Lena arrived in Madrid on a Tuesday in September with two suitcases, one of them with a broken wheel. That detail matters, because for the first three weeks of her life in this city, the sound of that suitcase dragging across cobblestones was basically her personal soundtrack. A miserable little squeak, going off every couple of minutes, reminding her that she had moved to an entire country without being entirely sure why.

The hostel was on a narrow street in Chueca, one of those streets where at eleven at night people are still eating dinner on the pavement and at seven in the morning it smells of bleach and bread. Shared room, top bunk, twelve euros a night. She had booked it for two weeks while she found a flat. She stayed five.

The girl in the kitchen

She saw her for the first time on a Thursday, eight in the morning, losing a fight with the communal coffee machine. Short hair, enormous T-shirt, the face of someone who had not slept. Lena walked in, the girl looked up, and then the thing happened that sometimes happens: the two seconds that last three.

Neither of them said anything. The girl went back to the coffee machine. Lena picked up a plastic cup she did not need and went out to the corridor to drink water like an idiot.

From there the choreography began. They passed each other on the stairs and both stepped the same way. They met at the washing machine and smiled with their mouths closed. One night Lena went up to the roof terrace to smoke a cigarette she did not want, and the girl was already there, sitting on the floor with her phone switched off, and the two of them stayed twenty minutes in silence, looking at the rooftops, with their hearts doing strange things inside their chests.

“It’s not like they teach you how to do this in Austria either. It’s just that back there it’s colder and you have a better excuse for never leaving your coat.”

Because that was the problem. It was not a lack of wanting. It was that neither of them had a single usable tool. Lena had mentally rehearsed roughly forty opening lines in three languages and every one of them sounded like a police interview. The other one, as she would find out later, had been doing exactly the same thing from the other side of the corridor.

Nineteen days. Nineteen days of three-second glances and zero words.

Chema, the receptionist

At the hostel front desk there was a man in his late fifties called Chema. Chema had a book of sudokus, a small radio permanently tuned to a football phone-in, and a prodigious ability to look like he was not paying attention to anything.

Chema was paying attention to everything.

On Sunday afternoon the two of them ended up at the desk at the same time by pure coincidence. Lena had come to ask whether they could keep her suitcase one more day. The other one had come for clean towels. They stood side by side without looking at each other, stiff as two lampposts.

Chema looked up from his sudoku, watched them for half a second, and said, in the flattest voice in the world, like a man commenting on the weather:

“Hey. This girl is from Austria too. She could probably help you out with your questions about the city.”

And went back to the sudoku.

The silence that followed was thick enough to slice. Lena turned. The other one turned. And both of them went red at exactly the same moment, which is, objectively, one of the most ridiculous things that can happen to two grown women.

“Seriously?” said Lena, in German, and her voice came out belonging to somebody else.

“From Graz,” said the other one. “Ida. I’ve been here a year and a half.”

“Lena. From Linz. I’ve been here —” she checked her watch for no reason at all — “three weeks.”

And then they started talking and it was a beautiful disaster. They talked about the metro, which Ida swore was the best in Europe and Lena insisted had transfers designed by a sadist. They talked about how nobody in Madrid eats dinner before ten. About how the tap water here is genuinely excellent and nobody in Austria believes it. They talked fast, over each other, laughing at things that were not funny, keeping their hands busy with whatever was nearest — the suitcase handle, the edge of a towel — so it would not show that they were shaking.

They had been at it for about ten minutes, standing there, unable either to sit down or to leave, when Chema looked up from the book again.

“There’s a very comfortable café right across the street.”

The look

They left. Ida went first, pushing the door open, saying something about how the coffee there was nothing special but the tables at the back were good. Lena followed half a metre behind, still processing.

And on the step of the doorway, with one foot already on the street, she understood.

Chema had not said that by accident. Chema had spent nineteen days watching the two of them perform their little pantomime across his reception. Nineteen days of stairs and washing machines and rooftops. And that afternoon, seeing them planted there side by side, incapable of saying a single word to each other, he had decided to intervene.

That man had just done her flirting for her. With a sudoku in one hand and a rubbish excuse about Austria, that man had just done her flirting for her.

Lena turned around.

Chema was already looking at her. He had been looking since she crossed the door, waiting for exactly that moment. He did not smile. He did not wink. He did none of those romantic-comedy gestures that would have ruined the whole thing. He simply held her gaze for two seconds, with an expression of complete calm, like a man who has resolved a minor technical issue.

And Lena thanked him without moving her lips. Only with her eyes. And he answered the same way: don’t mention it, go on, off you go.

Then he lowered his head and got back to the sudoku.

They had that coffee. It lasted four hours. And that is another story.