Aurora Carranza and Daniel Carter were married three months later, at noon on a magnificent Sunday toward the end of June. The bride wore an heirloom white organza gown, and despite her mother’s efforts to comb her hair into a showy bun in the style of Grace Kelly, Aurora categorically refused to have her hair swept upward. The groom, in morning dress, waited for his future wife at the altar of the Church of the Caridad as if that were the moment he’d been anticipating all his life. On Aurora’s side were the most prominent members of local society, while on Daniel’s side were Domingo Cabeza de Vaca (accompanied by a professor of Visigothic history whom he’d begun to court during the spring); Señora Antonia and her sons, who didn’t stop handing handkerchiefs to their mother; and the top brass of the U.S. naval base in Cartagena. Daniel’s parents were also present, having come from the United States—thanks once more to Loretta’s maneuvering—and putting aside their bitter disagreements of the past. Andres Fontana sent them a telegram from Pittsburgh: “With my most heartfelt best wishes for the great adventure that you are embarking upon together.”
The wedding luncheon took place at the Club de Regatas with the Mediterranean serving as backdrop, and the couple spent their wedding night in the Grand Hotel. To the bride’s mother’s shock and Nana’s delight, they didn’t emerge from the nuptial suite until six o’clock the following evening. They then left on a whirlwind honeymoon that would take them to Chalamera, Pamplona, Biarritz, and Paris. The visit to Chalamera was a desire of Daniel’s in order to show Aurora the land of the writer who had indirectly been the cause of their meeting; the stay in Biarritz was an homage to Nana; and the trip to Paris was a present from Daniel’s parents in an effort to compensate somewhat for all their years of estrangement.
They didn’t make clear to anyone the reason that drove them to visit Pamplona, and both families were able to understand the couple’s urge for that stopover only when, among some photos sent by mail a few months later, was one of Daniel dressed in white with a red neckerchief, running like someone possessed down Calle Estafeta, inches away from the tip of a bull’s horn. In another picture the newlyweds appeared sitting at a terrace café next to a well-built man with a white beard who only a few were able to identify. It was Ernest Hemingway, and that would be the last time he’d attend the festival of the running of the bulls. He left a record of it in a book, The Dangerous Summer, published shortly afterward in three installments in Life magazine. There were those who said that the excesses committed by the writer during those months, traveling across Spain in a mad bullfighting-and-bacchanalian pilgrimage, altered him so much that they cost him his life. For the young couple that summer, on the other hand, it was a time of glorious happiness.
Aurora brought to the marriage a degree in pharmacy and a trousseau of table linens and Valenciennes lace bedding sets inherited from her grandmother, but she could hardly fry an egg and scarcely spoke a few broken sentences in the language of the country that would welcome her until the end of her days. Without realizing it, she made the biblical words from the book of Ruth her own: “And Ruth said, Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. . .” Daniel, for his part, offered as his entire fortune a prodigious knowledge of the Spanish language and a modest job offer secured through Andres Fontana to teach Spanish literature at a university in the Midwest while he wrote his dissertation on Ramon J. Sender.
Toward the beginning of August 1959, on board a flight somewhere over the Atlantic, a young American whispered two lines of a poem by Pedro Salinas into the ear of a Spanish girl half-asleep, whose unruly straw-colored hair covered part of her face. I know when I call you / among all people in the world / only you will be you.
Together they were taking a step toward a future whose outcome, fortunately for them, they could not yet imagine.
Chapter 30
* * *
He waited for me on the street, leaning against his car, a blue Volvo neither too new nor too clean. Dark glasses covering his eyes, his light-colored beard seemed even lighter in the morning sun, and his hair as always somewhat longer than the usual. With his arms crossed idly, and wearing a pair of wrinkled chinos and an old denim jacket, he looked relaxed and attractive.
“It looks as if you’d just woken up, I bet you haven’t even had breakfast,” was his accurate greeting.
