by Maria Duenas
The one who spoke was the emeritus history professor, whose name I now knew was Joe Super. All eyes turned to him, toward his Hawaiian shirt and wise blue eyes. He then asked me permission to add something else.
“Of course, as long as it’s in Spanish.”
“I’m going to try my best,” he said with a charming gesture that brought a general peal of laughter. “Los Padres National Forest refers to the Spanish Franciscan monks who began the exploration and colonization of California in the second half of the eighteenth century. They were driven on by a force that, wrong or right, enabled them to accomplish their objectives. And El Camino Real is the result: the string of missions that these fathers founded throughout California.”
“Twenty missions, right?” Lucas, a graduate student in foreign relations, asked.
“Twenty-one,” Joe corrected. “They begin in Southern California, with San Diego de Alcala, and end in the north, very close to here, in Sonoma, with San Francisco Solano. Very little is known in Spain about this, right?”
“It’s true,” I acknowledged with a sense of collective shame.
“That’s sad, because all this is part of your inheritance, both historical and cultural.”
Having finished with One, Two, Three, I resumed the class and we had a pleasant, fruitful session for another hour or so. But in some recess of my subconscious those references to fathers, missions, and trails must have taken hold, because at one point I suddenly remembered that among Fontana’s papers, I’d seen in passing some mention of the Franciscans and their buildings. Those documents remained in a couple of boxes set aside in a corner of my office, needing further attention. Once I gave it, perhaps I’d be able to fill in the gaps.
I left the campus as soon as the class was over, satisfied by the results and exhausted after an entire day of nonstop work. I finally took a deep breath, inhaling the smell of eucalyptus in the late afternoon.
“How did your new course go?”
I had been walking along the sidewalk, distracted, when the voice came from a car that had halted beside me. Like me, Luis Zarate was about to go home, and instead of his customary work clothes, he was wearing a pair of shorts and a deep-red sweatshirt with the logo of some university other than Santa Cecilia. Next to him, a sports bag occupied the passenger seat.
“Extremely well. It’s an excellent group, very motivated. I’m lucky.”
“I’m glad. Would you like me to give you a lift home?”
“Well . . . I appreciate it, but I think it’ll do me good to walk awhile and get some air. I’ve been locked up since nine o’clock this morning, I didn’t even go out for lunch.”
“Whatever you like. Enjoy your stroll, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I was about to return the farewell, but he had already rolled the window up, so I didn’t make an effort. I simply raised my hand in a good-bye gesture. And suddenly, unexpectedly, the window rolled back down.
“Perhaps we could go for dinner one of these days.”
“Whenever you like.”
I was not taken aback by the invitation. In fact, I was quite tempted, and even if the invitation had been for that very same evening, I would have said yes. Why not?
“Do you know Los Olivos?”
One more in the long list of words from my native tongue in this foreign land, I thought, recalling the recently finished class.
“No, I don’t know it. I’ve heard it mentioned several times, but I’ve never been there.”
“They serve wonderful pasta and excellent wines. Let’s talk about it, okay?”
The car disappeared into the distance and I resumed my walk home, rapidly reviewing the different parts of that intense day. I made an effort to put the memory of Ana’s phone call aside, categorically refusing to stop and think if behind the impetus of my sister’s words there was an undeniable piece of truth. Instead, I turned my attention to more pleasant things, like Luis Zarate’s invitation. Then to Fontana’s papers, which had absorbed me, enticing me to make sense of them all, to the point of leaving off all other obligations to the last minute, even forcing me to satisfy my hunger with a miserable sandwich spat out from a vending machine. It was a job that was becoming increasingly gratifying and simultaneously made for good therapy. The more I was engrossed by the dead professor’s legacy—the more conscious I became of his charisma and worth—the less I thought about my own predicament.
By then I had already realized that, after a spell as a lecturer, his intention was to return to Spain and continue with his projects there: to sit for a public entrance examination in the then prestigious positions for secondary-education teachers, perhaps even return to university and maybe in the meantime find a job at some private school or academy. The Spanish Civil War in the distance, however, froze his will and soul. Overwhelmed, dismayed, devastated, he decided not to go back.
Among his papers I hadn’t found any desire to return after the war to that motherland, irremediably different from the one he’d left behind, although one could intuit the occasional shadow of nostalgia in his writings. But he remained resolute: he packed up his feelings along with the emotions and impressions of his youth and stored them in the back room of his mind. From then on, he settled in his host country with a definite sense of permanence, devoting himself to teaching his country’s language and literature, to transferring his feelings, his knowledge, and the memory of his lost world to hundreds, perhaps thousands of students who sometimes understood how much this meant to him and sometimes did not.
There were many testimonials from students who had at some time or other over the decades attended his classes. I suddenly remembered the postcards that I’d hastily placed in my folder that very afternoon.
