This Flor is really quite something, I said.
All the landladies we’ve dealt with have been quite something, said T.
That’s true, I said. However, I never shared an apartment with any of them.
It was different with Flor.
I have to say from the start that Flor was (and remains) the most tight-fisted person I’ve ever met. The fact that I ended up there resulted from a misunderstanding. The room was not available till the end of the month, and so after a short mail exchange I was about to say no thanks, when she suggested, you stay on the sofa in my living room, very cheap, and then who knows, maybe my current tenant will leave early, anyway, you arrive Saturday, have a look, make up your mind by Monday, no obligation.
I have only myself to blame, really.
And so, I arrived on Saturday and till Monday she was nice and welcoming. As soon as I paid the deposit, though, she revealed her true self.
Let’s start with this very deposit. She carefully inspected the banknotes. One of the fifty-euro bills was slightly ripped. I explained that I’d just got them from the ATM and she shouldn’t have any problems using it. That was not good enough.
She said she’ll guard this bill until the day of my departure and will return it to me with the rest of the deposit. That did not look too reassuring.
Ah, Flor, Flor. Being only a couple years older than me, this lady seemed to proudly possess the mentality of a generation (or two) ago. She had never worked in her life, never had a family, her parents were long gone, she didn’t have any friends. The object of all her affection was a large elderly cat whose main occupation was shedding hair. Six months later, unpacking my suitcase back home, I discovered that the damn animal’s hair was still all over my clothes. Flor fascinated me, in the grotesque way of Gogol’s characters.
When I’m out of here, I said, I’ll have to write something about her.
That would be great, said T.
In the course of the following days, Flor started to introduce the rules of living in her apartment. The laundry had to be done once a week, one load only. When I told her that I at least have to separate the whites and non-whites, she answered that no, no, no, I don’t have to, with modern detergents and modern washing machines like she has. This approach somehow explained the grey colour of the towels and bed linen she provided me with.
When locking the door, you always had to turn the key twice, whether you were outside or inside, whenever.
On the other hand, she allowed her cat, whom she never called anything other than “my Lucky”, to sleep on the top of the glass-ceramic cooker. Needless to say, I didn’t cook much in her kitchen. From the onset, her Lucky chose to ignore me, but Flor regarded his behaviour as a sign of noble benevolence. I take it that his attitude towards her other tenants had been far worse.
One day she sent me a message at six in the morning warning that her Lucky had made a mess in the hall, asking me to turn the light on and look under my feet. I only read it at eight, when I had already left for work and it was too late anyway.
Flor spent most of her time at home, with quick shopping excursions when it was not too hot (and, as it was hot all the time, I can’t imagine when exactly she did it). I never met her in the morning.
Arriving from work, I always saw her in the kitchen, where she apparently spent all her evenings and nights with the telly on till the early hours of the morning. She loved TV game shows. From time to time she would leave the kitchen in order to ask me something — like, what was the birthplace of Beethoven? — related to the programme being watched at the moment. Another thing she was watching was her tenant’s movements.
“Come and go whenever you need”, she’d say. “No problem. Total freedom here.”
Once I arrived home just before midnight. “Look, Cinderella is here!” Flor shouted from the kitchen while I was locking the door (double turn of the key, of course).
Another time, I came home quite tired and took a nap. After waking up at about 2 am, I decided that now was the time to have a full-scale sleep. When I saw her the next day, Flor seemed a bit upset (or, shall I say, a bit more upset than usual). I asked her what was up; she grumpily explained that I didn’t wish her a good night.
She’s in love, said T.
In the living room — where seemingly nobody had lived until I arrived, for all the furniture was covered with plastic, to protect it from dust and omnipresent cat hair — there was a cuckoo clock. From Black Forest, Flor boasted. I didn’t check. The clock was driving me nuts because its cuckoo action did not correlate with time at all. Flor asked me if the clock bothered me and I said yes, I would greatly appreciate it if the bird kept silent at least when I went to bed. So just before midnight Flor would come to the living room and switch the sound off, and then the next morning (I suppose) she would switch it back on.
After sleeping for twenty days on a sofa, I was finally given my “own” bedroom. Needless to say, as soon as I left the living room, the damn cuckoo was never quiet again. Flor chose that very day to make an announcement. She told me that I was a wonderful tenant, polite and helpful and that we got on so well...
