But those CDs hardly made it out of the jewel cases. I found that the music on the rock radio stations was just fine for me. They played a wide-ranging variety of music—you could hear Nirvana followed by Boyz II Men, the Spanish singer Rosario, the British group Wet Wet Wet, and Frank Sinatra—that I found palatable. There were about four stations that I could stand, and I gave each one a button on my car radio so I could switch fast and furiously, just as I’d always done at home.
Spanish deejays were not much different from those in the U.S.—there were the usual prank phone calls, celebrity interviews, and so on—but I had a problem with the jokes. One of my favorite deejays, José Luis, the morning man on Cadena Cien, did a feature in which callers told jokes—and I never understood them. It was a language barrier, mostly, I figured: idioms and catch phrases that I didn’t get. It was a problem if the caller spoke too fast, too, and then I became convinced that there was a Spanish sense of humor that escaped me. Just too big a cultural gap. I always felt disappointed when the guys in the studio broke into guffaws while I sat there, blank.
* * *
Amy Levine called during the week and suggested that for our Saturday night date we have dinner at Bolo, a famous old restaurant in the historic center of Madrid. “Have you been there?” she asked.“No,” I said. “I don’t even know where it is.”
She gave me instructions for how to get there. “It’s the most famous place in the city for cocido,” she said. “We’ve been there a couple times with the kids. You know, a Spaniard would never have cocido for the evening meal—it’s way too heavy—so they kind of laugh at you when you order it for dinner there, because only a tourist would do such a thing.”
“That won’t bother me,” I said. “I haven’t even tried cocido yet. But Mike told me about a place the people from the office took him to one day for lunch, where they serve nothing but cocido, and they bring in huge tureens of soup and gigantic platters of the meats and vegetables—“
“I’ve been there!” Amy said. “The portions of food there are unbelievable, inhuman. Nobody could eat that much!”
As I made my plans for Saturday night, I decided to try to get to my 12-step group before meeting Amy and Eric. I had heard from Lorraine that the people from the group were mostly back in town and the meetings would resume. There was a Thursday meeting at the church where the two of us had found each other, and a Saturday afternoon meeting at St. George’s Church, the same place where my art history class met.
“What time does that afternoon meeting start?” I asked Lorraine.
“It’s from 7:30 to 8:30,” she said.
I remembered what Mike had explained about times of day in Spain. “Morning lasts until 4 p.m.,” he explained. “That’s what they told me—when you go in for lunch at 2:00 it’s still morning, but when you come out it’s afternoon. Same thing with dinner—until you start dinner at 10:00 it’s afternoon, and when you’re finished it’s night.” I thought this was hilarious.
I decided take the bus into Madrid and attend my meeting that Saturday, and Mike would drive in and pick me up at 8:45 or so. This got to be a regular thing for us, even if it was just a movie and dinner, or dinner and a movie. There were certain cinemas that showed foreign movies in V.O.—versión original, which is to say with subtitles instead of dubbing. So it wasn’t difficult to find American and British films in English. Later, when we felt more secure about our Spanish, we started going to films that were in languages foreign to us—Chinese or German, for instance—and reading the Spanish subtitles. Finally we advanced to the point where we could see and understand an American movie dubbed into Spanish, though we tried to keep it easy by concentrating on action films, where the dialogue didn’t matter too much.
Timing was an issue, too. Most movies started at 8 and 10 p.m., but there was no dinner to be had much before 9, so sometimes we’d make a dinner of tapas, and sometimes we’d go to an American place like Foster’s Hollywood that served earlier. If we wanted good food, though, we’d skip the movie and eat at 9:30 like normal Spaniards.
I met some interesting people at our small 12-step meetings. Lorraine had become close friends with Carmen, a woman her age who had a Dutch father and a Spanish mother. Carmen spoke wonderful English and several other languages as well, and she had lived and worked in the Middle East for several years. There was a man in the group, José María, about 35 years old, who was a perpetual student working on a law degree. He brought along another fellow, Ed. Ed’s English was great, too, but he had a strange accent that took me weeks to place. I finally realized he had learned his English in Ireland—he spoke with a lovely Irish-Spanish lilt.
Another group member was Elena, a single woman of about 28 who made a meager living teaching English. Elena, whom I came to know well, lived with her mother, brother, sister, and nephew in a small apartment in the city. “When I was a child,” she told me in a British-Spanish accent, “I had a very bad fever, and it impaired my ability to learn. But in high school the sisters felt I had a gift for languages, so I was sent to England to learn English.” Her life was difficult. There was little privacy in her apartment, and her nephew occasionally stole pieces of her jewelry. She had few English students and few friends. She was religious and involved in church activities, but she didn’t attract any male attention, which she longed for.
“My friend Nuria told me, ‘I see you much fatter today,’” Elena told me sadly one day.
“What?” I responded. “I can’t believe she would say something like that!”
“Oh, that is very normal here,” Elena said. “I know you Americans and the English don’t say such things, but here we tell one another the truth.”
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