by Maria Duenas
But there was no time for nostalgia. Something had changed between us with Luis Zarate’s untimely arrival, and it was practically impossible to turn back the clock. Our objective was before us, not behind. There were only three days left until my departure and the deadline for the Los Pinitos project.
Toward midmorning, when we finally picked up the pace of our work, I got up to make a phone call.
“All’s in order,” I said simply, then listened to the person on the other end of the line for a moment and hung up.
Daniel, meanwhile, hadn’t taken his eyes off the document he had before him. As if he weren’t aware that I’d just spoken to Luis Zarate, as if he hadn’t heard me. But he didn’t talk to me until a couple of hours later.
“Are you hungry?” he asked me.
“Not yet.”
I thought he’d wait for me to eat something together as he had at other times, but I was mistaken. Given my negative answer, he simply headed to the kitchen and, with the familiarity of one who knows himself on friendly territory, began to rummage around. I heard him search the fridge, tear a plastic bag, cut, split, pour, spread. A knife banged against the sink, then he briefly turned on the faucet in the manner men usually do, to its maximum. He walked out into the garden, passing through the door that once took me to meet what was left of his friend Paul Cullen.
The large dining room window provided me with the opportunity to observe him without being seen. With his back toward me, again in his worn-out jeans and a blue wool sweater. Seated on the cold stone step, the dog Macan in the distance. Eating a sandwich with his gaze fixed on the sad pool full of autumn’s fallen leaves. Thinking. Perhaps of his very own presence in that same house when he was still a young professor oozing ambition and project ideas, when he still lacked an inkling of the low blows fate had in store for him. Or for all those who had accompanied him then. Thinking, perhaps, of Aurora and her infectious laugh; of his lucid and fun philosopher friend frolicking with his kids on the grass; of Andres Fontana, silently in love with the pretty Spaniard who was his wife.
Or perhaps, between bites of bread stuffed with something or other, his mind wandered much nearer: to our work together, recalling Luis Zarate’s unfortunate interruption and our proximity to each other. Or turning over in his head what he took to be my betrayal.
“I’ve left a sandwich for you,” he said on returning to his place at our worktable.
“Thank you,” I murmured. I never did eat it.
After several more hours sifting through hundreds of unrelated documents, an aged cardboard folder appeared tied with a simple ribbon. Inside, a handful of loose papers. Perhaps at some point they’d been white, but now they were several shades of yellow. Between lines and phrases, we found a bunch of references written offhandedly by Fontana:
Year 1823, April 4. Altimira demands from Argüelles documents for better administering his future mission. July 10: Altimira announces to Father Señan the construction of the new mission in Sonoma. July 22: Altimira urges Argüelles regarding the construction of new installations. August 23: Father Sarria writes Altimira disapproving of the foundation of his recent mission in Sonoma for not having requested permission from his superiors.
The rebel father Altimira had, little by little, turned into the great protagonist of the story that the professor had invited us to follow. We knew the insurgent Franciscan had gotten away with the construction of the Sonoma mission. In spite of the initial reservations of his own ecclesiastical hierarchy—which refused to authorize Altimira to found that new mission—he managed to move ahead with it. The documents showed, however, that the unwavering support that Governor Argüelles had given him at the beginning slowly began to falter.
From different documents we learned that in January 1824 Altimira asked him by letter for a bell for the Sonoma mission, but Argüelles appeared not to have even responded. In the same month of the following year, 1825, he again sent him a request indicating that it would only be a loan, but it seems his plea fell on deaf ears. No one seemed interested anymore in those outdated missions whose survival he was bent on.
Altimira’s trail was lost as of the summer of 1826. It was then that, tired of suffering under the father’s aggressive treatment, the Indians rebelled and set fire to the mission that he had built with such tenuous resources. No matter how hard we looked and how thoroughly we went over hundreds of papers, we were never able to ascertain what became of the impetuous father immediately after the fire. It seems he never returned to the Sonoma mission.