I’d only had time for half a cup of coffee. I’d woken up with just enough time to take a shower, fix myself up a little, and leave home the moment the horn honked for the second time.
He’d called me in the middle of the week to set a date for the plan we’d discussed on Thanksgiving night.
“On Saturday I am going out for dinner with Luis Zarate, so it’s best we leave it for Sunday,” I suggested. After the Thanksgiving break, the chairman and I had finally settled on a day.
“And if he kidnaps you and you don’t come back?” he said sarcastically. “Why don’t we move it forward to Friday?”
I agreed. His presence was always pleasant and I had a growing interest in visiting that mission so often mentioned in Fontana’s papers. Why postpone it any longer?
Before, however, there had been some somewhat murky days. The start of the last month of the year had brought with it a barrage of e-mails from Spain asking again about my short-term plans, sometimes discreetly, other times bordering on impertinence. My university colleagues wanted to know if I’d join them for the traditional dinner before the Christmas holidays, and my sister Ana censured me permanently with her bellicose ideas as to how to torpedo my ex. Our mutual friends—those with whom we’d brought up our children and had lived through so much—inquired diplomatically about my plans in an effort, I assumed, to coordinate things so Alberto and I didn’t run into each other at someone’s home. I put everyone off. “I’ll let you know, we’ll see, let’s keep in touch, I’ve got a lot of work, good-bye, see you soon, good-bye.”
The campus, meanwhile, began to take on that end-of-semester atmosphere. Not to mention end-of-year, end-of-century, end-of-millennium. Big changes on the horizon. For the time being, however, what worried students were the impending exams and deadlines for handing in papers, essays, and projects. The anxiety was palpable; its noisy presence made itself felt in leisure areas, in the recreational center, on the sports grounds, and in the cafés. Dorms and apartments remained lit until the wee hours, and the library, housing what seemed like a great camp of refugees, remained open twenty-four hours a day.
There was a feeling of last-minute pressure among the professors as well. Briefer hallway conversations, a ton of exams to prepare, mountains of tests to correct, and a great desire to put the first half of the academic year to rest. It was similar to what I had felt year after year at my university, except that now, for the first time in my life, I had no desire for the holidays to arrive.
It was clearer by the day that my work with Andres Fontana’s legacy was coming to an end. The stack of papers on top of my table had progressively diminished as their contents were poured into the computer’s memory. The documents, once read and classified, accumulated in Cartesian order in cardboard boxes lined up on the floor. Everything that I managed to understand and retain regarding the history of California in the previous weeks had facilitated my task a great deal, but nonetheless I was aware that any reconstruction of the final stage of the professor’s life would lack cohesion. I was missing information, documents, pieces of the great puzzle that was his last investigative work. To create some kind of clarity out of what remained was beyond my reach. Perhaps that was why I had been so eager for Friday to roll around.
“How about we eat something first?” was Daniel’s proposal the moment I confirmed I was famished.
In no hurry to hit the road, we stopped at a café on the outskirts of Santa Cecilia where a handful of hippie night owls shared space w
ith workmen and white-haired grandmothers. Seated by a large window, we ordered eggs, bacon, pancakes, orange juice, and two cups of coffee.
We chatted away while doing justice to the pair of plates that a robust waitress put before us. The portions were more than generous, perhaps due to Daniel’s lighthearted flirting in Spanish, which seemed to have brightened her morning’s boredom.
“I give up,” I said eventually. “I’m full.”
“Finish it,” he joked, “so that your family doesn’t go around thinking we don’t take good care of you in California.”
I focused my eyes on the yolky remains of a fried egg.
“What’s left of my family, and the little I matter to them . . .”
I hadn’t finished saying those words when I already regretted them. Perhaps my intention was to make a humorous remark, but what came out of my mouth was a crude point-blank gush of bitterness. I felt disconcerted, not knowing why suddenly, without justification, I’d lashed out against myself. All the more so after I had recently begun to notice that my spirits were picking up. Perhaps that was why I dropped my guard. Or it might have been because for too long I’d been putting up with so many things on my own that I was no longer able to hold back.
