Joanne at the Post Office

Freelance writing in Spain had both advantages and disadvantages. It was easy to get my query letters read. The envelopes would arrive in an editorial office adorned, festooned even, with Spanish postage stamps. These envelopes always got opened and the contents read.

Mailing manuscripts was another story. For me, at least, a mailed manuscript meant a trip downtown to the post office, walking of course since there was never a place to park, and they never had stamps in the exact denomination I needed. Also, a Spaniard has a built in aversion to standing in line for anything. Instead a post office crowd consists of many unruly people, a seething cluster, a scrum, as each person tries to be served first. It’s fun to watch, but not to participate in.

On this particular overcast day, gray with precipitation, a cross between a fog and a drizzle, Joanne was taking a manuscript to the post office for me, and then going to pick up something at the office of Lookout, the English language magazine for the Costa del Sol. She made her way to the window and the clerk calculated the postage. Joanne always likes to pay to the last penny, pence, centavo, sous, dirham, whatever, so she fished out a handful of coins and began to carefully count them into the clerk’s outstretched hand. She was very pleased to have the exact change and pressed the last coin into his hand in triumph. Then she thought to herself, “Oh, oh, that was suggestive.” In Spain, everything a female does is suggestive.

“Oh, well,” she thought, and then left the post office for home. Several minutes into her journey she remembered the Lookout mission. With a mental, “Oh, darn,” she wheeled and found herself face to face with a little man who looked vaguely familiar. The little man was not short by Spanish standards, but he was several inches shy of Joanne’s six feet. He smiled shyly as she walked by him on her way to the magazine.

But halfway there she realized it was too wet. She had no car with her and it was beginning to rain. She wheeled again to go home after all, and there stood the same little man, same shy smile. Just a little wetter.

Joanne brushed by him again and returned home. It wasn’t until after she got home and was telling me the story that she realized that the little man was the post office clerk. Apparently Joanne’s pressing the coin into his hand drove him mad with passion and he just closed up his window and followed her out the door.

Such behavior would be bizarre here, but perfectly understandable in Spain.