Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  After dance class I’d sit in the little café in the market beneath the Amor de Dios until it was time to go off and teach. I’d listen to the music on the radio and watch the way the vibrations from the stamping above made my coffee ripple.

  One morning a familiar song came on. It was one that Zahra and I had danced to in Seville. I pulled out my phone and dialed her number in Switzerland.

  She answered the phone with “Toma que toma!” I held up the phone so she could hear the music. “Ay, chica,” she said, “I miss you so much!” I told her that Spain just wasn’t the same without her, and she said, “Don’t worry. As soon as I can take a long weekend I will come to visit you. I will find you an ojos, and I will say, ‘Ojos, take this chica and toma que toma till I get back!’” I laughed as I hung up the phone. Though I knew it wasn’t easy for her to take time off work, just the thought of her coming to visit made me smile.

  • • •

  There was a little flamenco dress shop opposite the Amor de Dios. I loved to go in and gaze at the dresses, running my hands over the material and every now and again taking one off the rack and holding it up in front of myself in the mirror.

  Generally I hated going into shops when I had no intention of buying anything. I was always conscious that I could be keeping the shopgirl away from her coffee or her magazine or her daydreaming. But this shop was run by a lovely woman called Lola and her husband, and they always welcomed me in, even though they could tell I didn’t have a lazy two hundred euro to spend on polka dots. But they liked to chat to me about flamenco and my classes and how I was finding life in Madrid. They knew how hard life was for foreign girls; they had them in their shop every day and had heard all the stories. And they’d seen the successes too. “Don’t let it get to you,” they always said. “Things will get easier.”

  I hoped they were right.

  One of my new English classes was at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The academy asked me to take over the class because the students hadn’t been happy with the last teacher. “They can be difficult, this group,” the coordinator told me. “I’m sure you’ll be fine, though; just make sure you go in prepared.”

  Prepared was the last thing I was. When I got to the classroom, a long, high-ceilinged room decorated with tapestries and oil paintings, there were two women sitting waiting for me. I asked them where everyone else was, and they told me they were the only students. “The others stopped coming,” said a woman called Paloma in barely accented English. “They did not like the teacher.” Paloma’s eyes traveled from my scruffy sneakers and jeans up to the coffee stain on the neck of my sweater. She fixed me with a sharp look and asked, “What are we going to learn?”

  “Today we’re going to start by reading,” I said, handing out copies of an article from the Guardian about a new airline operating in Afghanistan that the coordinator had given me to use. I thought back on the way my high school German teacher had made us read in class, listening intently and every so often making a firm but gentle correction. I did my best impression of her, and amazingly I must have pulled it off. At the end, my two students smiled and thanked me before going back to their offices.

  After the class I was so proud of myself for simply getting through it that I went back to my favorite shop. Lola greeted me with a kiss on each cheek and asked me how things were going. “Bien,” I told her. I’d just had a successful English class and maybe things were going to start looking up for me. The little triumphs I had were so few and far between that I was determined to celebrate them, because each one was bringing me a step closer to the life I wanted to be living.

  There was a pair of earrings on display that I had been dreaming of ever since I first stepped into the shop. They were silver, chandelier style, and set with little blue stones. They were gypsy princess earrings, and Lola agreed: I had to have them.

  • • •

  The next Monday morning there was a new sign up on the notice board at Amor de Dios saying that La Tati would be starting up her classes for the year. I was so excited to see her name up on the board. Not only was La Tati one of Spain’s most legendary flamenco dancers, but she was also Marina’s ex-teacher, so of course I had to take her class.

  As I waited outside the studio, I saw an old woman ambling up the corridor. Her dyed red hair was pulled back into a bun, and she wore an old coat over a long skirt. A dozen dancers had already taken their places in the studio, and I took my usual spot in the back, nervous but excited to be learning from such a legendary dancer.

