by Bea Gonzalez
“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 not to be a priest but a seminarian masquerading as a man whose allegiance to God had already been pledged—was offering a solution to her plight.
“We need each other,” he said.
Mónica coughed, lowered her eyes, and said nothing yet.
Emilio was careful not to scare her off with the weight of his true feelings. The girl was frightened and the girl was lost, he thought. Why tell her more than she needed to know?
“If we marry,” he continued, “you will have a father for your child, and I, an excuse to abandon the cloth.”
Still she said nothing. But she began to raise her eyes, furtively, stole a quick look at the awkward young man who was seeking, incomprehensibly enough, to make her his wife. His nose was prominent and his skin strangely sallow in a land awash with so much sun—but he was not an altogether repulsive man.
He was not cut from the same cloth as Don Ricardo, she could see that. And let us be clear, this bothered her more than she cared to admit. He had neither the bearing nor the clothes, could clearly not offer her the position she so coveted, a life lived among the luxuries she had grown accustomed to in a short time.
Dreams die hard if they die at all, and Mónica’s dream of marriage to Don Ricardo was struggling to remain alive in the face of a certain ugly demise. Perhaps Doña Fernanda would still succumb to some mysterious disease, she thought. Perhaps she would disappear, would be magically transported to another place and time. Perhaps, quizá, perhaps.
Time was galloping. The walls were caving in.
During the next three weeks, Mónica appeared at the cathedral for her regular morning prayers, where she waited to meet with the seminarian on a bench close to the building’s main doors. Here they sat, not too close but close enough, Emilio growing more determined as each day passed, Mónica’s dreams dissolving, minute by minute, bit by bit.
Do you know, we ask our Abuela, the most powerful of all flamenco songs? The seguiriya, sí, but do we really have to ask this from a woman who lived and breathed for flamenco, for her memories of Seville, where the guitar is ascendant and the tap-tap of the dancer beats constantly, helping the city to keep time? The seguiriya, you say, sí, the most powerful gypsy lament, the one that tells of a tragic and bitter existence, sung in a rhythm that alternates between 3/4 and 6/8 time. It is a song worthy of the lament; for those who are not versed in the intricacies of the cante jondo, it is hard to discern where the seguiriya begins and where it ends.
When we think of Mónica on that bench—a cool spot to hide from the punishment of a too hot sun, a stone chair for a heart that is growing colder and wiser in equal time—it is the seguiriya we hear in the background. It is a song of despair never abandoned by the strumming of a guitar, a song awash in black tones and deep feeling, a song sung for all the dreams we had for ourselves, our hopes and expectations for a life that never delivered on its promise, that took our adolescent dreams and squashed them like a hammer beating on an overripe pear.
They married in the end, no one as happy with the outcome as the surprised, then relieved, and finally, indifferent Don Ricardo, who promptly forgot the whole affair until he was compelled to remember it many years later by a force of hand and a twist of fate.
We have always wondered about Don Ricardo, about men like him. Was he just a simple womanizer or a man more complicated than the details of his life can hope to reveal?
But history is like that. As hard to interpret as a map created by a culture whose traditions and mindset you know nothing about. It leaves only outcomes in its wake and very rarely evidence of the true feelings and motivations of those in whose hands events unfolded and whose actions had a role in shaping our destinies into what they are.
There was one victim who emerged seething from the marriage of Emilio and Mónica—Remedios, Emilio’s Mass-mad mother. Bad enough to have lost her one chance at immortality, her one opportunity to have endless prayers said on her behalf, ensuring her prompt escape from the pit of purgatory into the glory of heaven guarded by St. Peter and his haloed help. Infinitely worse was the fact that her son, the seminarian, had impregnated a nobody from La Mancha, had been forced to make the girl his wife.
She never forgave him. Never saw her grandson who, as we know, was not her grandson in any case. She lived for many years after that, in decent health and in want of nothing, her outrage at her son’s betrayal providing ample fuel to keep her going well past her allotted days.
