Chapter 12: I Beg Your Pardon?

“It’s time to get stressed,” said Kate. Or so I thought.

“Why are we getting stressed?” I asked.

“I didn’t say that. I said, ‘It’s time to get dressed,’” said Kate.

For some, half of being married is yelling, “Whaaat?” from another room. But Kate and I lived in only 465 habitable square feet. There was barely another room to yell from, let alone any walls to muffle the sound. The fact that we were leaving for a concert within the hour tells you all you need to know.

Years before, Kate had encouraged me (rather strongly) to get my hearing tested, which I did. Three times. The doctors were unanimous in their assessment that there was no problem with my hearing. This was hardly encouraging. The problem was with my listening.

I had hoped that once I retired, my listening problem would magically disappear. After all, my work as a lawyer was engrossing. I had good reason to betray that I was getting stressed instead of dressed. But a few weeks into living in Madrid, as happily retired and relaxed as one can be locked down under a global pandemic, Kate and I had the following exchange:

“Pea Paws escaped in Madrid,” said Kate. Or so I thought.

“What are pea paws?” I asked.

“PEACOCKS,” said Kate.

Granted, our Madrid apartment is much larger than the one we had in New York, so I was in a different room this time. But still.

Oliver Sacks delighted in such mishearings, saying they “reflect one’s own interests and experiences.” But my chief interest right now is in learning Spanish, not in pea paws. And my mishearings do not bode well for a task that involves the crucial steps of listening and internalizing, then replicating by speaking.

Kate, on the other hand, has a great ear for languages. Her wiring from ears to brain to tongue is gold-plated. She can replicate an accent almost too accurately, bordering on parody. Whether in Spain, Italy, or France, Kate’s simple request of, for example, a table for two leads to a torrent of foreign words about how nice a day it is, whether we would prefer a window table, and what the daily specials are. But when I say something as simple as, “How are you?” I am met with blank stares.

And yet while Kate can pronounce the ¡Top 500 Spanish Words! like a native, she can barely remember a single one. Thus, during previous trips to Spain (when we could travel as a pair in a non-pandemic world), this would devolve into a routine in which I played Edgar Bergen to her Charlie McCarthy: me whispering the correct words into Kate’s ear, and Kate repeating them in a perfect Castilian accent.

Since moving to Spain mere days before the COVID-19 lockdown, our interactions have been limited to grocers, pharmacists, and delivery people, all eased by the ability to point to things or write out key words in advance. The phone, of course, is more challenging. Recently, I was surprised to get a phone call advising me that the bed sheets we purchased would be delivered that day but reminding me that they would be blue, our second choice, not white. “It’s okay, thank you, the blue lady told me that yesterday,” was my bungled response.

We have recently come to the stark realization that each day of the lockdown postpones our day of reckoning. If we want to live in Spain, we have to be able to speak the language — each of us independently, that is. As a result, we decided last week to end our state of blissful denial and sign up with a Madrid language school for online Spanish classes.

Eventually, Kate and I will be able to wander the streets of Spain together again and, with a little luck and a lot of hard work, my listening skills and her Spanish vocabulary will catch up to our ambitions. After all, going through life saying only, “perdon,” “desculpe,” and “lo siento,” could become even more isolating than the encerrada.

©2020 Kay Diaz

Chapter 11: The Origins of My Species

Grandpop — never Grandpa — was the only grandparent my brothers and I ever knew. Andy, as he was called, was born Andrés in Spain in the momentous year of 1898. He moved with his parents to New York City as a boy, but never lost his Spanish accent. What made him most foreign to me, however, was that he lived in Pennsylvania. My parents talked of leaving Pennsylvania the way friends’ grandparents talked of escaping shtetls in Lithuania.

“Grandpop’s coming,” my father would announce. This usually meant that my parents were going on vacation, leaving us kids behind in the care of the short, elderly man who had long ago raised my father and his brothers.

One of my earliest memories is of having a stare-down with Grandpop when I was about two years old. I had been bellowing about something, but — rather than coddle me like the toddler I was — he simply glared at me until I glared back. Both of us bullheaded, we met each other on equal terms, and I honestly don’t recall who won that particular match. But I do remember that Grandpop was always a source of much curiosity for me.

For starters, there was his right hand. It only had three fingers.

How this came to be was shrouded in some mystery. My mother always said it was an accident with a fan. She was a smart woman. I grew up in an era in which industrial-style cooling fans were common in homes, and I took this as a warning that little children should keep their hands away from fan blades, no matter how mesmerizing, no matter what the dare. But my brother Drew, being seven years older and privy to more family stories than I ever was, speculated that it was a different kind of warning, perhaps from an underworld bookie or someone Grandpop ran moonshine for during Prohibition.

When I got older, I could have asked my grandfather how he lost his fingers. But by the time I became a bellowing teenager, I was too self-involved to inquire. It was my loss. Grandpop was a raconteur, and I am sure I could easily have coaxed the colorful details out of him.

