Hostel life had finally worn me down. It wasn’t one dramatic incident. It was the accumulation of small things: people cooking at midnight, alarms going off before dawn and the bunk above me complaining every time its occupant moved.
Barcelona no longer felt like a place I was passing through. My Spanish course still had some time to run and I wanted a desk, a door I could close and perhaps a night without being woken by somebody searching for a phone charger.
A girl at the language school knew of a small apartment near the coast that was available for a few weeks. She warned me that it wasn’t luxurious, which was fine. By then my standards were fairly modest. The mention of a balcony and a partial sea view did most of the selling.
The apartment was brighter than I expected. The furniture had seen better decades and the kitchen was small, but it felt calm. You could see the sea from the balcony if you stood in the right place and looked past the building opposite.
Then I tried to open the bedroom window.
The handle turned, followed by a movement from the frame that didn’t seem intentional. The window opened slightly and refused to move any further. When I tried to close it, the top corner stayed where it was while the rest appeared to head in another direction.
The owner described it as “a little difficult.”
That was generous.
I could talk about classes, food and surfing in Spanish. None of this helped me explain that a window appeared to be coming away from its frame. I knew ventana, but not handle, hinge, seal or draught. I pointed at the relevant parts and made a series of movements with my hands which probably suggested that I wanted to fly the window rather than close it.
The owner understood that something was wrong. The problem was establishing what would happen about it.
I heard arreglar, which I knew meant repair. I also caught what sounded like presupuesto, a word I had seen but couldn’t place quickly enough. The rest of the answer went by at normal Spanish speed while I was still trying to remember the first sentence.
I left without knowing whether the window would be repaired before I moved in, after I moved out or at some distant point in the building’s future.
Back at the language school, the apartment viewing became an unofficial lesson. Several people in the class had rented rooms with similar problems. Between us, we assembled the vocabulary I had needed: marco for frame, manilla for handle, bisagra for hinge and cierre for the part that was supposed to keep the window closed.
The student who had told me about the apartment came from Alicante. Her parents had dealt with the same questions while improving an older villa further north and she showed me a page about replacement windows in Javea that explained the different frames and glazing used in coastal properties. It was more information than I needed for a short rental, but it finally helped me understand what the owner had been trying to say. The frame wasn’t being patched again. He was waiting for a quotation to replace the whole window.
The next viewing went rather better.
I asked whether the bedroom window would be replaced before the apartment became available. The sentence wasn’t elegant and I probably used the wrong tense, but the owner understood it without needing the hand movements.
He explained that the quotation had been accepted and the work was due the following week. I understood most of his answer. More importantly, I knew which part I hadn’t understood and could ask him to repeat it.
That felt different from simply surviving a conversation.
Much of learning Spanish had involved rehearsed situations. Ordering a coffee was easy because I knew what the waiter was likely to ask. The classroom was manageable because the teacher slowed down when everybody looked lost. An apartment viewing was untidy. The owner assumed I understood ordinary things that had never appeared in a lesson and I didn’t know which words I would need until I needed them.
I took the apartment.
The sea view was narrow and the kitchen had one useful knife, but the bedroom window closed properly by the time I moved in. The first evening was so quiet that I briefly wondered whether something was wrong.
I put my notebook on the desk and added presupuesto to the growing list of words I had learned outside the classroom.