First 'expate' on my street

One morning last September I was sitting in my armchair in the studio, which is on the street level, and the movement like a Merlot or a crow on the other side of the street made me turn my head. I saw through the window, on the balcony of the house opposite, a tall black figure that frightened me. It was a white-bearded man in a black cassock, walking up and down the balcony and talking on his cell phone. Then an old woman, also all black, like a nun, came out onto the balcony. It turned out that she was the mother of the new owner of the house opposite, who had come from Georgia with the man to bless the house.

Now the house has a discreet cross nailed to the lintel of the entrance door and a plaque warning that there is an alarm. The neighbor is called Shorena and she is the first expanded of a street in the process of gentrification that for the moment is still shared by the aging natives, the Spanish immigrants of decades ago, some young Muslims and sub-Saharans, and now, the latest trend, a expandedShorena is divorced or widowed, she is my age, she works for a German pharmaceutical company and spends half her life here, alone and locked up at home, and the other half in Germany.

The other day she invited half a dozen neighbours to dinner to introduce themselves. I've been living on this street for fifteen years and it had to be her who introduced me to people who had been here all my life, who in fact were as if I already knew them, because the roots touch each other under the ground, but it's always interesting. She served us Georgian food, with fish, beets and coloured things that I don't know what they were. She had a daughter here visiting, and she's the one who cooked. Also dressed in black, she spent the whole dinner locked in the kitchen.

Shorena has preserved the house as the previous owners left it when they died. I'm not talking about the furniture, which is also there, but about the decoration of a proudly Catalan house, with a Sant Jordi at the entrance and Catalan shields on the staircase and fireplace. Shorena explained to me that when she went into the house with the estate agent and saw the Sant Jordi, she thought that this place had been waiting for her. She is very religious, as well as Georgian. She showed me a room in which a chapel has been made dedicated to her spiritual master, who is in a photo and which I took for the September stern, but it was another one. She told me that she was interested in the Iberians and I left her some books. I insisted that in order to get along with the neighbours she learn Catalan. She promised that she would. If she does, it will help me forget the impression of having come back one day and it seemed to me that an exorcism was taking place in the house opposite.