I pulled them out while I kept walking. It’d grown dark, but the streetlamps provided plenty of light to skim over them. There must have been about a dozen: short missives that greeted the old professor, sending regards from remote cities or in a few lines narrating how life was treating them. At first glance they didn’t seem to be organized according to any specific criteria, so that the most disparate places were paired with dates that danced haphazardly in time: Mexico City, July 1947; St. Louis, Missouri, March 1953; Seville, April 1961; Buenos Aires, October 1955; Madrid, December 1958. Postcards of the Teotihuacan pyramids, the Mississippi River, Maria Luisa Park, Recoleta Cemetery, the Puerta del Sol.
I smiled on seeing such a familiar picture of the Puerta del Sol during that period. There was the bright Tio Pepe billboard, the clock announcing the New Year, the perpetual crowd at the heart of the capital. I stopped beneath a lamppost to take a good look at it, while beside me a constant stream of students hurried along with their backpacks.
I looked for the postmark date: January 2, 1959. The postcard’s succinct contents appeared to have been hastily written with a fountain pen:
Dear Professor,
Spain continues to be fascinating.
My work is coming along well.
After the grapes, I’ll go in search of Mister Witt.
The text was further confirmation of the close relationship Fontana had with his students.
But what shocked me was the closing:
Wishing you a happy new year,
Your friend,
Daniel Carter
I had begun my research project thinking that it concerned the legacy of one man. But this innocuous postcard from Madrid now opened up an intriguing glimpse of a far greater puzzle. What I was to discover in the following weeks about Daniel Carter—both from himself and from others—would enable me to begin piecing together that larger enigma. And although I had no way of knowing it at the time, these discoveries would in turn leave an indelible mark on my own life.
Chapter 11
* * *
The Spain that welcomed Daniel Carter the first time he crossed the Atlantic had already shaken off the brut
al slumber of the postwar years. It was still a sluggish, backward nation, but amazingly picturesque to the eyes of an American student.
He brought with him twenty-two years and a handful of vague reasons for his trip: a certain fluency in the Spanish language, a growing passion for its literature, and a great desire to set foot in that distant land to which he was bound ever since he boldly decided to ignore his destiny.
The son of a dentist and a cultivated housewife, Daniel Carter had grown up in the comfortable conventionality of the small city of Morgantown, West Virginia, tucked away in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. His parents’ dream was that their firstborn—an outstanding student and athlete—would become at the least a brilliant lawyer or surgeon. But as often happens in such cases, the parents’ plans were moving along on one track while the son’s followed another.
“I’ve been thinking about my future,” he finally told them, dropping the phrase casually between bites of pot roast and boiled green peas. A dinner like any other, on an ordinary late Sunday afternoon.
“Law, finally?” his mother asked cheerfully with a forkful of mashed potatoes halfway between the plate and her mouth.
“No . . .”
“Medicine, then?” his father interjected, hardly hiding his satisfaction.
“Neither.”
They looked at him in astonishment as he began explaining in a strong voice what not even in a hundred days of conjecture they would have guessed. Upon completing his undergraduate studies, he had no interest in specializing in law despite being admitted to Cornell Law School, nor was he in the least interested in medicine. He wouldn’t remotely consider a future surrounded by judges, operating rooms, criminals, or scalpels; what he wanted to do with his life was to know other cultures and to devote himself to studying literature. Foreign literature, to be exact.
Daniel’s father folded his napkin with extreme slowness, his eyes fixed on the tablecloth.
“Excuse me,” he whispered.
The slamming front door resounded along the street. His mother was left speechless. Tears began to well up in her lovely green eyes as she wondered when and where they had gone wrong in rearing the son whom they thought they had provided with an exemplary education.
However, they knew Daniel was headstrong and had a fiercely passionate temperament, so they realized that this resolution, no matter how ridiculous and far-fetched it sounded, was firm. The younger brothers exchanged kicks beneath the table but didn’t dare utter a word lest they be caught in the crossfire.
From that day on, silence spread through the house. Weeks went by in which Daniel’s parents barely addressed him, naïvely hoping that perhaps exhaustion would end up instilling some sense in the wayward youngster. All they achieved was to heat up the atmosphere to such a disagreeable extent that, far from encouraging him to change his attitude, they accomplished the exact opposite, awakening in him an overwhelming desire to get away as quickly as possible.
His next step was to apply for graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Past the deadline and by the skin of his teeth he managed to get accepted in the classical- and Romance-languages program, bolstered by the French and Spanish courses he’d taken previously. The family’s stable income and the hastiness with which he’d applied, however, disqualified him from receiving a scholarship. His father maintained his unyielding refusal to finance such an absurdity, so Daniel abandoned the family home at the end of summer, carrying with him a canvas backpack, sixty-seven dollars, and the still-festering family rift.
His first objective once he landed in Pittsburgh was to find a part-time job. He figured that the paltry savings he’d accrued as a lifeguard that summer—his sole capital—wouldn’t last long. He quickly found a night job at H. J. Heinz, the great manufacturer of ketchup, beans, and pickles.
