28   17 March 92   Hello again, my journal. I am not used to opening you so soon after the last time, only two days. But there was a call from Daniel as I was making dinner, and this time I was able to talk to him. Or rather listen, since he did most of the talking. I have never known him to be so voluble and so excited. He talked about how beautiful Catalonia is, or what he has seen of it: the town of Sitges, the city of Barcelona and the seaside country between them. He emphasized Catalonia, not Spain, saying that it would be the same for Québec rather than Canada. He explained that the people of Catalonia are much more bilingual than we Québécois, that everybody seems to speak both languages and they switch from one to the other with ease. I told Betty about that at dinner, and she got quite excited. Alors c’est possible, she said. D has not yet had a chance to get to know Mauricio very well, because Mauricio’s girlfriend Vicky, who is of D’s age and is half-English, insists on speaking English even in Mauricio’s presence, and Mauricio doesn’t speak it well. For the past two days, in fact, D has been in Barcelona with Vicky, except when she was taking classes, while Mauricio has been busy with his psychiatry practice in Sitges. Tomorrow, according to the original plan, the three of them were supposed to go Valencia for the celebration of Saint Joseph’s Day, but D just found out from Vicky that Mauricio can’t make it because of an emergency with a patient. So only D and Vicky will go, by train. Vicky is a great tour guide, she has actually studied tourism though her actual major is linguistics. And – here Daniel switched to French – she is une fille formidable, and he is afraid that he might be falling in love with her. Daniel, in love! He went on to say that this would be very inappropriate, both because they live separated by an ocean and because she is his cousin’s girlfriend. I reminded Daniel that I fell in love with his father when he was still legally married to Brigitte and also living mainly in Europe. Love is what it is, I told him, and I quoted Carmen: L’amour est enfant de Bohème, il n’a jamais, jamais connu de lois. I am not sure how he took my sage advice. He laughed and said that he knew that I would always have a quotation from an opera. Then he said that it was midnight and he needed to go to sleep. Daniel, in love! Well, he is 20½. I was 21½ when I fell in love with Miki. But by then I had gone through several infatuations when I thought that I was in love, and when I met Miki I knew that it was the real thing. I was 20 when I met Jean-Marc and I thought at first that I was in love with him, and before him there was Albert, and before him Frank… But for Daniel it seems to be the first time that he even imagines himself to be in love. So, my journal, as I was saying good night, I said “Bienvenu au monde des amoureux.” He laughed and said “Bonne nuit, maman.” Bonne nuit, mon journal. Amoureux   The two days went by as planned, with scarcely a free moment. Both nights they got back to the apartment after two o’clock. The first night, with Vicky especially elated because of Barcelona’s 3-0 victory over Dynamo, she said, “We’d better get a good night’s sleep,” and they did, in their respective rooms. The second night, with Daniel still feeling feuertrunken from the burning of the fallas, his mind reeling from the historical and cultural information that Vicky had given him, and his body sweaty from intense dancing to the music of bands playing rumba flamenca, he could only say, as they were standing uncertainly in the hallway of the apartment, “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.” “Me too,” Vicky said. “The best Fallas I’ve ever been to.” “Really?” “Not because the Fallas were better than before, but because of you. You’re fun.” “I like you too.” She began to move into the living room, and he followed her. “I don’t generally fancy guys my age,” she said after a pause. “When I was fifteen I liked them in their twenties, and now I’m twenty I like them in their thirties. I spent a year in England, for lower sixth, when I was sixteen, and I thought it might be different there, but I found even the university chaps too young.” She paused again before going on, more softly. “But you’re different. I could almost fall in love with you.” “I think I’ve already fallen in love with you,” he blurted out. He scarcely believed his own words as he said them, but not their truth value, only the fact of having uttered them. Yes, Daniel Wilner was in love at last. With his cousin’s girlfriend. She took his hands in hers and smiled at him. “What are we going to do about it?” he asked uncertainly. “You mean, after tonight?” “No, starting tonight.” “Tonight we’re going to shag our brains out,” she said as she kissed him. But their lovemaking was quiet and gentle, with none of the frenzy that her words might have implied. Vicky seemed surprised, as though she had never experienced such a thing; and Daniel was in turn surprised by her seeming inexperience with non-frantic sex. They managed to get perhaps an hour or two of sleep before