By Thursday the decorations are hung, the lights are lit, and the shopping frenzy begins. Stores are open on Sunday now and Calle Sevilla is nonstop commercial mayhem. A neon carousel has appeared on the Plaza de España, belting out carnivalesque Christmas songs. A three-story inflatable SpongeBob stands beside it, crawling with pea coat-clad toddlers who climb its plastic rungs and come bouncing down its puffy slide. Glittering bells, snowmen, angels, and stars hang above the downtown streets and poinsettias and garland adorn the balconies on the Plaza Grande. 
Levi and I had intended to use the Puente and the six-day weekend it afforded me (I LOVE my job) to spend some time in Madrid. He recently discovered he has dual citizenship thanks to his Quebecois father and is applying for a Canadian passport. This will allow him to leave the EU every ninety days upon the expiration of his tourist visa and return to Spain with a different passport, getting a new tourist visa and remaining legal. This means we can travel outside of Spain without fear of immigration issues, a far superior option to the hide-out-in-Zafra plan we had previously worked out. So we planned a visit to the Canadian Embassy and some exploration of the capital city.
On Thursday, the day of our scheduled departure, the crucial documents Levi’s parents had UPSed to him had yet to arrive. I called the Spanish office of this disastrous company and was told that the driver had come to our house and no one was home and now the package wouldn’t come till Tuesday. I put up the best fight I could manage in Spanish and was eventually connected to the driver himself, who screamed at me that this was my fault because no one answered when he rang the doorbell. When I informed him that we don’t have a doorbell, I could practically hear him throwing his hands up. He told me he’d call me on Tuesday and I could come meet him in the Plaza because he simply couldn’t find my house. So we cancelled our trip and spent the weekend in Zafra, putting together a little Christmas tree and hiding out from the endless rain.On Tuesday, a long conversation with the UPS office revealed that the documents had been delivered to a place where we don’t live and signed for by a person we don’t know. I tracked them down at the knife shop around the corner and Levi took a midnight bus to Madrid. He came home exhausted at six the next evening, having been turned away by a self-important bureaucrat for being short a form.
On Thursday night poor Levi got back on the midnight bus. I tagged along this time. We stumbled into the cold morning at 5:30 and found an all-night café, where we chugged some coffee and listened to the angry ramblings of a group of drunk thirty-somethings on the tail end of a dramatic evening. When the sun finally came up, we found a Starbucks (oh, how I’ve missed that chai) and waited for the embassy to open. Levi’s meeting went smoothly this time, and we celebrated with a soon-regretted Burger King binge (the fries suck in Europe, too). Back on the bus by 3:30pm, passed out in an uncomfortable vertical contortion by four.
Maybe if we had stayed longer or been in better spirits I would have come to a different conclusion, but from what I observed in those brief hours, Madrid sorta…sucks. It’s Chicago without the culture, Barcelona without the architecture, Buenos Aires without the charm; there’s nothing unique or surprising there. It just felt like a huge, dirty city. I was happy to be back in friendly little Zafra.
As the school year has gone on, I’ve realized more and more that I am a point of real interest to my littler kids. I catch wind of strangely specific rumors about myself and my life; some of these are surprisingly accurate and others are truly baffling. There seems to be a hilariously intense curiosity about Levi. He’s at the school fairly frequently giving private lessons, so all the kids know I have a novio. Last week, a few of my bilingual first-year girls (my favorite students) swarmed me with questions about him—is he American? Does he speak Spanish? How long have you known each other? Do your parents know you have a boyfriend?? They giggled uncontrollably at every response. One of them went on to inform me that I should have two boyfriends, because the actor from the new Narnia movie is really cute and about my age and speaks English so of course we should be dating.I have one little boy, about eleven or twelve, who sits in the front row of all my lessons and raises his hand every time I ask a question, even though he hardly ever knows the answer. His teacher tells me he asks about me every day I’m not there, and one of his greatest concerns is whether I still have that damn boyfriend.
I’ve generally stuck to the little white lie that I speak no Spanish; I feared that if all the kids knew I understood their language, they wouldn’t bother to speak English to me. When I ran into a bunch of my students at the Spanish-dubbed Harry Potter movie, I knew I would be found out. Sure enough, the following Monday, all of my students refused to speak English, and one of my first-years informed that word had spread and I could fool them no longer.
In a Monday class, a first-year boy caught a glimpse of the tattoo on my shoulder. I’ve kept the thing carefully hidden since I’ve never seen a single tattoo in Zafra and figured it would be a bit of a scandal in this conservative place. He wouldn’t let it go, of course, and the class’s interest in my vocabulary lesson was pretty quickly replaced with a shocked fascination with my little bird. I kept my coat on the rest of the day but the damage was done. In an unstructured Art lesson on Thursday, two of my favorite little girls invited me to paint with them, and I soon found myself trapped in a barrage of questions (all in Spanish, sigh) about the tattoo they’d heard I had. Of course I refused to show it to them, and after getting past their disappointment they spent the rest of the class speculating on what it might look like.In that same class I discovered another strange rumor. In their investigation into my personal life, one of the little girls asked what I did for a living. After a very confused exchange, I realized that these kids all think I teach for free.
They have also somehow figured out exactly where I live. This really is a small town.
On an unrelated note, what the hell is going on over there? Machines snapping photos of travelers through their clothes, the so-called liberal president calling inconvenient journalism “deplorable” as corporations cut off all its resources, and now Congress is denying health care to ailing 9/11 responders while cutting taxes for Bill Gates? I didn’t realize I was fleeing fascism. Doesn’t exactly make a return to the US very tempting.
Watch out sav soon these kids are going to find your blog...
ReplyDeleteEvery time you write about the bureaucracy there, i feel better about the bureaucracy here.
ReplyDeleteYour students crack me up. Sounds like you're becoming a folk hero. (you're not going to face a Spanish inquisition from the school over that tattoo, are you?)
Miss you, sweety.