The Heart Has Its Reasons (14 page)

“Oh, blessed Lord! What bed am I going to put you in with that height of yours?”

She began to clear the table: to her satisfaction, the American had had a second serving of stew, devoured half a platter of rice pudding, and topped it all off with half a pot of coffee. As soon as he saw her piling plates, he stood up, ready to help.

“Out of the question, my son, out of the question!” the concierge protested energetically. “You go ahead and start putting the suitcases in the room; I'll be there right away.”

Sure enough, the bed was too small—but just how small, Daniel would have to find out.

“Lie down, kid, lie down . . .”

With great difficulty they contained their laughter. Daniel's legs stuck out of the bed from the middle of his calves on down.

“Mauricio the carpenter will fix this for us; you'll see,” she said, tapping him lightly on the arm as if to reassure him. “What is your height, Mr. Daniel, so that I can tell him?”

“Six foot two,” he answered automatically, adjusting to the language but not to the country's measurement units.

“And how much is that in plain Spanish, if I may ask?”

“Excuse me?”

“In meters, kid: how tall are you in meters?”

“Well . . . I don't know.”

“We'll take care of that in no time at all,” Señora Antonia mumbled under her breath as she left the room in search of her sewing kit. She was back a few seconds later. “Lean back against the wall,” she said, unwinding the tape measure. Daniel obeyed, amused. “Wait, I can't reach,” she said, bringing close the only chair in the room and hopping on it without a second thought. “Let's see, lift your head; don't move, there. A meter eighty-seven: there, now you know your height, in case you're called for the draft, God forbid.”

Daniel was unable to understand the meaning of many of the widow's words and turns of phrase, but nonetheless he sensed perfectly her affectionate, generous disposition. Between them both, the young American student and the widowed Spanish matron, the bed problem was soon solved with a little ingenuity and the combined help from Mauricio, a neighborhood carpenter, and the mattress maker next door. The former used a few boards to construct an extension of the bed; the latter made a mattress specifically tailored to the addition; and Señora Antonia sewed some additional pieces of cotton onto the sheets to lengthen them.

After a few days' adaptation to Madrid in the concierge's humble dwelling, Daniel should have ventured to find more spacious quarters: a nice pension for young provincial gentlemen, a centrally situated hostel with lots of natural light, or perhaps a room in the infamous Students Residency. But he chose to continue living in the dark room that opened onto a patio in which there was always linen hanging and
the smell of bleach, his only light coming from a bare bulb as he read, seated on a bulrush chair in the absence of a good, comfortable armchair. None of this seemed to bother him; in fact, quite the contrary. He found it to be vital, authentic, down-to-earth.

There might have also been in his choice not to move an unconscious desire to perpetuate something that had been abruptly interrupted more than two decades earlier. For it was at Señora Antonia's former quarters on Calle Princesa, before she had become a widow and her sons had flown the nest, that Professor Andres Fontana had lived during his student years in Madrid. He suggested those accommodations to Daniel as an initial option during his first days in Spain, after writing Señora Antonia from Pittsburgh to request that she receive his American student at a weekly rate of two hundred pesetas.

There were many reasons that, added together, left little room for doubt that Daniel would remain there. The stews with their tasty broth with bread to dunk; the freshly brewed coffee with which he opened his eyes in the morning; his hand-washed shirts that were starched and ironed with such care . . . Señora Antonia's anecdotes and her sharp memory of former times that, in uninterrupted sessions by the brazier table, would help him discover the substance of the country he was in; the wellspring of popular speech that he heard on a daily basis; the turns of phrase and funny anecdotes—all of these he began to jot down copiously in a small notebook that he thereafter always carried in his pocket.

