Roman era and others that dated from the Islamic occupation.
Although he didn’t mention this, Paul wondered whether Virtudes had ever noticed the arrow and recognized its import. Someone just as pious as she, just as committed to prayer, penance and almsgiving, had preceded her here.
The carmen now had another faithful Muslim under its roof. The houseboy, a Black migrant who answered to the name of Blessed, had slyly insinuated himself into a storage closet off the kitchen. At this moment, Blessed was probably crouched on the floor muttering the Fajr, the morning prayer. When he finished, he and Paul would hike down to Plaza Nueva to collect an arriving resident who had texted from the airport that she was catching a taxi into town.
Paul could have dealt with the pickup alone, but Blessed had a keen sense of ceremony and regarded all travel, especially an overnight flight from the States, as worthy of respect. It did no harm to have him along, and Paul appreciated his company. He also believed that Blessed’s presence reassured guests that the residency wasn’t some rinky-dink operation. It had a staff.
At present, it had more staff than paying guests. A middle-aged American who described himself as an environmental musical composer spent his days lugging around video and audio equipment and what appeared to be a feather duster. He called this fuzzy device a “dead cat,” and he waved it at arm’s length, sweeping up ambient sound. When he found something he liked, he arranged a camera on a tripod and recorded himself recording street noise.
Twice he had been accosted by the Guardia Civil. Once a teenager, high on glue, had beaten him with a stick. Nothing, however, dissuaded the man from his project, which he vowed to exhibit publicly after he edited it. Paul encouraged him to take his time; there was no rush. Art needed to marinate, and the carmen needed the income.
“It’s time to go,” Paul called. Blessed was already outside, spindly and ill-clad as a scarecrow, idly stroking the wrought-iron bars on a ground-floor window, strumming them like harp strings. The carbon darkness of his skin was highlighted by a background of whitewashed walls.
From Huerta de Carlos, they headed steeply downhill. Judging by its name, the plaza had once been an orchard owned by a man called Carlos. During Paul’s childhood, it had served as a soccer pitch of packed earth, studded with broken glass and bottle caps. Neighborhood kids, the sons and daughters of maids and day laborers, had treated Paul, a blond yanqui with no father, as an outsider until he proved he could take care of himself in games and in fistfights.
Paved with bricks, the soccer pitch was now an esplanade constructed atop an underground garage. On this mild morning, bums slept off last night’s wine on the concrete benches. Later in the day, people would congregate to listen to guitarists and flamenco singers, girls with tambourines and boys beating percussive tunes on wooden boxes. A snarky poet at the residence had once accused Paul of choreographing this folkloric scene as a treat for guests at the carmen. But music, like the splash of fountains and the scent of jasmine, laced the air everywhere in the Albaicín.
Blessed and he advanced along crooked alleys, down staircases scalloped by centuries of passing feet. As a boy, Paul had owned an ant colony in a clear plastic container. In cross-section, insects had scuttled up and down winding tunnels, never losing their way. He pictured himself like this in the Albaicín, hardwired to track his location anywhere in the tight mesh of streets. Step by step, stone by stone, the neighborhood was mapped out on his nerve endings.
Blessed seemed to possess the same self-correcting instincts and seldom put a foot wrong. In fact, he was often a step ahead of Paul, anticipating the next move. Paul assumed the Albaicín resembled the place Blessed came from. Not that Blessed had ever named where that might be. When Paul asked, Blessed left it that he was from “far away.”
“But which country?”
“One of sand and hot sun.”
Blessed was similarly vague about his age and family. Even his name was a bit of a mystery. He paused before saying it, then paused again when others said it. Paul guessed it was a free translation of Barak.
Blessed spoke a smidgen of English and Spanish, but the sounds that poured out weren’t always coherent. Patsy, the cook who had replaced Virtudes, believed he suffered a speech impediment or was soft in the head, maybe brain damaged after thudding across the Sahara in an open truck and surviving the Straits of Gibraltar in a rubber boat.
It struck Paul as logical for an illegal African refugee to prefer to remain incommunicado. How could authorities ship him home if they didn’t have a clue where he came from? And how could they interrogate him if he barely spoke any language they understood?
