BÉA GONZALEZ
The
MAPMAKER’S OPERA

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Canada by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

A paperback original 2006

Copyright © Béa Gonzalez 2005

Béa Gonzalez asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007207794

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007386505

Version: 2016-08-24

Dedication

For Andrew, who taught me to look up at the sky, and our dear pingüinos, Will and Andre, who bring such joy to our lives.

Seguiriya

No soy d’esta tierra | I’m not from this land,
Ni en eya nasí: | Nor was I born here;
La fortuniya, roando, roando | Fate, rolling, rolling
M’ha traío hasta aquí. | Brought me this way.
Ar campito solo | To the fields
Me voy a yorá; | I wander to weep;
Como tengo yena e penas | Filled with such sorrow and grief
El arma | It is only solitude
Busco soléa. | I seek.
Las cosas del mundo | The things of this world,
Yo na la jentiendo. | I just don’t understand
La mitad de la gente llorando | Half of the people cry,
Y la otra riendo. | While the other half laugh.
Horas de alegría | The happy times
Son las que se van | How fleeting they are,
Que las penas se queden | While the sad times
Y duran | Last and last
Una eternidad. | An eternity at least.
Arbolito del campo | The little tree in the field
Riega el rocío | Is watered by dew
Como yo riego | Like I water the cobblestones
De tu calle | Of your street
Con llanto mío. | With the weight of my tears.
Cuando yo me muera | When I die
Mira que te encargo: | I ask you do this for me:
Que con la jebra de tu | Take a strand of your
Pelo negro | Brilliant black hair
Me amarres las manos. | And bind my hands with it.

Dramatis Personae

Emilio, a seminarian | Tenor
Mónica, governess in the house of Don Ricardo Medina | Mezzo-soprano
Remedios, mother of Emilio | Contralto
Doña Fernanda, wife of Don Ricardo Medina | Contralto
Don Pedro, priest and confidant of Doña Fernanda | Baritone
Raimundo, master of the Medina house | Bass-baritone
Don Ricardo Medina, head of the Medina clan | Baritone
Alfonso, bookseller and Emilio’s uncle | Bass
Diego, son of Mónica and Don Ricardo | Tenor
El Señor Raleigh, English traveller, friend of Emilio and Diego | Bass
Edward Nelson, Diego’s mentor | Bass-baritone
Very Useful, Mr. Nelson’s servant | Baritone
Sofia Duarte, daughter of Roberto Duarte | Soprano
Don Roberto Duarte, Yucatecan hacendado, bookseller | Bass-baritone
Gabriela, wife of Roberto Duarte | Mezzo-soprano
Doña Laura, mother of Roberto Duarte | Contralto
Aunt Marta, Gabriela’s sister | Mezzo-soprano
Don Victor Blanco, henequen magnate | Bass
Carlos Blanco, son of Victor Blanco | Baritone
Rosita, childhood friend of Sofia | Soprano
Patricia, friend of Sofia | Soprano

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Seguiriya

Dramatis Personae

ACT ONE

Overture

SCENE ONE: As we walk on sacred ground

SCENE TWO: We listen to the woes of Doña Fernanda

SCENE THREE: On a stone bench, a seguiriya

SCENE FOUR: Inside a bookstore on the Calle San Vicente

SCENE FIVE: Sorry her lot

SCENE SIX: The house on the other side of the world

ACT TWO

SCENE ONE: In a Mérida square

SCENE TWO: Two birds

SCENE THREE: In a Mérida bookstore

SCENE FOUR: A hacienda on the outskirts of bliss itself

ACT THREE

SCENE ONE: Inside the oldest cathedral of the New World

SCENE TWO: At the Virgen de Guadalupe Ball

SCENE THREE: Ah! je vais l’aimer

SCENE FOUR: A song with wings

SCENE FIVE: Two birds in hand

THE CURTAIN CALL

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

ACT ONE

Overture

It begins in a once-upon-a-time land, on a remote plain, far from the place we call home. It begins with a dreamy voice, closed eyes, and a glass of warm milk to tame the chill of a too-cold night.

In the background, the first notes sound out, preparing to lure us in.

A seguiriya tonight, perhaps?

“No, something livelier,” she says, “something irrepressible, something joyous.” She stops to think. “Ah, yes, I have it, niños! A bulería sung by the incomparable Lola Flores, all passion, all grit, a voice with which to tame the wind!”

She begins—

In a town in the heart of La Mancha, home to Don Quijote and his windmills, to long afternoons and silent, silent nights, the Clemente family lived for centuries, their fortunes tied to those of a plant: the Crocus sativus—from whose dried stigma comes saffron, the world’s most precious spice. What you may not know is that it takes 160,000 flowers to produce just one kilogram of this culinary bit of gold. When Mónica Clemente left La Mancha for the narrow streets of Seville, she carried the taste of saffron forever on her tongue. More than any bucolic recollections of childhood, Mónica’s memories were imbued with the taste of saffron soups, saffron stews and most of all, the sublime paellas of her Aunt Bautista, who always knew instinctively the precise amount to be placed into the olla, where the chicken, chorizo and thirteen other ingredients blended and brewed. …

Ah, here it was, the opening bars of our grandmother’s favourite story, the one she would tell most often because it was full of the beautiful—forbidden love, unbearable grief, a country lost and another one found and moments of true transcendence. It was the story she would tell most often because it was true, because it was full of joy and sadness too, and the poetry, she would argue, was in the pity most of all, in all the tears shed for life’s pain and life’s losses.

In her accented English, with Spanish peppering the narrative—“because Spanish,” our Abuela would insist, “is not only the language of love, oigan bien, but the language of life itself”—our grandmother would transport us to a world where we would easily lose all sense of time. With her words, the streets of nineteenth-century Seville would come alive and we swore we could see the señoritas, with their long black hair and their tortoiseshell combs, flirting with the men from opened windows; that we could hear the call of the water-sellers, hear the steady strokes of the brooms as the cleaners made their way through the narrow streets; that we could smell the oranges and the jasmine and even the pungent olive groves, though there were no olive groves for miles but just the hint of their scent in the air; that we could feel the taconeo of the flamenco dancers’ feet deep inside our hearts; that we could taste the saffron in Bautista’s famous paellas and stews.

And when she was all done with Seville she would carry us over the ocean, across a tumultuous sea—“because this is a story without borders,” our Abuela would say, “a story that although rooted in place and time manages to transcend both”—and suddenly we would find ourselves in Mexico, melting in the unbearable heat of the Yucatán, tasting the tortillas that arrived still warm inside a hollow gourd, gazing at the sky to catch a glimpse of the area’s splendid birds.

In our Abuela’s capable hands we would wander into uncharted territory, passing from century to century, from vivid descriptions of a bal costumé to landscapes we had never seen but could depict down to the last shrub and tree—an often rocky terrain of recipes, seguiriyas, soleares, tonás, the poetry of Antonio Machado, the philosophical musings of Ortega y Gasset.

“A world, niños, a world!” she would proclaim. And we would agree, nodding our heads, seated side by side on a basement floor feasting on galletas imported from the distant Carmelite convents of Southern Spain.

All that is left now is the memory of her voice escaping from her empty room where her books and papers are scattered about as they have always been and where ghosts still linger on the sheets.

“Vamos,” she urges us from the grave. “Forget the mess left behind and get on with the tale.” Because the only things you really leave behind, we hear her say, are the things that obsess you, that give meaning to your life, the things that fill you with the energy to rise up in the morning and keep you on your toes throughout the long days and even longer nights. Because we are meant to tell stories, to relate the tales that make living bearable and, when all is good and gone, there is only this, a hushed voice, a lingering note, a tale that will outlive our little selves until the last generation is done.

With that in mind we sit down to retell the story with the help of our Abuela’s most cherished prop—a century-old map. Beneath the lines of longitude and latitude there is a deep blue ocean that turns reddish where land meets sea. On either side we scan the two continents—the old and the new, the past and the present, the beginning and the end. We bring forth also a black-and-white picture of the mapmaker, a certain Diego Clemente, the tenor who resides at the heart of this tale. The photograph is yellowed with age so that Diego’s face appears jaundiced, as if he were suffering from one of the myriad diseases common in the tropics where he played out the last scenes of his life. But he is handsome, that we can see, his eyes are large, his bearing is refined, there is no hint of the abusive girth that has accompanied many a splendid voice but has made a mockery of a well-loved part.

We return once again to the map. It is an exquisite specimen drawn on parchment, minutely detailed with mountains, rivers, oceans and a wealth of symbols waiting to be transformed into music by our trembling, excitable minds. Along the map’s borders lie the spectacular birds that beckoned to Diego from across an ocean and that accompanied him until the very moment of his death. The names of those birds had tumbled easily from our lips as children, as familiar to us as the seguiriyas, the arias and the soléas that played on our grandparents’ ancient turntable with its large knobs and its heavy wooden lid. Back then, we would take turns naming the birds one by one: an Aztec Parakeet in the west, a Turquoise-Browed Motmot in the north, a Ferruginous Pygmy Owl in the east, a Violaceous Trogon to the south.

Even as children, we could see something else in the map—that it was weighed down by secrets, that there was a dark stain lying beneath the pinks and the yellows, that the oceans were murky and that shadows were cast upon the earth.

It would take us almost twenty years to piece the story together, with all of the ups and downs, the good and the bad. It would take us that much time to unearth the mysteries, to plug the holes that our Abuela had left behind, the bits and pieces that would alter the tempo of the music, allowing a tone of lamentation to weave its way through the score.

In the background we now hear our Abuela urging us along from the grave. “Vamos,” she says in her familiar, impatient way. We smile, remembering, and together begin to trace a path on the map—from the yellow waters of the Guadalquivir River in Seville to the alabaster jewel that is the city of Mérida—travelling happily along the musical latitudes of our childhoods as if our Abuela were here beside us once again.

SCENE ONE
As we walk on sacred ground

As always, it is best to begin with the map.

Once, centuries ago, a map was a thing of beauty, a testament not to the way things were but to the heights scaled by men’s dreams. Mapmakers were not just artisans, they were artists intent on creating universes where the magical and the mythical were very much alive. On the corners of their maps they placed the wondrous creatures that guarded the entrances to heaven and hell. The world was a more mysterious place and everything was more beautifully drawn, more beautifully imagined, more beautifully named. In Europe a man would gaze uneasily to the West, fearful of drowning in the unknown sea—the mare ignotum. To the East lay Eden with its promise of everlasting innocence.

In the sixteenth century, a Spanish king, Philip II, obsessed with a love of God and in need of enough gold to prove it, instructed the royal cartographers to map his kingdom. Make the invisible visible, he told them, and let every European know who reigns over the New World. Within a few short years he was dead, but through engravings and woodcuts, the cartographers continued fashioning territories, travelling the spaces they sought to make real with measuring chains, wooden goniometers, compasses and their vivid fantasies—because before a land can hope to be mapped, it must first take root in our dreams.

Diego Clemente’s map is to be read carefully, from east to west, from right to left, beginning at 5°59’W, 37°23’N—the red spot that marked his birth in Seville—and ending at 89°39’W, 20°58’N—Mérida, his final resting place.

It is a beautiful map, more beautiful yet when you consider the sorrows he must have conquered in order to leave behind this final testament of symbols, lines and grids. A man should wait until he is close to death before attempting to draw conclusions about the meaning of his life—so you once said, Abuela, and we cannot help but wonder if Diego had been furnished with the opportunity to inspect his handiwork, to reflect one final time on his journey from his beginnings in Seville until that very last day at a Mexican hacienda an ocean away.

