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
* * *
Just 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.
Death struck him before he could reach definite conclusions in his research, but it was obvious that the effort had been immense. He had visited almost all of California’s archives and libraries that could shed any light on the Spanish presence i
n the area; he’d visited one by one the state’s missions, as well as various dioceses and archdioceses. Where he didn’t go with his own two feet he did so by mail in hundreds of letters that were answered by their recipients. His work had been thorough and painstaking to the utmost. Now it was our responsibility to rise to the occasion.
We began on Friday morning and completely forgot that in the calendar of normal people’s lives there existed something called the weekend. At times we worked seated and at others standing, moving around the large table. Sometimes we kept apart, each concentrating on a specific piece of the legacy. Other times, however, we worked side by side, bent over the same document. Searching, finding, jotting. Shoulder to shoulder, heads touching, my fingers grazing his, his grazing my skin.
The verbal exchanges were scarce and almost telegraphic. By surprise, due to an unexpected setback, or out of admiration for something we had discovered, we’d sometimes let out an exclamation. In English or Spanish, indiscriminately. “Fuck. Que tio. Shit.”
We compared information, we marked places, we identified patterns, until the first surprises started to appear.
“You told me in Sonoma that Father Altimira was the founder of that mission, right?” Daniel asked me at some point on Saturday afternoon from the other end of the table. “The unruly Franciscan who didn’t have the permission from his superiors to build it.”
“Have you found something on him?” I asked, surprised. “I’ve already come across him three times.”
“And so have I, a bunch of times,” he noted. “Here he shows up in a couple of written notes, listen:
December 1820: Father Jose Altimira announces to Colonel Pablo Vicente de Sola, last governor of Alta California, his new destination in these territories. 1821: Altimira thanks Sola for several favors. October 1821: Altimira notifies Sola of the delivery of a shipment of grain to a Russian ship . . .
The information was not truly significant, nor did it highlight any relevant fact, but it attested to the fluid relationship the recently landed Franciscan had with the higher civil authorities.
“In any case, there are more names that appear relatively frequently. I’ve come across Father Señan in four or five other references, and pretty much the same goes for Father Fortuni.”
As we kept working, indeed, traces of the old Franciscan fathers started to surface regularly among the papers.
“Reserve Altimira just in case. Let’s stack all his documents here,” I said, pointing to one end of the table. “Make sure we don’t lose sight of him.”
And we didn’t. Neither of him nor of anyone else, including Fortuni, Señan, and the dozens of monks, missions, jailhouses, laws, and governors who kept crossing our path.
Saturday came to an end, Sunday flew by, and Monday arrived. At the end of each day we’d go out onto the apartment’s little terrace with our coats on and, letting the cold wind clear our minds, we’d stretch our legs against the balustrade and drink a glass of wine. Or two. Or three.
On Monday afternoon, however, we hadn’t yet taken a break, when our peace was shattered.
“She’s here!”
It was almost seven p.m. and we’d been scrutinizing papers and listening to a bunch of old tape recordings: interviews with priests, filing clerks, and fellow Spaniards, with Fontana’s loud voice in the background. I was moved on hearing him; Daniel, even more so.
Then there was knocking on the door. Daniel called out his usual “Come in!” and, with hardly the time to say hello to her, we heard Fanny scream like someone possessed.
“She’s here—I’ve found her!”
As soon as we realized who she was addressing with such boundless enthusiasm, we exchanged a perplexed glance.
“She’s here, Professor Zarate! There’s no need to keep on looking! Professor Perea is here, with Professor Carter!”
The slender figure of Luis Zarate appeared at the door without time for us to consider what to do. A loud rebuff flew across my mind. How could I have forgotten to inform the chairman, to disguise my absence with any old excuse?
Too late for regrets, we got up, greeted him, and stood motionless at one corner of the large table. He, meanwhile, stepped inside the apartment without waiting for Daniel to invite him in. Then he carefully let his eyes wander across all the material and equipment strewn about. Bundles, diagrams, maps. Our computers. The scanner. The prehistoric gadgets. And the printer. My printer. The one he’d given me.
The situation became extremely uncomfortable for all three of us and I again cursed myself for not anticipating that this moment might come to pass.
After the tense silence, Luis was the first to intervene.
