“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 Becquer 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 Becquer 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:
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 Garcia 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 Becquer and he made me an immortal. I wrote it for a lover long forgotten. But they reflect my feelings for Becquer exactly, on our first winter in Vienna.”
“Becquer 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.
“I don’t blame him either for my falling for him. He never claimed that he loved me. Never hid his other lovers from me, the ladies he lured with his charm and forgot as soon as they loved him, for it was his gift that they would love him, his curse that he could not love them back, after they fell for him.”
“He played with them, and with you. Why did you let him?”
Federico shook his head. “He didn’t play with me. I knew he didn’t love me. He couldn’t, nor the way I wanted: Becquer is not gay. He took me as his lover to heal my broken soul when he realized I did not want to live. I had lost my will to live that summer of 1936 when I witnessed my friends betray me and saw the void of undiluted hate in the eyes of my killers.
“Becquer cured me of my despair. He took me as his lover and healed my soul with his passion and words of love he reinvented for me. I fell in love with him, how could I not? But he never guessed it. He had not planned or expected this to happen. Until he met me, he thought immortals could not love.
“When I told him, when he realized how much he meant to me, how much I hurt when I saw him with others, he left me, making clear that, from then on, I was allowed to see him only once a year for a week. He thought, that way, I would forget him.”
“But you did not.”
Federico stared at me. “Don’t let his charm blind you, Carla. Do not fall for him.”
I laughed, too eagerly perhaps. “I won’t, don’t worry. Becquer’s only my agent.”
“Of course.”
Turning his head away from me, Federico looked through the window to the road ahead. “Matt is coming,” he said. “Good. I was starting to suspect Becquer had forgotten to pass him my message.”
I followed his stare, and saw nothing but a wall of darkness beyond the halo of our headlights.
“Don’t worry. He’ll be here soon. I feel his mind.”
“You feel his mind? So Matt is an immortal too?”
“Not at all. Matt is quite human.”
“But … then. Are you saying you can read minds? Human minds?”
“No. I don’t read minds. I sense them when they are close enough.”
He said it casually as if unaware of the magnitude of what he had just revealed to me.
“You tricked me, didn’t you? Right now. When you asked me about Becquer, you forced me to think of him so you could read my feelings for him.”
“Yes.”
“How dare you?”
“I needed to know to warn you that Becquer … ” He stopped and with a sudden movement of his hand flashed the headlights. As if conjured by his signal, a beam of light glowed in the distance. “Matt is almost here. I’ll explain later, I promise, after we change cars.”
He was still speaking when a car drew near and, leaving the road, came to a stop facing us. It was not the blue convertible Becquer had driven in the morning, but a white limousine. Somehow, the idea that Becquer owned still another car — Federico had told me the silver Mercedes was Becquer’s also — irked me in an irrational way I found most disturbing.
“Carla?”
I turned toward Federico’s voice and found him standing outside the car, holding the door open.
Too startled to speak, as I had no recollection of him leaving my side, I took his hand and stepped outside. Beyond the halo of the limousine, I saw a man emerge from the driver’s seat.
With easy strides, Federico walked toward him. “Hi, Matt,” he greeted him, as he got closer. “So nice of you to come.”
“My pleasure, as always,” the man said, in a formal way that belied his age. For he was young, I realized once I moved into the beam’s halo and the light stopped blinding me. His youth made even more evident because, instead of the standard suit I had expected, he was wearing a leather jacket and tight black jeans with metal chains hanging from his belt.
“Nice costume.”
Matt sulked. “I thought all the guests had arrived so I had already changed when Mr. Becquer asked me to come at once. Please, Don Federico, don’t tell my mother I came like this.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t mention your costume to her, you have my word.”
Matt smiled a crooked smile that lit his face with pride. “It’s not a costume. I’m playing later.”
Federico raised an eyebrow in mock admiration. “A paying gig?”
Matt nodded.
“My congratulations,” Federico said, taking the boy’s hand in both of his and shaking it firmly.
Matt shivered at the contact, and when Federico moved toward the car, Matt’s eyes followed him. If Federico noticed the boy’s reaction — how could he not when he could sense feelings? — he said nothing.
I didn’t mention it either when we were sitting side by side in the back of the car, although the window to the front seat was closed and Matt could not hear us. The boy’s feelings for Federico were none of my business, and I was still upset at Federico for intruding on the privacy of my mind.
