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

pursuing my PhD and instead find a respectable job in order to help Alberto in his noble effort to become a high-ranking state servant like his father—the father who, like my own, had thought it a dishonor to the family that we married so young and with a more-than-noticeable pregnancy rounding out my silhouette. The father who had never cared about his son, or his son’s wife, until the Official State Gazette finally published his offspring’s appointment. Only then did he seem to have forgotten our dishonor and once again opened the doors to his world. A little too late. But Alberto willingly returned to the fold with the same astonishing ease with which he later left me to start a new life with Eva. As if nothing had happened; as if there had never been a before.
    When he passed his public examination, I was finally able to look for a steady full-time job. My experiences giving so many private classes to dozens of teenagers made me dismiss the idea of devoting myself to teaching high school. I was not cut out to explain the passive voice and relative clauses while struggling with the hormonal explosions of my students’ awkward stage. So I pinned my hopes on a position at one of the new universities that had begun to flourish at the time, a spot in the lowest echelon of teaching. That is how I started out.
    Eventually I finished my dissertation and found a stable job. We changed residences: from a small, poorly laid-out apartment in an old neighborhood, we moved to a much larger apartment, recently built and with two terraces. The kids grew up and started coming and going, and life went on. Until one day someone crossed paths with my husband and suddenly his wife and domestic world must have seemed terribly boring. Toward the beginning of the summer, when the heatbegan to beat down ferociously, Alberto finally announced that he was leaving home.
    For the first time in my life I was aware of how fragile the things we believe to be permanent really are. When Alberto left that night, he took more than simply a suitcase with summer clothes. My confidence also left with him, my innocent belief that existence is something that can be planned and that my life would follow a unidirectional and preestablished path through the years. When he closed the door behind him, he left not only a woman with a broken heart but a woman irrevocably changed: a being who had thought herself strong had been turned into someone vulnerable, disbelieving, suspicious of the rest of the world.
    And now his call once again caught me unawares. I realized that one of my children must have given him my number. His voice seemed alien in the distance. It sounded the same, but no longer transmitted that complicity we’d shared for almost twenty-five years living together. Now it was the voice of a thoughtful, distant man who spoke to me about lawyers, checking accounts, mortgages, and powers of attorney. I accepted his proposals unconditionally like an automaton, raising no objections and offering no alternatives. Deep down, I didn’t care.
    We’d never established boundaries in our property and our common life beyond those that the force of habit had imposed: which side of the bed we slept on, where we sat at the table, how we ordered the closet and our bathroom shelves. We’d started our life together with so few possessions that everything that came afterwards we ended up sharing: the two cars we’d drive to work, the apartment we lived in, and a little cottage on the beach. Alberto was now offering to put the apartment and cottage up for sale, pay off our outstanding mortgage, and divide the money between us. I wasn’t against it or for it. As far as I was concerned, he could torch them.
    After hanging up I remained motionless, my right hand still clutching the receiver as I tried to rewind and digest the conversation. A couple of seconds later the phone rang once again, abruptly breaking my solitude. I figured it