by Maria Duenas
Several weeks before they returned to the States, one of the professors—Sarah Bulton, the slender blonde who always wore pants and smoked nonstop, leaving a perpetual rim of scarlet on the filters—informed him that her university had set up a yearly program for bringing in foreign conversation assistants. If he was interested, she could recommend him. In the event that he were to accept, besides teaching his own language, he would have the opportunity to take advantage of his year in America to learn English and continue with his education by enrolling in courses relevant to his major: linguistics, American history, comparative literature. At the end of the course he could return to his career in Madrid having seen a bit of the world and having acquired new experiences and acquaintances.
The Americans returned to their country toward the end of March loaded with beautiful fans, typical pottery, and espadrilles, unaware that they left behind an Andres Fontana whose perspective on the world had been altered for good. He would go to bed turning over the proposal in his mind and would wake up the following morning the same way. Leaving his mining village to move to the capital had been a big step, but accessible; crossing the ocean to stay at an American university seemed more like leaping over a chasm. Immense, but fascinating.
The spring of 1935 settled in calmly over Madrid as Andres prepared for the last stretch of his course work and impatiently awaited news from the program in Michigan. Four weeks after the Americans left, he received an envelope in the mail that Señora Antonia handed him on his return from the university. Despite the great anxiousness he felt on seeing it, he took it to his room, opened it, and pulled out the letter, sitting down to read it unhurriedly at the foot of his bed. It had been sent by the head of the Department of Classical and Romance Languages, who informed him that, given the highly favorable report that he had received from Professor Bulton, he had the pleasure of extending a formal invitation to take advantage of a grant within the Hispanic studies program at the university. Andres’s responsibilities would include teaching fifteen hours of classes weekly and participating in something called the Spanish Club on Friday afternoons. In exchange, Andres would live on campus, receiving a small stipend for his expenses, and could enroll in as many courses as he wished, tuition free. If need be, the university could pay fifty percent of the trip’s costs. His engagement would last for one academic year, beginning on September 1, 1935, and ending on May 31, 1936. The letter was written in perfect Spanish, neatly typewritten on ivory bond, and signed with an emphatic stroke by Richard J. Taylor, PhD, Chairman. They needed to have Andres’s answer by the end of the month.
Andres refolded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope, placing it in his inside jacket pocket before sitting down to lunch with the family, trying to hide his nervousness amid the conversation. As soon as he finished eating, he left the house and walked around aimlessly. When he returned at dusk he’d resolved his dilemma, but didn’t tell anyone, and went straight to bed without dinner. The following morning he solemnly informed Señora Antonia of his decision while she hung the freshly washed sheets on the patio wire. He wrote a letter to his mother for Don Ramon to read to her.
On July 14, 1935, Andres embarked from the port of Cadiz on the Christopher Columbus, where his berth was located on the lowest deck for that journey to an immense unknown country. He initially planned to return to Spain in the summer of the following year once his classes had concluded, but an invitation to collaborate on a summer course for high school teachers made him change plans and postpone his return until the beginning of August 1936. He thought that with the extra money from that course he would be able to buy some clothing and modern appliances to take home as gifts.
That small change of plans irremediably altered his destiny, for in one of history’s cruel tricks, he never returned. He remained in America with a shrunken soul and a suitcase full of new clothes, half a dozen cartons of American cigarettes, and four portentous GE electric irons. Señora Antonia, his mother, and his sisters would have to continue to spend long years ironing the old-fashioned way.
The civil war changed his country forever. Madrid prepared itself for a hard resistance and its physiognomy was radically transformed. The statue of Don Agustin de Argüelles that had greeted him each morning on leaving his caretaker’s apartment on Calle Princesa was removed so as not to hinder the movement of troops and vehicles. The Hotel Palace ballroom where he had danced, led by a blond knockout, became a field hospital. At the beginning of the conflict, all University City facilities were in an advanced stage of construction, with some already finished and operational. However, the fresh paint, shiny windows, and recently varnished writing desks wouldn’t last long. The bloody war would reduce a proud university to rubble, crushing as well a large part of its scientific, artistic, and bibliographic heritage, and forcing numerous members of its faculty toward the abyss of exile. As soon as Madrid fell, that ambitious monarchic dream of a magnificent American-style campus was brutally wiped out and its buildings reduced to frightful skeletons. Of the forty thousand trees that had been planted, only the roots remained. The area containing classrooms was occupied by trenches; the laboratories, by parapets. Barricades were erected using encyclopedias, dictionaries, and sandbags; rifles and bodies were scattered throughout the lecture halls and libraries.
Thousands perished, among them Marcelino, who had fallen in the Hospital Clinico with a shattered skull, lying facedown on the floor and carrying in the left-hand pocket of his combat jacket a crumpled half-written letter. In his childish scrawl he’d begun formulating a greeting intended for a destination far across the ocean: “Dear Friend Andres, I hope this letter finds you in good health . . .”
