TALES OF THE BAJA

The Spanish language is a beautiful thing. An old compadre, Nacho, once described it as muy fluencia (very flowing). It has a natural, musical flow to it that makes it easy to listen to, and easy to learn. The kids had learned some while backpacking in Spain, and I'd picked up some on previous trips to Mexico, so between us we knew a few dozen words and phrases that allowed us to get by pretty well. It was an ongoing process, of course. Our dictionary was never far away, and our vocabulary was growing fast. We were throwing out the hola's right left and centre, ordering beer like there was no tomorrow, and we could ask where the bathroom was standing on our heads.

So, in true primate fashion, we were feeling pretty cocky about our communication skills when we rolled into Todo Santos on Thursday morning. We were hungry and thirsty, and if you can believe it - actually cold - from the breezy early morning drive up the misty pacific coast highway in the open jeep. So we pulled into the warm, friendly confines of restaurant/bar Las Fuentes (the fountains), pictured below.

We sat down at a table outside where the sun could warm us up, and when the waitress came over we took menus and ordered cafe just like we knew what we were doing. Buenos dias, por favor, gracias... it was all rolling off our tongues like we'd been saying it all our lives. When the waitress came back, we rattled off our orders like experts. Our waitress - a very lovely, friendly lady who knew no English - copied our orders down, understanding us perfectly, saying Si, si... and nodding her head as she wrote. And then she looked at us and rattled off a question, and none of us had any idea what she said.

Mande? (pardon?)

Again the question, seemingly babbled at supersonic speed, this time with a short list recited at the end, but I didn't recognise one word. The kids and I looked at each other like idiots, and she repeated the question one more time.

"Did she say gomez at the end there?"

"Yeah, it sounded like gomez."

So I looked up at her and asked, "gomez?"

Now it was her turn to look confused, poor lady, and she repeated, "gomez?" But when all I could do was offer her a blank look and a meek no entiendo (I don't understand), she waved her hand as if to signify that it wasn't important anyway, and walked off to place our orders.

And that's where we should have left it, and everything would have been fine. We should have filed it away as just another one of life's little mysteries, and moved on. But oh no, not us. We had to know. We looked up gomez in the dictionary, but there was nothing even close. We discussed, we conjectured, we made wild guesses. Every time the conversation drifted into more rational waters, one of us would invariably say something like, "Do you think she was asking us to vote for someone named Gomez?" It was slowly but surely driving us insane.

When our ever gracious waitress came with our food, we tortured her by giving her the dictionary, and trying to get her to show us gomez. She leafed through a few pages, with no idea what we wanted from her, a look of complete panic on her face. Finally, looking like she was about to burst into tears, she fled the table, making motions like she was going to get someone. Now we'd done it, we thought, she's going for the police.

A few moments later, a man walked up with a concerned look and said in perfect English, "Excuse me, I'm the owner. Is everything all right?" We assured him everything was excellent, the food, service, everything... we were just curious what gomez meant. We thought the waitress had asked us something about gomez, and we didn't know what it meant.

"Gomez?" he said. "Gomez doesn't mean anything. Gomez is a person's name. Let me go talk to your waitress again."

When he came back he was laughing. "She was just asking you what more you wanted. She wasn't saying gomez, she was saying que mas? - what more?"

Now we were all laughing. We couldn't believe it. Que mas! Of course! It made perfect sense. How could we have missed it? Were we deranged? Or was this yet more evidence for the controversial multiple universes theory of reality?

When the waitress came to clear the table we apologized profusely, calling ourselves stupido gringos which made her laugh and say, No, no... but after what we put the poor woman through, we felt it only fitting to leave her an obscenely large tip.

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