I have never been so happy to see a toilet in my life, and that includes the time I got food poisoning in Magaluf. The drive from Santiago airport to Raxo had been straightforward enough, or so I thought until I realised I had misread the hire car's fuel gauge and spent forty-five minutes panicking on the PO-552, convinced I was about to conk out in a lay-by surrounded by eucalyptus trees. I did not conk out, but I did develop an urgent need for the facilities at the exact moment Google Maps decided to send me down what I can only describe as a goat track with pretensions.

The Raxo itself, when I finally staggered up to it, looked like somewhere my grandmother would have approved of, which in my book is high praise. Whitewashed walls, terracotta roof tiles, the whole Mediterranean-meets-Atlantic vibe that Galicia does so well. I was too preoccupied with my own bladder to fully appreciate the bougainvillea climbing the front, but I remember thinking it looked reassuringly solid after my automotive ordeal.

I dumped my bags in the hallway and made the sort of undignified dash to the loo that would have shamed a toddler. Emerging considerably more human, I finally noticed the note on the kitchen table. "Senor," it began, in handwriting that suggested primary school exercise books, "the boiler is temperamental. Be patient. Also the neighbour's cat is not stray, do not feed him again. Maria." I looked at the empty cat food tin in the bin and felt the warm glow of someone else's mild scandal.

Maria turned out to be the letting agent, a woman in her sixties who appeared the next morning with fresh bread and what I can only describe as aggressive helpfulness. She spoke no English, I spoke restaurant-menu Spanish, and together we achieved something beyond language. She demonstrated the boiler by thumping it in a specific location while reciting what sounded like a prayer. When it ignited, she crossed herself. I was not sure if this was devotional or theatrical, but I copied her just in case.

The neighbour, I discovered, was a man called Pepe who sat on his wall from approximately ten in the morning until the light failed. He had the weathered look of someone who had spent decades arguing with the Atlantic, and he took my cat-feeding transgression with remarkable grace. "Gato is liar," he told me, pointing at the creature in question, who was indeed winding around my ankles with the practised desperation of a seasoned con artist. "He eat at five houses. You are number six." I felt simultaneously foolish and inducted into something. Pepe offered me a cigarette I did not want and we sat in companionable silence, watching a fishing boat putter across the ria.

Down at the little harbour, which was barely five minutes' walk, I met Luisa running the solitary cafe that seemed to operate on principles unavailable to science. Open when she felt like it, closed when she did not, menu dependent on what the boats had brought in. I ordered a coffee and received a lecture on pulpo preparation that I understood perhaps thirty percent of. "You," she said, jabbing a finger at me, "you boil too long. English always boil too long." I had not mentioned being English, nor had I ever boiled an octopus in my life, but I accepted my correction with the humility of the genuinely ignorant.

The afternoon I spent trying to follow her instructions, purchasing an octopus from a van that appeared at the harbour with the reliability of a coastal mirage. The fisherman, whose name I never caught, communicated exclusively in gestures and raised eyebrows. He seemed disappointed by my small purchase, holding up larger specimens with the expression of a man whose children had underachieved. I took my modest octopus and my wounded pride back to the Raxo, where the boiler required another thumping and Maria's note seemed to judge me from the tabletop.

I never did master the pulpo. But I sat on Pepe's wall the following evening, sharing his cigarettes and watching Gato work his scam on a family of German cyclists, and I felt something shift. The mishap with the fuel gauge, the goat track, my undignified arrival, it had all delivered me here, to this particular patch of Galicia, to these particular people who tolerated my presence with the casual generosity of those who have seen worse.

Maria appeared on my final morning with more bread and a jar of something purple she called "mermelada de moras." She did not explain, and I did not ask. Some things, I was learning, did not require translation.