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If you asked Mami, she would say my fracas with Val is best understood in the context of her sister Matilde’s love triangle, and, in a broader sense, Princess Diana’s. I’ve resisted showing Mami episodes from The Crown during my monthly visits because there’s no point triggering one of her monologues about esos viejos engaῆadores, Charles and Camilla, and how, like Princess Diana, Tia Mati was an innocent teenager who married an older man who never stopped loving another woman. Imbued in my childhood memories of Tia Mati’s house in Brooklyn are glossy copies of Hola! magazine, the Spanish language version of Hello!, blanketing the surface of her glass coffee table and beaming with photos of the royals. These days, countless Instagram royal fan accounts displaying photos of Diana posing with Charles after their engagement in 1981, floating up the stairs to St. Paul’s Cathedral in her engrossing wedding gown, and, later, hugging William and Harry, fill me with nostalgia for Saturday afternoons with the aroma of arroz amarillo and pollo con azafrán wafting through the air as the doo-woppy timbre of Leo Dan singing, “Como Te Extraño Mi Amor” plays on repeat in the background. Mami and Tia Mati would pore over every outfit and piece of jewelry Princess Diana wore, and, later, lament over every detail of the Charles and Camilla scandal, including that infamous recorded Tampongate phone call, and every clandestine beach photo.
It was within this familial context, or as a psychologist friend of mine once clarified, legacy, that I met Val in the fall of 2003 during my first year of law school in Boston. Technically, I met his voice first since he’d call my roommate, Jed, in the afternoons at the house Jed, Jed’s buddy Tim, and I rented in Quincy. Auspiciously, I believed, Val was born on Valentine’s Day. Mami says, from what she remembers from the day Val visited her in the early summer of 2004, he had beautiful blue eyes, like the sapphire set in Princess Diana’s engagement ring, but he was demasiado viejo, a fact she gleaned from the bald spot peeking through the top of his mouse brown hair as she watched us climb the front steps of her condo building in Queens, highlighting the fact that at 24, I was almost seven years his junior. Es igualito a Prince Charles, Mami said afterwards, tightening her straight lips. That bald spot will grow until he becomes un cuy pelado. And if Abuelito were alive, he would have told Val to shine his shoes and not show up in old corduroys and a wrinkled shirt to visit his enamorada’s mother. But all I saw was a brilliant, scruffy engineer who reminded me of wiry Edward Norton in Fight Club. Most people prefer the Brad Pitt version of Tyler Durden. Not me.
Anyway, the similarities between Val and now King Charles went beyond a receding hairline. Like Charles, Val had historically bad dating luck. One of the first things Val told me was that the longest he’d ever dated anyone was six months. Another was that his parents divorced when he was around fourteen and his mother not only left Pennsylvania, but moved all the way back home to Germany. He said I was his first Ecualicious babe, and his first New Yorker. Before me, he’d apparently messed around with his ex-roommate before she moved to D.C. Jed said before that, Val’s college girlfriend left him for L.A. I suppose it was only a matter of time for Val to lose me to my hometown, or as Val called it, my lifeblood, New York. But there were lots of other reasons he lost me. The main one being Percy, aka The Swedish Bombshell.
My instinct throbbed the first time Val mentioned Percy during one of our early phone conversations. When I mentioned that I learned to speak Spanish while running around Abuelita’s garden on summer vacations with my cousins in Quito, Val’s kneejerk response was that a very good Swedish friend of his also spoke Spanish. He said I should meet her sometime. I asked how he knew her and he said they worked together at MIT. She worked in admissions while Val conducted engineering research. He said he’d asked her out a few times in the past, but she turned him down, explaining that she, “only dated Latinos.” I would soon learn that fetishism was one of many things Percy and Val shared in their technically platonic relationship.
So, Val said, they remained friends, going to movies and dinner and even spending Valentine’s Day (which, he reminded me, was also just his birthday) together. I ignored the twinges in my stomach telling me to run like Tom Cruise in Minority Report and, more importantly, I refused to be like Mami. I was determined to keep an open mind. After weeks of phone chatting, Val and I began dating, and, skilled engineer that Val was, he lit me up cuerpo y alma. Jed said he was happy I was seeing Val after Percy had led him on for so long. So I paused my instincts and trusted Val.
After my 24th birthday in December 2003, Val visited me over Christmas break in New York. I introduced him to my friends and they loved him. At S.O.B.’s-Sounds of Brazil-on Varick Street, he told them that MIT sometimes sent him to Brazil to measure carbon emissions from towers along the Amazon. “He’s such a doll!” Dania, my best friend yelled in my ear during our samba. I smiled. She saw it too.
