Margaret C. Williams and Celsa's romantic relationship

Meg Williams and Celsa’s relationship is a love story shaped by migration, language, and a disclosure that Celsa’s fiancé could not accept. Their intimacy grows from an exchange of Spanish and English in a small New York café, but the relationship does not endure: Celsa leaves Meg to marry a Polish bricklayer, while Meg later remembers her as the person she loved most.

Meeting in New York

Meg, the daughter of Hank Williams, a Democratic congressman, remained in Dallas with her mother after her older brother moved to Washington. When Barnard College accepted her, she left for New York. Near the college, at the corner of Broadway and West 120th Street, she found a small café that offered discounts to university women. It was run by two immigrants, one Polish and one Galician; the Galician was Celsa’s father.

Celsa had been born in Mouruás, a village in Ourense. Her father emigrated when she was very young, and her mother followed him soon afterward, leaving Celsa with her grandmother. She did not see the sea until she was fourteen, when she boarded a ship at the port of Vigo with her maternal aunt. Even El Barco de Valdeorras had seemed immense when she and her aunt went there to arrange the papers for her journey. These memories of distance and departure were among the first things she told Meg, who was her friendliest customer and the only one consistently willing to speak Spanish with her.

Language and intimacy

When the two women met, Celsa was eighteen and spoke English in infinitives, like the Indians in movies. Meg corrected her, taught her vocabulary and verb tenses, and offered conversation lessons. In return, Celsa would help Meg improve her Spanish. Celsa protested that Meg already spoke it almost better than she did; Meg insisted that she needed her friend. The proposed lessons gave their affection a shared, practical form: each had something the other wanted, and neither was simply the teacher or the pupil.

The later account makes clear that this closeness was not merely friendship. Meg had been deeply in love with Celsa—more deeply, the narration says, than with her brother’s friend, whom she had nearly married. The contrast places Celsa at the center of Meg’s emotional history, even though their time together is recounted through scattered memories rather than a sustained account of their life as a couple.

Disclosure and separation

Celsa eventually left Meg to marry a Polish bricklayer. Recalling the loss to Manolo, Meg reduced the memory to a blunt, bawdy verdict about Celsa’s body and the fact that she had chosen a husband. When Manolo responded with sympathy, Meg noted that Celsa herself had often said the same expression of dismay. The joke carries grief without disguising the concrete fact of the separation.

Celsa explains the conflict in her own plain terms: on some days she likes men, and on others women; she says this is not her fault, any more than Perry’s failure to understand it. Manolo suggests that she should not have told Perry. Celsa acknowledges the possibility but calls herself a crazy American rather than a sensible Spaniard. Her account connects the breakup to her disclosure of her attraction to women and men, and to Perry’s inability to accept it. The evidence establishes Celsa’s explanation and Meg’s love, but does not specify whether Perry was the Polish husband or describe the precise timing of the disclosure in relation to the marriage.

Love remembered in exile

By the summer of 1939, Manolo had returned to Geneva under circumstances very different from the life that had made him popular as Monsieur Agoyo before 1936. Meg no longer lived there. In the city where they had once been happy together, he missed her in sunshine and cloudy mornings, in the taste of chocolates, and along the lakebanks where he no longer had a dog to walk. He remembered the bars diplomats did not frequent and the street corners where they used to meet after parties at which they barely acknowledged one another. The small details turn absence into a map of places and routines still marked by their past.

Meg was the one person Manolo longed for, and loneliness defined his new period in Geneva. The account does not claim that Meg returned to him or that their relationship resumed. Instead, their love persists as memory: a private history that survives migration and separation, carried forward in the language lessons, the shared city, and the ordinary places that have become reminders of someone gone.