Like many a good Diaz, Grandpop liked to pepper his stories with superfluous verbiage. Grandpop’s particular verbal tic was, “I mean uh . . .” but he would import a Spanish tilde so it always sounded like “I meeña.” He was also known to exclaim “jeekers crickers” — his own portmanteau of a phrase, presumably from jeepers creepers and Jiminy Cricket. My father had a scholarly bent, but he never once corrected Grandpop. After all, Grandpop was the only polyglot in the family — he could speak four or five languages — and he was entitled to a little creative license when it came to the turn of a phrase.

My relationship with my grandfather was fraught with competition. As a stubborn and strong-willed child — traits I likely inherited from him — I tested my grandfather many a time. I have no doubt that I tried to get away with things when he was babysitting that I would never have dared try on my parents. Neglect to pick up my toys? Of course. Run around in my pajamas and refuse to go to bed? Certainly. My brothers tell me that I once even locked Grandpop out of the house. He and I were engaged in our own Spanish–American War.

But I quickly brought my behavior in line when Grandpop walked into the kitchen. It was there that Grandpop — an excellent cook — lovingly prepared a culinary treat deeply embedded in his Spanish roots: potatoes! These were not my mother’s Irish boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes (though I loved those, too). Grandpop, with his sleeves rolled up to expose his strong forearms and dressed in my mother’s flowery apron, cut his potatoes in large smile-shaped wedges and fried them — twice — in a big cast-iron pan until they were golden brown. Tourists scour Spain in search of potatoes like his.

It was only recently that I learned how much family history went into Grandpop’s potatoes. When he was a child, his parents owned a boarding house and restaurant in Manhattan, and young Andrés was forced to peel a couple of bushels of potatoes each morning and wash as many as 200 dinner plates before going to bed at night. Soon he ran away to the Hudson River docks, lied about his age, got a job as a mess boy on the White Star Line, and worked his way back to Spain.

Eventually Grandpop went back home to New York, and ultimately moved to Pennsylvania.

I think about my Grandpop often now that I live in his homeland. And as I stand in my Madrid kitchen frying potatoes, I wonder whether I will ever return home to New York.

©2020 Kay Diaz

Chapter 10: Airing Dirty Laundry

It wasn’t my best idea. But having a glass of wine while hanging bedsheets outside, thirty-six feet up in the air, seemed reasonable at the time. After all, I’m retired, so why not?

It has been colder and wetter in Madrid than I expected, with temperatures dipping into the 30s on some nights. This makes staying inside to abide by the rules of the confinamiento easier. But it presents another challenge: getting the laundry dry when competing with the neighbors for laundry line space.

Whether it is because of the climate or the high cost of electricity, clothes dryers are a rarity in Spain. That, in itself, is not new to me; I have lived without a dryer before — in the early 2000s in the Bronx. But then I had use of a garage and a backyard, both with cat’s cradles of laundry lines that enabled me to hang my soggy washables in relative privacy. And I’m no stranger to communal laundering, either. Our apartment building in Manhattan has machines in the basement, with the upstairs-downstairs experience of learning which neighbors do their own laundry and which contract it out to domestic staff.

So I regard it as a step up that our apartment on a quiet street in Madrid has a washing machine. But the morning after we moved in, I heard a screeching sound that could have been mistaken for a barn owl with metal vocal cords. I had no idea what the sound was, but I tried to remain calm, remembering the time I called the NYC police when I heard a blood-curdling sound in the middle of the night; it turned out to be a frog.

I made my way to the kitchen, which not only houses the washing machine, but abuts the building’s interior courtyard in which the communal clotheslines are strung from railing to railing on old-fashioned pulleys. I peered through our casement window to see — and hear — our neighbor pulling his laundry in, the length of each screech matching the length of each tug.

The next day, it was my turn. Our online shopping spree had included several indoor clothes-drying racks, but today was bedsheets day, and I needed to brave the courtyard clotheslines.

I wasn’t exactly sure of the etiquette. Were the clotheslines that ran diagonally closest to our apartment door “ours,” or did we share all the clotheslines with the other three apartments surrounding the courtyard, first come first serve? Maybe a glass of wine would give me the confidence I needed, if not provide the answers to my questions. Besides, it was a Saturday afternoon on lockdown, so what possible harm could come from one small glass of Spanish tempranillo?

My time had come, and I was ready. I passed through the latched door to the courtyard, sheets and a laundry bag on one arm, basket of clothespins in the other. I put the basket on the window ledge and the laundry bag down on the tiles underneath the damp sheets. As I turned my attention to the line and pulley, I heard the sound of my three dozen clothespins crashing onto the tile floor behind me.

The quaint courtyard had become my rival.

As I dropped to all fours to gather my clothespins, I glanced around to see if my neighbors had witnessed my rookie mistake. Satisfied that I was alone in my humiliation, I rose to my feet and tried to look confident as I returned to the clotheslines.

I grabbed a sheet that I had folded accordion-style, cheering myself with the delusion that it made me look competent. But as I leaned over the railing to unfurl it, I felt my pulse in my stomach as I looked down into the three stories below and considered the potential consequences of an inadequately placed clothespin or two. So I discarded my plans to pin the sheet to the line and elected to simply heave it over two lines instead, justifying this cowardly act by reasoning that I may be saving lives. Humbled, I tiptoed back to my kitchen.

It was time for another glass of wine.

©2020 Kay Diaz