Mudéjar

Bricks, tiles, colour and language palettes.

It’s a tyranny, sometimes, this writing malarkey. I should be fixing the car, but writhing in the dirt and skinning my knuckles holds little appeal. I should walk on the mountain, it’s a Tuesday, so no hunters or tourists mean I won’t get shot in the stomach or frighten anyone with my dogs. But I have a weird stricture; if I feel the pull of whatever this dreadfully important nonsense is, the words come first. It’s a self-imposed tyranny, at least.

At dawn I was standing outside with fierce and committed coffee. You are correct in detecting my contempt for any other kind of coffee. One should start the day like a wind-up toy, or as if shot out of a cannon. Anyway, that powerful and essential opinion shared, I was standing outside, and my eyes fell on the pillar that holds up my porch, made of flat terracotta bricks, illuminated by the setting harvest moon. There are 25 courses of four bricks, exactly 100 of them, around a steel-reinforced concrete core. The arch over the front door is made of these bricks, as is the vaulted pizza oven I built with the help of an Italian, which makes the best pizzas in this, the ruins of Roman Hispania

These bricks are everywhere in this house where stone wasn’t appropriate, and form an integral part of the vernacular architecture of Spain. I was watching someone walk around the extraordinarily well-preserved rural mosque of Almonaster La Real in Huelva, Andalucia (photo below) and was impressed by the arches of flat bricks still standing after over 1000 years. In this format the humble flat brick, a slab of clay shaped in a mould and fired, has remained essentially the same for c.11,000 years, passing through the muddy hands of the Romans, the Visigoths and the Moors, who made it their own, a style that remained in fashion after the Reconquista and is to be seen in the Mudéjar buildings across this province of Teruel.

Part of the beauty of these bricks is in their ease of use and practicality. They’re soft to cut, take to lime mortar with the delicate alchemy that is slow cementation, as the crystallising process of setting fuses the brick and its mortar at a microscopic level. Until the arrival of Portland cement, we humans used lime mortar for centuries, and while it sticks to these bricks in structure, when the structure is done, it isn’t afraid to let go. Looking at all the bricks in the house, as details and solutions to particular problems, I realise there must be hundreds of them, although I never bought one in my life, picking them up mostly from landfill sites.

Chipping off the soft, crumbly mortar and feeling it easily fall away in gratifying plaques, I realise these bricks have possibly been recycled many, many times, as considerable resources went into their production, both muscle and firewood. In Barcelona, where the fashion in chic apartments of the Eixample is to have the brick exposed, one can frequently see walls made up of coursed fragments, chips and half bricks, laid fast, with never the intention that they should have been on show. Even the broken bricks were reused. In Barcelona I once pulled quite the manoeuvre across the busy Diagonal after spotting a skip-full of these bricks up a side street. To a chorus of horns and indignation, I heaved luggage out for the kids to hold on their laps while I filled the boot and we carried on home, the car’s nose pointing in the air, the steering feather-light with all the weight in the back. I was thrilled with my haul, I can’t tell you what the kids might have thought.

More often than seems sensible, I dwell on comparisons between building and poetry. That there is poetry in these bricks is undeniable. They might carry a faded provenance of lime-wash, or azulete; the lime tinted with washing blue, said to keep away flies and the evil eye. (There’s a window surround in azulete in the photo of my house above, also flat bricks forming the sill and capping the buttress at the foot of the wall).

Sometimes the brick might be blackened from a fire surround or even a chimney, and cutting them with an angle grinder releases the scent of an ancient fire to rise with the dust. The unmistakeable sweet vanillin smell of oak is pungent and lingering and occasionally, if the sun falls on one of these faintly charred bricks, I might catch the whiff of another home’s hearth. I wonder what was said around it, and in which language, or languages.

One of the other joys of the indigenous building materials here in Aragón is their restrained colour palette, defined as it is by the landscape from which the buildings emerge. The sandstone is the colour of straw or honey, the azulete lime-wash a perfect sky-blue. In many parts of Spain doors and windows were routinely painted a grass green, like the alicantina roller blind in the photo. Then there are the manufactured elements; the flat bricks and the roof tiles, or ‘Arab’ tiles; teja arabe, as we call them. Dug from the local clay, they range from an oxide red through a dreamy salmon-pink to a lemon-syllabub yellow and everything in between. Like the bricks, they will have been used over and over again, for centuries probably, for millennia, possibly.

If you’re curious about such things, here’s a time-lapse of one of these farmhouses being rebuilt, using, (mostly) only the materials and techniques that would have been used in its original construction. Alfredo, the builder with a certain light about him who took it on, told me that time and again, making rammed earth floors, or pointing the stone with hot lime, they noticed how easy and what a joy it was to use these materials, so much so that he rather despaired at many modern innovations.

So many bricks and tiles, so many words and so many people, been and gone. At a zoom poetry event, a poet remarked rather pointedly that she thought using a foreign language in a poem was ‘showing off’ and I was a little taken aback. I did think about this on and off for quite a while, concluding I was and am happy to throw in Spanish, Catalan, Ladino or even Arabic words into poetry. It means I get to do things like rhyme ‘ever’ with ‘cueva’ and because as someone pointed out, these languages are a part of my ‘lived experience’. Just like the bricks and the roof tiles and the honey-coloured stone, they are the linguistic palette of the land and its lingering traces. They are the raw material from which the words arise, passed hand to hand through Roman Hispania, or the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba, proudly Mudéjar, a product of Teruel, where I live. I may be English, but here in Spain, when our heads settle into their pillows to rest and dream, they are still cradled through the night by the almohada, from the Hispanic Arabic: al-Muhádda.