Well, she is wrong there, said T.
Only on the last part, I said.
...but I have one teeny tiny flaw: I spend too much time in the shower. From now on, I should shower no more than once a day, like 99% of the Spanish population do. (I have no clue where she read that.) She said that, one time a day, I can stay in the shower as long as I want though. My argument that two short showers instead of one long one would save her more water didn’t convince her.
For a week, I considered various options (like getting a gym membership or going to the beach every night) but none of them seemed reasonable. With night-time temperatures reaching the thirties, there was no way I could continue like that. Finally, I confronted Flor and said that I wanted to make a deal with her.
Flor seemed surprised by my attitude.
“We’re talking deals now”, she observed.
I said that I needed my shower at least twice a day and was ready to pay my part of the water bill.
“But I don’t know what the bill will be. It’ll only arrive beginning of next month.”
I said by that time I’d be long gone.
And she knew it.
Many years ago, reading Treasure Island, I was struck by young Jim Hawkins blaming his mother “for her honesty and her greed”. Jim boy, surely you don’t mean that? How could anybody be both greedy and honest? Maybe in books like Treasure Island, but not in real life.
And here was Flor, just to prove me wrong.
“Oh well, you can have two showers a day”, she sighed at last. “But make them fast, will you.”
Very soon, as if to extract further value, shower-wise, from her amazing tenant, Flor asked if I knew how to change a shower head. The one I was using — twice a day, as she never failed to keep track of my bathroom activities — was leaking a bit. So she bought a new head and wondered if she could save on a plumber.
I said yes, I know, but I can’t do it with my bare hands. The old shower head was rusty as hell and refused to be unscrewed. Flor said, shall we look in the toolbox? This toolbox turned out to be just an old cardboard box filled with assorted bits of iron, also rusty. There was nothing useful on the surface, so I started to dig. Wait a minute, said Flor. She produced a couple of apparently new, in fact ten-year-old newspapers (from her secret stash of never-read periodicals, I guess — she never threw anything away) and I emptied the box on them. Still nothing.
“I need a wrench”, I said. “Or pliers. Or something.”
“Can we buy a wrench in a Chinese shop?” she asked.
“I guess.”
“Then hurry up, it closes in 10 minutes. Here, take a fiver.”
What a persuasive lady.
The nearest Chinese bazaar was just round the corner and, indeed, was about to close. I bought their last (!) adjustable spanner for under four euros and came back. It took me about five minutes to replace the shower head.
Flor refused to take the change.
“Keep it,” she said, “you earned it.”
With just over a euro in profit, I thought I should start considering a career in plumbing.
It was mid-July and not getting any cooler. In my room there was an air-con on the wall, but Flor did not provide me with a remote to turn it on. “If you need air conditioning, you can always go to the living room”, Flor said. So I did, from time to time, when I didn’t mind the dumb cuckoo.
Flor suffered too. According to her, she’s never liked the heat, and it’s always hot in this city, so she lives a miserable life here. She came here from the north of the country twenty years ago and bought this blasted apartment because she thought it was a sound investment, something that she is regretting now. It’s nothing like in my home town here, she would say: too hot, too noisy, too expensive...
“If you’re so unhappy, why don’t you go back?” I asked once when I couldn’t bear her whingeing any longer.
“I can’t. I would need to sell the flat then.”
Flor gave me some incomprehensible figures. I bought this apartment for so many millions of pesetas, she said, and now I couldn’t sell it for more than so many thousands of euros because, you see, the area is going to the dogs, that’s why I charge you so little.
I thought that if she expected to keep the number of zeros intact she was probably stuck there forever.
Once I was in the kitchen slicing an avocado.
“What a weird fruit!” noted Flor. “What is it?”
Wow.
“Avocado.”
“Never tried it in my life. What does it taste like?”
“Um... I can’t explain. It’s indescribable. Do you want a slice?”
“No.”
She explained that she didn’t like trying new things.
I proceeded with my dinner.
Ten minutes later (seeing me still alive):
“Can I try a little bit?”
“Be my guest.”
She hated it, suggested T.
