I thought about it, but there wasn’t much to think about. It was a step up from where I was, and I needed to get into cheaper and more permanent accommodation. So even though it was dark and dingy, I told him I’d come around the next day with the first month’s rent.
“I’m living on air,” I whispered to myself as I stepped back out onto the cold streets. “And my feet don’t touch the ground.”
THE PRESENT PERFECT
Or
Everyone is beautiful at the ballet
This is how cold Madrid is in January: I was sitting on my creaky bed in the Tirso de Molina apartment, under the blankets, dressed in tights under jeans and a sweater and a scarf, and I was still cold.
I was leafing through an English-language newspaper looking at job ads. Some of the ads for English teachers asked for a bachelor’s degree or CELTA certification, some asked for a minimum of three or four years’ experience, some wanted bilingual applicants. There were two ads that asked simply for native English speakers, so I called each and made interviews for the next day.
They say that you should dress for an interview as if you’ve already got the job. I’d been adamant that I wasn’t going to bring my black suit with me, but as I rummaged through the contents of my suitcase looking for something appropriately teacherish, I regretted having taken that stand. The best that I could do was jeans, a sweater, and a scarf. I hoped it would be smart enough.
At the first office I went to, I was given a form to fill out. It asked for my name, address, education, marital status (are they allowed to ask that?), number of children, and availability. The last question left me stunned: What is the lowest amount you will accept per hour? €…
I should have put the pen down there and then and walked out. But I didn’t. I filled in the application, though I must have answered something wrong because they never got back to me.
At least I had another interview. This one was for a reputable English academy with offices all over Spain. When I got there, a coordinator took me into a classroom and started explaining why I should work for them. It didn’t take me long to realize that he was desperate. He needed a teacher to start immediately, and I guess I looked enough like someone who spoke English for him not to even bother with my CV. Instead he gave me a pile of textbooks, the address for my first class, and a map.
• • •
The present perfect…past perfect and future perfect…is there a perfect present? It certainly wasn’t this present. I was on a suburban train that was taking me to the outskirts of Madrid. It was so early in the morning that it was still what I considered to be nighttime, and I was packed in with the rest of the sleep-deprived commuters, reading the grammar lesson that I was supposed to be teaching that morning.
Now, I’d always assumed that I spoke English. But flipping through the pages of the grammar tome in my hands, I was starting to have my doubts. What is a gerund? What is a transitive verb? What am I going to do if my student asks me to identify the subject or the object in a sentence? What exactly did I learn at school? A lot of World War II, but no past continuous.
I started imagining different possibilities for future perfect.
Future perfect #1: I get a phone call right now telling me that the class is canceled, and I get off this train at the next stop and have a hot café con leche as the sun rises.
Future perfect #2: I click my heels together and magic myself away to Seville.
I closed my eyes and clicked the heels of my sneakers together. Nothing happened. So I went back to the textbook and read about embedded clauses.
Tom, who is only six, can speak three languages.
Well, hooray for Tom. Nellie, who is twenty-two, apparently can’t even speak English.
By the time the train arrived at my stop, first light was breaking. The company was a fifteen-minute walk from the station alongside the highway. Globs of sleet hit my face as I walked through the slippery gutter. It was like having a Slurpee spat at me through a straw.
My student’s name was Andrés. I found him in a glass-enclosed office on the sixth floor of the modern building. He was in his late forties and wore a stylish suit and Loewe tie. He had a shaved head, which suited him, and wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He was typing an email as I walked in and held up his hand for me to wait until he clicked Send.
Then he took off his glasses and fixed me with his bright blue eyes. “You are American.”
“No,” I said.
“English.”
Again I shook my head. Andrés furrowed his brow before asking, “Where are you from then?”
“Australia,” I told him.
“Australia!” he cried, jumping out of his seat. “Look at this!” He beckoned me over to his computer. The image on his desktop was of a surfer suspended on a spectacularly nasty wave. “Do you surf?” he asked me hopefully.
Andrés spent the better part of our ninety-minute class talking about the years he’d spent traveling in search of the perfect wave. He explained to me the pros and cons of Maui and Indonesia, the coast of South Africa and the south of France, waving his hand impatiently every time I tried to correct his broken English. His eyes became wistful as he talked about the tube waves of the famous surfing beach Mundaka in his native Basque Country, in the north of Spain.
Andrés let out a sigh. “How did I finish here?” He looked around his plush office as though it were a cage, then leaned across his desk and said, “Do you know how these multinationals function?” I shook my head. “They must to grow all the years. Always getting bigger. Why?” he demanded.
“Uh…I don’t know.”
He leaned back in his chair and said, “Nobody knows.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, as if afraid that the walls might hear him. “We have to feed the monster.
“And tell me,” he continued, changing the subject. “What is an Australian girl doing in Madrid?”
