Historia de los siete murciélagos by Manuel Fernández y González: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

It begins in the mountains of the Hejaz. Aben-Zohayr, a defeated Arab chieftain, falls for the houri Fayzuly and sells his soul to Eblis to have her; she flees and the valley is cursed. Nearly nine centuries later Abu-Kalek, an old warrior of Boabdil’s, receives from the dead king and the houri Rhadhyah their son, Aben-al-Malek, who grows up in an Alhambra raised by genies in the desert. As a young man the prince dreams of a woman: she is Fayzuly, spellbound in a tower in Granada.

The novel then goes back to the thirteenth century. Al-Hhamar, the king who begins the dynasty of Granada, follows a white gazelle into a cave, where the genie of the Future shows him in the smoke what is to come. His younger son, Juzef, fifteen, loves Betsabé, a slave the Jewish merchant Absalon keeps in chains, who has tiny bat wings on her back. She is a cursed fairy: if the king builds a castle on the Red Hill and a tower over the chasm at its foot, she and her sisters Djeidah, Zahra and Obeidah will be turned into bats.

To prevent it, Betsabé wants to become sultana and to see the king dead. Her sisters seduce three rebel governors, of Málaga, Guadix and Comares, while Bib-Rambla square hosts the festivities for the heir, with a bewitched bull and a knight in green with a bat on his shield. Sultana Wahdah, Juzef’s mother, forces Absalon to tell her the story of Djeouar, a juggler who inherited a sorcerer’s skull, and in it she discovers her own origins.

It is a book of legends within legends, told in the ornate language of Eastern tales.

Fernández y González was the great author of the serialized novel in nineteenth-century Spain, and he was educated in Granada. This book belongs to Romantic Orientalism: Nasrid Granada as a world of genies, houris, astrologers, talismans and fairies turned into vampires who drink their lovers’ blood, set among real places such as Bib-Rambla, the Zacatín and the Albaicín.

Today it reads as a fantasy tale and as a doorway into the lore surrounding the Alhambra. The Gate of the Seven Floors is real: Boabdil left the city through it, and Granada tradition tells of a headless horse that haunts the spot. The trials in the tower recall the seven deadly sins, and mottoes like the green knight’s “Si no venzo, esta es mi suerte” (“If I do not win, this is my fate”) have the flavour of the old Moorish ballads.

Manuel Fernández y González was born in Seville on 6 December 1821 and died in Madrid on 6 January 1888. He published his first book of poems at fourteen, studied at the University of Granada and became the leading author of the serialized novel in Spain, mostly historical, with hits such as Men Rodríguez de Sanabria (1853).

He earned fortunes from his serials and spent them all. In his last years he dictated his novels to secretaries, among them a young Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, and he died nearly blind and in poverty.