15
12 July
90
Todays
postcard from D must surely be the last. It was from Frankfurt, and that is
from where he is flying back to New York, on this very day.
Britain was
fun. Betty repeated, in reverse, the trick that she and Daniel played when we
were in France in 86. That was when they persisted in speaking English with
each other (and me) so that they would be taken for anglophones and then
surprise the French by speaking perfect French. This time she spoke nothing but
French with me (which of late she has been doing anyway, probably influenced by
Gérard) and surprised the Brits by speaking perfect English with them. At first
she spoke with the Princess Di accent that she had learned in 81 but she soon
reverted to North American, except that whenever she was taken for an American
she was indignant. Each time she said emphatically I am Canadian and repeated
it in French Je suis Canadienne.
To be frank,
my journal, I have mixed feelings about hearing nothing but French at home. And
now there will be even more French in my private life.
Yes, my
journal, I am coming to it. On the flight coming back from London I met Bob.
(Just as I met Wayne back in 81, except that W was a flight attendant the
first male one that I encountered and not a passenger.)
He was already
sitting in the window seat of our row when we boarded. Normally I like to sit
in the aisle seat but this time Betty made me sit in the middle seat, next to
him. She must have sensed something. When I sat down he smiled and said hello,
in English but with a definite French accent. I said hello back and he said, I
am Bob. I said, mais vous êtes Français and he laughed, especially because I
(une jeune Québécoise comme toi, he said, he spotted my accent immediately) had
used vous with someone of her age.
Speaking (or
rather writing) of Québécoise, Betty has been hinting that when she finishes
Sec V at NAA she will go to a French cégep. Gérard?
Back to Bob
His name is Robert Cloutier, he is 36, single, is an actuary at Banque
Nationale Assurances, studied at Laval and lives in Lachine. When he first said
it I thought he meant that he lived in China, and we had a good laugh. He
explained that the name of the town does in fact come from la Chine because
its founder, Sieur de La Salle, tried to find a route to China. It felt strange
that in my 20+ years in Montréal I had never been to Lachine, probably no more
than 12 km away from St-Laurent. Well, my journal, I have been there now, and
it is lovely.
I also asked
him what he had been doing in England. Changing planes, he said. He had been in
Marseille, visiting family, and the connection via London is better than via
Paris.
After 20
years, Bob is my first French Canadian lover since Jean-Marc. I have not spoken
French with a man since Miki. But Mikis French was learned in school
and was of the literary, poetic type. He didnt know much of the sexual argot
until I taught him, and he didnt particularly enjoy using it.He preferred to quote Verlaine. Aime-moi, car sans toi, rien
ne suis, rien ne puis. Et surtout ne parlons pas littérature. Ah, Miki, Miki,
Miki, tu me manques.
But with Bob
we speak Québécois, like with Jean-Marc. Its like reliving my teens. My wild,
wild teens.
I remember
what Tina said when she started dating Louis. There is frank sex talk, and
there is francophone sex talk.
What to do
when G calls? Tell him the truth, of course.
Centro Hispano
Daniel had a portside window seat on his flight back to
New York, and the sun was on him throughout the endless morning. His seatmate,
a South Asian man who was coming from Singapore, slept throughout the flight.
And so, except when reading the days Frankfurter Allgemeine and the
months Priority magazine or occasionally glancing at the Bollywood
movie that was shown on the screen (but with his headphones tuned to the
classical-music channel), he spent his time thinking.
His
thoughts were mostly about Brigitte. She had become such a large presence in
his life, like another mother, that he felt that he needed a word to designate
her relationship to him. She was not his stepmother, since she was married to
his father before, not after, his relationship with his mother. He thought of
calling her his foremother, mon avant-mère, but he quickly remembered
that what the English word means is a female ancestor, the equivalent of
forefather. The French term has no such secondary meaning, and he decided that
this was what he would use for Brigitte, at least when talking to himself, and
possibly to Betty. They did, after all, call their mother maman and
refer to their father as papa when speaking with her or with each other,
even in English.
