Immortal Love (3 page)

He wasn’t angry. Not yet. Only curious. He wasn’t angry, until I raised my hand and showed him the card. “Who gave you this?”

Fast and furious, Ryan reached forward and tore the card from my fingers. “What does it matter?” he asked as he squeezed it in his fist. “Are you spying on me?

“You don’t trust me, do you?” he continued, his voice getting louder with each word. “I did what you asked me, I took your dumb tests, and still you don’t trust me?”

“Have you met Bécquer?”

“Why should I tell you anything? You won’t believe me, anyway.”

Before I could answer, he grabbed some clothes from the floor and left the room.

I sat on the bed.

My two worlds that until then I had kept apart, my writing and Ryan’s addiction, had unexpectedly collided and lay broken at my feet.

Was Ryan using again? Why had Bécquer not mentioned he knew him?

Could it be he had met him, but didn’t know he was my son? Besides, even if Bécquer knew who Ryan was and had given him his card, that didn’t mean they had been together when Ryan … It was only a rolled card. It didn’t have to mean he had been using. But if he hadn’t, why had he refused to answer me?

“Mom?” I looked up. Madison, dressed to kill in a short dress over tight pants, and wearing more make-up than I use in a month, stared at me. “Are you ready?”

“Ready?”

Madison pouted. “Don’t tell me you’re bailing on me? Whatever Ryan has done this time, we need to go to the mall.”

Lucky for me, I had somebody to set my priorities straight.

I knew better than to say that aloud, as Madison didn’t take well to sarcasm. Besides, she was right, we did need to go to the mall. As things stood between Ryan and me and, despite the fact that Bécquer was not quite human and I barely knew him, my guess was I had a better chance to get an explanation from Bécquer than from my son. And that meant I had to go to the party to talk to him, and thus needed a dress.

I stood up. “No. I’m not bailing on you.”

Madison rolled her eyes when I pulled the black lace dress from the rack.

“That won’t do, Mom. It’s Halloween. It has to be a costume party. Why don’t you call and ask.”

But I couldn’t call because I didn’t have Bécquer’s number with me. Thinking wearing no costume to a costume party would be less embarrassing than to show up in disguise to a regular one, I ignored Madison’s advice and bought the dress.

The dress was too fancy for me and much too expensive, but we didn’t have time to shop any longer. As it was I had barely finished my make-up when the doorbell rang.

I called to Madison to open the door while I put on my earrings and struggled with the clasp on my necklace.

Downstairs, I could hear a male voice pronouncing my name with a Spanish accent that mimicked mine.

“Mom,” Madison called as I left my room. Without inviting the man inside, she climbed the stairs. “I told you it was a costume party,” she whispered when she reached me.

I looked over her shoulder at the man framed in the doorway. He was dressed in an ivory suit that would have been in fashion a century before. Yet, by the easy way he carried it off, the jacket open, revealing a white shirt with the two first buttons undone, and a red handkerchief loosely tied around his neck, I knew it was not a costume. I also knew, by the wide smile spread across his face, he had heard Madison’s comment.

I smiled back at him. Apologizing would have made the situation even more awkward. Instead, I offered him my hand.

“I’m Carla, and you must be Matt.”

He was handsome, I noticed, with black hair and dark sensitive eyes that stared openly at me.

“Federico, actually,” he said and took my hand.

I looked at him with renewed interest. Federico. The friend Bécquer didn’t want to pick up. The one who didn’t want to rent a car.

Federico took a step back. “Shall we?”

In the dim light of the only lamp outside, I noticed a reddish glow in his eyes, a reddish glow that could only mean he was an immortal.

I stopped. Why had I agreed to go to this party? What if immortals fed on human blood like the vampires of lore and the party was Bécquer’s excuse to lure me to his house?

But that was absurd. Bécquer had given me his word that he would not harm me. Besides he needed me alive if I was to write for him. And I would not be the only human there. He had invited other authors “who didn’t know of his condition,” as he had put it. Other authors who had been his clients for years — I had checked — and who were still very much alive. And Beatriz, his secretary, was human too and would be at the party as well. Although this last fact was not reassuring. The hate in her eyes when leaving Café Vienna had been unmistakable. Beatriz would not help me if her boss decided to drink my blood.

