by Bea Gonzalez
They walked there in silence, Don Ricardo leading the way, Raimundo cursing his luck for being born a servant, for finding himself there at that very time, knowing that he would be reprimanded severely once the Duke had left, wanting to wring the neck of this young man who had appeared so inopportunely on the one day when everything was to be perfect—when all had been cautioned and groomed and prepared in honour of the bloody Duke.
“Just my luck,” he repeated to himself, under his breath, “just my cursed luck.”
Once in the back parlour, Raimundo was dismissed—in a cutting tone, he thought, retiring to the kitchen to fret—and Diego was left standing, Don Ricardo making sure to cut the visit short by not even offering the guest the dignity of a seat.
“Is this about my son?” Don Ricardo began, “because if it is, then this is not the time to discuss such matters. These matters, you must know, are to be resolved in the early hours of the afternoon.”
“No, this is not about your son,” Diego began and then added quickly, “although in a way it is about a son.”
“Speak clearly,” Don Ricardo ordered now, his patience already spent, his thoughts on the Duke, what would the Duke make of this visit, the Duke was not impervious to the gossip that his son generated so generously about the town. What would the Duke tell the others in his circle about this moment of infamy inside Don Ricardo’s house? Oh, to be saddled with such a son! At times he could not bear the thought of it. At times he wished his son forever gone.
Diego spoke clearly then. He told him that his mother’s name was Mónica Clemente and when Don Ricardo’s face failed to register even a hint of recognition, as if he had never even met her—the bastard, Diego would write in his journal later, the rotten bastard who abandoned my mother to her fate—he added, “your cousin from La Mancha, the woman who left your house fifteen years ago in disgrace.” And then, yes, oh yes, the name registered and he finally conjured up her face, relief washing over him for a fleeting moment, relief that this was not about Diego and his gambling, until it occurred to him, in horror, that this visit was perhaps even worse than one to do with an unpaid debt.
“I am her son, your son,” Diego said now, “named Diego after your father, sir. Just as you requested of my mother back then.”
Don Ricardo’s eyes opened wide; he inhaled deeply, attempting to curb the fear that surged immediately in his chest. For inside the withdrawing room with its grand furniture and its doilies of Belgian lace, sat not only the Duke of Olivares but worse, much worse, his own wife, Doña Fernanda, who had not mellowed in the slightest with the passing of time. He could picture the outcome of all of this now, his wife exploding at the news of this misbegotten son arriving at their doorstep with the Duke. Yes, he could hear her words, could feel her fingernails clawing already at his eyes, could feel the weight of her rage on his aged skin. Madre mia, it would be the end of him, this son, he thought, cursing, like Raimundo before him, the ill luck that had brought this young man here, to his door at this very time, on this very day.
“What do you want? What do you intend with this visit, in the name of God? Can you not see that I am a busy man?” Don Ricardo asked, his frustration and fear rising so that his voice sounded choked, his eyes bulging perceptibly from his face.
Like a sea bream, Diego thought, dead on a plate.
“I want nothing, sir,” he answered quietly, “but to look just once upon the man who is supposed to have fathered me and then be on my way.”
Don Ricardo, relieved then furious again, his anger building in response to what he perceived as insolence in the tone of the young man’s voice, now walked over to him, stopped for what seemed an interminable moment and suddenly and with remarkable force, slapped Diego hard across the face.
“Then do not leave without learning the most important lesson a father can impart,” he said, spitting out the words at the shocked young man. “This is how life is. Unfair in the extreme. Take stock of this so that the next time you will be prepared for what it delivers and have no reason to be caught unawares.” And with these words he called out to Raimundo, ordered him to show Diego to the door, telling him in no uncertain terms that no more visitors would be allowed in that day, and that words were still pending between them.
Just you wait, his eyes were saying, just you wait.
