The Mapmaker’s Opera

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 (#ulink_2d627793-0c58-54b8-b7d5-82b0702e428d)

Inside a bookstore on the Calle San Vicente (#ulink_2d627793-0c58-54b8-b7d5-82b0702e428d)

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?”