19   25 May 91   It seems that lately I have begun your pages more often than not, my journal, with the words “Daniel is back in Montréal.” This time he is here because he will be going to Cuba and there are no flights to Cuba from the US. He will stay for Betty’s birthday party. She is looking forward to the party not only because she is turning 17 but because it will also be a farewell to her friends at NAA and to her anglophone phase. She has been accepted by the cégep de Saint-Laurent and will be going there in the autumn, like Gérard, who is in the music program there. But Gérard may no longer be relevant. During the past year she has become close to Paul Berman, who stayed at NAA for Grade 12. Yes, Paul Berman, whom she has known since they were infants. He had planned to go to university in Toronto, as Marcia did, but now is thinking of staying in Montréal and going into the second year at Vanier College, as his brother Harvey did. If that happens he and Betty will still be practically going to college together, since the two campuses are next to each other. But she is not changing her mind about going to a French college. She says that she needs better grounding in literary French because she wants to be a bilingual writer. Not simply to write something in French and something else in English, but books and poems that are actually bilingual. I asked if there would be a public for such a literature, except for the few true bilinguals like her and Daniel. Not so few, she said, look at Trudeau and Johnson and Mulroney, and there will be more in the future. She believes that the destiny of Québec is bilinguismalism and she wants to help it along. For her it is not a pragmatic fact of life as it is for Daniel (who is in effect quadrilingual, now that he knows German and Spanish) but an integral part of her essence. Her identity, as she would say: “c’est mon identité, une Québécoise bilingue.” She would like to see bilingual Quebeckers officially recognized as such, alongside francophones and anglophones, and she hopes that some day they will be a majority. She hates Bill 178 and all other laws that restrict language freedom. I admire her enthusiasm but I can’t help feeling a lack of realism. Still, we are all entitled to our youthful follies. Nos folies de jeunesse. And I am glad that she is not of the génération désenchantée (tous mes idéaux, des mots abîmés) that Mylène Farmer sings about in her latest song. As for Daniel, I don’t even know if he still thinks of himself as a French Canadian. Perhaps I will ask him the next time that he is here. But his folly is another matter; it frightens me. A couple of weeks ago I finally spoke to Greg about the exhumation business. He told me that Daniel, as an adult, has a right to request it, and if he can find a lawyer who can convince a judge to order it, then it would be difficult to stop it. And if the body turns out not to be Miki’s then there is the slight – very slight, Greg emphasized – possibility that someone, somewhere in the world, might question the validity of the inheritance. If, for instance, Miki had not died in the Yom Kippur War but went into hiding somewhere and wrote another will. After 18 years, Greg assured me, the chances of that are astronomically small, and he only felt obligated to mention it as an attorney. For several nights after the talk I had to take some estazolam to be able to sleep. And at least one of those nights, maybe two, I again dreamt about Jean-Marc. Why? Is it because of Bob, who is my first francophone lover since J-M? It is true that on a few occasions I thought about J-M when I was with Bob, but it was because the language we used reminded me of old times. I already told you about that, my journal, and that it was different with Miki. So why did the dreams come back right after talking with Greg about Miki? Why, my journal? Toronto to Havana   Finals were over. Cici and Daniel’s last date of the spring – celebrating the end of the academic year and Daniel’s having signed, two days before, the papers that made him the owner of his apartment – was on the eve of their respective morning flights from La Guardia to Miami and Montreal, flights that were to depart within a half hour of each other. They shared a taxi to the airport. Inside the terminal, as they were parting in order to walk to their respective gates, they bade each other farewell with “See you in August, I guess.” Years later, Daniel was to remember those words of farewell when he read a short story by Gabriel García Márquez titled En agosto nos vemos. He spent three weeks in Montreal, culminating with Betty’s seventeenth birthday. Megan was out of town – she had a summer job somewhere in Ontario, he was told – and Daniel didn’t mind. He discovered that in order to fly to Havana he would need to take a very early flight to Toronto first. He decided, instead, to go to Toronto by train – he had never taken that quintessentially Canadian train ride before – and spend two nights there, including a day for visiting the Royal Ontario Museum. “I wish I could go with you,” Betty said when he informed