The Heart Has Its Reasons (24 page)

Her monologue was interrupted by the arrival of a couple of female students in sweatsuits. Carefree and tanned. They chatted and laughed, ignoring us, their blond ponytails bobbing. The fact that they were unable to find the book they were looking for seemed extremely funny to them. Their frivolous talk brought Fanny back to reality.

“I think I have to go; it's late now,” she announced, bringing her watch up close to her eyes. “I'll tell Mrs. Cullen that you'll go see her as soon as you can.”

I watched her walk away with her clumsy gait while I grabbed a felt pen to continue with my work. But I wasn't even able to uncap it because Fontana and Fanny still hovered in my mind. Fontana and Fanny, Fontana and Darla Stern—unexpected connections that suddenly came to me. I was unaware that mother and daughter had had a close relationship with him, but it didn't seem so far-fetched. Fontana had been the department chairman and Darla his secretary; Fanny, then a somewhat clumsy fatherless girl, had likely elicited tenderness from those around her.

Time had reassembled things. He was absent now; they were still here. He was dead, but they were alive and with him in memory—at least, Fanny was. But perhaps Darla was too.

I forced myself to resume my task and once again pored over the map of the old missions. From Santa Barbara to Santa Ines, from Santa Ines to La Purisima Concepcion. The afternoon advanced into evening, the setting sun visible behind the windowpane. The image of the Spanish professor and the girl Fanny on a roller coaster remained, hovering before me, keeping me company like a little spider hanging from a nearly invisible thread.

Chapter 22

T
he following morning I returned to Guevara Hall to see Rebecca, who received me warmly as usual, serving me some tea. She worked with soft background music and freshly cut flowers by the window, making me envious. Despite planning to do so at the beginning of each semester, I never managed to have a teapot or CD player in my office. Not even a simple bouquet of daisies or an old transistor radio. The furthest I'd gone was a couple of pots of plants that ended up drying out on me during the holidays.

“My kids and grandchildren will be there, as usual. I prepare the turkey according to my maternal grandmother's recipe, and after dinner the boys will watch the football game on TV and the girls will clean up, as tradition demands,” she said with an ironic wink.

“I'd be delighted to spend such a special day with all of you.”

She fell silent for a couple of seconds, as if hesitating about sharing something else.

“Daniel Carter will also be coming.”

“Wonderful.”

“And . . . and someone else.”

She again fell silent for an instant and then she added:

“Paul will also be there.”

“Paul . . . your ex-husband?”

She said yes with a simple nod. She hadn't spoken to me about him since the day we loaded her car with the chairs for my party; I had assumed Paul had disappeared out of her life for good. But everything indicated that I was mistaken.

“Perhaps because . . .”

“If you mean a reconciliation, the answer is no.”

“Then?”

“Well . . . because life always ends up taking unexpected turns, Blanca. Because sometimes we believe that we've got it all clear and we suddenly realize that nothing is as firm as we'd thought. What I want now is for him to be able to see his kids again.”

“But I thought you'd lost touch with him, that—”

“At the beginning he'd call us once in a while and tried seeing the kids twice a year. But they were never able to understand his shifting attitude: adoring them one minute, neglecting them the next.”

“So they slowly distanced themselves,” I suggested.

“Yes. The distance grew in every way and it got to a point that we preferred not having any news from him.”

“I imagine he didn't live nearby.”

“He never quite settled down permanently: he changed universities a bunch of times, and although he had a few relationships, as far as I know, none lasted. Meanwhile, the children grew up and set out on their own lives. But now I want to bring them all together again.”

“But why, Rebecca, after such a long time?”

“So that they can say good-bye. It's very likely that it will be the last time they'll see each other.”

She took off her glasses and closed her eyes, and with her fingers massaged the place at the top of her nose where the frames of her glasses had left two faint marks. I thought she must have a headache. Or perhaps she just wanted to protect herself before answering the question she knew I would ask.

“They still don't know that he's coming, right?”

She shook her head.

