The Heart Has Its Reasons (47 page)

“And, most important, I should have never gotten anyone involved. Nor should I have turned to you, or confronted Zarate, or implicated the department, or . . .”

It seemed as if we were each speaking more to ourselves than to each other.

When we ran out of sentences, we started thinking. The crude reality was undeniable: there was nothing substantial for us to hold on to, nothing conclusive on which to build a solid argument to appeal the Los Pinitos project.

“Are we going to lick our wounds all night, or shall we start clearing up?”

The proposal came from me some minutes later. Return to life, return to the present. We'd failed, but I, at least, knew that I had to get
back on the move. Good-bye to Andres Fontana and his false expectations. Good-bye to his old student and to his attempt at redemption; good-bye to an alien world and to some men who seduced me and carried me along for a while, but with whom, it turned out, I had very little in common. For better or worse, it was time to turn the page. It was no use lamenting; it was too late. I was leaving. I still had my apartment to clear out, suitcases to pack, matters to conclude, good-byes to say.

As at many other junctures of my life, it was time to get up and get going once more.

Up, I wished to tell myself. But instead of giving myself an internal order, the word popped out of my mouth and became an order to us both.

The great untamed one obeyed without protesting. Before I got up from the floor by my own means, he rose from his chair, came over to me, and offered his hand. Once we were both standing, without exchanging a single syllable more, we set out to pack up that chaos once again and convert the space into a regular dining room again.

He began at one end of the table, I at the other. Stacking documents, piling papers. Mechanically.

“He even left behind telephone bills, but not even a clue . . .” Daniel said.

“What bills are you referring to?”

“These,” he said, raising a wad of papers in the air, tied loosely with a rubber band. There were seven or eight of them, it seemed.

“Where were they?”

“Underneath this bunch of newspaper clippings. I thought you'd had a look already.”

“I hadn't even seen them . . .”

“I imagine there's nothing there, but take a glance anyway, just in case.” He tossed them in my direction and I caught them on the fly. “In the meantime I'll start taking this stuff out to the car.”

Two business letters from Pacific Bell telephone company, three from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, one from his medical insurance company, and another from a local dentist informing him of a change in his appointment date. All dated the year of the
professor's death. Maybe Darla herself picked them up from his house; perhaps she took more things: clothes, personal property, photos. And those insubstantial letters that she threw in by chance among the research papers she'd also decided to make off with for no apparent reason.

Between the envelopes, practically lost in the tedious bank and company claims, there was a smaller one. Thicker, heavier than the rest. Handwritten, for a change.
E. C. Villar, Fr.,
could be read with great difficulty on the top left-hand side corner. An old man's handwriting, I thought.
Santa Barbara Mission, Calif.

“It's from your hometown,” I said when Daniel walked back into the dining room.

“What hometown?” he asked absently, picking up a few more boxes and three rolls of maps.

“From Santa Barbara. From the mission.”

I tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter. A few lines written with a shaky hand and in old-fashioned calligraphy:

May 15th, 1969, year of the Lord

My dear Professor,

After your last week's visit to our mission's archive, on replacing the records on their corresponding shelves, this fragment of a letter was left sticking out which I presume went unnoticed by you, and, unable to catalog it for lack of sufficient information, I am sending it to you as a mere curiosity and proof of my personal gratitude for your great interest in the history of our beloved missions.

I look forward to your next visit, and in the meantime I wish you my sincerest best wishes for the Lord's everlasting peace. Kindly extend them as well to the pleasant and extremely friendly Spanish woman who accompanied you to our last meeting.

A series of pictures came to my mind with powerful luminosity. An elderly archivist whose days went by immersed in files and dusty papers and whom most likely no one had consulted about anything in ages. Successive visits by a curious professor with whom he shared a common language. The pretty woman who unexpectedly appeared by his side at their last meeting, the Spaniard with her familiar accent and the quick laugh whose image remained engraved in the soul of the old archivist, who was accustomed to silence and solitude.

