At Home, part 4

We needed to reciprocate some of the hospitality we’d been shown by Mike’s Spanish colleagues, so we arranged a dinner party for a Saturday night. “They’re dying to see the house anyway,” Mike said. “They all live in apartments in the city. They wouldn’t even think of moving to the suburbs, but they’re really curious about what we have here.” We invited Pedro and Marga, who’d had us to their dinner party; Marino and Pilar, who had had us over before we’d even moved to Spain; and Rafa and Maricarmen, who had taken us to their country club. I asked Ana and Phil to join us, because I thought they’d fit in well, and I could get Ana’s opinion of everyone afterward.

We considered ourselves accomplished cooks, so we weren’t afraid to use our Spanish cookbook to make a fairly elaborate meal: salpicón de mariscos, a seafood salad; pollo en pepitoria, chicken in almond sauce; and arroz con leche, rice pudding. Mike had been learning a lot about Spanish wines, so he chose a good red (preferred by all to white) for our guests. Sangría was not even considered—it was a regional specialty in Andalucía, in the south, not worthy of consumption by serious Castilian wine connoisseurs.

Everyone arrived in good time except for Rafa and Maricarmen, who failed to appear as the time got later and later. The group got along well, and Mike and I were hanging in there with our Spanish, which made us feel pretty good. I had fun watching Ana watch Pedro, appraising his suave manner, while our guests looked over our house and pool, which apparently seemed quite grand to them. And we talked about our recent trip to Paris.

“Oh, I hate the French food,” Pedro said dismissively as we discussed the restaurants we’d been to.

“You hate it?” Mike said, incredulous. “But why?”

“Well, they put all those sauces on everything!” Pedro answered. “You can’t taste the food!”

I was happy talking to Pilar and demonstrating how far I’d come in my Spanish. “Te echo de menos a tu familia?” she asked me.

“No,” I answered, not even knowing what the question had been. That was a horrible habit I’d developed—I often pretended I’d understood when I hadn’t, thinking I might get the meaning a split second later.

Pilar peered at me. “Entiendes qué quiere decir ‘echo de menos’?” she said—do you understand what “echo de menos” means?

“No,” I admitted, embarrassed. It was an idiom that sounded familiar, but I couldn’t pull the meaning out of my memory.

“It means do you miss, like do you miss your family,” Marino explained in English.

“O, no,” I continued, right back in the conversation, “tengo muchos amigos nuevos aquí, y voy a ver a mi familia en diciembre”—I have a lot of new friends here, and I’m going to see my family in December.

The food was accepted appreciatively, and the wine and conversation continued to flow, though Rafa and Maricarmen never came. We found out later that they were in the midst of a divorce.

Before they left, Marino issued an invitation to us. “Come and bring the kids to my mother’s place near Toledo next Sunday,” he said. “We’ll be down there for the weekend. I’ll give you the directions. Come early, and we’ll go pick olives in the family grove. You’ll stay for lunch.”

“That would be great!” Mike said. “We’ll be there.”