  The first half of her class was footwork. La Tati threw complex steps at us, which we were expected to pick up and repeat back with machinelike precision. I tried to fudge my way through it, but I hadn’t counted on La Tati’s ear. After a particularly tricky step, she listened carefully, then stopped us. Someone was out. Who was it? Oh God, I thought as I tried to disappear into the corner.

  La Tati walked across the room until she was standing in front of me. The class was silent as La Tati counted me in: “Uno, dos, tres…” There was nothing for it. I tried to do the step on my own, but I knew what I was doing was wrong.

  Tati lifted up her long skirt and showed me the step, breaking it down into stages. Then she barked an order at me in Spanish.

  What? I looked around blankly. The girl next to me translated her words: “She say do it three hundred times before tomorrow,” giving a shrug that said, “Sucks to be you.”

  Three hundred times?

  At the end of the class, everyone went forward to give La Tati the seven euro she charged for the class. As the girls were counting out their euro, Tati pointed at me and said, “Para ti, viente.” At first I thought that I must have misunderstood her: everyone else was paying seven, and she was demanding twenty from me? I tried to protest, but La Tati threw her arms up in the air and shouted at me in Spanish. I had no idea what she was saying, so I reluctantly handed over a twenty-euro bill, which was my entire daily dance budget.

  I didn’t have enough money to take another class that day, so instead I shelled out an extra five euro to rent a studio. Surely La Tati had been exaggerating. She couldn’t really expect me to do that step three hundred times. But when I remembered the look on her face, I decided that she was probably serious.

  So I repeated the step, counting one, two, three… By twenty-one, my legs were already aching, but I kept on going. Thirty, thirty-one… The ache moved up to my hips. Forty, forty-one. When the pain became too much, I stopped and shook out my legs. Then I started again. Fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two… My toes were starting to hurt. Sixty. I stopped to catch my breath, then carried on. Seventy. I felt like my legs were about to fall off. Eighty. I can’t do it.

  By the time I reached one hundred, the pain in my feet and legs was so bad that I had just zoned out. I kept on, breathing and counting. One hundred and ten, one hundred and eleven. By one hundred and fifty I had stopped feeling the pain; I was just listening to the sound of my feet. I had slipped into an almost meditative state.

  Two hundred. I started counting back down. One ninety-nine, one ninety-eight… I couldn’t even remember what the step was anymore; my feet were moving on their own. One seventy. I held my own gaze in the mirror to keep my focus. One forty-nine, one forty-eight…and suddenly my body was flooded with joy. I stopped counting the steps. I didn’t even want to stop dancing. I just kept on going and going and going until I felt suddenly faint. The floor was moving beneath me. I staggered to the side of the room and collapsed.

  As I stretched my legs out in front of me, the pain came flooding back. It was like knives stabbing into my feet, legs, and hips. I lay there, slumped against the wall, wondering how I was ever going to stand up again. Somehow I got up and made my way to the changing room. I didn’t even bother putting on my jeans, just pulled my jacket on over my T-shirt and skirt, then carefully took off my shoes and slipped my sore feet into sneakers.

  The walk home had nev
er seemed so long before. Each step was agony. I tried to walk on the smooth pavement, avoiding the rough cobblestones that pressed into all the sore spots on my feet. When I finally got back to the apartment and pulled off my shoes, I saw why I’d been in so much pain. My socks were stained with blood. What had I done to myself? I shuffled to the bathroom and peeled off my socks, then swung my legs over the side of the bath and ran water on my feet. The water came out icy cold and stung the burst blisters on my toes.

  Miguel knocked on the door and asked if I was okay. He came in and looked down at my injured feet, then asked me what had happened. I told him it was from dancing. He beamed at me and took my face in his hands and kissed my cheeks. “Qué bonito es el flamenco!” he said. Isn’t flamenco beautiful!

