The Heart Has Its Reasons Read Online Free PDF Page B

comes along.”
    We said good-bye on the street with a vague promise of meeting up on some other occasion and took off in opposite directions as the first stars became visible.
    On reaching my apartment I was again overwhelmed by that uncomfortable and hard-to-define feeling that I’d been dragging along like a deadweight ever since the department luncheon. I slept poorly that night, restless and preoccupied with Andres Fontana. Seeing a photo of the actual man, his face and his forceful presence, had somehow destroyed all my preconceived ideas, creating a new anxiety. Toward dawn my dreams were filled with vintage photographs among which I tried to identify a face as the images began dissolving and then disappeared.
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    I woke up thirsty and hot, my head throbbing. Daylight was advancing timidly. I threw open the window, seeking fresh air. Hardly any cars could be heard and only the silhouettes of a few joggers broke the stillness with their rhythmic pace. I grabbed a glass mechanically, turned on the faucet, and filled it. As the water ran down my throat, the previous day’s images came back to my mind. Then and only then did I understand.
    I had approached my task from the wrong angle. After my self-imposed discipline of long hours locked up in the storeroom, struggling before a ton of old documents, something was still lacking. I had been dealing with Andres Fontana’s papers as if they were so many boxes of nuts and bolts, turning my task into a disrespectful invasion of a human being’s privacy.
    Between the archival material and the conference room’s old snapshots I began to see something more than a tenuous common thread. The connection linking the legacy’s contents and the four images of thedead professor, whose name was all I knew at that point, grew sharp and powerful.
    I could no longer confine myself to simply classifying the work Professor Fontana had left behind upon his death. My task had to be approached from a human stance, up close. I had to make an effort to grasp the person hidden behind the words—someone whose soul I had until then failed to seek out. Seeing those photos the day before made me realize that I had handled my new assignment with a coldness verging on hostility, as if I were dealing with a mere commercial product. Absorbed by my own miseries, forcing myself to work compulsively to evade my problems, I hardly bothered to take into account the human being hidden among the pages of his legacy: crouching between the lines, concealed within sentences, suspended amid the strokes of each word.
    My job had suddenly become clear to me: to rescue and bring to life the buried legacy of a man who had been long ago forgotten.

Chapter 4
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    H is father was a miner, basically illiterate. His mother served as a maid to a wealthy family and was able to string a few letters together and add and subtract with moderate speed. Her name was Simona and she had given birth to Andres at the age of thirty-seven, after more than fifteen years of infertility and the consecutive births of her first two daughters and a stillborn child who had been quickly buried and virtually forgotten. They lived in a village south of La Mancha in a dwelling known as a barrack, two small connecting rooms with dirt floors and no running water or electricity. The untimely arrival of that last child was received with little joy: another mouth to feed, a little less space. Simona had continued to work until the afternoon prior to delivery; the luster of her lady’s floor made no allowances for an aging maid’s pregnancies. The following day, mother and son were back at Doña Manolita’s house: she, mopping the patios and feeding the furnace with coal; the baby boy, wrapped in rags and tucked in a basket in a corner of the kitchen.
    Doña Manolita must have been fifty-something at the time. A decade earlier she had been a rich spinster,