The letter was dated two days before their deaths. They never learned of its contents.

“Read this,” I whispered to Daniel when he came back inside, ready to continue packing up.

I did not show him the Franciscan's missive with the mention of Fontana and Aurora: Why remind him of that painful story? But I did hand him the unfolded half piece of paper that the priest had sent Fontana from the Santa Barbara mission archive. Without a letterhead or addressee. Without a header or date, with half of its essence unrecoverable.

“Altimira saying good-bye to us. He shows up at a fine time, the son of a bitch,” he said ironically.

It was the first time we'd seen his handwriting and signature on what seemed half of a letter that he perhaps never sent.

. . . and then our modest construction was the victim of the most violent action by the obstinate Indians in their heathen errors, who equipped with clubs and bow and arrows, readied to put their depraved design into practice. “Love God, children,” I told them, but the heathen failed to understand such a greeting in their urge to attack. “Long live the faith of Jesus Christ and death to its enemies,” I insisted, and still they didn't heed my call, which resulted in the death of seven converts, all of whom were buried among pine trees in the consecrated land of our humble mission, beneath simple slabs engraved with a Lord's cross, their Christian initials, and the year of their fatality, 1827.

And I thus bid you God speed until the next occasion, and may the Almighty keep you in His love and grace for many years to come. With my best wishes, your servant who commends himself to Your Reverence from the bottom of his heart.

Friar Jose Altimira

A modest construction, seven converts buried among some pine trees beneath simple stones with the Lord's cross, year 1827, in the consecrated land of our humble mission.

“Our humble mission . . . We were so close, so close . . .” I whispered, biting my tongue.

He placed a hand on my shoulder and pressed it. A useless gesture of consolation.

“It's no use being sorry. Come on, let's finish packing up. We've got to make this room decent again.”

Just then, his cell phone rang.

“What's up, Joe?” he said as he let go of me. Same words as last time, and the same reaction.

With Altimira's half letter in my hand and that of the archivist in my back pocket, I headed to the kitchen in search of Rebecca. That would be our last dinner, the last day I'd sit at her table, the last night I'd enjoy her warmth and affection.

“Can I help you?” I asked her, thinking that maybe by stirring the sauce for the pasta that was simmering on the stove I'd also be able to calm my uneasiness.

“Blanca!” I heard Daniel scream the minute I'd grabbed the spatula. “Blanca!” he repeated.

He burst into the kitchen, bounding over to me with a marathon runner's strides. Then he grabbed my arms forcefully and fixed his gaze on me, almost shaking me.

“On digging in Los Pinitos to make a . . . a . . . What the hell is the name for the hole you make in the ground for excrement?”

It was the first time I heard him hesitate in my language, the first time the breadth of his Spanish vocabulary turned on him.

“Latrine.”

“Latrine, that's it! On digging a hole for the latrines the campers have come upon what seems like a small cemetery among the pine trees. So far they've found what appear to be three graves, but there could be more. Very simple, hardly covered by some flat stones with rudimentary inscriptions.”

A cold shiver ran down my back.

“Each stone has a set of initials,” he said.

“And a cross?”

He nodded.

“And a year?”

He smiled under his beard, as he had done on the days when there was sun between us.

“Also.”

“1827?”

The spatula fell out of my hands and crashed to the floor with a clatter, splattering the tiles and our feet.

Chapter 43

W
e'd hardly slept; we both still had traces of water from the shower in our hair and a folder with documents in the backseat.

Classes and exams were over; students were waiting for grades or packing for the Christmas holiday, many had already gone home. The more combative, however, remained at Los Pinitos, camping by the humble graves of the seven converts in that territory that we no longer doubted had housed a mission, the last Franciscan mission of the fabled Camino Real. The one never cataloged, the twenty-second: the most fragile and ephemeral, which Andres Fontana chose to name Mission Olvido.