As Diego walked west, away from that house, away from the man who had imprinted his hand forever on his face, he could think of one thing only—how to avoid passing the humiliation onto his mother, how to keep the sting of Don Ricardo’s ire from extending across the city to slap not one but two faces. He had surmised correctly that his mother had lived for this moment, had placed all her hope on this man—all arrogance and pomposity—and that what had been struck was not only his face but his mother’s last remaining dream. God only knew the full extent of it, but he knew the matter must be kept quiet, the secret guarded close to the chest.
He told her little of his encounter. He said only that Don Ricardo had been courteous but understandably there was the issue of his wife. And what a fine young man he had turned out to be, he had said, so well dressed, such good posture, such education in his speech, such dignity in his bearing. He asked that Diego pass on his warmest regards and his heartfelt congratulations for raising a good son, which was not so easy in these troubled times. But, really, there was no question of another visit—his wife and children would simply not understand.
Poor Mónica! How her composure crumbled, how the light disappeared from her once-eager eyes.
For Diego it was a question of putting the episode behind him as if it had not occurred at all. He thought with the innocence of a child that it was possible to erase what one did not fully like or comprehend. But Don Ricardo’s slap had buried itself already inside the marrow of his bones, merging inextricably with the pain of losing Emilio until both affronts became one, driving him unconsciously and mercilessly from that day on.
And it was on that very day, after his mother had retired with her disappointment to her bed, that in the deepest hours of the night Diego picked up a quill and put the first strokes on the wondrous map we now hold in our hands.
Time passed then, the days, the months and the years, first crawling and then, as he grew older, picking up the pace. He continued to sell books—some months many, some fewer and often none at all. He continued to learn the names and markings of his beloved birds, venturing on occasion into the surrounding countryside to observe the European and African specimens during migration, accompanying an increasingly frail Señor Raleigh, who shared Diego’s love of these birds. He continued to hone his skills, drawing the birds with evermore precision, nurturing the artistic talent that would eventually help to pave the road to his dreams.
As time passed, things changed for those around him as well. Great-uncle Alfonso, reduced for ten long years to an attic room, with hardly a spot of fresh air and no view to console him, no cathedral spire, no glimpse of the great Alcázar, deteriorated further, until he was a shell of his former self. All was quiet now except for the sounds of the occasional reveller outside and the soft footsteps of his nephew’s wife below him as she travelled the hallways like a ghost. And as Great-uncle Alfonso’s health deteriorated, Mónica’s did as well, and for every moan the old man uttered, she delivered a cough in return.
Typhus, a doctor told her son, the scourge of the age and no remedies discovered yet to save the day. And what did it matter in the end? Mónica, first bitter, then hopeful, then finally resigned to her fate, had lost the thing that had once armed her with the strength to carry on—the expectation that things would somehow change. In the mirror of an aged armoire she watched her body shrink, her shoulders stoop, her head jut forward until it seemed to Diego that she resembled one of his beloved birds, flitting through life as if lost in a dream, grounded no longer by the routine that had once given her existence meaning, descending into the lower vocal ranges step by step. She soon grew too weak to emerge from her bed except for short
periods at a time and this suited her well; she preferred to be cocooned under the covers, remembering her childhood days, her invented memories of simple meals transformed into feasts and the singing and the dancing and the celebrations that seemed larger, more resplendent to her as each day passed and she grew weaker beneath the weight of embroidered sheets.
Upstairs, an old man remembered as well. He remembered those days when la Señorita Mónica had climbed the stairs to the attic to serve him with flaring nostrils and tight lips. He remembered her spirit, the fervently issued attacks, the insults that had once travelled through the stairs and had provided them both with the spark, the desire to live. The sound of Mónica’s coughing seemed to him to be a harbinger of his own looming death and he took to striking his cane against the floor in hopes that it would somehow anger the señorita below into warding off the black-hooded intruder bent on sucking the marrow from their respective bones.
“Venga, muchacha,” he would shout, his voice weakened by age. “Time to get up, to walk about. Arriba, sí, arriba!” And then, tap, tap, tap, he would strike with his cane, hoping the noise would raise her from the stupor into which she had fallen and which had banished her forever from his sight.