And, perhaps without his realizing it, there was another reason why he remained: something intangible that he perceived the very first moment he crossed the threshold of that dwelling and encountered the crocheted tablecloth and the aged print of a village wedding. The smell of food on the fire; the framed print of the Sacred Heart; the almanac of dark-haired women with Cordovan hats and sad eyes; the constant sound of the radio, at times almost inaudible, with its stream of game shows, serials, and ballads. The enveloping warmth and tenderness. The fact that, after the abandonment he'd felt ever since he'd renounced a future in medicine or law, he was finally certain that someone truly cared about him.

Chapter 14

B
ut domestic life wasn't meant for Daniel. Right from the start he also took to the streets, wandering across a Madrid that constantly unfolded before his eyes, offering up its secrets at every corner. He invested his initial days in that erratic rambling through various neighborhoods, taking in the plazas and parks, churches and taverns, wine cellars, shops, schools, and department stores—and quickly showing his identification each time a hardheaded keeper of the peace and national security would, in the unlikeliest spot, plant himself before him.

Once that initial thirst was satisfied, Daniel finally decided to set a more definitive course and pursue his future. His objective was an area to the west of Madrid, close to his neighborhood of Argüelles, a place that, despite being the formal justification for his stay, he had yet to set foot in.

On a cloudy day in early October, the Facultad de Filosofia y Letras in University City awaited him just as it had Andres Fontana over two decades earlier. In the interim, a civil war had taken place, with a thorough sweep of undesirable professors and students and a program of reconstruction at all levels that would radically alter the institution's essence.

Minutes before Daniel was to head there, the widow came up
to him holding a pot in her hand with a rag wrapped around its hot handle. Having scrubbed the stairway on her knees, she was now about to serve him breakfast. The ordeal of having to go from one concierge job to another after her husband's death, dragging her sons along with hardly anything to eat and the constant struggle to get ahead, ended up making her stronger. After hiding her tears so that they wouldn't see her pain, loading furnaces, taking out the garbage, and swallowing countless miseries, she had become a resolute woman with no room for discouragement in her squat, compact body.

“Where are we off to today so elegantly dressed, my son?” she asked him while she poured the hot milk into his coffee.

She'd noticed Daniel's tie, full of stripes and colors, so different from the dark, sober ones the common Spaniard wore. It was the first time she'd seen him wearing it since his arrival.

“I'm afraid it's time for me to get down to work,” he said while dunking one of the fritters she'd just bought fresh from the stall.

“So the good life is over, then.”

In a few bites he polished off the fritters. He then answered:

“Or maybe it's just about to start. We'll see . . .”

On his way there, he once more pondered how he was going to present his project proposal to the Fulbright Commission. Fontana and he had sometimes spoken at length about it on their way from one class to another as they walked the neo-Gothic halls of the Cathedral of Learning, and on other occasions as well, such as while sharing a couple of beers after class on the long warm days at the end of spring, when the relationship between them had matured sufficiently so that their conversations extended beyond teaching hours.

“Caution, kid,” Fontana would repeat. “Caution and a level head.”

“Why do you insist so much on caution, Professor?”

“Because Ramon J. Sender is not liked by many, and it's best we don't cause any misgivings.”

Fontana knew all too well what he was talking about. The writer from Aragon was then, in the late 1950s, a figure with a peculiar reputation among Spanish writers exiled after the civil war. A prolific novelist, essayist, and journalist even before the conflict, his life as a man of
letters and arms on the Republican side was, however, full of ups and downs. A dissident of the Communist Party, accused by its leaders of dark episodes of cowardice and treason, afterwards he was subjected to a long campaign to discredit and unceremoniously exclude him from the circles of expatriate solidarity.

Sender himself had always refuted those accusations, although he openly recognized episodes of lack of discipline and even negligence in carrying out his military duties during the war. But where the Communist Party saw disloyalty and vileness, Sender and his few defenders saw it as a simple disagreement with the politics and military conduct of the party: a personal form of rebellion before the arbitrary authority and a heroic defense of his integrity as an individual. In any case, the reality was that the writer, faithful to his political compromise, had, like many others, gone into exile. Far from being considered one more among the group of exiles, he was instead treated like an enemy on numerous occasions, an awkward traveling companion during the diaspora's long journey.

