Bea Gonzalez - The Mapmaker’s Opera

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.