The nutmeg is key. It is essential. How did Husband #1, who certainly liked to eat Béchamel (I left the accent off last week, pardonnez-moi), not know this? Should’ve put him out of the running. Should’ve been a sign. But Husband #1 once sent me a telegram. A telegram. What romantic (yes, I am one, despite appearances to the contrary) wouldn’t say yes to a man who sent her a telegram?

It is unforgivable, not to know about the nutmeg. Yes, it is unthinkable. But maybe not terribly shocking in Husband #1’s case, as he was an absolutely terrible cook. Speaking of terrible cooks, if you, Dear Reader, will permit me a slight digression, there is a spammer who religiously comments on my posts, every week, in poorly constructed phrases he (I assume it’s a “he”—his screen name has the word ‘Viagra’ in it) probably believes amusing. Last week he bewailed his two (unfortunate) offspring’s refusal to eat his Béchamel, into which he puts mustard. For which crime his offspring should be removed from his custody, immediately. Child Services, if you’re out there… Viagra Spammer (who, curiously, has never tried to sell me any Viagra) likely wonders why his comments fail to appear in the comments section. That would be because all comments must first be approved by the moderator, and that moderator is…Moi.

So. Husband #1. Not only was he a terrible cook, he had such poor culinary aptitude–really zero food sensuality, and that should have set off all sorts of warning bells–that once in Manhattan—we were living in the East Village, on Bleecker Street—when I asked him, as part of a shopping list, to buy cardamom, he came back with cinnamon and swore that there was no difference between them. Actually, he later confessed to not knowing the difference in English: my ease with his language and his comparative unease with mine was an early sore spot for us. His English is better now, or so I hear (fifteen years later, it’d better be). My money, though, would still be on him failing a taste test.

But that telegram. A telegram! It arrived one week to the day after Bad Love Incarnate and I had definitively broken up. Actually, we broke up while having sex (probably some of the best sex of my life; what is wrong with me?), really early in the morning, after which he drove me in his rattly truck to the god-forsaken Spanish version of a truck-stop where I caught the bus back to Granada, and refused to stay for breakfast. I, still high on post-coital, post-fight endorphins (they really are similar), didn’t particularly care. I enjoyed the dramatic figure I cut, sidling up to the tiled bar of the cafeteria, in my miniskirt and platform sandals, my waist-length red hair in just-had-sex disorder. I lit up with studied nonchalance as I ordered my tostada con aceite y tomate (toasted bread with olive oil and tomato compote, an Andalucian breakfast staple: by ordering it and sprinkling salt all over it like you never heard of a heart attack, you signal that you know your way around and are not to be fucked with). As the waiter put my cortado doble (lots of espresso, the barest hint of milk) in front of me with one hand, offering me an ashtray with another, his eyes unabashedly took in the sight I was for sore ones. He audibly blessed the mother that bore me (dios bendiga tu madre), and I felt fine. I was fine. The Bad Love Teflon the world grants to the young. It hurts, bad, but when you’re young, you know you’re hot while you hurt. And so the hurt hurts less.

Because you know there will be more chances.

And there were. Enter, once again, Husband #1. We had parted, like actors in too many movies to list, on a station platform, a Roman one, amid the hisses and whistles of trains, arriving and departing, with hugs and te echaré de menos-es. I honestly didn’t think I would ever see him again. And that was fine, it was part of the script. I was sad, and enjoyed being sad, like I was in my own little movie. I even cried a little on the train to the airport—the young are pretty when they cry, I enjoyed the sympathetic glances.

But I underestimated him. He remembered the name of the street in the Albaicín, where I rented my studio—which I had told him because I liked it, calle del Agua, “Water Street,” because of an old medieval cistern, still there today. And I had told him my landlady’s name, Ana, in the context of describing our evenings sipping jerez on her balcony, me high from smoking up first with my downstairs neighbors, translating into Spanish the fruits of my daily labors, Arabic love poetry from the eleventh century that would melt a stone.

He might not be able to tell cinnamon from cardamom, and I might eventually come to hate him for that, but Husband #1 could find a woman when he wanted to. The way he went about it was actually pretty genius. Rather than an address, he attached to his telegram a sort of description. Of me, of my street. Of my landlady, of her house. And they let him get away with it. The Granada telegraph people found me. Likely because, unlike today, with the Albaicín converted into a sort of Disneyland version of a suq in Fez, literally crawling with teterías and touristas, in the early 1990s a redheaded guiri measuring almost two full meters in height, and with near-perfect Spanish to boot, would be easily findable. More than one bricklayer, like the waiter at the roadside cafetería, had blessed my mother for what she’d given to the world; another had opined, as I walked past him, to or from the market, that I was a monumento (this was way before #metoo; as long as they looked and didn’t touch, I kind of didn’t mind). And I partied a lot, I was out every night. All this to say, they knew me around those parts.

So I got my telegram. Quiero verte, he said. I want to see you. Necesito verte—I need to. He was having another show, this time in the cultural center of a town of which I had never heard. Sotillo de la Adrada, in the Province of Ávila. Where Santa Teresa was from. Yes, that one, Bernini sculpted her with her head thrown back in ecstasy, throat bared to the very pointy point of the mean little angel’s poisonous arrow. Husband #1 was living in a room in his former painting professor’s house (like Husband #1, said painting professor was Argentinian; they get around, and they find each other). The bed was big. Would I come and see him.

I would.

Sotillo means ‘little grove.’ Sounds idyllic. And it was, incredibly. Hallucinatory, really. Sotillo de la Adrada (in order to get there, you needed to take a crazy-romantic number of buses, and I wore platforms on them all) was where Husband #1 and I became an official Thing.

Sotillo de la Adrada was also where I witnessed, for the first time, an Argentinian man making Béchamel. It is where I learned about the nutmeg. And, looking back, it is probably significant that I did not learn that fact from Husband #1. And that he witnessed the same incident of food preparation that I did, and retained nothing. Hindsight and all that.

Speaking of sauce, I need to feed myself, and feed the bunnies. So I will knock off here… and wish you some Bad, Bad Love of your own. Preferably some upon which you can look back and ponder. Hope you’re not living it right now.

See you next Friday, in Sotillo de la Adrada. It’s really beautiful there, I’ll show you around.