training

Zafra enjoys a regional reputation and an ideal place for families and thus, despite its relatively small size, it is positively overflowing with children and teenagers. Partially because of its smallness and resulting lack of resources, but primarily due to its utter Spanishness, these hoards of under-18s, organized into their lifelong cliques and bands, entertain themselves by walking. They meet up in the plazas and parks and wander the streets in groups of five to ten kids, stopping at every snack store for gummies and chips. They storm cafes and restaurants, where sympathetic proprietors leave jugs of water on the bar to hydrate the kids in their roving. A few stop for a joint in the park, and some of the older ones dress up and try their luck at the less scrupulous pubs, but most are content to simply pass the evening engaging in that most Spanish of activities: socializing in the street. Groups come together, kisses are exchanged, gossip and small talk traded, and then the groups divide and move to the next block, to the next meeting. They're not going somewhere; the point is just the going, always with the expectation of not-so-chance encounters.

In the winter months, when temperatures occasionally hit freezing late at night and rain is more frequent, this activity loses some of its appeal. The American answer to this quandary is, naturally, to go to a friend's house. The problem here is that the group of close friends of the average Spanish teenager is not limited to the eight or so kids who join him on his evening walks, but rather extends to every one of those dozens of members of groups he meets. I once asked an eighth-grade student why he didn't just have his friends come hang out in his sizable living room. "Well," he said, with a tone that implied that I was missing something very obvious,"there are thirty-five of us."

The solution is the local. These thirty-five thirteen-year-olds pool their allowances and rent an empty office. Presumably borrowing from their parents' houses, they stock it with furniture and spend the cold evenings there with their mob of friends.

My parents would have never allowed this (for good reason), nor would have any other American parent I know. It would never have even occurred to me to request permission for such a thing. And what landlord would open his property to three dozen unsupervised kids?

But all my students insist that although the privilege is occasionally abused, the true purpose is just innocent socializing, and seem honestly confused that I would assume anything different. The mindset is just different here. Socializing with every person you know every single weekend is the normal course of things here, and when the weather prohibits street wandering, why should your social life suffer? They don't seem to be abusing the old-fashioned naivete of their parents, but actually provide it to be sound wisdom. It's Pleasantville.

But I suppose it's a means of feeding that natural Spanish lust for socialization and bonding. From the very beginning, they have their group, and they're not ever to be parted with them, especially not for something so trivial as cold rain or insufficient space. Because later in life they will drift bar to bar with that same core group, stopping for a drink in each place with the same satellite groups, exchanging kisses and gossip and small talk before going for a snack at the next tapas bar.

rocks

My Fridays are light, so I like to spend the open hours in the rocky green hills. It's a cool, sunny day and I'm seated in the front yard of what must have, at one time, been a charming little country house with a broad patio and lovely views of the olive groves, the village, and the Castellar. Now it's all mossy stucco and grassy floors, the uneven stones of its thick walls exposed and sprouting flowers, its roof disappeared and its windows collapsed, but the birds still love it, and I suspect it was a happy place.

I've come to love the mountains, the Pyrenees and the Andes and the Irish cliffs, but even (or maybe especially) the humble little ones like those that compose this forgotten Spanish sierra. I spent my childhood on the flat expanses of the Midwestern prairies, where you can see miles of corn and rest assured that, were you to traverse those miles, you would encounter still more corn. It's gorgeous in its own way, but I love the mystery of a mountainous horizon, where the peaks fade until their blue contours are indistinguishable from the sky, where the distance is inscrutable.

hunting

In late autumn, the sweltering Mediterranean air retreats as the Atlantic winds invade with their heavy clouds and blustery rains. This year, however, the two-week Christmas vacation happened to share its days with a rare phenomenon in Spanish winter: constant sunshine. We took advantaged of our reprieve from the dreary December and spent nearly every day of our holiday in the rocky green countryside just outside of town.

The dominant feature of this lovely landscape is the Castellar, a low ridge crowned with enormous vertical slabs of stone that appear to be bursting from the very soil. In past excursions to the top, Levi and I had discovered the ruins of rooms, walls, and foundations, and had learned upon asking around that a Moorish fortress had once watched over the town from those heights. But no one had much in the way of details; the Arab history of Zafra tends to be ignored or minimized in relation to the earlier days of Roman occupation or the later era of feudal Iberia, and no one I talked to seemed knowledgeable or even particularly interested in the crumbling ruin of the Castellar.

