An Angry Neighbor Part 1

When I arrived back on the roof, my friends had been joined by Mencha's daughter, Estefany. The five of us carried on a little longer before each making our way down to our apartments. I found some pretense to bug Line some more and in due course we found ourselves on the couch in her apartment discussing the finer points of Dominican gender relations. "Nosotras mujeres aguantamos mucho en este pais," she told me, "we women put up with a lot in this country." We talked for a while about Dominican men and when I asked how a woman can know that her boyfriend has other girlfriends and still not want to leave him, she shared with me a dicho (a saying):

Una llave que abre muchas puertas es una llave maestra, pero una llave que abre todos las puertas no sirve. (A key that opens many doors is a master key, but a key that opens every door is no good.)

The best I can do in interpreting this is to suppose that it means that a woman wants a man who is so desirable that he can get other women if wants, but who won't take just any woman.

"Each person reaps what he/she sows"

What happened next was unprecedented. From down the hall came a steady stream of angry shouting, which gradually grew louder before parking itself somewhere in the hall outside Line's apartment. I knew its source to be the overweight single man who lives next door to me and I wasn't surprised to hear vulgar English sprinkled in amongst the Spanish epithets; though I had never interacted with this man, I had noticed he posessed the American habits of smoking cigarettes and going straight to his apartment without spending some time socializing in the hallway.

Fairness: even if your rubio brother can levitate and you can't

He must have heard me and Line because next thing either of us knew, he was venting his frustration at full volume, more or less in my face. Mostly he cursed Pablo, but also there was talk of the people Pablo answers to at the school and in Philadelphia. I reasoned that the best course of action would be just to agree and act disgusted. But gradually it began to appear as if my obvious lack of indignation was only aggrevating him more. Finally, I detected in his tone and choice of words a kind of antagonism that was directed at me.