Brigittes
reference to the friendliness of the meeting in January of 1971, it seemed to
Daniel, had a double meaning. The obvious one was that they had no disagreement
concerning the divorce. The divorce, at that time, could not yet have been
motivated by Mikis impending fatherhood since he didnt know about it yet
but by the fact that the marriage, as he had known it, had ended. But Daniel
was convinced that Miki still loved Brigitte how could he not have loved that
extraordinary woman who had been so much to him? and that he showed his love
sexually, now that they were on a more equal footing: during the months of
their separation he had slept at least with Nili and with Mireille, and
possibly nay, probably with other women as well. And so the cloud of
one-sided fidelity was no longer hanging over him.
There
was also the nagging thought that in some strange ways he knew Brigitte better
than his own mother, who had always showed herself quite reserved when talking
about herself. He would have liked to hear her reaction to Nilis report that
Miki had not been in love with her, but he knew better than to ask; he would
have received a noncommittal reply. He would have liked to know some details
about her loss of virginity at the age of fifteen in Québec for example, who
the guy was but she didnt offer any, and he didnt want to pry. Brigitte
showed no such reserve, and he was sure that if any unanswered questions came
into his mind, all he had to do was write them to her.
His
reflections were briefly interrupted when lunch was served. The stewardess
asked him what he wanted to drink, and, without any thought, he answered beer,
please. Daniel realized that in the course of his German wanderings beer
drinking had become a habit, with two potentially problematic consequences.
One
of the consequences, of which he had been gradually becoming aware over the
last week or two, was that his pants were feeling ever tighter on him. Here he
was, not quite nineteen, with an incipient beer belly! He recognized that
during his freshman year he had severely neglected physical exercise, and he
resolved that he would do something about as soon as possible. Come the fall
semester he would start going to the gym he needed to fulfill the physical
education requirement anyway and he would look for an intramural soccer team
to join. Meanwhile he would take advantage of his apartments closeness to Central
Park and go running there, or possibly bicycling: he would buy himself a
bicycle and use it not only for exercise but as transportation for his two-mile
commute to the Columbia campus.
The
other problem was that, if he were to continue to indulge his newfound taste
for beer, the absurd drinking-age laws of the United States would be an
obstacle. Not only would he not be able to order a glass of beer legally in a
bar or restaurant, but he could not even buy any in a store in order to drink
it at home. He had no older friends or relations in New York who could do it
for him. On second thought, he did have one older friend: Gen McGrath. But,
other than sending her a Christmas card from Montreal, he had not called her
since the time he went to bed with Audrey, and he would not be comfortable
doing so by this time. On third thought, there was Mireilles friend Sam, but
Daniel had never contacted him nor had she ever suggested that he do so and
it would seem crass to do it now.
Then
he remembered Eddie the super. He hardly ever saw him without a bottle of beer
in his left hand. He was sure that he could be persuaded, when he restocked his
supply, to get a few additional six-packs for him. He might also ask him to get
him a few bottles of wine, in case he had any dinner guests over.
The
passing thought of Gen led him to consider the satisfaction of his sexual
needs, of which he was reminded every time one of the lovely Singapore Girls
walked by, her colorful sarong kebaya draping her slender body. And then Cici,
Cynthia Carmona, came into his mind. Would he have a chance with her? She had
encouraged him to call her, but to what purpose? He now thought that, being
under drinking age, he might be too young for her, though she was probably no
more than a year, at most two, older than he. Strangely, the thought of being
too young had not occurred to him when he was with women who were older by a
decade, like Gen and Angie. But unlike them, the beautiful Cici undoubtedly had
her pick of men, and someone more mature might be more to her liking. But of
course he would call her, and let chance take its course.