And so they lived. The old man incapable of making his way down, Mónica in no condition to climb up. Their lives were reduced by their respective physical infirmities into a duet of tap, tap and cough, tap, cough, tap, tap, tap, cough, cough. Only the appearance of Diego three times a day to tend to their needs provided respite for the endless silence, the weight of their long days.
The old man would attempt to engage his great-nephew in the only way he knew how, with complaints, recriminations, and then later—because Diego, like Emilio, refused to be drawn into the old man’s ill moods—exaggerated sighs of despair.
‘Are we selling anything of late, sobrino?” the old man would ask Diego, caring little for the response but eager to keep him there for as long as he could.
“The same titles of old,” the young man would respond in that gentle voice, the voice of a warm afternoon that always reminded Uncle Alfonso of the young man’s father, gone so many years now but still sorely missed.
“And how is your mother faring these days?” the old man would ask next, this time eager for the young man’s response.
“Some days better, some less well, tio. It is getting harder and harder for her to get out of bed.”
‘Ah, well, that is the way it is with disease. It leaves you helpless like this, decaying inside a bed, eager to see the last of your sorry days.” Still, there is hope, the old man would add, referring to Mónica’s condition, surprising Diego, who could remember the many years his uncle had sworn up and down the narrow stairs, the many times he had threatened her from the safety of an attic room. And now his concern seemed genuine. Was it possible that the old man had grown, unbelievably enough, to care for the woman for whom he had once only insults and scorn?
“We all grow soft with age,” el Señor Raleigh had once said, referring to himself, explaining his diminished interest in traversing the spaces of the earth that had once been his life’s quest. Now there were infinitely more important things to be experienced. A good night’s rest, the taste of a well-cooked meal, the view of an ancient cathedral on a late afternoon as the sun transformed stone into gold.
In the evenings, Diego would sit by his mother’s bed, sharing with her the details of the map that had by now become his greatest creation, a parchment full of symbols and grids and land masses drawn over time, so that some lines had been erased here and there and some newly added as experience and knowledge required. He spoke to her of Ptolemy’s Geografía, of its errors, “the Mediterranean hanging down like a bad dream, Mamá. See here,” and he would turn her face towards him so that she could see for herself the error in a reproduction he held in his hands.
Mónica would attempt to focus on the book, her body tired but her eyes eager to take in whatever she could of her son’s world. “Sí, hijo, I see what you mean,” she would whisper, fighting the discomfort that even a tiny amount of light brought to her eyes. Encouraged, Diego would speak then of the famous Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, how the great man—a king’s third son destined for obscurity by order of birth—had managed to outshine his brothers, creating his own splendid court peopled by the best cartographers, astronomers, shipbuilders and navigators of the age, working in tandem to fulfill the prince’s goal of exploring every corner of the earth.
“And let us not forget Columbus,” Diego added, enthused, “the man who once sailed across a formidable ocean and found land on the other side, this in spite of so many gross miscalculations on his part, from the circumference of the earth to his estimations of the length of a degree of longitude itself.”
Mónica listened between laboured breaths. And when she could no longer conquer the torpor that invaded her bones, when she could no longer focus on her son’s enthusiasms, his love of this obscure world of discoveries and maps that seemed like a foreign language to her but which lit up his face so warmly, so intensely—when her illness succeeded in defeating her and the lethargy crept over her body and shut her eyes—then Diego would pack up his books and speak to his mother of his other love, the birds that had been his companions since that day he had discovered their existence between the covers of Audubon’s great book. He spoke to her of birds he had never seen but had been able to sketch from his dreams. Birds that appeared in the work that had sparked his interest first and all the birds that followed, the ones that had escaped from the pages of the other books in el Señor Raleigh’s collection, the titles of which he recited to his mother as if he were singing her a lullaby—Ray and Willughby’s Ornithologia, Albin’s Natural History of Birds, and Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina. And then he described the birds themselves—Ray and Willughby’s splendid Black Stork, Albin’s earnest Barn Owl and Catesby’s Crested Titmouse perching on honeysuckle.
