The Mapmaker’s Opera. Bea Gonzalez

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СКАЧАТЬ tongue, Remedios’s orders and later her disdain, it was as if all these things had coalesced in Emilio’s gallbladder until it was too much and the beleaguered organ poisoned him to death.

      Diego held Emilio’s hand throughout all of it, hoping against hope that the fever would break, oblivious to Mónica’s shrieks, Mónica’s laments. For what would become of them now, good God? Had she not already weathered enough? Had she not suffered more indignities than the good Job? What was she to do in this wretched city with no husband to protect her, no way to survive without a man to fend for them, without a place to live?

      Uncle Alfonso, old, ill-humoured, tired of life, yes, but genuinely fond of his nephew, genuinely distressed by Diego’s despair, yelled back at her, “Mujer, if there was ever a need for peace it is now, woman. Can’t you see that Emilio lies close to death?” And old as he was, weak and withered as he felt, he dragged the hysterical Mónica upstairs to give his nephew the silence he needed for rest.

      Diego did not record Emilio’s last words, and he leaves to our imagination his feelings, the despair he surely felt as he watched his beloved father fade. But in the half-light of the early morning, a dim and tenuous light, we are sure we can see them—a boy lying over the dying body of the man he has loved deeply, while his father tries desperately to ward off the pain and offer a few consoling words.

      Upstairs a woman wept, engulfed by her fears, wallowing in her misfortune but torn by her equally strong feelings of love—because she did love him, make no mistake. Love is an unruly emotion, few parameters can limit it: There are as many ways to love as there are ways to meet your death and she had loved, not well perhaps, but loved in the only way she could.

      Upstairs, too, an old man grimaced, keeping his emotions in check, tired, distressed with the machinations of the world. Is this how it all ends, Dios mío, he asked, are we mere instruments to be played at the whims of the gods?

      A month would pass after Emilio’s death before Mónica conceived her plan.

      And then a new dot would be added to an ancient map and another wound would be administered just as others were beginning to mend.

SCENE FIVE

       Sorry her lot

      If our philosophers are right, then we must accept their assurances that the bad can only lead to the good, that everything on the ascent is descending at the same time, that tragedy has its purpose and that events transpire as they do because there is a plan, though the shape of it eludes us and the end remains a mystery until the moment it arrives, blowing in like an unpredicted hurricane, strewing the pieces of our little lives about.

      Emilio’s death opened its own doors. Mónica—once drowning in self-pity, a victim of regret and all the wretched disappointments in the world—was sharply awakened, one could say rudely, given the circumstances, but awakened she was and she now grew docile in equal measure to the anger that had possessed her before. Up above her in the attic, counting time with frail fingers and a stale cup of wine, was Uncle Alfonso, revelling in his newfound power, for Mónica would not dare let an errant word escape from her lips now, he surmised correctly. No, señor, not one complaint would readily roll from that wicked tongue.

      Instead—“Could I get you something, Don Alfonso?”—she would ask, her once unhappily pursed lips unzipped, the sarcasm of old displaced by the considerable weight of her fear.

      Uncle Alfonso did not press his luck too eagerly. Old age had its own handicaps—a boulder around a frail neck, you said of it once, Abuela—and old Alfonso was not eager to be abandoned, to be left on his own to face the encroaching frailties that emerged with the passing of time. A weak leg, a cloudy eye, a shaky hand.

      Finally, there was silence—a charged silence to be sure, for the air was wound as tight as the string of a guitar. It was impossible to guess when one of them would snap from the tension, when the veneer of civility would be abandoned and the war of words resumed. But in the immediate aftermath of Emilio’s death, silence filled the house and Diego was thankful for it, wondered often how much his father would have appreciated this sudden ceasefire, how much he would have enjoyed a peaceful home.

      The English kept coming to the store, though the tours were cancelled, Diego being too young for the task. In any case, his knowledge of English was still poor and he had no desire to be trotting about Seville with a group of foreigners bent on a bit of culture after a morning of hunting in the Andalusian countryside; he could not but feel badly for all those dead bustards, the deer, the red-legged partridges and the wild boars.

      Without Emilio, the bookshop fared even worse than before. They were reduced to selling the standards of old—the French and Spanish dictionaries of Nuñez de Taboada, the Arte de la Lengua Arábica of Pedro de Alcalá, paper made of linen, which pleased the Englishmen who were used to the inferior product sold in their own country, paper fashioned from cotton rags.

      Uncle Alfonso rarely descended from the attic to help mind the store—there was no need for it, he reasoned; his own life was sure to end any day, his rheumatic legs were a torture and he could no longer boast of the sharp wits that had once astounded those who knew him—many of whom were now long dead.

      It was easy to grow used to the silence that had emerged in the aftermath of Emilio’s death and hard to recall what all the fuss had been about during all those years of recrimination and strife. Silence such as this was bliss, a pocket of heaven in an often-wretched earth. Sí señor, we should have arrived here long ago, Uncle Alfonso told himself, happily almost. But then he would find himself looking into the eyes of la señorita de La Mancha, and looking into those eyes he would see that for all the amiability that now spilled from her once too-tight lips, those eyes were painting a much different picture instead.

      You have won for now, old man, they were saying, but it won’t always be like this.

      Mónica had a plan. It had entered her head even before Emilio had breathed his last—a guilty sin, a sacrilegious thought weaving its way through her grief, but a welcome solution nonetheless to the sudden tragic turn of events.

      Without Emilio there would be no reason to hide the truth from the boy, to continue misleading him about who his father really was. The time had arrived for Diego to learn that he was not the son of a humble bookseller but of a man of means—that he carried the proof of it in his name, Diego—the name of Don Ricardo’s own beloved father. It was the only request Don Ricardo had ever made with respect to the boy and one she honoured, ignoring Emilio’s dismay and the fact, too, that Don Ricardo already had a son named Diego, named, claro, of course, also for his beloved papá.

      “There is nothing in a name,” she told Emilio when Emilio, timorous and bookish yes, but capable of feeling the slightest injury in the core of his being, mouthed his objection to this. “A name means nothing in the end,” she had argued then, but deep down she felt quite the opposite to be the case. The name Diego would connect her son to Don Ricardo, would keep the flames of her hope alive. Perhaps there could still be a marriage in the end. Perhaps Doña Fernanda would finally succumb and things would be put in their proper place—Diego would be returned to the home that should have been his from the start.

      What would happen to Emilio she had not considered at that time. She never envisaged his death—she dreamed only half-truths and half-dreams where the barriers to fulfillment merely melted away. It was a dream that had nurtured and comforted her through all those years with Emilio, all those miscarriages, the stillbirths and the two-week-old СКАЧАТЬ