The Heart Has Its Reasons (43 page)

It took us several hours to get everything out of that creepy garage and into the trunk and backseat of Daniel's Volvo, and required two trips. We hardly spoke during the whole operation. It was he who finally broke the silence.

“And now what do we do?”

“I don't know, Daniel, I don't know . . .” I whispered. I took a deep breath. “I sense what you're thinking and I'm afraid the answer is no. It's too late: I'm already out of the story. And besides, I take off in no time, you know that.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the boxes while I felt his on me.

“You can't or you won't?”

“I can't take care of this; it's too much material. And after everything that has happened over these past couple of days, I hardly have any strength left. I wouldn't be able to do it in so short a period of time: it's enormous, can't you see?” I said, pointing helplessly to the brimming boxes.

“You don't know if you want to.”

I headed toward his bathroom without answering him or asking for his permission and washed my filthy hands. Around me were the meager toiletries of a man accustomed to living alone: toothpaste and a toothbrush, a razor, and a large towel hanging from a rack on the wall. The dirty exercise clothes from that morning were piled in a corner; on a shelf a radio. Not a trace of anything unnecessary.

“A lot of unexpected things have happened in the last couple of days . . .” I said, coming near him again while I finished drying my hands on my pants.

He hadn't moved; his attention was concentrated on the documents. Or so it seemed.

“Things that have changed us both—pulled us apart and brought us together—”

“But you keep thinking that I deceived you,” he interrupted.

We raised our eyes at the same time. His light, mine dark. His tired, mine too.

“I haven't quite been able to convey to you how sorry I am,” he went on. “I could repeat it from dawn to dusk, and I still wouldn't be able to forgive myself for having been such a boor with you. I've behaved like a fool and a coward. I understand how you feel and I'd give whatever it would take to be able to start over on a different footing. But unfortunately it's no longer possible, Blanca. Now we can only look straight ahead; there's no turning back. This is why I'm asking you to let me put the counter back to zero, so that we can start all over with no hard feelings.”

We still stood before the boxes, motionless, our arms crossed.

“Everything would be over by next week,” he added. “On the day of your departure, the deadline to lodge any appeal against the Los Pinitos project expires. You wouldn't even have to change your return ticket.”

“But there's a much easier solution, Daniel: you take over. You can do this work as well as I can. Just as you told me, there's no need to be a specialist in any one field. Simply be accurate and methodical.”

“There's not enough time. I could never move at your speed; I'd need to go back to the earlier material, familiarize myself with all of it to know exactly what I'm looking for. And I'm afraid it's too late. With so little time left, you're the only person right now who has a precise idea of what it's all about: the background, the specific gaps that need to be filled in, the connections between one set of documents and another, the pieces that need to match.”

I left my apartment firm in my refusal and headed for my office. That very afternoon I would conduct my last Spanish culture class, and I still had work to do before it.

No matter how hard I tried to clear my mind and return to normal, the events and emotions of the last couple of days had been so intense that they affected my mood and turned my feelings upside down. I had difficulty concentrating on the last batches of papers
and kept making mistakes at my computer keyboard. My mind was elsewhere.

After a period of total unproductiveness, I detached my gaze from the screen and directed it toward the piles of ordered and classified documents that had been Fontana's messy legacy three months earlier.

With no hope left of concentrating on my work, I leaned back in my chair to stop and think about him. I recalled his roundish figure in the old photos in the conference room; his dark beard, his lively, keen eyes. I mentally went over his writings, his letters, the countless notes written with his forceful strokes. I re-created the fifty-six-year path that fate had allowed him to follow. At first I had imagined that he'd died at a much more advanced age. “My old professor,” Daniel often called him, and now Daniel was older than Andres Fontana had ever been.

Almost unwillingly, I began imagining Fontana and Aurora's final night and what their tragic end would have been like. Blinding headlights, sharp turns, brakes screeching. She, all contorted, her fingers like hooks grasping him when the countdown had already began. More glaring lights, broken glass, screams. The tapping of raindrops when everything came to a standstill, then silence.

I got up and approached the window. Leaning against the window frame, I contemplated the campus, practically deserted at that time of the afternoon. Students were wrapping up their last classes or preparing for exams as the autumn was coming to an end and winter approached. There were piles of leaves on the grass, and the branches of trees boldly displayed their nakedness.

The words of Darla Stern returned to my memory, dragging with them what was perhaps the last great certainty in the professor's existence. She was convinced that he'd been in love with Aurora. Daniel, from another perspective, thought the same. Were they both right? Was that the truth? The miner's son captivated by the wife of his friend and pupil, someone whom he'd never be able to have. Deeply attracted to that young and vivacious compatriot, separated by a barrier that he'd never be able to cross.

I turned away from the window and looked back at the pile that throughout the months had constituted the legacy, now in order. A vague yet nagging idea began to take shape, a premonition, a hunch that told me there was something among those papers that might corroborate what Daniel and Darla believed. Something that I had come across, that I'd read at some point without quite being able to grasp its meaning.

I glanced at my watch. Five minutes before my last class in Santa Cecilia. The first good-bye.

An hour later, when the session had lost any resemblance whatsoever to an academic encounter and we were busy exchanging e-mail addresses for that visit to Spain that all my students promised to make at some unspecified date, in the darkest corner of my brain a light went on. Tiny as a match in the middle of a pitch-dark clearing, almost imperceptible, but bright enough to shed light on my memory and guide me on my search.

As I quickly made my way back to my office, my conviction grew. I rushed in, knelt in front of one of the boxes of papers, and began to rummage in it with both hands. Then it appeared. A yellowing piece of paper on which Fontana, on an old-fashioned typewriter, had written out the first stanza of a poem by Luis Cernuda. One more fragment filed away like so many other of Fontana's writings.