So I went hunting in the local bookshops and found a thin little publication by two local historian-archaeologists who had investigated the very limited remains of the fortress. With two weeks of sunny freedom at our disposal, I started exploring myself, climbing up to different sections of the ridge with the book in hand. Levi and I found the watchtowers, the entrance, and the curtain wall described in the book, all magnificent in their crumbling allusions former grandeur. But it turned out that these are comparatively new structures. The authors describe a pre-Moorish, even pre-Roman Castellar, where a scattering of small but sophisticated Stone, Iron, and Bronze Age settlements thrived.

My attention was immediately pulled to this more distant past, and we began searching, using the authors' descriptions as a map. We found stone houses, walls, fences, all under a foot high, all fractured, broken ruins, all the fruits of the labor of humble individuals and families who had no resources for or need of warlike fortifications. A stone-lined path connected them, and its little monoliths still stand, firmly planted in the accumulated dirt of centuries, forming a deteriorating but plainly discernible roadway.

The book then sent us to Belen, the hilltop chapel and community picnic area on one of the lower ridges of the sierra. The ruin we find is more complete than the ones on the higher, more sun-baked and wind-swept cliffs of the Castellar. We can make out two rooms and an oven or forge that the authors suspect was used for the melting of metal. But this place isn't isolated its rockier counterparts. It sits in the backyard of a manor house, a stately place that probably had its heyday a couple hundred years ago but has suffered roof collapses and the accumulation of beer cans and graffiti. Someone built a house right next to this ancient little place, perhaps on tops of parts of it, and then just left it alone. Soon after our arrival, the ruin was overrun by sheep and goats. We asked the shepherd, presuming he's familiar with the area, but he just shrugged, saying he knew nothing about either of the structures.

Some photos in the back of the book led us back to the highest peaks in search of cave paintings. I'd heard of these somewhere and had asked around, but had again been met with blank faces and shrugs. I was dying to find them, these little yellow suns and red handprints. There's no markers, of course, for any of these sites, no mention of them in any tourist brochure, no map to tell me on which of the thousands of rocks I might encounter these ancient works of art. So ultimately, my expeditions were fruitless. But one day, as I was scrambling around the dizzying heights of the top rocks, Levi called me down to show me a strange stone he had found. It's shaped a bit like a spade, thick in the center and gradually thinning to a point around its edge. It's curiously symmetrical and the edges appear unnaturally even. We took it home and started looking around online. We never found the paintings, but unless our research has led us very much astray, we now have an artifact of the same period. It appears to be a spearhead, carved by a hunter some 13,000 years before the Romans set foot on the Castellar.

flaca

It's the first day of classes after a two-week Christmas vacation, and I've prepared a review for 11-year-old Marta, hoping to jar her memory on what we learned last semester. I've cut out dozens of little cards, a word on each one: verbs on the triangles, nouns on the squares, prepositions on the circles, etc. It's taken me a while to complete, but she's a hands-on learner and I figure that physically constructing the sentences will be good for her.

(This little girl is the eldest of three siblings, the youngest of whom is an autistic 8-year-old boy. On our first day of class, Marta's brothers are in the next room, deeply entrenched in a Playstation battle, and our lesson is frequently interrupted by a wail of frustration or the rattle of a hurled controller. Most of my students have a noisy sibling or two, and the reaction to such disturbances is usually an eye roll or a retaliatory scream. But skinny little Marta, smiling and shaking her head in amusement, peeks into the game room and gently instructs the boys to quiet down. We don't hear a peep for the rest of the hour.

During a later class, Marta explains her youngest brother's condition in the straightforward terms and positive tone of a professional. "He can't learn the same as other children, so in his class he learns things differently," she summarizes.

Marta tells witty, compassionate stories about her little brother. She tells me about the time her pet bird was discovered missing from his cage. After a long search, the boy said to his father, waving his arms toward the window, "he flew away." She smiles, more charmed by her brother's good-natured error than hurt by the loss of her pet. She says he didn't realize the cage needed to be shut, that he thought the bird just wanted some fresh air.

