We had handled guests who didn’t function before 2:30 in the afternoon and guests who wrote on us and even a boarder who never wound up paying for his two weeks here. But four guests at once? It sounds just plain crazy. Matt, Peg, Sue, and Jeff rolled in like a basket full of puppies one lovely Saturday morning. The magnificent Barcelona sunlight glinted off their fake teeth, and shadow cast by Matt’s luggage told us that this would be a different sort of visit.

By now we have sufficient experience with red-eyed travelers that the sequence is simple: they fly all night, show up giddy and swearing they’re not tired, eat about six croissants, and promptly fall asleep for five hours. These four said no to convention and insisted that they be taken outside and marched around to stay awake until a normal sleeping hour. Thus began something of a week-long performance, in which the main characters had names as phony as their bridgework and specialized in pulling the cameraman – Jeff, who really did bring a big video camera all over town – aside and muttering something about the rest of us to remember the trip by. We still haven’t actually seen any of the tape, so we can’t say much more than that.

They managed to keep themselves up until after midnight, when Matt decided that he missed some of the six pairs of shoes he had lugged across the ocean, and we returned to the casa for bed. The rest of the week was a perfect example of good guesting: each of them set reasonable goals to challenge themselves, thereby lending some structure to the week. Sue tried to consume all the hot chocolate in Spain. Matt wanted to bring home his ceramics for everyone he knew and all of their first and second cousins. Jeff only wanted to check his e-mail and buy some scallops, but he failed on both counts. And Peg, always easygoing, was happy just to watch a little male porn.

Like all our other visits, much of the time was spent preparing to eat, cooking, finding restaurants, and being too full to remember what it was we were going to do after we ate. Jeff made us a couple of nice risottos and some delightful lenguado, which is what you get is you ask enough people what “Dover Sole” is in Spanish. It’s not quite Dover Sole, but it’s flat, and Jeff is very good at cooking flat fishes. His special flat fish recipe goes mighty nice with a round of good old American Scrabble, a contest that he and Sue purport to play in jags of three or four games in a night. The practice paid off, as Sue wiped up the board with the rest of us. I think she might have doubled my score.

Another night, Matt and Peg took everyone out to dinner, where I fared better. We went to a restaurant called Cal Pep, which I think means “Joe’s House.” It is a small place near the harbor that looks, upon entry, like a tiny bar with a glass case full of funky shellfish behind it. We were led into a tiny hidden dining room with four tables and heavy wooden beams in the ceiling. We ordered the house wine and asked for some menus.

The house wine request went ok. But menus? Not happening. “We’ll bring you an assortment,” said the waiter, and he was gone. Since none of us know exactly what the names of the different shellfish were, I suppose the menu wouldn’t have helped. In other words, we can say, “We’ll have the clams,” but when there are four kinds of clams behind the bar, you need a specialized seafood vocabulary that isn’t taught in intermediate level Spanish classes. We had the assortment.

The assortment consisted of the following:

• three of the four kinds of clams, some cooked in garlic and others in tomatoes
  
• tiny fried eels? minnows? Something, with a fried egg smashed around in it. I assure you it was good.
  
• fried baby squid
  
• more squid, cooked with onions and tomatoes
  
• some funny things that looked like angry shrimp with big claws, with onions
  
• a lot of toasted bread with tomato rubbed on it
  
• a very nice tortilla patata
  
• and Crema Catalana.
  
  When we ordered dessert, Matt had to cause problems and insist on his coffee with it, not after it. The waiter smiled politely, zipped off, and then returned carrying a cup on a saucer. He walked slowly as if he was trying not to spill it. When he got to our table, he stumbled, flipping the cup – empty, of course – over with the handle hooked on his pinky. Matt jumped up and screamed like a stuck pig; to his credit, it did look exactly like he was about to be scalded with coffee, and before even getting to taste his dessert. This was very upsetting, as he and Peg were planning to pay and we feared he might run off immediately. But it was just a little Barcelona humor and he weathered it well, and the only sad part is that it wasn’t on tape. The rest of the coffee came without incident. Nothing else exciting happened on that evening until Peg found the pornography mentioned above.
  
  Later in the week, we took the train to Montserrat, where the Moreneta, or Black Virgin icon, is kept. People line up to rub their fingers on the statue, darkened by years of burning candles. The church in which the Moreneta sits is so cool, in fact, that you could forget that you are on a big jagged mountain with views of Barcelona in one direction and France in the other. For example, there is a carving of Jesus recessed into the wall of one chapel with eerie eyes that follow you around the room, so that’s sort of neat. We walked back and forth in front of it for twenty minutes, lit a candle in a chapel that is supposed to help people bring fewer shoes on vacation, took a little hike, and headed for the train.
  
  On the way home, Jeff, probably overcome by the power of the almighty, put in his fake teeth. Anyone could tell that he was deep in thought about spiritual matters, and it looked nice, so I took a picture of him. Two teenage girls nearby said, “Oh, those Americans are making fun of that poor man’s teeth.” And so we were. But we weren’t making fun later, when Jeff hitched up his pants and fixed our cranky telephone. He did such a good job that it even stayed fixed until nearly 36 hours after they all left.
  
  The visit was only a week long, but that was all it took for everyone to realize what a good idea we had: they all began hatching plans to move here themselves. For once, Matt appeared the most serious of anyone, but that might have been because he was the only one who brought all of his winter and summer outfits, as well as raingear, ski boots (not counted as one of the six pairs of shoes), two kinds of flip flops and, inexplicably, a tennis racquet. Sue spent a little time working out what it would cost her to live here if she rented out the second floor of Matt’s bag to sleep in, and Peg left a John Grisham novel, so we think she may be coming back for that. And Jeff kept quiet and got all the machinations on film, grinning slyly through his phony teeth all the while.