I hesitated at the unsetting thought and considered excusing myself. But when I met Federico’s eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to lie. Besides, I needed to see Bécquer. I needed to ask him why and when he had given his business card to Ryan. So I nodded, put on my coat, and followed Federico into the gathering dusk.

“I really appreciate your picking me up,” I told him as we reached the silver Mercedes parked by the curb.

“My pleasure,” he said opening the passenger seat for me. “Actually, I’m in your debt. Bécquer and Beatriz were arguing and I was glad to have an excuse to leave the house.”

“Why were they arguing?” I asked him after we joined the traffic.

Federico stole a quick glance at me, as if wondering how much I knew, then shrugged. “The usual,” he said. Without warning he switched to Spanish, his words flowing fast, in the clipped pattern of Southern Spain. “As far as I can tell, she didn’t want Bécquer to represent your work.”

“Why not?”

“I wouldn’t be offended if I were you,” he continued, without answering my question. “On the contrary. Beatriz has no literary talent. Yet she has taken it upon herself to save humanity. Through books. She believes only philosophy treatises should be published, and literary books dealing with the human condition. You know the ones where nothing happens and the authors are so much in love with their own writing, they forget to tell a story. I don’t understand why Bécquer has put up with her this long.”

“You don’t like her much.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“That wasn’t my impression. This morning, she convinced Bécquer to go to the airport to pick you up.”

He braked sharply and swerved off the road, bringing the car to a halt on the dirt shoulder.

“Bécquer didn’t want to go?”

“He … he had things to do and — ”

“Things to do. Like what? Decorating the house? I haven’t seen him in a year, and he needs convincing?”

His voice rose as he spoke so that by now he was shouting.

I looked ahead at the trees caught in the headlights and waited for his anger to pass. When he spoke again, he sounded subdued.

“What else did he say about me?” he asked.

“Nothing. Really. He left right after Beatriz came. Well, not after she came. First, he stopped time for us so she wouldn’t interfere with my signing the contract.”

“He stopped time? So you know? You know what — who he is?”

I nodded.

“What about me? Did he tell you who I am?”

“No, he didn’t mention it.”

“Of course not. I’m not important enough. For two decades we were lovers. And what am I to him now? An inconvenience when I come to visit, an errand to add to his list of things to do before his guests arrive.”

I gasped. Lovers? Bécquer and Federico were — had been lovers?

Federico was not looking at me, but straight ahead, his hands grabbing the wheel with such intensity it broke loose. He stared at it for a moment as if puzzled, then opening the door, threw it against the darkness. His eyes flaring red, he turned to me.

He hates me
, Bécquer had said.
He doesn’t
, Beatriz had told him. And she was right. Federico didn’t hate Bécquer. He was in love with him.

I stood still, eerily aware I was sitting next to a man who was not human and that, for all his gentle appearance, could break my neck without even trying. As he had the wheel.

I had to leave. Now.

My hand trembling uncontrollably, I reached for the door.

“Don’t.” Federico’s arm flashed in front of me and grabbed my hand.

“Please, don’t,” he repeated, his voice softer now, apologetic. “Bécquer might forgive me for breaking his car. Or for failing to drive you to the party. But if I do both, he will kill me for sure.”

I frowned, surprised at his self-deprecating tone. “I thought you were immortal.”

“I’m sure he would find a way,” Federico said, releasing my hand. “His ingenuity to cause me pain knows no limit.”

“You love him.”

I regretted my words the moment I said them for I was afraid my inappropriate comment would throw him into another fit of anger. But Federico didn’t seem to hear. He was staring at the gaping hole in the dashboard where the wheel used to be as if willing another one to appear.

“Bécquer is right,” he said after a moment. “I do overreact sometimes.”

He sounded so defeated I felt sorry for him. Bécquer was charming, I had to admit. It was not difficult for me to imagine falling for him and the pain at his rejection.

“Not at all,” I agreed to keep him calm. “Your reaction was understandable given the circumstances. He should have offered to pick you up.”

“You think?”

