The Heart Has Its Reasons Read Online Free

narrow room like the corridor of a train. The cement walls, which had not been painted, were lined with industrial shelving whose contents spoke of dislocation and oblivion. Through two horizontal windows located at a considerable height, some natural light filtered in and the sound of hammering from a nearby construction site could be heard. At first it seemed like a rectangular space; however, after we had taken a few steps forward, I realized that the apparent shape and size were somewhat deceiving. At the back end, to the left, the storehouse had an L-shaped space that unfolded into another room.
    â€œ Et voilà, ” she announced, flipping on another switch. “Professor Fontana’s legacy.”
    I was filled with such a terrible feeling of discouragement that I was about to tell her not to leave me there, to take me with her, to shelter mein any corner of her hospitable human office, where her calm presence would mitigate my anxiety.
    Perhaps aware of my thoughts, she tried to rally my spirits.
    â€œDaunting, right? But I’m sure you’ll be making your way through it in no time, you’ll see . . .” she said as she took her leave.
    My eagerness to flee my domestic demons had led me to imagine that a radical change of work and geography would anchor me. But on seeing that chaos—piles of papers, folders strewn on the floor, and boxes stacked one upon the other without a trace of coherence, I felt I’d made a huge mistake.
    Even so, there was no turning back. Too late, too many bridges burned. And there I was, marooned in the basement of a campus at the farthest reaches of a foreign country, while thousands of miles away my sons ventured forth alone in the first stretch of their adult lives, and the man who until then had been my husband was about to relive the passionate adventure of paternity with a blond lawyer fifteen years younger than me.
    I leaned against the wall and covered my face with my hands. Everything seemed to be getting worse and I was running out of strength to endure it. Nothing seemed to be sorting itself out; nothing moved forward. Not even the immense distance had brought me a glimmer of hope. Even though I had promised myself to be strong, to endure courageously and not surrender, I began to notice that salty, murky taste of saliva that precedes weeping.
    Somehow I was able to hold back, to calm down and thereby halt the threat of succumbing. One step before descending into the void, some mechanism beyond my will kicked in and transported me via memory to a time far in the past.
    There I was, with the same chestnut-colored hair, the same slender body, and two dozen fewer years, facing adverse circumstances that were nonetheless unable to knock me down. My promising college studies were truncated in their fourth year by an unexpected pregnancy, intolerant parents who were unable to accept the blow, and a sad emergency wedding. An immature counterpart as a husband. A freezing subterranean apartment as a home. A scrawny baby that criedinconsolably and all the uncertainty of the world before me. Times of mackerel sandwiches for dinner, cigarettes of dark tobacco, and lousy tap water. Poorly paying private classes and translations on the kitchen table seasoned with more imagination than exactitude; days short on sleep with lots of rushing, shortages, anxiety, and confusion. I didn’t have a bank account; all I had was the unconscious strength provided by my twenty-one years, a recently born baby boy, and the closeness of the person I thought was going to be my life mate.
    Suddenly, everything had turned upside down and now I was alone, no longer struggling to bring up that skinny crying little kid, nor his brother, who came into the world barely a year and a half later. I no longer had to fight for that young rash marriage to work out, to help my husband in his professional aspirations, to achieve my own career by studying at dawn with borrowed notes and