“¿Habla inglés?
Living in the Canary Islands for fifteen years, you might reasonably expect my Spanish to be pretty good by now.
I have even taken two Spanish courses.
And yet, somewhere between my brain and my mouth, Spanish occasionally takes a completely unexpected detour.
My children know this.
In fact, my daughters have more or less established a family rule:
Mum should not be allowed to speak Spanish in public without supervision.
I would like to say they’re exaggerating.
Unfortunately, I have evidence to the contrary.
The Pharmacy Incident
I have psoriasis, and one day I went into the pharmacy looking for a comb.
Simple enough.
The Spanish word I needed was peine.
The Spanish word that came out of my mouth was…
pene.
For anyone unfamiliar with Spanish, I had not asked the pharmacist for a comb.
I had asked for a penis.
My daughter Alex immediately realised what had happened.
“MUM! SHUT UP!”
Of course, at that point I was still trying to explain what I wanted.
Somewhere in the confusion, what should have been a perfectly innocent trip to buy something for my hair was rapidly heading towards the possibility of me being offered a battery-operated man instead.
I avoided that pharmacy for months afterwards.
You’d think I would have learned from this.
You’d be wrong.
The Graveyard Dust Incident
Back in 2018, both my sons were visiting from Norway, and we had our horses at our finca.
The horses, being horses, had decided that the wall was apparently optional and had kicked part of it down.
We needed to repair it quickly.
The girls were at home looking after the horses, which meant I had no translator with me.
This was mistake number one.
My sons and I went to buy bricks and cement.
Bricks weren’t the problem.
Cement was.
I tried mortado. The clerk looked confused.
So I decided to explain.
Now, the Spanish word for cement is cemento.
The Spanish word for cemetery is cementerio.
These are dangerously close together when your brain has already abandoned you.
I needed cement powder.
What I apparently asked the poor man for was:
“Polvo de cementerio.”
Cemetery dust.
I can still remember the clerk’s face.
He went white.
And really, can I blame him?
A foreign woman had walked into his shop with two men, asked for bricks and then started insisting that she also needed powder from a cemetery.
Urgently.
Somewhere back at the finca, two horses were tied up beside the crime scene they’d created, completely unaware that their wall demolition had apparently sent their owner into the building trade looking for ingredients for a dark ritual.
My sons have never let me forget it.
And when my daughters heard the story, their response was basically:
“Yep. One of us needs to go with Mum EVERY time.”
Fair.
Fifteen Years Later…
So, no, after fifteen years in the Canary Islands, I am still not fluent in Spanish.
I understand quite a lot.
I can usually make myself understood.
But occasionally my brain reaches for a Spanish word, opens the wrong drawer, grabs something vaguely similar and sends it straight out of my mouth before anyone can stop it.
Peine becomes pene.
Cemento becomes cementerio.
And suddenly I’m no longer a perfectly respectable woman trying to buy a comb and repair a horse wall.
I’m a woman wandering around Fuerteventura looking for battery-operated men and graveyard dust.
Perhaps my daughters have a point.
I really shouldn’t be allowed out without a translator.
🤣🤣🤣💜
With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,
— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫
My new song “Silenced,But not broken ” is on all streaming platforms.
Lyrics video :
https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken
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