his voyage of discovery in triumph and with a few other things besides. A suite of plants, exotic birds and the few Indians whose likes had never been seen in Europe and whose sad faces stunned those ladies who peeked at them from behind their tortoiseshell fans.
In Seville, Diego Velázquez was born—perhaps the best painter Spain gave to the world. Here, too, the first words of our national masterpiece, Don Quijote, were written by the great Cervantes, while a prisoner in the Carce Real.
Eventually Diego stopped in front of the Archives of the Indies, his favourite spot in all Seville.
Hijo, he heard Emilio call out to him, will you never tire of the reams of paper, the exuberant scrawls of a bunch of explorers eager to tell of their exploits, more invented than real?
Diego was not hungry for the reams of paper but for the memory of a map.
El Señor Raleigh had taken him there once. “To look upon one of the best maps of all time,” he had said to him in his tentative Spanish, with its soft r’s and lightness of tone. Juan de la Cosa’s Mappa Mundi—“astounding,” el Señor Raleigh had declared, in English this time. And after the Mappa Mundi, the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas commissioned by Philip II—“a madman” to the English, “a man made of more complex stuff than could ever be unearthed” to the Spanish—a king, nevertheless, who had dreamed of revealing the invisible to the naked eye.
Diego stood outside for almost an hour, accompanied by his memories—the maps, Emilio’s tours of the city, el Señor Raleigh’s musings on life and Philip II. Had the king been a simple madman or had he been indeed a man of more complexity than history could ever hope to discern? He stood there, as if transported, but really just a confused bony child aching for certainty, aching to have his father back—Emilio and his stories of love, Emilio and his jumbled, not-quite-right English rhymes.
He went home then. Mónica was waiting for him, and remorse now tumbled from her lips—“I should not have told you about him. I should have taken the secret with me to the grave.” All night she apologized like this, chastising herself, cursing at their bad luck in losing Emilio so early, could fate have been crueller to them? Her words of regret and reproach were uttered quietly. There was no need for Uncle Alfonso to know any of this. “No, no, hijo,” she cautioned him, fear in her voice. “Uncle Alfonso would waste no time throwing us out onto the street.”
In the morning—after a night of tossing and turning for Diego, a surprisingly solid rest for his mother—the point of her stories came to land, finally, at his feet.
“Not now, ahora no, not yet,” Mónica told him, as she fed him his favourite breakfast of hot chocolate and sweet bread made by the Carmelite nuns, “but soon, very soon, Diego, you will go to the house of Don Ricardo Medina and demand to be received in the manner that you deserve.”
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