This morning I was accosted by a woman with a upside-down map, evidently about to ask me for directions to somewhere. Delighted to be confused with a real madrileño and also to be presented with the opportunity of getting out my Spanish, I began explaining to the maiden in distress where we were. By the baffled look on the poor tourist’s face I gathered that this was not in fact her mother tongue. Nor did it appear to be her any kind of tongue, as the most basic indications were completely lost on her.
I have recently begun to take pride in offering a selection of European languages to helpless tourists, and was hopeful of finding her fluent in at least one of them. Her English proved extremely shaky so, not to be undone, I tried French and Dutch on her, both eliciting similarly blank responses. By this point I was curious, and had even begun to mention other languages of which I knew but the name. Italiano? Deutsch? I enquired, tentatively. Both were greeted with the same incomprehension. In the end, we got there in English, rather in the way you might make your way up a glacier on skates. I think I was able to point her in the right direction, and she was able to point out to me exactly which language I had been found lacking in: “Czech”.
