Page 9 of Cava with My Colleague

Presentation training starts next week. Carlos will be joining to help coordinate translation needs. See attached schedule.

* * *

Rebecca

“What is it?” Tessa asks.

I stare at the screen. Next week I’ll start training with Carlos. The countdown has officially begun.

“Nothing,” I say, shoving my phone back in my pocket. “Just work stuff.”

But my dry spell is suddenly the least of my problems.

4

Jade

If I thought Manny was going to let me slack off in my own home during our Wednesday evening Spanish lessons I was sorely mistaken.

When he arrives at my apartment he immediately sits at my dining room table, plopping down a container of food, and opens his phone to the timer. We usually meet in a café, but it’s raining out and Manny was already nearby, so now he’s getting to see my apartment for the first time.

At least he brought a bottle of wine.

I’ve been working with him since October, when my first few months in Madrid made it embarrassingly clear that high school Spanish and living-in-Spain Spanish are two entirely different languages.

Growing up in Texas had given me a false sense of confidence. Greeting someone in Spanish slips out without thinking—hola, gracias, lo siento—common enough back home that I’d convinced myself I had a head start. What I hadn’t accounted for was that the Spanish I’d absorbed growing up in San Antonio sounded, as I was informed repeatedly during my first weeks in Madrid, like a Mexican.

Not an insult. Just a fact that apparently required repeating.

Manny had been endlessly entertained by this when I first told him. He still brings it up occasionally when my vowels slide into something too flat and Texan, but then he gentles it by telling me stories about his time in college in the US and his own version of Spain-Spanish/Latin-Spanish kerfluffles.

Manny sets a timer for twenty minutes. I eye the food container, my stomach already grumbling.

I bet whatever it is it’s going to be great with the wine later.

My tutor leans back in his chair and looks around my apartment. He points over my shoulder and says in Spanish, “Tell me about this.”

I glance behind me. It’s the corkboard I bought when I moved in. I didn’t bring many decorative or sentimental things across the Atlantic with me, but I did bring a stack of pictures and my beloved instant camera. They’re my favorite shots from decades of travel, the most important people captured and displayed.

The camera sits nearby, a white retro-looking Polaroid, the third one I’ve owned since I got my first instant camera in China, a Fujifilm Instax.

I take the corkboard off the wall and walk through it with Manny, speaking in Spanish the whole time. “This is my friend Brenda, who I met in a hostel in Sri Lanka. She lives in DC now, I think. I haven’t spoken to her in a while. And this is an ex—maybe . . . how do you say—” I switch to English. “Fuckboy?”

“Fuckboy,” Manny repeats back to me with laughter.

Manny lets me keep speaking in English. “What, there’s no other word?” Of course, I’m familiar enough to know that there are tons of English words that Spanish people use—and other languages too; most of my coworkers say ciao when saying goodbye—but it’s fun to learn slang from Manny.

Manny thinks for a moment, and then grins and wiggles his eyebrows. “Picaflor.”

“Picaflor,” I repeat.

“Literally, it means hummingbird. Going from flower to flower . . .” Manny pinches his fingers together and imitates a bird looking for nectar.

Manny continues, “And what you had with him was just ‘un rollo.’”

“A roll? What the hell is that?” I ask.

“Just a brief, meaningless relationship with a picaflor, bonita.”