who belonged to them but his discovery of the New World. Yet, it was a fine discovery and it pleased them enormously that an Englishman should remember that it was indeed “theirs.”
“The Spanish conquistadores were indeed a fanciful lot. Upon returning to Spain, they told of the extraordinary sights to be found in the New World—whales with breasts, flying fish, and beaches covered not with sand but pearls. The mermaids were a disappointment though. They had imagined extraordinary creatures and were dismayed when they failed to be as beautiful as their imaginations had conceived them to be. Columbus himself believed in the existence of Saint Bernard’s Island, where the daughters of Atlas guarded a luscious garden filled with golden apples.
“They were men in search of mythical cities. Some they found and some remained trapped in their imaginations for all time—the seven cities of Cíbola, for example. Have you never heard tell of this?”
Emilio knew the story well enough but he encouraged its telling for Diego’s sake.
“Around those fanciful times, legend had it that during the Moorish invasion of Spain, seven bishops and their congregations had sailed west and founded seven great cities of gold in the New World. These cities were known as the seven cities of Cíbola.
“Many men planned expeditions to find these fabled cities, but it was Francisco de Coronado who ventured into the American Southwest in 1540 in search of them. He did not find them in the end, but the dream of their discovery nurtured the aspirations of many other men in the centuries that followed.”
El Señor Raleigh lowered his voice to a whisper. “There is a rumour in Madrid that a map exists of the seven cities of Cíbola, drawn by the one man who made it there but took the secret with him to his grave. That man was an Andalusian and it is thought that his map is in the possession of one of the booksellers of Seville. Is it you, Don Emilio?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Ah, if only I were in possession of such a map! How much easier it would be to live my life. No, it is not I, Señor Raleigh. Regrettably, it is not I. Nor anyone that I have ever come into contact with.”
For years, Diego would be haunted by the thought of that map. More than years—for that map, the thought of that map, inflamed Diego’s imagination, haunting him throughout his life. Who was that Andalusian, who was that bookseller and what of the seven cities of Cíbola? Were they indeed made of gold? Did they boast the most beautiful mermaids in the world? Were they the cities where one could find the key to eternal life?
Diego’s own mind was fanciful. He had read the dreams of those who had gone before him and was convinced that his future lay there. On the other side of the ocean, in a world not only new but golden, not only alive but overflowing with life. How he longed to travel the yellow waters of the Guadalquivir until they deposited him in the vast ocean, to ride the waves like Phaeton in his golden carriage as he dragged the sun across the sky.
Ah, but you, Abuela, who lived so long, know more than anyone how the world sags under the weight of our intentions. How our dreams, once realized, are dreams no longer. Dreams and nightmares—two sides of the same coin; he who dreams of knights will live to see them transformed into monsters in the morning.
In the meantime, under the cover of darkness, Emilio had stumbled upon the tiny spark that would ignite his life for one brief moment before the curtains fell on his spot on the stage. A song. A dance. A lament worthy of the name, where voices carry for eternity and ruptured hearts find a way, through the intensity of the jaleo, to mend.
To his shame, it was a tourist who alerted him fully to this glory, a foreigner who arrived intent on imbibing Andalucía’s riches inside the confines of a dimly lit café, for these were the great days of the cafés cantantes in Seville. Oh, how your eyes would once shine, Abuela, when describing these days, how you seemed to float back in time as if you had been there yourself witnessing the rebirth of flamenco inside those rooms lit by oil and paraffin lamps.
In those days, a man by the name of Silverio Franconneti, half-Italian, half-Spanish, but with the spirit of the gypsies coursing through his blood, opened the Café de Silverio on the calle del Rosario, with a view to waking his countrymen up. He opened the doors in order to stoke the passion that lay dormant in their bones, to unearth the unuttered howls that clouded minds in a land filled with so much sun. He opened the doors to music that soaked the organs with quicksilver and found its way right to the pit of the soul. He opened the doors so 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