(After a pause.) “It is not disagreeable.”
Not bad, considering, T. said.
The avocado pit, washed and dried (by me), was still on the table. Shiny, almost perfectly spherical, shame to throw away.
“Can we plant it?” asked Flor.
“Sure. If you want.”
“At what depth?”
I see you have a lot of use, said T.
“I don’t know really.”
“Very well”. Flor sounded disappointed. “I’ll ask Siri then.”
“Go ahead”, I muttered, incredulously.
“Siri, at what depth should I plant an avocado seed?”
There was a pause of a few seconds that seemed like an eternity.
“Seriously?” finally said Siri.
I almost slid off my chair. Then I washed my plate and excused myself.
Later the same night, just before going to bed, I found on the web instructions on how to grow avocado and sent it to Flor. She responded instantaneously. “We already did the first two steps.” The steps were: 1) take out the pit; 2) dry it. And I did it on my own before she even knew what the fruit was called.
She is funny, said T.
The next day, Flor procured four toothpicks (that’s generosity, that is, said T.) and watched in childlike fascination as I, following the instructions, suspended the avocado pit over a glass of water. Then she marked the day of Avocado Pit Soaking in her wall calendar. For a few weeks after my departure, Flor kept sending me avocado progress reports until it got rotten and she threw it away.
Since the day I told her I wouldn’t be staying for another month, Flor placed ads for the room and informed me daily how many applicants she got. She was judging them just like she judged the participants of First Dates, one of her favourite programmes. Most were rejected because she didn’t like their Whatsapp userpics. There were a lot of students but she accepted no students. A guy with a stable job phoned but he sounded Chinese. There was a young working girl but she had a cat and one could not possibly bring another cat to her Lucky’s house. One day a young, muscular man (she showed me his userpic later) even came to check out the room but she rejected him as too superficial.
You set the bar too high, T. said.
So I did. For example, once she asked me if I can accompany her to meet one Mohammad. This latter was coming from out of town to buy her mobile phone, the same one she had unsuccessfully tried to sell me for the last month or so. Flor said that Mohammad sounded very polite on the phone, shame she couldn’t understand him very well, but in the end they agreed on a time and place to meet. It was after dark, and she was a bit afraid to confront a stranger. While we walked towards the supermarket parking lot (that was the meeting place she specified), she suddenly asked:
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
No, I said. How could I possibly know that?
“Have you ever heard about Islamic terrorist bombs triggered by mobile phones?”
That’s just great, I thought.
In spite of her suspicions, she was determined to sell her mobile to the Islamist because he didn’t haggle. In the end, everything went smoothly, as far as I was concerned.
I was leaving Saturday morning. To my surprise, Flor decided to return the deposit on Friday. Sure enough, it contained my torn banknote.
For a few months, Flor continued to update me on her life. Her new tenant, an American, was nothing like me (but of course!), he never volunteered to throw out the cat litter, for example, nor could he master the art of running the washing machine; after moving in, he stopped working and spent all his time hanging around the house, and Flor did not like that at all. When the water bill arrived, no higher than normal, she wrote to apologise (with the photo attached) for restricting my access to the shower.
I replied monosyllabically, so as not to encourage her. Gradually, the stream of messages died down. That year’s season’s greetings seemed to be a logical point to stop.
Two years later, I got a message sent from an unknown number. Somebody enquired if I and my family were OK; adding later “you probably don’t remember me”. I did not apologise for not recognising her singular style; nor did I say anything along the lines of “How can I forget” (I can’t), just asked if she changed her mobile.
“Oh no,” she said, “I still have the one you know. But that is reserved for business only.” I assumed that I had been pro/demoted from “clients” to “acquaintances”.
Flor informed me that her trusty Lucky had died and her life had been even more miserable ever since. Although she got a new cat, Tiger, as a present (it remained unclear from whom), it could not fill the void in her life. And he’s nothing like her Lucky who was all love and tenderness, she said, this one is a vicious wild beast with razor-sharp claws and teeth.
A few photos of her new master were attached. I didn’t see a wild beast, just a frightened tabby kitten. Don’t worry, Tiger. Everything’s gonna be all right. You’ll tame Flor soon enough.
Of course, I didn’t tell her that.
