In the family I was staying with for a month while I took Spanish classes, the little grey-haired grandmother appeared to base a good part of her verbal behaviour on this expression. At first, this did not surprise me. I was astonished at how hot it really was, and that she too should find it hot and attempt to communicate her impressions to me in this wonderfully simple and comprehensible form, without irregular verbs or complex syntax, seemed to me quite normal. By the third or fourth day, however, meeting her several times a day, it seemed to me that she tended to overdo it, for our conversations were limited to this subject, and indeed to these words. While I appreciated the linguistic benefits that were accruing to me from the pattern repetition, I was also a trifle miffed, in fact, more and more miffed. She obviously considered me either congenitally incapable of dealing with other subjects, or a desperately slow learner, so that despite the intensive lessons she knew I was taking for eight hours a day in the blazing heat, I could not be expected to make any improvements to my understanding or production of her language. ¡Qué calor Juan! she would say to me as we met in the corridor – whenever I left my room, I met her in the corridor – ¡qué calor Juan! Juan is of course not my name, but the one she had chosen for me after deciding on the first day that my real name was unpronounceable, ¡Qué calor Juan!, and I would say, si ¡qué calor!, or sometimes just si, si, in my rapidly improving Spanish.
On the morning of the fifth or sixth day, I met abuela in the corridor on my way to the bathroom at 7:30 or so in the morning when it was really still quite cool. I was at that very moment laboriously composing a sentence in my head to indicate to her how nice and cool it was, providing a variant on our usual topic, showing my real interest in it, and practicing my Spanish at the same time. But then, quite unexpectedly, she looked at me and said ¡Qué calor, Juan! ¡qué calor! At this point I realized that my still emerging sentence would be quite useless. It was not possible to communicate rationally with abuela on this topic. Either her mind was made up, or the words were simply an automatic response to the stimulus of seeing me. I grunted my usual si and continued on my way to the bathroom.
The following morning, the remains of my prepared sentence still coursing through my mind, and having spent no little time reflecting on the subject, I met abuela in the kitchen and managed to reply to her usual greeting with a statement that it seemed to me still really quite cool. If her behaviour thus far had been completely conditioned, my statement obviously shocked her out of it. ¿No tienes calor? she said, incredulous. No, I said, in my best Spanish. Abuela was speechless, and having no further sentences prepared, I went to the dining room to have breakfast. As I sat down, abuela's daughter came into the kitchen, which you could see from the dining room, and I heard abuela say to her, her voice trembling, ¡Juan no tiene calor!
As a way of dealing with the heat, abuela herself had a fan, as most Madrid women seem to do, and fanned herself continuously. One evening, in an unusually talkative mood, she told me that if my mother didn't have a fan, a hand fan like hers, I should take her one back as a gift. I explained through the English girl who was helping me understand these longer, conditional sentences, that my mother in Leeds had little use for a fan, and we smiled knowingly at each other, a nice girl. However, abuela could clearly not get her mind around this. The expression on her face, even more than the words she used, and which the girl chose mostly not to translate, clearly showed that she had now added to her poor opinion of my linguistic and intellectual abilities, and her scarcely veiled disapproval of my unnatural insensitivity to heat and cold, the damning conviction that I was an ungrateful son.
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