The catastrophe of Nov. 30, 2011

I got home from work on Wednesday night, exhausted as usual, after working over 7 hours in Alcorcón and tutoring for over an hour in Arroyomolinos.  I had been trying to get my laundry done since Monday, but sharing one washing machine between 5 people is always a challenge. However, I was determined and desperate.  The fact that I wore capris to work when it was 40ºF shows the urgency of my clothes-washing situation.
   

I noticed there were clothes hanging on our clothesline, clothes hanging on our drying rack, a bucket of wet clothes sitting on the kitchen windowsill, and a load of wet clothes in the laundry machine waiting to be claimed by their rightful owner. I opened the kitchen window and leaned out to see if there was any room on the line…..and that´s when it happened.  The entire bucket of Victor´s wet clothes that was sitting on the outside windowsill went crashing down….4 floors….hitting every single neighbor´s clothesline on the way down, and finally landing with a huge crack in the dank courtyard below.  Come to think of it, I don´t know if the crash was that loud, or if it was the sound that was ringing through my head when I realized I had just dropped someone else´s clothes down the inaccessible interior shaft of a Spanish apartment building.

I screamed for Topher, my friend who is currently residing on the sofa bed in our saloncito until he moves into his apartment.  It took me a good 50 seconds of standing in frozen shock before I realized I had to deal with the situation.  I told Topher he had to come with me down to the lobby.  We went downstairs and saw the clothes and the broken bucket, but I could only stare longingly at them through the barred windows.  A boy came down the stairs, and I whipped around and asked (not even trying to hide the panic in my voice), ¨Perdona, ¿sabes como entrar en el patio? ¡¡¡Es que se me cayó toda la ropa de mi compañero de piso y necesito cogerla….AHORA!!!!¨  I then realized it was the Belgian guy who I had run into a few days before when I was struggling to get my keys in the front door.  (The boy obviously thinks I´m manic at this point.)  He said he didn´t know how to get to the courtyard and that he had some socks down there as well.  He starting laughing at my cries of panic/hysteria and when I told him, ¨No, you can´t laugh! This is bad!¨ he pointed at Topher and said, ¨How come I can´t laugh, but he can?¨…I think this may be the start of a beautiful friendship between Topher, the Belgian, and I.

I decided to get over the embarrassment and ring the doorbell of the only apartment in the lobby.  I could hear voices, but they weren’t answering the door.  I knocked…and knocked again, to no avail.  Finally an elderly couple came in the building, and I asked them if there was a way to get into the courtyard.  The wife told me that the only way to access it was through the nail salon next door.  Topher and I went to the nail salon (in our pajamas) and had to explain the situation to a nice little Chinese lady.  She led us to the back room, slid a heavy box out from in front of the door, and we got the bucket and about 1/3 of the clothes.

The next obstacle was to go to the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd floor clotheslines and try to reel in the rest of Victor’s clothes.  The 1^st floor was a success.  The 2^nd and 3^rd floors’ clotheslines, however, have knots on them that stop random strangers from pulling clothes into the stairwell.  Topher’s brilliant idea was to knock the clothes off and have them land on the 1^st floor's clothesline.  It didn’t work.  They fell into the courtyard.  Cut to: Topher and Niki having to go back to the Chinese nail salon and asking the poor lady if we could go in the back again.

We finally got all the clothes and went back to the apartment, but the bucket didn’t look quite full enough to me.  I looked down the shaft and saw two pairs of boxers hanging from my downstairs neighbors’ plants on their kitchen windowsill. I went down and rang their doorbell, prepared to explain the situation for the 6^th time, and it turned out to be the elderly couple that originally helped us out in the lobby!  They got the boxers, and all that was left to do was to confess to Victor.  When he got home I said, “Victor, the clothes in that bucket were yours right? Don’t flip out, but they…” and he said, “They fell?”  He wasn’t even surprised it happened!!! We never put the bucket of clothes out there, but he said he just wanted them to get a bit of air!!!

Later that night, Christian came in the saloncito and said, “Hey Niki, I’m defrosting a container of soup on the windowsill.  Be careful.  It’s frozen solid. You could kill a Chinese person.” I replied with a classy gesture and said, "The middle finger is international right?"