The first semester flew by. He had strong yearnings and few needs, renting a room in a dilapidated house that he shared with seven other students, five cats, and a good number of broken windows. He didn’t much care about its decaying state, using it only for sleeping. His remaining time was spent at the university and completing his shifts at Heinz. He would eat in any old corner, sometimes a cold can of beans as he sat on some step going over his grammar exercises, or a cheese sandwich downed in three bites as he hurried along the hallways between classes. In his scarce free time—whenever he had an unoccupied hour—he could be seen running around the university’s athletic track like a being possessed. It didn’t take long for that tall, extroverted kid, full of energy and always in a hurry, to become popular among his classmates. In the factory, though, they would tease him whenever they saw him with a book during breaks, seated amid piles of boxes in his work uniform. He did not cut himself off completely, however. In a feat of multitasking, he didn’t miss out on anything that might be happening: from the latest honorable defeat of the Pittsburgh Steelers in the NFL to the jokes about the bosses, women, and the lives of his fellow laborers, who came from all kinds of backgrounds.
Among his second-semester courses was Twentieth-Century Spanish Literature, which took place in the Cathedral of Learning, Pitt’s emblematic landmark.
Daniel arrived at the first class early, just after lunch, hurried as usual. He stretched out his legs and relaxed as he waited for the professor’s arrival, risky behavior for someone exhausted from the nightly effort of loading trucks. In a few minutes his chin was resting against his chest, his hair was covering his eyes, and his mind was plagued by those strange presences that swarm in the first moments of sleep.
A quick, sharp kick to his left foot jolted him awake. He immediately muttered an embarrassed “I’m sorry” while swiftly recovering his composure. Before him stood a dark-complexioned man with a corsair’s thick beard, dark combed-back hair, and emphatic eyes like two pieces of coal.
“Siestas, at home and in summer. And, if at all possible, in the shade of a grapevine, with an earthenware jug of cold water by your side.”
“I beg your pardon, sir . . .”
“We come here to work, young man. There are better places for napping. Your name, please?”
With a still somewhat shaky command of Spanish, Daniel was debating between specializing in this language or French, not knowing for sure which of the two cultures he would end up marking as his territory. But he grasped the meaning of the message immediately, just as he grasped that its speaker didn’t seem in a mood to tolerate any kind of nonsense in his classroom.
Before shattering the family’s expectations for good, his contact with the Spanish-speaking world had been confined to basic grammar and an arsenal of somewhat unrelated facts regarding painters, monuments, museums, and certain gastronomic curiosities such as octopus, oxtail, and those marzipan rolls with the sinister name of “saints’ bones.” Added to that, at most, would be reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls one long summer night, and a handful of stray expressions mumbled by mustachioed Mexicans in Westerns on Saturday afternoons in the Warner Theatre of his native Morgantown.
But it was not long before that man’s classes tipped the balance for Daniel. The poets of the Generation of ’27 along with a fascination with the Spanish Civil War ultimately persuaded him that his studies in Spanish language and literature, despite his family’s opposition, had been worthwhile. His relationship with his parents, however, never quite sorted itself out. They still couldn’t understand why their son wasted his outstanding intellect in pursuit of an absurd academic specialty that in their eyes augured an uncertain professional future and a hardly promising social position.
Perhaps his decision was merely due to a rebellious impulse, to an unconscious urge to lash out against the established order of things.
Whatever was the spark, it soon burst into a flame that torched his elders’ plans and left a clean slate upon which to establish his career. And hovering above it all, intangible but powerful, was Andres Fontana’s push.
In the end it all came down to a verse—a simple handwritten verse found in the folds of a dead poet’s pocket. Words of apparent simplicity that Daniel would have never fully understood had his professor not opened the young student’s eyes. Andres Fontana wrote them in white chalk on the blackboard: These blue days and this sun of childhood.
“What was the sun of Antonio Machado’s childhood like, Professor?”
The question came from a bright-looking female student with the face of a mouse and large horn-rimmed glasses who always sat in the front row.
“Yellow and luminous, like all others,” blurted out a smart aleck.
A few laughed timorously.
Not Fontana.
Nor Daniel.
“One only appreciates the sun of childhood when one loses it,” the professor said, leaning against the edge of his desk with the chalk between his fingers.
“When one loses the sun or loses one’s childhood?” Daniel asked, raising a pencil in the air.
“When he no longer has the ground he has always walked upon, the hands that have held him, the house he grew up in. When one leaves for good, pushed by an external force, never to return.”
Then the professor, who had scrupulously adhered to the syllabus until that day, dropped all academic formalities and spoke to them. Of loss and exile, of letters stored away and memory’s umbilical cord; of something that, despite mountains and oceans separating souls from the sun of childhood, is never severed.
By the time the classroom bell rang, Daniel was absolutely certain where his future lay.
A few weeks later, having finished reading “Lullaby of the Onion” by Miguel Hernandez, Fontana caught them by surprise with a proposition.
“I need a volunteer for . . .”
Before Fontana even finished the sentence, Daniel had already raised his arm toward the ceiling in all its noticeable length.
“Don’t you think, Carter, that before volunteering you should know what it entails?”