Chapter 7
* * *
With the help of several graduate students, I had transferred the first batch of Andres Fontana’s legacy from the storeroom to my office, heaping the boxes and piles against the wall. I had the feeling that I was finally beginning to rescue him from darkness.
From then on, his profile began to take shape before me as I directed a more human focus on his life. Everything made more sense now: his letters, his movements, his correspondence. Thus the days rolled by as I proceeded on a firm footing—or so I thought—on the straight path toward reconstructing my life. Until an unexpected call at the beginning of October made me stumble. It was Alberto, once more shattering the harmony.
We hadn’t spoken to each other since the summer, before I had learned through David of his imminent paternity. In fact, as soon as I found out, it was I who dug in my heels and refused any type of contact whatsoever. I chose to avoid him, knowing that it would be painful to be confronted with the crudeness of the circumstances, like throwing acid on an open wound. Most likely Alberto had also understood and decided not to continue calling in order to spare me further suffering. Or perhaps he didn’t understand and simply forgot about me, immersed as he was in his vital new project in a refurbished loft with that young workmate who now was also his life mate.
It seemed a lifetime ago that Alberto and I had struggled so that he could take the examination to join the higher ranks of the civil service. For three grueling years we had made a coordinated effort with the aim of obtaining our objective. When we got married, neither of us had finished college. I was a semester and a half away, and he only had a couple of months to go. At the time we thought it wisest to concentrate our efforts on his professional career. Besides being a year ahead of me in the university, Alberto had a perfectly clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life: prepare for the public service exam as his father and brothers had. My future plans, on the other hand, were vaguer. In fact, they hardly existed. I liked languages, I liked books, I liked traveling. Undefined banalities, in short, with little hope of them soon materializing into some type of productive job that was moderately well paid. So Alberto, whose résumé was inferior to mine, devoted himself to studying. And I, meanwhile, put my humble aspirations aside and made sure our litt
le family got ahead.
The success, naturally, was all his: he had prepared manically for the exam, obtaining his objective on the second round. Meanwhile, I neither took an exam, nor got any congratulations on passing, nor substituted professional garb for my old jeans and the thick wool sweaters that I knitted for myself on the run. But I did do other things that might have contributed, in at least a tangential way, to the triumph of my young and promising husband. While he memorized his laws and statutes locked in a room and wearing earplugs, isolated from everyday routines, I gestated, delivered, and brought up his two kids, and devoted myself night and day to making sure they didn’t interrupt his much-needed quiet with their crying and childish protests. My life wore on, glued to a stroller carrying one baby while another baby was forming inside of me, through endless miles and hours seated on cold stone park benches. Later it was two boys that I led by the hand with their minute steps, picking them up from the ground when they fell, wiping their tears and noses, dealing with their cuts and bruises.
While my husband remained isolated in his legal bubble, ignorant of domestic trivialities such as paying the rent and gas bill or buying eggs, chicken, and laundry detergent, I worked. Tutoring students while the kids had their naps or crawled on the floor in between my students’ legs; translating medical texts with one hand while with the other I bottle-fed David; typing up indecipherable manuscripts with Pablo stuck to my breast. So that Alberto could study as I would have liked to be able to study myself.
In spite of it all, and with great difficulty, I managed to establish a career. I had no choice, however, other than to put aside my desire of pursuing my PhD and instead find a respectable job in order to help Alberto in his noble effort to become a high-ranking state servant like his father—the father who, like my own, had thought it a dishonor to the family that we married so young and with a more-than-noticeable pregnancy rounding out my silhouette. The father who had never cared about his son, or his son’s wife, until the Official State Gazette finally published his offspring’s appointment. Only then did he seem to have forgotten our dishonor and once again opened the doors to his world. A little too late. But Alberto willingly returned to the fold with the same astonishing ease with which he later left me to start a new life with Eva. As if nothing had happened; as if there had never been a before.
When he passed his public examination, I was finally able to look for a steady full-time job. My experiences giving so many private classes to dozens of teenagers made me dismiss the idea of devoting myself to teaching high school. I was not cut out to explain the passive voice and relative clauses while struggling with the hormonal explosions of my students’ awkward stage. So I pinned my hopes on a position at one of the new universities that had begun to flourish at the time, a spot in the lowest echelon of teaching. That is how I started out.
Eventually I finished my dissertation and found a stable job. We changed residences: from a small, poorly laid-out apartment in an old neighborhood, we moved to a much larger apartment, recently built and with two terraces. The kids grew up and started coming and going, and life went on. Until one day someone crossed paths with my husband and suddenly his wife and domestic world must have seemed terribly boring. Toward the beginning of the summer, when the heat began to beat down ferociously, Alberto finally announced that he was leaving home.