When I nodded, he added wistfully, “Let’s hope Bécquer agrees with you when I tell him.”

I waited for him to produce a phone and call Bécquer to ask him to give us a ride. Although it wasn’t cold outside, I was not looking forward to walking in my too tight black dress and fancy shoes. But Federico didn’t move and when, after digging into my handbag, I offered him mine, he shook his head.

“That won’t be necessary. Bécquer just told me Matt is coming.”

“He told you? But how? You didn’t … ” I waved my phone at him.

Federico shrugged. “I don’t need a phone to talk with Bécquer when we are this close.”

“You can read his mind?”

“Not exactly. I only hear what he wants to share. I cannot force myself into his mind. He would notice and block me. Actually, he just did that before, when — Did Bécquer ask you to be his … secretary?”

“No, why would I want to be his secretary? I’m a writer.”

“Of course.” He smiled, a friendly smile that lit a twinkle of mischief in his eyes. And I found myself warming to him. “And what do you write, if I may ask?”

“Fantasy stories set in medieval times.”

“It sounds like something Bécquer would love, and Beatriz would hate.”

“And you?”

“Me? I would have to read the story first. I used to write dramas when I was human. But I’ve mellowed with time.”

“You were a writer before you were immortal?”

“I was indeed.”

Federico bent forward and worked the CD player with his long fingers until he found the right track. “Listen,” he said. Sitting back against his seat, he closed his eyes.

The broken voice of Leonard Cohen came through the speakers, declaiming a poem-made-song. The first song I had danced to at my wedding with the husband who had since become a stranger:
Take This Waltz
.

Federico, eyes still closed, sang along, keeping the beat on the dashboard with his fingers.

I looked at him in profile and, as if seeing him for the first time, I noticed his dark wavy hair, his cleft chin, and his arched bushy eyebrows. I gasped. “You are Federico.”

My voice broke before I could complete his full name: Federico García Lorca, the most beloved Spanish poet in the twentieth century.

Federico nodded. “Yes. I am ‘that’ Federico.”

Without missing a beat, he resumed his singing, his voice fitting perfectly the lyrics of the song, the lyrics that were Cohen’s translation into English of Lorca’s perfect words.

“My cross, indeed,” Federico said when the song ended, repeating the last words of the poem. “I wrote this years before I met Bécquer and he made me an immortal. I wrote it for a lover long forgotten. But they reflect my feelings for Bécquer exactly, on our first winter in Vienna.”

“Bécquer made you an immortal?”

Federico nodded.

“Why? Did you ask him to do it?”

“No. I was unconscious when he found me, bleeding through my broken skull and half buried in the ditch that was meant to be my grave. I didn’t ask him to do it, but I don’t blame him. I would have died otherwise.

“I don’t blame him either for my falling for him. He never claimed that he loved me. Never hid his other lovers from me, the ladies he lured with his charm and forgot as soon as they loved him, for it was his gift that they would love him, his curse that he could not love them back, after they fell for him.”

“He played with them, and with you. Why did you let him?”

Federico shook his head. “He didn’t play with me. I knew he didn’t love me. He couldn’t, nor the way I wanted: Bécquer is not gay. He took me as his lover to heal my broken soul when he realized I did not want to live. I had lost my will to live that summer of 1936 when I witnessed my friends betray me and saw the void of undiluted hate in the eyes of my killers.

“Bécquer cured me of my despair. He took me as his lover and healed my soul with his passion and words of love he reinvented for me. I fell in love with him, how could I not? But he never guessed it. He had not planned or expected this to happen. Until he met me, he thought immortals could not love.

“When I told him, when he realized how much he meant to me, how much I hurt when I saw him with others, he left me, making clear that, from then on, I was allowed to see him only once a year for a week. He thought, that way, I would forget him.”

“But you did not.”

Federico stared at me. “Don’t let his charm blind you, Carla. Do not fall for him.”

I laughed, too eagerly perhaps. “I won’t, don’t worry. Bécquer’s only my agent.”

“Of course.”

Turning his head away from me, Federico looked through the window to the road ahead. “Matt is coming,” he said. “Good. I was starting to suspect Bécquer had forgotten to pass him my message.”