Читать книгу The Mapmaker’s Opera - Bea Gonzalez - Страница 14

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.”