by Bea Gonzalez
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.”
Later, when he thought back to that day, Diego would recall that he had not liked the thought of this. He had not liked it one bit.
SCENE SIX
The house on the other side of the world
The “soon” arrived sooner than he imagined, sooner than he would have chosen if it had been offered up as a choice.
What madness was coursing through Mónica’s mind when she conjured up the idea of a meeting between father and son? History did not record it. History—Diego—recorded only the lengths to which Mónica went to find him the right attire for the occasion, the right attire being as essential in Spain a century ago as it still seems to be today.
With the skills she was taught by the nuns, she sewed breeches of black velvet—“not the finest velvet, not fine at all,” she told him, “but no one will notice in the dim light of the parlour inside Don Ricardo’s house.” She sewed also a vest of blue cashmere with black stripes and added the coral buttons she had acquired in exchange for a slim bracelet given to her long ago by the Don himself.
And when she deemed him suitably attired, she turned her attention to ridding Diego of all of his Emilio-inspired fantasies—the maps, all talk of American birds, the views of Seville as seen from the perspective of a tour guide—“Por favor, Diego,” she cautioned him, “just remember that no one cares about Columbus. And that the Mappa Mundi whatever of Juan whoever is just a piece of parchment. What matters, Diego, is who you know, the homes where you are received, the treatment accorded to your hat.”
Diego nodded, thought again that his mother might be a little mad.
She moved on to the issue of language. In this case, Emilio’s beloved English.
“Members of Don Ricardo’s circle do not pepper their phrases with English but with the glorious words of the Italians and the French. Look here,” she instructed and then proceeded to mouth the one or two French words she had heard Don Ricardo utter, using the same exaggerated mannerisms that had marked all of the Don’s phrases and that had given him that pompous air that amused his servants and irritated his wife to no end.
There was more. Lessons on how to kiss a lady’s hand, on how to treat the help that answered the door, on what words are to be used in a note if the gentleman of the house happened to be out and a note was required. He learned too how important it was to be the first to applaud at the opera (though he would never attend an opera in Seville or indeed, anywhere else, “But you never know, hijo,” his mother told him, “knowledge like this seeps through the very skin”); the importance of good form on a horse and the authors that gentlemen of a certain kind are expected to read: Paul de Kock, d’Alencourt, Voltaire and Sir Walter Scott.
Mónica had, of course, never read any of these books, had never been to the opera or any other public performance of any kind. But she had been seduced by Don Ricardo’s talk of these things, had been taken in by his meticulous renditions of the minutiae of upper-class life: the words, the dress, the food, and yes, even, silly girl, the colourful descriptions of the love affairs that all gentlemen like the Don were expected to have.
Mónica had but one thought in her head. She wanted something more ya, now, ahora, do you hear me? she screams across the ocean, her voice still crystal clear even though more than a century has passed. For I was not born to live like this, she is yelling, I was not born to sew breeches, I was not born to be deprived of a flower that once grew freely at my door. I was not born to serve an old man in an attic, whom I despise and fear.
All that time, as Emilio and Diego traipsed across Seville with their tourists in tow, Emilio rattling off this fact and that, Diego trying to make himself useful, offering up oranges, water and fans to keep the heat from injuring sensitive English heads, Mónica had been busy with a little rattling of her own.
Seville was not so big that you couldn’t find out things, that you didn’t know a servant who knew another servant who knew the master of Don Ricardo’s house. Oh and how eager too they were to share the goings-on inside the houses they served, for make no mistake about it, there is not a servant in the world who doesn’t resent those whom they serve, no matter how well they are treated—no matter the little extras given to them from the pantry of a spacious kitchen, the well-intentioned offer of second-hand clothes. Between a man and his superior there can only be resentment travelling along one route—from below to above, from the shoes that the servant polishes in the morning to the hair he brushes from his master’s coat in the afternoon. And there is no better cure for resentment, no better way to assuage it when it rears its ugly he
ad than to spread the news that a master wants kept hidden—the battles, the embarrassments, the secrets guarded fiercely inside each and every home.
