“Did I tell you,” she asked me, “how everyone assumes it was the Moors, but it was actually the Romans who built the first fortress there? The beautiful stuff—the walls, the palace that Washington Irving fell in love with—that was constructed by the Moors.”

“Yes,” I said, “you did.”

“Did I tell you how after the Reconquista it became the Royal Court of Isabella and Ferdinand because Isabella was in love—obsessed actually—with Granada?”

“Yup,” I said, “I remember that too.”

She went on. “Did I also tell you how the arrangement of the mosaic tiles and angles of the architecture in the palaces are reflected in the pools so that it gives the appearance of something infinite?”

I didn’t think she told me that, but I said yes anyway.

In the days leading up to our arrival in Granada, Kerri also read me passages from The Tales of the Alhambra and showed me pictures of the Court of Lions and the Royal Gardens and the Arabic inscriptions carved into the stucco and told me stories about Charles V tearing down parts of La Alhambra to build a palace fit for a king, a residence never completed and never lived in.

“It really doesn’t matter what we’ve seen so far,” she said earlier in the morning, “as long we walk through La Alhambra, the trip will be a success.”

I wish she would have told me that sooner—about her enthusiasm born in a picture she saw of the Generalife in her Spanish 2 textbook more than a decade ago—because I would have saved my energy for the Andalusian leg of our trip. This was the start of our third week in Spain, and I had already felt like we walked across the entire peninsula, each day baking under the unadulterated Iberian sun.

As the gates of the Alhambra came into view, an old lady came from behind us and put her hand on Kerri’s arm.

“Perdón, Señorita.”

“No, thank you,” Kerri said, and we kept on walking.

The old lady, however, kept pace and grabbed Kerri by the wrist.

“No. Lo siento,” Kerri said to the old lady. “Tenemos que ir.”

“Es un regalo” the old lady said softly. She was dressed in a long black skirt and black smock-like blouse and had a swarthy complexion. She stuck her hand in a bag slung across her body and pulled out a small, needled branch. “Un regalo.”

“What’s she saying?” I asked.

“She says it’s a gift. It’s rosemary.”

The old lady gestured for Kerri to hold out her hand and placed the rosemary in her palm. She then closed Kerri’s hand over it, holding down gently to keep her hand from opening back up. I smiled at Kerri and she smiled back, a smile that indicated we were presumptuous American assholes for blowing off this old lady and the least we could do was play along.

The old lady gestured for Kerri to present her other palm, so she did. Taking a stubby index finger, the old lady began drawing. While mumbling some sort of incantation, she opened up Kerri’s hand and pressed more rosemary sprigs into it. Then, she carefully traced the lines in Kerri’s open palm.

“Usted es muy inteligente. Va a tener muchos hijos, hijos bonitos. Va a vivir una vida muy larga.”

Even though my Spanish was poor at best and I could only make out a word or two, my suspicions abated. My attention was hers.

“La Santa María le bendiga. Ella te cuidará. Ella te protegerá.” The old lady lifted the fist of rosemary closer to Kerri’s nose and mimed that she should breathe it in.

So she did.

“Todo eso va a ser la verdad, si patea conmigo.” The old lady then stomped her left foot twice.  Kerri looked confused, as if in a hypnagogic daze. The old lady stomped again. “Hazlo,” she said. Kerri finally did.

The old lady blessed Kerri with the sign of the cross, “En el nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo, amén. Ahora, da un beso.”

“¿Que?” Kerri said.

“Beso,” the old lady said.

“Beso?” I asked.

“She wants us to kiss,” Kerri said.  I shrugged at the simple request, and so we kissed.

“Otra ves,” the old lady then said.

“She wants us to do it again.”

I laughed. “Sure.” So we kissed again.

The old lady, who had not addressed me at all before this moment, looked into me. “Ahora, usted.” She motioned for me to hold out my hand. I did, and she placed the rosemary into my palm and closed it up. It was dry and prickly. She mumbled her opening incantation like she did with Kerri and then started again with the drawing and tracing on my palm this time.

“Es muy inteligente. Va a tener dos hijos, hijos bonitos. Sí, dos. Con ella.”

Kerri smiled. “She says you’re smart, and you will have two kids with me.”

“Va vivir una vida muy larga.”

“And you’ll live a long life.” 

I was glad to hear that I was going to live a long life, but I was a little concerned the old lady jumped the gun on my relationship with Kerri.

