of our story, Remedios’s obstinacy would prove fortuitous in the end. If she had not insisted on her son’s adopting the clerical robes, Emilio would have never chanced upon Mónica Clemente as she bowed her head in prayer every day inside the great cathedral walls. Mónica and Emilio, born hundreds of miles apart in a time when people lived and died within miles of the dot that marked their entry into the world, should never have even met. And had it not been for a series of unforeseen circumstances, it would indeed have turned out that way; but fate had other things in store for them.
Mónica Clemente, a bit thin of lip, a tad long in the nose, was nevertheless blessed with a sweet face—the face of an angel, Emilio would say—though as we shall soon see, she was made of more complex matter than any angel with a golden halo and alabaster wings.
When Emilio spotted Mónica inside the cathedral for the first time, the girl had been living in Seville for less than a year. It had not taken long for the city to bewitch her with its narrow, ever-winding streets and its houses of pink, blue and yellow stucco; it was a fairy-tale setting, with its Arabic patios, its majestic fountains half-glimpsed from open gates, the weight and colour of the roses that hung from the balconies and the orange and lemon trees that perfumed its streets. Already, Seville was considered one of the true marvels of the world, immortalized in countless plays, poems and operas composed by the great European minds of the day.
To a young girl from a sleepy village in the region of La Mancha, Seville was like a magical apparition—a dream she found herself in almost by accident and in which she roamed with half-issued breaths. To breathe too deeply, she feared, would dissolve the dream in an instant, leaving her trapped once again inside the quiet village of her birth.
And how had she come to be there? Through misfortune, of course. For it is not from happiness that opportunities arise for fates to change and paths to diverge but from within the realm of the tragic—that which leaves us scrambling for solid ground, overwhelmed and lost. Caminante, the poet now declaims from stage right. Walk, for the path is made by walking.
Mónica Clemente had been sent to Seville, far from the fields of her beloved Crocus sativus, upon the death of her father and, with that death, had begun travelling a path that would change the direction not only of her own life but that of our mapmaker as well.
Seville was the home of Don Ricardo Medina, her mother’s cousin, who was in need at the time of her father’s demise of what the English called a governess. Mónica’s skills were not extraordinary—embroidery, simple crochet, a tune or two played on the piano—but she performed them with reasonable technical skill and the lack of enthusiasm that was expected then from a proper lady.
“How lucky you are,” her aunt had told her, when she was offered a place in the home of Don Ricardo, “to have found a saviour, even one so far removed from La Mancha.” And, saying this, her aunt had sniffed at her own words, stopping to peruse Mónica with a look that said she was clearly undeserving of such beneficence.
Mónica herself would come to believe that it had not been luck but fate that had guided her way to the great city, because fate was like a giant serpent that coiled itself around your neck and dragged you towards your destiny without mercy or restraint. Escaping it was as useless as trying to stem a tidal wave with a fingertip. It was fate that had seen fit to free her from the dismal life that awaited many in her position, an existence lived within the confines of a convent or, worse, in a marriage arranged in haste to an old man with oxen and land to spare but with the spirit of decay emanating from his bones and breath like the steam that rose up from the earth during the hottest days of summer.
Instead, Mónica had been sent here, to Seville, to a city brimming with life, a city bustling with possibilities, as far away from the quiet plains of La Mancha as she could imagine. And although she was thankful, there were times when the city overwhelmed her, when it seemed too large, when its heartbeat was too penetrating, and then she would bring her fingers up to her nose and summon the comforting memory of Bautista’s saffron stews with their fifteen ingredients that blended and brewed for hours.
So it was, then, that Emilio and Mónica chanced upon one another inside a cathedral that sat on an ancient mosque, with its spectacular Gothic retablo carved with the forty-five scenes from the life of Christ, the Capitular with the magnificent domed ceiling mirrored in marble on the floor, paintings by Murillo, silver reliquaries and monstrances and the keys—above all, those tear-stained keys—handed over reluctantly in the thirteenth century by the Moors to the Castilian king, Fernando III, after they were forced to surrender their beloved city to him. There, every day, Emilio would linger as long as he could near the kneeling figure of Mónica Clemente, providing the English with every detail of the enormous cathedral so astounding it could only have been built by madmen, all the while staring at the young girl who never failed to materialize here, always at the same time, always alone, it seemed. A Spaniard for sure, he thought, for she wore a proper lace mantilla upon her head and not one of those infernal rose bonnets favoured by the English. It was true, the young women from the good families of Seville were lately succumbing to such fashions—bonnets from England, cretonnes from Alsace, crinolines from Paris, malakofs they called them. But this, he knew, was a proper Spanish señorita. A bit long in the nose, a tad thin of lip, but a Spanish señorita nonetheless, mantilla on head, rosary beads in hand, prayers regularly offered to the virgin—a woman, Emilio supposed, who would make a splendid wife one day. And once his mother died—and forgive me Lord, but let it be soon, Emilio thought, now looking up at the roof by Borja—it would be a woman like this Emilio would be courting.
Ah, and there she was now, head bent, eyes closed.
“Bueno, señores,” Emilio said to his group, his eyes fixed on the young woman’s face. “Let us now take a final walk around the cathedral to inspect its jewels in all their magnificence.”
“What did he say?” an old man, exhausted already by Emilio’s first frenetic run around the building, asked his wife. “Not another damned walk around the cathedral!” he added furiously, beneath his breath.
Ah, but the English. Let us just admit this one thing now, shall we? Among their greatest virtues are their impeccable manners. So the unhappy man circled and then circled again, breathing in the damn “jools” of this magnificent cathedral, never suspecting that the tall, hawk-nosed seminarian who was leading them about was inspecting a young girl with all of this to-ing and fro-ing, this vamos-ing and venga-ing.
In the meantime, oblivious to Emilio and the English in his charge, Mónica Clemente continued, head bent over rosary, to issue her prayers. Who was she praying for? Emilio wondered, eyes glued to her face. Was it for a mother, ailing and near death? Perhaps her prayers were being said for a sickly brother. Pray God, let them not be meant for a suitor, he now thought, and thinking this, suddenly stumbled.
Mónica Clemente, sweet of face yes, but not, as he would later find out, so sweet of tongue, was not praying for a father or a mother, a brother or, thank God, a suitor. Mónica Clemente was praying, as she did every day, in order that she be granted her most cherished desire. And what is this, you ask? Ah, in a million years you will never guess. For Mónica Clemente, thin of lip and long of nose but sweet of face nonetheless, was praying fervently that the wife of Don Ricardo Medina—Doña Fernanda—be sent to her death.
“And it would be better if it were sooner rather than later,” she whispered between her many Padre Nuestros, her countless Ave Marías.
“And not without a little pain,” she added, as an afterthought.
But this, claro, only if the good Lord Himself should think it best.
We listen to the woes of Doña Fernanda
Enter stage left now Doña Fernanda Olivares—the woman whose death Mónica prayed for so fervently—an imposing figure in possession of her own