“Your work is of great interest—very much so. It’s most valuable and fundamental, bringing sense to everything. But there are other matters.”
“Well, then, spell them out once and for all.”
“Let’s see how I can explain this to you . . .” he said slowly, trying to come up with the right words. “The proposal to build a mall in Los Pinitos was the trigger—a very powerful trigger. But there was something else behind it. An outstanding debt.”
“With Fontana?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes, with Fontana; with his memory and his dignity.”
“Are you telling me that thirty years after his death you still had to settle matters with your old professor?”
“That’s right,” he admitted with an emphatic gesture. “To my great regret, that is so. Even though three decades had gone by since his death, and Aurora’s—and although I’d completely rebuilt my life and all of that was part of the past—there were still loose ends between us.”
“I swear, this exceeds my power of comprehension,” I murmured.
“Deep down, it’s all quite simple. Sadly simple. To summarize what turned out to be the most dreadful years of my life, I want you to know that, after that horrendous accident, I hit rock bottom. Like Dante in his Inferno, in the midpoint of my life, I found myself in a dark forest after having gone astray. I descended to hell, and did a few stupid things.”
“You still do.”
My comment didn’t seem to bother him.
“But back then, unfortunately, they were much more regrettable. And among them was to refuse to have anything to do with the memory of my old teacher. After the accident I fled, literally. In truth, I did not know what I was running away from, but wanted to get away as soon as possible, far from anything related to my previous life.”
“From your life with Aurora, I suppose.”
“Especially. From my ten years of happiness with a wonderful woman whom I said good-bye to with a long kiss at our kitchen table at breakfast and who that very same night I saw for the last time muddied on the shoulder of the road, covered with a bloody blanket and with her skull crushed between crumpled metal.”
I was moved by the harshness of his story; I was disconcerted by the naturalness of his account. I didn’t say a word. I let him talk.
“But I overcame it. In time and with effort, after so much turmoil, little by little the despondency turned into a great grief, then into a bearable sadness, and in the end, a simple melancholy that in time slowly vanished.”
I sat in an armchair and he sat on the couch in front of me, face-to-face, separated by a low table with a few outdated magazines on top, a firewall between us. He then leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees.
“I’m not some kind of disturbed idiot clutching at a shadow of an absence, Blanca. It’s been many years since I came out of the darkness,” he declared. “It was a painful process but I learned to live without Aurora and was able to rebuild my life. But with Andres Fontana, unfortunately, it wasn’t the same. I was so shattered by my wife’s death, so lost and heartbroken, that I was never able to reconcile with his absence because I never shed a tear for him.”
“And then, after the passage of years, you announced this alleged fellowship and hired me to dust off his legacy. Not only in search of documentary evidence against the shopping center, but also to clear your guilty conscience without even getting your hands dirty.”
He did not answer me. He stared at me but didn’t answer.
“I really trusted you, you know?” I went on, lowering my eyes toward the table that separated us. “Maybe you think my problems are insignificant compared to your own tragedy, but I also know what loss is,” I said, raising my eyebrows at him.
“I know, Blanca, I know . . .”
“I arrived in Santa Cecilia disoriented and badly wounded, fleeing, struggling to rescue myself from the wreck my life had become.”
“I know . . .” he repeated.
“And I clutched on to Fontana’s legacy like a lifeline. Then you crossed my path, apparently always willing to help, to make my life easier, to make me laugh . . . to . . . to . . . And now . . .” I swallowed my feelings, trying not to fall apart. “I thought you were my friend.”
He extended a hand toward me but I moved back, refusing to accept his contact.
“Blanca, let me finish telling you what from the very beginning was behind my actions. Before you judge me, you need to know about Fontana, Aurora, and myself. Afterwards, do whatever you deem fit: banish me from your house and life, hate me, forget me, forgive me, or do whatever you must do. But first you must listen.”
The old photograph pinned with a thumbtack in Rebecca’s basement came back to mind. The young, pretty woman with the broad laugh, white dress, and disheveled hair who was standing under the sun of Cabo San Lucas and whose life had come to an end one rainy night. Perhaps because of her I instinctively yielded.
“They hit it off from the start, from the moment Aurora and I settled in Santa Cecilia two years earlier. The three of us had a very close relationship, a relationship that far exceeded the boundaries of the purely professional. But between them, however, most likely because of their common condition as Spanish expatriates, they established a special bond with a mutual understanding that I myself sometimes didn’t fully grasp. Invisible references and cultural codes, nuances that were beyond me and brought them closer together. A deep friendship ensued. And in time Aurora began to collaborate with him.”
“Doing what?”
“She would often accompany him in his search for documentation; they’d compare facts and scrutinize papers together.”
“She was a historian . . .” I ventured.
