It was a sweltering July. Paul and I did the Gaudis, the cathedral, the Barios Gothic and Xino… And yes, fags that we are, we went to Sitges: The Romantic Hotel, the nude beach, the woods behind the dunes across the railroad tracks…
“Where are you from?”
“Köln.”
“Where are you staying?”
“The Romantic Hotel.”
I jacked off boy number one against the background of the postcard sunset. We saw each other again at breakfast. By then there’d been boy number 2. He was staying in the same hotel. He was also at breakfast. His name was Juan.
I met him in a disco brimming with Parisian transvestites. He had that faggy goatee which meant he could have been from anywhere.
But what’s to make this story any different from the other boy stories? What do I need to record here about Barcelona and Sitges and Juan de Palma de Mallorca?
Everyone in Sitges is on vacation, so he wasn’t really a native, but he was at least an authentic Catalan.
He hung out with me while Paul was at the nude beach. I pumped him for cultural information over a pitcher of Sangria at one of the tourist bars. He provided almost too many details in a broken English with a nearly unintelligible accent. That was our only option, though, since he didn’t speak French, and I didn’t speak Spanish or the official language of his country, Catalan. He considered himself a Catalan nationalist. Catalonia was the region of Spain which brought the most money to the country, he explained, but it all went to Madrid even though the capital didn’t invest anything back into Catalonia, which suffered terribly as a result. It was time for a separation of Catalonia from Spain. He’d been educated in Spanish, but his sister had gone to one of the new schools that conducted classes in Catalan. She was even more militant than her brother.
“When she come to see my father, he have friend who Spanish. She tell him, ‘You no’ lairn the language of our country and you gonna’ have to leave or I no’ come no’ more.'”
“What was this guy’s relationship to your father?”
“It his boyfriend. It long story. He leave my mother, and she make him pay much money, and now he divorce and he with his boyfriend who Spanish.”
“Your father is gay?”
“Yes, but he still think Franco did much for Catalonia and he go to church all the time. I tell him, ‘The Catholic church hate us’ but he no’ believe me. He say, ‘Bible tell only homosexual is bad.’ He say, ‘Jesus is good,’ and I tell him ‘Jesus was psychotic crazy man.’ Really it true.”
He continued to tell me about the strengths of the once great Catalan empire that included today’s Southwest France. I was astounded at this mixture of references. A son speaking to his gay father about the role the Catholic Church played in creating homophobia, and a 22-year-old’s nostalgia for a tiny former country long forgotten by the world.
He took out a little sketchpad and showed me his drawings: minotaur-like creatures in Victorian gowns against Daliesque landscapes.
We walked along the beach with Sitges’ earthen stone church in the background. We each had 24 hours left at Sitges before returning our separate ways home—me to Paris with Paul, Juan to Palma de Mallorca, alone. We found Paul at a Tapas bar and ate dinner with him. Paul talked about his experience trying to speak Spanish to local vendors.
“Catalan people prefer speak with you in English than in Spanish,” explained Juan. Indeed, Paul had discovered that they preferred either the Catalan of yesterday or the English of tomorrow and nothing in between. If you thought you were being nice by making an effort to “speak the local language,” you’d better remember what the local language was.
We spoke in English—or a Continental European approximation of it—which I usually find stranger than speaking in a totally foreign tongue. The three of us walked along the beach, danced at a few bars. The guy Paul had jacked off in the dunes (from Paris) kept showing up. We went to different bars. They were all the same. I saw the Köln boy I’d done. He was with his boyfriend. Juan’s ex-boyfriend, an American-Philippino living in Amsterdam, showed up with an entourage of queens from the States, Germany, Holland, and God knows where. They primped themselves in the street. We stood in a circle like hens, clucking at each other. We chose another bar.
At 2 a.m., we ended up walking along the beach again, Juan, Paul, me, and a Peruvian guy who happed to live down the street from Paul and me back in Paris. Juan had met him the night before in the lobby of the Romantic Hotel. Paul’s beach trick showed up and cruised him. The Peruvian gave us his Montmartre address and cruised the waterfront rocks. Juan cruised me and talked about his passion for Francis Bacon. He had a tiny white body and black eyes. He was Catalan, and that sounded sexy. There was a moon and black waves. It was the end of vacation. We’d just heard the reports of the subway bombing back in Paris. It was going to be a long autumn.