And then Val and I went back to Boston. One weekend in January, I told him some friends from class and I were meeting for Ethiopian food in Cambridge. He said he would ask Percy to join us. As she tromped through the door, Percy’s tall stature, amber feathered haircut, and sweetheart-shaped face established, as one of my friends later noted, that she definitely wasn’t ugly. As she sat next to Val, I noted their penchant for plaid, buttoned-down shirts while I wore a red boatneck shirt from Urban Outfitters and fitted black slacks over my Doc Martens. As I scanned the menu, Percy mentioned Val’s love of roasted meats. When I mentioned his recent visit to New York, she mentioned indie flicks they’d seen and caressed his arm so often I thought they were on a date. When he told her I spoke Spanish, she shot back that her Spanish was from Spain. Chama, Simon Bolívar gave me the right to pronounce my c’s and z’s as an s. Gracias. Me gusta la cerverza en Barcelona.
Val locked his legs around mine under the table and mouthed that he loved my espresso brown bob, which I’d spent the whole afternoon at a salon on Newbury Street getting and cost around $100. Clearly, though, Val hadn’t told Percy who I was. To be fair, he hadn’t yet referred to me as his girlfriend. But still. When I confronted him about it the next day, all Val said was that Percy was a very flirtatious person but, ultimately, she was harmless. He assured me I didn’t have to worry about her. So I took him at his word, as though I’d learned nothing from Contract Law.
Still needing a particular kind of reassurance, I called Mami. As expected, she huffed and drew her usual parallels.
“Well, Aurelio stayed in touch con La Profesora, the poeta from Ambato, the whole time he was married to pobre Mati. Almost 40 years. Aurelio used to say she was just his good friend, and that their romance ended when she went to teach at La Universidad de Quito and he moved to New York with Mati. But as soon as Mati died, he married La Profesora. Exactamente como ese pendejo Charles married Camilla.”
“Technically, Charles waited a few years to marry Camilla.”
“No importa! Camilla was in Diana’s way the whole time she was married to Charles. Remember Diana’s BBC interview? You know, the first time Mati had a heart episode, your cousin Fé found her lying on the couch with Hola! clippings about Charles’ affair all over her. Gracias a Dios Fé found her in time. But the second time,” Mami’s voice choked. “It was too late.”
As always, my throat tightened with tears over the memory of Tia Mati, who died not long after Princess Diana in 1997.
“Why didn’t Aurelio marry La Profesora in the first place?” I asked Mami.
“Mati was pregnant con los gemelos. She was 17 and Aurelio was 23. Abuelita was afraid of el qué dirán if they didn’t get married. Abuelito never wanted Mati to marry Aurelio, but he gave his permission to make Abuelita happy. For Charles, the pressure to marry Diana came from his father, Prince Philip,” Mami said with her usual authoritative tone on the subject. “Charles was Diana’s first man, just like Aurelio was Mati’s.”
“So I should end things with Val?”
“You have a lot of mirrors, mija.”
After a longer-than-necessary protraction of our relationship that culminated in Percy sending Val a Thinking of You postcard from Pittsburgh which he left writing-side up on his bedroom desk, I ended things with Val. He sent me a few postcards from his trip to Rome and Venice with his mother in the early summer of 2004 (I’ll never understand why he thought sending me postcards after what happened was an apt choice) and had brunch at Mami’s condo in New York with me for one last time. But as we parted ways at Port Authority Bus Terminal, it seemed that whatever commitment remained between us blew out like a candle in the–I won’t even say. Anyway, by the end of that summer, I would meet the man who would sell his car, leave his home country, marry me, and father our son. Best of all, he had no Camilla.
A few years ago, I found cherimoyas in Chinatown. I cracked open the heart-shaped fruit, just as I had in Quito as a kid, savoring its dripping sweet flesh, rapt in its myriad overlapping flavors. Then I wrote a poem about it in a chapbook about love, loss, and self-empowerment that was published by a small press. In the interim, I finished law school and became the first attorney in my family. I like to believe that if I could go back in time and talk to Tia Mati, to Princess Diana, and to myself, I would tell them all to eat a cherimoya. To listen to Shakira songs on repeat. To love themselves above all. To be their own princesas azules, and to drop their spineless, philandering partners, whose most egregious offense, in the end, was having wasted their precious time.
By Stephanie Laterza
