28 ❧ chapter one
and triple-crossing themselves in an excess of care and devotion. And, fi nally,
the old woman kissing the bloody feet of a plaster Christ, with a bunch of
faded roses stuck between them, and caressing the knees and legs as if he
had been her own son. With eyes brimming, I came out into the marketplace,
each arcade crowned with a white cluster of eighteenth-century cupids, and
from all sides the reek of fi sh, entrails, vegetables, and fruit and the rhythmi-
cal, almost wailing chant of the vendors, and a man almost covered, front
and back, with a curtain made of strings of garlic.
Aranjuez, July 3, 1947
Here I am sitting on a restaurant terrace on the banks of the Tagus, close by
the royal palace and garden where once Farinelli directed the fi reworks and
embarkation of the fl eet of Ferdinand and Barbara. Instead of the King’s
harpsichord playing, or the Queen’s duets with Farinelli, there is no sound
from the river but the shouts of a few boys and Franco soldiers in rowboats.
There are no echoes of Scarlatti, no hunting horns, not even guitars—tonight
only the radio with Liebestraum and the A-fl at Polonaise. The moon is rising
behind the trees of the park, in a sky that at sunset was pure Velásquez. The
palace is extremely beautiful, of a warm stone and the pink brick of Madrid, of
a nobility that is completely lacking at La Granja. There are occasional echoes
of mid-eighteenth-century sweetness, of the court of Ferdinand and Barbara
and Farinelli, a little gate in the palace garden, with handsome ironwork and
elegant stone curves, with shepherds lounging at the base, in true Pannini or
Piranesi style. And at a bend of the Tagus is the old embarkation platform of
the Farinelli fêtes, with bushes growing between the stones, and a decaying gar-
den house of the purist proportions, like the best Juvarra. The air is sweet with
boxwood, burning leaves, and some unfamiliar fl owering shrub. Great waves
of coolness arise from the river, and the sky has been luminous in the early
evening. All around the palace is the sound of water, rushing over the dam
of the Tagus, and gurgling through the irrigation canals of the gardens. The
outbuildings of the royal establishment are connected by handsome vaulted
arcades in the same warm stone and plaster crumbling to expose the rose-col-
ored bricks. At the end of one of the squares is a round-domed church with
exquisitely curved passages joining the main colonnades.
Attached to the pages of this unfortunately discontinued journal I fi nd a
series of notes, each one of which conjures up a series of impressions of an
intensity and richness that in the meantime I had almost forgotten. The best of
the main ideas found their way into the Scarlatti book or into my subsequent
playing of Scarlatti. But on reviewing them, I discover once again the strongest
possible evidence of the attraction and fascination that Spain has always held
for me. The fact of never having lived and worked in Spain for any extended
length of time constitutes for me the biggest bundle of missed opportunities in
my entire dealings with Western European culture.
KKirkpatrick.indd 28irkpatrick.indd 28 2/8/2017 9:56:34 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 56 : 34 AM
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
#1