This was how Mónica had come to learn of the disappointment Don Ricardo felt with the other Diego—his eldest and only legitimate son, whose bad fame was legendary in Seville. This was how she had come to learn of the elder Diego’s addiction to gambling and of his drinking, a weakness that had exuded from his chin when he was younger, a weakness that had grown more pronounced until chin melded into neck. That was how she arrived at the idea that her Diego must be offered up as a substitute, thinking—ever the strategist, ever the fashioner of ridiculous dreams—that Don Ricardo could not but welcome this worthy young man. Heir to his father’s strong jaw and his hawkish nose, but most of all, worthy of the name given to him—he was a young man capable of being the New World whereas all the other Diego could be was the Old—dilapidation, waste, a land buckling from the weight of its own decay, desperate for the fresh air that arrived with the discovery of every unknown land. Let any conquistador tell you just how fresh.
In the meantime, lost in adolescent fantasies culled from ancient books and maps, Diego too was thinking of a new world—not a world fashioned by conquistadores but one that arose from the dusty realms of a seventh-century mind. Diego was a dreamer at heart, heir through his mother’s line to the illusions that had once captivated another Manchegan, the Don of all Dons—Don Quijote himself, who with nag and squire rode out one day to set the world right.
Can you guess what Diego was thinking? No? We will tell you then. The young man was meditating on the notion of Paradise. Spain’s very own Isidore of Seville had been the first to place it on a map, the first to describe it from its many fruit trees to the firewall that enclosed it to the glorious temperatures that could be enjoyed inside. That was how one man, theologian, archbishop and encyclopedist (as if the previous two weren’t enough) perpetuated a myth that would persist throughout the Middle Ages in the form of a seductive dot.
Paradise, east of the land of spices, the land of incense, the source of morning light. What would Isidore have made of us, so eager to sail west, far from the source of paradise, away from the rising light?
Diego told his mother about Isidore of Seville, of spices and incense and the light that beckoned from the east. Mónica, usually quick to dismiss such stories—“Hijo,” she would exclaim, “this sounds like one more tale from that Señor Raleigh and tell me, why has he troubled your head with such things?”—surprised him this time by asking to hear more about this Isidore and the paradise that had appeared, until the fourteenth century, in every medieval map as a destination in the farthest reaches of Asia, a beacon, a promised land.
When he had told her everything he knew, his mother screamed out in delight, “There you have it, Diego. Your father’s house lies also to the east. Sí, sí! Think of it as a sort of paradise of your very own and so it is. A grand house with a grand courtyard and help to spare. And like paradise it holds a spice more precious than any other,” she told him, referring once again to her beloved azafrán.
Poor Diego was so taken aback by his mother’s unexpected reaction to their very own Isidore that he did not have the heart to tell her that the paradise that appeared on those maps had never been found.
The day arrived and in his breeches of velvet not-so-fine-but-it-will-do, in his vest with the coral buttons and the black stripes, he stood before his mother as she inspected him for lint and bad posture, combed his hair, rubbed an imaginary spot from his well-scrubbed face, all the while fretting over one thought—would he be found worthy of Don Ricardo’s approval, would he be found worthy of being Don Ricardo’s son?
Skinny Diego, all eyes and limbs, had only one desire in mind and that was to keep his mother’s love. His trip along the east, towards an Eden of its own kind, a house with a grand courtyard, a house with servants and paella made with good-as-gold azafrán, was important to him only in equal measure to the happiness it would bring to his not completely right-in-the-head Mamá.
So it is that he found himself arriving at his destination almost by accident, travelling through the streets of Seville in a haze—water offered by water-sellers, oranges peddled by boys much younger than he; Eh niño, a gypsy woman screamed out to him, Where are you going dressed in such finery on a hot day like this?
Later he would remember none of it, not the water-sellers, not the oranges, not the taunt of the gypsy nor the furious bells of the cathedral that rang in honour of a dead man’s soul. He would forget that day’s heat, beating on his back and on the top of his head, the sounds that erupted around him, the screams, the laughter, the mournful song of the blind man who sat on a street corner with an outstretched hand, the beauty of the courtyards glimpsed during his interminable walk, step after step, heart in his hand.