For the first time in my life I was aware of how fragile the things we believe to be permanent really are. When Alberto left that night, he took more than simply a suitcase with summer clothes. My confidence also left with him, my innocent belief that existence is something that can be planned and that my life would follow a unidirectional and preestablished path through the years. When he closed the door behind him, he left not only a woman with a broken heart but a woman irrevocably changed: a being who had thought herself strong had been turned into someone vulnerable, disbelieving, suspicious of the rest of the world.
And now his call once again caught me unawares. I realized that one of my children must have given him my number. His voice seemed alien in the distance. It sounded the same, but no longer transmitted that complicity we’d shared for almost twenty-five years living together. Now it was the voice of a thoughtful, distant man who spoke to me about lawyers, checking accounts, mortgages, and powers of attorney. I accepted his proposals unconditionally like an automaton, raising no objections and offering no alternatives. Deep down, I didn’t care.
We’d never established boundaries in our property and our common life beyond those that the force of habit had imposed: which side of the bed we slept on, where we sat at the table, how we ordered the closet and our bathroom shelves. We’d started our life together with so few possessions that everything that came afterwards we ended up sharing: the two cars we’d drive to work, the apartment we lived in, and a little cottage on the beach. Alberto was now offering to put the apartment and cottage up for sale, pay off our outstanding mortgage, and divide the money between us. I wasn’t against it or for it. As far as I was concerned, he could torch them.
After hanging up I remained motionless, my right hand still clutching the receiver as I tried to rewind and digest the conversation. A couple of seconds later the phone rang once again, abruptly breaking my solitude. I figured it must be him again; perhaps he’d forgotten to tell me something. The voice on the other end, however, wasn’t his.
“Blanca, it’s Luis Zarate. Are you free for lunch? I want to propose something to you. Or rather, two things.”
• • •
I met the chairman at the entrance of Guevara Hall and together we headed toward the campus cafeteria. Although I tried to feign absolute normalcy, I still had Alberto’s words buzzing in my ears. His voice had hit me with such unexpected intensity that, while the chairman spoke I only pretended to be listening, nodding every now and then as we served ourselves, when really my mind was lost in other directions. After we carried our trays over to a table, he brought up his reason for seeing me. I had no other choice than to return to reality and pay attention.
“The department has been invited to participate in a new program of continuing education courses,” he said, attacking his salad conscientiously. “They’ve proposed that we offer a course that could be of general interest. I thought that your stay here could provide a good opportunity to prepare something related to contemporary Spain. Little is known of your country in these parts: practically all Hispanic influence comes from Mexico. That’s why it might be interesting to design a course that shows a different aspect of Spanish, a course aimed at those interested in improving their command of the language while learning about present-day Spain. What do you think?”
In fact, I had no thoughts on the matter, neither that one nor any other he might have proposed. But I tried not to show it too blatantly.
“It seems interesting,” I lied while poking at a sad-looking mushroom on my plate.
“It wouldn’t be like an academic seminar; it’d be something more informal,” he resumed. “You could use newspaper articles, fragments of novels, any kind of material that you think might be useful. Even movies: I’ve got a good collection of videos. It would only take up a couple of afternoons a week and it doesn’t pay badly.”
“Who would the students be?”
“Professional adults; graduate students from other departments, perhaps; people connected to the university; Santa Cecilia residents interested in learning more.”
Despite my lack of interest, the offer was tempting. I liked classroom work and to be able to design my own material. Besides, I had nothing special to do in the afternoons and the money would always come in handy. Still, I was unable to commit.
“Can I think about it?”
He looked at me with curious eyes, as if trying to figure out if I really did need time to make a decision or if in fact I didn’t quite accept his proposal for some other reason.
“By all means, take your time. In any case, Rebe
cca has the exact details regarding the course requirements, if you wish further information. Well, and now here comes my second proposition, shorter and simpler.”
I was convinced that no matter what he said, it wasn’t going to elicit enthusiasm in me. But I pretended.
“Tell me about it.”
“I don’t know if you’re aware that in this country between the fifteenth of September and the fifteenth of October we celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month. I think it’s something that goes back to the sixties, a tribute to the richness of the Hispanic contribution to our culture.”
“What does it involve?”
“A bunch of different projects, from folklore festivities to political rallies. The university’s committee on international relations, for its part, hosts a debate in which our department usually participates by contributing a representative to the panel. And it occurred to me that this year you could be that panel member.”
“To speak on what?”
“Usually on anything and everything. It’s quite a large panel, with seven or eight participants from different areas and fields related to the Hispanic world. Professors of Latin American history, international relations, political science; some visiting professor, a doctoral student—”