her and Mireille of his plan, “but I still have school. Finals are coming up.” Her English was as fluent as ever, and Daniel wondered if anything had happened with Gérard. “Well,” he said, “maybe you can. I plan to leave the day after your birthday, which will be a Saturday, and you can come back Sunday afternoon, or even evening, if you fly. Can’t she, maman?” “Bien sûr,” Mireille said. “Of course,” she added. “Okay, then,” Daniel said. “I’ll take care of the booking.” “Mister World Traveler,” Betty said with an affectionate smirk. Betty was in fact quite busy with schoolwork during Daniel’s stay. She spoke, for the most part, English with him and French with Mireille. She was about to graduate from North American Academy with a Secondary School Certificate, and her plans to attend the French CEGEP had not changed. Gérard did come to Betty’s birthday party, but she didn’t seem any friendlier with him than with some other boys, none more so than Harvey Berman’s younger brother Paul. Amy Kenner was there too. The various cross-related couplings rolled through Daniel’s mind: himself with Vivian and Vivian with Harvey, himself with Leslie and Leslie with Harvey, himself with Megan Kenner and his mother with George Kenner, and now, possibly, Betty with Paul. What about Amy? She was already seventeen – she was four months older than Betty – and seemed quite receptive to Daniel’s flirting. There was no time to start anything with her at that point, but the next time he was in Montreal, why not? And it probably wouldn’t matter – would it? – if she had a boyfriend, being a Kenner.   To say that Betty had matured in the almost two years since Daniel left home would have been a major understatement. In many ways – in her poise, judgment, thoughtfulness – she reminded him of Cici, who was almost four years older. It struck him as counterintuitive, but gratifying, that two young women as beautiful as his girlfriend and his sister would turn out to be the opposite of spoiled princesses. As the train sped through the Quebec and then the Ontario countryside, they talked about their academic and cultural interests, their plans for the future, and, surprisingly for Daniel, about politics. Betty was concerned about the failure of the Meech Lake Accord, for which she blamed Mulroney (unfairly, in Daniel’s opinion), and looking forward to voting Liberal in the federal elections two years hence, hoping that that the next government would not be in bed with the United States as Mulroney’s was. Her mild anti-Americanism was typical of their crowd, and Daniel’s lack of it was an exception. Betty actually showed familiarity with American politics, only occasionally betraying the fact that she had received some of her information in French, as when she referred to the Democrat Party, a calque of parti démocrate. “In the States,” Daniel told her gently, “it’s considered hostile to speak of the Democrat Party.” “Then what’s the nice way?” “Democratic Party.” After the train left Kingston they went to the dining car for lunch. When it passed Trenton Junction, where it did not stop, they went back to their car, and soon afterward Lake Ontario could be seen intermittently from the window, until they reached Oshawa. Toronto was half an hour away, and they began to discuss plans for visiting the big city. Daniel had reserved tickets for a performance of Romeo and Juliet by a local theater company that had been well reviewed by the Montreal Gazette’s Toronto correspondent. He had also made a point of booking a separate room for his almost-adult sister, for the night that she would be in Toronto, in the no-frills downtown hotel that Harvey Berman, who went there frequently, had recommended to him. After checking in they went for a walk to the Eaton Centre, a few blocks away. It turned out to be much bigger than the one in Montreal, but in Daniel’s eyes not very different. Betty, on the other hand, seemed awed by the center’s vast scale and its endless shopping opportunities. “I’ll come back here next year when I’m rich,” she said with a laugh. The mood turned sour when they sat down for dinner in a pizzeria, and something in the conversation led Daniel to mention what he had learned about DNA analysis. “You’re still on that kick,” Betty said as she bit into a wedge of pizza. Her almost sneering tone took him by surprise. “Yes, I am,” he said defensively. “How do you know about it?” Betty did not answer him directly. “You know,” she said instead, “there might be problems if the body turns out not to be papa.” “How do you know?” “Paul told me. Maman told his dad about it, and he said that if our dad didn’t die when he was supposed to, then he may have written another will, later, and our inheritance would be in jeopardy.” Daniel was taken aback. It was he, after all, who had floated the possibility that his father may be alive, but only as a prisoner in an Israeli, or perhaps a Syrian, jail. That Miki Wilner would be free, somewhere in the world, with perhaps another family to whom he would leave his wealth, was unthinkable. Inquiring journalist that he was, surely he would have