The Mapmaker’s Opera. Bea Gonzalez

as to sing, his voice as powerful an instrument as there ever was—a mixture, in the words of the great poet of flamenco, García Lorca, of Italian honey and lemon from Andalusian soil—a man who knew all the songs and sang them until those who listened wept in despair and begged him to stop.

      Inside the Café de Silverio—a Sevillian patio with a fountain in the centre, Moorish columns, multicoloured tiles and the sacred platform, the tablao, from where guitarists, dancers and singers conducted their incomparable Mass at the front—Emilio sat night after night until the amber voices of the singers insinuated themselves into his blood, displacing the hallowed words of the English poets with the sighs of the seguiriyas and the howls of the soléas.

      There, on that sacred stage, the singers intoned and declaimed what he himself could not, the frustrations, the deceptions, the ache that surged from the weight of all life’s unfulfilled promises, an existence where there were only scant minutes of happiness, scattered pages where one had expected more substantial tomes. It was as if the singer and he were strings tuned to the same pitch, and when one was plucked, the other could not help but vibrate sympathetically to the touch. It was as if something had been unearthed from that part of himself that had once seen the potential in everything, that had been able to fashion dreams from specks, universes from three lines of a poem.

      Inside the café, a cup of wine in his hand, his eyes heavy from the sounds, the smells, the view of a dancer’s bare leg as a foot came down furiously on the floor, Emilio felt himself transported to a kingdom outside of space and time. Olé, he whispered at first, unable just yet to let the word rise forcefully from its birthing place in the pit of his gut.

      (Was he aware, we ask ourselves, that the mathematical proportion of the distances between the planets from the Sun out to Saturn is exactly that of the notes on a guitar string? And if he did know, did he attribute this relationship to the ethereal nature of the music, to its capacity for invoking the heights of heaven and the depths of hell below? Alas, this we will never know.)

      He now arrived back home in the early hours of the morning—the hours of indecency, Mónica called them, for she was afraid of this new Emilio, this stranger who arrived humming to himself, eyes lost inside mysterious landscapes, sour wine emanating from skin and breath. She was afraid that she was losing her grip on her husband, that he had gone the way many others have before and since, was spending the little they had on pleasures she abhorred. Above all, it enraged her that he was siphoning resources from their already inadequate stocks.

      “You have turned out as rotten as the rest,” she spat at him when he stumbled in, uncaring, tired, needing only the comfort of silence and a partial night’s rest. And so he would climb into bed alongside her and offer her his back, falling into sleep almost immediately, leaving Mónica to nurse her bitterness and reproaches until the morning light announced the day and then Emilio would slip away quickly again, leaving her with all of her unexpressed rage stored corrosively inside.

      She thought: How has this come to pass? How has this respectable man, once a servant of God, managed to degenerate into this lamentable state? How has he come to wander so perilously down this shameful path?

      She blamed it on the old man on top. Uncle Alfonso in his attic with his miserly ways and his venomous tongue. She was sure that the old man was hoarding the profits from the bookstore, that there was much more to be had than the old swindler would admit, that he meant to keep them like this, dressed in rags, living from hand to mouth like peasants, beholden to him, when he gave them so little and he himself had so much. She was convinced that this, above all else, was driving Emilio into the arms of disgrace, driving him into the darkest hours of the night in search of respite from the unappeasable sorrows that plagued him in the harsh light of day.

      She cried, full of pity for herself, not yet thirty years old and an old woman already, with little to look forward to—nothing but the endless drudgery of cook, clean and mend. And the unbearable sun to contend with, and the smells of Seville, the burning charcoal, the horse manure, the grease and the sweat. And the noises, the infernal conflagration of noises, yells, barks, the sobbing of children, the clanging of church bells. When would it all stop, dear God, when would the misery end? She brought her fingers up to her nose then and summoned the scent of the fifteen ingredients from her aunt’s stew, the memory of a distant childhood, uncomplicated, secure.

      And Emilio thought: How lucky I am to find myself in this city filled with life, this city that bears witness to el compás, to the beat that makes all music ring truthfully, ring loud, ring straight through to the heart. He thought this because it was night, because darkness had descended and the voices would soon cease to utter mere words and be overtaken by song instead and the pain would rise to the surface then, would be experienced and then expunged. He had, for the first time in his life, found a way to balance body and spirit, to cope with the disappointments of the morning by receding with the singers into the underworld.

       Estoy viviendo en el mundo

       Con la esperanza perdida.

       No es menester que me entierren

       Porque estoy enterrao en via.

       (I am living in the world

       with no hope to speak of.

       Don’t bother to bury me

       for I am buried alive already.)

      Emilio thought: There is much in the world left to me. The bejewelled night, the endless river of song, the hope I carry in my heart for Diego, the brightest star in the heavens, my beloved son.

      And Mónica thought: There is much in the world to despair of. The sorrowful days, the smells and the noise, the fear I hold in my heart for Diego, fruit of my one true love, my only son.

      In the meantime, Diego himself, now eleven years old—lost until then in a world circumscribed by books and maps, a sanctuary in which to hide from his mother’s bitterness, the ill moods of his Great-uncle Alfonso, the unhappiness that radiated from his father’s eyes, all the disappointments that seeped from their hearts and into the very walls of the house—was moments away from placing another piece in the puzzle that would become his life, moments from adding bits of earth and sky to a hitherto uncharted bit of his map.

      It was around this time that a book arrived at the Librería Alfonso for el Señor Raleigh. The Englishman had recently settled in Seville, hoping the climate would soothe the aches in his aged bones and that the proximity to the Archives of the Indies—the impressive building that housed the history of the Discoveries—would satisfy the unquenchable curiosity that continued to course through his blood.

      The arrival of this book marked the moment that Diego Clemente left all childish things behind. Herewith, he would embark on the journey that would begin right there, as a single bacterium that lodged itself in his mind, a fantasy, a boy’s delusion that, like the delusions of small and great men alike, would provide the spark to send him across an ocean and deposit him into the arms of the Mondo Novus, the glorious New World.

      What book was this you ask? Ah, in a million years you would never guess. For it was none other than one of the volumes of the famed octavo edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, published in 1842, hand-coloured and magnificent even if plates had been removed here and there so that he could no longer admire the Brewer’s Black-bird nor the Crimson-Throated Purple Finch. But there were treasures to be had, in any case. There, in all their natural splendour, were the Cape May Wood Warbler, the Burrowing Day Owl, the Louisiana Tanager, the homely but comforting Brown Finch.

      Diego hid the book inside the floorboards where he kept the three precious items that provided him with comfort when all upstairs was awash with regret and loss—a tin horn, a glass marble and a book of Becquer’s poetry, ragged and well worn but magical, he thought, a salve against the injustices inflicted by those who claimed to love him most.

      And now this, an infinitely more precious book. He failed, in his ignorance, to appreciate how precious it actually was, but the boy had his own barometer to gauge the things of the world and the monetary value of the book would not have impressed