“Don’t say that, Blanca, for God’s sake. I know you’ve got your kids; I’ve heard you talk about them. And even if you always go around making sure not to say a word about yourself, I’m sure there are others who are concerned about you. Someone who wants to know that you’re well, that you’re working hard, that you’re healthy and take care of yourself, that you’re making friends who appreciate you in this corner of the world so far from home and your normal life. Siblings, parents, friends, ex-boyfriends, future boyfriends, what do I know? Or a husband, or an ex-husband, more likely. Perhaps this is a good moment for you to tell me once and for all something about yourself beyond your progress with Fontana’s past.”
“You want to know something about me?” I said, lifting my eyes from the remaining food. “Well, I’ll tell you. My sons, the two of them, have each gone their separate ways. They finished school and have flown the nest. One is studying in London and the other alternates between Tarifa and Madrid, horsing around, and of course both are pretty much off doing their own thing and don’t give a rat’s ass about me. My parents, both gone: my father from prostate cancer fifteen years ago and my mother from a brain hemorrhage four years ago. I do have, I must admit, a sister by the name of Ana who calls me every other day to crush my morale while thinking she’s helping to fix my life, but unfortunately never in a way I would like to see my life fixed. And until a few months back I had a man by my side whom I was married to for almost twenty-five years. I thought we made a stable, reasonably happy couple, but one fine day he stopped loving me and left. He fell in love with another woman, he’s going to have a child with her, and I’ve refused to see him since; that’s why I decided to leave and that’s why I’m here now. Not because I was particularly interested in the academic life of this university at the other end of world, or because I had the slightest interest in digging up a dead man’s dusty legacy: I simply came here fleeing the purest, bitterest grief. That’s all—that’s my life, Professor Carter. Fascinating, right? So as you can see, no one cares if I eat or don’t eat.”
I was suddenly assailed by a momentary weakness and turned my head so as not to look him in the eyes. But I didn’t regret what I’d just told him. Nor was I satisfied. Deep down, I didn’t care one way or the other. I gained or lost nothing by cluing him in to my reality.
I gazed out the window without paying attention to anything in particular: neither to the sickly couple that had just walked into the café, nor to an SUV that was parking, nor to a half-broken-down truck that was going into reverse, about to take off.
Then I noticed Daniel’s arms cross the table in the direction of my plate. Two long arms with big bony hands at the ends. With them he grabbed my plate with my knife and fork and the rest of my breakfast and pulled it toward him. He cut, poked, put down the knife, and raised the fork toward my mouth. With a tone of professorial authority, which he most likely used when he had to bring his students in line, he said:
“I care. Eat.”
His reaction, which almost made me laugh, was compassionate, but had a hint of sharpness to it.
“Come on, let’s go,” I said when I finally swallowed the piece of pancake that he offered me.
I went out while he paid. He didn’t take long to catch up with me. As we headed to the car leisurely, immersed in our separate thoughts, I suddenly felt his fingers grazing the nape of my neck through my hair.
“Blanca, Blanca . . .”
He said nothing more.
• • •
Sonoma turned out to be a lot like Santa Cecilia, yet quieter without the noisy students. We parked on a downtown street, next to the large Sonoma Plaza containing the city hall and a good number of ancient trees. Scattered around it were low buildings in motley colors: the legendary Toscano Hotel and the Blue Wing Inn, the Sebastiani Theatre, the old Mexican army barracks, and La Casa Grande, the house of General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo during the first years of independence.
“And here is our mission . . .”
At the far corner of the square, simple, white, and austere, with a veranda supported by old wooden beams that ran its entire length, was San Francisco Solano, commonly known as Mission Sonoma. The end of a chain established by the Spanish Franciscans in their heroic missionary zeal, it was the last outpost on the fabled Camino Real, that open road over which friars in coarse leather sandals rode on the backs of mules. Like its sister missions, it had a cast-iron bell outside hanging from a crossbeam, a recurring symbol that dotted California from south to north, calling to mind those austere men who had settled there in a not-too-distant past.