Like Columbus, who believed the New World contained mysterious islands brimming with wondrous gardens and golden apples, Diego’s mind had a touch of the fanciful in it, a penchant for concocting magical kingdoms, for imagining perfection, for clawing at the edges of mortality, attempting to map with his quill the mystery of existence, trying to keep death and, what is more, extinction itself at bay. We pause briefly to remember those who have disappeared forever from the skies—the Carolina Parakeet, the Passenger Pigeon, the Labrador Duck—and we lament, oh how we lament, the absence of dreamers like Diego who dared to stand up to the throngs, to the beliefs and disbeliefs of his own day and age.

But the lights begin to dim now, the words of the program become harder and harder to make out. A hush falls over the audience, a sense of expectation rises until it is met at its peak by the lowering of the baton as the first notes sound out. The curtains slowly rise and we find ourselves seated before the heavenly streets of nineteenth-century Seville. Picture a city bathed in the smell of orange blossoms in spring, jasmine in the fall. Imagine the women, their long dark hair covered by lace mantillas—black or white depending on the occasion—their fiesta dresses boasting trains, ribbons, frills and polka dots. In the distance the sounds of a guitar escape from a half-opened window—a song of love and death, for as any Spaniard will tell you, any love worth having must meet with a tragic end. Imagine too the tap-tap-tap of the flamenco dancer, arms intertwined, the music evaporating like steam, for the notes will not submit themselves to transcription and the dance vanishes forever once the passion of the dancer has been fully spent. And imagine then the heat, languorous, sultry, unbearable, the kind to be escaped in the early hours of the afternoon as shutters are closed and all retire inside for the siesta—those two hours of well-needed rest.

Inside the city’s cathedral a tall, thin man with a prominent nose is hurrying towards the main door, dressed entirely in black, his ardent eyes focused on a distant horizon, his mind lost in unknown thoughts. See him? It is Emilio García—the man who will eventually marry Mónica Clemente—at this point a seminarian, though he will end his life as a humble bookseller in Seville.

It was Emilio’s knowledge of English that would bring him much of his renown in his later days and it was this knowledge that also provided the means for the fateful meeting between Mónica Clemente and himself inside the city’s great cathedral. It was here that Mónica came to say her daily prayers and it was here too that Emilio spent his mornings shepherding about the English tourists who had begun arriving in Andalucía in small numbers around this time.

Darkly dressed, sallow-skinned, large dark eyes peering out intently from beneath an unruly head of hair, the young man appeared almost cadaverous until he began to speak and then he seemed to suddenly ignite, as if a spark had entered his body and granted him the gift of life. “Venga, venga,” he would urge his charges, gathered dutifully by the Puerta de la Asunción. “Inside,” he would enthuse, “await paintings by Murillo, Valdés Leal, Jordaens and Zurbarán. But that, gentlemen, is not all—shrines decorated with amethysts and emeralds, gold in abundance, the precious stones of Cardinal Mendoza and silver work the likes of which you have never seen before.” And then he would wave them forward as if waiting inside that building were the keys to the heavens themselves, the enthusiasm in his voice increasing with every step until it reached a crescendo from where he would only slowly and reluctantly descend.

“Notice, if you will, the roof by Borja, señores,” he would point out to the tourists first. “A beauty, no? A marvel to behold.”

“Ah yes, indeed,” the tourists would respond, necks stretched awkwardly upwards trying to get a good look, their efforts interrupted abruptly by Emilio, who had already moved on to other more important things.

“And before you, the sculpture of Santa Veronica by Cornejo. Yes, splendid it is. I have no words to adequately describe such works. Magnificent, tremendous. Señores, you must admit that they simply fill the heart with awe.”

“So true,” the English would agree, shaking their heads, eyebrows arched in wonder as their young tour guide charged earnestly ahead.

Emilio, to all appearances oblivious to those who trudged faithfully behind him, would continue to point out the delights of the cathedral. “On your right, the Virgin with the Christ, St. John and the Magdalena, all by Pedro Roldán. And, my personal favourite—notice, please, the stupendous statues and Corinthian pillars designed by Juan de Arce. Magnificent, señores, outstanding beyond compare.”

The English would nod. Ah yes, ah no, of course and indeed, they would say, walking dutifully behind the young man who would saunter ahead as if fearing the great building itself was on the verge of disappearing into thin air and it was all they could do to catch this one final glimpse of it.

Later, alone in the cramped rooms of their pensiones, it was not the ostentatious delights of the cathedral the tourists would remember, but the enthusiastic young man who had been their guide: his passion, the quickness of his stride, his facility with English, which he spoke with such flourish and drama that it seemed in some ways a totally new language.

In the evenings too, alone in his dark room at the seminary, Emilio would pore over his books, trying with all his might to block out the gaiety of Seville. The sounds and the smells drifted into his room from the streets outside as people played, sang and declared their love for each other; because there, outside, were the sounds of life, he would tell himself and, thinking this, he would sink into despair at the sight of his narrow bed, the stained walls, the brass cross hanging over his desk and even his own pale hands turning the pages of a book by the dim candlelight.

On that particular evening, Emilio was reading the poetic works of Shelley, stumbling over the words but determined to get them right for if there was one thing that Emilio loved above all it was the sound of the English language.

English—yes, it seems strange indeed that a man who had been raised speaking the sonorous language of Lope de Vega and Cervantes felt such passion for the language he often accused of driving a person mad with its incomprehensible grammatical rules and its impossible pronunciation. But Emilio had been ensnared, seduced by English words, English cadences. Even more than the language, he loved the writers: Sir Walter Scott, above all, whose novels Emilio spent hours admiring, dictionary at the ready, or the heady outpourings of the English Romantics.

Inside the cathedral of Seville—not so much a building as a city in itself, with its staff of more than one hundred priests and sacristans, the comings and goings of peasants, tourists and nuns, the thirty Masses heard and the thirty yet to be heard in honour of Count this and estimado señor that, dead but nobly buried with seven priests and the most important families of Seville in attendance—Emilio would saunter along the hallowed aisles, savouring those English words as they rolled roughly from his tongue, all the while lamenting every moment that took him closer to a union with God.

It was his mother’s wish that he become a priest. “You were conceived with that in mind,” she had told him once. He had been born long after her other sons and shortly before the death of Emilio’s father—yet another sign, she had argued, that he was meant for God, that he had come into this world to guarantee his father’s passage from purgatory to heaven above and to ease the pain of her own life, a life she forever threatened was coming to an end, though the years passed and no end ever appeared imminent to those around her.

A tiny woman with a commanding voice, in her later years Emilio’s mother had taken to spending much of her free time inside the churches of Seville. This habit had made her something of an authority, not, as you would think, on the architecture of these beautiful buildings, but on the many sins of the prominent dead of the city, in whose names Masses were said, bells rung and souls siphoned from purgatory by the prayers of those below.

Hoy se sacan ánimas, the churches proclaimed. On this day souls will be set free. To those tourists who were puzzled by things Spanish, nothing seemed more ridiculous than the thought of the numerous Masses paid by a man not yet dead in order that he be assured a place up above.

“Simply barbarous,” the more critical would point out. “Proof indeed that Spain sits on the periphery of a distant century and that to Europe she surely does not belong.”

To Remedios, Emilio’s mother, these Masses were proof not of the barbarism of her compatriots but of another and more sinister truth, and that was this: only the rich ever secured a place for themselves in heaven. Those like her, who could not, had no choice but to find other means to ascend. It was in this spirit then that she offered up Emilio, for there was no greater reward, she knew, than the one saved for women who produced sons dedicated to the word of God.

Emilio had no desire to dedicate his life to God. Not even ten years old when his mother first informed him of her wish, he had determined from that moment on that his lot in life would be to escape, writhing and screaming if need be, from the stultifying clutches of the Church.

“Don’t despair just yet,” his friend Camilo would say to him years later when Emilio complained of his future as a priest in a city made for music, for gaiety—vamos hombre, let’s just come out and say it—a city made for love.

“For remember, amigo,” Camilo would continue, “in Spain only the clergy eat well.”

For the purposes of our story, Remedios’s obstinacy would prove fortuitous in the end. If she had not insisted on her son’s adopting the clerical robes, Emilio would have never chanced upon Mónica Clemente as she bowed her head in prayer every day inside the great cathedral walls. Mónica and Emilio, born hundreds of miles apart in a time when people lived and died within miles of the dot that marked their entry into the world, should never have even met. And had it not been for a series of unforeseen circumstances, it would indeed have turned out that way; but fate had other things in store for them.

Mónica Clemente, a bit thin of lip, a tad long in the nose, was nevertheless blessed with a sweet face—the face of an angel, Emilio would say—though as we shall soon see, she was made of more complex matter than any angel with a golden halo and alabaster wings.

When Emilio spotted Mónica inside the cathedral for the first time, the girl had been living in Seville for less than a year. It had not taken long for the city to bewitch her with its narrow, ever-winding streets and its houses of pink, blue and yellow stucco; it was a fairy-tale setting, with its Arabic patios, its majestic fountains half-glimpsed from open gates, the weight and colour of the roses that hung from the balconies and the orange and lemon trees that perfumed its streets. Already, Seville was considered one of the true marvels of the world, immortalized in countless plays, poems and operas composed by the great European minds of the day.

To a young girl from a sleepy village in the region of La Mancha, Seville was like a magical apparition—a dream she found herself in almost by accident and in which she roamed with half-issued breaths. To breathe too deeply, she feared, would dissolve the dream in an instant, leaving her trapped once again inside the quiet village of her birth.

And how had she come to be there? Through misfortune, of course. For it is not from happiness that opportunities arise for fates to change and paths to diverge but from within the realm of the tragic—that which leaves us scrambling for solid ground, overwhelmed and lost. Caminante, the poet now declaims from stage right. Walk, for the path is made by walking.

Mónica Clemente had been sent to Seville, far from the fields of her beloved Crocus sativus, upon the death of her father and, with that death, had begun travelling a path that would change the direction not only of her own life but that of our mapmaker as well.

Seville was the home of Don Ricardo Medina, her mother’s cousin, who was in need at the time of her father’s demise of what the English called a governess. Mónica’s skills were not extraordinary—embroidery, simple crochet, a tune or two played on the piano—but she performed them with reasonable technical skill and the lack of enthusiasm that was expected then from a proper lady.

“How lucky you are,” her aunt had told her, when she was offered a place in the home of Don Ricardo, “to have found a saviour, even one so far removed from La Mancha.” And, saying this, her aunt had sniffed at her own words, stopping to peruse Mónica with a look that said she was clearly undeserving of such beneficence.

Mónica herself would come to believe that it had not been luck but fate that had guided her way to the great city, because fate was like a giant serpent that coiled itself around your neck and dragged you towards your destiny without mercy or restraint. Escaping it was as useless as trying to stem a tidal wave with a fingertip. It was fate that had seen fit to free her from the dismal life that awaited many in her position, an existence lived within the confines of a convent or, worse, in a marriage arranged in haste to an old man with oxen and land to spare but with the spirit of decay emanating from his bones and breath like the steam that rose up from the earth during the hottest days of summer.

Instead, Mónica had been sent here, to Seville, to a city brimming with life, a city bustling with possibilities, as far away from the quiet plains of La Mancha as she could imagine. And although she was thankful, there were times when the city overwhelmed her, when it seemed too large, when its heartbeat was too penetrating, and then she would bring her fingers up to her nose and summon the comforting memory of Bautista’s saffron stews with their fifteen ingredients that blended and brewed for hours.

