Settling In, part 15

Lisa had become friendly with a girl in her class, Alia, who was also new to the school that year. Alia’s mother called me one day to ask if Lisa could go to their apartment after school to play.

“We live in Mirasierra, but it’s not too hard to get here,” she said. “The girls can come home on the bus, and I’ll give you directions for when you pick Lisa up.”

I agreed and took the directions. Mirasierra was the northern neighborhood where Christine Lotto lived, and I figured that by now I was ready to venture up that way. But it was dusk when I went to get Lisa, and I was nervous, as usual. My stomach was knotted, my hands clutched the steering wheel, and my teeth were clenched.

The directions were complicated but effective. I found the apartment building, parked, and rode the elevator up to get Lisa.

Alia’s mother, Malek, met me at the door. She was tall and striking, with dark shoulder-length hair. I remembered meeting her at the orientation—she was Moroccan, and her husband was Spanish. This was an extremely unusual combination, because Moroccans were generally not well regarded in Spain. The Spanish economy was healthy at the moment, but for many decades Spain had been a labor-exporting nation, sending workers who could not find a livelihood to other countries where labor was sought. Now Spain was importing laborers, mostly for low-level jobs, mostly from Morocco, and the stereotype of Moroccans was that they were low-class undesirables. They were implicated in a lively illegal drug trade and suspected of picking pockets, snatching purses, and stealing car radios.

But Malek certainly appeared to be from another class of Moroccan society. Well-educated and elegant, she was an executive at a software firm. Her husband Roberto, a banker I remembered meeting at school orientation, was as suave as Mike’s colleague Pedro. The family had been living in Morocco for several years and had only recently moved back to Madrid.

“Please come in,” Malek said, smiling. “May I offer you something to drink?”

“No, thank you, I’m fine,” I said, a little anxious about getting home on the maze of roads. “Did the girls have a good time?”

“Yes, I think so,” Malek said. “Please, come and sit for a minute.”

I hesitantly entered the living room, which seemed very Moroccan to me, with a low sofa and dark, colorful rugs on the floor and the walls. It was warm and inviting, with a sparkling view of the now-dark sky outside the large windows. “This is beautiful,” I told her.

“Oh, thank you! Do you like it? We brought almost everything from Morocco.”

“I think it’s wonderful—very cozy,” I said.

Lisa bounded in with Alia, who was round, fair-haired and cheerful. “Hi, Mommy!” Lisa chirped. “Alia wants me to sleep over some night. Can I?”

“Sure,” I said, glad they’d gotten along well.

“That would be great,” Malek said. “I’ll call you to make a plan, all right?”

“Yes, that’ll be fine,” I said, getting up to go.

“Now, don’t worry about finding your way home,” Malek said as we walked to the front door. “It’s actually easier than getting here, with the one-way streets.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ve got Lisa to read the directions for me.” We said our goodbyes and took the elevator down.

“I had a great time, Mom,” Lisa said. “Alia’s apartment is so big! She’s got two maids and a nanny for her baby brother. They have a cook who made us a great snack! I don’t know what you call it, but it tasted so good!” I laughed as she bubbled over all the way home, and we didn’t even get lost.

Settling In, part 14

One of the Price Waterhouse partners, Pedro, invited Mike and me to his place for a Saturday night dinner party. I knew how unusual this invitation was—most Spaniards lived in small apartments, and they rarely entertained at home. They hardly ever invited foreigners to come over! Most socializing was done at restaurants. But Pedro, like most of the Spaniards at PW, had lived in the U.S. for a few years and knew that we would love to go to his apartment.

The invitation was for 8:30, and I figured I had better ask for advice on when to actually arrive. Even the textbook I had used during the summer had information on the Spanish concept of time and promptness. No Spaniard would think of arriving at or near 8:30, but I didn’t know when to really show up, so I asked Lorraine, my 12-step friend.

“Nine-thirty,” she said without hesitation, confirming what Ana had already told me.

“Really?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

“Yep, nine-thirty is the time,” she said. So we planned accordingly.

I asked Ana what we should bring. “You go to an Arab bakery and buy a little pastry,” she said.

“But I think there will be other people there,” I said. “I should probably get something bigger.”

“No,” she said, “just a small cake. That’s what is done.”

