Free Love in Lowercase by Francesc Miralles

Gabriela, who hadn’t even recognized me.
    Why, then, had she shot me such a knowing glance at the traffic light? Not only that, she’d turned around to give me one last look before continuing on her way. Or had the whole thing been nothing more than a fever-induced hallucination?
    On my way home, I replayed the scene in the music shop in my mind. I finally came up with the only logical explanation. Our eyes had just happened to meet when we were crossing the road, and she’d turned around by chance. We all turn around sometimes when we’re walking on the street.
    Without a doubt, she was the same person who’d roused my passions thirty years earlier with a butterfly kiss. The problem was that she did not remember it. Maybe this scene from our childhood had meant nothing to Gabriela—not then and certainly not now.
    For the first time I accepted the painful fact that I was not amemorable man. The worst, most absurd thing was that I was hopelessly in love with her.
    â€”
    When I got home I almost rushed out again to the hospital to tell Titus what had happened. Don’t they say that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved?
    I decided against it. I had accepted defeat and didn’t want to rub salt into my own wounds. In order to alleviate my sorrows I’d do the only thing I knew how to do: work. As I went upstairs laden with books, I was glad that I had this extra task to keep me busy.
    After my obligatory pause in front of the
Wanderer
, I sat down at Titus’s desk ready to get on with the job.
    I’d pasted the titles from the contents page on separate pages of the document with the intention of filling up each section with whatever ideas occurred to me. I glanced at the final section, “Love in Lowercase,” and added another detonator of universal love.
    No. 2: Talk to a Stranger
    I had to include this because my conversation with Valdemar had taken me to the topic of Ravel, which led me to the music shop. There, the “Venetian Boat Song” had carried me away, along mysterious canals, to Gabriela. But what good had it done me?
    I briefly abandoned this section in order to work on “Heart in the Hand.” While rereading
Werther
before one of my classes, I’d come across a passage in which Werther offers his friend some moving thoughts on the mysteries of love. He’d included an anecdote. Full of self-pity, I began to copy it out:
    Wilhelm, what is the world to our hearts without love? What is a magic lantern without light? You have only tokindle the flame within, and the brightest figures will shine on the white wall; and, if love only shows us fleeting shadows, we are yet happy when, like mere children, we behold them and are transported with the splendid phantoms. I have not been able to see Charlotte today. I was prevented by a social occasion from which I could not disengage myself. What was to be done? I sent my servant to her house, that I might at least see somebody today who had been near her. Oh, the impatience with which I waited for his return! The joy with which I welcomed him! I should certainly have caught him in my arms and kissed him, if I had not been ashamed.
    It is said that the Bonona stone, when placed in the sun, attracts its rays and for a time appears to glow in the dark. So it was with me and this servant. The idea that Charlotte’s eyes had dwelt on his countenance, his cheek, his very apparel, endeared them all inestimably to me, so that at the moment I would not have parted from him for a thousand crowns. His presence made me so happy! Do not laugh at me, Wilhelm. Can that which makes us happy be adelusion?

III
    The Pathos ofThings

The Gondolier Again
    A week after that strange, sad afternoon, there was another sign. I was free that morning, so I set about some housework and tuned in to the classical-music station on the radio.
    I was washing a pile of food-encrusted plates when the announcer mentioned
Songs without Words
. I