The Heart Has Its Reasons (50 page)

“She touched your shoulder, you turned around, and I finally saw your face. Your hair was loose and you still had the summer's sun on your skin. You smiled at Rebecca with relief, as if her presence was something you could hold on to in order to keep from drifting. She introduced us. I told you any old thing and grabbed your hand—do you remember?—one of your hands, which are now so familiar, but back then I was struck by their lightness. A weightless hand, like a brown feather. I found you adorable from the very first instant, but how much sadness was written in your eyes. An angel with broken wings lost in the middle of the supermarket. And from that very moment I knew that I wouldn't be able to go. I struggled and in fact tried several times. But at each absence I wasn't able to stand it for more than three or four days, so I came back to stay. To help you with the legacy of good old Fontana, to find out if you'd hit upon any clues on the vague mission and, above all, to be close to you and to accompany you on your journey without the slightest idea where—together or separately—we'd end up.”

I kept listening without looking at him, without interrupting that flow of sincerity.

“These have been fascinating months for me, Blanca, tremendously enriching in very different dimensions. For having reconciled myself with the past, for meeting you, for rediscovering myself. And I've done a few
things I never thought I'd be able to do. I have written about my life, for example. In the loneliness of many a night I have scratched at the bottom of my memory, I've reflected and put order to myriad recollections of mine and some of Andres Fontana's too—fragments of time that I spent with him and details of his own life that he told me in pieces throughout the years. Would you grab that envelope in the backseat, please?”

It was a plain-looking manila envelope, the kind we used on a daily basis at the university to send memos between and within departments.

“It's for you, what you still need to know about my professor and myself, so that you understand both of us a bit better. So that you know what made us take the step you are now taking: to jump into the unknown without a safety net, without any certainty as to what we would find. To become the ‘other,' the one who does not belong and is perhaps somewhat freer.”

I put the envelope inside my bag without opening it.

“Because you know,” he added, “deep down, Fontana, you, and I have a lot more in common than meets the eye. You, like us, have taken the plunge. And even though you're returning to your normal life again, nothing will be the same.”

“I don't doubt it for a moment,” I said sincerely. “I don't think I'll ever forget these months.”

“Why don't you also write about it? About what has happened during this time inside and around you; the other lives you've come in contact with, what you've felt . . .”

“I've never written anything except academic pieces and letters to my kids when I'd send them to summer camp in England.”

“I'd never done it either, and now I've realized that it's less complex and infinitely more enriching than I thought. Unlike the academic writing we're accustomed to, we can throw a little more heart and soul into it. It makes you reflect on a bunch of things, delve deeper. It creates a sense of catharsis—”

“There's the exit for the airport,” I interrupted. “If you continue spouting those crazy ideas, you're going to miss it.”

We reached the terminal and I checked in. There was hardly time for anything except an intense and rushed good-bye.

He wrapped his large body around me, pinning me to his chest.

“Take good of care of yourself. You can't imagine how much I'll miss you, Professor Perea.”

“I'll miss you too,” I said, with a knot the size of a fist in my throat. I don't think he heard me.

He then caressed my face and deposited a brief kiss on my forehead, a fleeting touch I could barely feel.

I did not look back as I headed toward the security line with my passport and boarding card in my hand. I could not bear to see him one last time. But I knew he hadn't left, that he was still standing there with his longish hair, his light beard, and his running watch. Seeing me off to straighten out my life in the country that had captivated him when he was still forging his soul, a country he'd never quite let go of.

When there were only three or four passengers in front of me, I heard his emphatic voice right behind me.

“I don't want you to start the New Year alone. I don't want you to end the century alone, I don't want you to sit at the table alone on New Year's Eve, or watch movies alone in bed, or for you to ever again go through life alone.”

I turned around as if there were no one else except ourselves in the terminal overflowing with rushing people. No other passengers, no other farewells, no plane about to take off or parking lot for him to return to. As if the universe around us had run out of batteries.

“Come with me,” I said hanging on to his neck.

“First straighten out your life. Afterwards, call me.”

And with the aplomb of one who knows exactly what he wants, he took me in his arms and kissed me with tenderness and warmth. Solid, sure, his fingers in my hair, transmitting with his lips the taste of a man who had lived a thousand lives and had been toughened by a thousand battles as well as the great discovery of a truth.

