The Polish cleaning lady from Guatemala

I have moved in to my newest temporary home: my brother's place in Astoria. He is kind enough to be letting me the room formerly occupied by Nana, our foxy Hungarian friend who is now on her way to Ghana to teach maths to the Ghaneans (sp?) for about a year. The room is small but after a day of cleaning and arranging, it is no longer impenetrable due to large piles of superfluous clothing and other personal items that were shipped over from Paris. Small but cheap and the flatmates - Aron and Gyurka, another Hungarian - are satisfactory, even if my brother constantly seems to find fault with my domestic behaviour...

The humidity was suffocating this weekend. As I was sweating away in my cleaning lady outfit all day yesterday, I fantasized about having a real, professional cleaning lady come and scrub away all the dirt and dust that had gathered on the window panes, under the cupboards, on the shelves - everywhere. I thought fondly of Madame Therese, the Portuguese magician who made sure that our large Parisian flat and everything in it was the way it was supposed to be.

And then I thought of my former east village hosts' cleaning lady, whom I met last Tuesday, the day I moved out of their apartment. Natalie and Micah had told me about her: they said she is not great and they are afraid to ask her to clean the cupboards, but that they couldn't fire her because she has been working for them for five years now and she is a Polish illegal alien in a difficult position. As I was opening the door last Tuesday, I could already hear the TV was on Spanish language soap opera. Then I saw the cleaning lady: a diminutive dark-haired, olive-skinned woman, chatting away on the phone in Spanish. I was a little surprised. She was clearly not from Poland but some place in Latin-America. I talked to her a bit and she is indeed an illegal alien - but of course from Guatemala, rather than Poland. Now this incident shocked me. I have not seen Nat or Micah since then so I didn't have a chance to confront them and I am not sure I will. I am just really puzzled as to how they can possibly not know where this woman - a person who is not only intimately acquainted with their lives but that they have known for five years - came from. Especially because it took all of two minutes for me to firmly establish the region, if not the country, that she came from...(I thought of the movie Dirty Pretty Things. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dirty_pretty_things/ . Perhaps I could get it for them.)