The Heart Has Its Reasons by María Dueñas Page A

writings. But he remained resolute: he packed up his feelingsalong 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
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    T he Spain that welcomed Daniel Carter the first time he crossed the Atlantic had already shaken off the brutal 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.
    â€œI’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