"Shouldn't we take an umbrella?" I asked as we walked through the school's wide double doors and out into the street.
"Not necessary. No rain now," my cute Spanish teacher said in her broken English which I found so amusing. But then, her English was a lot better than my Spanish, so I had resolved early on not to laugh or make fun of her.
Two weeks earlier, I had decided that being monolingual was a huge embarrassment when trying to do business with the Hispanic population in California and had enrolled for a Spanish course at a school in Antigua, Guatemala. My friends had been skeptical, but Antigua had captured my heart as soon as I arrived. The colonial ambience, the climate, and most of all the people were simply fantastic and I never regretted my decision.
The Spanish classes were a bit tough, however. In Antigua, Spanish instructions are all one-on-one, each student has a teacher all for himself, and that makes the instructions very intensive and sometimes rather tiring. Ten years after graduating from college, sitting still and having my brain barraged with grammar and vocabulary for several hours on end was hard to get used to. Therefore I quickly fell into the habit of breaking up the classes with short walks around town together with my teacher.
The only thing about Antigua that was just short of perfect was the weather. The rainy season was in full swing when I arrived, which meant that it rained for two or three hours every day -- still not too bad compared with most places in the world, but the rain often set in with little forewarning, as I was soon to find out.
Anyway, I left the school with Carmen, my teacher, and we didn't take an umbrella, which would turn out to be a mistake. Carmen was about 25 years old and a native of Antigua. Always elegantly dresses, she took me to different places every day, as she loved to show her history-laden hometown to an ignorant gringo like me whose only prior visit to Latin America had been a two-week stint at a beach resort in Cancun.
As we strolled along Antigua's historic cobblestone streets, Carmen trying to teach me some Spanish and I trying to steer the subject to other topics, dark clouds began to fill the sky and I caught her looking up and frowning more than once, probably doubting the accuracy of her weather forecast by now.
"Let's walk back," I suggested.
Carmen nodded and we turned back towards the school, but it was already too late. Less than five minutes later, the dark gray clouds turned black, then the floodgates opened and released a torrential downpour that drenched us to the skin in seconds.
"No rain now," I repeated her words and laughed. I was a little bit annoyed, but mostly I was just amused that even a local couldn't accurately predict the weather in this place.
"Sorry," she said and looked at me with her sexy, dark eyes. "I was wrong."
"Obviously," I said and laughed even harder.
"You angry with me now?" she asked earnestly, maybe even a bit fearfully.
Standing there in the downpour, her long hair and elegant clothes plastered to her slender five foot two frame, looking up at me, she looked so fragile and vulnerable that I hugged her spontaneously. The force with which she hugged me back and squeezed me took me by surprise. "No, I'm not mad at you," I said softly, still holding her as if my embrace could protect her from the elements.
"Let's go," she said after a few moments and released me, but still kept an arm around my waist as we walked silently through the pouring rain.
After a few minutes, she guided me into a narrow side street and stopped in front of one of the houses at the back. "I live here," she explained as she unlocked the door and dragged me inside, along a long, narrow corridor into a mini courtyard of no more than a hundred square feet, and finally into her living room, which was sparsely but tastefully furnished.
"Take wet clothes off," she said without any preliminaries. "No want you catch cold."
Before I could recover from my surprise, she was out of the door again. The room was still nice and cozy from the day's heat and I was uncomfortable in my soaked and clammy clothes, so I began to strip slowly. I took my shirt off, then my shoes and socks, and finally my jeans, but stopped short of my boxers.
"Shorts too," she said immediately when she returned a few moments later with two large towels. She dropped them on the small couch and began to undress as unselfconsciously as if I wasn't there, kicking off her pumps, then taking off her skirt, blouse, bra, and panties. She draped her wet garments over two chairs and turned to look at me like nothing were amiss. "Coffee?" she asked and went over to the small kitchen area to get the coffeemaker going.