When he bursts in on our class one day, Marta laughs and calmly explains that she's busy right now and he needs to play elsewhere until she's finished. Once when I arrive, her room is pitch black. Her brother likes the movie theater atmosphere when he watches his cartoons, so she lets him sit in her purple, Justin Bieber-themed room with the blinds closed and the volume up.

She's curious about where I came from and where I'm going. There's a globe on her desk and she asks me to point out Springfield, Indiana, Buenos Aires, Thailand. She's shocked at the distance between my hometown and my Asian destination, and asks me, her Mediterranean eyes filled with concern, if I'm very homesick.)

As I arrange the cards before her and explain the activity, Marta examines the more intricate shapes, the bowties and amoebas to which I've resorted when the simplest forms had been used up. Lesson planning takes little efforts like this--I've found that a highly-structured activity helps me make the most of the hour-- but not even my adult students have ever mentioned it. Marta, turning a gerund star over in her hand, looks at me and says, "This must have really been a lot of work."

vecinos

The ground floor of the building across the street from ours hosts a storefront which, for the first eight or nine months of our residence here, was occupied by an Italian pizzeria. The proprietor was a middle-aged Napolitano, a soft-eyed, smiling, ever-gesticulating character who, rather than attempting to learn Spanish, spoke in his Italian dialect and, on the rare occasions that these deeply similar languages failed to match up, was content to smile and nod.

Enzo was assisted in the shop by a strange host of cooks and cashiers. His primary kitchen help came from a burly Milanese twenty-something who wore a pointy goatee and had tattoos wrapped around the considerable girth of his flabby upper arms. He would spend hours seated in front of the restaurant, smoking and chatting in drawling Italian on his cell phone. He sold weed to the waiters of the plaza cafes, sometimes in broad daylight, and once kicked in our front door for us when we locked ourselves out.

On the register was a thirty-five-ish Brazilian woman and her pretty teenage daughter who, despite her youth, was blissfully unoccupied while her peers were at school. These women, like Enzo, seemed to be entirely lacking any skill in the local language, and tended to respond in Portuguese, be the language of their interlocutor Spanish, Italian, or Napolitano. 

On our fairly frequent evenings of culinary laziness, Levi and I would stop by for a slice of the mediocre pizza and always enjoyed the strange conversations that tended to ensue. We came to presume the Brazilian woman the wife or girlfriend of the proprietor, and although their language barrier, age difference, and unexplained shared presence in this obscure European corner seemed unusual, as expats of initially dubious Spanish skills ourselves, we felt ill-suited to judge.

But after a couple months of patronage, we noticed that this wasn’t just an unconventional family. Our Milanese friend wasn’t the only bulldozer Italiano in Enzo’s employ. In fact, the soft-spoken old man never seemed to be without one of these surly hulks. Nor were Enzo’s supposed paramour and Kamila, the teenager to whom Levi was now giving English lessons, without the company of their countrywomen. It was impossible to keep track of who or how many, because they were constantly changing and some appeared at the restaurant only once or twice, but in an isolated and distinctly homogonous town like Zafra, it just isn’t normal to see that many people of the same age and sex from the same distant country.

In the spring after our arrival, Enzo was absent for several days. Levi asked after him in a class with Kamila, and learned that he had raced back to Napoli to be with his son, who had died soon after. The man had been murdered by a cop. The weapon was a fork to the jugular.

Enzo returned and business continued as usual. Kamila, homesick and lonely, returned to Brazil, and although we saw less of our pizzeria friends, we continued to observe the bizarre and constant staff turnovers.

Then one day they were gone. The neon sign lay on the ground, the kitchen was dismantled, and the metal grate was pulled down over the door.

Around this time, a friend of ours (presumably conveying local gossip rather than knowledge personally acquired) mentioned that the brothel on the edge of town was staffed by a strangely high number of Brazilian women. 

Later, during an afternoon of paella at the country house of our sweet old neighbor Pepe, the landlord of the storefront, we learned the details of the unexplained disappearance of the business and its operators. After accepting their deposit and signing them to the lease, Pepe had fought with them for nearly a year, and had never seen a dime. Ten thousand euros they stiffed him. When they left, it was as sudden to him as it was to us, and despite the magnitude of the sum, his dealings with Enzo, our gentle, smiling local pizza vendor, had led him to believe that it would be wise to let the matter rest.