Miami - 12:03 A.M. Taco Bell. From the window of a Jeep comes a voice that orders in perfect English four tacos and a medium Coke. The owner of that voice, a young man in a baseball cap, talks on his cell phone while the cashier rings up the total. “Six dollars and 12 cents. Drive through to the window.” The Jeep stops in front of the window. A hand reaches out with seven dollars, and from the other side of the window, shouting is heard: “Enrique! I was waiting for you. Today I brought the Polaroid camera to take the picture of you that Marisela wants.”

The young man in the baseball cap who is going to eat the four tacos with the medium Coke is Enrique Iglesias. While magazines around the world wait impatiently for a new photo captured by one of the paparazzi, this Argentinian guy, late-night cashier at Taco Bell, is taking it. In that photo that will never be published and will most assuredly live in a frame on Marisela’s nightstand, Enrique isn’t serious like in the 250 magazine covers that he has done. Nor does he look sad. A little hungry, perhaps, but the tacos will take care of that.

No one who looked at that Polaroid photo would think that the young man in the baseball cap, with a face that looks fresh out of school, who doesn’t like to dance, and who has $20 in his wallet, has sold 14 million copies of Bailamos in the English market. Universal, a record company which covers 95% of the world music market, signed him four months ago. They needed someone to compete in the English market with Ricky Martin or with Jennifer López. And it cost them 44 million dollars.

“I don’t like to talk about money,” Enrique warns. “I have never celebrated signing a contract or releasing a CD. To me, talking about money is embarrassing. Money isn’t my motivation, it’s a way to measure things. I like it when people talk about my concerts, my CDs, not my money or my house or my cars...”

Cars - he has two. A Jeep and a Porsche, which he doesn’t drive because he feels like it’s ostentatious. He doesn’t like limosines either because he feels embarrassed getting out of them. He prefers taxis. “I just don’t like red carpets or black limosines,” he explains with such sincerity that you have to believe him. “I don’t like luxuries. Look, for me there’s nothing better than the applause at a concert. There’s nothing better than being being successful. Having success recharges my batteries, touches my heart. The day I don’t have that, I’ll be screwed. I had never been depressed until I finished my tour last year. When it was over, I got depressed. I felt like I was empty inside. I didn’t leave my house for two weeks. It’s because I don’t know how to do anything else.”

At his house, located in Baypoint, an island of Miami, the cameras that follow him day and night have still not been able to enter. The few who have been able to enter it tell that the TV is always on MTV or VH1. It is also said that Enrique oversaw its decoration, and as in everything he does, simplicity was the main element.

In this house he lives with la Seño, Elvira Olivares,the woman who has bought him over 300 white T-shirts (which he collects), and the person who knows him better than anyone else in the world. She gives him two kisses everytime he comes home, and when he doesn’t come home she scolds him. She lent him the money to record-- unknown to his family-- his first demo tape in 1994, and she is the one who consoled him when he was eight years old and cried day and night because he was in Miami and he missed his mother, Isabel Preysler, who was in Madrid.

“I cried a lot when I came to Miami,” Enrique recalls. He still clearly remembers the day in 1983 when he had to flee from Spain with Chábeli and Julio José, his siblings, for fear of a kidnapping.

“I missed my mother a lot. She had stayed in Spain. We were always alone. When they asked me about my parents at school, I would just say that they were out of the country. It made me sad to say that my mother lived in Spain and my father was always traveling. Those of us who raise ourselves turn out a little strange. The day I have a child, I won’t leave it alone so much.”

Enrique makes you want to love him. Not just for his six-pack sculpted in the gym or for his beautiful eyes, but because he seems harmless. Full of life. Nice. Aware of everything around him. Few people know, however, that he’s a dangerous practical joker.

“Once a Panamanian businessman came into our office,” his manager Fernán Martínez tells. “Enrique sat beside him and said, “Panama, Panama... that’s south of Argentina, right? Tell me, how are the ski slopes and the snow in Panama?” The man looked at him, terrified, and Enrique didn’t so much as smile. He told John Quiñones of ABC, off-camera, ‘No one knows that I got married to a girl I went to school with and we have two children.’ Once he called my brother to the office and told him I was in the hospital because I had herpes... He always joking around.”

When he goes to his office Enrique not only answers the telephone, he also asks about everything that’s going on there. He gives out autographs for the relatives of his staff, and sometimes he even falls asleep on the sofa.

“I like a quiet life... Going to the movies on a Tuesday afternoon or going snow-skiing or skiing in the ocean,” he says, sitting on the same sofa, while his team, four of whom worked with his father, run around preparing for the release of Enrique, his first CD in English. It will be released in November. (He’ll do the Spanish release on the Cristina Show). Experts are already predicting that it will be the confirmation of a much-trumpeted crossover.

“I hate that word. Just because a Latino crosses to the other side, to a larger audience, doesn’t mean he has made it. The success lies in seducing the U.S. public and letting it be them who cross over to our side. I’m singing in English because I like it. Period.”

Enrique was in Europe when Ricky Martin hit #1 in the U.S. They say he was happy. “Consistency is the most important thing,” Enrique explains, as if he had not four but forty years in this business. “If 8 out of 10 songs on a CD are hits, that’s success.”

What he refused to learn from his father was how to make love to three thousand women. In the past five years he has only been seen kissing Sofía Vergara, at the door of her house, and Samantha Torres, at a gas station in Los Angeles. He insists they’re just friends. Maybe so that his thousands of fans won’t feel betrayed.”

“I like women who don't smoke, and are not spoiled,” he says, enumerating the requirements. Another fact: he loves women from the Caribbean, but he prefers not to say it too loud so that no one will be upset.

And once again he comes back to that story that no one believes still-- the one about before becoming famous he said he was from Guatemala and his name was Enrique Martínez so that no one would know that he was recording a CD... and that girls didn’t even look at him.

That has to be a lie. With this one, three thousand years can pass and no one will forget him. [Play on words from a line in Enrique’s song “Nunca Te Olvidaré"].