It was Master Raimundo, the same servant who had once bowed disrespectfully to the busybody cleric, Don Pedro, who answered the bell when Diego rang it and in ringing it realized at that moment that there was no turning back, that if Emilio were observing from high above, then Please forgive me, he thought, I want nothing from this Father, not riches, not acceptance, certainly not love.
We can only imagine, sitting here all these years and years later with the benefit of hindsight, how different things would have been at that very moment if Diego Clemente had obeyed his most powerful instinct, which was to run back to his humble home.
Instead he stayed, found himself staring at the coat of arms painted on the blue tile that surrounded a door made of Oxford oak, found himself responding to the question of “Who goes there?” which rang out from beyond the door, in a voice an octave higher than its usual tone—found himself saying what was expected of him, “a person of peace,” as he waited breathlessly for Raimundo to shuffle over and let him in.
The servant did not know the young man who appeared before him, but he suspected that he was related in some way to a gambling debt of the other Diego and, suspecting this, immediately began to shake. Inside that house, visiting Don Ricardo at that very moment, was none other than a Duke. There was no title more important in all of Spain aside from the king himself and it had taken years and years of effort on Don Ricardo’s part to coax this man to his door. The servant knew Don Ricardo would be less than pleased at being interrupted by this—a collector of yet another debt foisted upon him by his failure of a son. And being less than pleased, Don Ricardo would take it out on Raimundo, for having the temerity to allow this young man inside, for daring to excuse himself when an excuse was demanded and finally for just existing because his mere existence could not but affront Don Ricardo in that angered state. But what could the good servant do? He feared the scandal the young man could create even more than the severe reprimand he was sure to receive from the Don.
“Look here, could you not come back some other time?” he asked the young man anxiously. But no, he could not, this was a matter of great importance Raimundo was told, and it could not wait for another time nor, Diego thought to himself, could he face the prospect of the long trek across Seville to visit this house once more.
There was nothing to be done. Raimundo escorted the young man through the courtyard, as grand as his mother had described it with its porcelain tiles and its glorious fountain and the potted flowers on every corner. Do you see them, Diego? he heard his mother ask, such beauty, such symmetry, such perfect pitch. He wandered through a hall whose walls seemed to buckle under the weight of the many engravings of saints and ebony crosses and the portraits of family ancestors, with their thin lips and imperious gazes, trying all the while to quell the volcanic rumblings in his stomach, the sense of foreboding that had lodged itself in his knees.
He was escorted then to the withdrawing room, the parlour where all visitors were received, where he listened still in a haze as his name was called out—Don Diego Clemente, he heard. He watched nervously as three men, dressed in grand clothes, cigars in hand, turned to look at him quizzically
, then dismissively, for a young man dressed in such clothes could not be deserving of too much respect, they communicated to him with their eyes; a man dressed like that was perhaps not even worthy of being referred to as a “Don.”
“I come on a private matter,” he said, addressing the room in general, for he did not know which of the three was his father, could not even venture a guess, and as he said these words he noticed, for the first time, the woman who sat on the sofa, a sour-faced lady dressed in black, none other than Doña Fernanda herself.
The three men who stood before him—the Duke, Don Ricardo and Don Eusebio Villareal—had been discussing matters of great importance, judging from their flushed faces, their conspiratorial tones, the last traces of their madre mias and their many Por Dioses. No, it was not politics that occupied these weighty minds, nor the scientific discoveries taking the continent by storm. While other Europeans of their ilk threw themselves into industry, made daring excursions and invented machines that would revolutionize the world, here were these men—Spain, scant years away from losing her last colony, of becoming the backwater of Europe, the nation of last resort—yes, while their nation wilted away, Spanish men of means gathered in each other’s salons dressed in grand clothes to fritter away the hours with gossip, idle chatter, cigars in mouth, snuff up the nose.
Don Ricardo, eager to impress the Duke and surmising, as Raimundo had, that this visit could only be related to the gambling debts of his son—the scoundrel, a crooked branch on an otherwise healthy tree, he thought—immediately excused himself before his guests and informed Raimundo that he would take this visit in the parlour at the back.
