The Heart Has Its Reasons by María Dueñas Read Free Book Online Page B

enabled him to live without too many hardships. Besides providing him with the indispensable tools—pencils, pens, ink—it allowed him to treat himself to certain luxuries on his quest to further his newfound knowledge: an atlas of Spain and its provinces, a laminated set of diagrams of the human body, a small blackboard. He even made a present to his landlady, invited Marcelino to a tavern, and handed some spare change to the kids for them to buy a cone of roasted chickpeas or a lollypop from La Habana.
    During the time it took him to complete high school, things happened around him that would change the history of his country for good—things that he, with his thirst for knowledge, would have hardly understood had it not been for Marcelino’s overflowing verbosity. Still eager in his resolve, the bricklayer was slowly learning to read and write near the brazier each night, immersed in his primer.
    They celebrated their first Christmas together toasting with soda water and cheap wine to a happy and peaceful 1931. And although the year was not a calm one, they did regard as fortunate the changes that took place barely a few months later with the king’s exile and the arrival of the Second Republic.
    On the twenty-third of May 1932 the son of the humble maid and the illiterate miner, neatly combed, wearing a tie and showing no apparent signs of nervousness, passed his pre-university entry exam with ease and before a foreboding tribunal. Doña Manolita wouldhave been proud to see that her pupil had satisfactorily carried out her plan. From the house of Señora Consuelo, the sturdy Asturian who lived in the second-floor apartment on the right, a long-distance call was put through to give Simona the news. She took the call in Don Ramon Otero’s house: she was soaked with sweat from busily ironing her master’s shirts. Deeply moved and unable to utter a coherent word in the unfathomable distance of the telephone lines, the poor woman was only able to repeat again and again, “My son, my son, my son.”

Chapter 6
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    A s stipulated in the will, the next step in Andres Fontana’s life was the university. In the early 1930s, the University of Madrid still lacked a common nucleus and had numerous buildings scattered throughout the capital, most of them quite old if not downright obsolete. The University City was still in its construction phase, immersed in a long process that had begun in 1927, driven by King Alfonso XIII’s goal of endowing it with a space similar to American ones, where integrated planning, functional architecture, and extensive areas devoted to sports and recreation would be a priority.
    The birth of the Second Republic and Alfonso XIII’s sudden exile did not slow down the project—quite the contrary: it gathered momentum but was now forced to eliminate any inclination toward grandiosity and excess. When Andres began his first course, the humanities were taught in an old, ramshackle building on Calle San Bernardo.
    The same perseverance with which he managed to succeed at his baccalaureate exam guided the young man in his university studies. He excelled to such an extent that in his third year, Professor Enrique Fernandez de la Hoz, lecturer in historical grammar, proposed that he be granted a fellowship to help teach the Spanish courses for foreigners that would take place the following semester. He acceptedthe offer without even weighing the full consequences of the commitment.
    Spreading the Spanish language was one of the activities of the Board for the Expansion of Studies, with lecturers sent year after year to universities in a number of countries and courses organized for foreign students and professors. Andres’s affiliation with that program began in January 1935 and lasted until the end of March. He participated in conversation sessions, acted as a companion on visits and excursions, and attempted to solve any problems that arose among the