About
an hour before the scheduled landing the captain announced, with a
Scottish-sounding accent, that it was raining in New York, with the temperature
at seventeen degrees centigrade. The announcement was for Daniel like a sudden
crossing of an invisible boundary: he suddenly felt himself in and of New York,
a New Yorker. He was impatient to be greeted by a rainy New York spring, to go
for a walk in his new neighborhood he didnt know yet what to call it, except
that was a part of the Upper West Side to see its sights, smell its smells
He
got home in time for lunch, which he had at a Chinese restaurant he had not
previously tried, and went back home to take a nap. After he woke up and
stretched his limbs he called Cici. The outgoing message on her answering
machine was alternately in Spanish and English. The English text consisted of
Hi, this is Cici, AKA Cynthia Carmona, Ill be away till the second part of
August, Call me then and Have a great summer! There was no opportunity for
leaving a message.
Kitty-corner
from the Cuban-Chinese restaurant, where he went to have dinner, he noticed a
low-rise office building with many signs on its windows. One of the signs read Centro
Hispano de Manhattan / Clases de Inglés / Spanish classes and listed a
phone number.
After
a good nights sleep in his own bed, he called the Centro and asked
about Spanish classes. The woman at the other end told him that he was in luck:
a beginning class would start the following Monday and continue Mondays and
Thursdays, from seven oclock to eight-thirty, for six weeks. If he was
interested he could come to their place at a quarter to seven, with a check for
two hundred dollars, in order to register.
After
unpacking, he spent most of the weekend looking through the photo album
Brigitte had given him and browsing through Mikis articles. Having heard
examples of his humor made him appreciate the covert irony in much of his
writing, something that even a competent reader of German might miss. He was
aware that reading his writings was having an emotional impact on him, but it
was not clear yet what that impact might be. Time will tell, he told
himself.
Sunday
morning he called his mother. She was happy to hear from him, but her response
to his account of his trip was guarded. He wondered if in some way she felt in
competition with Brigitte. That was another thing, Daniel thought, that time
would clear up. Betty, on the other hand, listened to his narrative
enthusiastically, thrilled to hear more information about the unknown man whom
she had finally, after receiving her share of the inheritance, accepted as her
father. One mark of her enthusiasm was every so often veering unconsciously into
French. When he commented on it she giggled, and when he asked her how things
were going with Gérard she said Très bien.
Monday
evening, after a pasta dinner he had made for himself, he went to the Centro
Hispano. The classroom had seats for about twenty, but only eight students
were gathered there, taking turns registering at what was probably the
teachers desk, where a brown-haired woman wearing a tee-shirt, jeans and
sneakers was handling the registration. When everybody had registered and no more
prospective students were arriving, she got up, announced with a slight
Hispanic accent that the teacher would be coming in a few minutes, and left the
classroom.
The
teacher did, in fact, come into the classroom ten minutes later. She was the
same woman, but now wearing a sleeveless red dress and high-heeled shoes. Buenas
tardes, she said breezily as she swept in front of the blackboard.
Buenas
tardes, a few of the students answered.
Yo soy la profesora. Ustedes son los
alumnos. Buenas tardes, alumnos.
Buenas tardes, profesora, all the
alumnos said in unison.
Yo
me llamo, she began as she wrote her name on the blackboard, Carmela
de la Peña. Mi nombre es Carmela. Mi apellido es De la Peña, she said as
she wrote nombre and apellido above her first and last names,
respectively. Y usted, ¿como se llama? she asked the woman seated next
to Daniel.
Yo me llamo María Chesny, the
woman said.
¿Cuál es su nombre?
The
woman seemed a little confused by the question. Diga, mi nombre es María, the teacher said.
Mi nombre es María.
¿Y cuál es su apellido?
Mi apellido es Chesny.
Muy bien, the teacher said. She
went on to Daniel next, and then to all the other students until they all knew
one anothers first and last names. At some distance above her name she then
wrote Alfredo and Dolores and drew slanting downward lines that
met just above the de of her name. Above Alfredo and Dolores
she then wrote padre and madre. She drew another pair of lines
from her parents names to an empty space to the right of her name, where she
wrote José.
Alfredo de la Peña es mi padre.
