I met Guada's father today. For breakfast, para desayuno let's say. Con cafe au leché y tres fracturas. The coffee's bitter. Good coffee though, just the bitter kind. Y las fracturas, the sweet bread, like sugar croissants, they're good too. And cheap as hell. Twenty pesos for everything.
I'd seen the place the day before on the way back from Carrefour with a re-used plastic bag (they charge for bags, unlike the Chinese markets) of eggs and pasta and pasta sauce and one steak in hand, and I'd thought to myself, "Twenty pesos, not bad. No malo."
No, it wasn't bad at all. Ricardo regaled me with stories in English while Guada worked on her laptop doing blogger things. In his heart I saw it. In his eyes really, more clearly like crystal beady balls of excitement and passion with his hands that would wave everywhere and now and again came down on the rickety table for a good shake, and Guada would get angry - or not angry no, but annoyed because her laptop would shake too and she would stop typing and look at him and say in Spanish, "Papa! No manos! Por favor!" I didn't mind though. If anything, I enjoyed the delivery. The twinkle in his eye when he spoke. Ricardo was a storyteller at heart, I think. Or maybe it was just the coffee.
Either way, he smiled through it all as we exchanged cultural differences. He told me of the one time, on his new motorcycle. "No chain, transmission. A Honda 900X," he said. A big bike, and he ran a stoplight on the street on that thing only to see two police bikes waiting at the next one. "Just smiling and laughing to each other, looking at me, with their bibs on ready to eat," he said. When the next light turned green, they pulled him per of course, and he told them, "Let me go. I have money to bribe you , see? And I showed him," he said, "but I'm going to meet a girl at a tevas. I've been working on her for three weeks and were finally going to shag, so I'll sign whatever I have to sign, ticket, whatever, just please let me go!"
"And the officer looked and said to me," he said, "he said, 'Don't stop for any lights now, just go. If anyone stops you, tell them I said it was all right, and just go! Go!"
"Vamos! Vamos!" I said in a fit, smiling.
"Si! And that's how it is here. Us men, if it is to shag we'll always help each other." What a man. He's been to jail. He has a knife on him. He spent time in the Foreign Legion, and I think he likes me, likes talking to me anyway, but he smiles true. He's just hesitant because here I am, some foreign Yankee boy with a beard, and I'm staying with his daughter. There's a very subtle protectiveness that I just only so pick up on. I'm the sensitive type. That's how I know he's a father. And he simply loves to correct her. He's a translator. I think that's what I love most.