I told him that I had come to Madrid to dance flamenco. His eyes widened, then he burst out laughing. “You? Dancing flamenco? Ba-ha-ha! Is even more funny than me dancing flamenco.”
“Don’t you like flamenco?” I asked him.
Andrés was suddenly serious. He shook his head. “No.”
I was surprised. I’d assumed that all Spanish people loved flamenco. But Andrés set me straight on that point.
“One, I am not Spanish. I am Basque. Is different. And two, in my country we do not like flamenco. It is gypsy music. We have our dance. Have you see it? The dancers play a flute and kick their legs in the air. It is a very stupid dance. I recommend you see it. When you finish with flamenco, you can learn Basque dancing.”
I walked back to the train station feeling relieved that I’d got through the class without having to actually teach anything. But at the same time I was a bit worried about that. What if Andrés were to turn around and complain that I was a lousy teacher? I couldn’t afford to lose this job.
When I went back to the academy that afternoon to pick up more attendance sheets and textbooks, I confessed all to the coordinator. “Look,” he said, “Andrés is the president of the company, so if he tells you he doesn’t want to do the lesson and just wants to talk, then let him. From what I heard from his last teacher, he’s not very interested in learning English.”
“So then why is he taking classes?” I asked.
“We get a lot of students like that,” the coordinator explained. “English classes are a perk. Companies offer them, often instead of giving their employees a raise. So the students go along. Every now and again you’ll get someone who’s motivated to learn, but most of the time they’re not.”
That sounded all right to me. As the coordinator loaded me up with textbooks for new classes, I hoped desperately that the rest of my students would be as uninterested in the lessons as Andrés.
• • •
“Everyone is beautiful at the ballet�
�” I hummed the song from A Chorus Line as I slipped into my ballet shoes. I was trying to keep my ánima up—my spirits. I was about to go into my first ever ballet class and the idea scared me to death.
Actually, it wasn’t quite my first class. I had taken ballet once before. I was six years old, and I remember my mother pulling me out of the car as I went limp in her arms, letting my feet drag across the pavement like a mini Gandhi in a pink tutu. Once we got inside I wailed and sobbed so hysterically that Mum was forced to give in and take me home.
Now, sixteen years later, I was going to give it another go. But this time there was no one to drive me home. Then again, I wasn’t wearing a pink tutu either—though I will confess that I was wearing leg warmers. How could you go to ballet class without leg warmers? Isn’t the whole point of doing ballet to have an excuse to do Flashdance fashion?
I loved the dance class look. I watched the girls who came into class in ripped T-shirts and sweaters and observed how they had transformed an oversize tee into a shrug, or woolly socks into ankle warmers, trying to memorize just where they had made their incisions so I could copy the look on some unsuspecting piece of clothing.
Today there were two other girls in the changing room getting into their ballet gear and they looked suspiciously like ballerinas. Especially the girl in the pointe shoes. Why do I have to do this? I considered walking out, but I thought of Marina and the way that she’d waggled her finger at me and told me that I had to work hard, harder than everyone else, if I wanted to dance professionally. I just had to bite the bullet and learn ballet.
The class started out innocently enough. The students, six girls and two boys, were lined up along the barre (which is for some reason spelled the French way, even though it is really just a bar), and the teacher told us to get into first position. I didn’t know what first position was, but I was able to copy the others. Basically, you stand with your feet pointed out like a duck and your arms lightly separated from your body. For second position you slide one foot to the side a little. Third and fourth are also variations on this pose, I discovered to my relief.
But then the teacher got serious and told us to do things that I knew were going to be painful, like putting one leg up on the barre. I think it was intended as a gentle stretch, but I could see stars in front of my eyes, like a Looney Tunes character that had been hit over the head with a mallet. Around me the other dancers were sliding into effortless splits with graceful arms bent over their turned-out legs, but it was all I could do to keep my heel from slipping off the barre while my face turned white from the pain.
But then it got worse. I hadn’t realized how great an ally the barre was: as long as I clung to the barre I was safe. There were horrible things to come, things with strange names, like jeté. That’s when you leap off the ground like a gazelle and hang suspended in midair for an obscene amount of time before touching down on the tips of your toes and skipping off.
The teacher cued up a tape of tinny piano music that lent itself perfectly to such ridiculous prancing, and told us all to go to the corner of the room. I watched the dancers in the line ahead of me take a few running steps and then leap into the air, toes pointed, legs outstretched, arms floating, and face turned to profile. Then they landed with a scowl that said, “That was rubbish! I do not deserve to call myself a dancer!” (in a Russian accent).
One after another they ran forward and leaped into the air. My knuckles whitened as I gripped the barre tighter. I’m not doing it, I thought. It’s not just that I can’t—of course I can’t—but that I won’t. There’s no way I’m going to even try that. I’ll die of embarrassment. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.
“Vamos!” the teacher yelled at me. Great. Now everyone was watching. “Venga!” There was nothing for it. I ran forward, stretching out my arms, and jumped. I jumped higher than I’d ever jumped before. Even so, I was in the air for approximately half a second before hitting the ground with a BOOM that made the mirror tremble.
