"Thank You For Being Here Now"

SEPTEMBER 21st, 2011

All along the streets to the subway station, up and down stairways, onto trains and busses I dragged my baggage all the way from Madrid to La Solana. My arms were wobbly and my shoulders tired. And once off the bus I could drag my things under the heavy, beating sun no further than to the nearest hostel I could find, which was obscenely expensive compared to past Spanish travels. Whatever, I was finally here in my town! and a little too hot and tired to fully enjoy it. But I put my bags down in the room, slammed a couple glasses of clay-flavored water, and went out walking in the general direction of the church steeple—pointedly the tallest building in town—in search of an apartment.

It was some three hours past noon; I remember it well. I thought that maybe I had landed in a ghost town. Or perhaps there was some very important fiesta somewhere. Perhaps everybody in town did nothing but pick grapes all day. What did I know? I walked and walked. A stray dog every now and then would scamper by timidly. Sometimes a passing tumbleweed; a swish and rustle of curtains in the wind. There was no one in this town.

I came to the Plaza Mayor where there stood one lone policeman beneath the colonnade of the town hall, smoking a cigarette and looking out at the pigeons in the chapel details. He stared at me as I walked across the plaza, the only other non-pigeon in the world, and made himself look generally stern and intimidating. I said to him in my too-tired American accent, "do you know, sir, where is there a list of apartments that I could rent?" And perhaps deciding at that moment that I wasn't a threat, he leapt into that Spanish talk that is always full of rhythm and hand gestures, explaining to me that there was no such thing as apartment listings in a small town like La Solana, but I could have this map if I wished. He would even put a dot over exactly the spot in which we were standing. Venga. Pues, nada. Hasta luego. Adios.
Gracias.

Even with the map, I got lost trying to find my school. I met some cleaning ladies, dressed in pink, on the street and got into their car. They took to my school which was already closed, joked that they were not going to let me out of the car unless I gave them all my money, and then took me back to the plaza. I walked around a little more to try and get a feel for the place. This time, murmurs and muffled conversation could be heard through windows behind their heavy blinds. A woman rolled up her shade and shook a rag at the dust on her balcony. An old man came around a corner humming and chewing something. We said hola. Some kids ran out of a curtained doorway to play fútbol on the road. La Solana was blinking her eyes awake, stretching and yawning. The siesta hour was coming to an end.

The evening went on and the plaza filled up. The restaurants put out their tables and the spaniards had cañas and tapas and shouted to each other the whole night. At dusk, the big trucks came in from the fields overflowing with white grapes. And as the night got cool, the air smelled like olives and mosto. I had a cup of wine on the patio of my hostel, then slept very deep and well.

SEPTEMBER 22nd, 2011

The next morning I had better luck. I went to my school and met my director and some professors whose names I had immediately forgotten. But I know all of their names now. The professors Antonia and David knew some people with apartments so they took me around town to look at them. Within an hour, I was dragging my suitcase and two backpacks up the cobblestone hills and skinny sidewalks, up the stairs and into my new apartment. It's on the second or third floor of a building on Calle Pacheco. Here in Spain, the ground-level floor is considered the zeroth. And on that zeroth floor is a home decorating shop that sells fancy windows and kitchen fixtures.

I hung up my prayer flags and wind chime, put my clothes in the armoire, and spent the next couple days trying to situate myself and equip my new home with cooking gas, hot water, towels, internet, and food. For those first few days, I lived on tomatoes with vinegar and oil, manchego cheese, and potato chips, for I had no money to buy anything else. The piso is long and thin with rooms all branching off from the hallway like a giant, seven-legged salamander. It has two balconies and tiled floors that are made to look like some sort of stone. It is built very sturdily—heavy doors, solid furniture, a carved lion head on the banister. In Spain they build things with the expectation that they will last at least a century.

The other auxiliares of La Solana began to arrive. Natalie from Minneapolis came and stayed with me while Dee from Toronto, through a mutual exchange of wrong numbers, could not get in touch with us and found her own cute apartment near the Universidad Popular. And the fourth, Holt from NorCal, who got his letter incredibly late, didn't arrive for another two weeks, when we'd already started our classes. I was very lucky to have been placed here with people such as these.

I grew more acquainted with La Solana, spending entire days walking around with my camera and no other objective than to see every part of it. And little by little, this town that I once thought desolate began to reveal itself to me, a sparkling gem here and a glittering rhinestone there. A movie theatre, a moroccan bazaar, a beautiful white library. Frutería, churrería, plaza de toros, döner kebab. Having all of the bare necessities set up in my new apartment, I went to the tourist information office one day to see what other kind of adventures I could get myself into. Juan Pedro, the guy who worked there, was very nice and took me upstairs and gave me a tour of the saffron museum, explaining all of the old traditions and tools. He even told me that he knew the family in La Solana that had the saffron field still, and promised that he would put me in contact with them. Hopefully they would let me come out to the field with them and help with the Azafranal.