Dolores Montes es mi madre. Yo soy la hija de Alfredo y Dolores. José es el
hijo de Alfredo y Dolores. José es mi hermano. Yo soy la hermana de José yo
soy su hermana. Yo no tengo hijos, pero mi hermano José tiene
hijos pequeños, she concluded with a gesture showing the small size of her
brothers children. She then asked her students to tell her whether they had
siblings or children. With that exercise over, she drew a horizontal line to
the left of her name, Rodolfo to the left of the line, and a heart above
it. Rodolfo es mi novio. Yo soy
la novia de Rodolfo. She
did not ask the class, however, whether anyone had a novio or novia.
Instead she started talking about what she and her novio like to do. A mí me gusta cantar canciones y tocar
la guitarra. Yo canto y toco. A Rodolfo le gusta jugar fútbol. El
juega fútbol en el Parque Central.
The
next round of responses by the class gave me a chance Daniel tell that he also
liked to play the guitar, pero no toco, and to play soccer, pero no
juego. The class laughed.
The
teaching format never changed: Carmela spoke nothing but Spanish, explaining
the meaning with gestures and illustrations, and the students were expected to
answer her questions in full sentences. Before long they engaged in dialogues
with fellow students.
As
the first class ended he found himself walking out alongside his neighbor. Is
your name really Maria? he asked her.
No,
she said, its plain old Mary.
Youre
neither plain nor old, he said, making her laugh.
They
left the building together and, by happenstance, both turned left. I could use
a beer, she said as they passed a bar. Would you like join me?
Id
love to, but Im afraid Im under age.
Oh,
thats right, she said, remembering the class giving their ages with the help
of a number chart that the teacher had hung over the blackboard (Mary had given
hers as twenty-nine).
But
Ive got beer at home, he said, and I live two minutes away.
She
looked at her watch. Oh, okay, she said.
As
they walked into his apartment she said, This reminds me of Jerry Seinfelds
apartment.
Whose?
Jerry
Seinfeld? Hes this comedian with his own show that was running back in June.
I
was away for most of June.
Well,
its supposed to be repeated in the fall, on NBC. Dont miss it. Anyway, Jerry
has this apartment thats super-neat and he always has women coming up.
Youre
the first woman coming up here. I moved in on the first of June, but then I
went traveling and I just got back four days ago. Daniel wondered if she would
ask him where he had gone traveling, but she didnt.
He
opened a bottle of beer and poured its contents, in equal halves, into two
glasses. He quickly realized that Mary needed more than six ounces of beer, and
his next pour was decidedly unequal. One thing quickly led to another.
At
ten oclock she announced that she needed to get home and dressed in a seeming
hurry. He asked her if she would like him to walk her out, but she declined the
offer.
For
the next six weeks Mary came to his apartment after every class, for an hour or
so, except for one time, an exception that he ascribed to her period. They did
not talk much. He learned nothing about her that she had not already announced
in the course of the class exercises: her name, her age, her being de
Pensilvania (after Carmela told the class that she was de Colombia
and Daniel announced that he was de Canadá), not having children and
working in a bank. Their farewell after the last class felt no different from
the others, except that it was earlier than usual at twenty past nine
because the class had ended early, and there was no See you in class,
only Good night. They never exchanged phone numbers, and he had no
expectation of ever seeing her again.
In
the meantime he wasted no time in putting his Spanish to use as he was
acquiring it, using it as best he could usually provoking smiles that he
interpreted as friendly, or at least indulgent in neighborhood stores and
restaurants. In his walks, jogs and bike rides through Central Park he
occasionally came across a pickup soccer game, and if one of the teams seemed
undermanned and was mainly Hispanic, he would ask ¿Puedo jugar con ustedes?
and get a hearty ¡Si, cómo no! in return.
He had
also learned enough to figure out that what had sounded as kewapo from
Cicis friend Letty was actually ¡Qué guapo! and meant that she found
him good-looking.
As
soon as Mary left for the last time he dialed Cicis number. Again he got her
answering machine. The outgoing message was now in Spanglish: Hola, soy
Cici. This is Cynthia Carmona. Leave me a message después del tono.