known that a court in Montreal had given his legitimate wife, Mireille Bouchard, control over his assets in accordance with his will. No, Daniel thought: Greg Berman had probably sensed Mireille’s misgivings about the project and fed her some lawyer talk to affirm her feelings. The argument didn’t even make sense logically: the putative existence of such a will had nothing to do with whether the bones were analyzed. “Did maman ever say anything to you about this?” he asked his sister. “Not in so many words. You know that she doesn’t like to talk about papa.” “How about indirectly?” “She once said something about Daniel et ses folies I think this was what she meant.” “Elle croit que je suis fou? She thinks I’m crazy?” Betty giggled. “No, not really. Sometimes when I talk to her about my future she’ll say C’est comme mes folies de jeunesse. I think she’s having a hard time with us growing up. But I think you’re crazy.” She giggled again. “You do? Why?” “It’s… it’s like waking up the sleeping cat.” Another calque from French, Daniel thought, but chose not to correct her this time. The cuteness of the expression temporarily masked the irritation that was growing inside him. “What does maman think is crazy about your future?” “For example, my idea of being a bilingual poet.” “That sounded perfectly reasonable when you told me about it on the train.” “Maybe that’s because you’re, like, crazy.” More giggling. “Seriously, I don’t get what you’re trying to accomplish with this DNA stuff. I don’t really care – to me papa, or Michael Wilner or whatever, is just a name. But I think it would be very painful for maman if the body turned out not to be his. She would lose her feeling of closure…” “I don’t give a damn! Closure! My girlfriend Cici was with this self-centered jerk, but she couldn’t leave him till she had closure. What is this with women and closure?” “You wouldn’t understand.” “Are you going through closure with Gérard?” Betty was silent for a while. “Speaking of self-centered jerks…” she began. “Is that what he is?” “No, not Gérard. He’s sweet, though I’m not in love with him any more.” It was a revelation Daniel had been waiting for. “I meant you.” It took a while for the missile-like second-person pronoun to find it mark and sink in. “Is that what you think of me?” he finally asked. “Not usually, Daniel. But this… this quest of yours, it… it’s all about you.” He had nothing at the ready to say in reply. And perhaps she was right. “Maybe,” he said. “Did you ever ask me how I felt about it? Or maman? Or Fela?” “But you just said that you didn’t care!” “That’s my point, Daniel. You didn’t know if I cared or didn’t care before I told you, but you didn’t ask me.” “You’re right,” he said. “Sometimes you’re like clueless. Like, you probably don’t even know that maman has a boyfriend.” “No! Have you met him?” “I met him when she met him, last summer on the flight back from England, though not since. His name is Bob, but he’s French.” “So he hasn’t come to the house or anything?” “No.” “So how do you know they’re still together?” Betty answered with a condescending smile, as if to say girls know these things. Daniel shrugged his shoulders. They were finished with their pizza, salad and soda, and sat in silence for a few minutes. “We’d better get back to the hotel and change,” Betty said suddenly after glancing at the restaurant’s wall clock. “Change what?” “Change foh the theatah, my deah brothah.” “What for? It’s just a casual little theater.” “Are you crazy?” Yes, Daniel thought but didn’t say, you just told me that I am. “Go to the theater in jeans? I brought a dress, just for this.” It was natural that Betty Wilner, having inherited Mireille Bouchard’s beauty, would also acquire her sense of style. And she was right. Most of the women in the audience, young and old, wore summer dresses or skirts and tops. And few looked as good as Betty did in hers, a sleeveless high-necked dress in royal blue that set off her auburn hair and the tanned skin of her radiant face and her full bosom and her athletically molded arms and legs. In the crowded vestibule of the former church that served as the playhouse, as they were filing into the nave, she elicited stares even among the supposedly subdued Torontonians. Had she been his date, Daniel would have felt proud of being with her, as he had so many times with Cici. But what was to keep him, he asked himself, of being proud of his beautiful sister? In the play, while the leads and their relatives were white, several other characters – the Nurse, Mercutio and some of the servants – were played by black actors. During intermission Daniel remarked that they could have been the descendants of children that Othello fathered before he took up with Desdemona. “But he was in Venice, and this is Verona!” Betty said. “It belonged to Venice in Shakespeare’s day. I took Italian history last semester. And people moved around. Anyway, I was joking.” “Oh,” Betty said. Evidently she was not as sophisticated as she had seemed up to then. Cici would certainly have laughed. It was also evident to Daniel, to judge from their