Читать книгу The Mapmaker’s Opera - Bea Gonzalez - Страница 10

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.