Love is blind

Love is blind and looking back on some of the boyfriends I thought were sensitive and talented when in fact they were just pillocks, I see that is true. Well, there is not really anything wrong with trying to see the good in someone, but you can take it too far, especially as there are shrinks for that. But now I suspect I am doing it again. Before we left the UK, I irritated Sandy by only playing Spanish music and watching Spanish films for about a year.

Me: How about this? Jamon Jamon, it sounds good.
Sandy: Silence
Me: Jamon is ham in Spanish, you know. You like ham.
Sandy: OK, if you like. Watch what you want.
Me: It has Penelope Cruz. (In a short nightie, most of the time: this is the movie that made her famous.)
Sandy: Silence.

Later on, Sandy suggests we don’t always listen to Spanish music.
Me: What do you want on – Queen, I suppose. Or Meatloaf. (These are the only 2 bands Sandy really likes, except perhaps the Doors, though he has been known, under my influence, to listen to some country music.)
Sandy: What is the world’s best selling album ever? (I know the answer to this: we have been here before).
Me: I don’t know. The Beatles?
Sandy: No.
Me: The Rolling Stones?
Sandy: No, it is Meatloaf.
Me: I don’t believe it. I don’t know anyone who likes Meatloaf.
Sandy: Well it’s a fact. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records.
Me: I don’t know anyone who reads that, either.


On the drive down to Madrid to visit Sylvia, and pick up the children, the garage attendant flirts with me. That is, he feigned astonishment at the sight of me, offered to come with me and banged on the window as I left to encourage me to return to the garage on my way home. I think this was flirting: it could be, given that I was wearing my 5 Euros top from Lubrin market (brown glittery chiffon), that he just thinks I am a tart. Later, when I arrive in her huge, tasteful flat in Madrid, Sylvia takes a breath and says: “Well, now you look like a Brit in Almeria!”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I say, suspiciously. I am not wearing shorts, for a start, though I do have something like flip flops on, and they are not particularly clean.
“In a good way, of course,” she adds quickly.

Well, I should have worn something more urban: Madrid is not San Jose, after all. But the point is, no garage attendant has ever flirted with me in the UK. For a start there are no garage attendants – in Spain they still generally fill the tank for you - and if there were, they wouldn’t flirt, they would say something like “you want to see to that oil, love, before you have an accident.” OK, so he was five foot tall and presumably not very successful but hey, I went on my way feeling pretty lively.

Other good things about Spain: space. Space, and no traffic. I drove for five hours non-stop (apart from the garage), and saw about 3 cars. There is nothing on the road: the countryside (except it is not countryside, it is really land) turned from the dry brown mountains of Almeria into the greener, huge boulder like rocks that rise out of flat land around Murcia, and then into the yellow, flat plains of Castilla La Mancha. I got by mistake onto the new toll road to Madrid: it was like entering a parallel universe. There was nothing but the road cut in the red earth and, I swear, about 6 cars in an hour. Then suddenly there was Madrid, appearing in the middle of nothing and nowhere and in some way seeming part of the huge nothing and nowhere of Spain. How unlike Paris, ringed neatly with peripherique, or London, merging outwards into suburb after vague grey suburb. Well, how could you not love it: it is somehow incredibly normal and at the same time, like the weirdest, most David Lynch road movie, set in mid-west America.

On Friday morning, I sat with Sylvia near the Plaza Santa Ana, eating a medialuna. The sun was hot, the houses around us were eccentric with balconies, frescos, pink bits, Moorish bits, bits of everything. It is not stylish like Rome, or grey and elegant like Paris, and it is not wacky and untidy like London, but there is a bit of all of that, and then it is Spanish. It seemed there was somehow both shouting and formality, chaos and manners. It beats my description, at least for now.