conversation as they were walking back to the hotel, that while they had both enjoyed the play, their enjoyment flowed from different sources: his from the performance and the production values, hers from the story and the emotions it stirred in her. Their aesthetic differences were confirmed the next day at the Royal Ontario Museum, where they spent most of the day. They agreed to do their gallery-hopping separately, and only rarely did their interests in the exhibits coincide. When it was time for Betty to go to the airport, she declined his offer to accompany her there. “I can manage just fine,” she said. She let him carry her bag for her to the shuttle stop, in front of a big hotel a few blocks away. “Is maman picking you up at Dorval?” he asked her as they began walking. “No.” “Is anyone?” “Yes.” She was playing a guessing game, but he did not play along. “Who?” he asked. “Paul.” Another revelation, if only partial. “Are you in love with him?” “I don’t know yet.” “Is he your boyfriend?” “He will be tonight,” she said, looking at her brother with wide-open eyes. “Tonight?” “If love be blind, it best agrees with night,” Betty recited. So that’s how Romeo and Juliet affected her, he said to himself. Just before boarding the shuttle, she gave him a brief hug and said, “Have a great time in Cuba or wherever!” He had dinner in an Irish pub. The food and the beer were good, and the people were pleasant, but he had a hard time getting involved in a conversation. Thoughts of Cuba were invading his mind, and some part of him made him think them in Spanish.   The first thing that struck him at the Havana airport was that the clocks showed the same time as his watch: Cuba was in the same time zone as Toronto, Montreal and New York, daylight saving included. It was noon. Then, as he began to listen to the sounds around him, he realized that he had been overly optimistic in estimating his facility in Spanish. The feeling remained throughout the taxi ride – he attempted a few phrases with the driver but gave up when he could not understand the replies – and after he got to his hotel, an old two-star place in Vedado, near the University of Havana. He thought that he was used to the s-dropping Caribbean variety of Spanish from his New York neighborhood, but in Havana people seemed to drop more than just esses: many words seemed to be made of nothing but vowels. As he was waiting at the hotel desk to register, a clerk hollered Gutao to a bellhop whose name tag identified him as Gustavo. And so, when his turn came, he spoke in English, in which the staff appeared quite fluent. “Only one night?” the clerk, a middle-aged woman, asked him, for that was what he had booked. “For now,” he said. “Well, if you wish to extend your stay, you must inform us by tonight.” “Of course I will.” “Welcome to Cuba, Mister Wilner,” the woman said as she handed him his passport, his room key and some papers to sign, including the open credit-card slip. He used his Canadian card, of course. She then called out something that sounded like Roeto and a bellhop named Roberto came to carry his bag up to his room. Daniel was not used to two-star hotels with bellhops, especially ones who were twice his age, but he accepted the man’s services, tipped him a dollar and said Mucha’ gracia’, trying to sound native. The bellhop said what Daniel understood to be De nada, but it sounded like Ená. After lunch – bistec en salsa, very much like the way it was served in New York – he went back to the lobby to look at the newspapers that were available. He heard a male voice from behind him ask “Are you American?” with a pronunciation indicating that the speaker’s fluency in English was not of the same caliber as the hotel staff’s. Daniel turned around and saw a mulatto in his mid-twenties. “No,” he said. “No soy gringo. Soy canadiense francés.” “Bonjour ami,” the man said. His accent in French seemed no better than in English. “¿Estás solo o con un grupo?” He pronounced all the esses, as Pablo Milanés did, probably in an effort to make himself understood by a foreigner. Daniel told him that he was alone. The man then reached his hand out to him, and Daniel took it. “Soy Gustavo,” the man said, once again pronouncing all the consonants. “Yo soy Daniel.” “¿De Montreal?” “Sí.” Gustavo then asked Daniel if he was booked for a long stay at the hotel. When Daniel said no, only one night, Gustavo told him that he could stay in the house of his relatives – Daniel thought at first that Gustavo meant his parents, until he remembered the meaning of parientes – in a room of his own, with all meals, for half the price that he was paying at the hotel for room alone. Daniel hesitated for a moment, but quickly told himself that in a police state like Cuba he would be quite safe in accepting the proposition, and that whatever might happen, it would be an experience. He briefly toyed with the idea of going to the house with Gustavo in order to check it out, but decided that it would be more of an adventure to go there cold. He therefore told Gustavo that if he was in the lobby at ten o’clock in the morning, he would