So we arrived in Pedro’s neighborhood, in the northeast part of the city, at 9:30 p.m. with tiny cake in hand. We found the apartment building and were buzzed in.

Pedro, who was about fifty and very tall and handsome, answered the door. I had met him before. He completely fit my idea of a Continental—a suave gentleman with elegant manners. Dressed in a beautiful cashmere sweater, wearing an appealing cologne, he didn’t seem like the stubborn, old-fashioned businessman Mike complained about. He had a way of paying attention to women that was very flattering. I found him delightful to be around, and I was pleased that we’d gotten the timing right.

“Bienvenido,” he said, giving me a kiss on each cheek in the Spanish manner. “I’m so glad you could come. Did you have any trouble finding us?”

“Not at all,” Mike said.

“Good, good! Well, please come in and meet our friends. You know Marga, Mike—Susie, this is my wife.”

Marga was short with auburn hair, looking a bit older than Pedro, dressed in an elegant suit. “Encantada,” she said, kissing me as well. “I’m happy to meet you. Please come in!”

The living room was snug, with just enough room for the eight of us. Two other couples were there—I didn’t get all the introductions straight right away, and Marga seemed surprised that I didn’t recognize one of the ladies, who was a news reader on Televisión Española, the government television channel. I did catch on that not everyone spoke English, but I was excited that we were going to give our Spanish the acid test.

The men wore sweaters, like Pedro, and the women wore suits like Marga—a combination that seemed strange to me, but one that I eventually came to see as normal after some months in Spain. That was typical attire in restaurants, too—the men were usually dressed more casually than the women.

The living room was warm, with grass-cloth wallpaper and modern walnut furniture. A big picture window took up one whole wall, with a good view over the neighborhood. There was a large stereo, and classical music was playing.

We got acquainted over olives and sherry and moved quickly to the dinner table, in an ell off the living room. Our Spanish was holding up pretty well as we swapped stories about our work, our children, the weather. Everyone was interested in how we liked Spain so far.

The dinner began with a delicious soup, followed by roasted whole peppers stuffed with fish. Marga did all of the cooking and serving herself, except for the dessert, which one of the other ladies proudly provided—a custard that must have taken a lot of effort to prepare. Our cake was welcomed, and Marga cut it and served it after the other dessert.

We returned to the living room for coffee and after-dinner drinks, and that was when our Spanish started to fail us. We were tired and full, and Mike, at least, had kept up with the steady flow of alcohol. It was by now 11:30, and the topic had turned to politics—not yet a subject about which we had any useful opinions. We didn’t venture a word, and then we lost the thread of the conversation altogether.

We exchanged a sleepy glance and wordlessly agreed that we’d better get out of there before we nodded off and really embarrassed ourselves, so we gave our profuse thanks to our hosts and said our good nights.

“It was great, though,” I said to Mike as we walked to the car. “For a while there I think I was actually thinking in Spanish.”

“I’m dead,” he said. “Let’s get home.”

Settling In, part 13

Karen and Rich Irwin wanted to make good on their offer to take us on a tapas crawl—a peregrination among some of the finer tapas bars of the city. We picked a Friday night and drove into town together.

“I have to get to know different police chiefs here, so that they’ll feel comfortable sharing information with me,” said Rich, the terrorism expert. “They all like to take you out for tapas. I’ve been everywhere! I know all the best places.”

“Sounds great!” Mike said. “Lead on!”

We started in Plaza Santa Ana, a short walk from the Plaza Mayor. The square was lined with tapas bars, some with particular specialties. “That one is known for German beers,” Rich said, pointing to a bar across the way, “and this one is the one for pimientos de Padrón.”

“What are those?” I asked.

“They’re tiny green peppers that they fry and salt. You get a whole plate of them. The trick is that some of them are unbelievably hot—you can’t tell which ones by looking. Are you game?”

“Sure!” Mike said, so we started there.

The place was crowded, but we edged up toward the bar and ordered drinks and a plate of the pimientos. “You know the tapas routine, right?” Rich asked. “Just one drink and one snack in each bar, then you move on to the next.”

The bartender pushed a plateful of freshly fried peppers across the counter to us, and we took them to a corner where we could huddle together under a bullfight poster. They were delicious. It wasn’t till the fourth pepper that I got a jolt of heat.

