“Aspirations are ruled by good and bad fortune.“
Javiera was making the empanadas before Django and I got to the door. Yes she was out of sight in the cave-like basement of the bici parking, down below in the arched roof coal reserve, like the one I slept so soundly in at the Airbnb on Île St. Louis a few summers ago, but Django wasn’t to be fooled. She, yes, she, Javiera, was out of sight but Django had his nose at the breech of the door at the street before I had my phone out to tell the landlady I was there to sign. But the landlady wasn’t there, nor her good English. Instead her husband Luis roared with pleasure at Django, whiffer wiggling like a bowl of jelly now that he was inside and even I could smell something was cooking. Puedo darle comida? He asks his eyes clear blue green like a pane of glass catching midmorning winter sun, his scarf arranged and wrapped about him like an adventure. This man could be on a yacht but was helping make empanadas and renting me a bicycle parking. What’s in the empanadas? This could be the start of a Grimm’s tale.
We sign and he gives me the keys without payment. He’s expansive, a tower of stories, perhaps some true, and continually charmed by my mongrel. “You’ll pay Erika by Bizum,” he seems to dismiss, “later.” We discuss the weather, it had rained for weeks, but he wheels to bemoan his time in Switzerland “I didn’t spend three years, I spent three winters!” His hand floating up near his scarf. Javiera shuffles and cooks quietly in the kitchen, a fourth wall to this force of nature. Django can’t believe his luck as he scarfs down another empanada from his new, scarfed, best friend. I order 9 for the family who are sick with Catalan flu, somehow Django and I are spared. Out on the street with a dog who didn’t want to leave I heft the old timey long shaft key in my hand, look up and down Carrer Monec, weigh the idea of a coffee at the corner but turn towards home, the empanadas, square and midsized, warm in my hands like a hot water bottle before it gets scuttled between the sheets.
~~
(St.) Teresa really pulls the look together with the cat eye glasses, it borders effortless. She’s like a librarian with a computer and no books, cardigan growing into the desk, quiet, patient, eternal. Bookish but for magazines maybe, she doesn’t seem like she gets out from behind her desk much but then again, the world ends up filing past her and there’s no need to go out. So her fingers, almost the color of brown rice, dimple in the keys day in, day out. I’m not really sure what’s going on but I’m supposed to be there, more Spanish paperwork for the Belgian big bird. The meeting, which I had tried to video conference, ended in communication disaster and I rescheduled in person, to be there, in person with brown rice hued Teresa quietly massaging her keyboard, kindly explaining what most 10 year old Spaniards could manage on their own. She, in her sainthood, ignores all the errors in my application for which I can but thank her as a wrap myself in prayer, a cowl to the night, every night.
¿ Necessitas cinco padrons? Si claro somos cinco en la casa. I try to intone with the right inflection. Almost all of my paperwork is wrong but kindness is seeping through the cat eye glasses. She’s experiencing time on another plain, ever patient, lifting to her goal, now my goal slowly, like tectonic uplift.
I suppose the paperwork was sufficient. I couldn’t tell you how, even now, if it were on a bet or a dare. I also couldn’t tell you what her plump fingers were kneading into the keyboard that somnolent lunch hour meeting. Poca a poca I venture in a wincing inflection. Poc a poc she corrects me in Catalan.
¿ Y el perro tiene un microchip ?
Si, pero es autra cosa… I venture. Teresa looks patiently from her gulf of all time and smiles beatifically.
~~
La platforma really isn’t a luxury though it’s priced as one. For the uninitiated, if I may dramatize the expensive daydream: think of a trailer, I’ve seen them hitched to a Ford Ranger of all things, it’s really bordering on Americana, thunderclaps and Jesus and such, pulled along old buildings somehow still standing, laddering up a small metal deck with boxes or furniture on it. After the city has been alerted and given It’s cut, the street is closed to cars. Old men mill about to ask for documentation and harass the Latin American moving crew. All in good order, it’s time to move along abuelo. And so up up up come the boxes and things, all our things, everything caterpillaring up to the balcony, Jacques’ balcony, to be unloaded by Leo.
Leo is calm and reflective, his tattoos pulled taut over his mover’s muscles. He spends about an hour taking things off the platform and setting them down.
Your English is much better than my Castellano. Where did you learn it? Video games he says, looking past the adjacent building, somewhere else, not Teresa’s eternal look but more of a hunger as you might a expect of a young man that looks at the sea.
Then they close up their truck banging the doors closed like a whimper and not a bang, hitch the platforma and are gone after a bank transfer. And it’s quiet. The tide of titles, a sea of stories, a tsunami of knowledge pooled up here at the tercero floor like a high sea lagoon. Boxes everywhere, a disaster of our own desiring.
Uxorial utterances aren’t long to be heard. It’s a mess in here. I did the sorting, the bulking furniture I diverted to
another cheaper storage unit. The truth is what I want is mostly here, disorganized, cramped, and settled. It’s a relief, mostly.
In sight of the mess I know these aspirations have been ruled, ever so delicately, by good fortune.
Next time I write, I’ll tell you about grill-baby.
~~