So it was, then, that Emilio and Mónica chanced upon one another inside a cathedral that sat on an ancient mosque, with its spectacular Gothic retablo carved with the forty-five scenes from the life of Christ, the Capitular with the magnificent domed ceiling mirrored in marble on the floor, paintings by Murillo, silver reliquaries and monstrances and the keys—above all, those tear-stained keys—handed over reluctantly in the thirteenth century by the Moors to the Castilian king, Fernando III, after they were forced to surrender their beloved city to him. There, every day, Emilio would linger as long as he could near the kneeling figure of Mónica Clemente, providing the English with every detail of the enormous cathedral so astounding it could only have been built by madmen, all the while staring at the young girl who never failed to materialize here, always at the same time, always alone, it seemed. A Spaniard for sure, he thought, for she wore a proper lace mantilla upon her head and not one of those infernal rose bonnets favoured by the English. It was true, the young women from the good families of Seville were lately succumbing to such fashions—bonnets from England, cretonnes from Alsace, crinolines from Paris, malakofs they called them. But this, he knew, was a proper Spanish señorita. A bit long in the nose, a tad thin of lip, but a Spanish señorita nonetheless, mantilla on head, rosary beads in hand, prayers regularly offered to the virgin—a woman, Emilio supposed, who would make a splendid wife one day. And once his mother died—and forgive me Lord, but let it be soon, Emilio thought, now looking up at the roof by Borja—it would be a woman like this Emilio would be courting.

Ah, and there she was now, head bent, eyes closed.

“Bueno, señores,” Emilio said to his group, his eyes fixed on the young woman’s face. “Let us now take a final walk around the cathedral to inspect its jewels in all their magnificence.”

“What did he say?” an old man, exhausted already by Emilio’s first frenetic run around the building, asked his wife. “Not another damned walk around the cathedral!” he added furiously, beneath his breath.

Ah, but the English. Let us just admit this one thing now, shall we? Among their greatest virtues are their impeccable manners. So the unhappy man circled and then circled again, breathing in the damn “jools” of this magnificent cathedral, never suspecting that the tall, hawk-nosed seminarian who was leading them about was inspecting a young girl with all of this to-ing and fro-ing, this vamos-ing and venga-ing.

In the meantime, oblivious to Emilio and the English in his charge, Mónica Clemente continued, head bent over rosary, to issue her prayers. Who was she praying for? Emilio wondered, eyes glued to her face. Was it for a mother, ailing and near death? Perhaps her prayers were being said for a sickly brother. Pray God, let them not be meant for a suitor, he now thought, and thinking this, suddenly stumbled.

Mónica Clemente, sweet of face yes, but not, as he would later find out, so sweet of tongue, was not praying for a father or a mother, a brother or, thank God, a suitor. Mónica Clemente was praying, as she did every day, in order that she be granted her most cherished desire. And what is this, you ask? Ah, in a million years you will never guess. For Mónica Clemente, thin of lip and long of nose but sweet of face nonetheless, was praying fervently that the wife of Don Ricardo Medina—Doña Fernanda—be sent to her death.

“And it would be better if it were sooner rather than later,” she whispered between her many Padre Nuestros, her countless Ave Marías.

“And not without a little pain,” she added, as an afterthought.

But this, claro, only if the good Lord Himself should think it best.

SCENE TWO
We listen to the woes of Doña Fernanda

Enter stage left now Doña Fernanda Olivares—the woman whose death Mónica prayed for so fervently—an imposing figure in possession of her own map, though not, it is true, a map any cartographer would easily make sense of. This map was a catalogue of treachery, one she created in the darkest hours of the night and which she brought into the light at dawn. Mira, she would whisper to herself, fingering the imaginary parchment, these are the places where the heart has withered bit by bit. In the corner is the house that lies west of the Calle San Vicente, home to many of Seville’s booksellers and several women of ill repute. Moving east—the house of Doña Alicia first, and almost next to it, that of Doña Lucía. And then there is the city of Malaga, all sun-drenched and blue water, a dot so brimming with affronts that it threatens to spill into the sea and blur away the details of the parchment.

The dots that were scattered across this map were responsible for making Doña Fernanda a very unhappy woman, a fact she used like a shield, revealing it at opportune moments to gain the upper hand. She was—in Mónica’s words—imperious, domineering and hard on the eyes, but Mónica had good cause to dislike her, so it is best, perhaps, to try to get at her through other means. What was true, because it had been passed on from generation to generation like a canker gnawing in the family mouth, was that Doña Fernanda had forever lamented having known only fourteen days of happiness in all of her life. For years, her family had waited for her to add one day to that count, but no fiesta, wedding or family celebration ever made an impression on her, and she died leaving those two weeks firmly imprinted in her children’s minds.

What did make her happy (or at least less rancorous) were the visits of Don Pedro, her parish priest, a corpulent fellow with a knack for attracting all of the city’s gossip, and a ferocious appetite for kidneys and stewed beef. Every weekday afternoon, at exactly half past three, Don Pedro would amble over to the house of Doña Fernanda, making sure that all of Seville knew where he was headed and the ceremony with which he would be received.

And what ceremony! The Seville of the time was not so much a city as a medieval court with rules of conduct that would have made even the most enamoured knight desist his courting in despair. Take the visiting hours as an example. Why was Don Pedro so insistent that he must arrive at the gates of the Medina house at no later than a quarter to four? The answer resided in the rules of etiquette that governed the lives of the Sevillanos of the time, for it was strictly held that all visits should occur between the hours of three and six, with the most formal visitors being received in the first hour, the semi-formal in the next and the most intimate arriving in the final hour between five and six.

Don Pedro had been visiting Doña Fernanda for a decade and should have graduated to the final visiting hour long before, had he himself not strenuously objected. Claiming the hour between three and four was the only part of his day with some time to spare, time to be provided “to you, of course, Doña Fernanda,” he would say, hands on his chest, “to which I add all my attentiveness and my respect,” at which point the corpulent priest would attempt, with some difficulty, to bow and kiss Doña Fernanda’s hand, a hand that would be quickly retrieved before the cleric’s flaccid lips ever once managed to raze the lady’s clammy skin.

The master servant of the house, a certain Don Raimundo, who hated the Church and, more than the Church, all of the priests, never failed to rail against the pompous prelate in the privacy of the kitchen at the back of the house.

“That pious ass says he lacks the time to come visiting at a later hour,” he would complain to the other servants of the house. “I’ll tell you what he does with his time. The weasel spends it inside the bars of Triana, rubbing shoulders with the gypsies and thieves—drinking and laughing it up when he should be saying a Mass to save some poor bastard’s soul from the pit of purgatory. It’s just like a priest, isn’t it? A bleeding wound on the corpse of Spain.” Ay sí, Amén the servants would all respond with gusto, for Don Pedro had few admirers among the members of the group, a group who resented his daily visits, his disdaining gaze, his insistence on a cold drink of agraz and most especially, the special treatment he demanded for his hat.

Ah, his hat. In the whole history of Seville, nothing had ever generated more conversation than Don Pedro’s black felt hat. It was an ordinary top hat, much like the ones worn by the men of the day, but it sat rather uneasily atop the priest’s head, contrasting oddly with his clerical collar and his long, black cape. That he should be demanding special privileges for his hat—“a cushion no less,” the master servant had guffawed to the cook, outraged, when first told of it, “That barrel of a priest is looking for a cushion for his hat”—was unheard of. Raimundo himself could hardly believe it, would not have believed it, had he not heard it from Doña Fernanda’s own mouth: “Raimundo, make sure Don Pedro’s hat is placed on that chair cushion by the door,” she had said.

“I beg your pardon,” he had replied, earnestly confused, for many were the archaic customs in this land bottled for antiquarians, a land where one of its ancient kings—finding himself seated too close to the fire—preferred burning to death than breaking the rules of decorum by moving away from the fire or shouting for help. In this land of hierarchies, titles and entitlements, the worth of a man could indeed be determined by the treatment accorded to his hat.

But never had a cushion been reserved for the head covering of a simple priest!

Doña Fernanda had repeated her command on that day and had done so in such a way that the servant, no fool himself, knew that she too realized the idiocy of her request, that she hated giving the command nearly as much as the good servant hated receiving it, but that some things in life came at a steep price. What those things were, Raimundo could not even hazard a guess, but he could think no improper thoughts of her—not out of any respect, but because it seemed inconceivable that even a character as decrepit and despicable as Don Pedro could want anything improper with the lady of the house. And so Raimundo placated his ire by complaining unendingly about the situation to the servants under his command.

As the scene began, Don Pedro was arriving at a quarter to four, late for his customary appointment with Doña Fernanda. It was a hot day in Seville, hotter than usual for May and the unseasonable heat, coupled with Doña Fernanda’s anxiety over the appearance of yet another dot on her imaginary map, had stewed inside of her to such an extent that by the time Don Pedro rolled in—not, in the end, more than ten minutes late—she had almost resolved to decline receiving him at all.

If only she didn’t need him so.

It is tragic to be burdened with a lack of confidants on whom anxieties can be deposited and whose kind words can erase fears, those imagined and those real, but Doña Fernanda—with her curt demeanour and imperious ways—had managed to alienate everyone but the priest and thank God for the sanctity of his robes, she thought, for many were the secrets she shared with him, always in confessional tones, so that the sanctity of his own vow to secrecy would compel him to keep her words guarded deep inside his breast.

(It did not. Don Pedro did not consider Doña Fernanda’s confessions to be received in his capacity as a priest but as a respected guest who—ojo, señores—was even offered a cushion for his hat. Indeed he poured fuel on many a good hostess’s fire who—for the price of a paltry dish of garbanzos and beef—could learn of the goings-on inside the house of Don Ricardo Medina as if from the mouth of Doña Fernanda herself.)

What ailed Doña Fernanda on most occasions were those dots—markers of her husband’s infidelities—and her husband’s infidelities were the stuff of legend in Seville, a city well accustomed to legends of the sort because it was home, after all, to Carmen, the Barber and Don Giovanni himself.

Madamina, il catalogo è questo. One thousand and three and counting still.

It was yet another indiscretion that had the señora in a state on this day, that had her brimming with anxiety and despair, that hardened her to the many entreaties of Don Pedro to “please forgive me for being late” and “Señora, I am at your feet” and so on until he finally tired of entreating and she tired of hearing him beg.

(“It is amazing, Rosita,” he would tell his sister later, speaking of Doña Fernanda, “that our fair Seville ever produced a slab of stone such as this!”)

“Give your hat to Raimundo,” Doña Fernanda told the priest gruffly, “and sit down quickly, as we have little time and much to discuss.”

“I am at your service, Señora, as always of course,” Don Pedro replied with relief, for he would have hated not to have been forgiven especially because this exchange had been conducted before the insufferable master servant of the house. The same servant had just smirked at him—I am sure of this, he would tell his sister later—as he placed the priest’s hat on the cushion, bowing his way in such an exaggerated manner that Don Pedro knew for sure Raimundo was having a laugh at his expense. And though his blood boiled at the thought of the man’s impertinence, he knew nothing could be said. Some exchanges are conducted so that only the parties involved recognize all the undertones. Doña Fernanda, blind to anything that did not affect her directly, would frankly not have cared had she perceived the injury in any case.

For the next hour the priest paid for his tardiness by having to sit there immobile (not even a drink of agraz was offered this time) as Doña Fernanda embarked upon one of her more vicious tirades—her waiting having made her mood all the more virulent—in which every bone of her husband’s body was put at risk through the enumeration of an impressive array of threats, none, of course, which would ever be realized—this was nineteenth-century Spain after all, and Andalucía yet, where well-to-do men spend Sunday afternoons promenading with wives and children and the evenings with mistresses or whores inside the brothels of Granada and Seville.

So you see, a little indiscretion was not so bad, at least in the larger scheme of things.

Doña Fernanda, it is true, had been bearing the weight of her husband’s many indiscretions quite some time—for it must be said now that she and Don Ricardo did not marry for love; such a luxury could ill be afforded by the more prominent families of the day. The trick was to marry into one’s social circle and forever maintain a stiff inglés upper lip. But Doña Fernanda, a martyr till the end, had never maintained a stiff upper lip, inglés or otherwise.