He clicked the phone off before the beep in order to compose the message that
he would leave in Spanish. When he called again, after the beep he said, Hola,
Cici, soy Daniel Wilner. Quisiera hablar con usted. Llámeme por favor. And
he left her his number before concluding with Ciao, which he had heard
Hispanics use with one another.
She
called him back the next morning, as he was preparing breakfast for himself.
Hey, Daniel, she exclaimed, its Cici! So youve learned some Spanish! ¡Chévere!
My
class just ended last night, but I didnt learn the word you just said.
It
means fantastic. But whats this usted business? Its like Sie
in German. People our age dont say usted to each other, except when
theyre from Colombia or maybe Costa Rica!
Oops,
he said. Our teacher was from Colombia. What do people say?
Usually
tú, except that some people, like Argentines and Salvadorans, say vos.
This
is great, Cici, a free Spanish lesson before breakfast!
Oooh,
breakfast! I havent had mine either. I just got back a couple of days ago, and
Im not quite on a regular schedule yet. By the way, I just got your postcard
from Berlin. Vielen Dank! I got the first one before I left. Anyway, you
wanna meet somewhere for breakfast?
Im
just making some eggs and stuff, and I could easily make it for two. Would you
like to come over?
Sure.
Where do you live?
It
was only after giving her his address and hanging up that Daniel realized how
bold he had been. To invite a woman that he barely knew to his apartment felt
quite natural, but he had not expected it to be so easy with a girl as
beautiful as Cici.
And
it was not so easy after all. They had a friendly breakfast encounter in which
they told each other many things about ourselves she told him, among other
things, that her major, like Karens, was psychology and that she had taken
German in order to read Freud and Jung in the original and they said good-bye
with a handshake, in the course of which she gave him a quick kiss on the
cheek. More meetings and more self-revelations followed in the succeeding days.
She told him about her complicated family life: her father was a businessman in
the garment trade, buying wholesale in New York and selling retail in a chain
of stores that he co-owned with his brothers in Puerto Rico, and in so doing he
had raised two parallel families. One was in New York, with his Nuyorican legal
wife and their children, Hector and Cynthia. The other was in San Juan, with a
younger common-law wife and four other kids. But when the manufacture of
clothes in Manhattan declined, he found it cheaper to import them directly from
China and bypass New York, so that he stopped going there. Eventually Cicis
mother moved to Florida, where she had relatives, and Cici usually split her
vacations between her parents residences.
A
week and a half later, after classes had begun and they saw each other on
campus, she told him that she was in the final throes of an extended breakup
with her old boyfriend, who was as Daniel thought he might be almost thirty
and pressuring her for a serious relationship, for which she was not ready.
After another two weeks they arranged to meet for dinner at the Cuban-Chinese
restaurant to celebrate his nineteenth birthday (she, Daniel had learned, was a
month shy of her twentieth), but had agreed beforehand that it was not to be a
date. He was there before her, sitting at a table. When she came in she greeted
him with a radiant smile and as he stood up put a gift-wrapped package into his
hands, saying, Happy birthday! He unwrapped the present and it turned out to
be a box of dates from Florida. You wanna date? she asked. He answered her
with a kiss, which she accepted warmly. The meeting turned into their first
date.
A week later he started playing intramural soccer. Just
before the beginning of classes he had received an invitation to join the
Canadian Culture Club, just as he had at the beginning of his freshman year,
when he ignored it, Canadian culture being at the time the farthest thing from
his mind. But this time, as he read the letter, he noticed that the Club had
entries in various intramural sports leagues, including soccer. He decided that
he would represent his Home and Native Land, Terre de mes aïeux, as a
member of Team Canada on the soccer pitch. Since all of his teammates were
English, Daniel made a point of identifying himself, to their surprise (and in
some cases disbelief), as a French Québécois.
After
another week Germany was officially reunified. The event was duly noted both in
the advanced German class and the European history class that he was taking.