“Usted es muy guapo.”

“She says that you are handsome,” Kerri said.

I was flattered, but I wasn’t certain if I should say thank you.

“Eso es de tu padre.”

“And you get it from your father,” Kerri said, which was said a lot when I was younger, something I had not heard in years. It struck me as odd, but it was the next statement that disquieted me.

“Hay que llamar él.”

“You have to call him,” Kerri said slowly, knowing the request would usher in sadness.

The old lady then guided my fist up to my nose. I took a sustained deep breath. She mimed the stomping, but I already knew what to do. I thought about the two kids thing and the father thing, which made me hesitate. I stomped twice anyway.

“En el nombre del Padre, del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo, amén. Beso.”

“Beso,” I said and kissed Kerri once and then a second time before I was instructed to.

At this point even I was anxious to get to the Alhambra, but the old lady held out her hand and said, “Págame.”

“What did she say,” I asked.

“She wants money,” Kerri said.

“Money? No fucking way,” I said. “Come on.”  I grabbed the wrist of the hand that held the rosemary.

“Si no pagas, vas a tener mala suerte para la eternidad.”

“Huh?” I turned to Kerri.

“She says if you don’t give her money we’ll be cursed forever.”

The old hag repeated the end with emphasis and pointed at me. “¡Para la eternidad!”

“What the fuck?” I said.

Kerri then scolded her. “No es muy simpática.” 

“That’s not cool,” I said. “Tell her that’s not cool.”

“Eres de mal humor,” Kerri said. “Eso es horrible.”

The old lady wouldn’t relent, repeating over and over, “¡Maldito! ¡Mala suerte para la eternidad.”

“Jesus,” I said. “This is like spiritual extortion.”

Kerri grabbed me by the arm to pull me away, but I thought better than to flee.

“You’re not going to pay her,” Kerri said.

“I have enough bad luck already,” I said. “I don’t need this hanging over me for the rest of my life.” I reached with my free hand into my back pocket where I had been keeping loose change. I didn’t want to pull all of it out at once, so I grabbed a euro and held it out.

She snatched it from my hand and shoved two dirty, pudgy fingers in my face. “¡Dos!”

“She says she wants two,” Kerri said, as if I couldn’t figure that out.

I wasn’t sure what to do, and my head was jammed in illogical logic. On the one hand, I needed to ward off her imprecation. On the other hand, I knew the old lady was full of shit. Probably.

I had already given her a dollar. I was angry at this hag for the bait and switch, but my rational, or maybe my irrational side, or a combination of both—confused by the unadulterated Iberian sun, the exhaustion of the trip, and the old lady’s palm reading—viewed this as a Pascalian wager of sorts, nudging me to give up the extra buck.

“What are you doing? Don’t give her anything else,” Kerri said.

I groaned. All the euro coins felt the same in my back pocket, so I pulled one out not knowing it was a twenty-cent piece. The old lady quickly snatched it from my fingers and realized I had come up short.

“¡Dos euros!”

This time I pointed back at her. “Mal. No es bueno!” A weak comeback, but it was the best I could do. “Tell her I’m going to put a curse on her,” I said to Kerri.

She stuttered to find the right words. “I don’t know if I should say that.”

“Mal, no es bueno,” I said again. I turned to Kerri. “Just tell me how to say evil.”

“I don’t know.” Kerri was flustered, appearing to frantically flip through old Spanish textbooks in her head to find a chapter on the occult. “Antipático?”

“What?” Even I knew that wasn’t going to convey the correct tone. “No, evil!”

“I don’t know!”

The lady kept yelling, “¡Dos euros! ¡Dos euros!”

“Fucking witch,” I said to her. “How do you say witch?”

Kerri answered with confidence. “Bruja.”

“Bruja! Tu una bruja!” I shouted at the old lady.

She snarled and continued yelling back, “¡Maldito!”

I took out all my change and found another damn euro and shoved it in her hand. The old lady finally nodded in satisfaction and waddled away. Clenching my fist full of rosemary, Kerri pulled me toward the gates of the red castle.

# # #

Thomas Genevieve’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in the Baltimore Review, Hobart, decomP, the Valparaiso Fiction Review, and the Sierra Nevada Review, among others. When he is not writing, he maintains a steady diet of the cultural arts.

Photo: Cristian Newman