It was very hot and very dry; it had been three months since the last rainfall. All of the windows and doors were open but the shades were drawn to let in the air and keep out the sun. From the fields and plains outside the town, dried thistle trees filled the wind with big cotton puffs. I spent the rest of the day wandering, just by accident making my way all along the periphery in a great circle, taking little tangent hikes on dirt roads to explore olive groves, wheat fields, cemeteries, and vineyards from which I stole a single grape under the hot afternoon sun. That night, a parade through the streets for the Virgin Peñarroya. And when I finally came back to my apartment and settled down to sleep, I looked out my bedroom window and out over the matchbox rooftops there blazed a brilliant night sky, sprayed with an entire aerosol can full of star glitter. I hummed a Billie Holiday tune to the darkness and dreamed of beautiful things until the lazy Sunday morning when church bells rang a slow, solemn bring...bring...bring...and the townspeople were drawn from their beds through the streets to the church like moths to the moon.

SUNDAY

We had all the best intentions of traveling and making use of our few days off before school started, but in the end, we really needed dish towels and oven mitts; we still wanted sugar and salt, and food other than chips and tomatoes. So we stayed here and got ourselves some library cards and bank accounts, found a very nice woman who sells fruit and always shows us the best and ripest deals and never tries to engañarnos. We met a great group of spaniards to hang out with, drinking cañas de cerveza en la plaza. Our new friends took us out to a casa de campo to eat potatoes and eggs, and to drink tinto de verano in the sun until we just couldn't anymore. We explored a village more tiny than ours, San Carlos del Valle, then were taken home by Natalie's Argentinian Toledano friends, who drove two hours to have pizza with us and then return home. So many friends, so many long unpronounceable names; don't worry, these characters will develop later in the story. I had tea before bed on the balcony, watching the teenagers flirt at each other in the plazuela, then slept.

THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL

By now, I have been teaching for a solid month. All is very well. It is a thousand times less frightening than my experience in Perú, trying to tame children with broken Castellano while they would much rather beat each other with broomsticks than listen to me. I am always with a professor, helping out with songs and perfect pronunciation. Sonia, Tomasi, David, and Maribel are my English professors I work with, and they are all very fun and kind. My students are anywhere from three years old to twelve, and they can all speak English so well. Okay, they can't really speak fluently or anything; not even close. But the three-year-olds know all of their colors and days of the week. I didn't really know all that stuff in high school. The other professors who I don't have class with are also really great. On my first day, the caretaker found a baby rabbit in front of the school and he was very excited about it. He kept it in a box and whenever a group of kids walked by he would take out his rabbit and say "look!" and they would all scream and run away.

Every class starts with daily routines. In the younger classes, we sing songs about how we are feeling, what the weather is like, days of the week, months of the year, heads, shoulders, knees, and toes. In the 1st through 6th grade, I get to torture one student a day by taking them up in front of the class and asking them questions about their family and the days of the week. But they're all very smart and if one doesn't know an answer, the others will help. I have some math classes, some reading, some lecture, and some just regular English. And the English they use is that of Britain, so for the sake of confusion I have had to change some of my speech patterns. "Have you got any brothers or sisters?" "This is my granddad."

We spent this month learning all about halloween, coloring pumpkins and learning The Skeleton Dance. Once, in the sixth grade, we gave the students a list of scary words to look up, and we gave them some Spanish/English dictionaries. Only a couple of the children knew how to use them. We had to explain that half of the book was for English words translated to Spanish, the other half was Spanish to English, and all of it was in alphabetical order. It was not that these kids weren't smart or that they were maleducados in any way. Perhaps just a sign of the times. They were all too accustomed to finding translations on the internet.

When Halloween finally came around, I dressed as a cat with Salvador Dalí wiskers, and I forced everyone else in the school to dress up with me. I made a bunch of caramel corn, which the children found disgusting but the teachers loved. And at recess we all made a big circle in the playground and sang "dem bones, dem bones, dem dancin' bones" in our scary fancy outfits. I would love to insert here a picture of all of my kids with their fake blood and bed sheets, but their photos are not allowed on the web. So it goes.

MEANWHILE, ON CALLE PACHECO

Little by little, our apartment became more of an actual home. We found another roommate, Manoli, to take our third bedroom. She is a Spaniard and a professor at Natalie's school, so we are forced to practice our Spanish all the time, which is just how we like it. Holt arrived and now lives in the apartment below ours. Every night, the teenagers chatter and shout in the plazuela, the wind chime tinkles on the balcony, and we sit around the table to talk and drink Bitches' Brew. One night, after playing a barajas game called 31, and after spending some time talking about travel plans, and having everything this time around fall just sweetly and perfectly into place, I lay awake in bed just thanking the stars through my window for everything that I had, wherever I was, who I was, and everything that had happened before—por las buenas, por las malas—to get me here. The stars were flickering bright that night, and dogs barked to each other somewhere far off in the dark.