Remembering the hopes for German unity that his father had expressed in his
writings, Daniel celebrated it privately with Cici with a dinner at a German
restaurant in Yorkville. She was no longer taking German she had fulfilled
her language requirement with the second-year course but they made a point of
speaking it during that date, and he was surprised by how well she remembered
it five months after the class.
Cici and Daniels relationship all through that semester
was literally one of dating. On occasion they would meet casually for lunch,
coffee or a short walk on or near the campus on weekdays, but their evening
and weekend encounters were invariably prearranged. One would ask the other if
he or she were free, and the answer would either Yes or Ive got to study.
The latter was their accepted formula for declining a date, since they both
took their academic studies seriously, even if the real reason for declining
was something else, such as Cicis period, or Daniel being caught up in reading
one of Michael Wilners essays (which he had been doing, at the rate of about
one a week, since the beginning of the semester), or even having a beer with
his clubmates.
The
dates invariably ended at Daniels place, since he was the only one of the two
who lived alone. Cici lived, cost-free, in the apartment where she had grown up
still in her mothers name and rent-controlled with two roommates, whose
payments covered the already low rent, the utilities, and any incidental
expenses. The building was under the threat or promise of gentrification,
just as Daniels had been, but Cici didnt care. She had already decided that
after graduation she would move to Florida, to be near her mother and nearer to
her father, and to study clinical psychology at one of the universities there.
And
because both of them understood that the relationship would not last, at the
utmost, past her graduation, they, and Cici in particular, worked at keeping
any excessive emotional attachment at bay. There was only a vague promise of a
resumption the following semester, after their respective winter vacations:
hers in Florida and Puerto Rico, his in Montreal. Back to our roots, Cici
remarked.
By the time he was settled in his seat on the Adirondack,
his copy of In meiner Zeit in his lap, he had read about a dozen of the
articles. He now began the introductory article to the series Eine
angelsächsische Reise (mit etwas Spanisch und Französisch) that was
published in 1962. In the second paragraph of the article, he learned that the
trip (with Brigitte, as Daniel knew) that led to the series was Mikis second
one to North America. The first had been eight years earlier, to visit his
uncle Leon, and on that occasion Miki, nineteen years old just as his son was
now, had taken this very train (or its predecessor on the New York Central), but
in the opposite direction: from Montreal to New York.
The
knowledge filled Daniel with wonderment. As he looked out the window at the
multihued bustle of the platform of Grand Central knowing that it was
probably his last chance to see it, since a few months hence Amtrak would begin
using Penn Station instead he tried to imagine what Miki might have seen when
he arrived there, thirty-six years before.
By
now Daniel had acquired a sense of the workings of his fathers mind, and could even
identify with some of them. For example, there was Michael Wilners insistence
on being simultaneously (and paradoxically) a Polish Jew and proud of it
and a German, or at least a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany; he had
even coined, in his very first article, a term Germanian in English
and Deutschländer in German for someone who was a citizen of Germany
but not necessarily an ethnic German. Daniel could, in a similar vein, envision
himself as remaining proudly a French Canadian even if he were eventually to
become a United States citizen. A Unitedstatesian? In Spanish, he had learned
from Carmela de la Peña, one could say estadounidense.
But
there was a difference. For Daniel, having the dual identity of French Canadian
and American would not present a paradox, he thought as the train began to move
amid muffled announcements over the stations loudspeakers, any more than it
did for Cici to be Hispanic and Puerto Rican and American, or for the millions
of other Americans who proudly proclaimed their ethnicity. Michael Wilners
writing, on the other hand, vibrated like a taut string under the tension
between his two identities, as a German and as a Polish Jew who had
survived the Holocaust (though this was a word whose use he disparaged, as he
had written in the article Wörter um Eichmann, around the time of the
Jerusalem trial).
Getting
to know my father wont be a simple matter, Daniel concluded as he began
reading the account of the riot in Londons East End in which a mostly Jewish
crowd attacked the British fascist leader Oswald Mosley.
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