On the way back, I stopped with the children at the Parador in Albacete. It is a restful, ranchlike building, appearing isolated in the flat yellow fields. A smart wedding party gathered at about 11pm. It seemed as if they were following some well-oiled ritual as they emerged, in evening dress, the women patting their hair a bit, into the central courtyard, where flowers were floating in the fountains. I walked round the cloister with my small, dirty children: the clothes were not the smart clothes at a Brit wedding –bought for the occasion outfits with obvious labels or imitations – and tags saying something about wallet or personality. The people – well dressed older men and women in particular - looked to me like characters from a film, in costumes that expressed the occasion, and were therefore somehow impersonal, clothes that a director might choose for a classic matron, rather than something with a price tag. The elegance looked knowledgeable and experienced but not cold, like French elegance – and unlike the UK, nobody was remotely drunk. Sylvia says there is a hard side to Spain but I still refuse to see it; in these early days of my ignorance of where I live, what I sometimes see is something very old, very mature and knowing, like a middle aged woman after many lovers, that maybe could amount to being hard.

I put my foot down all the way back: nobody appears to observe the speed limit of 120 and most cars seem to be driving at around 180. This is a function of space, I suppose – like Montana not having a speed limit until recently: it is easy to feel you own the road. My heart lifts as I drive down the Autovia del Mediterraneo. There is Almeria, the hills papery brown and dry and hot, patched with scrub, and as I drive towards my turn off I feel more and more happy. The road climbs into the scratchy desert-like hills: the heat gets more intense. It is not at all pretty, but then, love does not really fall for pretty, for Austria, for instance, which is fine for skiing and then you get bored. We are nearly in Africa in Andalucia after all, and with its cactuses, its desert, its different pace and its big dominant spaces, it feels like verging on the times and rhythms of another continent.

Not that idols don’t have clay feet, or at least the odd clay toe. One of these is the paperwork here, which is quite something. I never thought of the UK as un-bureaucratic, but now I see it is. Nobody asks to see your passport, or indeed anything except the colour of your money, before you buy anything, but here, it is quite different.

A while back, still trying to get to grips with the paperwork and before I realised it is easier to let things slip through your fingers here than try to grip them, I called Inma, our lawyer’s very nice and patient admin lady, about our residency cards. It was like this:


Me: Inma, now we are living here, Pedro said I should call you about our residency cards.
Inma: Oh, residency. Well, you need that if you live here.
Me: We are living here.
Inma: Oh, are you? Well, She said, oh yes, you have to go to Almeria office.
Me: Do we both need to go?
Inma: Yes, you do. It is personal, you need to go by the office.
Me: OK.
Inma: You want me to fix a meeting for you?
Me: Yes, please.
Inma: Well, send me your NIEs, your name and surname, all that, which I’ve forgotten.
Me (thinks: surely Inma (her actual name is Inmaculata), knows our names?) And our passport numbers, do you want those?
Inma (as an afterthought): OK, give me those, send me everything.

After I got off the phone, I wondered about the NIEs. I looked through our official papers here, which amount mainly to the escritura (official documentation of the purchase of a property). In there, among a lot of legal language, were various numbers, including one that called itself a NIF. I rang Sylvia and asked: what is a NIF and what is a NIE? She said, a NIF is a Nacional Identificacion Fiscal and the other one is a Nacional Identificacion de España. Or something like that. She said we couldn’t have NIEs yet as we weren’t resident, but Sandy appeared to have one. I sent all the numbers to Inma and waited. After a while I rang her. Chulia, she said loudly and clearly to me, I will try to call the office in Almeria, I call you back. Eventually when I did, she said that the office was moving address, she was waiting to here what address they would be at. She would call me back. We didn’t hear for a while. With a rare flash of insight, I said to Sandy: I bet she fixes a meeting without asking if we can make it. Later that day, we, I got a message on my phone saying we had a meeting for Friday, a day when Sandy was travelling and I was in Madrid. It went like this:

Ima: You call me back tomorrow as this afternoon the office is closed.
Me: (next day) Can we ask for another meeting, maybe on a day we could do?
Inma: No, you can’t ask for a meeting. It doesn’t work like that, you can’t ask for a meeting, they give you one.
Me: Well, that will be hard if Sandy isn’t here.
Inma: Maybe Monday, Tuesday.
Me: He isn’t here, he’s travelling. He has to work, you know.. Friday?
Inma: Well, I’ll send a mail to Almeria and say Friday, or the next week, then I’ll have to wait and hear back.

