The present
Never ask someone to be your girlfriend before Christmas because you’ll have to buy them a present. I just made this mistake by asking Eider out in Marrakesh. Even worse, her birthday is on the 24th of December, which meant I had to get her a birthday present as well.
I had no idea what to get her for her birthday. If my birthday would have been first I would have been able to get her something of equal value. I needed something good enough where she’d keep going out with me, but not too good where she thinks I’m obsessed.
Leaving asking her out for one month more would have put me in the clear.
Eider is from the Basque country in the north of Spain. She is used to gifts from Spanish men. What gifts do Spanish men give their girlfriends? I imagine they cook, sing to them with their filthy Spanish, and then bang them for eight hours.
When I speak Spanish, I sound disabled and I’ve never measured my sex in anything more than minutes. I needed a different angle.
While having dinner I asked her, “what about instead of doing Christmas presents we forget about that and I’ll just get you a birthday present?” She agreed. Nice, I didn’t need to worry about a Christmas present. But I still needed to figure out her birthday present.
“What about a trip to London or something?” I said. “We could combine our birthdays and do a bigger trip,” she replied. A good plan, but I still had to give her something for her birthday. I couldn’t just hand her a card that said, don’t worry, we’ll go on a trip together.
I was desperate, so I asked her what she wanted. She said don’t buy me anything, let’s just do something together. Having dated Irish women before, this sounded like a trap.
“What about a tasting menu at a restaurant?” I said. She said with the enthusiasm of a kid being told to spend their Saturday with their dementia granny that she’d been to those dinners before.
Why couldn’t my birthday have been first?
I had less than a week to get her a gift because I had to go home for Christmas. I’m sure she’d have Spanish men ready to give her something else during the Christmas if she didn’t get a present.
The next day, I was sitting at home, wondering if I should break up with her to end my suffering. But then an idea hit me. I’d just started writing these stories again. My first story was about how we fell for every scam in Marrakesh. She hadn’t read that story yet. I’d make that story into a book for her.
Was it over the top for someone I’d been dating for four months? Yes. But you need over the top when you’re an Irish guy competing with Spanish men. Fuck, I’m brilliant, I thought. Now I just needed a book.
The problem was I was in Gran Canaria, a Spanish-speaking island. The English here isn’t the best and my Spanish is even worse.
Do you know how someone makes a book? I don’t. The bookbinder should be able to figure it out if I send them everything. I emailed the bookbinder all the text and the photos to include and walked over.
When I arrived, it looked like a mechanic’s store with a big garage door. Inside there were glass displays full of different sized books. The room was full of manual machines used to make books. In the back was a small, stressed Spanish woman.
“Holah,” I said in my terrible Spanish accent.
“Buenas, un momento” she said while she used her glasses as a magnifying glass to read her email.
So far, so good. It’s polite to start in Spanish in Spain.
“No problema” I said. Hoping that would be enough before we switched to English.
I looked at the other books, trying to figure out what design I was going to get. She didn’t have the romantic short stories for three-month relationships on display. Must have kept them in the back.
She jumped up. “Buenas,” she said. I tried to say in Spanish, “I have pages for you. Can you make me a book?”
She thought I needed a proofreader for English. I said I want a book. She said, sorry she can’t proofread, then started looking through a bunch of business cards she had looking for a proofreader. “I want a book made,” I said in Spanish. She continued to look through the business cards, looking for a proofreader. Before giving up and saying she can’t find the card for the proofreader. I explained I wanted her to make me a book. With the help of some hand gestures, she got it.
She asked me if I was German. To be fair, I look more German than most Germans. I said no, I’m from Ireland. She told me she had studied German. I thought that was a cool fact, but I needed English. It was time to change languages. I’d been polite, but I was too deep in the swimming pool. I needed her to throw in the lifesaver.
She asked one more time if we could speak in German, hoping I had learnt German in the one minute since she last asked me. No, I said. She looked disappointed and said she didn’t speak English.
In a restaurant where I need to speak Spanish to order and my ham sandwich turns out to be tuna pasta, I’ll eat it and I’ll laugh. But I couldn’t afford to get my order wrong here. My relationship was on the line.
After a lot of struggling, we established I had emailed her earlier. She looked confused and called me ‘Luis’ instead of ‘Reece’. Luis was my name for the rest of our time together.
She walked over to her computer, telling me to go with her to look at her email.
