I was bored and lonely when I got an answer to the text I’d sent. It came from a different number than the one I’d texted.
Hi.i saw your message just
a min. Ago. Now í at home.
we will drink with friends
now and go out about 12
o’clck. Do u like to come
here? (hanife)
Hanife lives about two streets over, so 11:30 found me sitting in the little living room of an apartment I’d looked at myself when trying to find a place, with Flavia, Hanife, Maria, and a girl whose name I couldn’t quite catch.
The nationalities: Spanish, Italian, Turkish, American.
The languages being spoken (with varying levels of proficiency): Spanish, English, Italian.
None of us were fluent in more than two, but each of us managed to make herself more or less understood, even if sometimes only in a slow garble of broken bits. Maria, an Andalusian girl with very red lipstick, cat-eye eyeliner, and a small shaved spot on one side of her head, dominated both through her strong personality and as the only Spanish native. She conscientiously expained everything she was saying over again in broken English for Hanife, looking up words on her phone if need be.
“But, when I say, lunares, you will understand means this?” she says to Hanife, pointing at the polka dots on the miniskirt she’s wearing over jean leggings. I tell her “polka dots” and she makes a face that says “no way I can pronounce that.”
Hanife wants to be an English teacher— she was placed in the same school as me, doing the same work. She’d wanted to go to England or Ireland, to be able to improve her own English, but instead she got placed in Spain, where she doesn’t speak a word of the language. Or, she didn’t two weeks ago.
“I had some bad days when I got here,” she says, after it’s come up in the conversation.
“Because you were homesick?” I ask.
“Yes, and because I don’t understand anyone. I was crying. But now, they help me.” She gestures to her roommates.
When we go out, we walk by a police car, and Flavia says, “There are Hanife’s friends!” Hanife’s been to the police station almost every day this week, trying to get her foreigner identity number so that she can stay the whole academic year. It’s a bitch of a process even if your Spanish is pretty good, so I can’t imagine how hard it must be for her. Some of the teachers from the school have been taking turns going with her to translate and help. “Soy extranjero,” she says with a smile. “I learned this word at the police station.”
We end up at a bar playing loud Spanish heavy metal. I catch the phrase “motherfucker” (hijo de puta) when the guy I’m looking at screams it along with the song and makes the devil horns gesture, which the bartender returns.
Maria has ordered an anise liquor for everyone, and we clink glasses and go outside. It seems better away from the music until you notice how cold it is. There’s a whole crowd of young Spaniards and foreigners gathered in the plaza. I meet more Italians and a French guy whose English is so good that I can’t help talking to him for quite a while, even though we are both here to improve our Spanish. “We are lazy,” he says. We discuss American house parties and the friendliness of people in different countries (he found his apartment in four hours by asking people in the street for help).
Then it’s on to another bar, but we don’t stay in the bar, we go outside again. It’s way too cold and I’m getting bored and impatient. I’d been holding out in the hope of going dancing, but Maria says they went yesterday around this time and the discotecas were all empty. What time is it? 4 AM. I’m dubious but don’t know any places yet myself, so I have to take their word for it. We’re not going anywhere yet and I’m getting steadily more annoyed, so I head home and think that next time I’ll bring a good jacket.
I slip into bed and dream strange dreams of being lost in Manhattan and riding a train like a roller coaster through water and over a highway, all in silence.