I called back a few days later. The secretary said, as she always does, Inma has just gone out for a coffee, call her back. Can she call me back? No, she’s very busy, best if you call. When we spoke, it went like this:

Me: Inma, I just thought I’d find out about that meeting in Almeria.
Inma: Yes? I have sent them a mail. But it’s fiesta this week, on Wednesday in all Spain and on Thursday in Albox.
Me: Yes, that’s why I thought I’d check about Friday? When we requested the meeting?
Inma: Oh. Well, maybe they won’t have time before Friday, or perhaps they’ll give you the meeting.
Me: But how will I know? You’re closed, aren’t you?
Inma: Yes, maybe the police will be closed, and we are closed. Then maybe it will be the week after.
Me: (giving up) OK! Bye!

While I was in Madrid, Sandy cheered himself up by buying a quad bike, which is the thing to have round here. Clearly, it is not going to get him to Madrid, or even Almeria airport, but it evidently made him happy. However, before long I had the lady from the shop on the phone. She said they needed his NIE number before they could “matricular” the bike. I said I wasn’t sure we had it on an official piece of paper. I offered her the “empadronimiento” which is a different piece of paper, in this case issued by the Mayor, which says we live at our address. I think, from what Sylvia said, that it’s a kind of census document. We certainly managed to buy the car with it. She said she would try that, meanwhile, I called Pedro, the lawyer, and asked if he had anything with the NIEs on it. He was on holiday, but said he would look and leave something at his parents’ house in Vera. Meanwhile, the quad lady said no, the empadronimiento would not do, it was out of date, and we needed to get her a “hoja de trabajo” – an official piece of paper of some kind – updating it. It is fiesta, so no go until Thursday, when I will have to go and queue up at the Ayuntiamento again.

Meanwhile, I found a letter from September, which mysteriously turned up, having been lost in the post until now. It was from the insurance company, cancelling our insurance. I called them and asked why; they said the bank had rejected the direct debit for no apparent reason, meaning we have had no insurance since June. I rang BBVA (ring us with any inquiry, it says on our statements), to ask why. The call centre said, you have to go into the branch for that. Later, I tried to buy some new insurance. No, you have to go into the branch, the call centre said. Hmm, but as it is fiesta, that will have to wait. As Sylvia kept saying to me, sarcastically, “African rhythms, African rhythms.” She is half French, half Spanish, and a fast, clever ex- journalist, so she has her perspective. I also love her: she is like me, only more so when many of my friends are like me, but less so, which makes me feel like hard work. Sylvia knows the answers to things, or looks them up at speed on the Internet, and she is the first person, I think, who tells me what to do and takes over – because I am the foreigner, and she is the native, but she is also a native who has been a foreigner. It is excellent: I can do what she says and stop worrying. “Tu tranquila,” she says to me, on more than one occasion.

When I got back, the painters were still at work in the house. They seemed to have done one window, maybe two, in a day. I mentioned to Juan that at this pace, they would be living with us for months. He said yes, they have their rhythm, but they do a very good job, which they did: the windows were a work of art. The rhythm is slow at times: nothing seems to happen for ages. You feel out of control and want to push things ahead, but you can’t. Then suddenly, it all happens very fast. The fiesta is over, the workmen appear, they work like crazy and it is all finished. And then it slows down again.
I feel maybe I am slowing down too, just a fraction. Sylvia ticked me off for not being assertive enough on the phone. “You don’t sound rude at all in Spanish,” she said. She taught me to say “¡Es inadmissible! firmly, (which I did, later, with Vera Gas who had failed to deliver gas bottles on either of the two days they said they would deliver.) I thought about this: it is true, I am not as assertive, or rude, as I would be at home. But then, I am still in the courtship days, and astonished at my luck. I am surrounded by this intense landscape, saturated with light and heat – you can hardly expect it to work like Madrid, let alone London. I got up at 7.30 and swam in the pool, surrounded by the mountains, which at that time are already swimming in the coming heat, the vines and the olives and almonds already sunlit. I feel astonished, and also grateful. After all, it is their remarkable country. Nothing gets delivered when you expect it, but the delivery, when it comes, is often quite breathtaking. It is hard to be rude, when I feel I might simply be missing a beat, not catching the right rhythm of the dance.