On passing by Rebecca's open office door, we gave her a silent greeting. She knew we were on our way elsewhere and that we didn't have a minute to spare.

Luis Zarate had been given a heads-up; I'd called the previous evening.

“We've got solid proof to bring forward against the Los Pinitos project,” I informed him. “Everything must be tied up by tomorrow morning. My plane leaves at six in the evening, and I have to leave Santa Cecilia at two.”

He summoned us at nine. We were there five minutes early.

I'd hardly had half an hour to swing by my apartment to change clothes and, while I was at it, start packing up in a hurry. Emptying out shelves and drawers with both hands, stuffing everything into suitcases without allowing myself to stop and think what I was about to leave behind.

“We want you to help us, Luis,” I said when we were seated before him.

“What kind of help are we talking about, exactly?” he replied from behind his desk, which was ordered as usual with the precision of a military parade.

I did not perceive any ill will in his terseness, nor sympathy. Daniel, seated to my right, with his legs and arms crossed, listened without interrupting. I knew there was no danger from him; the beast had finally subsided. Throughout the small hours of the morning, while we struggled before my computer screen with four hands and two brains full of caffeine to write a coherent report summarizing our investigation, I was able to get his yes. Yes to letting Zarate in on it. Yes that the remaining legacy coming from Darla's garage be integrated seamlessly with the rest in the department's custody. Yes to a few more things.

“My proposal is that you join us,” I then said. “That you do so as the chairman of this department, which, one way or another, in the past or in the present, we all have some sort of bond with. That you forget about SAPAM and its irregularities, that you accept Daniel Carter's part of the legacy as a donation, and that your name appears in the appeal. That you be the official spokesperson of our findings.”

He looked at me with doubt written on his face, not quite believing it. And then I resumed. All at once.

“I'm asking you that you accept, in Andres Fontana's name. What we've done during the past days, even what I've done for more than three months, is an insignificant task compared to the colossal job he did. Our work has consisted of tying up a few loose ends, but the one who struggled for years to unearth this mission was Fontana. Perhaps at first he did so purely for personal reasons, sensing in the old missions a trace of his country's soul and his very own essence. But, above all, he did so as an academic, as a humanist committed to research and
the spread of knowledge, in this department, this university, and this city. When death carried him away, he held the position you hold now, Luis. And like yourself he watched over this house and its people, for academic excellence and the common good.”

I then pointed to Daniel, who, leaning back in his chair, listened attentively.

“He might be Fontana's intellectual and sentimental heir, given everything that bound them for years.” Then I turned my eyes back to the serious-looking department chairman. “But don't forget that Fontana's institutional heir is the one seated today in the chair he filled. That institutional heir, Luis Zarate, is you. Both of you have the moral duty to respect each other and fight for the dignity of the man whose legacy you are stewards of in equal measure.”

Silence fell over the office. From the hallway and through a wall the hysterical muffled scream of a student slipped through, perhaps an irrepressible explosion of happiness at a higher-than-expected grade. Meanwhile, all three of us remained quiet.

Finally Daniel sat up and broke the silence.

“I think Blanca is absolutely right. She offers us a reasonable solution. My initial intention was to hand over the results to the platform against the Los Pinitos project and for them to decide how best to use the documentation. But she's convinced me that Fontana's voice should somehow stand on its own. And the most fitting way is through the institution he worked for.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “And as far as I'm concerned, I'm sorry about my behavior. I realize my mistake and I apologize to you, Luis, for having invaded your space in pursuit of my own interests.”

I wasn't too sure whether to cheer, raise a victorious fist into the air, or hug him with all my might. My plea to vindicate Fontana had convinced him to place his teacher and friend's memory above his own pride, but I never imagined that he'd express his apology in such words. With sober humility, without a fuss. He didn't stand to extend a heartfelt hand to the chairman, nor did he intone a mea culpa, but he spoke to him candidly, called him by name, and it sounded genuine.