“Far from it: she was a pharmacist. In fact, when we arrived in Santa Cecilia she’d just finished her PhD in pharmacology in Indiana, where we’d lived the previous five years. Her field consisted of formulas and chemical compounds, but, I don’t know why—perhaps because he instilled that passion in her—she began to feel a bond with those old Spaniards who wandered these lands centuries ago. Her Catholic faith in which she was brought up must have influenced her as well, by then channeled toward a much more active social commitment. She worked with immigrants and the elderly, participated in adult literacy programs, that sort of activity—something quite praiseworthy despite living with the wild agnostic I used to be. She was gradually captivated by the old Franciscan missions. When the accident occurred, they were returning from Berkeley, where they’d gone looking for documents on what they called Mission Olvido. With both of their deaths, that research was left unfinished and the chapter on the uncataloged mission was closed inconclusively.”
“But—”
“Wait,” he whispered. “Let me continue. I think you still need to know a few more things. Fontana, in his will, left four heirs. Half of his savings were to go to Aurora, which I ended up receiving. From that money, which I’d never touched, came all the monthly checks written out to you.”
“And the other heirs?”
“The other half of the money went to Fanny Stern, still a child at the time. He felt a great fondness for her; her mother, Darla, whom you met that afternoon in the square, was the department secretary at the time. He had a special type of relationship with her.”
“I know. Fanny herself told me,” I said.
“He left it to Fanny formally, but for all practical purposes he left it to both of them. To the university he bequeathed his house, which was absorbed into what now are extensions to the campus. They tore it down years later and in its place built a laboratory, if I’m not mistaken. And I was named, let us say, his intellectual heir, and as such received the magnificent library that he’d slowly built over the decades. But his documents, his personal papers, his research . . . never reached me, and were left here, in Santa Cecilia, forgotten in a basement in Guevara Hall with
out anyone ever showing any interest in them whatsoever.”
“But you should have been the one to reclaim them: they were your mentor’s legacy and you were his beneficiary.”
“I know. Legally, that was my responsibility. And morally too.”
“But you never did so.”
“No.”
“Because you were never interested in their contents.”
“Probably.”
“And because you wanted to cut all ties connecting you with the past.”
“Most likely.”
“Nothing else?”
He gave me a dark, piercing look, pressing one hand against the other, weighing his words.
In the end it was I who suggested the answer that he refrained from uttering.
“Perhaps there was also a wish on your part,” I said in a lower tone, “to distance yourself from Andres Fontana for good.”
He nodded. Slowly at first, more forcefully afterwards.
“I was never able to forgive him altogether,” he finally admitted with a heavy voice. “During my long mourning, in those dreadful months and years of pure grief, I cried only for Aurora. He, I only blamed. Not for having killed her: it was all an accident, that was always clear. But I did blame him in a certain way for having dragged her along with him, for having gotten her involved in something alien to her. For having, in a way, separated her from me, from my care, my protection . . .”
“So you decided to punish him. To keep his memory buried for more than thirty years in a basement full of dust, without a single human hand coming close to him to unearth him from oblivion.”
He swallowed his emotions before continuing.
“It’s a very crude way of expressing it, but perhaps you’re right. I intentionally refused to assume responsibility for his legacy, and with this decision I also decided to push aside the memory of the man he was.”
“Until some months ago, in light of this matter of Los Pinitos, you decided to pardon him. You thought that perhaps Fontana had been onto something after all, with his belated passion for those humble Franciscans and his extravagant notion of the existence of a lost mission. So you decided to act.”
A wistful smile became visible at the corner of his mouth. He leaned back on the sofa. Tense, sad, and tired. Like myself.
“Yes and no. When I found out through Rebecca about the urban aberration that was in the pipelines, I started to turn the matter over in my head. I recalled the walks that Aurora and he would take in the long afternoons of that last spring they were alive. All that fruitless effort came back to my mind, the work they never finished because death swept them away: their conjectures, their hopes, and especially their work’s relevance to the present. Then I made some inquiries of my own and learned that Los Pinitos is presently under the town hall’s custody, with no legitimate proprietor or recorded history.”
“And you put two and two together.”
“It didn’t strike me as totally implausible that, among those lost documents, I might find some missing clue. But most important, I thought that the time had come to make peace with my past, and above all with that man who had meant so much in my life. To compensate for my unjust behavior and to try and pay some kind of tribute, half privately, half publicly, to the person and his work.”
“So that’s how it all began.”
“Yes, Blanca. That is how my reconciliation got under way.”
Chapter 34
* * *
The night advanced and there we were, facing each other, under the tenuous light of a corner lamp, without even a lousy glass of wine or some background music or a simple sip of water to attenuate the sorrow. There were no sounds to disturb us beyond those that occasionally slipped in from the street, muffled by the closed window.
The sadness was palpable. His feelings were no doubt true; in no way did I doubt his sincerity. But it wasn’t enough. Beyond his words, which at times sounded both convincing and devastating, I felt once again the bitter sensation of having been betrayed by someone whom I had trusted blindly. As if history had repeated itself.