hurrying to the station, rolling their bags behind them, for the Barcelona-bound Talgo. After a quick breakfast in the dining car they returned to their seats and, lulled by the smooth, gently rolling motion of the train as it tilted along the hillsides, fell asleep with their arms about each other, Vicky’s head resting on Daniel’s shoulder. The conductor awakened them just before their arrival in Tarragona. While waiting on the platform for the regional express train they talked confusedly about how and when they might see each other again. “I’ll be in Sitges most of the summer,” Vicky said, “working at the hotel. We’re already booked solid, because of the Olympics. What about you?” “I intend to go to Israel for a part of the summer,” he said slowly. “Some day I’ll explain to you why – it’s complicated.” “Has it got to do with your dad getting killed there?” He was taken aback. “How do you know about that? Did Mauricio tell you?” “Yeah. Our first conversation was about you, you know.” “But… but I don’t think I told him about it.” “He told me that he found out all about you from your… your great-aunt, I suppose. Su tía abuela, he said.” “Tía abuela,” Daniel repeated. “I like that. She really has been like both an aunt and a grandmother for me.” “But obviously he didn’t know all about you. He knew that your dad had married a Canadian girl, but not that she was French Canadian. Or at least he didn’t mention it when he first told me about you.” There was a pause. “Anyway,” he said, “the answer is yes, it does have something to do with my father. I haven’t actually made any plans yet, but I don’t intend to go for the whole summer. I’ll make sure I’ll spend some time here.” Suddenly, just as their train arrived, Vicky said, “I know. I’ll go to Philadelphia for my Ph.D. Next year. I’m interested in sociolinguistics, and the greatest sociolinguist in the world teaches there, at Pennsylvania University.” No point in correcting her, Daniel thought. “That isn’t far from New York, is it?” she added. “No, it’s an hour or an hour and a half by train, maybe two hours by bus.” Besides, he said to himself but not to her, there’s a journalism program at Temple. “But aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves?” he asked weakly as their train arrived. “Of course we are, darling,” she said as they were boarding the train. “Isn’t that what being young is about?” Darling! No one had called him ‘darling’ before except Fela, and his mother on two or three occasions. But never a girlfriend. Was Vicky in the habit of calling her boyfriends querido or corazón, or whatever the Catalan word might be? Did she say it to Mauricio? “Should I tell Mauricio?” Daniel asked as they sat down. “About what?” “About us.” “What do you mean?” “That I’ve fallen in love with his girlfriend?” Vicky laughed. “I’m not his girlfriend. We’re just having a fling. You know, a fortnight ago we had Carnival in Sitges, and it’s a time – and the time leading up to it – that’s conducive to flings. Besides, he’s got a girlfriend in Poland. He goes there quite often, you know, to visit his mum and his sister.” “He told you about that?” “Yes. So I wouldn’t get my hopes up, I suppose.” She laughed again. “He’s got a bit of an ego, your second cousin has.” “Once removed,” Daniel said, and they laughed together. He was holding on to his bag with one hand, and Vicky took the free one into hers and kissed it tenderly. The third stop from Tarragona was a station with a long name: Sant Vicenç de Calders – Coma-ruga – El Vendrell. “This is where you get off,” Vicky said, helping him move his bag toward the door. “Make sure you take the train towards Vilanova, not Vilafranca,” she reminded him. After a quick kiss he got off. She waved at him as the door closed, and then again through the window.   Alone on the platform, he suddenly felt that he understood what being in love meant. It was not the sex: as physical pleasure, it had not been any better with Vicky than with Audrey or Claire, let alone Megan or Cici. But with every previous girlfriend, the moment of physical separation, the good-bye-until-next-time, was also a moment of alone-at-last relief. Not so with Vicky. He had now been in her company uninterruptedly for more than twenty-four hours, six days if you counted nights and classes and the presence of others, but not for one moment had he felt even a twinge of desire that she not be there. Now he already missed her. A train came by, but he heard Vilafranca among the list of announced destinations, and so he let it go by. Six minutes later another train came, and this time he heard not only Vilanova but also Sitges. He boarded it, and twenty-five minutes later he was in Sitges. John Renshaw was at the desk when he entered the hotel lobby. “Did you have a good time?” John asked as he handed Daniel his room key. “Fabulous,” Daniel answered. He thought of adding I’m in love with your daughter but refrained. “And exhausting,” he said instead. “Yes, a bit of rest will do you some good. Cheerio, then!” He took the elevator up to his room, dropped his bag on the floor, removed his jacket, brushed his teeth – that salty water again! – and lay down on the bed. It was now about ten-fifteen. Vicky’s just arriving in Barcelona, he thought. He had been apart from her for an hour. Yes, he missed her. I’m in love, he told himself again. Whom would he tell about it? Betty, of course; he was not a mutant, after all. Je ne suis pas un mutant, he would say to her. J’suis pas un mutant, he repeated to himself. And, without his noticing it, his thoughts now came to him in French. Je suis amoureux, he said to himself as sleep overcame him.   