SCENE FOUR
Inside a bookstore on the Calle San Vicente
Let us turn now to the maps of our childhoods. Therein we find the coordinates of happiness and loss, of innocence and half-remembered dreams. There, too, is the taste of the madeleine and the ever-present promise that hangs, forever suspended in mid-air. Intense sunsets, first-love and heartbreak, moments lived as if all subsequent ones are destined never to pass. The past merges into the present; the pr
esent subsumes into dreams of the future; the future is too nebulous and distant to be of use. Childhood is a dreamlike state, a vibrant map—and for too many lost souls, it is a lifelong curse.
Diego García Clemente, born on a warm Christmas Day, was blessed with a happy early childhood, at least. When Emilio married Mónica, he accepted not only her, but also her son, fully into his heart. “Only saints are born on Christmas Day,” he said to Mónica. “Jesus, the boy Segundo, who once minded my mother’s stables and was as good as freshly baked bread, and our own child, Diego.”
Alas, Abuela, although you wished it otherwise, there would be no other portents that they were witnesses to a momentous birth. No wise men appeared; the trees in Seville did not suddenly burst into bloom; no star shone brightly in the East.
They would have other children, Mónica and Emilio, but all would fail to survive past the early few months—victims of premature birth, disease or, as Mónica liked to put it, “of being wise to what the world would deliver and choosing to abandon it quickly.” Despite Emilio’s kindness, his generosity and his unconditional acceptance of Don Ricardo’s bastard son, Mónica would never fully abandon her dream of reuniting with the Don himself, would never fully accept that this little life she had stumbled upon was the one she deserved and not punishment for having dared to dream. And this thought, insidious but deeply held, hardened her against what others in her position might have interpreted as her supreme good luck.
Instead, she retreated to that spot on her map that marked her past, only to be held captive there by the many if-onlys and the countless could-have-beens. Thus, her days as a convent girl, those days she had once decried for their brutality—the good sisters had taught her well but often with the backs of their hands—seen now from a vantage point skewed by regret, became her glory days, days of fresh air and the smell of the azafrán, and her present life in Seville, the city she had once loved, was now the jail that had, through force of circumstance, become her home.
So it was that she transformed the quiet town of her birth into a shrine, the boredom of the long days and the hard work harvesting the saffron forgotten in the wake of the blow that life had delivered her. Instead, what was now remembered was the town as it appeared on one day a year, dressed in its finest vestments to celebrate the festival of its patron saint, Saint Agatha, when the women congregated at the baker’s house to cook and talk, their efforts infusing the town with the seductive smells of freshly baked cake.
So it is with the past—a state, a place the great St. Augustine spoke of as a spacious palace—a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who really can plumb its depths?
Emilio was not held captive to his past in the least. On the contrary, his love for Mónica had armed him with the courage to embark upon a new life and he did so with relish and without regret. His Uncle Alfonso, owner of a bookstore in the Calle San Vicente, provided him with employment inside his shop, a shop visited increasingly by English travellers who wanted to learn more about Spain. They appreciated being guided by Emilio, whose English was respectable and whose enthusiasm for their own writers flattered and convinced them that they were being served by the very best.
By the time little Diego was one, he was spending most of the day inside the shop—the Librería Alfonso—hiding among the books, a happy prisoner of dust and ticks, mesmerized by the feel of heavy paper, the smell of glue and ink. There he would be taught how to read, first in Spanish and then, under the spell of Emilio’s enthusiasms, in English, as it appeared in the poems of the Romantics. His knowledge of English was forever coloured with elegies and odes, things less useful than they were beautiful, and he came to share Emilio’s belief that English was the language not of progress, as its native speakers believed, but the language of beauty and of life itself.
Uncle Alfonso, a lifelong bachelor and a man of many ill moods, never ceased to complain about the child. “There he is again, the scamp, eating the books,” he would accuse, pointing a shaky finger his way. Emilio would respond by laughing and removing little Diego from the scene of the crime, bits of paper hanging still from the edges of his tiny mouth, screaming at the indignity of being moved until he could crawl back to his spot and resume his meal of words and rhymes.
In his more impatient moments, Uncle Alfonso would try to move the boy with the end of a broom, poking at him until Diego’s screams filled the store and Emilio appeared to rescue him from the old man. But eventually Diego came to view the episodes with the broom as a game and, growing stronger as his aged great-uncle grew weaker, he would pull it from the old man’s hands and swat it back at him until Alfonso’s curses drained the store of all the fine poetry lodged inside.