“Oh, man, you weren’t kidding about the spice!” I moaned. My mouth was on fire and my eyes were tearing. Then I saw my companions get hit one by one. We started laughing as we guzzled our drinks—anything to kill the pain.

“Wait, bread is supposed to be better than liquid,” Mike said, so we got a plateful of that from the bartender and tried to soothe our sore mouths.

On we went to bar after bar, around Plaza Santa Ana, on the streets nearby, and around the foundations of the Plaza Mayor. Some of the places looked like normal restaurants, and some looked like hot dog stands or luncheonettes. We had plates of jamón (ham), lomo (cured pork loin), and chorizo (sausage). We had boquerones, tiny marinated fresh anchovies, which I adored. We went to the place that specialized in patatas bravas—chunks of fried potatoes with a spicy red sauce (though not nearly as spicy as the pimientos de Padrón). We kept eating, drinking and walking—a fabulous way to spend an evening, I began to think.

Rich, who was tall and beefy with shaggy light-brown hair, began to tell us a bit about his work. “I go out with these cops and try to get to know them,” he said. “My job is to be a liaison and to try to be helpful with terrorism matters. You know the Basque terrorists—ETA—are a huge problem here, right?”

It was impossible to ignore ETA, whose deadly acts headlined the newspaper almost every day. “Basque separatists” was a term I recognized dimly from the news back home, but here it was clear that a portion of the Basque people were angry at the Spanish government and would do anything to secede from Spain.

As the wine flowed, Rich talked about his previous postings. “We were in Honduras for a few years when the kids were babies,” he said.

“Oh, that was wonderful!” Karen added. “We had a big house there, and lots of servants, and the expat community was really friendly. It was like a country club!”

“And then I had to be away for six months,” Rich said.

“That was really hard,” said Karen. “He couldn’t call home. We had no communication that whole time.”

This started to sound strange to me. “You couldn’t call home for six months?” I said.

Rich smiled a sideways smile but didn’t answer. CIA, I thought. He must be CIA! I didn’t ask any more questions.

Settling In, part 12

One day I got a call from an American woman I didn’t know. “I got the new directory for the American Women’s Club in the mail, and I saw your name in it,” she said. “I think we might have a lot in common, so I thought I’d take a chance and call.” Her name was Sandra Ptacek. In her early forties like me, she’d lived in Spain since spending her junior year of college there. She was married to a Spaniard and had two daughters the same ages as Julie and Lisa. She lived in Las Rozas, west of Pozuelo.

“Would you be interested in getting together?” she asked. “I’d be happy to come to you.” We agreed that she’d come for coffee one morning while the kids were at school.

Sandra was an athletic-looking brunette of medium height. Cheerful and energetic, she was also new to the American Women’s Club despite her many years in Spain.

“I’ve really worked all the time until now,” she explained. “I didn’t have time for outside activities, and I wasn’t in touch with other Americans. Well, there were a few who came through the Waldorf School, where my girls go, but they would leave after a year or two when their husbands got a transfer, and I got tired of investing in short-term relationships.” She had worked in sales for a firm that made irrigation equipment, and her work had taken her throughout Spain and much of North Africa. “I’m sure I would have continued with the company, except they moved the office to the suburbs east of Madrid, and there’s no way I can commute there,” she said. “So for the first time I find myself with some leisure time, and I thought I’d like to connect with some Americans. I guess I’m a little homesick.”

She went on to describe her big Czech family in Milwaukee and her interest in spiritual healing practices, and then she said she hoped to use some of her new free time for writing. “There’s a writing group I joined through the International Newcomers Club, and I’m enjoying it a lot,” she said. “I’d also love to spend some time hiking in the mountains. Would you be interested at all?”

“I’m not much of an outdoor person,” I said, “but I’d love to see some of your writing. I was working for a newspaper before I moved here.”

“I’d love to see some of your writing, too,” she said. “Shall we get together again? Maybe the girls could meet each other, too.”

“I should warn you that I’m only here for two years, but I’d love to get everyone together,” I said, and we made a date.