Paul escaped from his admirer. He wanted to go back to the hotel to sleep, he said. Juan suggested we go dancing. I went with Juan. Paul left. Did I really want to dance? I didn’t think so. “I’m tired.”
“Do you want come to my room?”
“Okay.” His room was the one facing the one I was sharing with Paul at the Romantic Hotel, it turned out.
Paul had left our door open to let in air. Or was he waiting to see if I’d go back to Juan’s room? Did he see us coming up the stairs, ducking into Juan’s room to make love? If he did, he didn’t say anything.
Juan was pale as a ghost except for his dark goatee and eyes. The top of his head only came up to the bottom of my chin, which left us with a rather limited choice of positions. I didn’t really want sex, anyway. I wanted to hold someone new in my arms and see what he felt like. He tried going down on me and I told him I didn’t really like that so much. “No?” He was surprised, but he accepted my resistance without a lengthy discussion. We belly fucked for an hour. It was just the degree of contact I’d hoped for.
The idea of Paul’s presence on the other side of the wall, though, was nearly enough to kill the mood completely. Of course I couldn’t stay there all night. I’d have to get dressed and leave. Juan seemed to be way more excited about me than I was about him. “It nice if you stay in bed tonight.”
“Well, I know that Paul is just on the other side of the wall, you see, so I don’t think any of us are going to sleep very well if I stay.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll see each other at breakfast.”
“Yes.”
Paul was waiting up for me. “I saw you coming up the stairs.”
Shit.
Arguing over the logistics of taking lovers in Sitges took another hour out of our lives. Was belly fucking a Catalan in the next hotel room more significant than jacking off a Parisian in the dunes? What constituted a deception? What were we required to disclose in advance to each other? These were questions with answers Paul decided on the spot. “It’s not the same thing. I sat here wide awake all this time while you were next door, knowing you were there…”
“Why didn’t you say you saw us?”
“Because you were sneaking up the stairs.”
“We weren’t sneaking.”
“I’m sorry if I’m spoiling your little weekend with your Catalan.”
“Paul, don’t be ridiculous. You were in the bushes just hours before with a Parisian.”
“Oh, yeah, and it was really great. Just what I wanted to be doing with my time here.”
“So what? Am I supposed to not sleep with someone I’m attracted to because you had a mediocre session this afternoon? I don’t get it.”
“You don’t get it! Doing it in the next room! That’s really something. I’d never do that.”
“Well, it’s one of those things I’d never actually have done had it been premeditated as you seem to be implying it was. Anyway, is it better when you do it on the other side of the ocean?”
The argument went on like that for some time as these arguments always did. Resolution came in the form of sleep near dawn. Everyone looked frazzled at breakfast: me, Paul, Juan, Juan’s ex Philippino-American boyfriend, the guy from Köln, the boyfriend of the guy from Köln, and the one night stands of all of the above. It struck me that these “gay resorts” functioned as convention centers for sex addicts. If only there were organized workshops and tables of literature addressing subjects like “At Breakfast—Intimacy Issues Between Your ‘Husband’ and Last Night’s Fling” or “It was Good for Me—Saying Goodbye to the Locals with a Smile.”
Paul was still pissed as hell. I wandered past Juan’s table on my way back from the buffet with my cornflakes. “He saw us coming back to the room. This is going to be a rough day.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.”
“It was nice, yesterday, huh?”
Oh shit, and he was falling in love besides. I could see it in the eyes.
“Yes.” I could feel Paul’s eyes burning a whole in the back of my scalp… “Gotta’ go.”
“How’s your little Catalan?”
“Don’t start.”
And from the next table… “Hello.” It was Köln.
“Oh, good morning.”
I wanted to get the fuck out of Sitges and back to Paris where we could be anonymous again. There was something to be said for the randomness of concrete and violence.
• • •
Dear Juan,
Well, I think you’re a little more than “summer history” (as you put it). We’re still writing to each other, aren’t we? That makes you “present tense.” Don’t forget that you told me about your Sitges harem before I ever touched on my stories of Paul and Michel. We boys are all the same, you know. We all fall in love too easily and with too many people. It’s wonderful, magic, sad, painful, and delicious all at once. Let’s just enjoy it while we can.
P.S. Can you send me a map of your city in your next letter? I know almost nothing about Palma except what I read in my tourist guide to Spain and what you told me when I met you in Sitges. I’ll study it when I get back from my trip to Egypt. Who knows? Maybe I’ll visit you some day.