The Mapmaker’s Opera. Bea Gonzalez
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