It’s been a big week for us. We got furniture, gas, and the past tense, in that order. For furniture, we did what one-stop, low-income shoppers do all over the world: go to IKEA. Here they call it EE-KAY-UH. They also call Euros AY-OO-ROS, for that matter. When they say “Nike,” they try too hard to remember how exactly American’s pronounce things and say it as if it rhymes with “bike.” It’s easy to learn to pronounce Spanish, because each letter only has one sound; in other words, there’s no way they would have words like “wood” and “food” that don’t rhyme. Of course, it’s a killer to learn the grammar, so we can pronounce things that make no sense correctly. When Spanish speakers learn English, they get the grammar very quickly, but they can’t say anything the way they want to pronounce it. Or so they tell me.

But anyhow, we went to IKEA. This was our second trip, actually, to the place. The first time, we went on a Saturday of a holiday weekend, or, as they call them here in Spain, a weekend. A saint had either been born or died, or maybe had his bar-mitzvah. Traffic was standing still on the highway. “Where could everyone be going?” we wondered. “Aren’t they all away for the holiday?” No, no they weren’t. They were headed to IKEA. (A friend of ours left his house a little later, encountered a twelve mile backup, and went home to read the paper. Sure, that’s a great plan, if you can read the paper.) Everyone, that is, except for the people who were already there. People were parked on sidewalks and grassy knolls. Inside, it looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve. They were out of everything except a few shower curtains.

So we went back on a Monday. It was empty and quiet. We bought up everything that was dirt cheap, a characteristic that tends to correlate, at IKEA, with primary colors and lots of plastic. The apartment looks something like a nursery school classroom – orange bathmat; red, blue, and yellow rugs; bright blue tables; a dresser made out of that weird translucent cardboard that the post office makes mail cartons from – but we no longer have to sit on the floor. Done and done.

But as the old song goes, of course, a bunch of plastic chairs is not a house, and a house is not a home, without hot water. That was a mystery, too, especially since the gas company’s phone reps were reluctant to speak anything but Catalan. If you know some Spanish and think that, by extension, you’ll understand some Catalan in the way that you know what people from Toronto are talking about, you are wrong. Catalan is a language that, to us, sounds like it was created by capturing a lost American, finding out what Spanish words he knew, and then changing those words to a mix of Italian and French. Then they added about 43 pronouns that can all mean the same thing, depending on context.

We had given up on calling them, and then our portera, Gloria, got involved. Her job, as we´ve mentioned before, is something of a cross between doorman and guardian angel, depending on how much she likes you. We think she likes us a lot. She called the gas company and found out that we needed a technician to come do something or other. It took her about a week to find one, which means that if we didn’t have her then we would have gotten our gas hooked up shortly after President Nader nominated Ken Lay to be Secretary of the Treasury.

The guy – Xavi - came by, all smiles, and looked under our sink. He said something in Spanish, then opened the window, leaned out, and turned a valve from closed to open. “Ya teneis gas,” he said, which means, “That’s going to run you 100 Euros anyway. Not too shabby for 12 seconds of work.” Then he poked a pipe cleaner into some of the stove burners and something on the water heater, took the money, thanked us (who wouldn’t?) and left. Never mind that the gas company doesn’t have our names or bank account number.

If those sound like big victories, think about this one: the past tense. It probably doesn’t sound very exciting to you all, but it is to us. Our lives have been like a cross between Memento and The Sopranos. If something happens to us, and then later we want to tell someone about it in Spanish, forget it. Either we go over the story right then or not at all. We had even thought about carrying a Polaroid, just so we could make ourselves understood when we needed to report on an event that had already finished happening.

When we did talk about the past, it came out like this: “So I’m in the store, right? And I says to the guy, ‘I’m in here two days ago and you tell me that I can return the radio if I don’t like it. Then, yesterday, the radio doesn’t work. And now, you tell me I can’t return the radio without a receipt. But two days ago, you don’t give me no receipt. So what can I do?’” You can’t talk like that for very long before you have to off somebody for the disrespect, if you know what I’m saying, then head down to the Bada Bing for a relaxing drink with the fellas.

The other thing that happens when you’re locked in to the present tense is that you can’t justify your requests with anything but wants and needs. There are no real reasons. You can’t say, “The woman on the phone told me to call today,” or “I just moved into an apartment and…,” you have to say, “I want gas in my apartment.” You can’t explain that you were in the store a few days ago and they had no cheap radios in stock and you asked the other guy when they would be in and he told you that they would be in today. If you say all that in the present tense, you sound like you’re just thinking out loud: “I’m…I’m in the store…you…you don’t have radios.” It’s just easier to forget about ever having come in before and act like you’re four, which is easy if you live in a nursery school: “I want a radio. I need a radio. Give me a radio, please.”

Because if you don’t, Paulie Walnuts over here is going to break your freaking legs.