Sandra’s girls turned out to be lots of fun. She brought them to our house one Saturday afternoon. The older one, Sara, was fluent in English and a chatterbox, so she and Julie bonded quickly and disappeared into Julie’s room. The younger one, Andrea, was quieter. “I have to admit that I didn’t work on her English as hard as I did on Sara’s,” Sandra said. “You put so much effort into it with the first one, but when the second one comes along—well, I just lost the enthusiasm.” But Andrea played cards—she was a real shark—and Lisa enjoyed playing with her, so the language didn’t matter as much.

Sandra showed me some of her writing, some poetry and a short story. It was wonderful work, artistic at a level I couldn’t even try to approach. “I admire you so much for being able to do this,” I told her.

“It’s been a long time coming,” she said. “But the writing group I’m in is helping a lot.”

I told her I had made a couple contacts at the local English-language publications, but it didn’t look too promising. “I’m going to Paris this weekend, though, and I’m going to do a travel piece for my newspaper at home—something on the lesser-known museums of the city,” I said.

Indeed, the time for my trip to Paris had finally come. Marla, a young American who taught in the pre-K at the American School, had agreed to take care of the kids, who seemed happy to be with her. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “We’ll have a great weekend, and you should, too!”

The trip to Paris was short and easy, and I was amazed at the idea of arriving there without jet lag. I’d arrived in Paris three times in my life, always miserably exhausted.

We checked into a small, plain Left Bank hotel—Mike would be moving to a fancy airport hotel Monday, when his meeting began—and stepped out to get some lunch. The slow and surly service we got at a sidewalk café was just what I’d learned to expect in Paris—a sneering acceptance of our orders, a tossing of plates onto the table, an ability to ignore our frustrated signaling for the check.

But we spent a busy afternoon getting around to some of the museums I had planned to cover—the Picasso and the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which I had read about in the novel Foucault’s Pendulum, a favorite of mine.

We returned to the hotel for a rest, and we chose a restaurant from our guidebook. I called for a reservation, but I had a miserable time communicating in French, though I did get the job done.

“That was uncomfortable,” I told Mike.

“What? You sounded fine,” he said.

“No, I could hardly think of the words to say!” I complained. “Whenever I tried to get out a word in French, a Spanish word came out instead!”

“Could you understand the person you were talking to?” he asked.

I thought for a moment. “Yeah, I could understand fine. I just couldn’t speak! I can’t believe this. When we were at Club Med last winter I could hold my own in French. Now it feels like the Spanish has come in and covered up all the French in my head!”

“That’s weird,” Mike said.

We walked through a dark and sparkling Left Bank night to the restaurant. There were several movie theaters along the way, brightly lit, with crowds of young people moving through the streets. The neighborhood felt very alive, very Parisian.

The restaurant was warm and cozy, decorated with dark wood and bright tablecloths. The menu had several appealing choices. We ordered—a veal stew for Mike, a duck breast with peppercorn sauce for me—and relaxed. Then the food came.

I was unprepared for the experience. There was a sauce! There were herbs! After six weeks of Spanish restaurant food, seasoned with only olive oil, salt, and garlic, I had forgotten what other flavors were like.

“This has taste!” I said to Mike.

“It’s wonderful,” he said.

“Spanish food is wonderful, too, but this is a whole other thing,” I said. We ate our meal in a state of bliss.

Sunday we went to more museums—the Pompidou, full of modern art, which Mike disliked, and the Musée d’Orsay, full of his favorite Impressionists. We were stunned by the huge scale and the beauty of the museum, a former train station. We had another wonderful dinner and turned in early, because Mike had to work on Monday.

He left in the morning, taking our luggage with him in a taxi to the airport hotel where he’d be in a meeting all day. I walked up the Champs Elysées and stopped at Virgin Megastore, which I’d heard of but never seen. After I browsed for CDs, I noticed that there was a café right in the store, so I took a break there and had a delicious artichoke-heart omelet—the best record-store food I’d ever had. Then I took the Métro out to the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, a huge science museum that I wanted to cover for my article. I found that it was terribly dull to go through a science museum without children in tow, and I was running out of enthusiasm for being a solo tourist. It was disheartening to realize that I was only good for about half a day on my own. Then I started to feel lonely and to long for someone to share my discoveries with.

The museum fit into my plans, though, because it was in the corner of the city nearest the airport. I caught a taxi that plugged through the traffic to the airport hotel where Mike was working. He had a business dinner that night, so we stayed over and returned home the next morning, happy with our little getaway.