Coldly contemplated, hardly any of that had to do with the wound caused by my marriage’s collapse. Alberto’s disloyalty had been a devastating cyclone that turned my universe upside down. Daniel’s manipulation was, by comparison, a simple summer storm. Even so, the emotional erosion that I was beginning to recover from had suddenly resumed. No matter how much he endeavored to string a clear and coherent speech regarding the genesis of that obscure plot, no matter how much he convinced me of his honesty, the fact was that I still felt deceived. I wanted to get to the bottom of the matter.
“So then, once you set up your foundation or whatever you wish to call it, why did you select me from among all the candidates?”
“They’re your sons, right?” he suddenly asked, pointing to a picture on the shelf.
Next to the only spot of light left, sitting beside my keys, a Chinese restaurant flyer, and the replica of the missionary bell that he himself had given me, was the photograph that David and Pablo had sent me along with a pair of gloves and a Joaquin Sabina CD. A belated happy birthday, Mother, as usual we’re hopeless, forgive us, they’d written on the enclosed card. The wet hair in their eyes, the laughter after an afternoon at the beach, the carefree breeze of the past.
“They’re my sons, but that doesn’t matter now.”
As if he hadn’t heard me, Daniel went up to the shelf where the photograph was.
“They look a lot like you,” he said with a smile. The first halfway genuine smile that either of us had that night.
“Would you mind leaving it where it is?”
He returned my sons to their shelf and sat down again on the sofa.
“You never had any competition,” he admitted, reclining against the back cushion. “You were the first to answer my call and I immediately knew that it was you I wanted here. I thought you amply fulfilled the requirements I was looking for. Just like that.”
He spoke with earnestness now, his legs crossed and his tone natural.
“But my experience was hardly relevant to what was needed here,” I countered. “My field of work, as you yourself know perfectly well, is applied linguistics.”
“That was secondary. What I was looking for was an academic who was capable of doing the fieldwork methodically and accurately. Someone who spoke English and who had experience dealing with foreign universities. Besides, I was in a hurry. It was important to get started as soon as possible, the business of Los Pinitos was moving ahead quickly.”
“Why did you insist on having someone from Spain? Why didn’t you try to find someone within your own country?”
“Out of pure, absurd, and pathetic sentimentalism,” he admitted. “From the very start I felt that a compatriot could engage with Fontana more passionately. And to be completely honest, there was another criterion that to a large degree influenced the reason that I chose you: age. I assumed that someone with maturity would be able to approach the legacy from a wiser perspective.”
He then unglued his back from the sofa and leaned forward, once more resting his elbows on his knees and again shortening the distance between us.
“I was looking for a professional and you for a new place in the world,” he said, regarding me intently. “I needed something, you needed something, and both our paths crossed. Thanks to our contract, you achieved your objective, which I now know was to flee your surroundings as soon as possible. And mine, the urgent processing of my friend’s legacy. Quid pro quo, Blanca, nothing else.”
I turned my eyes away from his and focused on the window. Through it only a frame of black night could be discerned.
“Anyway,” he added, “I want you to know that not a single day has gone by since I began to know you that I haven’t thought of telling you everything.”
“But you never did!” I y
elled, venting the rage I thought I had under control. “That’s the worst of it, Daniel! Had you been clear from the very beginning, we would have most likely reached the same place and you would have saved me a lot of pain.”
“You’re totally right, Blanca,” he admitted. “I should have been clear with you from the start; this I know now, but I didn’t before. Because I was not counting on you and me having any kind of relationship; I thought you’d simply be some employee who wouldn’t know the whole story. And at first I didn’t even intend to stay in Santa Cecilia. When Rebecca introduced us in Meli’s Market, remember, I’d just come to meet you and make sure my project had gotten off the ground as I was hoping.”
“Why didn’t you leave afterwards? If you and I hadn’t met, or if we’d let it rest at that first encounter, everything would have been so much easier.”
“Because . . . sometimes things take an unexpected turn. Because . . . life is like this, Blanca. Sometimes plans are derailed . . .”
He got up and paced the room from one end to the other, which he accomplished in four or five strides, since the room was so small. Then he remained standing there as he went over the stages of our common journey from his point of view.
“I learned from you that the approach you were taking was not the one I had expected: you got much more deeply involved with Fontana and his world than I ever thought you would. I began to realize that I’d underestimated the extent of the task, the complexity of the legacy, and your attitude toward it. I decided not to leave. I rented an apartment, fetched from my home in Santa Barbara what I needed for the time being, and came back. For you to have me close whenever you needed me. Not to control you or manipulate you, but rather, simply, to be close to you and to accompany you on your path.”
“Three months on my path is a long time. Three months in which you haven’t told me one word—”