check out of the hotel and go with him. Gustavo seemed pleased. “Hasta mañana a las diez,” he said as they shook hands again. “¡Chévere!” Daniel said, making Gustavo laugh. Then Gustavo remembered something. “En la casa hay algo más,” he said. When Daniel asked what that something else might be, Gustavo laughed again and said “¡Ya verás!” Daniel spent the afternoon exploring Old Havana on foot. He was surprised by the great number of seemingly idle people hanging out in the streets. The city was quite dilapidated, though charming, and he wondered why all that available manpower was not mobilized to renovate it. The next morning Gustavo was in the lobby as arranged, and had a friend with a car waiting for them outside the hotel. He insisted on taking Daniel’s bag and putting it in the car’s trunk. The house was in an outlying neighborhood of Havana, with modest but well-maintained houses. When Daniel asked Gustavo about payment for his and his friend’s services, Gustavo told him not to worry: his aunt, who was to be Daniel’s host, would take care of him out of Daniel’s payment to her. The aunt, who introduced herself as Eva and was a shade darker than Gustavo, showed Daniel to his room, telling him that it was her daughter Marisa’s room. Marisa was a student, she told him in carefully enunciated Spanish, like Gustavo’s, and Daniel assumed that Marisa had moved out of the house to attend university. Eva accompanied him to the bus stop, two blocks away, where he could take the bus that would take him to the center. Going the other way, she told him, the same bus would take him to the beach. He went back to Old Havana for more exploring, this time with his camera. He returned to the house around five, covered in sweat, and showered in the only bathroom in the house. As he was drying himself, he heard someone come into the house, and then a younger-sounding female voice talking with Eva. When he came out of the bathroom, wearing only shorts with a towel around his torso, he saw a young woman, also mulatto, sitting with Eva in the living room. She looked up at him and waved at him with a big smile. She was quite pretty. “Hola,” she said, “soy Marisa.” Perhaps, then, Marisa was the algo más that Gustavo had mentioned. And it now seemed clear that Marisa’s room doubled as the guest room. It was probably standard procedure for her to sleep in another room, perhaps Eva’s, when a guest was in the house. Marisa left the house shortly after arriving but was back in time for dinner, in the course of which she and Daniel told each other about their studies. Marisa was studying chemistry and expected to go either into industry or secondary-school teaching, depending on the country’s needs – en función de las necesidades de la patria – at the time of her graduation, which was two years away, just like his, though she was twenty-two already. The course of studies for the licenciatura was five years long, and she had taken a year off after her second year in order to work. After dinner she would do some studying – her final exams were a few weeks away, since the semester went into July – but afterward, she told him, she would take him to a club where they would listen to music or dance, as he wished. He didn’t feel like going dancing until he got more used to the sweltering heat, and he opted for music. Marisa asked him what kind of music he liked. “Me gusta Pablo Milanés,” he told her. “Ah,” she said, “la Nueva Trova.” They took the bus – a strange articulated contraption called camello, in which she insisted on paying his fare – back to Vedado and she led him to a place called Casa de la Trova, where a number of musicians only slightly older than they, white and mulatto, took turns performing songs that were in fact similar to those of Pablo Milanés, though with a more modern, rock-like sound. They seemed to form a kind of collective, since many of those who had previously sung would play instruments with other singers, and vice versa. He thought that Cici would like this kind of music. It was the first time that he thought of Cici since arriving in Cuba, and the thought produced in him a vague sensation of desire. Marisa, as expected, knew many of the people in the audience, and she introduced him as mi amigo Daniel, un canadiense francés, invariably adding él habla español. There seemed to be a lot of casual flirting among the crowd, Marisa included, but people seemed to be wary of displaying any openness toward someone perceived as a foreigner, even a friendly one. The music was heavily amplified, and conversation was difficult. After eleven the place became more and more crowded, and the atmosphere became stifling. He asked Marisa if it was all right to go home. “Claro que sí,” she said. After they relieved themselves in the toilets, she led him by the hand through the crowd, but dropped his hand as soon as they were outside, where the slight breeze wafting from the Caribbean made him feel better. She told him that buses at that time were not very frequent, and perhaps they could take a taxi. It was understood that he would pay. “Claro que sí,” he said.