The Mapmaker's Opera

by Bea Gonzalez

  “And next to me, Señor Diego Clemente, assistant to Mr. Nelson of the United States Biological Survey.”

  “Of course,” Don Victor says, waving a cigar Diego’s way.

  Nonentities, Don Victor thinks, just exactly as I had thought.

  “Now, son, perhaps you should make your way back to the hall. There are many young ladies searching for you inside so that they may dance a quadrille or a waltz.”

  Ah, my loving, devoted Papá, Carlos thinks, scorn in his eyes. Always trying to bend those around him to his will. Always looking to reshape the world to fulfill his infinite needs. Ah, but the boy has his own arms with which to fight.

  “You are so right, Papá,” the young man says with a triumphant smile. “But I cannot think of a woman I would rather be dancing with than the señorita who is standing next to me now.”

  He turns to Sofia, whose face is now a bright pink, who can feel the tension that is coursing between father and son and who dares not look at Diego for fear of his reaction to Carlos’s words.

  But Diego is unaffected by what he hears, is much more concerned by what he can see. Is it really ever possible to leave the past behind? he asks himself, as he stares at Don Victor Blanco, whose appearance and demeanour catapult him back into a distant time. Don Ricardo Medina, he thinks, resuscitated in a new country and in different dress. The voice is similar, the way he holds his head exact and those sea-bream eyes—it is the eyes, above all, that remind Diego of the Andalusian aristocrat he had seen but once.

  “Forgive me,” Diego hears Sofia say. “But I have been nursing a most violent headache and would prefer to be sitting down.”

  Carlos blinks hard, offers to show Sofia to a quiet space inside.

  Don Victor’s smile grows tighter until it seems etched upon his stone face.

  Rejected by a nonentity, he thinks. The clown! And right here in front of my friends. He will have a word later with the boy’s mother, threaten to cut his son off entirely if he continues with these pubescent charades.

  The young people leave now, Sofia walking quickly ahead, the two young men behind her, strolling silently in the half-lit night.

  Inside the ballroom, Sofia is greeted by her mother, her grandmother and her aunt with a mixture of anger and relief.

  “Where have you been?” they ask. “We have been worried sick,” they accuse.

  Sofia pleads for understanding. “I am not feeling well,” she says, one hand cradling a hot cheek. “It is better that we leave.”

  Leave? Surely not now! No, the women will not have it, are not prepared to sacrifice this opportunity to one of Sofia’s ill moods.

  “And just what were you doing with those two young men?” Doña Laura whispers to the girl, taking her aside. “In my day, girls were decent, knew what was expected of them. Ah, but how we have fallen. How one girl can ruin a family reputation that has been pure for centuries now.”

  But Sofia is not prepared to appease anyone at this point in time—has had enough of the evening, will not respond to threats issued by her enraged grandmother, the urgent pleas from Gabriela to stay, or even Aunt Marta’s gentle admonitions that they must not appear rude by leaving precipitously.

  Only Don Roberto seems unconcerned by his daughter’s wish to leave the hallowed Blanco Torres ball and will remain unconcerned even after his wife has complained bitterly and unendingly to him once they have left, to the point of accusing him of having allowed Sofia to wander down dangerous paths, of not having been careful to inculcate the good breeding expected of a girl of her kind. He will sleep soundly all through the night, knowing that the rest will be much needed to face his mother’s wrath the following day. But for now, contentment! A soft bed, his feet liberated finally from the boots that have tortured him all night. He thinks he will throw them out when he awakens, remembers to thank God that the affair has ended with no one bringing up the issue of his debt.

  “Come on woman, sleep!” he implores his wife, who has moved on from Sofia to the horrendous ball gowns that had been everywhere in evidence that night.

  “The dress on that Ballesteros woman!” she prattles on. “Does she not have a mirror to tell her the truth? And what about Doña Magdalena, with those cherries in her hair as if she were a piece of unripe fruit! A disaster, Roberto, from the top of her fruit basket of a head right to the tips of her oddly shaped feet.

