Living between Languages
or Eres de aquí, pero no eres de aquí

Please imagine a handsome drawing room in the New Town of Edinburgh, at dusk on an evening of freak snowfall. My aunt, still beautiful in her late seventies, sits on one side of the fireplace looking at the two tall windows through which snow can be seen falling heavily on the Water of Leith and the little neo-classical Temple of the Goddess of Health. I am sitting on the other side of the fireplace, up from the country and caught in Edinburgh by the new year snow, corduroy trousers and checked shirt, fleece waistcoat. Between the two windows is a birchwood secretaire from the first decade of the nineteenth century; my two elegant cousins, dark-haired sisters, are on the sofa facing the fire. We are talking about the snow and about how long it is likely to be before I can make my way home. At which point my aunt sneezes, and the three of us say in perfect unison, ¡Jesús, Maria, José!

A decade later I was in the archaeological museum in Jerez (a rewarding museum in a nicely old-fashioned part of the town) and was asking for our tickets (my cousins were following on) and the genial people behind the desk, with genuine curiosity, asked the usual question of where are you from, adding Eres de aquí, pero no eres de aquí. (This is a phrase which haunts me.) Then my lovely cousins arrived, one sherry expert with a perceptible Andaluz accent, the other an artist with the elegant, whispering ‘z’ of her long Mexican residence, rekindling the question ...