Four lines from the poem “Where Oblivion Dwells,” with four additional lines handwritten beneath them.

Wherein oblivion dwells,

In the vast gardens without aurora

Where I am but the memory of a stone buried amid nettles

Above which the wind flees its insomnia

Gardens without dawn

Without Aurora

Without

You

As soon as I'd read it, tears came to my eyes.

Removing the malicious stain that Darla Stern was eager to impose on Fontana, which had hounded Daniel in his gloomiest moments, Andres Fontana's true feelings surfaced between the verses. They expressed his silent love for the unexpected arrival from Spain who, without intending to, graced the last stretch of his life with a fullness he'd been longing for in his exile.

Echoes of his native tongue, of his country and his childhood. Evocations relegated to memory's back room, sayings and exclamations that he hadn't heard in more than three decades. Cooking pots by the firelight, quince jelly, Ave Maria Purisima. Her scent, the young laugh, the involuntary brush of her skin. Reason trying to rein in his feelings, which, wild, growing out of control, disobeyed.

A silent passion hidden from the world. Even from her, perhaps. But alive and real, powerful. Andres Fontana and Aurora Carter. The old professor long exiled and the Mediterranean woman who came by the hand of his pupil to that land that didn't belong to either one of them. So unlike in everything. So close at their end.

Suddenly, strangely, in a hasty connection, I grasped something else, and for a moment the dense fog that for months had settled over me cleared. In contemplating Fontana's passion for Aurora, I also realized something about Alberto. Through them I understood that what drove him away from me was the force of an unexpected love that crossed his path just as it could have crossed mine. It blindsided him.

In spite of Alberto's ineptitude with me, in spite of what was reproachable and reprehensible in his behavior and of all the pain that he'd caused me, the old professor's love helped me understand that, before the turns that destiny unexpectedly places before us, reason is sometimes useless.

There was not a soul left in Guevara Hall when I came out of my office, only closed doors and the sad echoes of the empty hallways.

On arriving back at Daniel's place, I found him seated before his working desk, in a total lack of concentration. “Come in!” he
simply yelled when I rang. He didn't even get up to open the door for me.

He was slouched in the armchair, barefoot, his hands interlaced at the back of his neck, a chewed pencil between his teeth: the spitting image of a person with a mental block. Around him, strewn about the floor, were fragments of material extracted at random from the boxes he had received from Darla.

He didn't change posture on seeing me. Nor did he seem surprised or greet me. He simply moved his reading glasses to the tip of his nose and stared above them.

“You look terrible; let's go for a walk,” I said from the door.

I waited for him on the street. It took him only a couple of seconds to appear.

“What this morning I said no to, now I say yes,” I announced after we'd walked a dozen yards or so in silence. “I agree to process the contents of all the boxes that Darla has kept. I'm ready to tackle the task of trying to piece together the end of the legacy.”

“You can't imagine—”

“But I want you to know the reason why I'll do it,” I interrupted. “It's not because of the Los Pinitos issue, or out of professional ambition, or for you. I'll be doing it exclusively for Fontana. For the Andres Fontana whose life I have reconstructed for these past few months, for my commitment to him. To try and make sure his efforts don't fall into oblivion, like his old mission. I'll be doing it only for him. Keep that in mind, Daniel. Solely for him.”

We kept walking without looking at each other, but out of the corner of my eye I noticed that his demeanor had changed.

“And don't count your chickens before they hatch,” I warned him. “I've got conditions. The first is regarding my departure: I'm still leaving, no matter what, on the twenty-second. The second has to do with you. I didn't lie to you before: the amount of work involved is immense and I'm not going to be able to deal with it all in the short period of time I have left. That's why I need your help: I'll set the pace, but I need your eyes, your hands, and your head next to me one hundred percent for all the hours that are necessary, and without a guarantee of
reaching any conclusion in time. So get ready to temporarily ditch your end-of-the-twentieth-century novelists, because you're going to have to cast your eyes much further back.”

He came to an abrupt halt and turned to me. The worried frown of a while earlier had completely dissipated as if blown away by the evening wind.

“I'm in your hands, my dear Blanca.”

Without taking his eyes off me, he moved aside a lock from my very long day's uncombed hair.

“Completely yours till the end.”

Chapter 39

J
ust as a field hospital is set up amid an earthquake's rubble, so too we went about our task, converting Daniel's apartment into some kind of documents laboratory. Both dressed in a comfort close to slovenliness, we placed in the middle of the room an enormous board supported by trestles and on top of it our computers, a scanner, and the printer I'd taken from my office. As a counterbalance to contemporary technology, there were a few relics that an old colleague of his had found for us in God knows what dump at the university: a prehistoric gadget to read microfilm, an old audiotape duplicator, and a pair of gigantic antediluvian magnifying glasses.

The place's sparse decorations made our job easier. We hung up some maps on the naked walls and arranged enormous piles of papers on the floor. There were all kinds of stuff: legal documents, sheets of paper scribbled in Fontana's unmistakable scrawl, and aging manuscripts with nineteenth-century handwriting. We even found a cross. A humble wooden cross, just two pieces of wood lashed together with a frayed cord.

“Where could he have gotten this?” I whispered.

Daniel took it out of my hands.

“God only knows . . .” he said, passing his fingers over its knots
and rough edges, caressing its coarseness. “But if it helped him, it will help us too.”

He propped it  up against the old tape recorder just as the Franciscan monks planted their crosses in their missions. So that it would accompany us as it did them on the harshness of the road, to make the difficulties of our undertaking more bearable. Although neither of us was moved by religious feelings, just as they had not prompted him, that old cross brought us a little closer to the memory of Andres Fontana.