foxy ladies

Manu's madre came back from Germany last week and is staying with us until Thursday. She seems to think my Spanish has improved since she left in July, and she must not be wrong because not only was I able to understand her entire end of a phone conversation she had the other day while I sat across the room pretending to read (pero no soy chismosa -- de verdad!), but I was also able to participate in the 3-hour conversation she and I had after she hung up. Just me and her. For three hours. In Spanish.

I fumbled my way through some sentences (no doubt riddled with grammatical and syntactical errors), but mostly Cristina did the talking. Here is a translation of the story she told me:

The Saga of the Country Club Squatters

The house that Manu grew up in is about an hour outside the city in what they call a "country," which is a residential country club. Walled-in, security-guarded, and complete with two golf courses, seven polo fields, extensive horse stables, soccer fields, tennis courts, club pool, club house and restaurant, bar, shopping, a gas station, and a Coto (Walmart-ish, but more bougie), it's a good place to summer or raise children.

Now they're trying to sell the house (a slow process), and in the meantime they rent it. The woman who's been living in it for the past year or so is a rich politician of some sort, and very cheap (it turns out). She's littered the house with crappy furniture, which, in Cristina's opinion, makes it harder to sell, and what's more, she's stopped paying rent.

Let me explain: Living in this neighborhood isn't cheap. On top of the price of the house itself, monthly utilities are very high, and you have to pay membership fees that almost match the amount for the rent. This woman (her name, Alicia, I believe, should be drowned out by groggers like Hamen's on Purim), who knows that Cristina has to pay these fees if no one is renting the house, and who also knows that it is hard to rent a house like this in the winter, came to Cristina at the end of last summer with this proposal: she had to move out because she "couldn't afford" to keep paying the rent, but if Cristina would let her stay there rent-free until she found a new tenant, she would continue to pay the fees.

Cristina describes this woman as like a fox. I describe her as a bitch (a side note: one of my students is tickled that in English the words "bitch" and "witch" are so similar in sound and meaning, and that she can use both to describe her mother-in-law).

Well, Alicia (boo! hiss!) has been thus living rent-free since March or April. She complains to Cristina about the "poor condition" that the house is in and in the same breath offers to buy it from her for half the asking price. Now that summer is rolling around again, Cristina has decided enough is enough and is kicking her out. The only thing is, the woman said she'd move out two weeks ago and she's still there. My suggestion was to change the locks and sell the furniture.

This story makes Cristina sound like a pushover, but she's not. And this actually isn't the first time someone has tried to take advantage of her good will.

Some years ago, she was renting it to a similarly "foxy" woman, who was living there with her children and came to Cristina bemoaning her economical situation and begging to not pay rent for a few months. At the time, Manu and his brother and sister were all living with Cristina in a rented apartment in the city, and Cristina's response to her tenant was this: "If you don't pay me the rent, then I can't pay my rent. But I have no problem helping you out. If you can't pay the rent, I will just bring my children and we will all live together in the house" (it's a big house, and she wasn't bluffing).

The woman paid the rent.