Immortal Love Read online

  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.

  “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: Bécquer 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.

  “Bécquer 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. Bécquer’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 Bécquer 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 Bécquer, 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 Bécquer … ” 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 Bécquer had driven in the morning, but a white limousine. Somehow, the idea that Bécquer owned still another car — Federico had told me the silver Mercedes was Bécquer’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. Bécquer 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.

  “How many cars does Bécquer have?” I asked him instead.

  Federico frowned. “Two that I know of. This limo is not his. He rented it for the party. But why do you care?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yes. Bécquer is quite wealthy.” Federico answered the question I had not asked. “When you can manipulate minds to do your bidding, it is not surprising the books you represent end up on the bestseller list. Money follows.”

  “Manipulate minds? Is that what you are doing with me?”

  “No. I have never manipulated anybody’s mind.” I glowered at him. “I’m afraid you’d have to take my word for it,” he insisted. “I cannot prove it to you.”

  “But Bécquer does — manipulate minds, I mean?”

  Federico shrugged. “I don’t think he does it on purpose. Every time I have confronted him about it, he has denied it. Yet things seem always to go his way. In business and in love.”

  “Is that what you wanted to warn me about?”

  Federico stared ahead, crossing and uncrossing his fingers as if trying to clarify his thoughts.

  “Bécquer has a new love interest,” he said at last. “I thought she might be you.”

  “Me? That’s absurd. I only met him twice.”

  “But he has read your books, liked them enough to sign you as a client. And Bécquer is quite impulsive when falling in love. Childish you may say. He falls not so much for the person but for his own idealized image of her. Seeing you twice would be more than enough for him to think himself fully in love, especially when he has glimpsed your soul in your stories. Yes, you could have been his new beloved. I’m glad to see that you’re not.”

  “And you know that by reading my mind?”

  “In a way. For if Bécquer were in love with you, he’d have charmed you already and you’d be blindly in love with him.”

  “But I wouldn’t be really in love with him. My feelings would be an illusion.”

  “Exactly my point. You wouldn’t be yourself anymore, just a puppet to his will. Yet Bécquer doesn’t seem to realize that distinction. He insists he does not change the feelings for a first attraction must be there. He just pushes the victim slightly in that direction.

  “Victim being my chosen word, of course. The so-called victims would call themselves fortunate, because to be chosen, to be loved by Bécquer, is an exhilarating experience. Nobody, not a single one of them has complained yet and, trust me, he has had many.”

  “What happens when he tires of them?”

  “They still love him for a while, I guess. But when he stops charming them, their love eventually wanes and they forget him, and thus forgive him for leaving them.

  “In fact, most of them remain friends with him until he moves on. For, of course, like all immortals, he can’t stay more than twenty years in a place before his not aging becomes obvious. Then he has to go somewhere else and reinvent himself.”

  Twenty years he had told me. He had lived in the States for twenty years. Did that mean he was ready to move? Now that I’d just found an agent, was he about to disappear and leave me agentless once more? He wouldn’t, now, would he? That would just be rude.

  Federico laughed.

  “Are you reading my mind again?”

  “I wouldn’t if you were not shouting.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Anger sounds that way to me, to us immortals. Don’t worry. He’s not planning to leave. Not yet. He’s been an agent for ten years only.”

  I sighed in relief. I guess an immortal, manipulative agent was, in my book, better than no agent at all. Which didn’t say much about my ethics. Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh on Federico for reading my mind. It was not as if he could help it.

  “Friends?” Federico asked.

  “Friends.”

  As I spoke, the car came to a stop. Through the window, I saw the facade of an imposing stone house covered in ghoulish spider webs glistening in the glow of blinking orange lights. Several jack-o’-lanterns flickered on the stairs that led to the porch.

  “Oh well, here we are,” Federico said. “Let’s hope I’m wrong because if Bécquer is in love, Beatriz is going to cause him trouble.”

  “Beatriz?”

  “Forget what I just said, and let’s go inside and enjoy ourselves. Bécquer’s parties are always interesting. I have the impression this one will not disappoint.”

  Chapter Five: The Portrait

  Matt opened the limousine door for me. Although I didn’t delay, by the time I got out, Federico was already coming around the front of the car, the gravel crackling under his light steps.

  “Thank you,” he said to the young man. “Please don’t forget to call the garage and ask them to tow the Mercedes.”

  “I have already.”

  Federico smiled. “Great. Now you better park this one in the back before your mother sees you.”

  Matt glanced toward the house. “I better,” he agreed and, with a nod in my direction and a last longing stare at Federico, he disappeared inside the car.

  Federico waved his hand toward the house and motioned me to go first.

  Following his suggestion, I crossed the open space and climbed the stairs.

  Up close the spider webs looked too perfect to be spooky and the artistic designs in the jack-o’-lanterns flanking the stairs to the porch inspired more awe than fear. An aged iron ring hung on the right side of the massive double doors that would have been perfectly in place at a Castilian noble house.

  Just as Federico reached my side, the doors swung open and a woman appeared in the doorway. A woman dressed in a low cut dress with a tight bodice and a long skirt that fell to the floor.

  “Here you are at last,” she said as a way of hello.

  Her face was in shadow, but her voice, I recognized. It was Beatriz´s. Beatriz, wearing a dress that belonged to the mid-nineteenth century, to the time in which Bécquer had been human. Madison had been right, I realized with regret: this was a costume party.

  “What a perfect choice.” Federico’s voice broke through my thoughts. “Bécquer must be delighted that you honor him so.”

  I looked up, puzzled by Federico’s words. Tossing back her auburn hair that fell in waves over her shoulders, Beatriz revealed a silk blue scarf.


  “La banda azul,” I whispered.

  The blue scarf that Beatriz, the protagonist of one of Bécquer’s most beloved short stories, loses in the mountains. The blue scarf she goads her cousin to go find later that evening. He agrees because he loves her but does so against his best judgment for it’s Halloween and, that night, the mountains are said to be haunted by the souls of dead warriors that roam the earth trapped in their skeletal bodies. The following morning, Beatriz finds the scarf torn and bloody in her room and dies of fright guessing right that her cousin never returned from his quest alive.

  Beatriz smiled. “So you noticed.”

  I saw a glint of victory in her eyes as they moved up and down my embarrassingly plain, black dress. “Please, come in,” she said and moved back. “Bécquer is waiting for you.”

  I breathed deeply to ease my discomfort, and was about to follow her when I felt the pull of Federico’s hand on my arm.

  “Thank you, Beatriz,” Federico said. “But Carla and I are not quite ready yet. Don’t worry about Bécquer. You are so lovely tonight, I’m sure you can charm him into forgetting everybody else.”

  Beatriz stared at Federico, like a tiger about to jump its prey. But Federico stared her down. “Of course,” she said, and closed the door, leaving us standing outside.

  Federico smiled when I frowned at him. “I apologize. I should have realized that this being a costume party, you would feel uncomfortable not wearing one. Please, come with me.”

  I hesitated. “Don’t you think it is a little too late now to go get a costume?”

  “Don’t worry. We don’t have to go anywhere. A mask will do. And I know where to find one.”

  I followed Federico around the porch decorated with white ghosts and black witches’ hats until he reached another door set on the left aisle of the L-shaped building.

  “Are you sure Bécquer doesn’t want you to be his secretary?” he asked me as we walked.

  “I told you I’m a writer. And, I assure you that organization is not one of my assets. No one would hire me as secretary. Why?”

  “Because Beatriz thinks so and resents you.”