He remained, however, loyal to his position. With his family destroyed forever—his wife executed in the cemetery of Zamora and his children taken in by a multimillionaire American woman—and after sojourns in France and Mexico, he ended up settling in the United States, where he continued to write and teach, remarried, and made new friends, many American, some Spanish, Andres Fontana among them.

Those talks with Fontana came to mind as Daniel made his way to the University City in search of his destiny. Once he arrived there, a concierge uniformed with the elegance of a colonel gave him directions.

“Dr. Don Domingo Cabeza de Vaca de Ramirez de Arellano, in Office 19, at the end of the corridor to your right.”

He walked the corridors with a reverential attitude, hearing only his steps on the burnished floor. It was nine thirty in the morning, classes had already begun, and not a soul could be seen outside. He finally rapped on the door of the office indicated, whereupon a well-tuned voice told him to come in.

Not even if he'd purposely gone looking for it would he have found a room or a man so different from what he had expected. Cabeza de
Vaca had been a colleague of Fontana's in their prewar student days, and Daniel had naïvely expected to find on that first visit a certain similarity to his professor's personality and habitat.

Neatness, tradition, elegance. Three new concepts to write down in his vocabulary notebook. Three characteristics applicable to both the individual and his surroundings. A large walnut desk with turned legs, a silver inkstand, a calendar block, and an ivory crucifix. A lectern with an antique tome lying open, dark green velvet drapes, an enamel tray with a heraldic coat of arms, a glass bookcase full of leather-bound books. Behind the desk, a slim man of exquisite appearance, with pale skin, an impeccable suit, gray hair combed back, cuff links on his shirtsleeves, and a golden clip across his tie. He did not rise to greet Daniel but simply stretched his hand over the table. A light, thin hand, but not without a certain energy.

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Carter. Please sit down.”

Daniel obeyed, fully aware of how out of place he was in that office and in such a presence. Hastily he adjusted his tie knot, straightened his lapels, and smoothed back his hair, which always had a disobedient tendency to fall over his face. He suddenly felt his attire to be too intense and too bright.

“What an honor that my dear colleague Andres Fontana has shown his faith in me by entrusting me with your tutorial. What a great honor.”

Cabeza de Vaca's voice was modulated; his esteem for the Pittsburgh professor seemed genuine.

“Fontanita, Fontanita . . .” he murmured to himself. “How well things worked out for you in the end, you rascal. How glad I am, how . . . Good, Mr. Carter,” he continued, changing tone, “so you are interested in specializing in our contemporary narrative.”

“That is correct, sir.”

“Excellent, young man, excellent. A wonderful academic objective. A fantastic idea.”

Daniel did not need to be perfectly bilingual to read between the lines and notice that both adjectives, “wonderful” and “fantastic,” had been uttered with something close to irony.

“And would you be so kind as to briefly explain the underlying reason for such a choice?”

It took Daniel seven and a half minutes to thrash out his reasoning; he had prepared the speech beforehand. The great Spanish literature and its noble authors, the strength of its prose, tradition, and heritage, the true representation of a people's spirit. An intense blah blah blah delivered in decent Spanish with a strong foreign accent, in which there was no room for the words “silenced,” “exiled,” or “dissident.” Much less the name of Ramon J. Sender.

Cabeza de Vaca listened to him with the stillness of a marble statue, his silver fountain pen poised between his fingers.

“And would you be kind enough to give me some hints regarding your work methodology?”

Close monitoring, rigorous research, straightforward interpretations. Five long minutes of verbal acrobatics to avoid openly saying that he intended his work in Spain to center mainly on visiting the settings where the life and novels of an exiled writer took place.

“If I understand correctly, then, your intention is not to lock yourself up inside lecture halls and libraries.”

Daniel attempted to camouflage his growing unease with Cabeza de Vaca's somewhat incisive professorial tone.