A couple of insistent ahems forced us apart. The man in front of me in Bermuda shorts and flip-flops had just gone through the passport screening process and I was next.

He whispered one more thing in my ear as he caressed me for the last time.

“I'll be there whenever you wish.”

I watched as he moved away and felt cold in his absence.

Before me was the glum face of a security agent waiting for my documents while drumming his fingers on the counter.

There were no delays; we boarded right away. Once I was seated, I devoted myself to looking out into the void from my window. Without focusing my eyes on either the vehicles or the operators that buzzed about the plane, without paying attention to the stewardesses who gave us instructions on how to put on the oxygen masks. Unwilling to think, trying to concentrate on mere trifles: what Ana would serve us for dinner on Christmas Eve, what the weather would be like in Madrid. Making an effort not to explore the unexpected twist my life had taken.

We took off. Good-bye to California, good-bye to this strange time. To a trip that had transformed my perspective on things, giving me more insight on dimensions whose reach I was still unable to gauge. I closed my eyes for the longest time, and when I opened them again only the dark night was visible out the window.

Finally I was unable to hold back any longer and opened the envelope.

My Dearest Blanca,

I've spent my entire life jumping onto moving trains; however, only two absolute certainties have struck me at simple, almost ordinary moments, catching me unawares, when my guard was lowered. One was decades ago in a pharmacy beside the Mediterranean, while looking for some remedy for an inopportune flu; the second, three months ago, when my most immediate concern was merely choosing a wine for dinner.

Different moments, different surroundings, but the shared feeling that the fullness of life was before me.

So that you know what that other time was like, here you have the rest of my past. The most recent part you know firsthand.

Yours, always,

D.C.

When the first tear fell, smudging the
Y
of “Yours,” I was unable to read on. After months of holding back, unable to avoid it, I finally broke down crying. I cried for me, for them, for all of us, as the plane flew over that strange country from one coast to the other and crossed the Atlantic on a sad night that never seemed to end. For Andres Fontana and that love of his, late and unrequited, so ill timed. For Aurora, for the life she was never able to live, for her eternally preserved image in a white dress laughing barefoot in Cabo San Lucas. For Daniel's dark years, for the depth of his pain and his courage to join the world again.

For Alberto and his new course, for the future we would no longer share. For my sons: for the children they'd been, and the men they were becoming. For all of our pasts and presents, for what we were before, for what was yet to come.

It was pouring when I changed planes at Heathrow and it was still raining when we landed in Madrid. It took me only a couple of seconds to spot my sons in the arrivals area, waving and laughing, calling me loudly. Dark-haired like their father, skinny like me. With the freshness of youth written all over their faces and their entire lives before them, making their way toward me.

On reaching home I read the pages in the envelope.

Afterwards I called him and said, “Come now.”

And after that afterwards, with my suitcases still half unpacked, the rooms warming up, and the Christmas tree still not set up, I traced the parallel lines of three lives and began writing.

Acknowledgments

T
o my friends and colleagues Malcolm Compitello (University of Arizona), Joe Super and Pablo González (West Virginia University), and Francisco Lomelí (University of California in Santa Barbara), for serving as a magnificent source of information and most valuable inspiration because of their knowledge and memories, and the nostalgic bit of half-Spanish soul they all have.

To Admiral Adolfo Baturone, Tata Albert, Juan Antonio Vizcaíno, and Juan Ignacio Ferrández, for their assistance in very different ways, which helped me reconstruct Cartagena in the 1950s and the city's connections to the United States Navy.

To Manuel Cantera and Miguel Zugasti, for their always wise ­revisions and corrections.

To my publishing team in Spain within Grupo Planeta, and very especially to Raquel Gisbert, Belén López Celada, and Isabel Santos, for their support, hard work, and contagious enthusiasm.

To my literary agent in Spain, Antonia Kerrigan, and to Lola Gulias, for pushing me and my books into the world.

For their splendid endeavor and wondrous zeal in bringing this Spanish story to American readers, my deepest gratitude to my agents in New York, Tom and Elaine Colchie; to my translator, Elie Kerrigan; and to my publishers, Judith Curr and Johanna Castillo, and the rest of the Atria team.

And finally, for everything, to my big family and my long-standing friends: always passionate and tempestuous, always essential.

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