“I really appreciate your picking me up,” I told him as we reached the silver Mercedes parked by the curb.
“My pleasure,” he said opening the passenger seat for me. “Actually, I’m in your debt. Bécquer and Beatriz were arguing and I was glad to have an excuse to leave the house.”
“Why were they arguing?” I asked him after we joined the traffic.
Federico stole a quick glance at me, as if wondering how much I knew, then shrugged. “The usual,” he said. Without warning he switched to Spanish, his words flowing fast, in the clipped pattern of Southern Spain. “As far as I can tell, she didn’t want Bécquer to represent your work.”
“Why not?”
“I wouldn’t be offended if I were you,” he continued, without answering my question. “On the contrary. Beatriz has no literary talent. Yet she has taken it upon herself to save humanity. Through books. She believes only philosophy treatises should be published, and literary books dealing with the human condition. You know the ones where nothing happens and the authors are so much in love with their own writing, they forget to tell a story. I don’t understand why Bécquer has put up with her this long.”
“You don’t like her much.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
“That wasn’t my impression. This morning, she convinced Bécquer to go to the airport to pick you up.”
He braked sharply and swerved off the road, bringing the car to a halt on the dirt shoulder.
“Bécquer didn’t want to go?”
“He … he had things to do and — ”
“Things to do. Like what? Decorating the house? I haven’t seen him in a year, and he needs convincing?”
His voice rose as he spoke so that by now he was shouting.
I looked ahead at the trees caught in the headlights and waited for his anger to pass. When he spoke again, he sounded subdued.
“What else did he say about me?” he asked.
“Nothing. Really. He left right after Beatriz came. Well, not after she came. First, he stopped time for us so she wouldn’t interfere with my signing the contract.”
“He stopped time? So you know? You know what — who he is?”
I nodded.
“What about me? Did he tell you who I am?”
“No, he didn’t mention it.”
“Of course not. I’m not important enough. For two decades we were lovers. And what am I to him now? An inconvenience when I come to visit, an errand to add to his list of things to do before his guests arrive.”
I gasped. Lovers? Bécquer and Federico were — had been lovers?
Federico was not looking at me, but straight ahead, his hands grabbing the wheel with such intensity it broke loose. He stared at it for a moment as if puzzled, then opening the door, threw it against the darkness. His eyes flaring red, he turned to me.
He hates me, Bécquer had said. He doesn’t, Beatriz had told him. And she was right. Federico didn’t hate Bécquer. He was in love with him.
I stood still, eerily aware I was sitting next to a man who was not human and that, for all his gentle appearance, could break my neck without even trying. As he had the wheel.
I had to leave. Now.
My hand trembling uncontrollably, I reached for the door.
“Don’t.” Federico’s arm flashed in front of me and grabbed my hand.
“Please, don’t,” he repeated, his voice softer now, apologetic. “Bécquer might forgive me for breaking his car. Or for failing to drive you to the party. But if I do both, he will kill me for sure.”
I frowned, surprised at his self-deprecating tone. “I thought you were immortal.”
“I’m sure he would find a way,” Federico said, releasing my hand. “His ingenuity to cause me pain knows no limit.”
“You love him.”
I regretted my words the moment I said them for I was afraid my inappropriate comment would throw him into another fit of anger. But Federico didn’t seem to hear. He was staring at the gaping hole in the dashboard where the wheel used to be as if willing another one to appear.
“Bécquer is right,” he said after a moment. “I do overreact sometimes.”
He sounded so defeated I felt sorry for him. Bécquer was charming, I had to admit. It was not difficult for me to imagine falling for him and the pain at his rejection.
“Not at all,” I agreed to keep him calm. “Your reaction was understandable given the circumstances. He should have offered to pick you up.”
“You think?”
When I nodded, he added wistfully, “Let’s hope Bécquer agrees with you when I tell him.”
I waited for him to produce a phone and call Bécquer to ask him to give us a ride. Although it wasn’t cold outside, I was not looking forward to walking in my too tight black dress and fancy shoes. But Federico didn’t move and when, after digging into my handbag, I offered him mine, he shook his head.
“That won’t be necessary. Bécquer just told me Matt is coming.”
“He told you? But how? You didn’t … ” I waved my phone at him.
Federico shrugged. “I don’t need a phone to talk with Bécquer when we are this close.”
“You can read his mind?”
“Not exactly. I only hear what he wants to share. I cannot force myself into his mind. He would notice and block me. Actually, he just did that before, when — Did Bécquer ask you to be his … secretary?”
“No, why would I want to be his secretary? I’m a writer.”
“Of course.” He smiled, a friendly smile that lit a twinkle of mischief in his eyes. And I found myself warming to him. “And what do you write, if I may ask?”
“Fantasy stories set in medieval times.”
“It sounds like something Bécquer would love, and Beatriz would hate.”
“And you?”
“Me? I would have to read the story first. I used to write dramas when I was human. But I’ve mellowed with time.”
“You were a writer before you were immortal?”
“I was indeed.”
Federico bent forward and worked the CD player with his long fingers until he found the right track. “Listen,” he said. Sitting back against his seat, he closed his eyes.
The broken voice of Leonard Cohen came through the speakers, declaiming a poem-made-song. The first song I had danced to at my wedding with the husband who had since become a stranger: Take This Waltz.
Federico, eyes still closed, sang along, keeping the beat on the dashboard with his fingers.
I looked at him in profile and, as if seeing him for the first time, I noticed his dark wavy hair, his cleft chin, and his arched bushy eyebrows. I gasped. “You are Federico.”
My voice broke before I could complete his full name: Federico García Lorca, the most beloved Spanish poet in the twentieth century.
Federico nodded. “Yes. I am ‘that’ Federico.”
Without missing a beat, he resumed his singing, his voice fitting perfectly the lyrics of the song, the lyrics that were Cohen’s translation into English of Lorca’s perfect words.
Chapter Four: Matt
“My cross, indeed,” Federico said when the song ended, repeating the last words of the poem. “I wrote this years before I met Bécquer and he made me an immortal. I wrote it for a lover long forgotten. But they reflect my feelings for Bécquer exactly, on our first winter in Vienna.”
“Bécquer made you an immortal?”
Federico nodded.
“Why? Did you ask him to do it?”
“No. I was unconscious when he found me, bleeding through my broken skull and half buried in the ditch that was meant to be my grave. I didn’t ask him to do it, but I don’t blame him. I would have died otherwise.