“This time it is worse, Don Pedro, infinitely worse, for it is happening here, inside my own house. Of this I am sure. Ricardo has always hid his indiscretions badly but this one he is not even bothering to hide at all. Virgen Mara Purísima, the things I am forced to accept.”

The governess. Don Pedro knew it had to be the governess—she was the only one young enough in the household to have attracted Don Ricardo’s eye—a lecherous eye, that one, he would tell his friend Doña Ana later. How that eye ever found itself resting on Doña Fernanda’s face was one of God’s greater mysteries, although marriage was not made for the sins of the heart—even a simple priest like him was certain of that.

For the next hour he sat listening without interjecting anything other than the usual exclamations of Oh and Ah—the signs of outrage expected of him at the appropriate times, as Doña Fernanda vented her rage. “Oh, God, how difficult it is to have been born woman,” she railed until, spent, she finally allowed him to excuse himself. It was almost five by then and he was to give a Mass to free from purgatory the soul of a certain Don Calixto, who had managed to sire six illegitimate daughters throughout his long life, the news of which was snaking its way along the streets of Seville.

“Then do not bother with the Mass, Don Pedro,” Doña Fernanda told him, her nostrils pinched, her head held high, “for that man is not in purgatory, but in Hell roasting along with the rest of the world’s libertines.”

On his way out, Don Pedro made sure to take the insufferable servant aside and, far from the ears of Doña Fernanda, lecture him on proper conduct and the respect that should be granted to the priests who had taken the Sacrament of the Holy Orders: “For there is no greater Sacrament than that, you ignorant peasant—a sacrament that makes one responsible, lest you should forget, for seeking absolution for the miserable likes of you. But only, oye bien, when and if they like.”

And with these words barely out of his lips the priest grabbed the hat from the servant’s hands and turned to leave but not before being subjected to one last bow from Raimundo, a bow lower than any bow ever delivered the priest’s way so that the servant’s nose came to touch the floor and his ample behind rose high in the air saluting the heavens from where, it is supposed, God himself watched the scene unfold in silent repose.

SCENE THREE
On a stone bench, a seguiriya

By the time Emilio García and Mónica Clemente actually met, the young woman was four months’ pregnant and desperate for Doña Fernanda’s death. Yes, it is true, our heroine was caught in one of the most hackneyed situations in the books—unmarried, pregnant, an innocent Zerlina to Ricardo’s Don Giovanni—seduced from a balcony into a bed not by a man’s looks nor his charm, but by a spectacular dot on a Spanish map. For what Mónica Clemente fell in love with is a city and you, of all people, Abuela, knew well what Seville is capable of—she can bewitch, ensnare, overwhelm the senses with jasmine, roses and sun until you are weak at the knees and in love with love, whatever its guise, whatever its name.

Mónica Clemente, at this point just eighteen years old, was caught in a muddle of emotion—saffron memories, grief over her father’s death, relief to find herself in Seville and not in some godforsaken convent up north, homesickness at times, elation at others, desperation, excitement, and the irrational fears that were seeded during this time and that would flourish and afflict her throughout her life. She was, in short, a small-town innocent adrift in a city whose dimensions were too large for her to fully comprehend—easy prey for the likes of Don Ricardo, who, let’s face it, was used to dancing the tango with much fancier fish.

It is worth repeating that Mónica had not fallen in love with Don Ricardo’s charisma nor with his looks—both of which he might once have had but of which he could boast no more. He was an old man now but still trapped inside the illusion that his charm had somehow outlived his youth. It had not. What Mónica had fallen in love with was what only he could provide: the chance to assume a position in Seville, to live in his house not as governess to his children but as his legitimate wife—with access to all a wife was privy to, his circle of friends, his home, every important nook and cranny of a city that had taken her heart by storm.

It did not occur to Mónica that even with the Doña dead, Don Ricardo would not marry her, that marriage was an arrangement made according to family name and family wealth and that she possessed neither. It did not occur to her that she was merely one of many—that this business of Lá ci darem la mano had been played out many times before and would be played out many times again. (It is curious indeed that only one illegitimate child is known of, given the many dalliances Don Ricardo engaged in during his long and sordid jaunt through life.)

It was at this point also that Emilio had finally resigned himself to a life lived among chalices and crosses—a speck of white in a long life of black, of Masses for the dead and baptisms for the newly arrived and the confessions uttered by old women harbouring tedious secrets of the heart.

His mother would not be dying in any foreseeable future—this much was clear. In truth, she seemed stronger than ever now that the time was fast approaching for her son to take his vows before God, and as that day neared, Emilio’s spirits grew steadily worse.

It had not gone unnoticed. Yesterday it had been Don Pedro who appeared before him, issuing the stern warnings that were meant to separate those with a true calling from those who longed not for a union with God, but the guarantee of a warm meal and a roof over one’s head. Don Pedro had put it clearly enough. A priest’s work was the most important of all for he was an emissary of the Lord; he had the power to absolve sins; only he could exorcise evil spirits from the hearts of troubled men; he was the conduit that bound heaven to this sullen earth. “And, above all—listen well, my boy, for this is most important—because he has the power that is bestowed by the people themselves when they offer up their most penurious secrets in exchange for forgiveness from the Lord.”

Emilio did not want to hear the penurious secrets of strangers. His heart was not in it. To become a servant of God was never my wish. Besides, he had his own penurious secrets—his desire, especially, that his mother die before he was forced to don the habit; his love for the tales of Sir Walter Scott, the blue flower of Novalis, the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats. At night, when his fellow seminarians pored over their St. Augustine and their St. Jerome, Emilio lost himself inside the exploits of English knights, and hung on to Byron’s and Shelley’s every ardent word of love.

You may ask how it is that we have come to know Emilio’s dark thoughts with respect to his faith, and we will answer you that they have made their way to the map. There has never been a man in love with words who has not unburdened himself on paper, parchment, or in the most stringent circumstances, on the back of his aged hand. Emilio’s words, exquisitely arranged because he had a sublime mind in addition to a generous heart, are represented symbolically on the parchment we hold in our hands. A lone figure at the top, dressed in seminarian black, holding onto a book of poetry, sadness pulling at the corners of his eyes.

Every afternoon he confessed his sins with the rest of the penitents, always stopping short of confessing his darkest truth—that he questioned the existence of God Himself. It was this, above all, that kept him from marching towards his fate with anything other than trepidation, and no infinite number of Ave Marías or Pater Nosters or times he ingested the body of the Lord—in vitam eternam Amen—or the deprivations he visited upon his body with the fasting and the all-night meditations, naked on a stone floor—none of these things did anything to erase the uneasiness from his soul. He felt imprisoned by his own doubt—could not rid himself of the questions that distanced him from God.

It was at this point that Emilio and Mónica met—the gods of symmetry rejoicing in their splendid machinations. Two people praying for a death in order to acquire a different life found each other inside a temenos of the most splendid kind. A gorgeous cathedral: roof by Borja, sculptures by Cornejo and Roldán, pillars by José de Arce, incense in almost obscene amounts.

Mónica Clemente, agitated from all the praying and the fears that were magnifying with time, got up to leave and managed, in her haste, to bump into Emilio as he returned from dispatching the last of the tourists he had been shepherding about. Looking up and seeing nothing but black, Mónica mistook the hapless Emilio for a man vested already with the power of God. She had a thought. Perhaps she must confess—it had been an awfully long time and she was asking God to grant her a favour. Something would have to be offered up in return.

Emilio, breathless from the simple act of being so close to the object of his desire, faltered and stammered when she looked up, smiled and told him, “I need to confess, por favor.” What was a besotted man to do? Tell her the truth and thus destroy the one chance to meet his lady love, for this was nineteenth-century Spain and decent young women did not engage in talk with men who were not their fathers, brothers or their parish priests? No, he thought, this was no time to be honest, not when fate had delivered up this chance, this one moment in which to reorient a life.

He took her to a nearby confessional—so emboldened by the opportunity that he did not bother to check to see if anyone had caught him playing the priest months short of the mark—and there he listened to every detail of the lady’s deeds, every one of the lady’s dark thoughts. And it was at that very moment that Emilio finally experienced a moment of spiritual truth, an epiphany if you like. Lady Serendipity beats on his door for the very first time—as two people, each in need of a quick death, met in darkness, one seeking absolution for sins of the heart and mind, the other, in the act of committing an even greater one.

Yet the time was not ripe for Emilio to reveal himself. Reasoning that a flustered young woman—one mired in such an ugly dilemma to boot—was unlikely to remember the brief glimpse she had of him before being ushered into the darkness of the confessional to unburden herself of her sins, he merely nodded his head like the best of them and offered up a smattering of the Catholic repertoire for her to repeat in prayer.

And then he waited. Emilio was more sophisticated than Mónica Clemente, who had been raised in a small town far from the danger and profligacy of a city such as Seville, and he knew with certainty that there would be no marriage to the estimado Don Ricardo Medina of the Medinas of Seville, and that the day was fast approaching when the child she carried would no longer be so easily concealed under long capes and carefully arranged shawls.

And as that day approached, Mónica’s eyes, once star-struck with city love and the excitement of this new life so far from her simple home, began to dim. Don Ricardo was told of the child, between heartfelt sobs and pleas for help, and she, naïve as could be, actually expressed surprise when her devout lover recoiled from her in shock and did not, as she had hoped, embrace her in blissful delight.

“I know a family who can take you in, Mónica,” he said, the smell of fear on his breath. He promised her help far from his home, far from Seville and far from his wife. “But you must leave the house before your situation can be perceived.” He insisted, knowing that this affront would be more than Doña Fernanda would be prepared to allow. “In my own home!” she would scream. “Beneath my very nose!” And so on until she bellowed him out of the house and he found himself lying prostrate in the outskirts of Seville. His wife had lungs of steel and a voice as sharp as the blade of a Toledo sword and she would not tolerate news of an illegitimate child with anything less than an uncontainable rage.

“No, no,” she had told him more than once. “Let all the other men in Seville dilly and dally till they’re blue in the face. But you, Don Ricardo, would be wise to respect my family’s good name.”

Everything always began and ended with the family name. But what was a name if not four walls within which to imprison a husband: a stifling ten letters to strangle the life from a man full of it? He liked to look at his reflection and see the energy brimming from his gaze, liked to position himself in front of the mirror and witness the glow—still as strong as a young colt, he would think, ignoring the jowls that tugged at his face, his toothless smile, his ever-protruding girth. Oh no, the girl would not put an end to his conquests. He was no more in love with his young cousin than his own wife, would not let this young thing, silly in the extreme, he now thought, keep him from continuing to explore the mysterious contours of the city of his birth.

Oh Seville, from whose heart sprung Velázquez and Murillo, whose feet gave life to music, city of a thousand guitars, a thousand celebrated songs. City of lights and fiestas and the lament that unites death and life in one single moment of neverending passion and joy. A city that is not just a city but a burning bush, mi amigo—capable of transforming even the most severe Victorian gent into a passionate, emotional fool.

Beware at what point you choose to stop and live your life, Emilio cautions from the depths of his fabulous map. Take heed. For a city has a role to play in how things will unfold. How right he was then and how much truer it seems today, when the choices are endless and we find ourselves adrift on an ocean, swimming desperately from shore to shore in search of that one magic place to call home.

Emilio watched as the days passed and Mónica’s agitation grew more marked, her face more peaked, watched as her every prayer was uttered with more vehemence, waited until the day she literally collapsed into the pew, and it was on that day, finally, that he knew the time had arrived to make his move.

He approached her as she was leaving the cathedral. “Señorita,” he said, “you may not remember, but you asked for confession not too long ago from me.”