  “Roberto!” Gabriela exclaims now, turning to her husband, who has begun snoring audibly by her side. But it is no use, no amount of poking will awaken him from his sleep and so Gabriela takes her place next to him on the bed, cursing, not for the first time, her husband’s lack of interest in anything that does not have wings.

  SCENE THREE

  Ah! je vais l’aimer

  – Béatrice et Bénédict

  Forget about it.

  It is Nelson speaking, trying to lay Diego’s guilt to rest. It is the morning after the ball and all across the now quiet city, the chickens are coming home to roost.

  For Diego, it is his bare hands that weigh the most—hands, he thinks, that should have been capable enough to honour a simple request. For weeks he had rehearsed over and over in his mind the path he would take. Parlour, dining room, hall, across a courtyard and then east towards home. No, not home, he corrects himself, the anger rising in his chest. Towards the aviary, towards the birds, two Passenger Pigeons trapped in a cage.

  “It was an insane idea, Diego,” Nelson adds. “I was obviously not thinking clearly when I asked for such a thing to be carried out.”

  The two men are sitting on the edge of a forest just five kilometres outside town, trying to erase the bitterness of defeat with the consolation provided by nature’s bounty in the spectacular early-morning light. Nelson begins to whistle a tune, trills that rise in pitch from beginning to end, attempting with his song to lure a Long-Billed Gnatwren to his side. Diego burrows deeper and deeper into his shell, watches listlessly as the bird darts quickly through the low forest brush, weaving in and out of sight.

  “There is an undertone in the bird’s song, do you hear it, Diego?”

  “Yes, Mr. Nelson. It seems sad, dark and alone.”

  The intricacies of birdsong, which had provided the weightiest challenges to Diego’s understanding of bird life at the beginning, now seem more interesting to him than the look of the bird itself. Eyes, ears and mouth, Mr. Nelson had repeated over and over during their first jaunt into the field. Eyes to see with, ears to listen with, mouth to whistle a song in return. For the past year, Diego has immersed himself in the language of the birds. Tempo, pitch, pattern and quality have become his measuring sticks. Over time he has come to know if a song is buzzy or clear, liquid or fluting, loud or soft. He has learned to distinguish between the various types of songs, knows how to interpret the pauses between the calls. A year after his arrival, a year spent learning at the master’s feet, Diego has become obsessed with the songs of the various species of birds.

  “Yes, Diego. The bird is indeed singing in a minor key.”

  The Gnatwren embarks on a series of long trills now, a much happier tune. Diego strains to listen, but his efforts to reproduce the tune are all for naught today—his mind is distracted; his worries will not let him focus on the subtleties in the bird’s song.

  “I am sorry, Mr. Nelson,” he says, shaking his head. Another failure, he thinks, still mulling over the disastrous events of the previous night.

  “Don’t worry, Diego. These things take their time.” Nelson whistles out another song, in a different pitch and a greater length."I was thinking the moon," about the moon,” he says, once the song is done.

  “The moon?”

  “Yes, the moon. I was thinking back to my days in the Yukon—of a morning when an entire village had come together to make sense of the lunar eclipse that had occurred the previous night. Various interpretations were bandied about, the most popular of which seemed to be that the eclipse presaged an epidemic or a war. Some people were even more specific
though. They thought it meant they would be raided by the Tinné who lived up the river, as revenge on the Eskimo for having killed some of their moose the year before.”

  Here Nelson stops. He picks up his field glasses and investigates the other birds hovering up above.

  “The ancient Maya thought that an eclipse was caused by a giant jaguar devouring the moon. They feared that this jaguar would descend to the earth afterwards and eat people until it was full.

  “Is it not astounding, Diego, this need that compels peoples all over the world to interpret nature, to see messages inscribed in every natural event?”

  A silence follows and then Nelson embarks on another series of trills.

