by Bea Gonzalez
Ah, his hat. In the whole history of Seville, nothing had ever generated more conversation than Don Pedro’s black felt hat. It was an ordinary top hat, much like the ones worn by the men of the day, but it sat rather uneasily atop the priest’s head, contrasting oddly with his clerical collar and his long, black cape. That he should be demanding special privileges for his hat—“a cushion no less,” the master servant had guffawed to the cook, outraged, when first told of it, “That barrel of a priest is looking for a cushion for his hat”—was unheard of. Raimundo himself could hardly believe it, would not have believed it, had he not heard it from Doña Fernanda’s own mouth: “Raimundo, make sure Don Pedro’s hat is placed on that chair cushion by the door,” she had said.
“I beg your pardon,” he had replied, earnestly confused, for many were the archaic customs in this land bottled for antiquarians, a land where one of its ancient kings—finding himself seated too close to the fire—preferred burning to death than breaking the rules of decorum by moving away from the fire or shouting for help. In this land of hierarchies, titles and entitlements, the worth of a man could indeed be determined by the treatment accorded to his hat.
But never had a cushion been reserved for the head covering of a simple priest!
Doña Fernanda had repeated her command on that day and had done so in such a way that the servant, no fool himself, knew that she too realized the idiocy of her request, that she hated giving the command nearly as much as the good servant hated receiving it, but that some things in life came at a steep price. What those things were, Raimundo could not even hazard a guess, but he could think no improper thoughts of her—not out of any respect, but because it seemed inconceivable that even a character as decrepit and despicable as Don Pedro could want anything improper with the lady of the house. And so Raimundo placated his ire by complaining unendingly about the situation to the servants under his command.
As the scene began, Don Pedro was arriving at a quarter to four, late for his customary appointment with Doña Fernanda. It was a hot day in Seville, hotter than usual for May and the unseasonable heat, coupled with Doña Fernanda’s anxiety over the appearance of yet another dot on her imaginary map, had stewed inside of her to such an extent that by the time Don Pedro rolled in—not, in the end, more than ten minutes late—she had almost resolved to decline receiving him at all.
If only she didn’t need him so.
It is tragic to be burdened with a lack of confidants on whom anxieties can be deposited and whose kind words can erase fears, those imagined and those real, but Doña Fernanda—with her curt demeanour and imperious ways—had managed to alienate everyone but the priest and thank God for the sanctity of his robes, she thought, for many were the secrets she shared with him, always in confessional tones, so that the sanctity of his own vow to secrecy would compel him to keep her words guarded deep inside his breast.
(It did not. Don Pedro did not consider Doña Fernanda’s confessions to be received in his capacity as a priest but as a respected guest who—ojo, señores—was even offered a cushion for his hat. Indeed he poured fuel on many a good hostess’s fire who—for the price of a paltry dish of garbanzos and beef—could learn of the goings-on inside the house of Don Ricardo Medina as if from the mouth of Doña Fernanda herself.)
What ailed Doña Fernanda on most occasions were those dots—markers of her husband’s infidelities—and her husband’s infidelities were the stuff of legend in Seville, a city well accustomed to legends of the sort because it was home, after all, to Carmen, the Barber and Don Giovanni himself.
Madamina, il catalogo è questo. One thousand and three and counting still.
It was yet another indiscretion that had the señora in a state on this day, that had her brimming with anxiety and despair, that hardened her to the many entreaties of Don Pedro to “please forgive me for being late” and “Señora, I am at your feet” and so on until he finally tired of entreating and she tired of hearing him beg.
(“It is amazing, Rosita,” he would tell his sister later, speaking of Doña Fernanda, “that our fair Seville ever produced a slab of stone such as this!”)
“Give your hat to Raimundo,” Doña Fernanda told the priest gruffly, “and sit down quickly, as we have little time and much to discuss.”
“I am at your service, Señora, as always of course,” Don Pedro replied with relief, for he would have hated not to have been forgiven especially because this exchange had been conducted before the insufferable master servant of the house. The same servant had just smirked at him—I am sure of this, he would tell his sister later—as he placed the priest’s hat on the cushion, bowing his way in such an exaggerated manner that Don Pedro knew for sure Raimundo was having a laugh at his expense. And though his blood boiled at the thought of the man’s impertinence, he knew nothing could be said. Some exchanges are conducted so that only the parties involved recognize all the undertones. Doña Fernanda, blind to anything that did not affect her directly, would frankly not have cared had she perceived the injury in any case.
For the next hour the priest paid for his tardiness by having to sit there immobile (not even a drink of agraz was offered this time) as Doña Fernanda embarked upon one of her more vicious tirades—her waiting having made her mood all the more virulent—in which every bone of her husband’s body was put at risk through the enumeration of an impressive array of threats, none, of course, which would ever be realized—this was nineteenth-century Spain after all, and Andalucía yet, where well-to-do men spend Sunday afternoons promenading with wives and children and the evenings with mistresses or whores inside the brothels of Granada and Seville.
So you see, a little indiscretion was not so bad, at least in the larger scheme of things.
Doña Fernanda, it is true, had been bearing the weight of her husband’s many indiscretions quite some time—for it must be said now that she and Don Ricardo did not marry for love; such a luxury could ill be afforded by the more prominent families of the day. The trick was to marry into one’s social circle and forever maintain a stiff inglés upper lip. But Doña Fernanda, a martyr till the end, had never maintained a stiff upper lip, inglés or otherwise.
“This time it is worse, Don Pedro, infinitely worse, for it is happening here, inside my own house. Of this I am sure. Ricardo has always hid his indiscretions badly but this one he is not even bothering to hide at all. Virgen Mara Purísima, the things I am forced to accept.”
The governess. Don Pedro knew it had to be the governess—she was the only one young enough in the household to have attracted Don Ricardo’s eye—a lecherous eye, that one, he would tell his friend Doña Ana later. How that eye ever found itself resting on Doña Fernanda’s face was one of God’s greater mysteries, although marriage was not made for the sins of the heart—even a simple priest like him was certain of that.
For the next hour he sat listening without interjecting anything other than the usual exclamations of Oh and Ah—the signs of outrage expected of him at the appropriate times, as Doña Fernanda vented her rage. “Oh, God, how difficult it is to have been born woman,” she railed until, spent, she finally allowed him to excuse himself. It was almost five by then and he was to give a Mass to free from purgatory the soul of a certain Don Calixto, who had managed to sire six illegitimate daughters throughout his long life, the news of which was snaking its way along the streets of Seville.
“Then do not bother with the Mass, Don Pedro,” Doña Fernanda told him, her nostrils pinched, her head held high, “for that man is not in purgatory, but in Hell roasting along with the rest of the world’s libertines.”
On his way out, Don Pedro made sure to take the insufferable servant aside and, far from the ears of Doña Fernanda, lecture him on proper conduct and the respect that should be granted to the priests who had taken the Sacrament of the Holy Orders: “For there is no greater Sacrament than that, you ignorant peasant—a sacrament that makes one responsible, lest you should forget, for seeking absolution for the mi
serable likes of you. But only, oye bien, when and if they like.”
And with these words barely out of his lips the priest grabbed the hat from the servant’s hands and turned to leave but not before being subjected to one last bow from Raimundo, a bow lower than any bow ever delivered the priest’s way so that the servant’s nose came to touch the floor and his ample behind rose high in the air saluting the heavens from where, it is supposed, God himself watched the scene unfold in silent repose.
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.