“Ay sí,” she replied, not really remembering, but sufficiently disoriented to assent with a nod of the head.

“Could we speak over here?” he asked, motioning to a corner, private enough for a talk but public enough so as not to alarm the young woman, who was growing evermore confused. She had been instructed well by the nuns at the Convent of the Carmelitas, knew how to embroider on fine linen, could play the more popular pieces on a piano without the need of a score, had mastered the art of not infusing the playing with any unwomanly passion or verve. She could quote the poetry of the best poets from the Golden Age, knew the adventures of Don Quijote from beginning to end. And, despite her naïveté with respect to Don Ricardo, she knew a thing or two about priests as well. Knew that not all were as wholly dedicated to God as they claimed. Take Don Gustavo, the parish priest back home. He had at least four illegitimate children and a live-in help rumoured to be more lover than maid. So she was not entirely surprised that the young priest—who turned out not to be a priest but a seminarian masquerading as a man whose allegiance to God had already been pledged—was offering a solution to her plight.

“We need each other,” he said.

Mónica coughed, lowered her eyes, and said nothing yet.

Emilio was careful not to scare her off with the weight of his true feelings. The girl was frightened and the girl was lost, he thought. Why tell her more than she needed to know?

“If we marry,” he continued, “you will have a father for your child, and I, an excuse to abandon the cloth.”

Still she said nothing. But she began to raise her eyes, furtively, stole a quick look at the awkward young man who was seeking, incomprehensibly enough, to make her his wife. His nose was prominent and his skin strangely sallow in a land awash with so much sun—but he was not an altogether repulsive man.

He was not cut from the same cloth as Don Ricardo, she could see that. And let us be clear, this bothered her more than she cared to admit. He had neither the bearing nor the clothes, could clearly not offer her the position she so coveted, a life lived among the luxuries she had grown accustomed to in a short time.

Dreams die hard if they die at all, and Mónica’s dream of marriage to Don Ricardo was struggling to remain alive in the face of a certain ugly demise. Perhaps Doña Fernanda would still succumb to some mysterious disease, she thought. Perhaps she would disappear, would be magically transported to another place and time. Perhaps, quizá, perhaps.

Time was galloping. The walls were caving in.

During the next three weeks, Mónica appeared at the cathedral for her regular morning prayers, where she waited to meet with the seminarian on a bench close to the building’s main doors. Here they sat, not too close but close enough, Emilio growing more determined as each day passed, Mónica’s dreams dissolving, minute by minute, bit by bit.

Do you know, we ask our Abuela, the most powerful of all flamenco songs? The seguiriya, sí, but do we really have to ask this from a woman who lived and breathed for flamenco, for her memories of Seville, where the guitar is ascendant and the tap-tap of the dancer beats constantly, helping the city to keep time? The seguiriya, you say, sí, the most powerful gypsy lament, the one that tells of a tragic and bitter existence, sung in a rhythm that alternates between 3/4 and 6/8 time. It is a song worthy of the lament; for those who are not versed in the intricacies of the cante jondo, it is hard to discern where the seguiriya begins and where it ends.

When we think of Mónica on that bench—a cool spot to hide from the punishment of a too hot sun, a stone chair for a heart that is growing colder and wiser in equal time—it is the seguiriya we hear in the background. It is a song of despair never abandoned by the strumming of a guitar, a song awash in black tones and deep feeling, a song sung for all the dreams we had for ourselves, our hopes and expectations for a life that never delivered on its promise, that took our adolescent dreams and squashed them like a hammer beating on an overripe pear.

They married in the end, no one as happy with the outcome as the surprised, then relieved, and finally, indifferent Don Ricardo, who promptly forgot the whole affair until he was compelled to remember it many years later by a force of hand and a twist of fate.

We have always wondered about Don Ricardo, about men like him. Was he just a simple womanizer or a man more complicated than the details of his life can hope to reveal?

But history is like that. As hard to interpret as a map created by a culture whose traditions and mindset you know nothing about. It leaves only outcomes in its wake and very rarely evidence of the true feelings and motivations of those in whose hands events unfolded and whose actions had a role in shaping our destinies into what they are.

There was one victim who emerged seething from the marriage of Emilio and Mónica—Remedios, Emilio’s Mass-mad mother. Bad enough to have lost her one chance at immortality, her one opportunity to have endless prayers said on her behalf, ensuring her prompt escape from the pit of purgatory into the glory of heaven guarded by St. Peter and his haloed help. Infinitely worse was the fact that her son, the seminarian, had impregnated a nobody from La Mancha, had been forced to make the girl his wife.

She never forgave him. Never saw her grandson who, as we know, was not her grandson in any case. She lived for many years after that, in decent health and in want of nothing, her outrage at her son’s betrayal providing ample fuel to keep her going well past her allotted days.

SCENE FOUR
Inside a bookstore on the Calle San Vicente

Let us turn now to the maps of our childhoods. Therein we find the coordinates of happiness and loss, of innocence and half-remembered dreams. There, too, is the taste of the madeleine and the ever-present promise that hangs, forever suspended in mid-air. Intense sunsets, first-love and heartbreak, moments lived as if all subsequent ones are destined never to pass. The past merges into the present; the present subsumes into dreams of the future; the future is too nebulous and distant to be of use. Childhood is a dreamlike state, a vibrant map—and for too many lost souls, it is a lifelong curse.

Diego García Clemente, born on a warm Christmas Day, was blessed with a happy early childhood, at least. When Emilio married Mónica, he accepted not only her, but also her son, fully into his heart. “Only saints are born on Christmas Day,” he said to Mónica. “Jesus, the boy Segundo, who once minded my mother’s stables and was as good as freshly baked bread, and our own child, Diego.”

Alas, Abuela, although you wished it otherwise, there would be no other portents that they were witnesses to a momentous birth. No wise men appeared; the trees in Seville did not suddenly burst into bloom; no star shone brightly in the East.

They would have other children, Mónica and Emilio, but all would fail to survive past the early few months—victims of premature birth, disease or, as Mónica liked to put it, “of being wise to what the world would deliver and choosing to abandon it quickly.” Despite Emilio’s kindness, his generosity and his unconditional acceptance of Don Ricardo’s bastard son, Mónica would never fully abandon her dream of reuniting with the Don himself, would never fully accept that this little life she had stumbled upon was the one she deserved and not punishment for having dared to dream. And this thought, insidious but deeply held, hardened her against what others in her position might have interpreted as her supreme good luck.

Instead, she retreated to that spot on her map that marked her past, only to be held captive there by the many if-onlys and the countless could-have-beens. Thus, her days as a convent girl, those days she had once decried for their brutality—the good sisters had taught her well but often with the backs of their hands—seen now from a vantage point skewed by regret, became her glory days, days of fresh air and the smell of the azafrán, and her present life in Seville, the city she had once loved, was now the jail that had, through force of circumstance, become her home.

So it was that she transformed the quiet town of her birth into a shrine, the boredom of the long days and the hard work harvesting the saffron forgotten in the wake of the blow that life had delivered her. Instead, what was now remembered was the town as it appeared on one day a year, dressed in its finest vestments to celebrate the festival of its patron saint, Saint Agatha, when the women congregated at the baker’s house to cook and talk, their efforts infusing the town with the seductive smells of freshly baked cake.

So it is with the past—a state, a place the great St. Augustine spoke of as a spacious palace—a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who really can plumb its depths?

Emilio was not held captive to his past in the least. On the contrary, his love for Mónica had armed him with the courage to embark upon a new life and he did so with relish and without regret. His Uncle Alfonso, owner of a bookstore in the Calle San Vicente, provided him with employment inside his shop, a shop visited increasingly by English travellers who wanted to learn more about Spain. They appreciated being guided by Emilio, whose English was respectable and whose enthusiasm for their own writers flattered and convinced them that they were being served by the very best.

By the time little Diego was one, he was spending most of the day inside the shop—the Librería Alfonso—hiding among the books, a happy prisoner of dust and ticks, mesmerized by the feel of heavy paper, the smell of glue and ink. There he would be taught how to read, first in Spanish and then, under the spell of Emilio’s enthusiasms, in English, as it appeared in the poems of the Romantics. His knowledge of English was forever coloured with elegies and odes, things less useful than they were beautiful, and he came to share Emilio’s belief that English was the language not of progress, as its native speakers believed, but the language of beauty and of life itself.

Uncle Alfonso, a lifelong bachelor and a man of many ill moods, never ceased to complain about the child. “There he is again, the scamp, eating the books,” he would accuse, pointing a shaky finger his way. Emilio would respond by laughing and removing little Diego from the scene of the crime, bits of paper hanging still from the edges of his tiny mouth, screaming at the indignity of being moved until he could crawl back to his spot and resume his meal of words and rhymes.

In his more impatient moments, Uncle Alfonso would try to move the boy with the end of a broom, poking at him until Diego’s screams filled the store and Emilio appeared to rescue him from the old man. But eventually Diego came to view the episodes with the broom as a game and, growing stronger as his aged great-uncle grew weaker, he would pull it from the old man’s hands and swat it back at him until Alfonso’s curses drained the store of all the fine poetry lodged inside.

“The boy belongs with his mother,” he would tell Emilio, who would nod but keep Diego close by his side because there was always something amiss with Mónica. She was either weak because she was pregnant, mourning a dead baby when she was not, and with no energy whatsoever in-between all the births and all the deaths. It was all she could do to keep the house in a semblance of order and cook the occasional meal.

They lived above the store and below Uncle Alfonso, who hovered above them in a room in the attic, from which he shouted at them to be quiet, couldn’t they see he was an old man, infirm and weak, and couldn’t they be thankful, for it was he who had given them a roof to live under and bread to eat? And where was his meal? That’s all he ever asked for, a meal and not a good one at that because Mónica of La Mancha had no talent in the kitchen and from what he could see, little talent to boast of when it came to everything else as well. What a shame to have been burdened with such a woman, Emilio, he would shout down at them. That you should have abandoned God for such a woman is more than a shame, it is an unpardonable sin.

Mónica, her body spent from pregnancy or childbirth, yes, but her lungs made of sterner stuff, would scream up to the attic, “Cállate, viejo. Be quiet for once, you silly fool.” And then, bitter from having to deal with the old man upstairs, from having to live in three small, darkrooms with no fine linen, no kitchen help, nothing to compare to those hallowed days inside the house of Don Ricardo Medina, with its proper courtyard with decorative fountains and plenty of fresh air, she would turn her anger to Emilio.

“Patience, Mónica, patience,” Emilio pleaded with her, though in truth he was the only one with patience, a patience he nurtured by escaping with Diego at every opportunity, to the store, to the street, hiding behind a book that he read by the dim light of a candle, retreating to any corner in search of a moment of quiet, a bit of peace.

It was to escape from the weight of Mónica’s bitterness that Emilio dreamed up the idea of offering tours of the city to the English, for if they had expressed interest in the cathedral, how much more would they express for the city as a whole? “Because Seville is not only a city of oranges,” he would tell Uncle Alfonso, “but a city dreamed of by Hercules and founded by none other than Julius Caesar himself—one, oye, of the greatest men to have ever lived.” And then, to underscore this, he would embark upon reciting the well-known refrain:

Raised by Hercules,

Julius Caesar fortified me,

with high walls and towers,

I was conquered for the king

of heaven by Garcí Pérez de Vargas

to which Uncle Alfonso would respond by rolling his eyes and saying, “That, sobrino, is a load of rot, but if it pleases you and brings in the English money, so be it.”

