Revisiting Carina – Part I

Revisiting Carina

She was leaving for Singapore.  A brief, four sentence, seven line e-mail heralded the news, marking the first time that I’d heard from her in over a year.

Hi Jeff,

Long time not talked…. HOW ARE YOU??

Where are you living right now?

I would be so happy to hear from you!

I will move to Singapore in October to study for two years!

Un abrazo muy fuerte,

Carina

And then all of a sudden, she, the near object of my infidelity, was back in my life.

My immediate response provided an update on where I was and what I was doing (fundraising in Vermont for Middlebury at the time), ending with a sincere petition that she reply soon, a request which I had little faith of seeing fulfilled.

Of her or for her, I have written in gross disproportion to how much I have actually seen her, or, for that matter, know her:  at some point in the winter of my senior year of high school, I wrote about her after seeing someone who looked so frighteningly similar to her that my parents, the young woman at the restaurant table, and I all caught me staring.  That night, in my bedroom, I for some reason drew a poor rendition of her using a blue ballpoint pen that would later explode in my pocket.

Then that spring, upon receiving a letter from her couriered by my Spanish teacher who had been to Barcelona, I wrote of her a second time, in the same imperfect Spanish and the same conventional and overly expressive English.

Then came a poem in the August after graduation which was proofread by a friend Alejandro in the dining room of my parents’ house, who, after correcting a few things, said, “You loved her.”

—

Part I:  So a German and an American Meet up in Barcelona

Alejandro and I waited outside Café Zurich in August one year later.  Cell phones were slowly becoming common, particularly in Europe, making my sporadic trysts more feasible.  Alejandro received a call, informing us that she had arrived at Plaça Catalunya.

We kissed hello.  I introduced them.   Alejandro made his way back toward the metro.

“Call when you want us to come pick you up.”

“Thanks; I will.”

There was smiling and shrugging.

“You look good,” one of us said.

“You do, too,” the other replied.

She had friends from Belgium visiting, with whom we joined as we walked towards the corner, in the direction of La Oveja Negra, the bar to which she wanted to take us.

We entered what to my American mind was a rustic entrance, sat down at a low-sitting wooden table with a tiled wall to our backs, and ordered sangria.

The Belgians got up to go to the restroom, so that it could be just us two.

“Fun that you have visitors.”

“I’m glad they leave tomorrow.  Sorry that they have to join us tonight.”

“It’s fine.  You like them?”

“Well enough; just that I have to speak in English with them.”

“And?”

“My English is horrible!”

“Say something to me?”

“Stop!”

“You’re no fun.”

The night ended without incident; she received a tenuous phone call from her boyfriend in Germany, and twenty minutes later Alejandro and his father Gerónimo picked me up in their ’super-car.’

—

“Have you seen the fountains at night?”

“No.”

“We could go tonight.”

“Okay.”

“They light up, there’s music, it’s great.”

“Sounds good; let me just make sure it’s okay.”  I put my hand over the mouthpiece.  “Jandro:  Carina wants to take me to the fountains tonight; okay if I go?”

“No problem; we have the day together.”

“Thanks,” I said, then turning to speak back into the phone:  “Hey – sounds good.  What time do I meet you and where?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Do you want to have dinner before we go?”

“Sure.”

Then there she was in the urban dusk, with the streetlights shyly flickering on, still unsure of their exact purpose, dragging on her cigarette with faded gray corduroys, and a thin, long sleeved black shirt, leaning against her bag pressed against the wall to the metro’s entrance.

“Hi,” one of us said as we kissed hello.

“Hi,” said the other.

She offered me a cigarette, which I accepted and struggled to light as we made our way along La Rambla, headed towards the Port.

I do not recall the name of the restaurant; we were seated outside, me facing towards the sea, her towards the rolling corpus of Mare Magnum, its shops and cinemas.

In all the times I’ve thought about her since, as I write these words, this is the first time that I remember that we ordered claras, or, as she explained to me while the waiter stood there dutifully, the strange combination of beer and lemon Fanta.

After our drinks were gone, our plates were cleared, and the check paid, she said to me, “No one’s ever invited me to dinner before.”

—

We sat on one of the benches that ran up and down the wooden sidewalk network, not far from where we had just eaten, with a few large and gray commercial ships docked on the other side of the jetty, carving their steely lines amid the fluorescent lights shining aimlessly out onto the sea.

She talked about the skinheads in Germany, for reasons that I don’t remember making much sense, commenting on their ignorance.  She mentioned that she was going to Seattle for a year, to work on her English.

“Would you spend Christmas with me in Connecticut?” I asked.

“I’d love to,” she replied.

She brought me something, wrapped.

“What’s this?”

“You can’t open it until you get back to the United States,” she demanded.

“That’s fine with me.”

I put it in the small backpack that I had brought with me.

We concluded that it was time to head to the fountains near Montjuïc, and so we began walking, stopping to have our pictures taken by passersby as we made our way slowly along the jetty.

As we waited for the water and light show to start, we talked about music.

“You know, I still listen to that tape you made me.  It’s in my car; I can’t even count the number of times I’ve listened to it.”

“Seriously?”

It was a mix that she made the night before she left Connecticut when we first met; the cassette itself had a vintage Coca-Cola print overlaid on the body of it.

“Here, listen to this,” I said, passing her my headphones, having her listen to a song I had discovered that spring.

I tried not to look at her while she listened.  But I did.  She liked the song I played.

Then we watched as the water began to dance to the strains of classical music; I remember thinking to myself how strange it was that people knew that this happened every week.  Years later, I would tell my parents as we walked past the dormant pools, that the fountains came alive at night, if it were summer and a Thursday, neither condition at that moment being met.

My concentration was divided unequally between being impressed by the show and wondering what she was thinking.  When the show ended, the inequality became even more exaggerated.

“That was great; thanks for taking me to this,” I said.

“You enjoyed?”

“Sure did.”

We meandered slowly towards the escalators and stairs, and, after a few more pictures taken of us by a few different unsuspecting parties, we lit our respective cigarettes, and retreated to our respective thoughts.

Finally, as the streetlights’ density diminished, she said, “I wish you weren’t leaving.”

She extinguished her cigarette, and we made our way down the stairs.

—

That night, sitting shirtless in Alejandro’s childhood bed, I wrote at length about the last two evenings in a journal with a seashell on the front of it, and then proceeded to write the lyrics to a song for or about her, which filled the last blank page in the book.  The tentative plan, in my head, was to write the song, and then play it for her if I made it to Seattle, or if not, at Christmas, when she came to visit me in Connecticut.  Before I went back to school that fall, I had written the accompanying notes, and polished it on the piano in my parents’ living room.

There was quite a farewell party that ushered me to the airport.  Most of the friends that I had seen over the three week period were there at the terminal, all of us hugging and kissing good-bye, taking photographs, and making promises to stay in touch, to see each other soon.

Carina and her mother made it to the scene about five minutes before I had to head through security and onto my flight.  Carina and I managed to exchange a quick kiss, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, with her promising to send me her new number in Seattle once she had it.  One of our friends waved at us, and took a few more photographs.

Then:  “I have to leave now.”

“Okay.”

And so she did.

I have never seen her since.