“Paul has been living in California for the past three years, confined
to a nursing home in Oakland. I go see him once in a while. He's got Alzheimer's.”

The day finally came, the fourth Thursday of November. Just as Zarate had forewarned me, the university became deserted as the majority of students flew back to their family nests, the dorms and shared apartments emptied out, caps, bicycles, and backpacks were no longer visible, laughter and voices fell silent in classrooms and corridors. And the solitary expatriates like me were fortunately welcomed by friends.

It took a while for me to decide what to wear that day. I had no idea about the degree of formality with which Rebecca's family celebrated the date, nor what the atmosphere would be like given Rebecca's decision to invite her ex-husband without letting her children know. Perhaps they would accept it readily, understanding their mother's feelings. Or perhaps they'd take it like a kick in the stomach and be incapable of understanding her desire to close the vital circle of a fractured family. Fractured but real.

I chose a burgundy velvet suit and a pair of long silver earrings that had captivated me the previous spring on a trip to Istanbul with Alberto and his brothers. The earrings I never got to wear, saving them for the summer, for those relaxed nights by the sea, for those dinners replete with the smell of salt and the sounds of friends and laughter. For those everyday evenings that never did come. In those months of heat and bile there had been no dinners beneath the stars nor laughter nor friends. Only anger and perplexity, which had driven me to change my life. But all that was part of the past. Now it was time to look forward, and in homage to that future unfolding before me I decided to put on my old yet new silver earrings.

At five o'clock in the afternoon, an odd dinner hour for a Spanish stomach, I knocked on the door of Rebecca's house with a bottle of Viña Tondonia purchased at the price of a ransom and a box of chocolates for the kids. The door was opened by a couple of lively blond girls no older than six who demanded that I answer a series of questions and conditions before letting me through. “What's your name? Where are
you from? Who are those chocolates for? How many kids do you have? Show us your shoes. Bend down. Show us your earrings. Will you lend them to us later?” Then they sped away like bullets, headed for the garden. Only then did I perceive the presence of Daniel nearby. With his long body leaning again the doorframe, he had been watching the scene in amusement. He had on a gray jacket and a blue shirt and tie, and was holding a glass.

“Test passed,” he said, smiling as he came up to greet me.

“Don't think it's easy: kids are unforgiving, and if you don't get on their good side from the start, you're lost. The tie looks good on you, but it's crooked.”

“Those two little devils tried taking it off. They're very dangerous.”

“Let me see.” I handed him the wine and the box to free my hands and straightened his knot. “Now perfect.”

The house seemed unusually quiet for the preamble to a great family dinner. However, behind the sliding doors that separated the entrance from the living room, the muffled sound of a conversation could be heard.

“How are things?” I asked while he led me to the kitchen.

“I have no idea; I arrived just ten minutes ago. Rebecca is talking to her children now, I imagine explaining the situation. Undoubtedly, they must be somewhat bewildered on seeing their father here. He was brought a while ago; he's in the garden with the nurse who accompanies him. The grandkids are also out there horsing around and looking at their grandfather as if he were an oddity.”

“They hadn't met him before?”

“They didn't even know of his existence.”

My eyes panned across the kitchen while he poured me a glass of wine. Everything was impeccably organized for the dinner. Platters and salad bowls, bread baskets, pumpkin pies. The oven gave off a mouthwatering smell as we sat on a couple of high stools beneath the hanging pans.

“Paul was a friend of yours, right?”

“A great friend, many years back.” He took a sip while his gaze rested on an indefinite point beyond the window. “In a complicated
period of my life, he was my greatest support. Later on, fate took us in different directions and we lost contact. He left his family—I think you already know that part of the story—and I roamed around different places until, in time, I ended up settling in Santa Barbara. Throughout the years, however, I kept up my friendship with Rebecca. And she's kept me abreast of what she learned about his life. His comings and goings, his squalid affairs, his wandering throughout the country from one university to the next, always with greater misfortune. That's how I learned about his mental instability and professional decline. And, finally, of his illness.”