The tours began slowly at first, but their popularity grew because Emilio not only spoke English but he was also a good story-teller and always knew what to leave out and what to tell. It was his theory that the English people, from whose minds sprang such glorious poetry, had of late been prone to a certain surliness born of industry and that for this condition, stories of love were the only cure. And so along with the tales of the Romans and the Visigoths and eight centuries of Arab rule, he never failed to tell them of Pedro I’s unrequited passion for Doña María Fernández Coronel, who suffered immeasurably at the hands of this cruel king, so desperate to have her that he imprisoned her husband and had him tortured to death. Inside the kitchens of the Convent of Santa Clara, the poor woman rid herself of Pedro’s advances by throwing boiling oil over her face. Emilio would tell his group, his eyes raised upwards, passion in his breath, that, thus disfigured, she became venerated for her chastity and her mummified body lay in the choir of the Convent of Santa Inés.

The English liked the story well enough but preferred visiting the great Álcazar and the Giralda to perusing the remains of a virtuous woman disfigured by the obsessions of an ancient Spanish king. In any case, stories of love did not inflame their industrious hearts as Emilio had hoped, but reminded them instead of the unruly passions of the Spanish—and especially the Andalusians—who were responsible for keeping their country mired in the brackish waters of tradition, ignorance and economic despair. A city concerned only with the carnal pleasures of love could not hope to ascend the world’s stage, could not expect to lift itself from its lethargic existence of sleep and song. City of a thousand roses, yes. City of heat and light, that too. But also the city that lost a continent, lest you should ever forget.

And as if to underscore their suspicions, Emilio would then trot the tourists over to the Plaza de los Refinadores to show them the bust of Don Juan Tenorio himself, which astounded the English even more because their busts and statues were of weighty persons like Shakespeare and the great Elizabeth I and not of fictitious libertines.

Ah, but the Spanish—and the Andalusians, above all. Oh dear, oh well. No, no please, Don Emilio, do go on.

These tours would not be worth a mention had they not turned out to be especially important to the history that followed, and more than the history, the means to depict it as well. It was through these tours that Diego stumbled upon the two obsessions that would define his life, driving him like an ancient conquistador across an ocean and into the arms of a spectacular New World—the twin obsessions that have weaved their way through the generations of this family like a hereditary virus capable of infecting even those of us who sit here so far removed from the coordinates of Diego’s own life.

The vector for this virus chanced upon them during one of Emilio’s English tours. His name was Mr. Raleigh and he appeared in their lives when Diego was just nine years old—armed to the teeth with copies of ancient maps and eager to share the stories they told, stories so full of wonder, so brimming with the steps and missteps of the human race that their mere mention today never fails to bring a chill to our spines.

Little Diego, enamoured already of the books that lined the walls of the Librería Alfonso, found himself battling a greater obsession yet, just like Pedro I, but not for a woman, no, no woman was worthy of a passion such as this. The maps that Mr. Raleigh traded were not just beautiful, they were much more than that—their brilliance truly did shame the stars, the stories they told more majestic than the words of Lope de Vega and the delusions of Don Quijote combined. The maps made Diego nervous, anxious to possess them, jealous of those men, like el Señor Raleigh, who had the means to travel the world in search of these ancient treasures and who, upon finding them, could make them theirs.

It was here, in one of Mr. Raleigh’s maps, that Diego first saw the country that would eventually beckon him forth.

“Mexico—did I tell you how Charles V first learned about the nature of Spain’s distant colony?”

“No, Señor Raleigh. Please do tell.”

“Very well, then. An envoy of Hernan Cortés appeared at the Spanish court and when asked by Charles V to describe what the new land was like, he picked up a sheet of paper, crumpled it into a ball and then unfolded it in his palm saying, it is like this, sire.”

Sire, it is like this. A paper, twisted and creased, a land with unkempt borders but, when straightened and flattened, capable still of piercing the skin.

He had an intuition then—would remember it much later on—that this crumpled paper would be his future too.

In the meantime, Diego’s father was sinking every day further under the weight of all his unfulfilled dreams.

Poor Emilio. The brighter a man’s light, the darker the shadow, and Mónica’s ill moods had done their work on him. He had been nodding apologetically for much too long. His head felt weary from all that movement, his heart heavy from the love that had once changed his life but was now siphoning it from his very bones.

Could she not be quiet for just one moment? Something was always wrong: the house was too dark, the city too lit up. It was too hot, at times it seemed dreadfully cold. There was no money in books, no money to buy a new mantilla, not a real to spare with which to buy Diego some proper shoes. How long was she supposed to live like this? Nothing in her past had prepared her for the disappointments that visited day after day with no respite visible on the horizon, no light left to guide her way through the dark.

“You hear that, Emilio?” Uncle Alfonso would shout from his attic, interrupting Mónica’s litany of complaints. “This is what you get for your ridiculous love of English words. That’s right, my son. Congratulate yourself, for you’ve managed to find a proper Shakespearean shrew!”

And then the arguing would begin in earnest. “The old man, that sick and useless old man,” she would scream at Emilio, as if Emilio had suddenly lost his hearing, and Uncle Alfonso would shout back, “More useless than the señorita of La Mancha? Impossible!” And the night would continue like this, one shouting up the stairway, the other down, both cursing and reproaching, both indifferent to what Emilio thought or felt, both oblivious when he quietly slipped through their venom and went downstairs to the store for a bit of quiet, some peace of mind. And there, in the corner, crouched tightly as if he were attempting to disappear, was Diego—a fugitive too of the war of words upstairs, book in hand. When he caught sight of Emilio, his hands flew up in the air as if to say, there they go. There they go again.

It was hard for Emilio not to resent the child at times, though it always sickened him later, his resentment, because he did love Diego. The child’s enthusiasms were his own. He was the only bright light existing in his universe, next to his tours and his books. But it was hard to bear the fact that Mónica could carry Don Ricardo’s child without incident, could give birth to this boisterous, happy boy and not manage to supply him, Emilio, the man who had sacrificed himself for her (that’s how he came to see it, as a sacrifice) with a child of his own flesh and blood capable of surviving beyond the first three weeks.

Not even the English poets could now bring him relief. His days were too long and too full to permit himself the luxury of reading any of the books he sold. At least he could still depend on the friendship of those who, like el Señor Raleigh, brought some much needed light into his world. The Englishman stopped by the bookstore often, where he entertained Emilio and little Diego with his magnificent maps and his towering tales of the New World.

“Did I tell you how truly admirable your Columbus was?”

El Señor Raleigh always referred to Columbus as “your Columbus,” a statement that flattered Emilio and Diego both, though they knew it was not Columbus who belonged to them but his discovery of the New World. Yet, it was a fine discovery and it pleased them enormously that an Englishman should remember that it was indeed “theirs.”

“The Spanish conquistadores were indeed a fanciful lot. Upon returning to Spain, they told of the extraordinary sights to be found in the New World—whales with breasts, flying fish, and beaches covered not with sand but pearls. The mermaids were a disappointment though. They had imagined extraordinary creatures and were dismayed when they failed to be as beautiful as their imaginations had conceived them to be. Columbus himself believed in the existence of Saint Bernard’s Island, where the daughters of Atlas guarded a luscious garden filled with golden apples.

“They were men in search of mythical cities. Some they found and some remained trapped in their imaginations for all time—the seven cities of Cíbola, for example. Have you never heard tell of this?”

Emilio knew the story well enough but he encouraged its telling for Diego’s sake.

“Around those fanciful times, legend had it that during the Moorish invasion of Spain, seven bishops and their congregations had sailed west and founded seven great cities of gold in the New World. These cities were known as the seven cities of Cíbola.

“Many men planned expeditions to find these fabled cities, but it was Francisco de Coronado who ventured into the American Southwest in 1540 in search of them. He did not find them in the end, but the dream of their discovery nurtured the aspirations of many other men in the centuries that followed.”

El Señor Raleigh lowered his voice to a whisper. “There is a rumour in Madrid that a map exists of the seven cities of Cíbola, drawn by the one man who made it there but took the secret with him to his grave. That man was an Andalusian and it is thought that his map is in the possession of one of the booksellers of Seville. Is it you, Don Emilio?” he asked with a chuckle.

“Ah, if only I were in possession of such a map! How much easier it would be to live my life. No, it is not I, Señor Raleigh. Regrettably, it is not I. Nor anyone that I have ever come into contact with.”

For years, Diego would be haunted by the thought of that map. More than years—for that map, the thought of that map, inflamed Diego’s imagination, haunting him throughout his life. Who was that Andalusian, who was that bookseller and what of the seven cities of Cíbola? Were they indeed made of gold? Did they boast the most beautiful mermaids in the world? Were they the cities where one could find the key to eternal life?

Diego’s own mind was fanciful. He had read the dreams of those who had gone before him and was convinced that his future lay there. On the other side of the ocean, in a world not only new but golden, not only alive but overflowing with life. How he longed to travel the yellow waters of the Guadalquivir until they deposited him in the vast ocean, to ride the waves like Phaeton in his golden carriage as he dragged the sun across the sky.

Ah, but you, Abuela, who lived so long, know more than anyone how the world sags under the weight of our intentions. How our dreams, once realized, are dreams no longer. Dreams and nightmares—two sides of the same coin; he who dreams of knights will live to see them transformed into monsters in the morning.

In the meantime, under the cover of darkness, Emilio had stumbled upon the tiny spark that would ignite his life for one brief moment before the curtains fell on his spot on the stage. A song. A dance. A lament worthy of the name, where voices carry for eternity and ruptured hearts find a way, through the intensity of the jaleo, to mend.

To his shame, it was a tourist who alerted him fully to this glory, a foreigner who arrived intent on imbibing Andalucía’s riches inside the confines of a dimly lit café, for these were the great days of the cafés cantantes in Seville. Oh, how your eyes would once shine, Abuela, when describing these days, how you seemed to float back in time as if you had been there yourself witnessing the rebirth of flamenco inside those rooms lit by oil and paraffin lamps.

In those days, a man by the name of Silverio Franconneti, half-Italian, half-Spanish, but with the spirit of the gypsies coursing through his blood, opened the Café de Silverio on the calle del Rosario, with a view to waking his countrymen up. He opened the doors in order to stoke the passion that lay dormant in their bones, to unearth the unuttered howls that clouded minds in a land filled with so much sun. He opened the doors to music that soaked the organs with quicksilver and found its way right to the pit of the soul. He opened the doors so as to sing, his voice as powerful an instrument as there ever was—a mixture, in the words of the great poet of flamenco, García Lorca, of Italian honey and lemon from Andalusian soil—a man who knew all the songs and sang them until those who listened wept in despair and begged him to stop.

Inside the Café de Silverio—a Sevillian patio with a fountain in the centre, Moorish columns, multicoloured tiles and the sacred platform, the tablao, from where guitarists, dancers and singers conducted their incomparable Mass at the front—Emilio sat night after night until the amber voices of the singers insinuated themselves into his blood, displacing the hallowed words of the English poets with the sighs of the seguiriyas and the howls of the soléas.

There, on that sacred stage, the singers intoned and declaimed what he himself could not, the frustrations, the deceptions, the ache that surged from the weight of all life’s unfulfilled promises, an existence where there were only scant minutes of happiness, scattered pages where one had expected more substantial tomes. It was as if the singer and he were strings tuned to the same pitch, and when one was plucked, the other could not help but vibrate sympathetically to the touch. It was as if something had been unearthed from that part of himself that had once seen the potential in everything, that had been able to fashion dreams from specks, universes from three lines of a poem.

Inside the café, a cup of wine in his hand, his eyes heavy from the sounds, the smells, the view of a dancer’s bare leg as a foot came down furiously on the floor, Emilio felt himself transported to a kingdom outside of space and time. Olé, he whispered at first, unable just yet to let the word rise forcefully from its birthing place in the pit of his gut.

