The afternoon that I moved all my belongings from the room with no window in Callao -- the heart of the red-light district -- to the piso in the barrio of Puerta del Angel, Claudia welcomed me with the familiar saying, “Mi casa es tu casa, tía.” The very next morning she scolded me for leaving my shoes under the coffee table overnight. Claudia was just nineteen, away from her hometown of Gijón, Asturias for the first time. Her parents were traveling prison guards who bought the flat to live in once they retired to Madrid. Until then, Claudia was acting as tenant and landlord, and seemed fearful of any mistakes she might make as her parents’ proxy. We reached the rental agreement in English, but after that we spoke only Spanish. No, it was more like a stutter somewhere in the meta-language of communication, something akin to Spanglish but a distant cousin at best. I only heard her English on cleaning days – she was frugal and tidy like a good Spanish daughter -- when she cranked up Bob
Milan Kundera wrote that "being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood." These are the stories of my tightrope walking and the joy of falling.