“Mariana Pineda was one of the greatest emotions of my childhood. The children of my age, and I myself, holding hands in a circle that opened and closed rhythmically, sang with a melancholy tone, which seemed tragic to me; ’¡Oh! Qué día más triste en Granada,[Oh! What a sad day in Granada], / que a las piedras hacía llorar [that made the stones cry] / al ver que Marianita se muere [to see that Marianita is assainated] / en cadalso por no declarar [by guillotine for not declaring’ (…). Marianita, the flag, the flag of freedom, Pedrosa, acquired for me fabulous and immaterial contours of things that resembled a nine, a downpour, a white fog in flakes, which came to us from Sierra Nevada and enveloped the small town in a whiteness and a silence of cotton. One day I arrived in Granada, hand in hand with my mother: the popular romance rose before me again, sung also by children who had the deepest and most solemn voices, even more dramatic than those that filled the streets of my small town, and with an anguished heart I inquired, I asked, I saw many things, and I came to the conclusion that Mariana Pineda was a woman, a marvellous woman, and the reason for her existence, her main driving force, was her love of freedom”.
“Materializing that ideal figure, the Alhambra seemed to me like a moon that adorned the heroine’s chest: the skirt of her dress, the valley embroidered among the thousand shades of green, and the white water, that snow on the mountains, jagged on the blue sky, a lace worked under the golden flame of a coppery candle”.