When I was 18, I discovered that contrary to what my teachers had always led me to believe, I really sucked at speaking Spanish. It had always been my strongest subject: I passed two Spanish AP tests in high school, with flying colors, and took a challenging seminar my first year in college during which I read all 464 pages of 100 Years of Solitude in Spanish--and more or less got the gist.
So when my father's Spanish friend told me she could get me a job as a summer camp counselor in Toledo, I jumped at the opportunity. I was an adult now, after all, and too old to be traveling with my parents. Not only would this solo international venture prove my independence, but I could also practice my Spanish and make a little spending money while I was at it.
On the plane to Madrid, I daydreamed about the summer fling I would have with a fellow camp counselor. He would have dimples, I decided, and whisper sweet Spanish nothings in my ear. In the meantime, I would gossip with my new Spanish girlfriends over late-night cervezas, and at the end of the session, there would be tearful goodbyes. I would come home spewing mindless, perfect Spanish and making coy references to my sexy Latin sweetheart.
Three weeks would never fly by so fast.
THREE WEEKS NEVER crawled by so slowly.
I tallied off each day in my journal before going to bed, trying to remind myself that I wasn't in prison, but kind of wishing I was. It all started when I first met my summer camp counselors in Madrid before we embarked on the drive to Toledo, about an hour away. With a slowly settling horror, I realized that I would not be working with an intimate group of four or five counselors, as I had envisioned, but with 25 other counselors, who were a good few years older than me and impossibly beautiful. To make matters worse, they had all known each other since they had attended the camp themselves as children.
I was the odd one out, in more ways than one. The second thing I realized was that the grunge/raver look, which was all the rage back in the States, had not yet crossed the Atlantic. While I was loafing around in baggy knee-length shorts, in which I could have fit two of me, the other girls were showing off their long, tanned legs, which stretched endlessly from tight jean cut-offs. I didn't have a tan (nor was I capable of acquiring one) and weeks before, I had just lopped off all my hair--another trend that had not yet made the trans-Atlantic leap.
The third thing I realized was that I couldn't speak Spanish. I got through the "What is your name?" and "Where are you from?" questions okay, but after that, I was stuck. The next thing most of the counselors wanted to know was how I ended up working at this particular camp, thousands of miles from home. "How did you end up here?" they asked, using a Spanish expression for "end up here" that my high school textbooks hadn't been thoughtful enough to include.
"¿Qúe?" I asked. (This single word, "What?" was to be my only loyal ally throughout the next torturous 21 days.) They repeated the question. But unfortunately, as I was soon to discover, repetition of foreign words doesn't automatically result in comprehension.
"¿Qúe?" I asked again.
"No importa," they said. ("Never mind.") This was to be the formula for most of my subsequent exchanges:
Spanish Camp Counselor: "!@#$%^&*()*&?"
Me: "¿Qúe?"
Spanish Camp Counselor: "!@#$%^&*()*&?"
Me: "¿Qúe?"
Spanish Camp Counselor: "No importa."
TO MAKE MATTERS worse, each counselor was assigned a group of children to look after throughout the session, and my group was comprised exclusively of 12-year-old girls. As a rule, I hate 12-year-old girls, no matter what language they speak. Unlike the smaller children, who talked slowly, with a vocabulary I could more or less grasp, these girls engaged in catty, complicated gossip that flew straight over my head. I always had the unnerving feeling that they were making fun of a certain pale, freckled, short-haired, baggy-pantsed gringa.
In a pitiful effort to impress them and to establish my superiority, I told them that I had not one, but two boyfriends, back in the United States. "They are very handsome," I said. "And very nice. They like me. I like them." The 12-year-olds wanted to know more, and fired off a slew of questions.
"¿Qúe?" I said.
My savior was Rafaela, a mentally disabled 12-year-old, who missed her mother terribly, cried frequently, and spoke with refreshing and excruciating slowness. "I want to go home," she confided to me on a daily basis.
"So do I," I said.
"I miss my mother," she said.
"So do I," I said.
Then she would burst into tears, and it was all I could do to refrain from joining her.
I DID HAVE a sexy Spanish summer fling--in my head. His name was Enrique, one of the most beautifully dimpled men I had ever laid eyes on, and in my head, he was infatuated with me. In my head, we spent all our breaks together by the swimming pool while he twirled my golden locks and I effortlessly communicated to him all my hopes and fears.