Freed from the intrusions of Vicky’s English, Mauricio, during the three hours that he and Daniel spent together on Friday afternoon, was back to his loquacious self. His talk was marked by that tone of good-natured condescension that was due from a doctor to a mere student, a tone that Daniel remembered from the way his mother had spoken to him in his early teenage years. That tone disappeared, he remembered, once English became the family language. He wondered if English served Vicky as a similar weapon in her relationship with Mauricio. He reflected on his meeting with Mauricio while looking out of the airplane window at the clouds over the Atlantic. They had lunch together, finished off with coffee, and then walked along the beach. At last they walked back to the Hotel Marisol. Mauricio then said good-bye to him, John and Marisol – Vicky had not returned from Barcelona yet – and took his leave. Daniel was not to see him again. Friday evening, then, his last in Spain, was destined to be spent in the company of the girl that he was in love with. The girl I’m in love with, he repeated to himself. La fille dont je suis amoureux. La chica de la que estoy enamorado, he added to himself for good measure. Their evening was quiet, much of it in the company of John and Marisol, and their second night together was even sweeter than the first. It was a lovely memory to dwell on, but it was the memory of his session (he couldn’t help thinking of it as a session) with Mauricio that was crowding his mind. Doctor Mauricio Rozowski, it seemed, had decided that on the basis of his conversation with Fela Rozowski he knew all about Daniel Wilner. And so while the conversation was mainly about Daniel, there was not much questioning of Daniel by Mauricio, except perhaps to confirm what Mauricio had already concluded. It seemed to Daniel that Mauricio was treating Daniel not even as a patient or client but as the subject of a study. The crux was that Daniel felt guilty of his father’s death. Te sientes culpable de la muerte de tu padre, Mauricio said. Daniel’s protestations were of no use. The fact that Miki chose not to stay in Montreal with his wife and son meant that Daniel necessarily felt rejected by his father, a feeling that led to hostility and ultimately the desire for the father’s death. And when the desire is fulfilled and the father dies – cuando el deseo se cumple y el padre muere – the son cannot help feeling guilty. Mauricio pronounced the result with the certainty of a mathematician presenting the proof of a theorem. When Daniel asked if this was a part of the Oedipus complex, Mauricio smiled and acknowledged that there was a connection, but a complicated one, the way a physicist might answer when asked if there was a relation between lightning and electricity. Now that he was alone in the airplane, Daniel amused himself by mentally psychoanalyzing the analyst. Did Mauricio unconsciously wish his ailing father dead because he wanted to be in Europe, closer to his mother and sister? And did he feel guilty over his father’s death? Was he projecting his feelings onto Daniel? He now remembered that on the eastbound flight he had thought of getting Mauricio’s advice on how to deal with two girlfriends. Now it was all moot, of course. He had only one girlfriend, una sola novia, and that was Vicky, just as Mauricio had a girlfriend in Poland. In Spain he had flings, like the one with Vicky. Well, then, there was no reason why Daniel could not have flings with Audrey and Claire and anyone else who came along. But like Mauricio he would be honest. He would tell both Audrey and Claire that he had fallen in love with a girl in Spain. If they took that as a reason for breaking up, then so be it.   As March ran its course and the spring semester ever so gradually began to live up to its designation (the previous year’s burst of summerlike weather, a fortnight after the equinox, was not to be repeated), a young man’s fancy – that of the young man named Daniel Wilner – turned to love whenever he thought of the young woman named Vicky Renshaw. What troubled him on those occasions was that they did not come as often as he had anticipated. And when they came, they were sometimes trivial, as for example about her predilection for high heels. Was it due, he wondered, to the year she spent in England, where she was probably shorter than the average girl? The day after his return he wrote letters to family (Mireille, Betty, Fela) and friends (Harvey, Megan, Roxane). He also write Vicky a passionate if concise love letter, mailed to her Barcelona