  Yes, it was beautiful. I was throwing myself at life like the dancer had thrown herself into the quadruple turn on the tiny stage of the tablao in Seville. And I was proud of the blood on my feet. It was a symbol of the passion I felt for what I was doing, even though it was hard, and even when it hurt.

  THE LATINAS

  Or

  Nellie, like the hairspray

  Here’s something I hate: getting out of bed. You could give me a million reasons to get out of bed and I still won’t do it. And it’s even worse when my alarm goes off at six a.m. and I know that it is minus three degrees in my room and there’s an icy floor waiting for my toes. On mornings like that, the only way for me to hoist myself out of bed is to remind myself that if I don’t move now I will miss the train that will get me to class on time, causing me to lose my job and my only source of income, thereby setting off a chain of events that will lead to me standing outside a homeless shelter waiting for a plastic cup of coffee from a harried-looking Missionary of Charity.

  Heaven forbid.

  Every morning I had to hold that image in my mind while I quickly stepped into my jeans and splashed water on my face, threw my makeup in my bag and scrabbled around looking for my keys, wasting another ten minutes, then ran helter-damn-skelter to the metro station and propelled myself down the stairs.

  All the while I tried not to stop and ask myself the question, “Does this scene look familiar?” Wasn’t this exactly what I came to Spain to avoid? If anything, hadn’t my situation gotten worse? I was getting up earlier to commute farther to make less money by working harder than I did before. What had happened to running away with the gypsies?

  It was Tuesday morning, and I was late for class with Andrés. It was dark and the only other people on the street were wandering drunkenly home after a night of partying. I raced down the station stairs and put my monthly pass through the metro turnstile. I ran forward, expecting the metal spoke to move, but instead I just got a big thump in the stomach and a red light flashed to say my ticket wasn’t valid. I tried again at the next machine and again the red light came up.

  I could hear the train pulling into the station. I thought about jumping the gate, but there was a ticket inspector in the booth, so I darted over to him and told him there was something wrong with my ticket. The inspector ran my ticket through a machine to check that it was okay, then calmly stepped out of the booth and walked me back to the turnstile.

  I could hear the sound of the doors closing as the train prepared to leave the station. I was going to be late again. The inspector calmly opened the gate for me to pass through. He smiled at me and said in English, “Don’t worry, be happy.”

  Don’t worry, be happy? Didn’t he understand I was going to be late for work? How could I not worry?

  I’m not good at not worrying. It’s easier for me to get out of bed than to stop worrying. In fact, worrying about the consequences of not getting out of bed is the only thing that gets me up in the first place.

  Taking it easy, relaxing, being in the moment are things that I appreciate in theory but that don’t seem to have any practical application in my life. I get the beauty of being in the now, but even that idea stresses me. Should I be in the now, now? Like, now? I think I’m missing it. Was that now? Oh, now? I can’t do this, I give up. That’s pretty much how it works for me. When I think about taking it easy and not worrying, it’s always as a future project that I will get to after I’ve dealt with all the things I need to worry about first. And during those first few weeks in Madrid, it wasn’t like I didn’t have enough to worry about.

  I knew that worrying wouldn’t solve my problems, but I couldn’t help it. I felt like I was always walking on the edge of catastrophe, like a tightrope walker without a safety net. Sometimes I felt invigorated by my new life, but more often than not it was just overwhelming.

  That was why I found it so refreshing to be around people who were relaxed about life, like Mariela, who worked in the café where I went for breakfast every morning after my first English class. Mariela was a Venezuelan woman with two daughters who was doing a part-time hairdressing apprenticeship. She had black hair with purple streaks that was cut into an asymmetrical bob, and had a mischievous smile that was never far from her lips. I didn’t know that she was Venezuelan at first, and when I asked her if she was Spanish, she gave me a long look, then threw her head back and hooted with laughter. “Una negrita como yo?” A little black girl like me? she’d said, laughing at my ignorance.

