One afternoon about 10 days after after the hotel night, I was walking to get some dinner when I encountered a woman I had met before. She had stopped me once to ask for five pesos, and since I didn't have that exact amount of change at the time, I gave her 10 pesos. We chatted a bit, she told me her name, N., then we basically said goodbye and went our ways. This night N got my attention again as I walked past, we talked a little, and then she asked me to invite her to dinner with me. I thought that was an odd way to ask, but I did, explicitly inviting her to join me. We went to McDonald's, ate our food, talking more or less the whole time, and then she asked if I would pay her to clean my apartment the next day. Since some of my neighbors occasionally had their apartments cleaned for them, I wanted to try it, too, so I agreed, for 200 pesos.
The next day, she came by my apartment, and after we chatted a bit, she asked about cleaning supplies, and I showed her my meager supply of brushes, brooms, and soaps. She started cleaning the apartment. I went back to my computer. Most of what she did amounted to cleaning the floor, i.e., sweeping the rooms and mopping at least the kitchen. Afterward I realized that she'd thrown away some minor things that I wasn't done with, and she didn't put everything back where she'd found it, which was annoying because some of the things are in a specific order determining which to use next. The annoyances were minor, though, and for a mere 200 pesos, the floors were fairly clean, and the cleaning experience overall was worthwhile, a learning experience. We did agree to meet the next day, when I would take her to a movie.
By this time I was already feeling like she was just sucking up to the rich foreigner (the phrase un tío rico, 'a rich uncle', came to mind), but I wanted to spend time with a local woman, and I hoped to practice speaking Spanish with her.
We had originally agreed to see a certain movie in a certain theater, but when me met, N decided she'd rather see a different one, in a different theater. On the way to the second theater, we stopped for dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, Taquitos Acapulco, a taco restaurant that also serves Italian food, the same place where I met T, recounted in my story about movie night. I ordered my usual spaghetti, while she had seafood --¬ some kind of crab or shrimp -- and a margarita or two. She left a lot of her food, which I didn't appreciate, but I also didn't say anything about it. We talked, too, but I had trouble understanding her, and I attributed my lack of comprehension mostly to the noise level in the restaurant, with music from different places, TVs blasting, and a bustling crowd of customers and passersby, along with all the usual sounds of traffic.
From the restaurant we went to see the movie, one I'd already seen in English, so this time we saw it in Spanish, for her benefit. We both enjoyed the movie, and when it was over, we looked around in the mini-mall where the theater is. She wanted to look in a clothing store, and started picking clothes off the rack, and when she carried them to the cashier, I told her I wasn't going to pay for them. She was unhappy with me, but we left the store and went back outside to the street and walked along the Costera (the main coastal street around the bay), still trying to talk the whole time. I suggested going to the beach for the quiet, so after walking further down the Costera, we turned off toward the beach. We walked in the sand on the edge of the water for a while, then sat down to talk. The waves were pretty noisy, too, but it was still quieter than the street was. We talked some more, but it was getting more and more frustrating. She'd say something, in her fast-talking way, often with her head turned away from me, and I wouldn't understand what she said, and when I asked for clarification or repetition, she'd say something else, and on and on like that. I even told her that it was frustrating not to be able to understand her, and she seemed to be frustrated too, but she acted as if it were all my fault, whereas I thought she should have put some effort into slowing down or at least speaking directly to me. In any case, we gave up sitting on the beach and walked back to the Costera. She said she would take me to her apartment, which sounded promising. It was a block or two away, but when we got there, she stopped next to a construction truck on the street in front of a condo or hotel or apartment complex, put her bags in the truck cab and locked its doors. She said guests weren't allowed in the apartments, and although it seemed like a huge lie to me (after all, why else did she bring me there?), I didn't question it with her. We walked back to the Costera and started talking about what to do next. I decided I wasn't ready to meet up with her again very soon, so when she asked about meeting the next day, I said no, which she wasn't happy about. We said goodnight and went our own ways.
I wasn't eager to ever see N again, but she knocked on my apartment door a few weeks later, having, uninvited, let herself into the courtyard through the unlocked gate, apparently just to ask about renting the empty apartment below mine. I got my landlady, who talked with N for several minutes about the apartment, its availability and features. After N left, I talked with my landlady, who speaks English well, and she said N talks like a crazy person, changing topics midstream, repeating things she's said before, sometimes more than once, and acting like she hadn't heard what had been said already. This confirmed my own experience, but came from someone who's had a lot more experience with people and for whom there was no language barrier.
In the overall scheme of things, not only was there no connection between me and N, but there was a barrier between us that, at the moment, doesn't seem worthwhile to me to try to breach.
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