F@#%¡!¡!¡ I said to myself as I dropped my head and hurried back to the barre.
I hate ballet.
I was so angry and humiliated after my first class that I felt as though I had steam pouring out of my ears as I walked to the changing room. I muttered furiously to myself as I strode past the dance classes: “Why am I doing this? Why am I choosing to put myself through this obscene indignity? What kind of adult person would allow herself to be humiliated, and in Jiffies? I never want to even set foot in another dance class for as long as I live. Whatever made me think that I could be a professional dancer? It must have been temporary insanity. I hate this. I’m going home and I’m going to get on with my life and get a communications degree, and I’ll get a job with a diverse range of responsibilities, including filing and making filter coffee, and I’ll get an apartment and a houseplant and some debt and I’ll be serious and sensible for a change, and I’ll shop at David Lawrence…”
In the changing room I splashed some water on my face and told myself, “Just breathe. It’s only your second day. Things are going to get better.” I put the idea of going home and going to university back in the case at the bottom of my mind with the label “In case of emergency, break glass.”
I hadn’t come all this way to give up just because I couldn’t pirouette. If ballet meant daily humiliation, then so be it. I’ve worked the registers on Boxing Day, I reminded myself. And if I’ve survived that, I can survive anything. So I hummed to myself as I put on my red shoes, “Everyone is beautiful at the ballet.”
THE TOUGH TIMES
Or
Ojos, take this chica and toma que toma!
Madrid is famous for being the European city with the highest number of bars per capita, but I suspect it also has the highest number of churches. Perhaps the churches in places like Rome are more attention grabbing, but in Madrid there’s a little church around every corner.
My favorite was the Baśilica de San Francisco el Grande, which was just a short walk from Tirso de Molina. I loved its bare stone walls and high stained-glass windows. I preferred the anonymity of the cathedral to the smaller neighborhood churches. In the cathedral I could just sit and feel like I was invisible. Tourists would come in and out, and every now and again people came in to pray.
Around the cathedral were wooden statues of saints with outstretched arms or halos of stars over their heads, but I didn’t know who they were. They seemed content to stare off into the distance and ignore me too, so that was fine. I would have liked to light a candle as I saw other people doing, but it didn’t really seem right to say, “Ah, excuse me, you in the robes with the doves at your feet, would you mind praying for me?” I felt I should at least have some idea of who I was talking to.
As I sat there one day, a policeman came in off the street and knelt down in front of a Sacred Heart Jesus. I marveled at the way people could just kneel down like that in a public place and do something that seemed to me so private. I couldn’t. I would be afraid I was doing it wrong and everyone was looking at me.
I felt comforted by the peace and quiet of the old building, but I didn’t really understand religion. I’d always heard from teachers and the media and society in general that religion was for sheep who need a shepherd, not for intelligent people who think for themselves and get their news from the New York Times and the Guardian. So whenever I saw the priests setting up the altar for mass, I knew it was time for me to move on.
I had other favorite haunts around Madrid. One was the Reina Sofía art gallery. On Sundays, when it was free, I’d go and sit in front of a Picasso, then wander through the Surrealist section and maybe watch some of one of the Luis Buñuel films they ran on a constant loop, then leave by way of the Robert Capa room.
I also liked going to Buen Retiro Park in the center of Madrid. It was still too cold to sit on the grass, but I loved to walk around the lake. And when it got too cold to be out, I’d go back to the apartment a
nd sit in my room with blankets around my shoulders, trying to be positive and avoid answering the question that wouldn’t leave me alone: What am I doing here?
Yes, I had come to Madrid to dance flamenco, and I was dancing. But it was a struggle, and with my ballet classes I had to deal with daily humiliation. And while it was a slight improvement from the hostel, the apartment where I was living was nothing like the sunny attic I’d dreamed of. It was so cold and cramped and filthy that the only place I could stretch out my muscles after a day of dancing and tramping to and from English classes was under the covers of my creaky bed.
But it wasn’t just about that. I had never imagined that it would be easy, and I knew that with time I would find a better job and a nicer place to live. It was Madrid. I had left my home and come to this foreign city in the hope that I would find a place where I belonged, but instead I was wandering the streets feeling as invisible as a ghost.
Every morning I woke up at what I considered the middle of the night to take the train to the outer suburbs to teach English to businesspeople before their workday began. Andrés had given my classes rave reviews, so the academy had given me more and more classes until I had to turn down work, or I wouldn’t have time to dance. Though I needed the money, I had to remember what I had come to Madrid for.
My pay was so low that every decision became a choice. Piece of cake or rent a studio for an hour? Buy a magazine or take a dance class? Things like eating out or even a couple of extra sweaters for the cold weather were luxuries I couldn’t afford.
Only in Spain Page 13