The Mapmaker’s Opera. Bea Gonzalez
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