Settling In, part 11

After a few weeks in my Spanish class I was feeling frustrated. There was not enough conversation practice for me. Grammar was my strong point—it was fluency in speech where I most needed help. The class was fun enough, and good for grammar review, which was important, but Dolo tended to do most of the talking.

I remembered that I had a phone number for a conversation group, which I’d gotten in Lauren Williams’ aerobics class. I thought it might be a good way to supplement what we were doing in class, so I called the number and spoke to Jan Carlson. She turned out to be the wife of an American Embassy worker who lived in the fancy neighborhood of Somosaguas.

“We have just a small group,” she said, “with a teacher, Victoria Sánchez.” I knew that name from Ana—Victoria’s husband worked in ODC with Phil. Those two couples had in common that the wives were Spanish and the husbands American military men.

“May I join you?” I asked.

“Sure, the more the merrier,” Jan said, and she gave me directions to her house.

To enter Somosaguas you had to stop by the unmanned entry gate, get out of your car, and press a button that opened the gate. Then you had to jump back in your car and drive through before the gate closed. I couldn’t figure out what kind of security this provided.

Jan’s house was a low-slung, modern white box with lots of windows looking onto a pretty lawn. I met Jan, a simply dressed woman of around my age with short, straight brown hair and freckles. Three or four other American women were there, and Victoria was handing out some papers.

“Here are some grammar review exercises for you,” she said. My heart sank. Just what I didn’t need!

Victoria was movie star glamorous, with long brown hair in a sort of Farrah Fawcett style. She was tall and had a great figure. She had us do some speaking in Spanish, but most of the class, to my great disappointment, was spent going over the grammar exercises. She did bring up one point of pronunciation that interested me, though.

“Did you know that in Spain we lisp the c and z before consonants as well as vowels?” she asked. I had never heard of such a thing. I pronounced zebra “thebra” and Barcelona “Barthelona,” but she said that her own name should be pronounced “Vith-toria.” It took some practice, but after a few tries I got it down.

Jan’s little beagle ran in while we were working. “Guapito!” she exclaimed.

“Tell Susie the story about Guapito,” Victoria said.

Jan started to laugh. “Do you know what guapito means?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said.

“It means ‘cutie,’ but it’s the sort of word you’d use when you’re coming on to someone,” she explained. “Well, I had some laborers working out in the yard one day, and the dog got out when he wasn’t supposed to. I ran into the yard and yelled at him, ‘Guapito, Guapito!’ and one of the workers started running toward me saying ‘Vengo, cariño!’ (I’m coming, darling)!”

I saw Ana later that day and gave her my new information about Spanish pronunciation.

“That woman is crazy,” Ana said. “Only a truly low-class person would be so ignorant as to pronounce ‘Victoria’ as ‘Vith-toria’.” I took that as the final word on the subject and didn’t return to the conversation group.

Settling In, part 10

So on the Saturday night of our date with Amy and Eric, Mike picked me up outside St. George’s and drove to the parking garage under the Plaza Mayor, in the center of the old part of town. We walked till we found Bolo, in a charming old-fashioned storefront painted in red enamel. Eric and Amy were already seated, and naturally the restaurant was otherwise nearly empty, since it was before 10 p.m.

I enjoyed getting to know Amy and Eric better, and I enjoyed the cocido and its ritualized presentation, too. At Bolo the dish came in individual earthenware pots. The waiter first poured some broth and noodles out of the pot into a bowl. The liquid was the yellow of chicken soup, but it had a much stronger flavor from the sausages and other meats that had been simmered in it.

We talked about ourselves and our children, our backgrounds and our reactions to Spain. “What’s it like living in the suburbs here?” Amy asked.

“Pretty much like any suburb at home, except we’re closer to the city and the public transportation’s good,” I said.

“I can’t imagine living in the suburbs,” she said. “We’re really city people, I guess. I love that I can walk downstairs and get the newspaper at the corner kiosk.”

“What do you do for things like grocery shopping?” I asked.

“Well, there are little shops near the apartment,” she said, “but usually Eric drives us out to the Jumbo market on Saturday, and we can stock up for the week.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“It’s in the northeast corner of the city. A lot of city people who have cars go out there. It’s a shame that everything is closed on Sunday, though, because it’s miserably crowded on Saturdays.”

