Now I am waiting at the spot where the driver let me off — a stop made only for me, alone among everyone on our bus from San Sebastián to Pamplona in wanting to disembark here — for pickup by my next host family.
Locals are rubbernecking through their car windows as they pass me on this segment of highway that at this point doubles as village thoroughfare, addressing me in semi-comprehensible Spanish.
It would be so nice to take a lover here.
Anywhere, really.
Every place I go feels like it could be the setting of an indie film in which I show up there and entanglements ensue and we are all changed forever.
After I had been shown my room — so beautiful with those beams crossing the ceiling and an ensuite toilet-sink-shower room tiled tinily in cobalt, the only room on the ground floor — to let me be closest to guests’ dinner dishes and other needs, I guess — and called Ura, the Basque word for water — Alberta Clara brought me to the upstairs kitchen and gave me to prepare us all a lunchtime salad of tomato, cucumber, carrot and lettuce from the garden, tinned tuna, and a packaged beet that I watched her cut the mold from but later tasted had been deeply penetrated by the flavor of funk. She did other things in the kitchen and the surrounding rooms in which their family lives and kept up an instructive monologue in a mix of French and English on the difference between desayuno, almuerzo, cena, and comida, between cocina abajo or arriba. Very helpful, but amid the multitask she missed that I was leaving the peel on the cucumber until it was too late to correct to her preference, and we were both embarrassed.
One of my jobs here will be to feed the chickens, let them out, bring them in, and gather their eggs for our use. In my first attempt, under Ilari’s bored teen supervision, I dropped and broke one. Immediately the chickens crowded around to eat its oozing contents from the cracked shell and packed mud. Nice, Guys.
For la cena today we had omelets from the eggs I had collected and potatoes I had fried, thinking of the Spanish speakers I’ve been close with heretofore, almost all of them standing over hot oil in New York City like now I do in rural Spain.
Patatas, my hosts here said while we ate and I played point-to-a-new-vocabulary-word. “Papas” is strictly American — North, Central, South — they said, as is “con gusto.”
I find myself feeling some loyalty to the Spanish — Mexican — Ecuadoran — Salvadoran — I’ve learned from coworkers back home, resistance to inculcation in the ways of the point of origin. Not my king, I want to say.
