The Song of Alhama

The Song of Alhama is a lament for the Moors’ loss at the Battle of Alhama, remembered in the novel as both a forbidden song and an intimate inheritance of Catalina’s childhood. When she sings it to Arthur, Prince of Wales, its account of a ruler’s defeat opens a view of the conquest through the grief of those who lost their kingdom. The scene makes the song more than a record of military defeat: it becomes a passage between generations, a test of historical memory, and a brief meeting of tenderness with the politics of dispossession.

The Request and the Forbidden Song

The song enters a private night between Catalina and Arthur. Arthur asks her for a story, then specifies a song about the Moors losing the Battle of Málaga. Catalina corrects him: the song concerns the Battle of Alhama. She warns that it goes on at length, but Arthur asks her to sing all of it, insisting that they have the night together. The exchange places the song inside a scene of marital closeness, rather than a public ceremony or formal lesson.

Catalina then discloses that the song is forbidden by her mother. Arthur is immediately curious about how she learned it. Catalina explains that a Morisco nursemaid used to sing it, forgetting who Catalina was and who she herself was. That detail gives the song a fragile route across a boundary: it passed from a servant to a princess through a lapse in the roles and identities that ordinarily governed their lives. The prohibition and the nursemaid’s singing coexist in Catalina’s memory; she knows the song precisely because someone entrusted with her care sang what the royal household had barred.

Arthur encourages her to perform, clapping his hands like a sultan and calling her Scheherazade. He asks her to sing in French so he can understand. Catalina responds with a bow and then sings. The gestures turn the moment playful, but the song itself carries a history neither playacting nor an affectionate audience can make harmless. Its language brings the lost kingdom into the room.

The Lament’s Story

The verses move through a compact sequence of warning and judgment. An old man asks the king why the sudden summons has come; an imam answers that the king has brought the calamity upon himself. The song recalls his killing of the Abencerrages, described as Granada’s flower, and foretells that Granada, the kingdom, and the king’s life will not endure. The repeated cry of Alas, Alhama! gives the account the form of mourning: the military loss is named, but so are the internal violence and political failures that precede it.

When Catalina finishes, she says the song’s prediction came true. She recounts Boabdil’s departure from the Alhambra Palace, the red fortress said never to fall. He emerged carrying the keys on a silk cushion, bowed, handed them to Catalina’s mother and father, and rode away. In the story attached to the song, he looked back at his kingdom from a mountain pass and wept; his mother reproached him for weeping over what he could not hold as a man. The song’s warning thus meets a remembered image of surrender: keys ceremonially delivered, a ruler leaving, and a kingdom made visible as something that can be lost.

Loss, Sympathy, and the Conversation Afterward

Arthur laughs at the harshness of Boabdil’s mother’s words. Catalina initially sees the episode as tragic, but joins Arthur’s laughter and acknowledges that she had not considered it in that way. Their different responses do not erase the defeat; they change the emotional register in which they discuss it. Arthur imagines the humiliation of going into exile with an angry mother, while Catalina insists on the scale of the loss itself: imagine losing the Alhambra and never going back.

Arthur pulls her close and kisses her face, then commands her to have no regrets. Catalina smiles and asks him to divert her by telling her about his own mother and father. The song therefore does not end the scene in historical exposition. It briefly brings exile and irreversible loss into their shared present, then gives way to affection and reciprocal storytelling. The movement from the conquered king’s grief to the couple’s intimate exchange makes the lament both serious and bearable without turning its subject into a joke.

Memory and Political Meaning

The song preserves a defeated perspective within Catalina’s royal household, even though her own family received the surrendered keys. Her mother’s ban marks the limits placed on that memory, while the Morisco nursemaid’s singing explains how it nevertheless reached Catalina. The contrast is central to the episode: the conquest belongs to the family’s victorious history, yet the song makes room for the sorrow of the people who lost Granada and for the failures the lament associates with their king.

The scene also gives Catalina an act of interpretation, not merely recollection. She corrects Arthur’s mistaken identification of the battle, knows the song’s history, and supplies its aftermath through the story of Boabdil’s surrender and departure. Later, when Catalina enters the court and stakes her position on her account of her marriage to Arthur, the narrative again places her before a public struggle over status, truth, and loss. The court scene does not cite the song, but the two episodes offer a meaningful contrast: the song remembers a ruler who surrendered a kingdom, while Catalina walks into court to defend the identity and claim she refuses to surrender. The lament’s force rests in that tension between remembering dispossession and insisting on what can still be held.