Paul imagined—this was his habitual response, an overactive imagination—that Blessed was smarter than he let on. He imagined that Blessed was a Haratin, a member of a tribe of virtual slaves who scratched out a living in the Sahara. He didn’t have enough fat on him to fry a hamburger, but he was strong and needed no instruction in tending the garden in the courtyard. He expertly pruned the fruit trees, espaliered roses, and tended to an irrigation system that prevented the soil from hardening into concrete.
Paul imagined that Blessed was illiterate, but he never put him in the humiliating position of having to admit this. What mattered to Paul was that he was easygoing and had a sense of humor—an unerring sign of intelligence, in Paul’s opinion.
All of Europe teemed with migrants like Blessed. They spread blankets on the sidewalks of Granada and sold mass-produced trinkets and cheap knockoffs of designer goods. Keeping an eye open for cops as they haggled over prices, they were ready in an instant to roll up their goods and flee with them piled on their heads.
By contrast, Blessed seemed relaxed, standing outside an Italian gelateria shaking a paper cup, and singing, “Change, change.” Rather than begging, he might have been cheerfully commenting on Granada. The city was changing. Everywhere you looked, Islam was invading.
Paul had fair hair and a slightly ginger-colored beard, and when Blessed first spotted him, he called out, “Hola, rubio,” mean- ing “Hello, blond.” He patted his own coarse hair, which was plaited in cornrows and tinted orange at the tips with lemon juice.
Paul smiled and dropped a euro into the paper cup. The next time they crossed paths, he gave Blessed two euros. The third time, they greeted one another as fellow rubios and shook hands. Blessed’s palm was pink and looked tender, but it had a work-hardened, sandpapery texture. They talked. Or tried to talk. Phrases in Spanish and English slithered between them, followed on Blessed’s part by laughter and lapses into pantomime. The Black man’s smile brightened everything except his eyes, which retained the wariness of a feral cat.
Paul gathered that Blessed had washed ashore at a Mediterranean beach resort and headed inland, where migrants weren’t hounded as they were along the coast. Lacking money and papers, even a basic ID, he lived in a house with other refugees. A house or a church—it was hard for Paul to tell which. He assumed it might be a place run by Caritas. When he asked for the address, Blessed gestured in no particular direction. Maybe he didn’t know the address. Maybe he actually slept rough in the street.
Rather than continue dropping coins into the paper cup, Paul invited him to the carmen and paid him out of petty cash to do odd jobs. Useful and unobtrusive, Blessed withdrew whenever he intuited that residents would rather not have him around. In the beginning, he departed at the end of the day, but eventually he lingered longer and longer, helping Patsy clear the dinner table and wash dishes. He ate leftovers from the communal meals, and after Patsy went home, he began bedding down in the kitchen supply closet.
Patsy, of course, was aware that Blessed had moved in, but she didn’t mention this to Paul, who had already noticed and said nothing. He paid Blessed more than the going rate for off-the-books work. That eased his conscience a bit. By not declaring Blessed an official employee, he distanced himself in case of trouble and was consoled that the supply closet was safer and more comfortable than where Blessed had been sleeping.
Paul thought he knew how it felt to be a refugee. Despite his Spanish and American passports, he never felt altogether at home anyplace except the tower. As a child, on court-mandated visits to his father in Florida, everything had marked him as a foreigner. At his father’s insistence—he refused to pay alimony and child support otherwise—Paul had attended a boarding school in New England and a college in the same state. There, he had learned to give a pitch-perfect imitation of an American. He excelled on the college soccer team, spent most winter weekends skiing, and was popular with the plump, giggling coeds who ruled campus social life. When he didn’t pair off with one of them, rumors spread that he had a serious novia in Spain. The truth was that women in Granada held him at arm’s length. In their eyes, he had become too Americanized.
In his college yearbook, beside his snapshot, was a class prophecy predicting that Paul would become a narc for the Drug Enforcement Agency. This had caused him to wonder whether anyone had heard about his father’s alleged links to undercover intelligence. But it turned out to be a lame joke alluding to Paul’s refusal to smuggle ziplock bags of Spanish hash back to his classmates….