Ok, so we promised some more about the other museum. This was a free part of the Fundacio Caixa Catalunya. Caixa Catalunya is a large bank that has its central office in a famous building, which is called both Casa Mila and La Pedrera. The wealthy Mila family commissioned Gaudi to build it for them, but then he wanted to put a big cross on top. The Milas thought that anarchists would wreck it, so they said no, and he quit.

But something funny has happened, and so you’ll have to hear about the art later. Yesterday, I arrived home to find Gloria in the hallway outside our apartment. To fully appreciate what it means to find someone in the hallway outside your apartment, you have to picture our hallway, which is maybe three feet wide. In Spanish, they say, “a meter.” She was with a workman and wanted to know if she could have her ladder back. We had borrowed it last week to hang up some lights.

I invited them in, and they decided that they would enjoy a quick look around before taking the ladder. It was while they did this that they noticed the half-completed wiring job. I had been stringing some sockets to the one functioning light fixture so that the whole living room, and not just the part in the corner where the original light was, would be habitable after, say, 5:30 in the evening.

But, lacking a drill, it was proving difficult to attach the new fixtures to the plaster ceiling. Ergo, a there were a lot of wires hanging around. The workman took one look at them and began to yell at me. Now, as I’ve described before, it is usually easy to deflect someone’s anger by using the powerful bubble of illiteracy. If someone is really mad, but you don’t quite know what for, it is easier to ignore. In that moment, I learned that this trick does not work if you are being yelled it in your own living room.

From what I caught, he said that the three sockets I was using would use way too much power and would cost us a bundle of Euros. In my experience, it is the workmen that wind up costing us most of the Euros, but so far he hadn’t asked for money. He didn’t like the paper lanterns that we were using to cover the bulbs - never mind that every apartment we’ve been in here has about five of them - because they would catch on fire. And he didn’t like that we were using 60-watt bulbs, for some reason.

Gloria translated some of what he said for me, and that made him even madder. “This isn’t China,” he said. Hard to argue with that. “So don’t speak Chinese. Immigrants need to speak Spanish. Don’t speak to him in English.” She began to translate that, but with the bubble rendered ineffective, I stopped her before he got even angrier. Now, understanding someone’s general meaning is one thing, but figuring out something coherent to say is quite another, and before I could manage that, he had told me that he would be back at noon the following day to fix the lights. I was to purchase more bulbs before that point. I got the idea that even if I had known Spanish, he would still have been coming back the next day. I said, “muchas gracias.”

I was going out, too, and we ran into each other in the entryway of the building. I said something small-talky to him in Spanish and he was very pleased. There he was, the grouchy Spanish workman from central casting. A rough exterior, but un corazon del oro. He told me I was a buen hombre for trying to learn Spanish and walked me to the subway.

The next day, he came much earlier than I expected him, around 12:15. He did not approve of the bulbs I had purchased, but like everything in Spain, it was a crisis of epic proportions that didn’t really matter. He made all sorts of noises and horrible faces before saying, “Es igual, es igual.” Then he went up on the ladder, screwed in the new bulbs, cut off one of my sockets and taped up the wires, and took down the paper screens. “Luz,” he ordered. I turned on the luz. The room was…well, not exactly bathed in light. More like misted. It looked like you might expect two bare bulbs hanging from exposed wires in a 400 square foot room to look: shadowy, sort of dark. “Muy bien,” he said. To emphasize his point, he went to the window and lowered the blinds. Windows here are all equipped with metal exterior blinds. When you put them down, it’s dark. The bulbs glowed but didn’t exactly light up the room. “Vale,” he said. This word literally means, “It’s worth it,” but it is used throughout Spain as a cross between, “All right?”; “Sure, why not”; “I’ll take it”; “Fine”; and “Whatever you want.” Like “dude” in English, it is possible to use this word, and only this word and, by varying your inflection, have an entire conversation.

“Vale,” I said, and that was that. No Euros. He told me to get some more nails and tack the wire to the ceiling, “poco a poco” - “little by little.” Since the wire is only about seven feet long, I’m not sure why I need to do this job little by little, but if I do it any other way, it is likely he’ll come by again and yell at me. A few weeks ago, we couldn’t find an electrician to save our lives. Now, they come by, unsolicited, and mess with our stuff. Before he left, he took a quick look around, and suggested that I move a few lamps. He also warned me that I shouldn’t be working at my desk without a lamp, and he took a desk lamp that had been sitting on the floor, put it on the desk, and plugged it in.

We don’t really want the lamps moved to the places he suggested, but it might be easier just to obey. Luckily, we’re still at the stage where every interaction is a Spanish lesson, and as long as we don’t get a bill at the end, it’s cool by us. Vale.