(Was he aware, we ask ourselves, that the mathematical proportion of the distances between the planets from the Sun out to Saturn is exactly that of the notes on a guitar string? And if he did know, did he attribute this relationship to the ethereal nature of the music, to its capacity for invoking the heights of heaven and the depths of hell below? Alas, this we will never know.)

He now arrived back home in the early hours of the morning—the hours of indecency, Mónica called them, for she was afraid of this new Emilio, this stranger who arrived humming to himself, eyes lost inside mysterious landscapes, sour wine emanating from skin and breath. She was afraid that she was losing her grip on her husband, that he had gone the way many others have before and since, was spending the little they had on pleasures she abhorred. Above all, it enraged her that he was siphoning resources from their already inadequate stocks.

“You have turned out as rotten as the rest,” she spat at him when he stumbled in, uncaring, tired, needing only the comfort of silence and a partial night’s rest. And so he would climb into bed alongside her and offer her his back, falling into sleep almost immediately, leaving Mónica to nurse her bitterness and reproaches until the morning light announced the day and then Emilio would slip away quickly again, leaving her with all of her unexpressed rage stored corrosively inside.

She thought: How has this come to pass? How has this respectable man, once a servant of God, managed to degenerate into this lamentable state? How has he come to wander so perilously down this shameful path?

She blamed it on the old man on top. Uncle Alfonso in his attic with his miserly ways and his venomous tongue. She was sure that the old man was hoarding the profits from the bookstore, that there was much more to be had than the old swindler would admit, that he meant to keep them like this, dressed in rags, living from hand to mouth like peasants, beholden to him, when he gave them so little and he himself had so much. She was convinced that this, above all else, was driving Emilio into the arms of disgrace, driving him into the darkest hours of the night in search of respite from the unappeasable sorrows that plagued him in the harsh light of day.

She cried, full of pity for herself, not yet thirty years old and an old woman already, with little to look forward to—nothing but the endless drudgery of cook, clean and mend. And the unbearable sun to contend with, and the smells of Seville, the burning charcoal, the horse manure, the grease and the sweat. And the noises, the infernal conflagration of noises, yells, barks, the sobbing of children, the clanging of church bells. When would it all stop, dear God, when would the misery end? She brought her fingers up to her nose then and summoned the scent of the fifteen ingredients from her aunt’s stew, the memory of a distant childhood, uncomplicated, secure.

And Emilio thought: How lucky I am to find myself in this city filled with life, this city that bears witness to el compás, to the beat that makes all music ring truthfully, ring loud, ring straight through to the heart. He thought this because it was night, because darkness had descended and the voices would soon cease to utter mere words and be overtaken by song instead and the pain would rise to the surface then, would be experienced and then expunged. He had, for the first time in his life, found a way to balance body and spirit, to cope with the disappointments of the morning by receding with the singers into the underworld.

Estoy viviendo en el mundo

Con la esperanza perdida.

No es menester que me entierren

Porque estoy enterrao en via.

(I am living in the world

with no hope to speak of.

Don’t bother to bury me

for I am buried alive already.)

Emilio thought: There is much in the world left to me. The bejewelled night, the endless river of song, the hope I carry in my heart for Diego, the brightest star in the heavens, my beloved son.

And Mónica thought: There is much in the world to despair of. The sorrowful days, the smells and the noise, the fear I hold in my heart for Diego, fruit of my one true love, my only son.

In the meantime, Diego himself, now eleven years old—lost until then in a world circumscribed by books and maps, a sanctuary in which to hide from his mother’s bitterness, the ill moods of his Great-uncle Alfonso, the unhappiness that radiated from his father’s eyes, all the disappointments that seeped from their hearts and into the very walls of the house—was moments away from placing another piece in the puzzle that would become his life, moments from adding bits of earth and sky to a hitherto uncharted bit of his map.

It was around this time that a book arrived at the Librería Alfonso for el Señor Raleigh. The Englishman had recently settled in Seville, hoping the climate would soothe the aches in his aged bones and that the proximity to the Archives of the Indies—the impressive building that housed the history of the Discoveries—would satisfy the unquenchable curiosity that continued to course through his blood.

The arrival of this book marked the moment that Diego Clemente left all childish things behind. Herewith, he would embark on the journey that would begin right there, as a single bacterium that lodged itself in his mind, a fantasy, a boy’s delusion that, like the delusions of small and great men alike, would provide the spark to send him across an ocean and deposit him into the arms of the Mondo Novus, the glorious New World.

What book was this you ask? Ah, in a million years you would never guess. For it was none other than one of the volumes of the famed octavo edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, published in 1842, hand-coloured and magnificent even if plates had been removed here and there so that he could no longer admire the Brewer’s Black-bird nor the Crimson-Throated Purple Finch. But there were treasures to be had, in any case. There, in all their natural splendour, were the Cape May Wood Warbler, the Burrowing Day Owl, the Louisiana Tanager, the homely but comforting Brown Finch.

Diego hid the book inside the floorboards where he kept the three precious items that provided him with comfort when all upstairs was awash with regret and loss—a tin horn, a glass marble and a book of Becquer’s poetry, ragged and well worn but magical, he thought, a salve against the injustices inflicted by those who claimed to love him most.

And now this, an infinitely more precious book. He failed, in his ignorance, to appreciate how precious it actually was, but the boy had his own barometer to gauge the things of the world and the monetary value of the book would not have impressed him had he known it. Instead, he waded carefully through page after page of the beautiful birds—here a Scarlet Tanager gliding, his plumage resplendent, while the less colourful female perched tranquilly on a branch below. Over there a duck, the Greater Scaup, with its pale blue bill and its perfectly webbed feet. And more, so many more, it seemed to him unbelievable that these creatures could even exist. Were they not just a madman’s fancy, the delusions of an artist tired with God’s inventions and determined to dip into the well of creation for himself?

And the boy wondered, is it possible, if they do indeed exist, that these birds, tiny and delicate as they seem, is it possible that they can cross lines of latitude and longitude so easily, that they can travel vast expanses of a land I can only envision in my dreams? He located their path on his atlas, traced a line from north to south across a great continent, from the broad shoulders in Canada to the end of the tail that was Mexico, and he thought, there on that line, on that grid, lies my future, though its shape eluded him just then, the particulars still nebulous at that point in time. But the days would pass, the months would fly and the moment of departure would arrive; the details would work themselves out.

It was one of the first signs of Diego Clemente’s ability to refashion his world, to reimagine it so that it would never fail to live up to his dreams, and it began there, with the images of birds that, until he sighted them with his own eyes, he would find difficult to believe were real.

Before he handed the book over to el Señor Raleigh, he dedicated himself to copying the images of each bird onto paper, using a simple charcoal pencil to draw its outline, committing the colourful markings to memory, so that years later he would be able to identify many a bird from the memory of a masked eye, a yellow band at the end of a tail, a pair of pink legs and feet.

He gave the book back to its rightful owner, fearful after three months of hoarding it that he would be found out, that el Señor Raleigh, who had always been so kind, would think ill of him suddenly, would detect the covetousness that resided inside his heart and he would be left bereft, not only of a precious book but also of the respect of a man he considered a mentor and friend. But if the older man suspected Diego’s crime, he kept his suspicions to himself. What was more, he shared the book eagerly with Diego, bringing it by the bookshop, where the two spent many moments perusing the specimens contained therein.

Not too many years passed before fate began its work in paving the road for the realization of Diego’s dream. Suddenly, it seemed, dramatically, it happened, in a wink of an eye, in a flash, with no time to make sense of it, no time to mourn, no time to adjust. Just ten days after his fourteenth birthday—the glorious fourteen, el Señor Raleigh proclaimed, the dawn of a truly golden age—Diego watched in horror as Emilio was commended, within a single turbulent day, to his eternal rest.

It was Diego who found him lying flat on the floor of the Librería Alfonso, feverish and writhing in pain. It was as if all the disappointment that had seeped through Emilio’s veins, all of the venomous words that had fallen from Mónica’s tongue, Remedios’s orders and later her disdain, it was as if all these things had coalesced in Emilio’s gallbladder until it was too much and the beleaguered organ poisoned him to death.

Diego held Emilio’s hand throughout all of it, hoping against hope that the fever would break, oblivious to Mónica’s shrieks, Mónica’s laments. For what would become of them now, good God? Had she not already weathered enough? Had she not suffered more indignities than the good Job? What was she to do in this wretched city with no husband to protect her, no way to survive without a man to fend for them, without a place to live?

Uncle Alfonso, old, ill-humoured, tired of life, yes, but genuinely fond of his nephew, genuinely distressed by Diego’s despair, yelled back at her, “Mujer, if there was ever a need for peace it is now, woman. Can’t you see that Emilio lies close to death?” And old as he was, weak and withered as he felt, he dragged the hysterical Mónica upstairs to give his nephew the silence he needed for rest.

Diego did not record Emilio’s last words, and he leaves to our imagination his feelings, the despair he surely felt as he watched his beloved father fade. But in the half-light of the early morning, a dim and tenuous light, we are sure we can see them—a boy lying over the dying body of the man he has loved deeply, while his father tries desperately to ward off the pain and offer a few consoling words.

Upstairs a woman wept, engulfed by her fears, wallowing in her misfortune but torn by her equally strong feelings of love—because she did love him, make no mistake. Love is an unruly emotion, few parameters can limit it: There are as many ways to love as there are ways to meet your death and she had loved, not well perhaps, but loved in the only way she could.

Upstairs, too, an old man grimaced, keeping his emotions in check, tired, distressed with the machinations of the world. Is this how it all ends, Dios mío, he asked, are we mere instruments to be played at the whims of the gods?

A month would pass after Emilio’s death before Mónica conceived her plan.

And then a new dot would be added to an ancient map and another wound would be administered just as others were beginning to mend.

SCENE FIVE
Sorry her lot

If our philosophers are right, then we must accept their assurances that the bad can only lead to the good, that everything on the ascent is descending at the same time, that tragedy has its purpose and that events transpire as they do because there is a plan, though the shape of it eludes us and the end remains a mystery until the moment it arrives, blowing in like an unpredicted hurricane, strewing the pieces of our little lives about.

Emilio’s death opened its own doors. Mónica—once drowning in self-pity, a victim of regret and all the wretched disappointments in the world—was sharply awakened, one could say rudely, given the circumstances, but awakened she was and she now grew docile in equal measure to the anger that had possessed her before. Up above her in the attic, counting time with frail fingers and a stale cup of wine, was Uncle Alfonso, revelling in his newfound power, for Mónica would not dare let an errant word escape from her lips now, he surmised correctly. No, señor, not one complaint would readily roll from that wicked tongue.

Instead—“Could I get you something, Don Alfonso?”—she would ask, her once unhappily pursed lips unzipped, the sarcasm of old displaced by the considerable weight of her fear.

Uncle Alfonso did not press his luck too eagerly. Old age had its own handicaps—a boulder around a frail neck, you said of it once, Abuela—and old Alfonso was not eager to be abandoned, to be left on his own to face the encroaching frailties that emerged with the passing of time. A weak leg, a cloudy eye, a shaky hand.

Finally, there was silence—a charged silence to be sure, for the air was wound as tight as the string of a guitar. It was impossible to guess when one of them would snap from the tension, when the veneer of civility would be abandoned and the war of words resumed. But in the immediate aftermath of Emilio’s death, silence filled the house and Diego was thankful for it, wondered often how much his father would have appreciated this sudden ceasefire, how much he would have enjoyed a peaceful home.

The English kept coming to the store, though the tours were cancelled, Diego being too young for the task. In any case, his knowledge of English was still poor and he had no desire to be trotting about Seville with a group of foreigners bent on a bit of culture after a morning of hunting in the Andalusian countryside; he could not but feel badly for all those dead bustards, the deer, the red-legged partridges and the wild boars.

