Twins Of Habit

‘You know what, I don’t care! I want my patatas bravas. That’s what I’m gonna order.’ Stephen pushed the menu back with decisive finality and looked expectantly at the rest of us gathered around the Spanish table for the last time on our Alcalá stint.

‘I don’t know yet’ I answered him as his look settled on me – ‘I still may need my translator’ I continued with a wink in my voice. Stephen – the professional – had faithfully been my menu translator since we’d arrived on Wednesday. It’s certainly good to travel with translators and interpreters.

With profuse apology, Stephen launched into a rapid-fire translation of the tapas menu, but we needn’t have bothered – in all likelihood I would be ordering exactly what Leïla was setting her heart on. By our fourth and final day in this little ancient Spanish city, my colleague and I had discovered that we not only were perfectly happy to travel like a pendulum between the restaurant we discovered on our first night and the tapas bar we ventured into on our first lunch but also that we had a knack for ordering the same food. The only culinary exception to our oscillation and mirroring came in the form of periodic sprints to the San Diego Coffee Corner in the plaza outside the Universidad d’Alcalá, where we would order wildly different caffeinated experiences off the coffee menu.

Tonight was no different. After Stephen had duly explained his way through Rusty’s Tapas Bar menu, Leïla ordered and I – thinking it would have been helpful to learn the Spanish for ‘the same’ at the outset of our trip – repeated her order – seeking to emulate her proficient Spanish accent.

In retrospect, I should have learned the Spanish for ‘I’ll share with her’ instead of ‘the same,’ and indeed, our kind waiter tried to shield us from the onslaught of food we were unwittingly setting ourselves up for – but linguists are as stubborn as artists and we stuck to our orders.

An hour and several platters of food later, we sat teetering over our final orders of huevos y gambas, jamón, and the totally underestimated field of patatas bravas that now stared menacingly up at Stephen from under their blanket of mayonnaise and piquant red sauce. Stubborn about being stubborn, we fended off our waiter who sought to protect us once again by removing our unfinished plates.

‘Pare! Por favor’ came Leïla’s sudden and somewhat surprising plea to the waiter who stood poised to sweep in and relieve us of the remaining challenge before us. I glanced over at Stephen who suddenly looked slightly off-color as he stared into his sea of patatas bravas. Alice, across from him, just looked mildly perplexed by Leïla’s outburst. I looked down at my empty plate – unsure of what to do – and actually not totally linguistically clear either about what had just transpired between us and the waiter.

Everyone laughed and he left us to our mission. Alice and Stephen looked at Leïla expectantly – as though she had just offered to finish off her own and everyone else’s food. I looked at the three of them expectantly – awaiting the translation.

We all made a move of solidarity in spearing up a solitary patatas each from off Stephen’s giant plate. But the valiance quickly subsided and instead, we spent the next half hour finishing off the bottle of Crianza and sharing stories of our geographical histories.

I told them of my childhood back-and-forth between California and Geneva – then turned my story into a question for Stephen. I was still trying to understand this Mancunian’s taste in foods – where was the love of patatas bravas stemming from? After he’d told the story of ‘moving to Mallorca for a laugh’ – a tale laced with veiled bitter-sweetness – Leïla began to share her equally eclectic background between Tunisia and Paris – with a touch of Vietnam and Germany.

We turned to Alice. Her muted American accent hid a hint of a Southern drawl – one that she could lay on thick on demand in an instant – but betrayed a more assorted background than simply North Carolina. She had picked up Spanish at a women’s soap factory in Bolivia – and Arabic on a whim – a bet with a colleague.

Where my own Mancunian roots brushed shoulders with Stephen’s, Alice’s German au pair days intersected with a fragment of Leïla’s story – and mine. Her North Carolina hometown of New Bern was an echo to my host country’s capital city.

We were a motley crew – a tapas bar of heritage and histories. And around the tapas table, our heritages mixed like the tomatoes and allioli of the patatas mountain before us.

This tapas table was laid not just with our own personal histories but with a rich history in its own right. The appetizers were designed to encourage conversation and the Spanish ‘tapar’ – meaning ‘to cover’ – seemed the appropriate language to convey the geographies and cultures the four of us had covered between us.

The Crianza emptied and the mountain of patatas bravas reduced to a mere hill, I began to zone out. Veering on food and wine comatose, I was taking in the scene I was a part of as though from one step removed.

I saw a table of strangers turned friends. Brought into communion like queso con anchoas. We sat around the table – once strangers with unknown and different stories – now polishing off patatas in an unexpected familiarity.