Thursday, July 19, 2007

no delante de los criados

My apartment has a cleaner. Normal, right? Not this cleaner.
When I got home Tuesday night I thought I had been visited by a poltergeist. Everything, I mean everything had been moved. She moved the sofas back where they were before I moved them. She moved the blue pouffe from the living room to under the dressing table in the bedroom (re-locating my luggage to do so). She moved every candle from where it was to somewhere else. She moved the bath salts from the shelf to the bath tub and changed the hook the loofah was hanging on. She burnt incense in the sink and moved my battery chargers from the living room shelf to a chair.
The strange thing was she didn't actually clean anything.
Of course I was braced for the worst when I came home last night. Would I find the stove hanging from the ceiling? Would all the chairs be piled on the balcony? Would she add dirt?
It wasn't too bad.
She cleaned things. All the furniture and the knick knacks were where she left them. She did move my shoes, relocate the spice rack, fold the clothes I left lying around and hide the ironing board, but I eventually found the extra blue blanket (in the bed). Perhaps tonight I will find my coffee cup. It's probably in the bathroom cupboard with bath salts in it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your cleaner sounds familiar. Perhaps she belongs to the same genus as the cheerful ferals who packed everything up at 129 Railway Road. I suspect that as they were paid by the box, they felt encouraged to wrap everything, including unbreakable items in dense layers of paper. Unpacking became a journey of excitement and discovery - how many pieces of paper does it take to wrap a fork so that it doesn't bend or warp in the short 6 minute trip to 17 Holyrood Street. The answer is anything up to 6 layers.