Without Emilio, the bookshop fared even worse than before. They were reduced to selling the standards of old—the French and Spanish dictionaries of Nuñez de Taboada, the Arte de la Lengua Arábica of Pedro de Alcalá, paper made of linen, which pleased the Englishmen who were used to the inferior product sold in their own country, paper fashioned from cotton rags.

Uncle Alfonso rarely descended from the attic to help mind the store—there was no need for it, he reasoned; his own life was sure to end any day, his rheumatic legs were a torture and he could no longer boast of the sharp wits that had once astounded those who knew him—many of whom were now long dead.

It was easy to grow used to the silence that had emerged in the aftermath of Emilio’s death and hard to recall what all the fuss had been about during all those years of recrimination and strife. Silence such as this was bliss, a pocket of heaven in an often-wretched earth. Sí señor, we should have arrived here long ago, Uncle Alfonso told himself, happily almost. But then he would find himself looking into the eyes of la señorita de La Mancha, and looking into those eyes he would see that for all the amiability that now spilled from her once too-tight lips, those eyes were painting a much different picture instead.

You have won for now, old man, they were saying, but it won’t always be like this.

Mónica had a plan. It had entered her head even before Emilio had breathed his last—a guilty sin, a sacrilegious thought weaving its way through her grief, but a welcome solution nonetheless to the sudden tragic turn of events.

Without Emilio there would be no reason to hide the truth from the boy, to continue misleading him about who his father really was. The time had arrived for Diego to learn that he was not the son of a humble bookseller but of a man of means—that he carried the proof of it in his name, Diego—the name of Don Ricardo’s own beloved father. It was the only request Don Ricardo had ever made with respect to the boy and one she honoured, ignoring Emilio’s dismay and the fact, too, that Don Ricardo already had a son named Diego, named, claro, of course, also for his beloved papá.

“There is nothing in a name,” she told Emilio when Emilio, timorous and bookish yes, but capable of feeling the slightest injury in the core of his being, mouthed his objection to this. “A name means nothing in the end,” she had argued then, but deep down she felt quite the opposite to be the case. The name Diego would connect her son to Don Ricardo, would keep the flames of her hope alive. Perhaps there could still be a marriage in the end. Perhaps Doña Fernanda would finally succumb and things would be put in their proper place—Diego would be returned to the home that should have been his from the start.

What would happen to Emilio she had not considered at that time. She never envisaged his death—she dreamed only half-truths and half-dreams where the barriers to fulfillment merely melted away. It was a dream that had nurtured and comforted her through all those years with Emilio, all those miscarriages, the stillbirths and the two-week-old deaths. It was a thought that had steeled her against the onslaught of the old man and his broom sitting up in the attic, composing the next aria to spice up the opera between them.

She did not reveal the secret just yet. Instead, after years of unwilling neglect (she would justify her indifference up till then by telling herself that Diego had been inseparable from Emilio, that only now, in his absence, could she begin to forge a relationship with her son), she began to hold Diego for the very first time, began to kiss him as if he were not a young man of fourteen but a baby of no more than one. All those wasted years, she told him. All that lost time.

And to lead him into the story that would irretrievably, irrevocably change his life, she began by telling him not of Don Ricardo, as you would imagine, but of her nostalgia for the smell, the taste, the feel of a purple plant.

Saffron. In Spanish, Monica’s beloved azafrán.

“From the Arabic, Mamá,” Diego told her when she embarked upon the story. “To be yellow—za’fran.”

“Very interesting, hijo,” she replied. “But not so important to the tale I’m about to tell.”

Ah, but how fine things were once, she lamented. How miserable she was without the taste of a paella that could boast of a generous quantity of the spice—part flower, part bitter herb. Once this had been the world she had inhabited—a governess in a beautiful home where no paella or winter stew was deprived of the colour and the taste of saffron because that was a house of means, a house that did not have to resort to substitutions—the vanilla and rose water that often masqueraded as the real thing in inferior homes.

The price of an ounce of azafrán was equal, even then, to an ounce of gold.

“But even before that, much before that,” she told him, “the taste of saffron saturated everything in my life.”

This was how the recipes for the famous stews of Mónica’s aunt, Bautista, came to land in our own hands. Because for months before Diego was told of the truth, he was forced to hear the lengthy descriptions of the ingredients that went into the dishes that had consumed Mónica’s early life. It was an expiation for her, perhaps—we all need, it is true, to revisit that point on the map where things began—but it was baffling to Diego, who could not understand why his mother needed so desperately to tell these stories, who battled the pleasure he felt in his mother’s arms, the embraces she had neglected to give him as a child that were offered so freely now, and his embarrassment, “Mamá, por favor, I am not a child,” he would say when she reached out to embrace him, reached out to touch the skin that had sorely missed a mother’s touch until now.

A child no longer a child but longing, at times—as we all do—to remain one for life.

Of all Mónica’s memories, the ones that would persist with Diego would be her stories of the great harvests that took place in mid-October before the chill set in, and that would culminate with the Feast of the Rose—a celebration that contained the essential ingredients of any good Spanish fiesta—the food, the music, the games and the unusual number of unruly drunks who sang until all hours of the morning, songs in honour of their beloved mothers or cherished sweethearts and sometimes, as in the case of Ignacio Aguirre, a neighbour and not totally sane of mind, songs in honour of a much-beloved goat.

“The work would start at dawn,” she would begin, “and when the men, women and children congregated in the fields to commence the task of picking the flowers before the sun rose and burned them with its rays, the excitement was palpable in the air as if they were there not to work but for a pagan celebration in honour of those flowers with their miraculous stems. In the afternoon the work would continue as the petals were separated from the threads—an arduous task—for even the most experienced man would find it hard to strip one thousand of these small flowers in one hour and it takes thousands of them to make just thirty grams of azafrán. In the evenings, the stems would be placed to dry over horsehair sieves warmed above tepid, half-spent coals.

“My father—may he rest in peace, he has been dead so long now—had the means to pay workers to do the harvesting for him but that did not save us from lending a hand, and we cooked all day to keep the workers well fed and content. Oh, but those were wonderful days! It is easy to forget the work and to remember only the colours—the mauve not-quite-purple of the flowers, the deep yellow-red of the stems; and the taste too of the newly produced saffron which brought to life one of Aunt Bautista’s splendid stews. I can smell them, hijo,” she would say then, and saying it would bring her red, hardened fingers up to her nose in an effort to recapture the moment, as if the taste of those stews rested still on her tongue.

There would be a point to Mónica’s stories, though it would take her some time to make it as she meandered around a hundred digressions and as many laments, but Diego would come to learn that Mónica’s memories exacted their own price, for none was offered without the expectation of receiving something in return. And the price, in this case, would be akin to blood—though not what courses through our veins, but the metaphorical stuff that links one generation to another, the one that links father to son.

“Because there is a reason to recall all of these memories, my son,” she told him, just when he was beginning to despair that the secret she hinted at would never be revealed. And the point to all of these bucolic harvest-memories and her happy time as governess in one of the grandest houses in Seville was this: “I miss the spice that once grew freely at my back door; the spice only the rich can afford while the rest of us wade in rose water dreaming of the taste. The azafrán that is not only spice but medicine, one that has saved many a good woman from suffering the pain of miscarriages and stillbirths and babies dead too soon to be properly mourned.

“Because there is no greater tragedy than this, Diego—listen well and never forget it, my son: To have savoured something so potent only to see yourself deprived of it for the rest of your life.”

And before he had time to digest the meaning of it, before he had time to understand the direction, the tenor of the tale, Mónica quickly sat him down and without emotion or remorse, told the young man every detail of his parentage, leaving out nothing—providing no proper preamble, for how can you jump from saffron to a secret of such magnitude?

The woman was a bruta, no doubt about it; we will soon see just how much of a bruta she really was.

Diego did not react to the news in the way she expected. He did not ask for more information than he had already received—did not want to hear about the colour of his father’s eyes, his manner of walking or his many peculiar likes and dislikes. Thinking about it later, Mónica realized that she was relieved, that she could not remember the colour of Don Ricardo’s eyes, his manner of walking or any of his peculiar likes or dislikes. That when she remembered him she thought only of the silk of his waistcoat, the green velvet of his breeches with the filigree buttons, the deep blue suit he often boasted of, made by Utrilla himself in Madrid—“the greatest tailor who has ever lived.”

As soon as he could, Diego left the house to recreate all the walks taken with Emilio, because it was clear to him that Emilio was the only father he would ever admit despite his mother’s stories—stories that convinced him only that there was something amiss with her head, that perhaps Uncle Alfonso was right, she was indeed a loca and what a martyr his father had been to have put up with this. What a saint, he said out loud, suppressing the onslaught of tears.

He walked to the cathedral first, entered it as his father had done, with respect and awe, not for God, Emilio had once told him secretly, but for the wondrous artisans who had fashioned this monument from stone. From there, he made his way across to the Patio de los Naranjos, a peek at the Giralda, and then run, run, run to the banks of the Guadalquivir, where the Torre del Oro stood, a resplendent monument of gold.

All the while, inside his head, he could hear Emilio’s voice chatting to the English.

It was Seville that first heard of the New World, that witnessed the arrival of Columbus himself on Palm Sunday in 1493. He had returned from his voyage of discovery in triumph and with a few other things besides. A suite of plants, exotic birds and the few Indians whose likes had never been seen in Europe and whose sad faces stunned those ladies who peeked at them from behind their tortoiseshell fans.

In Seville, Diego Velázquez was born—perhaps the best painter Spain gave to the world. Here, too, the first words of our national masterpiece, Don Quijote, were written by the great Cervantes, while a prisoner in the Carce Real.

Eventually Diego stopped in front of the Archives of the Indies, his favourite spot in all Seville.

Hijo, he heard Emilio call out to him, will you never tire of the reams of paper, the exuberant scrawls of a bunch of explorers eager to tell of their exploits, more invented than real?

Diego was not hungry for the reams of paper but for the memory of a map.

El Señor Raleigh had taken him there once. “To look upon one of the best maps of all time,” he had said to him in his tentative Spanish, with its soft r’s and lightness of tone. Juan de la Cosa’s Mappa Mundi—“astounding,” el Señor Raleigh had declared, in English this time. And after the Mappa Mundi, the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas commissioned by Philip II—“a madman” to the English, “a man made of more complex stuff than could ever be unearthed” to the Spanish—a king, nevertheless, who had dreamed of revealing the invisible to the naked eye.

Diego stood outside for almost an hour, accompanied by his memories—the maps, Emilio’s tours of the city, el Señor Raleigh’s musings on life and Philip II. Had the king been a simple madman or had he been indeed a man of more complexity than history could ever hope to discern? He stood there, as if transported, but really just a confused bony child aching for certainty, aching to have his father back—Emilio and his stories of love, Emilio and his jumbled, not-quite-right English rhymes.

He went home then. Mónica was waiting for him, and remorse now tumbled from her lips—“I should not have told you about him. I should have taken the secret with me to the grave.” All night she apologized like this, chastising herself, cursing at their bad luck in losing Emilio so early, could fate have been crueller to them? Her words of regret and reproach were uttered quietly. There was no need for Uncle Alfonso to know any of this. “No, no, hijo,” she cautioned him, fear in her voice. “Uncle Alfonso would waste no time throwing us out onto the street.”

In the morning—after a night of tossing and turning for Diego, a surprisingly solid rest for his mother—the point of her stories came to land, finally, at his feet.

“Not now, ahora no, not yet,” Mónica told him, as she fed him his favourite breakfast of hot chocolate and sweet bread made by the Carmelite nuns, “but soon, very soon, Diego, you will go to the house of Don Ricardo Medina and demand to be received in the manner that you deserve.”

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