Nobody is fully immune from an occasional bout of narcissism, my friends. Here’s a case in point. Agrider, the owner of my small countryside hotel that’s belonged to his family for over a century, speaks a very slow, careful Spanish to me.
“Ah!” I think in an attack of wounded narcissism. “He doesn’t trust that my Spanish is good enough to understand fluent speech.”
To convince Agrider of my outstanding language skills, I start firing off long, complex sentences delivered at a breakneck speed.
In response, Agrider speaks even more slowly and enunciates even more carefully.
Finally, today we had a good conversation, and I discovered that the reason why a guy who has lived his whole life in the Basque countryside speaks slow Spanish has nothing whatsoever to do with me. He’s simply a speaker of euskera. Spanish is a learned language for him. I was confusing him with my rapid-fire, convoluted Spanish.
It’s my fault for forgetting one of life’s most important rules: whatever it is, it’s probably not about me at all.
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