In the dismal reality that existed outside my head, Enrique more or less ignored me. Like everyone else, he had made a few polite attempts at conversation, which of course only ended in the requisite, "No importa."
He did finally start making fun of me now and then, as a result of my attempts to combat my overwhelming sense of loneliness and isolation with a few too many ron y Coca Colas (rum and Cokes) at the local bar. After putting the kids to bed each night, the counselors, being true Spaniards, would head into town to drink and socialize into the wee hours of the morning. No matter that we had to wake up at 8 a.m. each morning and essentially work until the kids were put to bed at 9 p.m., 11 hours later. I was tempted to put myself to bed around the same time, but maybe, I thought, a healthy dose of ron would help lubricate the Spanish inside me that I knew was there but just couldn't coax out.
My plan worked, to some extent, but at 18 I was still very much a novice drinker and tended to over-indulge. I gained a reputation as la alcohólica (one Spanish word I did understand), and Enrique in particular became fond of teasing me. One evening about halfway through the session, while all the camp counselors were congregating for another night on the town, Enrique asked if he could have a sip of my water. "It's not water," I told him, smiling slyly.
"What is it?" he wanted to know
"It's vodka," I said. "I'm an alcoholic, remember?"
Everyone laughed, and for one fleeting moment, I felt human again. Not the lumbering, stuttering, ghostly, freckled freak I had felt like for the better part of two weeks, but like an interesting, funny, intelligent human being.
I'll tell you one thing: feeling human sure feels good.
I had hoped that evening would mark the start of Phase Two, during which I would become "part of the gang," joking around with the girls and maybe stealing a kiss or two from Enrique. But unfortunately, there was one nagging problem: I still couldn't speak Spanish.
It's funny what you learn in a classroom. If anyone had been interested, I could have engaged them in a long, involved conversation about the metaphorical significance of moons in the poetry of Federico García Lorca. But when one of the kids I was teaching cut himself, I couldn't remember the word for "band-aid." In fact, I'm not sure I had ever learned it in the first place. "I need one of those brown things that you put on your skin when there is blood," I told the head counselor.
THROUGH SHEER GRIT, I barely managed another 10 days at the camp; then I collected my pay and spent two days wandering around Madrid in blissful solitude. Whenever I spoke, I was always complimented on how well I spoke Spanish. With my superior accent and strong tourist's vocabulary (" I would like the roast chicken, please." "Where is the bathroom?"), I had them fooled. If only they knew, I snickered to myself.
When finally I boarded a plane back to the United States, the three weeks of emotional turmoil, the long days of working, the long nights of drinking and the short nights of sleeping finally caught up to me. "How was the trip?" my parents wanted to know.
I realized that I could tell them everything--and with perfectly conjugated verbs, to boot. But they weren't the stories I wanted to tell: no sexy Spanish boyfriend, no new international girlfriends and certainly no invitation, nor desire, to return next summer.
"Fine," I said, and promptly fell asleep. Twenty-four hours later, I stumbled out of bed to a blissfully foggy San Francisco day, back in a place where I knew how to ask for a band-aid, where not everyone had tans, and where my baggy pants were finally fashionable again.
____________________________
Kerala Goodkin, Travel Correspondent:
Kerala's column, "On The Verge," published every other Tuesday to Gather Essentials: Travel, shares stories and reflections from the less-traveled corners of the world.
Kerala is co-founder and Editor in Chief of the Glimpse Foundation, a nonprofit that fosters cross-cultural understanding and exchange, particularly between the United States and the rest of the world, by providing forums for young adults to share their experiences living abroad. Read their stories at glimpseabroad.org. Kerala has also recently published her first novel, "How Things Break," which won the Elixir Press Inaugural Fiction Award and relates a year in the life of one young woman in small-town Michigan. It is available on Amazon.
You can find all of Kerala's "On The Verge" articles at www.gather.com/OnTheVerge
Keep up with Kerala's other postings and Gather activity by joining her Gather network -- just click here and select the orange "Connect" button on the left-hand side of the page
You'll find Kerala and other Travel Correspondents, plus expert tips and plenty of other travel lovers at travel.gather.com
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