In a letter dated March 1828 and addressed to Father Sarria by one Ildefonso de Arreguin, we learned that Altimira reappeared but soon vanished toward the beginning of that very same year, escaping from Alta California under somewhat obscure circumstances, along with another father by the name of Antonio Ripoll. Back to Spain, supposedly.
After this last brushstroke regarding the end of the Franciscan’s stay on American soil, darkness descended, and we were left with only questions. Where were you, Jose Altimira, during this time? What happened to you when the Sonoma mission was burned to the ground? Where were you for that year and a half? We never asked those questions out loud, but we mentally asked ourselves a thousand times as we unpacked the boxes, not finding an answer. Why did Andres Fontana follow you so closely? What did you do once the angry Indians torched your first mission?
We added the folder to the small but growing bunch of accumulated evidence from the previous days and kept breaking ground.
Rebecca returned a little before seven. With a long striped jacket, two brown bags from Meli’s Market, and a news item.
“Los Pinitos is intensifying. They’ve called for a new protest, they’re mobilizing once more.”
“But they still have nothing to latch onto. I spoke to Joe Super a couple of hours ago,” Daniel said.
“Nothing at all apparently,” she confirmed, raising her voice as she moved toward the adjacent kitchen with the brown bags in her arms. “But there are less than three days left for the deadline to expire and they insist on making noise until the end. Does anyone want a glass of wine?”
We both got up, ready to accept the invitation.
Without looking at Daniel, I simply asked him, “Are you planning on going?”
He raised his arms toward the ceiling and stretched, exhaling heavily like a worn-out giant.
“To the protest? No.”
How comforting to feel looked after by generous hands. While we drank that first glass, Rebecca prepared dinner with her usual diligence. Tasty, hot, fortifying, served on large white crockery plates on the kitchen’s rustic table. There was no need for us to agree not to talk about work: we chose to clear our heads by going over a thousand trivialities that didn’t affect any of us much. And thus, for a little over an hour, the tension started to dissolve and we even managed to smile at some point.
When we were about to finish the ice cream dessert, Daniel’s cell phone rang in his pocket.
“What’s up, Joe?” he said, standing up and walking out of the kitchen.
He came back half a minute later with his jacket in his hand. He didn’t sit down.“The students have decided to camp at Los Pinitos tonight,” he announced as he took his car keys out. “Without authorization. I’m going to swing by. I’ll come back as soon as I can, to try and keep working a little longer.”
He didn’t bother to ask me if I wanted to accompany him, nor did I propose it. The tentative closeness that we’d reestablished over dinner had vanished; his trust in me still wavered. It was not clear if we’d be able to revive either one of them.
Rebecca proposed we watch a movie together, a comedy with a happy ending or a drama by which to transport myself to some other reality. I refused the offer and continued with my work, although I did accept her invitation to stay overnight in one of her daughters’ bedrooms. That way I wouldn’t have to return to my apartment in
the middle of the night and would feel less lonely.
In spite of having struggled on my own with Fontana’s legacy for almost three months, Daniel’s presence in the last stretch had been so intense that to reenter that world without him by my side suddenly felt strange. But I overcame the moment and carried on late into the night, disentangling information regarding transactions and assistance between missions: which had handed over to another two dozen chickens and three mules; which had welcomed fifteen sick converts; which had requested from the motherhouse a sculpture of a virgin, work tools for the blacksmith, or some authorization to do something. At around a quarter to two, with Rebecca asleep hours ago, the house in total darkness and in the thickest of silences, and Daniel still absent, my eyes were finally about to close, when a simple phrase in an old document snapped me out of my drowsiness.
And Altimira apologized before Your Reverence for once more failing to request permission to proceed with the new mission.
Nothing else, the rest dealt with the inventory of a bunch of small details that I could not string together, an incomplete record.
