Si hebras de oro son vuestros cabellos

“Si hebras de oro son vuestros cabellos” is a song Abindarráez sings to Jarifa when love has made him distrust the very affection he longs to believe in. The lyric converts his suspicion into a portrait: each feature he praises seems, to his anxious eye, to speak a refusal. Jarifa’s tears interrupt that imagined rejection, and her answer makes the song a turning point in their exchange, leading from private doubt to an explicit promise of marriage.

Occasion and Context

The song belongs to Abindarráez’s account of his love for Jarifa. For a time, the two had understood themselves to be related; when they learned that no kinship bound them, their affection could take its proper form. Abindarráez describes their happiness, but also the jealousy and self-distrust that soon entered it. At a meeting beside the fountain of jasmines, Jarifa asks him to sing, as she often enjoys hearing him do. He suspects that the request is meant to occupy him and keep him from telling her what troubles him. Since his attention is fixed on fulfilling her wishes, he sings in Arabic, using the song to express the cruelty he imagines in her conduct.

That setting matters to the lyric’s emotional movement. Jarifa’s request is an invitation to sing, but Abindarráez hears it through his fear that her manner has changed. The song therefore does not report an established rejection: it gives voice to his interpretation of her gestures before he has tested it. His words reveal how readily affection can become a source of doubt when the lover reads distance into a beloved’s ordinary behavior.

The Beloved’s Portrait and the Lover’s Doubt

The lyric begins by arranging Jarifa’s beauty through images of gold, light, and precious materials. Her hair is likened to gold; her eyes are bright as suns beneath her forehead; the neck and breast are associated with crystal and diamond. The body becomes a sequence of admired features, each offered as evidence of the beloved’s extraordinary beauty. Yet praise does not settle the speaker’s mind. The same features become signs from which he tries to infer whether she will show him mercy.

This reversal gives the song its central tension. Abindarráez asks whether there could be a more beautiful yet unresponsive brow, and whether eyes so serene could belong to someone so cruel. He imagines that the neck and breast, the brow and hair, already say no, then wonders what he can expect from the eyes and mouth. The poem’s recurring attention to these features makes them seem to answer him in turn. A gaze, a face, or a mouth is not merely described; each is treated as a possible verdict on his love.

The praise and accusation remain entangled. Jarifa’s beauty is never in doubt, but Abindarráez cannot tell what that beauty means for him. His language moves between admiration and complaint, and the movement exposes the gap between what he sees and what he fears. The song does not establish that Jarifa has refused him; it dramatizes how suspicion makes even the beloved’s most beautiful features appear capable of withholding an answer.

Jarifa’s Answer

The song’s effect is immediate: Jarifa sheds tears. Abindarráez recognizes them as a true sign of her love, yet his response is divided. He cannot decide whether his greater feeling is the joy of seeing such evidence of affection or the pain of having caused her to weep. The lyric’s imagined refusal has thus produced a real emotional consequence, prompting the beloved to answer the fear it expresses.

Jarifa tells him not to blame himself for his distrust, which she presents as a familiar condition of love. She then offers a concrete remedy: Abindarráez may regard himself as master of her freedom, provided he does not refuse the bond of marriage, which her honor and love require. His response is joyful and reverent; he kneels and kisses her hands. What the song could only ask for as mercy, Jarifa makes definite as a commitment. The scene turns an inward monologue of suspected rejection into a spoken agreement between the lovers.

Place in the Narrative

The song is a lyric episode embedded in prose narration: the surrounding account establishes the meeting, Jarifa’s request, and Abindarráez’s suspicion; the song gives that suspicion a concentrated poetic form; and the prose then records Jarifa’s tears and declaration. Its function is not simply to praise her. By making the lover interpret beauty as possible evidence of cruelty, it brings his emotional uncertainty to the surface, where Jarifa can answer it directly.

The assurance does not remove every external danger from their story. After their exchange, the king of Granada orders a change of command that requires the alcaide to leave Cártama for Coín, separating the lovers. That later separation is not caused by the song, but it casts the scene’s promise in sharper relief: their mutual love has been made explicit just before circumstances threaten to part them. Within this sequence, the lyric marks the passage from suspicion to commitment, while the surrounding narrative shows that emotional certainty alone cannot protect the lovers from changes imposed upon their lives.