  Mariela’s boyfriend was an artist who made a living doing caricatures of tourists in the Plaza Mayor. He also came to the bar every morning for breakfast. One day he drew a caricature of me dancing flamenco on a serviette, which I folded up and slipped into my wallet where it sat among receipts, metro passes, and museum tickets. They were little pieces of the puzzle that one day would form a whole picture so that I could look back and understand the journey that I was taking. At least, I hoped it would make sense one day.

  • • •

  My class at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was held twice a week, and at the second class I had two new students. Paloma had told them that the new teacher was an improvement from the last, so they decided to give me a chance. The next week I had five students, then seven, then ten. Every class I’d come in to find a new face gazing up at me expectantly, waiting for the fun to begin. And the more students I had, the more interesting the class became.

  The trick to teaching English, I was learning, was finding out what your students are passionate about; my students at the ministry loved to argue and debate about Spain and Spanish politics. That was perfect for me, because I was always asking them questions about things that I didn’t understand. Like the day I was running late for class and the road was blocked by a hundred men dressed up in top hats and frock coats carrying a giant papier-mâché sardine. I’d come to accept a lot of strange things in Spain, but when the men in tuxedos tried to fill my pockets with sweets, I really needed an explanation.

  “It’s the burial of the sardine!” the class told me. They explained that it was Ash Wednesday, the final day of the carnivals and the first day of Lent. The men in frock coats were doing a mock funeral parade, my students explained to me, to mourn the end of the festivities.

  “And will they actually bury the sardine?” I asked.

  “Of course,” my students said. “They bury it in the park. Don’t you celebrate Carnival in your country?”

  I thought about that, but I couldn’t recall ever seeing giant fish being carried through the streets of Sydney.

  “What holidays do you celebrate?” my students asked.

  “Well…” I pondered that for a moment. “I guess we have Australia Day.”

  “Do you wear your traditional costume?” they asked. I didn’t know that we had a traditional costume. “But,” they protested, “what is the costume you wear for your festival days?”

  “Well,” I said, thinking carefully about how Australians dress up to celebrate our “festival days,” “I guess it would be jeans and a T-shirt.”

  “No!” they said. “Really?”

  The new student who had joined that
day, a white-haired, bespectacled man named Antonio, politely raised his hand and asked, “Who is the patron saint of your village?”

  I had to think about that one. The patron saint of Sydney… Well, there was only one person it could be. “Kylie Minogue,” I told them.

  They gasped in scandalized delight. “And your Virgin?”

  That one was easy. “Nicole Kidman,” I told them.

  • • •

  One thing I needed to do was get out of the apartment in Tirso de Molina. If there was one simple way I could improve my quality of life, that was it. I couldn’t keep shivering through the nights, brushing my teeth over the cruddy bathtub because the bathroom sink was broken, hanging my wet laundry up around my bed, and going to sleep with two pairs of pants on just to stay warm. Plus I needed an apartment with a kitchen I could actually use. Each time I walked into the kitchen, there would be something to make me walk straight back out again, whether it was a mountain of dishes in the sink, gray-looking seafood that had been put out to defrost and then forgotten about, or a stew that made the whole apartment stink. On top of that, with the expense of my dance classes, there was no way I could continue to keep paying the rent. I was earning very little from my English classes and paying for my dance classes with my Australian savings, but they wouldn’t last forever, and in the meantime I needed to find a cheaper home. The problem was that I didn’t know where I’d find one.

  A girl called Brigita had just rented the room opposite mine. A young Brazilian girl who’d also come to Madrid to study flamenco, she was paying for her classes by working nights serving drinks. She’d get home in the early hours of the morning smelling of smoke and exhausted after being run off her feet all night, then go off in the mornings to dance. Brigita had only been staying in the apartment for a few days when she came into the kitchen in tears. She told me that Miguel had asked her what kind of work she did. When she told him she worked in a bar, he asked her if she had drinks with the customers. “He thinks I am a prostitute just because I am from Brazil!”