  These are the stories Diego usually loves the most, the moments when out of the blue, his patrón recounts an experience he had had in the Arctic or in northern Mexico or in the American southwest, moments when he shares a theory, a thought. Today, though, Diego is in no mood to listen with the careful attentiveness he usually lends to Mr. Nelson’s words. Diego is carrying a hot coal in the pit of his stomach, a smoldering, painful reminder of his failure to get the task done. Try as he might, he cannot rid himself of the shame, rid himself of the rage at having failed to save a bird from the very precipice of extinction itself.

  Two birds in hand, he thinks, two birds that would have been on their way to Cincinnati today had he been more careful from the start. He thinks then of Don Victor Blanco, of those sea-bream eyes, and his thoughts suddenly lead him to the one place he hoped never to return—the house of Don Ricardo Medina, his father, the man for whom his mother had pined all of her life. Bastard! he says to himself, thinking of Don Ricardo and then of Don Victor. Bastards both.

  “Do you know what overtones are, Diego?”

  “No, Mr. Nelson, I do not.”

  “In music, overtones are what make up a complex note. They give an instrument its timbre or tone colour. In life, I have observed that these overtones correspond to those elements in every experience that linger long after the experience itself has passed—memories, shock, emotional residues, reactions and things of the like.

  “Overtones make for the finest poetry, Diego, the most sublime songs. But I have found they are not so useful when it comes to dealing with the vagaries of everyday life itself.”

  Diego feels as if his patrón can read each of his thoughts. He would like to appease him, to put the sorry episode behind. He knows Mr. Nelson feels no anger at his failure to secure the birds, is relieved even that things turned out as they did. But Diego cannot let the matter go. Until yesterday he had thought he had put an ocean between himself and his past. But oceans too are full of overtones, overtones to torture those who, like Diego, are blessed with a discerning ear and a sensitive heart.

  “Forget about it, muchacho,” Mr. Nelson says again, gently, and he places his arm around the young man’s shoulder, delivers some reassuring pats to his back and then returns to the bounties of nature that, alone on earth, have the power to make things right.

  *

  Across town, Sofia slept fitfully all during that long, treacherous night. Guilty thoughts kept her awake. If only I had not followed Diego. If only I had been less impulsive, less curious. But then what? a little voice interjects. She knows something awful occurred the night before, knows that a train had derailed in Diego’s head, but she is uncertain as to the destination of this train or who the passengers were. One question obsesses her, above all. What task had Diego been entrusted to carry out at the ball? All through the night she searched her brain for clues—snippets of conversation she overheard, the notes she had once rummaged through—but things seem as murky in the morning as they were in the thick of night.

  It is all right, she tells herself. Time will bring all things into the light. Right now I must find a way to see Diego, apologize for having ruined his plans, whatever they were.

  First, though, she must face the prospect of breakfast with three women who have still not overcome their shock at the missed opportunity, who will talk about this missed opportunity until they grow weary from their words, until they have hashed and rehashed the memory of the night and have thoroughly exhausted themselves with the sorry bits.

  Luckily, her father appears, fresh from a dressing-down by his mother, fresh too from having stood up to her on his daughter’s behalf. Backbones are emerging in Mérida on this glorious day. Let us just see if they will be used for greater things than holding meddling mothers back.

  “Ah, there you are, Sofia,” he says as she approaches the table, where three sets of eyes stare at her with muted rage. “Eat quickly so we can head out to the bookstore. A shipment is arriving from New York and I need to get it sorted out before we open at ten.”

  Sofia sits down and stares at her breakfast of sweet buns, tropical fruit and soft cheese. She is not hungry in the least and the prospect of eating with those three sets of eyes fixed upon her can only make the situation worse, but she chews on a piece of fruit in any case, careful to keep her mouth full, careful to avoid meeting any one set of furious eyes.

  Mercifully, the two leave quickly, Sofia with head bowed down, Don Roberto sporting a satisfied smile. He is feeling well rested, well fed, content, almost, despite the burdens he guards so close to his chest.

  “What are we to do with that girl?” Gabriela asks as they leave, shaking her head in defeat, and for once it is Doña Laura who offers a there, there in consolation, putting aside their historical enmity so that they may band together now against this much greater ill.

