Ben Hartley

The summer I turned twenty-eight, I spent a week in a rented room in a village outside Seville. Every evening the old woman on the next balcony said something to me, and every evening I smiled and said “sí”.

On the last evening her granddaughter told me what I had agreed to: a plate of her stew, a visit to her sister, and coming back next summer. I kept all three. The next summer I decided that this time I would understand the questions.

I had no Spanish at school. I learned it as a foreign language, as an adult, from books, a notebook, the radio, and years of talking to people.

Some things I learned the hard way. “Soy aburrido” tells the whole table that you are boring; I meant that I was bored. In Seville the final -s often turns into a breath, and for my first months at the market I could not hear a plural. I keep the list on my phone under “cosas que dije mal”.

I have lived in Seville since I was thirty-one. I cook with the radio on and repeat whole sentences after the presenter, and most mornings I walk along the river.