“I think there’s supposed to be one Sunday a month when the stores can stay open,” Mike said.

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that. How do you find out when it is?”

“I think it’s supposed to be in the paper,” he said. “Or maybe there’s a sign at the store.”

Amy and Eric’s girls got to and from the American School on a school bus, but when Sarah, the older one, had a volleyball practice there was often a dilemma about how to get her home. “Do you think it’s okay to let her ride public transportation?” Amy asked. “She’s a city kid, she knows how to handle herself, but I don’t know about this.”

I said I’d ask Ana for her. And then the waiter came over to serve the next part of the cocido: the meats. There was chorizo and morcilla (blood sausage), chicken and beef. Still steaming in the earthenware pot were the cabbage, chickpeas, and potatoes for the last course.

“Do you like the teachers at the American School?” Amy asked.

“I think Mr. Tribe is fantastic. Do you like Anna’s teacher?”

Anna had Cindy Phoa, the other fifth grade teacher. “I think she’s fine,” Amy said, “but I’m glad they all go to Mr. Tribe for science. He’s quite a live wire!”

Julie had described some of Mr. Tribe’s antics to me. He was notorious for his sneak attacks on kids wearing sweatshirts with drawstring hoods. He’d come up behind an unsuspecting kid, flip the hood over his head, and swiftly pull the string so the kid was peeking out of a little space in the front. When a student was caught tipping back on his chair Mr. Tribe took the chair away, and the kid had to kneel for the rest of the day. Julie loved him, but she was a little scared of him, too.

“What I’m not satisfied with is the Spanish class,” Amy went on. “Sarah’s taking French as well as Spanish, and the French department is wonderful—very demanding. They don’t seem to be learning much in Spanish, though. When I complained to the Spanish teacher, she said that most of the American parents don’t care if their kids learn any Spanish, and when Spanish homework starts to interfere with the other subjects, they bellyache about it and demand that it be reduced. Can you believe that?”

After my brief experience with the military wives at Ana’s house, I thought I knew what Amy was talking about. It seemed that not everyone was as thrilled to be in Madrid as I was. Some of the people who rotated through one country after another didn’t really care about plugging in to the local culture.

As we continued to talk, Amy mentioned some of the Spanish books she was reading—biographies, histories—and I was tremendously impressed. “But I have to tell you about my dirty little secret,” she said. “I’m addicted to Hola.” Hola was a weekly celebrity-watching magazine—a big-format one, like the old Life magazine, with a similar emphasis on glossy color photos. I’d read one or two issues but couldn’t get clear on the Spanish aristocrats and film stars Hola covered—they were all new to me. Well, except maybe Julio Iglesias. But Amy had already become a junkie for news about the Spanish royal family, much beloved in the country and, frankly, much more to be admired than the laughable British royals we had followed at home. My new intellectual friend was also a gossip maven.

We had our final course of vegetables and chickpeas and declined dessert, full as we were. The restaurant custom was to offer dessert and coffee separately, as different courses. Most of the desserts were not that appealing to us anyway—the popular items were flan, crema catalana, and natillas, all custardlike desserts. Ana had explained that one could go to a bakery to buy fancy Arab-style pastries, which were considered very elegant, but that cakes and pies were not common in restaurants.

“How about a walk to work off a little of that meal?” Eric suggested. We took a stroll around the lovely old neighborhood, famous for the nearby Convento de las Descalzas Reales, a convent that had some magnificent paintings. Across the plaza was Cornucopia en Descalzas, a restaurant I had read about. The owner was an American woman married to a Spaniard, and the place was known for cocina creativa—creative cuisine—something different from the usual menu of plain but perfectly prepared meat and fish dishes. The place looked lovely, and I resolved to return.

Settling In, part 9

Mike and I hadn’t converted our collection of music albums and tapes to CDs by 1994, but the move to Spain propelled me into action. “I bet it’s all going to be horrible techno music on the radio,” I told myself. “I’m going to buy a few CDs of decent music so I can have something to listen to.” I got some music that had been popular during the summer of 1994, like Alice in Chains and Crash Test Dummies, and I combed the bargain racks for compilations by some of my old favorites—Elvis Costello, Ricki Lee Jones, the Grateful Dead.

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.”