a hot day in that fabled land where the Catalan is closer to Siciliano than the tongue of Firenze and I remembered my parents’ village had been founded in the 1600s by a Spanish baron and the ladies with black kerchiefs tied around their heads could have been my nanna’s sisters and we took a pensione with a shared bath not a fancy hotel room and made love after lying under meridional sun the pounding of waves an aphrodisiac the salt in our kisses an aphrodisiac even the sand of little consequence and we followed twisty roads too narrow for cars and ate at places with no English on the menu no tourists and pointed to dishes we liked with our eyes and encountered paella a newest love and walked by construction sites where six men worked and twenty men watched and we were so much taller than the locals that it seemed we were gods untouchable even when we found ourselves down darker and twistier roads never afraid and then there was the news across the headlines and the radio repeated and people stood stunned in tableaux-morts that Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris and I knew they must have gotten it wrong