I wrote down the words on a sheet of paper. I underlined “once more,” I underlined “permission,” I underlined “mission.” The “once more” obviously implied that whoever wrote that was not referring to the Sonoma mission, the first that Altimira founded without authorization, but to some other undertaking. What else did you do, Altimira? What else? What else? I kept repeating under my breath, patting the table, encouraging him to come out of hiding and show himself. I kept searching, eager and ravenous, but found nothing else.
I switched the last light off and climbed the stairs a good while later wondering how far the path of the erratic Franciscan would end up taking us. If indeed there was a place to be taken to.
On waking up the following morning I confirmed that Rebecca’s efficiency had gotten ahead of me. In the bathroom next to the room I’d slept in, I found my toilet bag and some clothes of mine. She had a set of keys to my apartment; I’d given them to her myself, in case something unexpected happened, I vaguely thought at the time.
Daniel was already at his spot when I came down. At his back, a large painting reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s naïf aesthetics. By his feet, good old Macan lay snoozing. Instead of the previous day’s wool sweater, Daniel now wore a sweatshirt with the emblem and letters of some university practically illegible from wear and tear. And as to what was inside his head, I didn’t have the foggiest idea.
“You didn’t come back. How did it go?” I said instead of good morning.
“Bad,” he answered without looking at me. “They’re hell-bent on battling it out, but with no conclusive piece of evidence to show.”
“Did they end up camping?”
“More than two hundred students, next to the excavators that are there already. I’m sure they have no intention of hauling dirt just yet; they’ve been sent to intimidate. But I’m afraid the countdown has begun, and no matter how much noise they make, it won’t be to much avail.”
“Unless we are able to achieve something,” I said to him, handing him the document. “Altimira showed up again last night.”
Chapter 42
* * *
Wednesday rolled by unnoticed, and Thursday brought an uninviting gray day with intermittent rain. All the lights in Rebecca’s dining room had remained lit from an early hour, casting clarity above us as we worked on the material scattered on the table and floor.
She had come back at nightfall. We had never even stopped for lunch, consuming instead a bottle of water, a couple of cans of Coke, three apples, and a bag of Doritos. We realized that our worst-case scenario had materialized once we got to the few loose papers at the bottom of the last box: a wrinkled receipt for some books bought in March 1969 at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, a schedule of liturgical events at the Santa Clara mission, and a map of regional roads.
After that, desolation.
We’d reached the end without coming up with solid proof; we had only intuition, suppositions, and loads of loose information hinting at the truth. Father Altimira, the one we thought would end up taking us to some safe harbor, had vanished from any written testimony for more than a year without giving us a clue to what he did during all of 1827. None of the sister missions took him in. His friends among the authorities stopped mentioning him. Fontana never did find out what became of him. Based on the Franciscan’s vehement and impulsive personality, the professor suspected that he might have established a new mission. Without authorization or license, without a founding charter, without a budget or backing, moved only by a faith of steel or perhaps by an ambition as fierce as it was mad. That was Fontana’s dream, which infected us now as well.
“There is nothing else,” I announced in a whisper.
At my wit’s end before the certainty that we had exhausted everything, I flung the empty box on the floor. It fell facedown like a gloomy confirmation of the truth.
Daniel dropped into one of the chairs with legs splayed and an absent gaze. Crestfallen.
I went to lift the box to turn it right side up, but I ended up down on the floor beside it. On Rebecca’s lovely flooring. Exhausted, I sat with my back slumped against the wall.
“What a fool I’ve been . . .” he said, his face raised to the ceiling and his eyes closed, as he ran his fingers through his hair.
“It’s no use blaming yourself now. No one knew what we were going to find: we had no idea how far Fontana had been able go.”
“I should have been less naïve, more realistic, and not have had blind faith in something . . . so weak and insubstantial.”
“It was a risk. You went for the high stakes and lost. But if it’s of any consolation, at least you’ve gotten half of what you sought: your teacher’s legacy is no longer in the dark.”
“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.
“Whe
re 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.