We contemplated the mission in silence, standing still before it. Nothing extraordinary lay hidden behind its clean lines and simplicity. But in a certain way, and perhaps because of this, I think we were both moved. The clay tiles, the sun beating against the whitewash. A couple of minutes flew by.
“I wasn’t altogether honest with you before.”
He didn’t ask me to explain; he preferred that I just tell him. And I did so without looking at him, without taking my eyes off the mission’s façade.
“It’s true that at first I agreed to take on Fontana’s legacy as a mere obligation to get away from my own problems, to distance myself from them physically and emotionally. But that doesn’t mean that I’ve taken it lightly. What began as a simple duty has somehow become a personal interest.”
He didn’t offer an opinion or judge; he merely waited a few moments, pondering my words. Then he grabbed me by the elbow and said, “Come on, let’s go inside.”
As with the twenty other California missions, San Francisco Solano was not completely rebuilt and little of the original building was left standing. But the aesthetics were there, the soul and structure, with its humble wooden cross, rough on the top part. A metal plaque summarized its history, intimate and poignant in its sobriety.
There didn’t seem to be any other visitors, and so, with no company other than the sound of our footsteps, we walked around the chapel with its whitewashed walls, clay-tiled floor, and modest altar. Afterwards, we visited the wing the priests had lived in, which had a tiny museum that showed a scale model of the original mission behind glass, a copper pot, cattle-branding irons, and a handful of black-and-white photos from different periods of the mission’s existence.
In spite of the reduced size of the premises and the humility of its contents, the place emanated charm and serenity. On the walls of what was thought to have been the refectory we came upon an ancient collection of watercolors and stopped to examine them. We admired fifty or so images of the missions, beautiful despite their varying states of decay before undergoing reconstruction: collapsed walls, roofs about to cave
in or already in ruins, belfries propped up by scaffolding, partition walls with fissures, other walls devoured by vines, and overall a pervading sense of abandonment and loneliness.
“Do you think he was right?” Daniel asked, his eyes still fixed on the image of an arcade half in ruins, without taking his hands out of his pockets, without turning toward me.
“Who and about what?”
“Fontana, in believing that perhaps another mission existed whose traces aren’t recorded anywhere.”
He kept looking ahead, motionless, as if behind the watercolors’ brushstrokes he could find part of the answer.
“Among his papers, I haven’t found any evidence,” I said. “But according to what you yourself told me, he believed there was. Mission Olvido was its name, right?”
“That’s the name I heard him mention. Perhaps it was the real name, perhaps an imaginary one he chose to give it, to label something of which he never had proof.”
A pair of tourists came into the room. The woman had a camera at the ready, and the man was wearing a brightly colored fanny pack and a baseball cap facing backward. We moved aside to let them through, since the prints didn’t seem to interest them.
“In any case,” I added when we were again left alone, “I’m afraid that there’s still no trace of that lost mission.”
As we slowly left the watercolors behind and moved toward the interior garden, we heard children’s voices. On stepping outside we realized that it was a school trip led by a young teacher and an elderly guide who asked for quiet with little success. We moved a safe distance away beside a central brick fountain, stopping to listen to what the guide finally managed to tell them: sanitized portions of history, digestible for an audience of fourth graders. Mention of the year of its founding, 1823; its founder, Father Jose Altimira; and the methods of work and teaching used on the Indian converts that were welcomed there.
We exited the mission in silence: Daniel, probably remembering the Andres Fontana he had known and those intuitions he had hardly paid any attention to at the time; I, still trying to reconstruct the professor from the testimonies he’d left behind. Two different versions of the same person: the man in Daniel’s memory, and the intellectual legacy that remained.