“What an interesting encounter,” he said ironically, without addressing either of us in particular. Then his gaze settled on me. “We’re looking for you, Blanca, because it got into Fanny’s head that something might have happened to you. She says that you didn’t show up in your office either Friday or today. We’ve called your apartment several times but without luck. Your cell phone is out of service and Rebecca Cullen is at a seminar in San Francisco, so we were unable to learn of your whereabouts through her.”
“You see, Luis, I—”
“Naturally it’s not part of my duties as chairman to be searching the streets for someone who has not shown up for work,” he interrupted me, “but Fanny was quite alarmed and at her insistence I had no other choice but to help find you.”
“A thousand apologies, really. I should have told you that I’d be out temporarily,” I said.
I was sincere. I regretted not having done so, but everything had happened so quickly that it didn’t even cross my mind to clue in the department regarding my intentions—although my forgetfulness, it suddenly dawned on me, might have simply been an unconscious defense mechanism, an excuse to conceal a truth that would have been unacceptable to Luis.
I realized I hadn’t seen him since the day he had shown up unexpectedly at my office. The day of that bitter visit to Darla Stern’s house, after which I lay cuddled next to Daniel on his couch while he narrated in the darkness the saddest moments of his life. The same day in which Luis Zarate himself, within the fiefdom of his department, offered me his support with implications that were light-years from the merely professional. Any affinity between us, however, seemed to have been blown to smithereens by this new set of circumstances. I thought it safest for me to keep quiet for the moment. Daniel too remained silent.
“A very productive absence, from what I gather,” he remarked while browsing through the material.
He lifted an antique map of California and pretended to examine it, then did the same with a letter from the Huntington Library in San Marino. Lastly, he placed his hand on the printer and patted it several times.
Fanny contemplated the scene impassively, radiating satisfaction at having found me and not in the least discerning the possible consequences of what she had unleashed.
Luis continued to address me: “From what I see, it hasn’t exactly been a few days of holidays that you’ve taken, right, Blanca? Evidently you’ve been working hard and, moreover, without wavering from your commitment.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And Professor Carter is helping me.”
“On the other hand, that doesn’t seem quite right, given the fact that he’s no longer connected to this university. Nor do I understand what all these documents belonging to the university are doing in his place. In case you don’t recall, these papers are restricted and should not be been taken out of the university without authorization.”
Where was the Luis Zarate who had prepared cocktails at my party, who had flirted with me unabashedly at Los Olivos, who had tried to kiss me and offered me what seemed like sincere affection?
“This material does not belong to the university: it’s mine,” Daniel corrected him before I could say anything. His tone was bitter and force
ful, so that there could be no doubt about his opinion of the department chair.
Taking a few bills out of his pocket, Luis changed his tone as he said, “Fanny, darling, would you mind going for some pizzas? Whichever ones you want, whichever you like best. Thanks, dear. And take your time, there’s no rush.”
When Fanny had left, we explained how those documents had come into our hands. We told Luis only about seventy percent of the truth. We mentioned Darla Stern’s garage, but not the checks that were paid; we spoke to him about the distant relationship between Fontana and Daniel, but not of the thirty years that the former pupil had decided to cast his mentor into oblivion. In any case, and in spite of our effort to come across as credible, Luis had difficulty accepting our version of the facts.
“All very laudable, no doubt about it. But from the evidence I gather the following,” he said, extending both hands over our cluttered table. “That all this material is part of what Professor Andres Fontana left behind in the department at the time of his death—a department that I now run—and that right now it is in the private home of an individual unaffiliated with the university and who was clearly facilitated illicitly by the researcher assigned to process it.”
“Luis, please . . .” I pleaded.
“So, much to my chagrin, I believe that my official duty is to demand that all this be taken out of here immediately and, afterwards, that you draw up a report explaining this series of irregularities. A report that I’ll have to send to the dean, of course.”
Daniel and I exchanged another quick glance, but neither of us said a word.
“And most likely,” he went on, in a tone of superiority that he’d never used in my presence before, “my duty will also entail sending the aforesaid report to your university, Blanca.”
“I don’t think they’ll be too interested,” I said with a touch of insolence.
He ignored my comment.
“And as far as you’re concerned, Carter, rest assured that I’ll also find a way for my report to reach Santa Barbara.”