Elena, his sister, was going to stay with him all August. Maybe it would bleed into September a little, she warned, and Andrés said that was fine. What else could he say? The house in Almería was as much hers as it was his, on paper—they’d inherited it from their father twenty years earlier. Andrés and Elena were French (they grew up in Paris), but their parents had been Spanish, Spanish exiles. When it had become possible for their father to go back to Spain, he’d bought a house in his hometown, a few blocks from the sea, and Elena had taken up the habit of visiting for a week every summer, with her husband and her daughter. Andrés would come as well, stay longer. After their father’s death, Elena had kept treating the house as a vacation home, but then she divorced, and her daughter grew up, and what the daughter, Sofía, didn’t tell Elena was that she found it sad now, coming to Almería to “explore her Spanish roots” without her grandfather around. After she graduated high school, no one went to Almería for a while. Andrés often daydreamed about retiring there, but one evening, after a tedious parent-teacher conference (he taught high school Spanish), he had an epiphany, as he called it (Elena, when Andrés wasn’t around, called it a breakdown), and decided not to wait, to quit his job right there and then and move to this sunny place where a house was paid for, where he could live on his savings for a while.
Moving from Paris to the south of Spain in the middle of the school year, he felt like he’d won the lottery. Off-season was for the rich, wasn’t it? Except he hadn’t won the lottery. His savings ran out after two years and he now worked remotely for a French publisher, cranking out schoolbooks and conversation manuals for French people traveling the Spanish-speaking world. Every two years, he had to update his manuals, come up with new dialogues, keep them fresh. This was more work than people imagined, and more creative, too: he had to come up with situations, with characters. Well, he didn’t have to come up with characters exactly, but he wanted to, and so he did. People, even his editor, didn’t notice their existence, they weren’t named, but Andrés knew who they were: the horny exchange student, the overachieving dad who wanted to make the most of his only week off and ruined the vacation for the whole family, the gregarious pilgrim on his way to Santiago. There were specifics, and an order to respect—you couldn’t get around the “Where Are You From?” section, for instance, the “Book a Hotel Room” or the “Car Accident” bits (even though he couldn’t imagine anyone taking out their conversational Spanish book in such situations), the essential “At the Bar” (a dialogue in which the horny student shone bright)—but within these compulsory sections, provided he included a few mandatory vocabulary words, Andrés had some freedom. He could give his characters a voice. Or that’s what he told himself, at least.
He had to complete his least favorite section that week, “Flirting.” You had to have a “Flirting” section in conversation guides. To fuck abroad was one of the main reasons people traveled. Andrés always felt a little uneasy when he reached that point in the process: he, the overeducated Baltasar Gracián scholar, putting himself in the shoes of a twentysomething French idiot trying to get laid in San Sebastián. He’d tried to turn it around every possible way, to have a woman character initiate the flirtation, to have it happen in a museum. He’d tried to make it a lesbian thing, tried to make it a thing between older intellectuals, but that was even worse. And his editor had said no. He wanted a douchebag and a pretty girl to resist that douchebag. “But if she resists the douchebag,” Andrés had said, “we’re admitting that our vocabulary and compliment suggestions are insufficient.” “Well of course they are,” his editor had said. “You’re not rewriting here. Just a pedagogical tool to learn a little Spanish.” Andrés hadn’t gotten the reference. He’d last read a book written after 1985 in 1989 (Deleuze’s ). Hadn’t flirted in years. Last dated in the eighties. Would’ve taken holy orders if he’d believed in the thing. The monastic lifestyle had always appealed to him, was indeed very close to his own—small meals, a lot of contemplating, a lot of silence. Andrés did like women, but he’d decided it was easier to do without them. One had broken his heart long ago, and hadn’t even noticed, didn’t know it to this day (she was still Elena’s best friend). The way Andrés saw it
