The Mapmaker’s Opera

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.