Quotes of the week: Cecilia

au pair's revenge

The other day, I was playing in the living room with the three girls and the boy from next door.  Nicolas, six years old, happens to go to the Lycée Français of Madrid, so I took advantage of this to get out my French, which has fallen into disuse lately.  While we were chatting away amicably  in the tongue of Molière, Cecilia had picked up on a foreign language being spoken in her vicinity.  How dare we say things that she might not understand!  She glowered at us with completely unconcealed disgust: “he speaks Spanish too, you know!”, she snapped at me before returning to more important affairs.

A rather different incident occurred during one of our “English lessons”, when I was quizzing the girls on various items drawn out on flashcards.  At one point, I held up a card with a representation of the steel instrument used for spearing food and generally accompanied by a knife.  Imagine my surprise when Cecilia shouted out, perfectly and precisely pronouncing a four-letter expletive beginning with the same letter as “fork”.  I was quick to correct her pronunciation on this particular occasion, lest this new addition to her vocabulary find its way back to her parents.

Although our relationship got off to a somewhat rocky start, Cecilia did still show some interest in me, particularly in anything regarding my family.  She was also interested in the country that had provided this inconvenient extra member of her family.  It is fair to say that she developed a fairly warped picture of my home country.  In Belgium, Cecilia argued, everyone was as bad as me.  Just like me, Belgians were apparently stupid and useless, and ate loads.  But she did concede that maybe, just maybe, my sister isn’t so bad.  After all, my sister, as she accurately pointed out, is a girl.

As a post-scriptum, and just to show how far Cecilia and I have come since those terrible first few weeks, she suggested to me her most recent cunning plan, meant to deal with the fact that I wouldn’t be in Madrid for much longer.  Perhaps inspired by my lego-building skills, she told me: “You can build yourself a house here in Madrid, so you can come and visit us”.  She paused, then added, as an afterthought: “But not too often…”