“The boy belongs with his mother,” he would tell Emilio, who would nod but keep Diego close by his side because there was always something amiss with Mónica. She was either weak because she was pregnant, mourning a dead baby when she was not, and with no energy whatsoever in-between all the births and all the deaths. It was all she could do to keep the house in a semblance of order and cook the occasional meal.
They lived above the store and below Uncle Alfonso, who hovered above them in a room in the attic, from which he shouted at them to be quiet, couldn’t they see he was an old man, infirm and weak, and couldn’t they be thankful, for it was he who had given them a roof to live under and bread to eat? And where was his meal? That’s all he ever asked for, a meal and not a good one at that because Mónica of La Mancha had no talent in the kitchen and from what he could see, little talent to boast of when it came to everything else as well. What a shame to have been burdened with such a woman, Emilio, he would shout down at them. That you should have abandoned God for such a woman is more than a shame, it is an unpardonable sin.
Mónica, her body spent from pregnancy or childbirth, yes, but her lungs made of sterner stuff, would scream up to the attic, “Cállate, viejo. Be quiet for once, you silly fool.” And then, bitter from having to deal with the old man upstairs, from having to live in three small, darkrooms with no fine linen, no kitchen help, nothing to compare to those hallowed days inside the house of Don Ricardo Medina, with its proper courtyard with decorative fountains and plenty of fresh air, she would turn her anger to Emilio.
“Patience, Mónica, patience,” Emilio pleaded with her, though in truth he was the only one with patience, a patience he nurtured by escaping with Diego at every opportunity, to the store, to the street, hiding behind a book that he read by the dim light of a candle, retreating to any corner in search of a moment of quiet, a bit of peace.
It was to escape from the weight of Mónica’s bitterness that Emilio dreamed up the idea of offering tours of the city to the English, for if they had expressed interest in the cathedral, how much more would they express for the city as a whole? “Because Seville is not only a city of oranges,” he would tell Uncle Alfonso, “but a city dreamed of by Hercules and founded by none other than Julius Caesar himself—one, oye, of the greatest men to have ever lived.” And then, to underscore this, he would embark upon reciting the well-known refrain:
Raised by Hercules,
Julius Caesar fortified me,
with high walls and towers,
I was conquered for the king
of heaven by Garcí Pérez de Vargas
to which Uncle Alfonso would respond by rolling his eyes and saying, “That, sobrino, is a load of rot, but if it pleases you and brings in the English money, so be it.”
The tours began slowly at first, but their popularity grew because Emilio not only spoke English but he was also a good story-teller and always knew what to leave out and what to tell. It was his theory that the English people, from whose minds sprang such glorious poetry, had of late been prone to a certain surliness born of industry and that for this condition, stories of love were the only cure. And so along with the tales of the Romans and the Visigoths and eight centuries of Arab rule, he never failed to tell them of Pedro I’s unrequited passion for Doña María Fernández Coronel, who suff
ered immeasurably at the hands of this cruel king, so desperate to have her that he imprisoned her husband and had him tortured to death. Inside the kitchens of the Convent of Santa Clara, the poor woman rid herself of Pedro’s advances by throwing boiling oil over her face. Emilio would tell his group, his eyes raised upwards, passion in his breath, that, thus disfigured, she became venerated for her chastity and her mummified body lay in the choir of the Convent of Santa Inés.
The English liked the story well enough but preferred visiting the great Álcazar and the Giralda to perusing the remains of a virtuous woman disfigured by the obsessions of an ancient Spanish king. In any case, stories of love did not inflame their industrious hearts as Emilio had hoped, but reminded them instead of the unruly passions of the Spanish—and especially the Andalusians—who were responsible for keeping their country mired in the brackish waters of tradition, ignorance and economic despair. A city concerned only with the carnal pleasures of love could not hope to ascend the world’s stage, could not expect to lift itself from its lethargic existence of sleep and song. City of a thousand roses, yes. City of heat and light, that too. But also the city that lost a continent, lest you should ever forget.
And as if to underscore their suspicions, Emilio would then trot the tourists over to the Plaza de los Refinadores to show them the bust of Don Juan Tenorio himself, which astounded the English even more because their busts and statues were of weighty persons like Shakespeare and the great Elizabeth I and not of fictitious libertines.