address, which he concluded with a quadrilingual declaration: I love you / Je t’aime / Ich liebe dich / Te amo. Before writing the last one he hesitated over whether to write Te quiero. There seemed to be a slight difference between the two that he had not quite grasped, but he had noticed that in telenovelas people were more likely to say te amo, while in songs it was usually te quiero, but that might be because it was easier to rhyme. As a farewell gift, Vicky gave Daniel a package that, as he found on unpacking it at home, contained a compact disc called 16 Grandes Exitos by Joan Manuel Serrat. She had mentioned to him that Serrat was her favorite musical artist, not least because he wrote and sang in both Spanish and Catalan. The problem was that Daniel’s 1980s stereo had neither a built-in CD player nor an input jack for a separate one. Maybe, he said to himself, it’s time to get a new stereo system. He resolved to buy one on the day that he received Vicky’s reply to his letter. Meanwhile he got busy. There was schoolwork, in the form of papers waiting to be written, and soccer practice, which began on the Tuesday after his return. He also made weekend dates with both Claire (Friday evening) and Audrey (Sunday afternoon). He left Saturday free so that he could work while listening to Parsifal, all six hours of it. At the first meeting of Team Canada, after telling his friends that he had met a girl who looked like Greta Scacchi, he mentioned the CD problem. Alan Silver said that his system had a CD player with a recording cassette deck, and he would make Daniel a cassette of the disc. Karen Litov, though she was back from Israel, would be busy until some time in April. Daniel, in the meantime, should study the information that she had sent him and choose a program that he might be interested in. He promptly began doing so, while speculating that Karen had been at Mossad headquarters – perhaps for a debriefing – and was now carrying out a secret mission of some sort. The following Monday he became aware of not having told either Claire or Audrey about Vicky. He rationalized the omission by telling himself that Vicky wouldn’t become a real part of his life until he got her letter. By the end of the week no letter had yet arrived. The cassette was ready, though. Once he began to play the music, the feeling of love overcame him. As Serrat’s compelling voice progressed from the first song, the poetic Cantares, with the insistent reading – recited, not sung – of Antonio Machado’s verses, passing through the boisterous La fiesta, the humorous La aristocracia del barrio, the lyrical La mujer que yo quiero (not amo – perhaps he shouldn’t have written that, Daniel thought), the stirring Para la libertad, the sardonic Señora, the ironically wistful Penélope and others, the feeling grew until he came to the last song, Tío Alberto, a jaunty minor-key waltz about someone by that name. A name that inevitably evoked the apartment in Valencia where love first came to Daniel Wilner. That weekend he once again had dates with Claire and Audrey. Once again, he didn’t tell them about Vicky.   Her letter came on Monday. It too was brief but affectionate. She asked him to send her his telephone number; she knew of a phone box with a broken coin mechanism from where she could call him for nothing. The letter ended with I love you too / Yo también te quiero (in Spain we don’t say ‘te amo’, it’s a South American thing). “South American” seemed to be a Spaniard’s way of saying ‘Latin American’; when, during his last evening in Sitges, Daniel told of his trip to Mexico, Marisol responded by regretting that she had never been to South America. John corrected her in Catalan, which Daniel understood perfectly, “Mèxic no és pas Sudamèrica,” and then said to Daniel, “Geography teaching is appalling here in Spain.” Vicky then said, “Yeah, dad, almost as bad as in England.” Then there was a postscript: Mauricio gives us his blessing. He was still holding the letter and thinking about it when his phone rang. It was Karen Litov. “Can you come over tomorrow?” she asked. Noon would be the best time, he thought, between his morning classes and soccer practice. “Sure,” he said. “Can I take you out for lunch?” She seemed unprepared for the invitation. “Yes, that would be very nice,” she said after a pause. He remembered the nice little restaurant where he had stopped the last time he had been at her office, and suggested it. She agreed to meet him there at a quarter to one. As he picked up the envelope from the table in order to put in the recycling bin, he noticed that it felt stiff between his fingers. He looked inside and found a three-and-a-half-by-five photograph. It had evidently been taken by someone in the bar in Sitges during the soccer game and featured, from left to right, Daniel, Vicky, Mauricio and John. With Mauricio’s implied blessing he got a pair of scissors from his desk and cut a clean line between Vicky and Mauricio. After cutting off some more on his left he had a wallet-sized picture of himself with his beloved. He wouldn’t leave home without it, he decided.