The Mapmaker’s Opera. Bea Gonzalez

would easily lose all sense of time. With her words, the streets of nineteenth-century Seville would come alive and we swore we could see the señoritas, with their long black hair and their tortoiseshell combs, flirting with the men from opened windows; that we could hear the call of the water-sellers, hear the steady strokes of the brooms as the cleaners made their way through the narrow streets; that we could smell the oranges and the jasmine and even the pungent olive groves, though there were no olive groves for miles but just the hint of their scent in the air; that we could feel the taconeo of the flamenco dancers’ feet deep inside our hearts; that we could taste the saffron in Bautista’s famous paellas and stews.

      And when she was all done with Seville she would carry us over the ocean, across a tumultuous sea—“because this is a story without borders,” our Abuela would say, “a story that although rooted in place and time manages to transcend both”—and suddenly we would find ourselves in Mexico, melting in the unbearable heat of the Yucatán, tasting the tortillas that arrived still warm inside a hollow gourd, gazing at the sky to catch a glimpse of the area’s splendid birds.

      In our Abuela’s capable hands we would wander into uncharted territory, passing from century to century, from vivid descriptions of a bal costumé to landscapes we had never seen but could depict down to the last shrub and tree—an often rocky terrain of recipes, seguiriyas, soleares, tonás, the poetry of Antonio Machado, the philosophical musings of Ortega y Gasset.

      “A world, niños, a world!” she would proclaim. And we would agree, nodding our heads, seated side by side on a basement floor feasting on galletas imported from the distant Carmelite convents of Southern Spain.

      All that is left now is the memory of her voice escaping from her empty room where her books and papers are scattered about as they have always been and where ghosts still linger on the sheets.

      “Vamos,” she urges us from the grave. “Forget the mess left behind and get on with the tale.” Because the only things you really leave behind, we hear her say, are the things that obsess you, that give meaning to your life, the things that fill you with the energy to rise up in the morning and keep you on your toes throughout the long days and even longer nights. Because we are meant to tell stories, to relate the tales that make living bearable and, when all is good and gone, there is only this, a hushed voice, a lingering note, a tale that will outlive our little selves until the last generation is done.

      With that in mind we sit down to retell the story with the help of our Abuela’s most cherished prop—a century-old map. Beneath the lines of longitude and latitude there is a deep blue ocean that turns reddish where land meets sea. On either side we scan the two continents—the old and the new, the past and the present, the beginning and the end. We bring forth also a black-and-white picture of the mapmaker, a certain Diego Clemente, the tenor who resides at the heart of this tale. The photograph is yellowed with age so that Diego’s face appears jaundiced, as if he were suffering from one of the myriad diseases common in the tropics where he played out the last scenes of his life. But he is handsome, that we can see, his eyes are large, his bearing is refined, there is no hint of the abusive girth that has accompanied many a splendid voice but has made a mockery of a well-loved part.

      We return once again to the map. It is an exquisite specimen drawn on parchment, minutely detailed with mountains, rivers, oceans and a wealth of symbols waiting to be transformed into music by our trembling, excitable minds. Along the map’s borders lie the spectacular birds that beckoned to Diego from across an ocean and that accompanied him until the very moment of his death. The names of those birds had tumbled easily from our lips as children, as familiar to us as the seguiriyas, the arias and the soléas that played on our grandparents’ ancient turntable with its large knobs and its heavy wooden lid. Back then, we would take turns naming the birds one by one: an Aztec Parakeet in the west, a Turquoise-Browed Motmot in the north, a Ferruginous Pygmy Owl in the east, a Violaceous Trogon to the south.

      Even as children, we could see something else in the map—that it was weighed down by secrets, that there was a dark stain lying beneath the pinks and the yellows, that the oceans were murky and that shadows were cast upon the earth.

      It would take us almost twenty years to piece the story together, with all of the ups and downs, the good and the bad. It would take us that much time to unearth the mysteries, to plug the holes that our Abuela had left behind, the bits and pieces that would alter the tempo of the music, allowing a tone of lamentation to weave its way through the score.

      In the background we now hear our Abuela urging us along from the grave. “Vamos,” she says in her familiar, impatient way. We smile, remembering, and together begin to trace a path on the map—from the yellow waters of the Guadalquivir River in Seville to the alabaster jewel that is the city of Mérida—travelling happily along the musical latitudes of our childhoods as if our Abuela were here beside us once again.

SCENE ONE

       As we walk on sacred ground

      As always, it is best to begin with the map.

      Once, centuries ago, a map was a thing of beauty, a testament not to the way things were but to the heights scaled by men’s dreams. Mapmakers were not just artisans, they were artists intent on creating universes where the magical and the mythical were very much alive. On the corners of their maps they placed the wondrous creatures that guarded the entrances to heaven and hell. The world was a more mysterious place and everything was more beautifully drawn, more beautifully imagined, more beautifully named. In Europe a man would gaze uneasily to the West, fearful of drowning in the unknown sea—the mare ignotum. To the East lay Eden with its promise of everlasting innocence.

      In the sixteenth century, a Spanish king, Philip II, obsessed with a love of God and in need of enough gold to prove it, instructed the royal cartographers to map his kingdom. Make the invisible visible, he told them, and let every European know who reigns over the New World. Within a few short years he was dead, but through engravings and woodcuts, the cartographers continued fashioning territories, travelling the spaces they sought to make real with measuring chains, wooden goniometers, compasses and their vivid fantasies—because before a land can hope to be mapped, it must first take root in our dreams.

      Diego Clemente’s map is to be read carefully, from east to west, from right to left, beginning at 5°59’W, 37°23’N—the red spot that marked his birth in Seville—and ending at 89°39’W, 20°58’N—Mérida, his final resting place.

      It is a beautiful map, more beautiful yet when you consider the sorrows he must have conquered in order to leave behind this final testament of symbols, lines and grids. A man should wait until he is close to death before attempting to draw conclusions about the meaning of his life—so you once said, Abuela, and we cannot help but wonder if Diego had been furnished with the opportunity to inspect his handiwork, to reflect one final time on his journey from his beginnings in Seville until that very last day at a Mexican hacienda an ocean away.

      Like Columbus, who believed the New World contained mysterious islands brimming with wondrous gardens and golden apples, Diego’s mind had a touch of the fanciful in it, a penchant for concocting magical kingdoms, for imagining perfection, for clawing at the edges of mortality, attempting to map with his quill the mystery of existence, trying to keep death and, what is more, extinction itself at bay. We pause briefly to remember those who have disappeared forever from the skies—the Carolina Parakeet, the Passenger Pigeon, the Labrador Duck—and we lament, oh how we lament, the absence of dreamers like Diego who dared to stand up to the throngs, to the beliefs and disbeliefs of his own day and age.

      But the lights begin to dim now, the words of the program become harder and harder to make out. A hush falls over the audience, a sense of expectation rises until it is met at its peak by the lowering of the baton as the first notes sound out. The curtains slowly rise and we find ourselves seated before the heavenly streets of nineteenth-century Seville. Picture a city bathed in the smell of orange blossoms in spring,