  Thankfully, there is much to occupy Sofia at the store since Don Roberto’s mind is occupied with other matters. Later, he will need to attend to business at the hacienda once again. Things are getting worse; indeed, they are spiralling right out of control. The harvest had been good, but there are fewer bodies to process the leaves once they have been cut. Don Roberto cannot afford to purchase one more worker to do the work, let alone the fifty he realistically needs. To purchase such help would mean going further into debt and the hand that once freely offered the money has of late turned into a clenched fist.

  “Hombre,” Don Victor Blanco had told him the last time Don Roberto approached him for help, “you understand that it is not the time to put out but to receive what is already owed.”

  Sofia spends the morning trying to quell the butterflies that flutter in her gut, jumping every time the door opens, expecting to see Diego walk in as if they had agreed to such a meeting the night before. Few customers of any kind arrive that day. They sell no more than a child’s workbook and a copy of La Hacienda magazine. A henequen planter places an order for a technical manual published in France. The morning moves at a snail’s pace. Finally, as they are ready to close the doors at midday, Very Useful makes an appearance, smiling from ear to ear, his hair tousled, his happiness a welcome respite for the father and daughter, who have spent the morning nursing their respective worries to themselves. Sofia is the first to jump up, welcomes Very Useful to the store with an effusiveness that seems out of place.

  “Señorita!” Very Useful exclaims in surprise. “Really, it is just me, a lowly assistant and not a divine apparition who has fallen from the sky.”

  Sofia smiles, beckons him warmly to her side. A suspicious light suddenly turns on in Very Useful’s mind. He is no fool, knows that the señorita is not seeking him personally but whatever information may be lying in his head. He starts to walk backwards, inching ever closer to the door, issues a hurried apology, insists he must take his leave at once, go in search of the other two men. But Sofia has already arrived at the door, has positioned herself in such a way as to make it impossible for him to leave.

  “Señorita?” Very Useful asks, mouth twisted, eyebrows raised high. He is looking at the door, trying to find a way to escape quickly before he is made to speak.

  “What was Diego doing in that aviary last night?” Sofia asks quietly, trying not to draw her father’s attention their way but making it clear with her tone of voice
that she is determined to extract the truth from Very Useful no matter the cost.

  “Why, looking at birds!” Very Useful cries out. “What else does one do in an aviary, my girl?”

  “Looking at birds in the dark?”

  “Well, how was he supposed to know that the birds had been kept in the dark? The whole hacienda was lit up like a fireworks display last night. One could easily have supposed the birds had been granted a night of merriment, a night of frolic and dance.”

  “There had to have been something else, Very Useful,” the young lady insists, but Very Useful will not budge, is not about to reveal anything that will incriminate even one single hair of Diego’s unsuspecting head.

  “Do you know, Señorita Sofia, how well that young man dances a waltz?” Very Useful now asks, trying to change the subject of the conversation before he accidentally reveals more than he should. “Yes, I taught him myself. He wanted nothing more than to try his new skills on you but alas, you took your leave so early and so suddenly last night. Really, Señorita Sofia, you could at least have had the decency to leave a glass slipper behind!”

  But the señorita is in no mood to play games. She is about to threaten to pull him by the ear, but Very Useful has already clasped his hands dramatically in prayer.

  Te rogamos, audi nos, he says in plainchant mode.

  “What?” the Señorita asks, confused. Hear us, we beg you. Hear what? She opens her mouth to ask but is stopped by her father, who has now joined them at the door.

  “Leaving, my good man?” he asks Mr. Nelson’s assistant.

  “Running,” Very Useful responds, and with a quick bow to Don Roberto he is already out the door.

  *

  The bookstore closed for the afternoon, Sofia heads home with a heavy heart. Bad enough she has not received a visit from Diego, bad enough she has not been able to figure out the mystery, but worse, infinitely worse, is the prospect that awaits her at home—facing the three sullen women still fretting over the thought of a wasted dress. May God protect me, she prays. The disappointments of the day will only make their anger seem harder to bear.