“And you hadn't seen him until today?”

My question made him shift his gaze back to me. He spoke calmly, without melancholy.

“When he was committed, a couple of years back, Rebecca told me about it and I went to see him in Oakland, close to here, in the Bay Area. I owed him at least a visit to his particular hell, just as he'd once acted so honorably in witnessing mine.” He took another sip and again looked outside. “These are stories from long ago, old stories, practically forgotten. Of when I left Santa Cecilia, some . . . how many years did I tell you the other day had gone by? Thirty?”

The kitchen was still quiet. Rebecca and her children remained locked in the living room, where once in a while a voice could be heard above the others, and the children's laughter could be heard coming from the garden.

“When I saw him again after all that time, I did not find the person I was expecting,” he went on. “The live wire that my friend had been was no longer there, that philosophy professor just a bit older than I, smart as a fox and incredibly fun, whom I'd met when I first arrived at this university. In Paul Cullen's place I found only a shadow. But since I know that shadows also appreciate company in their own way, once in a while, every two or three months, I go visit him.”

“Does he talk to you? Or does he understand, at least?”

“He neither talks nor understands. At the beginning he was still able to get by, although he'd forget words and was easily disoriented. Little by little, however, his vocabulary became more limited, until his
memory completely deteriorated. On the first visit he only recognized me for fleeting moments; it was painful but touching. The last time we had seen each other was under difficult circumstances, so that first meeting was particularly special. The second time, he treated me ­affectionately, but I think that he was never quite able to tell who I was or what I was doing there. From the third visit onward, we were unable to keep up even a simple conversation.”

“But you continue to visit him . . .”

“I spend the afternoon with him and recount things, nonsense. I speak to him about books and movies, about trips, politics. About the NBA, about the nurses' butts. Whatever comes to mind.” He drained his glass. “Come meet him. I've also spoken to him about you lately.”

Almost without realizing it, I was dragged to the garden turned zoo, full of strange human creatures who were supposedly being watched over by a Japanese au pair. A five-year-old Terminator had just finished ripping his pants with a torn branch and a pair of twins were fighting like tigers over a yellow plastic truck while their keeper stubbornly defied a Game Boy. The two dangerous blondes who'd received me upon my arrival—Natalie and Nina—were subjecting their Uncle Jimmy's girlfriend to a cosmetics session. Lying in a hammock, the poor thing stoically bore the makeover as the two sisters wrung her hair into impossible buns and painted her nails a raging green. Out back, next to the pool, a pinkish chubby nurse turned the pages of
People
magazine and commented on the latest intimacies of Hollywood's celebrities to a man seated in a wheelchair.

“Betty, this is our friend Blanca,” said Daniel. “She wants to meet Paul and you.”

Daniel's presentation left no doubt of the importance of Betty in Paul's life: she was the conduit to him.

“It's a pleasure to meet you, dear,” she said. “We're having a lovely afternoon. I was just telling Paul that I don't like JLo's new look, what do you guys think?”

“And this, Blanca, is Paul.”

He'd gotten behind his friend's chair and placed his hands on his shoulders, massaging them. Paul didn't seem to notice.

My only image of Paul was from former times: that photo pinned on the bulletin board in the basement of that house that had been his, of the young man with wild dark hair, a ribbon across his forehead, and a beer in his hand. Nothing to do with the small being with thin hair and eyes lost in infinity to whom Daniel spoke as if his mind were there in the garden with us.

“Do you recall I recently spoke to you about Blanca, Paul? She is working on Fontana's legacy, you know. You remember Andres Fontana, right? Do you remember how much you both argued about Thomas Aquinas at my place? My Spanish friend was tough, eh?”

Rebecca's voice calling us from the kitchen door suddenly replaced Paul's eternal silence before his old friend's questions. The children flooded into the house and the rest of us followed. Daniel pushed Paul's chair while Betty resumed chattering about the latest gossip in the world of entertainment. Until Rebecca, bless her heart, rescued me.