In my email I had attached the link to the google doc and the images I wanted. I sent the witch the ingredients it was time for her to make the potion.
She got out her glasses and started reading her emails from top to bottom. Checking each email. Mine was the 12th email down in the list. She checked all twelve.
Once she clicked on my email, she saw all it contained was a link to a Google doc. She panicked and said she needed a Word doc. It was like she had found a stranded bag outside of a Northern Irish bank. I tried to tell her I didn’t have Word but if she opened up Word she could copy my google doc into it. She’d have preferred to defuse the bomb in the bag by the looks of it. I wasn’t sure what I was saying in Spanish anymore.
Turns out this woman had no idea how to use a computer. Her email skills were her biggest strength.
With a shaky hand, she hovered over the link, and double clicked it. She started trying to copy the text. Highlighting the text at the top of the page and scrolling. She would get halfway through copying the document and she’d have to start again. This did not annoy her. It seemed to be some sort of ritual she always went through. Like sacrificing a goat for a good harvest.
I told her how to copy the entire document. I might as well have turned water into wine.
There were some images I wanted to include in the email. When trying to open her email, she closed it by mistake. The dance started again. She had 15 emails above mine now and she checked each one.
She found the email. The sweat on her forehead was building up. I felt like a terrorist forcing the woman to do my bidding. My accent didn’t help.
It was at this point I asked her if she would like me to do it. “Si, si, si, siéntate” she ran away from the computer like you’d run from a possessed child.
With some struggle, I got a basic version of the book. Neither of us had the technical or emotional strength to do anything else.
It was time to pick the cover for the book. Not knowing how to say hard back, I just said “Fuerte”. She understood. They say when you go to war with people, you get a deeper connection. I felt that now. She gave me a book with all the colours. I picked red.
So far, so good. But now she tested me. She said, “what colour string do you want?” The string used to keep your page in a book. I didn’t understand and said yes. She said which colour? I replied yes. She pointed to the string, and I said ok. After asking me for the fourth time, I said red.
The last piece of the puzzle was the title. I didn’t know how to say the same as the inside of the book “Our friend from Marrakesh”. She told me to write it down. This was a problem.
Maybe you think you have bad handwriting. Mine is worst. People without hands write better than me. Back in school, I’d write out my exams and then afterwards speak them out loud to a teacher who would type what I’d written.
She could see the fear in my eyes. She didn’t need my backstory. I pointed to the title, and she copied it down.
She had everything she needed. She told me it would cost 20 euros, and I needed to come back on Thursday. The day before I left for Ireland.
I waited for three days not hearing from her. I never got Eider a backup gift. My relationship was in the bookkeepers’ hands.
I told everyone I knew in Gran Canaria about the gift, hoping they confirm I wasn’t crazy for doing it. My female friends loved the idea. The boys thought I was mental. It was too late now to get anything else now.
On Thursday, I got a message saying the book was ready. Was the font going to be tiny? Was it going to be in all red? I walked in and said my ‘Hola’
She was busy as always and said ‘un momemento’.
She went over to the machine and pressed down on the book, pushing the letters on the front inwards. Hand cranking the machine. She used every muscle in her body to press. This book was a mental and physical ordeal for this poor woman.
She took it out of the machine and walked it over to me. A beautiful red hardcover case with a red string to keep your page. Fourteen pages of pure romance with some images of the trip. A gift suitable for a proposal, not a birthday. I flicked through the pages and looked at the images. Perfect.
The bookbinder looked at me like a child getting their first drawing stuck on the fridge. Reading the title on the cover from left to right, it said “Our… Friend… Fron Marrakesh”. Fuck. There was an ’n’ where there should have been an ‘m’. She had spelt the title wrong.
I didn’t know how to react. There was only the title on the front. The title is the most important part. It was impossible to miss. What am I going to say to this poor woman? My relationship is on the line. It needed to be perfect.
While I was trying to figure out how to explain the mistake, I looked over at my small, stressed friend. She was standing there with sweat on her upper lip from pressing down on a machine, having made it to a deadline with no shared language. I smiled. I couldn’t ask her to whip me up another one. It wasn’t a pancake. I realised it was better the title was wrong. It showed how much effort that went into this. “Es perfecto” I said.
I didn’t get the ‘Our friend from Marrakesh’ title I wanted, but I had a new friend fron Gran Canaria.
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