And he spoke of other birds as well, the ones that appeared now only in men’s memories, the ones like the Dodo, banished forever from the earth.
In her half-sleep Mónica would smile at her son’s enthusiasms, her eyelids shut but her mind staying with him as long as she could and she wondered on more than one occasion, hearing the way Diego’s interests suffused the room with warmth, if blood accounted for anything in the end. For she could see traces only of Emilio in her son’s demeanour, in his habits, his obsessions, in the way he pushed his hair impatiently from his eyes. She searched in vain for a hint of Don Ricardo, but his image too had faded in her mind, was now only a figment that appeared distorted in her dreams—like the Dodo, she thought, a bird gone forever, leaving nothing but a ghostly imprint behind.
She slept. On and off, in fits and starts, between cough and tap, she slept, opening her eyes less and less, but welcoming her son forward with a turn of her face and a weak nod of her head.
One afternoon, when her breathing seemed more laboured than usual, it was Uncle Alfonso who called the young man upstairs, a frantic call for help as if he were standing on the edge of a great abyss and needed to be rescued from himself.
“Take me down to see her,” the old man ordered, tapping his cane against the floor with even greater insistence, all of his strength dedicated to this one wish, the desire to close the distance that lay between them and take in her face one final time.
As light as a pile of feathers, Diego thought as he carried the old man down the narrow stairs and into the room where his mother lay on a bed, ashen-faced and quiet, seemingly lost to the world.
He worried for a moment that the old man had come in search of one final battle, one last heated exchange, but he quickly put the worry aside, reasoning that neither had the strength nor the will to do much harm to the other at that point in time. In any case it was not words that the old man wanted but to take one final look at la Señorita Mónica, lying quietly on her embroidered sheets, a wisp of what she had been—just like me, the old man thought as
he reached out to cover her hand with his, bowing towards her like a priest, listening as she fought for each breath. And then it was as if the strength had been suctioned from his own breast and he motioned to Diego to carry him upwards again, his face devoid of emotion except for the occasional gasp of pain that emerged from his chest.
She was buried three days later in her one good dress, with her lace mantilla on her head and the gold chain given to her by her father lying between her breasts, with few people in attendance—Diego, el Señor Raleigh, and a few of the neighbourhood women who appeared at every funeral, ever mindful that it could be their turn next. She was buried without fanfare or music and with none but her own son’s tears shed.
We are mere travellers on this earth, the priest said. We wait only to ascend to heaven, where our prayers will be answered and our everlasting life will commence. Amén then, Diego thought, exhausted from so many consecutive nights of little rest.
Once his mother had been buried, he wandered the streets of Seville, gay on that day as they always are, flowers in abundance, lemons and oranges perfuming the air, the cramped, stone-cobbled streets resplendent then as they are today. He wandered unperturbed by the sight of those astoundingly beautiful façades. Renaissance, Gothic, Mudéjar, whatever you like—you are wandering in a city of contrasts, of hidden courtyards, exuberant gardens, a city unconditionally alive. A city brimming with life, yes, let us not forget this now; the music continued to play and over there a woman twirled in her beautiful gown, a rose in her hair. And if he were to cross the Guadalquivir and head into Triana he would have occasion to hear the claps of the flamenco dancers, the strumming of guitars, the gritos from the audience, Olé! Bonita! Eso es!
Diego wandered like this, through dazzling streets, without direction or a plan until he found himself standing, incomprehensibly, before the gates of Don Ricardo Medina’s house. What am I doing here? he asked himself, shocked that his feet would have taken him there of all places, on this very day, his mother freshly buried and an old man waiting anxiously for his return so he himself could die in peace. What in heaven’s name had possessed him, arriving at the gates of the grand home his mother had once so desired be opened to them, but which loomed before him now as closed and foreboding as before?