“Nestor! Nestor! Ayudame! Joe quiero mi matar!! El tiene uno cuchillo en su mochila! Ayudame!”
Which, roughly translated from Spanish, means:
“Nestor! Nestor! Help me! Joe wants to kill me!! He has a knife in his backpack!! Help me!”
Ah yes - that is La Senora crying out…this is taking place in the same decrepit apartment building in the Jersey City Heights described in my last blog. The reason it is in Spanish is because La Senora doesn’t speak a word of English. Now, I know I’ve had a somewhat contentious relationship with La Senora in the two years that I have been here, but by no means do I want to kill her! Even though she permits me in the kitchen for only 5 minutes to make my shake (and grudgingly at that!), while she spends 16 hours a day there, and even though she once thought my rather expensive piece of oatmeal soap, which I had left on the bathtub, was a cake - and tried to bake it…still, I have no reason to want to kill her!
Well, apparently, she walks through my bedroom again, as usual, and in this instance, she spies a knife that I use for peeling mangoes in the webbed front pocket of my backpack. Somehow, she contorts this into some kind of diabolical plot to asassinate her!
When I arrive home later that night, her son, Nestor, confronts me.
“Joe - why are you trying to kill my mother?!”
I mean, what do you say to that?
